The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  “Maybe,” Starhawk said. “It could account for Kaletha wanting as badly as she did to get Tazey into her teaching, if her own vanity didn’t. But there was no change, nothing new happening with Kaletha that could have triggered all this. Why now? Why not nine months ago, when Altiokis died?”

  “You’re arguing as if the killings made sense. They may not.” Sun Wolf heaved himself to his feet and gasped at the agony of his back and legs.

  Starhawk pushed herself more or less upright also, moving as if she were in pain but not showing it on her face. “Don’t get excited,” she said in her usual calm voice. “It’s going to be lots worse tomorrow. Let’s see what the books have to say about all this.”

  Of the eighteen books, seven were in various forms of the old tongue of Gwenth, as it had been spoken in the Middle Kingdoms in the centuries before. Together, Starhawk and Sun Wolf limped to the rock-pools below the chapel and watered the horses and bathed in the freezing, shallow water. Sun Wolf shaved with Tazey’s dagger and bound the messy, abraded flesh of his wrists with part of what was left of his shirt. It was fully light when they returned to the chapel and settled down to read.

  “I don’t like this,” Starhawk said softly, looking up from the faded and grubby pages of the Book of the Cult. “Nanciormis was right. They didn’t always know, especially not at first. But their mothers and sisters and aunts would watch for the signs, if the girl was mageborn, and would initiate her, teach her to control the demons her mind had summoned. It was only five or six generations, you know,” she added, settling her bruised shoulders gingerly back against the wall. “That’s not a long time in the history of the Ancient Houses. It looks as if there was a family cult before that time, but the demons probably came in when the mageborn streak surfaced. Unless...” She paused for a moment, frowning to herself at those words, then began thumbing back through the faded, close-written pages again, with their red and blue capitals, their loops and pothooks where words were abbreviated by a hurried scribe, seeking impatiently for something there which she could not seem to find.

  Sun Wolf’s yellow eye narrowed. “By my first ancestor, that palace must have been a hell to live in,” he murmured. “Have you ever dealt with a knocking-demon, Hawk? Even when they aren’t throwing things, or making noises, you can feel them in a place, watching you. No wonder no one would come to the defense of Wenshar when Kwest Mralwe sent armies through the passes.”

  In the forenoon Jeryn rode laboriously up the trail on Walleye, sweating in his ill-wrapped head veils and starting at every unfamiliar noise. He curled up in a corner of the chapel where a dim sun shaft fell through the weed-clogged roof hole of the rock chimney. While Starhawk pursued her own researches, Sun Wolf sat beside him, following the boy’s finger along the scribbled black line of brushed writing. The more he heard, the greater his uneasiness grew.

  All those who wrote of demons remarked upon the fact that in dreams they might show the features of those who sent them. Nowhere did it say that they could cloak themselves in the forms of those who had not.

  They had known his name, in Wenshar. Could that have given them his form as well? Or was there another explanation?

  I’d know it, he thought, over and over, while feeling the stir of fear in his veins. By my first ancestor, I would sense it, in my dreams if nothing else...

  But the boy’s voice droned on, over the names of the various demons—hundreds of them—and the obscene and hideous spells of their summoning. Sun Wolf remembered, years ago, a man in his troop who, disturbed suddenly in sound sleep, had strangled his mistress to death, taking several minutes to do it. Waking, he had sworn with bitter tears that he remembered nothing of it—that when the men had wakened him, he had been sitting by her corpse—and could not be convinced that it was not they who had done it and put the blame on him.

  In the haunted halls of Wenshar, the painted shadows of the women had watched him from the walls, amusement in their dark eyes. They had initiated one another, the elder helping the younger along, cushioning the shock of that terrible knowledge. What was it to one who had not that help?

  After Jeryn had gone and he and Starhawk were settling down to the meal of meat, bread, and wine that the boy had brought, along with blankets and a chisel to rid them of the last of their chains, he spoke of his fears. The Hawk thought the matter over, as if they had been discussing some third person whom neither knew well. “Do you hate Nanciormis?” she asked.

  Sun Wolf considered. After what the commander had done to him and to Starhawk last night, he realized he should, but he didn’t, really. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he’d done the same thing himself. “I don’t trust him,” he said at last. “He’s too strong and too smart for the position he’s in, or he thinks he is, anyway. Osgard seems to have been pretty shrewd to keep him where he is. He looks good, but he’s irresponsible—he’s a decent fighter, but he couldn’t teach a dog to lift his leg to a tree. He could have got Jeryn killed one day, if he goaded him into trying a horse too strong for him. He’s a schemer and a user and he gossips worse than an old woman. But no, I don’t hate him. And I certainly didn’t hate him before the attack.”

  “Or Incarsyn?” she pressed. “You care about Tazey, and you might say he insulted her.”

  “There wasn’t enough to Incarsyn for anyone to hate.” The Wolf took a bite of the tough, harsh-textured bread and stared thoughtfully at the canyon wall beyond the door, where the shadow of the rim lay across it in a slanting line of blue and gold as sharp as if it had been drawn with a rule, inked, and gilded. He added, “Tazey might have.”

  Starhawk shook her head. “She never wanted to marry him,” she pointed out. “She just couldn’t say so to her father—maybe couldn’t admit it to herself. If he’d died before backing out of the match, maybe...”

  “You think she wouldn’t have feared her father would find some way to revive it, in spite of Illyra? Particularly if Nanciormis had told her what he told us about what Incarsyn had said of her?”

  The woman’s dark brows went up thoughtfully and she looked down into her wine cup, digesting that idea.

  “You’re still talking as if the killings made sense,” the Wolf said. “They might not have. Tazey might have hated Incarsyn, might have hated Galdron for telling her she was damned—evidently she believed she hated Nanciormis enough, after whatever it was he said to her, for it to be her. That still doesn’t explain Egaldus’ death.”

  “Unless we’re dealing with two killers,” Starhawk said quietly. “Kaletha may very well have had reason to hate Egaldus, if he was trying to get her books away from her. She certainly had reason to hate Galdron.”

  “And Nexué?” the Wolf said. “For all she was a vicious old gossip, Hawk, she was pretty harmless. The way you deal with someone like that is to cast spells to make her hair fall out or her sciatica act up, not strew her guts over fifty square yards of ground.”

  “If you’re sixteen, you might.” Starhawk finished a piece of bread, tossed the crumbs to the threshold where three little black wheatears swooped down to fight over them. “And then, we don’t know what Nexué knew. She was a spy as well as a gossip. If she’d seen Kaletha and Egaldus coupling like weasels in rut in the empty quarter, Kaletha might just want her dead to preserve that purity she’s always throwing up in everyone’s face. It would kill ’Shebbeth to find out her precious teacher is less than perfect. As badly as Kaletha sometimes treats her, she isn’t anxious to give up that devoted a slave.”

  “You’ve changed your mind about her, then?”

  “No.” She leaned back against the dressing stone of the lintel. “I’m just arguing both sides. It doesn’t sound like Kaletha—but it doesn’t sound like you or Tazey, either.” She frowned again, scouting the thought, then let it go. “As I said, there was no change in Kaletha’s life, except one, which argues more than anything else that it wasn’t her.”

  He cocked his head, curious.

  “You,” the Hawk said. “A rival, a b
arbarian, a boor. She hated you from the beginning. You should have been the first. A potential book thief...” She gestured towards the dark volumes, stacked at the foot of the altar, threads of reflected light gleaming dully gold and pewter on their bindings. “Also, you’re the one with the greatest chance of figuring out what’s going on. But there hasn’t been an attack directed at you.”

  “Hasn’t there?” The Wolf studied his bandaged wrists for a moment, the flesh around them bruised brown and stained now with the poultices he’d concocted to cleanse the wounds. “You know what was odd about that attack on Nanciormis? It was the only one to take place early enough in the evening for people to be around.”

  “You know,” Starhawk said, “I thought there was something strange about that. Something—I don’t know. During the calling of Galdron’s spirit...” Her dark brows came together for a moment, as if she searched for some lost thought, then she shook her head. “But not only was the attack on Nanciormis the only one reasonably early enough to expect witnesses, but it was the only one which the victim survived.”

  Sun Wolf dusted the crumbs from his hands. “I don’t think Nanciormis was the one who was supposed to die as a result of that attack,” he said quietly. “I think it was me.”

  “Could Kaletha have done that?” she asked. “Sent an illusion which felt like the coming of a demon, with your face?”

  “She might have,” he said. “I can’t think of a neater way to get rid of someone in a position to expose her without drawing blame to herself by killing me and narrowing the field still further. If she’d been dealing with demon magic from these books, she would have known what one felt like and put it together. Particularly if she was afraid to send the real demons after me, for fear I’d take them and twist them to my own will.”

  He got painfully to his feet and limped to the door. Outside, the narrow rock-cleft, sun-touched for only a brief hour at noon, was sinking again into cool green gloom. From here, he could smell the water and hear the sounds of the birds and beasts who came down to drink, so unlike the untouched, sterile catch-tanks of Wenshar. “In the Dark Book our little Scout read us this afternoon it said there always came a point at which the Witch realized her power, realized it was she who was causing the deaths of those she hated. I think Kaletha might have reached that point with Egaldus’ death. She certainly didn’t shed a hell of a lot of tears over it.”

  “Not where you’d see them, anyway,” Starhawk put in softly.

  “But Nexué, and Galdron, and maybe Egaldus, were all her enemies—and when Egaldus died she must have realized there were people who’d guess it. And she had to shift the blame. There was no—no smell of evil in Nanciormis’ room after the attack. That might just have been an effect of the storm, but I’m not so sure.”

  “And Incarsyn?”

  He glanced back at her over his shoulder, his one eye darkening with concern. “I don’t know,” he said. “That worries me. Maybe by that time the demons had begun to touch Tazey as well. Maybe...” He half turned back, drawing closed the clasps of his worn old sheepskin doublet, which had been part of Jeryn’s contribution that afternoon.

  The southern-window slit above the altar was dimming now, as darkness settled on the desert. Through it, nothing of the Fortress was visible, nor the town—only the endless planes of air and sand, marching away into a flat infinity, broken by the single whitish plume of dust where one of Nanciormis’ scouts cantered back towards Tandieras after an unsuccessful day of search.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  He sighed heavily. “There’s no way I can prove my innocence, or Kaletha’s guilt. And if the demons have begun to touch Tazey’s mind...” He turned back. Starhawk, her big hands clasped around bony knees, sat watching him in the blue glow of the witchfire. “I think if Tazey could get away from this place, she’d be all right,” he said. “But I can’t see her father letting her go, not to get the teaching she’ll need. And untaught, God only knows to what channel her powers will turn.” He leaned his powerful shoulders in the stone lintel. “We’ll have to stop them both at the source.”

  Starhawk glanced again at the books. The witchlight, gleaming on the sand-polished jewels and the queer, twisted silver shapes that clasped them shut, seemed to impart a glowing half-life to them, as if they had spent the centuries, like the demons, dreaming in silence of alien longings. “Do you think you can?”

  He nodded, though he felt by no means sure. “There are spells in the Demonary that provide for the binding of demons into a rock, or a tree, or an altar stone,” he said. “The Book of the Cult lists all their names. If I can make a Circle of Darkness wide enough and draw them into it, it would keep them long enough for me to work such a binding, to hold them to the stones of Wenshar for eternity.”

  The woman who had been for years his second-in-command and who never failed to pour the cold and lucid water of her logic onto his strategies regarded him with those enigmatic gray eyes for a moment, then said, “If it works.”

  Sun Wolf nodded and tried to ignore the chill curl of dread at the thought of standing once more in that haunted temple. “If it works,” he agreed.

  Chapter 16

  ORDINARILY IT WOULD HAVE taken them until just after noon to reach Wenshar from the tiny chapel on the Binnig Rock, but they were delayed, searching for certain herbs and stealing a bull calf from an isolated foothills ranch. By the time they entered the ruined city, the shadows were already beginning to slant over, the sun blinding but curiously heatless in the crumbled mazes of the lower town, a glaring line halfway up the chromatic rocks in the canyons. It took them a few hours to water their horses, stable them in the rear chamber of the temple Sun Wolf had used before, and to barricade them in. As he drew the Circles of Light around the door this time, Sun Wolf was interested to see how close his own half-learned, half-guessed defenses had been to the Circles as described in the Demonaries. Whatever happened, they knew they could not afford to lose the horses.

  He thought with brief regret of the small cache of his and Starhawk’s money, hidden behind a loose brick in the dusty little cell where they had slept and talked and made love. When this was over and the demons bound to the rocks of Wenshar for all time, they would have to flee; a dozen pieces of silver would come in handy, perhaps make all the difference, somewhere along the road between capture and escape.

  But more than that, there was a sharp ache inside him as he realized that it would be years, if ever, before they would see Tazey and Jeryn again. That, too, was a sensation totally unfamiliar to him, as unfamiliar as the pain and terror he had felt for Starhawk’s safety—as if, loving her, some wall within him had been irreparably fissured, and he had had thrust upon him the capacity to love others as well. He had come to look upon those two children as if they had been his own; his deceased ancestors were the only ones who might have kept track of the bastards he’d fathered over the years. Odd that the first children for whom he should feel responsible should be some other man’s.

  But if nothing else, Tazey would be safe. If he could not engineer her happiness, at least he could give her that.

  “I don’t like this, Chief,” Starhawk said softly, as she watched the Wolf trace the final signs of the Circle of Light around her on the smooth-swept temple floor. The bleached smudge of daylight that lay like a rumpled carpet by the nearer door was fading. The gloom seemed thicker beyond the wavering rings of a dozen small fires whose smoke, in spite of the old air shafts hidden in the darkness of the ceiling, stung and burned the eyes. It would soon be night.

  Sun Wolf sat back on his knees and used the ragged hem of his torn shirt to daub loose charcoal and ochre from his scabbed fingers. “I don’t like your even being here,” he retorted. He wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand, leaving long smudges of black and rust. The vast silence of the dark temple around them picked up the echoes of his broken voice. “But I’d like it a hell of a lot less if you were where I couldn’t see you.”

 
“I didn’t mean that.”

  Looking across the lines of the Circle at the thin, strong face, with its old scars and rock-crystal eyes and sun-whitened hair, warmed to honey by the light of the small fire enclosed with her in the enchanted ring, Sun Wolf knew too well what she did mean.

  They had both been a dozen times over the rite of summoning in the Demonary and the Book of the Cult of Wenshar. Near the lighter doorway into the entry hall the bull calf lowed plaintively, as if it knew it had reason to fear the slow gathering of darkness.

  The central canyon, as they had walked up it, dragging the unwilling calf between them, had been dead silent. The crunch of their feet on the gravel, the slip and scrape of the calf’s hooves, and its frightened bawling, had echoed in that horrible stillness, prickling the hair on the Wolf’s nape with the sensation of being watched. Now and then, from the tail of his eye, he had glimpsed movement. Several times he had turned his head, knowing there would be nothing when he did so. And there was not. Familiar as he had come to be with the haunted canyons and the not-quite-empty black eyes of the stone-cut houses, still his heart thumped hard against his ribs, and the sweat crawled clammily down his backbone at those soft, scritching movements and the touch of those unseen eyes.

  What little light filtered into the temple from the entry hall was fading.

  He and the Hawk, working together and as swiftly as the unfamiliar rituals would let them, had swept and ritually cleansed the temple. Sun Wolf had repeated the archaic spells learned from the Demonary as he had drawn the runes in the temple’s four corners, first slowly and clumsily, checking the moldering black book to make sure they were right, then with more certainty in his harsh, scraped voice. It would take him longer to form and consecrate the greater Circle, which was his ultimate goal, without her help—longer, as the weariness grew on his stiff and aching arms and tired mind; but he was not having her unprotected once night came.