The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  With the demons bound to the rock that had given them birth, it would have been possible to sleep safely, even within the temple, but Sun Wolf had not wanted to risk the dreams that might come.

  He mumbled, “What is it?” By the color of the light, he knew he’d slept four or five hours.

  “Riders on their way,” she said. “Still a couple hours out on the desert, but my guess is it’s reinforcements.”

  “Good.” He sat up. Starhawk, as usual, refrained from helping him; he didn’t know whether he should be miffed or pleased with the implied compliment of superhuman stamina. The jab of the hardened dressing was almost as bad as the cracked ribs underneath. “They can take Nanciormis back.”

  Starhawk shook her head. “He’s gone,” she said. “You’d started the binding-rites already when his guards took him out of the temple. He was cut to pieces, you know, and bleeding like a flayed steer. For a long time he just cried in a corner....”

  “Don’t tell me,” the Wolf said wearily. “They thought the poor bastard was pretty harmless where he was.”

  Starhawk shrugged. “After what went on in the temple, they weren’t anxious to search the canyons for him. I’d have the lot of them flogged, myself, but it’s not my business.”

  Sun Wolf sighed and sat quietly, his back to the crumbling house wall. Dry wind curled across his naked chest, bearing the smell of dust and horses.

  He wondered why, in spite of everything—the memory of his humiliation at the commander’s hands, the beating they’d given Starhawk, the pain in his wrists and side—his only anger toward the man stemmed from what he had done to Anshebbeth and what he had tried to do to Jeryn—not even so much trying to murder him, but planting in his mind the fear that he was a coward and turning his father against him.

  He still found it difficult to hate Nanciormis. After seeing Anshebbeth’s death, he found it difficult, at the moment, to hate anyone.

  Thinking back, he realized that he always had—and in that he was like Nanciormis himself.

  “He was only playing the game, you know,” he said after a time. “It was only selfishness and greed, with no hate in it. He couldn’t have summoned the demons if he’d wanted to, and maybe he knew it. There was nothing personal in it at all. None of them, not Tazey nor Anshebbeth nor Incarsyn, was real to him. Only himself and his wants.”

  “It’s what tipped me off, you know.” The Hawk settled back on her heels, a bar of sunlight slanting through the broken roof, turning her hair to platinum but leaving that cool, scarred face in shadow. “You saw Nanciormis as a man, but I saw him as a woman sees him. He was a man who used women. He used other people, too—their hates, their loves, their fears—and their magic. In a way, his evil was deeper than Anshebbeth’s hate or Kaletha’s vanity and irresponsibility with what she’d found in the books that had lain forgotten for centuries in the library. And, of course, poor Ciannis knew less of the cult than Nanciormis did. If she had known, she might have warned Kaletha about it—if she ever knew Kaletha had found the old books at all. But Nanciormis simply didn’t care.”

  Sun Wolf nodded. “The worst of it is,” he said quietly, “that it was my evil as well. That was what being a mercenary was all about. Like killing that poor calf—you do what you have to do, like an animal eating. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed, not for a kingdom or for love or pride or for anything, really—just because some politician was paying me to take a city they happened to be living in.”

  The corner of her mouth moved slightly, less ironic than simply rueful. “Yes, I know,” she said. Their eyes met. In hers he saw the understanding that he had done evil and that she had known it for evil at the time and had still followed him into battle as his second-in-command. It was, he understood then, what Nanciormis had done to Anshebbeth. It was how she had known.

  It was some time before he could say anything. When he did, it was only, “I’m sorry, Hawk.” In her eyes he saw that she knew for what.

  She only shook her head. “It’s history,” she said, meaning it. “Like Anshebbeth, I had the choice. Unlike her, I don’t hate myself for the choice I made.” He remembered that she had remained Kaletha’s friend.

  “You understood that?”

  “Oh, yes. She knew in the end what she had become—and the one she most hated was herself. I suppose it’s what happened to all the girls, when they came to an understanding of what was happening to them.” She uncoiled her whipcord body and rose to her feet, watching with her usual mild detachment as Sun Wolf agonizingly followed. “It was only the evil ones that survived.”

  “I can’t say that I blame those that didn’t,” he said.

  They passed through a gap in the wall, which might or might not once have been a door, and walked across the trampled, dusty side of a sand dune toward where one of the old rain tanks hid in the niche of a rock, away from the prevailing wind. “Would you have done the same in her position? If you learned it was you?”

  Sun Wolf glanced up at the dark, eroded cliffs of the Haunted Range, guarding their rainbow labyrinth of evil within. “I’d like to think I would.”

  There was water in three of the old tanks; Sun Wolf bathed in the shallowest of them; Starhawk joined him there and later on the spread-out blanket that he’d worn flung over his shoulders like a cloak. “No wonder soldiers’ women have to be versatile and creative,” she commented, when he flinched at the pain of his ribs.

  In time they both dressed in the clothes that were part of the bundle Tazey had brought to Wenshar with her to further their escape. The bundle also contained some food, their weapons and mail, but not the little cache of money. “Cheer up,” Starhawk said, slipping various hideout daggers into her boots with the air of one resuming a much-loved garment. “With the demons laid for good, they’ll have to give us some reward—an exorcist’s fee if nothing else.”

  “Bets?” the Wolf grumbled.

  They rode out of Wenshar as darkness began to fall and met, an hour and a half later, the oncoming party from Tandieras in a circle of torchlight on the pebbled desolation of the wind-scoured reg.

  As they got close, Sun Wolf could see Osgard’s coarse blond-gray hair by the torchlight and, beside his great horse, the fat, trotting figure of Walleye and his small rider. Tazey cried out, “Daddy!” and spurred her buckskin gelding, riding like a mad antelope to throw herself into her father’s arms.

  “It seems I’ve you to thank that I’m not going to find scorpions in my blankets some night.” By the campfire’s windblown light, Osgard looked sober and better than he had since the Wolf had come to Tandieras. The veils that swathed his coarse, stubbly face were pushed back, falling over his sand-colored cloak behind. With his rough shirt and battered boots, he might have been just another range hand, as he had been before his warrior-uncle had made him King. “Oh, I knew he was dangerous, but...” He hesitated, then looked into the amber heart of the fire, his thick mouth pursing with embarrassment. “I suppose I was like the owner of a dog trained for killing. You get careless.”

  Sun Wolf nodded. “I know.” On the other side of the campfire, a guard told a joke, but the laughter was subdued. Out on the asphalt blackness of the reg, it was less easy to dismiss the demons and djinns of desert lore as mere superstition, no matter what the priests of the Triple God might say. “He did, in a way.”

  “He always was careless,” Osgard said. “He was a good fighter, but irresponsible—he never thought anything could touch him. I’m not sure being publicly broken and turned out like a beaten dog in the desert wasn’t something to which he’d have preferred death. He had a conceit of himself, besides liking his pleasures. But I wouldn’t have let him put a hand on Tazey...” He paused, and the bluster died out of him again. Off by the other campfire, Tazey and Jeryn sat together, conversing quietly with Starhawk, their arms around her. Past Osgard’s shoulder, the Wolf could see Jeryn’s dark eyes shining with a boy’s gruesome enthusiasm as Tazey spoke of what had happened in the temple.

&n
bsp; The King sighed. “But God knows I’d have sworn I’d never have let matters go this far. Damned witches with their stinking magic...” He stopped again, looking over at the Wolf, as if he’d spoken slightingly of sand in the tents of the shirdar.

  Sun Wolf shook his head. “Magic had nothing to do with it,” he said. “Nanciormis was the kind of man who’d have used any weapon. He’d made attempts on your life—and Jeryn’s—before he learned Anshebbeth’s mind had been touched by the demons. Her power was just the readiest weapon at hand. If she’d been mageborn and not simply the victim of her own and Kaletha’s vanity, she’d have understood what was happening to her and been able to control it. I felt it—I think Tazey did, too. If you have power, you must face it, touch it, and learn to use it, or it rots within you like an abscessed wound.” He fell silent, regarding the King across the campfire, and Osgard, knowing his thoughts, looked away again.

  He muttered, “I—I know.” Unwillingly, his eyes returned to the Wolf. “But you can’t blame me, can you? I wanted a daughter I could be proud of...”

  “Good God, man,” Sun Wolf said angrily, “you’ve got one of the finest natural wizards I’ve ever heard of for a daughter and a son who’ll politic and finesse and treaty-make rings around the shirdar and the Middle Kingdoms, and all you can do is complain because they’re not a brainless brood mare and a beef-witted ox like you and me? I can only think of two things in my life that I wouldn’t trade for those children of yours. Can’t you be proud of them for what they are and not for what you want them to be?”

  Osgard stared into the fire, rubbing his big, sword-scarred hands over one another, as the Wolf remembered his own father used to do. Then he looked up again and grinned, a little embarrassed to admit it. “Jeryn is a clever little bastard, isn’t he?”

  “It’s men like Jeryn,” Sun Wolf said, “who hire men like me. Let ’em be what they are, Osgard. They’re going to get hurt bad enough swimming against the stream as it is.”

  The King sighed and rubbed his stubbly chin. “I know it,” he said quietly. Then, after a long pause, “Where should I send Tazey?”

  She’d been willing, Sun Wolf remembered, to give up everything she wanted to please him. He remembered the fauve torchlight on her hair as she danced the war dance and the pride that had glowed so visibly from Osgard as he’d spoken of her—the sweetest daughter a man could want. Beside the nearby campfire, she and Jeryn sat huddled in their quilted jackets and head veils, their eyes bright as they talked to Starhawk, reunited for this last brief time.

  “You could send her to Yirth of Mandrigyn,” he said at length. “She’s just about the only wizard I know qualified to teach.” He added, seeing her father’s face thicken at the thought of how far away Mandrigyn was, “But if Tazey prefers, I could stay here for awhile first, teach her what I know. It isn’t the teaching she’d get from Yirth, but it would tell her what to look for later. And it would give her more time here.”

  “No.” Osgard sighed. “Tazey can’t stay here. And neither can you.” A half-burned log broke in the fire; he picked a branch from the slender bundle of wood they’d brought in from the far edge of the reg and pushed the fallen chunks back together. The spurting flame showed deep lines in his unshaven face—annoyance and shame.

  “You don’t know the temper of the people in Pardle, Captain. They’re a superstitious bunch, when all’s said, and the mageborn have always had a foul reputation in Wenshar. I wouldn’t have cared if you’d been lynched on the way back, but when I heard Illyra’s men were out hunting your blood, I thought I’d better come and make sure Tazey got back all right. The miners and the Trinitarians being on one of their witch hunts is one thing, but Illyra...”

  Sun Wolf felt his face flush with anger. “I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the murders.”

  The King held up his hand. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “And I think you know it doesn’t matter.”

  The cruel vulture-eyes of the Lady of the Dunes returned to Sun Wolf, and the keyed-up tension in the Hall, the night Nanciormis had staged his attack. And it was gold pieces to little green apples that Nanciormis had spread the story of his confession from the Fortress to the town. Anger surged like a core of heated iron in him, but he knew Osgard was right.

  “I think you’d better ride on tonight.”

  Osgard collected all the spare food and water from his troop of guards, and Jeryn and Tazey helped them load it on their horses. “We can hold off Illyra for a while,” the King said, as Sun Wolf finished tying the latigos that held the slender bundle of his possessions to his dapple gelding’s cantle. “But you’d better ride straight north and get across the Backbone as soon as you can.”

  “Easy for him to say,” Sun Wolf growled, as the big monarch went striding off to give some direction or other to the little knot of dark-clothed guards. “You know every copper we have is still behind that brick in our cell in the empty quarter?”

  Starhawk regarded him, amused, by the faint glow of the ball lightning that flickered over his head. “You want to risk meeting Illyra to go back for it?”

  Sun Wolf grumbled an impious wish concerning Illyra’s future sex partners and tightened the gray’s cinches. He added, “I never should have promoted you from squad captain.”

  “You always said a warrior had to be versatile.”

  “I wasn’t talking about sweeping floors and feeding pigs from here to Farkash.”

  “Chief?” The bright flicker of magelight danced in the night; the black gravel of the reg crunched underfoot as Tazey and Jeryn came back from the baggage piles, carrying sacks. It was not lost on the Wolf that the guards looked askance at the soft light that surrounded the girl, and gave her wide berth. “These are all the Demonaries and books of magic that weren’t in the shirdane.”

  Sun Wolf hefted the sack experimentally, then opened it and removed the three largest volumes. These he handed back to Tazey. At her inquiring look, he explained, “They’re too big to grab up in an emergency. I’m not going to have them destroyed by accident just because I want them with me on the road. Take them to Mandrigyn with you, along with the others. You and Yirth between you can work out translations of the shirdane ones.”

  She nodded, hugging the books to her breast. Her mouth flinched a little, and she looked away; he saw the witchlight glisten in her eyes.

  Gently, he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll like Yirth,” he said softly. “She’s a good lady.” Then, grinning, he added, “You say hello to Sheera of Mandrigyn for me, too.”

  “And be prepared to have her spit in your face if you do,” Starhawk added irreverently.

  Jeryn, who had been doing something over by Sun Wolf’s horse, came back into the double ring of fox-fire light, and the Wolf could see in his face, too, the grief of parting.

  Tazey asked hesitantly, “Will I meet you again?”

  “Not if we keep getting thrown out of every kingdom we visit.”

  Sun Wolf ignored his second-in-command. “One day, yes.” He hugged them both, the daughter and the son that he would never father, and felt Jeryn’s thin arms around his waist in a tight clutch and the sting of Tazey’s tears against his unshaven chin. Neither mercenary captains nor wandering wizards could afford to raise children. It was the first time he had been conscious of regret for what he had been or for what he was.

  It was the first time he fully understood what it was he had given up.

  The wan glow of Tazey’s witchlight was visible for a long distance across the reg as they rode away.

  “It’s going to be hard for her,” Starhawk said after a time. “Hard for them both. But she never really wanted to be mageborn, you know. She really wanted to be what her father wanted her to be—a beautiful girl who dances well, rides anything with four legs, and eventually marries some handsome man and lives happily ever after. There was a time when she could have turned aside from what she has and gone back to lying to herself about it. She gave that up for us.”<
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  “No.” Sun Wolf glanced back over his shoulder at that will-o’-the-wisp, a marsh light in the flat, black desert of stone. “You can never turn aside from it, nor lie to yourself about it. Not ever.”

  The moonlight dusted her uncovered ivory hair as she moved her head. “Do you want to?”

  He thought about Tazey and Jeryn again, their years of learning to be what they would be, years in which he could have no part. “Sometimes.”

  His horse stumbled a little on the harsh gravel, making him curse as his cracked ribs pinched him, and something tied to the saddle horn jogged against his knee. Curious, knowing he had hung nothing there, he reached down and brought up a little wash-leather bag that jingled softly as he opened it and dumped its contents into his hand.

  “Well, I’ll be go to hell.”

  Starhawk drew her rangy bay mare closer, to look over his shoulder at the handful of silver gleaming softly in the dusky moonlight. “It has to have been Jeryn,” she said.

  Sun Wolf laughed, with relief and triumph and delight. “Nine years old and already he knows you don’t turn your hired troops off without pay!”

  “Yeah?” Her eyebrows went up. “And how long do you think his daddy’s troops are going to cover our tracks against Illyra once they realize he’s gone through and rifled every pocket and saddlebag in the camp?”

  Sun Wolf shuddered and shoved the money into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “Kid’s going to be hell on wheels when he takes over Wenshar,” he said. “Let’s ride.”

  “And just think,” Starhawk mused as they nudged their horses into a canter, north to the distant, jagged line of the mountains under the sand-colored moon. “The next teacher you find may be even worse.”

  The Dark Hand of Magic

  Barbara Hambly

  For Sensei

  Contents

  Chapter 1