Kneeling on the end of the extended bridge with the faintest of chill breezes flicking at the ends of his hair, with hand, knees, and rolled-up sleeves smeared with mercury and hellebore and the goose fat with which the machines were greased, it occurred to him that if the supporting ropes broke now or if the planks of the bridge gave beneath him and he plunged sixty feet to the stony ground below, that, too, would be a “misfortune,” an “unavoidable accident” in the bad luck of the troop.
He finished his work and came down as quickly as he could.
It was nearly dark when he completed his task. As he smeared salt and silver in the last siege tower he could hear the clatter of hooves outside and the voices of men exclaiming. The overpowering sweetness of torches made up with incense stung his nose. Renaeka Strata, without a doubt. He grinned, picturing Purcell’s panicked discomfiture. Wiping his fouled hands on his thighs as he emerged from the darkness of the tower, he found he’d guessed right on all counts. The Lady Prince stood before its narrow door in a refulgent golden gown which put the torches of her guards to shame. Nervous and looking colder than ever with a drip on his narrow nose, Purcell hovered a few paces behind. “Did you find aught?” the Lady inquired, and Sun Wolf shook his head.
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything there.”
And as he gave her the same little lecture he’d given Ari—of which he was beginning to become extremely tired—on Eyes and auligar, he wondered what other substances might raise marks, substances that the Witches of Wenshar had not written down or that Yirth of Mandrigyn’s teacher had been murdered before she could pass along.
Renaeka Strata listened, her head tipped a little to one side, the jewels in her pink wig flashing in the cresset’s juddering light, eyes narrowed and long, white, impossibly graceful hands fingering the luminous ropes of her pearls. When he was done she said, “The attack is set for an hour before dawn, the morning after tomorrow. If our wicked magician—should he exist at all—is to put the Eye on these engines, he must do so tonight.”
“He exists, my Lady.” Sun Wolf sighed.
“Indeed?” She studied him from beneath hennaed lashes, seeing a big, grimy lion of a man, with his heavy forearms furred with gold beneath the stained linen of his rolled-back sleeves and his hands scarred by the teeth of demons. “How fortunate, then, that you are working for us. Will you watch tonight?”
He thought, I should try to get into the city again, but the thought of the djerkas raised gooseflesh on his back. Sooner or later they’d have to meet, that he knew—and better sooner, before worse harm could befall his friends. And yet, there was a good chance that the Lady Prince was right—that Moggin would come to him, here. If not, there was tomorrow, and no one else he knew could expect to catch the mage if he did come.
Slowly he nodded. “All right.” And if Moggin came, he found himself thinking, at least there’d be help within call.
Her voice got brisk. “It would also assist matters if, on the night preceding the attack, we might count upon a good, heavy fog to cover the advance of the siege engines along the road from here to the walls of Vorsal. As a wizard I’m sure you could arrange...”
“No.”
She didn’t shift an eye at the bald finality in his voice. “You would be paid extra, and not, I assure you, ungenerously.”
“No.”
Though she was far too controlled to redden, even supposing any blush could penetrate the stucco of her cosmetics, there was an edged quality to her laugh. “Captain, really...”
“I may be a killer but I’m not a whore,” he said quietly. “I don’t use power for other peoples’ convenience. What I’m doing in Vorsal is for my men and because Moggin’s damn hex killed innocent people and nearly killed someone I love.” The phrase echoed strangely on his tongue; he realized it was the first time he’d publicly admitted to caring for anyone. “My quarrel is with him, not with the people of Vorsal.”
By her eyes, he saw she understood, but she tried anyway, laughing through her thin nose. “Your quarrel may not be with them, but they’ll certainly suffer along with him when he dies. If you kill this man, his city will fall. And when his city falls, we’ll give you your chance to kill him or kill him for you if you prefer, in any manner you want. You can’t kill him without dooming those ‘innocent people’ in the town, you know.”
“I know.”
“And it is, after all, the object of the siege,” Purcell pointed out, hastening to back up anything the Lady might say. “Believe me, you will be well paid...”
“Pay isn’t the reason I’m doing this!” He swung around upon the little man, stung with the knowledge of his own evil, and saw the affronted surprise in that collapsed pinkish face. “God’s grandmother, don’t you people ever think about anything but money?”
“Of what use is your power, if not to give you a good living?” the Councillor inquired, with very real puzzlement. “I should think that now that you are too old to lead a mercenary troop, you would welcome another way of making an even better living without effort, something which will guarantee you a comfortable old age. Isn’t that what we all do?”
“NO!” Anger filled him, stung by the words “too old,” but with it a curious cold sickness, a disgust with them and with himself. When he had been a mercenary, he realized, there had never been a wrong course—only inept, inefficient, or erroneous ones. He had been paid, and that was that. It was different now.
“No,” he said again, softly now. “That’s what a bandit does.”
The banker’s thin little mouth hardened, and he tucked his hands into the fur muff he carried. “Well, really...”
Or a merchant, he thought belatedly.
“It isn’t—It’s different with power,” he said clumsily, groping for what he meant and knowing they would not understand, for he did not understand it himself. It was another reason, he realized, that he needed training with an experienced wizard, not only to learn to put that rationale into words, but to have someone else who understood that it was needed. “I can’t sell it... I can’t use it without knowing in myself that what I’m doing is... is right...” It wasn’t exactly what he meant and he knew he’d lost them by the cool glint in the Lady Prince’s eye.
“And does the distinction you make mean that a thing will be right when it is done for one reason, and wrong if done for another? Particularly when the results are exactly the same?”
“I suppose you mean,” Purcell put in, tilting his skullcapped head to one side, “that you feel there’s a taboo of some kind on the use of your powers. But if so, wherein lies the difference between wizards using power for what they think is worthwhile and using it for what another thinks is worthwhile, especially if that other is able to take a wider view?”
“I don’t know!” Sun Wolf said, backed into a corner now, angry, outmaneuvered, and wondering why he hadn’t simply stuck to killing people for his living.
“But that’s nonsense! Really, you’re like an artist refusing to buy bread by taking commissions or a skilled accountant refusing to use his skills for his own benefit by working for a wealthy man...”
Renaeka gestured impatiently. Purcell, though more earnest than the Wolf had ever seen him, pinched shut his mouth and looked at her protestingly, truly not understanding, as quarreling lovers say, “what the fuss is about.” Awkward silence hovered for a moment, broken only by the crackle of the scented torches and the dull background of overseers’ voices as they counted the slaves for the night. Then, with a kind of prim self-satisfaction and a glance at his ruler, Purcell began, “And in any case you really have no choice. We have...”
“Be silent!” Renaeka Strata didn’t raise her voice—though she could do so with hair-raising effect if it would get her what she wanted—but the venom of her tone was even worse. Purcell flinched and seemed to look around for a small hole in the ground into which to crawl, and Sun Wolf, knowing Starhawk’s name had been on his lips, balled his fists hard on a red su
rge of anger. Just for an instant, he caught the glance Purcell gave his mistress, a glance of protest, of resentment, in which, like a hidden glass splinter, gleamed hate.
But if she was aware of this, she said nothing. With her usual smooth graciousness she turned back to the Wolf. “I will not ask it of you, then. But you will watch?”
He turned his face away from them, looking past the ring of torches set up in the open space of the park, past the dull knees of the hills to the south, as if beyond them he could see the black walls, the lightless towers of Vorsal against the unnatural sky. It stood to reason that the hex marks—if the hex marks were in fact made on the machines and not somewhere else in the camp—couldn’t be made by a confederate, that Moggin had to be coming into the camps himself—didn’t it?
He didn’t know and cursed his ignorance, his lack of training that put not only himself but all his friends in peril of their lives. As had been the case in trying to explain magic to these two grasping and money-loving merchants, he felt helpless, awash in a sea of things he simply did not know, and anger stirred in him again, like a goaded beast’s, undirected and dull.
“Yeah,” he said softly, to the hills, to the torches, to the night. “Yeah, I’ll watch.”
“And was your mother a witch?”
Renaeka Strata, standing at the half-opened curtain of the window of the small dining room, moved her head a little, her cold white profile thin and hook-nosed and suddenly very old against the dark. She had taken off her wig, covering the thin, lackluster hair of an ageing woman with a close-fitting velvet cap like a man’s. Instead of the gorgeous dresses she changed into and out of all day, she wore a loose robe of equal gorgeousness, voided velvet colored as only the velvets of Kwest Mralwe could be colored, the luminous violet of sunset with a collar of shagged silk soft as fur. Only her hands were the same, incredibly long, incredibly narrow, white as a spirit’s hands and thick with a lifetime’s ransom of jewels.
“I don’t think so, no.”
She turned slowly and came back to the table, where Starhawk still sat like a well-mannered young boy in her petaled neck ruff and head bandages. The servants had cleared away the remains of the meal which the Lady Prince had asked her guest to share with her in privacy; the musicians who had played softly in a corner of the chamber had departed. A lute, a psaltry, and a painted porcelain flute still lay on the bright-blue cushions of their ivory stools; the candlelight that wanned the room picked out the gold spider strands of strings, the hard flicks of the bright tuning keys, softening where it cast shadows like mottled water on the molded plaster of the wall behind.
Wine gleamed like liquid rubies in goblets of gold-mounted nacre and nautilus shell. The smell of meats was in the air, with that of the patchouli in an ornate table jar of enamel and gold. Voices and the noise of traffic jangled faintly from the street outside, for this room was close to the front of the house. In a pierced bronze brazier close by charcoal flickered, warming the room; as the Lady Prince held her hands out toward it, the amber glow edged her long fingers in rose and called secret colors from the hidden hearts of her jewels.
Her voice, with its veined sweetness of silver and rust, was low. “Had she been a witch, she would not have staked her power, her very life, upon the lust of a man. Had she been a witch, she would not have had to. My mother was a greedy woman, wanting money, wanting power, and wanting to control men—wanting especially to control my father, and through him all that the wealth of the House could buy. With the alum mines that were his first wife’s dowry, he’d become truly the ruler of Kwest Mralwe, and she wanted that. But had she been truly a witch, she’d have been able to control him with more than his lust—an evanescent bridle at best, particularly in my father’s case. And had she been truly a witch, she’d have been able to keep him from learning of her infidelities far longer than she did.”
She turned her hands over, above the jewel bed of the glowing coals. “They burned her,” she said after a time. “Publicly, in the square, clothed only in a rag of a white shift—though the servants who told me about it when I was four said she was naked—and in her hair, which was black and reached her knees. They do that to the mageborn in the Middle Kingdoms, you know. She’d lost most of her beauty by then, I’m told—she lost it when she miscarried my brother—and my father repudiated her, but it was noticed he didn’t take his old wife back, nor return her dowry. In many ways I’m more like him than her.”
“I’m sorry,” Starhawk said softly. Sun Wolf had not told her that.
Renaeka Strata shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “And she was far too vain and taken up with fascinating every young man in the city to have much time for me, in any case. I don’t think, even had she had power, she’d have known what to do with it, how to make it work for her—always provided such power exists, as your friend seems to think.”
“It exists,” Starhawk said, unconsciously echoing the Wolf’s assertion.
The older woman smiled, her eyes suddenly warm. “If it does, I’ve never seen it. And with Church law on the subject as it is, I’ll hold to that disbelief for everyone’s sake. Ill luck is ill luck, and someone is always bound to benefit from it, as Purcell did when old Greambus’s dye lots all turned the year of the King of Dalwirin’s coronation, or as I did, when that dreadful brother of his fell down the stairs.”
“Perhaps,” the Hawk said softly, “your mother merely chose to use her powers for other things—to bring her a man she wanted beyond sense or reason—and didn’t look beyond that.”
That sharp face, so old in its narrow frame of colorless hair and dull purple velvet, turned toward her with a wry expression, the flames picking out all the intricate tracery of lip and eye wrinkles that cosmetics usually hid. “It scarcely explains why she’d stand by and let them burn her.”
“Maybe she wasn’t a very good witch and didn’t know how to escape,” the Hawk pointed out, folding her bony hands together in the elongated linen flowers of her cuffs. “Maybe the miscarriage you spoke about wearied her, drained her, to the point where she couldn’t summon the power. And maybe,” she added more softly, “when the man she loved repudiated her, she simply didn’t care.”
She winced suddenly, the fine muscles of her jaw twisting into flame-touched relief as a stab of pain in her head left her breathless. She opened her eyes and, for a moment, saw two figures, columns of damson shadow blazing in a firestorm of jewels, bending toward her, white hands reaching...
Then they resolved themselves into the Lady Prince.
“Are you all right, child?”
Starhawk managed to nod, cursing herself for showing weakness. “Fine,” she whispered, wanting more than anything to lie down and not certain that she could negotiate the marble corridors as far as her room. If she were attacked now, she thought giddily, she wouldn’t stand a chance. She could barely remember where she’d put her hideout knives.
The crystal tone of the Lady’s bell was like another spear going through her brain. “I just need rest,” Starhawk said haltingly, and forced herself to rise. The room doubled, reeled, then stabilized again; embarrassed and feeling ridiculously shy, she started for the door. Another pain struck her, buckling her knees, and Renaeka, who had been walking close beside her, waiting for that, caught her in arms surprisingly strong, and lowered her to the floor.
Chapter 7
IN THE DEAD, waiting calm of the night Sun Wolf watched, listening to the darkness.
All day and evening the wind had been still. He had dozed for an hour after Renaeka Strata had left, and had shared the guards’ rations, but always, it seemed, with one ear cocked toward the east. When he slept, his uneasy dreams had been a confusion of cloud and storm. Later, sitting in the pooled-ink shadow of a siege tower, facing out into the night, he had cautiously conjured winds.
Though unable to summon them against a natural inclination without sinking into the moving trance of deep magic—something he feared to do, now—he was able to herd and co
ax a kind of gentle push of land breezes eastward, to thrust against the cold masses over the sea. It was the most he could do, though his hands, his spirit, ached with holding back from more, and he cursed his ignorance again—his ignorance of weather; his ignorance of the healing that he was coming more and more to sense that Starhawk needed; his fatal ignorance of the magic of ill.
He knew he shouldn’t have to track down the ill-wisher like an assassin and kill him with his hands. There had to be other ways to finesse around a lack of power. His methods of healing were inefficient, he only bulled his way through on strength when he should have used skill. As a warrior and a teacher of warriors he knew that only worked until you met someone stronger.
Worry clawed him like a rat chewing in a wall. In thirty years’ experience with physical mayhem, he had seen thousands of head wounds, and he hadn’t liked Starhawk’s pallor that morning, or the lines of strain around her eyes. Glad as he’d been to see her out of bed, there was a part of him that had wanted to order her down again. She shouldn’t have been up, shouldn’t have been sitting with him...
But, by his ancestors, it had been good to talk to her again!
The warm land breeze stirred his tawny hair, and he watched its footprint pass him in the nodding weeds. Far down the dark line of the coast he could see the lights of the City Troops, camped in the ruins of Vorsal’s little port. By this time next year, those ruins would be replaced by warehouses, ropewalks, and the barracoons of slaves; the wharves would bristle with mastheads bearing the red-and-blue banners of the Pierced Heart.
On the way out to the engineering park to meet Purcell, he had ridden past the decaying walls of the ancient Royal Palace. Through unguarded gates rusted open, the Wolf had glimpsed unswept courtyards and a weed-choked portico, empty of life save for one laundress taking a shortcut with a basket of washing on her arm. The contrast with the city’s markets, with the lively chaos of money and fine clothes around any of the great merchant houses—the Stratii, the Cronesmae, the Balkii—was glaring. No wonder the King wanted a tame wizard, to win him back power in this land.
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