The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  The scholar sighed, and ran his hand over the lower part of his face again, aged by two days’ growth of gray stubble and disfigured by a swollen lip under which a side tooth could be seen to be missing. In a low, beaten voice he said, “Trying to raise magic.” He lifted his eyes to the Wolf’s again, wry and hopeless but with a kind of ironic amusement at himself. “I knew it was stupid. Drosis had told me hundreds of times I hadn’t the smallest glimmering of it and that all the spells in the world weren’t going to work if I did them, but... I don’t know. The spells were there, in his books. For weeks, I’d been working the weather-spells, trying to summon storms—anything to end the siege. I knew what was coming... or I thought that I knew. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d realized then...”

  He fell silent, staring down at his swollen hands. Sun Wolf knew what he himself would, have done, had he known in advance that the woman he loved and children he cherished would die as Moggin’s had. The scholar was, he guessed, his own age and, in those forty years, had lived in the contented comfort of his inherited riches. Without a doubt, he had never killed anyone and wouldn’t know how to go about it painlessly.

  After a time, Moggin sighed and pushed back his greasy hair. “Well, I had to try—with what success you could see, because of course it didn’t rain a drop. And I must say I felt extremely foolish, standing there in the study in the middle of the night, muttering incantations with candles all around me—besides the fact that, if I was seen by anyone, it would cost me my life. Two or three people in town had already been lynched for witchcraft, and, of course, since I was Drosis’ friend, there’d been talk about me for years. Rianna...” He broke off, his jaw and his blistered hands clenching tight. “My daughters used to be teased about it at school. But before the siege, it wasn’t a serious matter.”

  “That wasn’t weather-witching you were doing,” the Wolf said softly.

  “No.” He shook his head. “It was—was a spell to raise power out of the bones of the earth, to add to a wizard’s power in time of extreme need. In Drosis’ books, it was surrounded by warnings, but by then I—I could see our defenses weren’t going to last.” He looked over at Ari. “It wasn’t to turn against your men, you know, Captain. I—I don’t think I could do that—even now I don’t think I could. It was just to get my family to safety. In any case I doubt it would have worked...”

  “It wouldn’t have,” the Wolf said. “Not if you weren’t mageborn to start with.”

  Moggin made a rueful, broken sound that might have been a laugh. “Even if I had been, you scotched that pretty effectively by telling the Duke—I barely got the marks rubbed out before his men returned. I was going to try it again the following night...” He broke off suddenly, turning his face aside as it contorted again with grief, horror, and the effort not to weep. In bitter silence, he hugged himself, fighting not to remember the events of that last night with his family and their murders on the morrow.

  Sun Wolf looked away, remembering the bodies on the terrace, and met Ari’s stony gaze.

  “If he’s not mageborn he’s no threat to you,” he said quietly.

  “And no use to you,” Ari replied softly. “So you shouldn’t mind, should you? Unless you’ve got a real good way of proving he isn’t lying.”

  Don’t say it, his eyes said, cold and hard as agate. Sun Wolf was silent, remembering the smothering heat of the King of Wenshar’s dungeons, and his own desperate awareness of the utter impossibility of disproving such a charge. He looked down at the man he had once thought he’d feared and hated, stripped of shadow and mystery and revealed as a pathetic, broken creature, too ill-equipped by a wealthy upbringing to make even a decent slave. The desolation he had glimpsed in almost losing Starhawk and the horror of his own near-enslavement by the unknown wizard smote him with understanding and pity far beyond his own need of a potential teacher.

  But he knew how far Ari could be pushed. Moreover, he knew that as a commander, Ari was right. It isn’t fair, dammit! he thought, but he knew in his bones that the fact that he didn’t think the man was lying didn’t prove that he wasn’t. For a moment he felt that he looked across a chasm of darkness, not at Ari, but at himself.

  Ari signed to Dogbreath. Both of them drew their swords, and went to help Moggin to his feet.

  For the first time, Starhawk spoke up. “Who was it you said tried to swim in the ford with a rope a day or two ago, to set up some kind of ferry?”

  “Zane,” said Ari, pausing with his hand on Moggin’s shoulder to look back at her, a little startled by the non sequitur. “He’s the strongest swimmer, the toughest...”

  With casual grace, Starhawk stepped between them to Moggin, pushed him a quarter turn on the stool where he hunched, and pulled down his ragged and bloodstained smock, making him flinch where the dried blood stuck it to his back. “How old would you say some of those marks are?”

  “Ten days,” said Ari after a moment. “Two weeks.”

  “And Zane didn’t drown?” She jerked the smock back up again, covering the stooped, bruise-mottled shoulders with surprising lightness of touch. “You’ve got the wrong man. And I’d also say—and since I’m stuck here in the same danger as you are, that makes it at least partly my business—that you probably ought to think twice about snuffing one of your sources of information about hexes and hoodoos and whatnot, if, as he says, mageborn or not, he at least read all those books.”

  “Thank you,” Moggin said weakly, as Sun Wolf helped him into one of the several makeshift camp beds jammed into Dogbreath’s lopsided chaos of a tent. One or two of these were already occupied—by Penpusher, from the look of the ferocious riot of curls visible above one blanket, and Firecat, by the grimy leather armor and strings of mud-crusted jewels thrown over the foot of another. Dogbreath’s random assortment of broken totems and holy relics was mostly packed away for travel, but a few dangling ribbons and a woman’s white glove still remained pinned to the inside of the tent, a rotting jungle that would eventually be replaced as it decayed. Dogbreath himself found another cot and fell asleep immediately and fully clothed, still in the garish yellow surcoat he’d taken from the siege, one tippet sticking out from beneath the blankets like the leg of a squashed bug under a brick. Sun Wolf called a faint pin of bluish light into the air above his head as he sat on the end of the cot Dogbreath offhandedly offered to Moggin. It was typical of Dogbreath, Sun Wolf reflected, that he’d been equally willing to kill the man or sleep in the same tent with him after the affair was over. On the road, the men usually slept in hammocks, but a little consideration made him realize why those had been abandoned. There were just too many things that could go wrong under the influence of so thoroughgoing a hex.

  “It was the Hawk’s idea,” Sun Wolf said, as the dim phosphorescence settled itself among the dangling garlic and rags, edging all things in its pallid blue glow. “And anyhow, I owe you.” From inside his doublet he produced the bronze trephine, holding it up to the light between blunt and clumsy fingers. The bronze seemed softly radiant to his touch, warmed by ancient spells of healing and life. “I pinched this, some powders and gewgaws, and three of your friend’s books before I left that night—”

  “I would have let you out, you know.” Moggin pushed his matted gray hair back from his forehead. “I’m not just saying that—I truly would have. I was terrified the Duke would put you in the lockup in the town hall, where you could give evidence against me, though I couldn’t imagine where you’d gotten your information. My one thought was to hide the books, then ‘accidentally’ leave the door open...”

  Sun Wolf sniffed. “And I thought you looked so pleased because you had me in your power. But I remembered they said Drosis was a healer. That’s the only reason the Hawk’s alive today. So we both owe you.”

  Moggin breathed a sound that might have been a laugh and whispered, “I’ll remember to mention this to the Elteraic philosophers the next time they contend there’s no God.”

  Sun Wolf tucked the ti
ny drill away again, and folded his massive arms. Did Drosis have a student?”

  Moggin nodded, garnering about him the dirty silk quilt Starhawk handed him. Though the tent was warm with the frowst of body heat, he was shivering. He fingered the chain on his neck in its ring of bruises as he spoke. “A girl named Kori, a laundress’ daughter, I think. That was nearly twenty years ago, when I first knew him. She died in an accident—fell off the city walls. He never took another.”

  The Wolf and Starhawk exchanged glances. The Hawk said, “Altiokis, at a bet.”

  “No odds.” He turned back to Moggin. “He ever mention his master?”

  “I’m sure he did, but I simply don’t recall it.” With everything that had happened to him, Sun Wolf wasn’t surprised. What did surprise him slightly was that Moggin could be as coherent as he was, but then, even in the face of an unexpected accusation of wizardry, he had kept his head. “I think most of the books originally belonged to him, but Drosis cut or inked his name out of them so he wouldn’t be traced. Drosis lived in fear of Altiokis, far more than of the Church. I must have known him for three years before I even realized he was truly a wizard at all. He was a sort of cousin of ours—Myla’s—my wife’s—and mine.” His voice stumbled on the unthinking habit, when there was, in fact, no more “ours,” but he steadied himself, and went on. “He was a physician. The local bishop was always suspicious of him, but never could prove anything. I just thought it was gossip, myself, like that wretched woman Skinshab down by the Gatehouse who was supposed to be a witch.”

  “Was she?”

  He shook his head. “I asked him that once. He said no. She was just a nasty-tempered old hag who hated children and was always telling them she’d put the Eye on them. I was surprised no one lynched her during the siege—surprised no one lynched her years ago, in fact. It was only a matter of time, I suppose...”

  One point for the King, Sun Wolf thought ironically.

  Thoughtfully, Starhawk said, “You know, if she was a witch, she might very well be one of the camp slaves. The King’s account of killing her didn’t sound very efficient. She could have survived. Would you recognize her, Moggin?”

  “Oh, yes. But I haven’t seen her among the slaves...”

  “If she was enough of a witch to put a hex this strong on the troop,” Sun Wolf said, “you wouldn’t see her.”

  “You mean—she could be here all the time, invisible?” Moggin cast a nervous glance around the witchy, dripping darkness of the tent.

  Starhawk propped one muddy boot on the end of the cot. “Don’t let that one get around.”

  “Not invisible, no. If you were really looking for her, knew already what she looked like, yeah, you might be able to recognize her. But if not, you’d know you’d seen someone, but you’d have the impression you’d never seen her before, or that it really didn’t matter. Your mind would just gloss on past her. That’s how those things work.”

  “Fascinating,” Moggin said. “I knew about nonvisibility from the books, you see, but it never explained how it worked.”

  “This is getting better all the time.”

  “That hoodoo doesn’t need to be in the camp, you know. All he’d need to do is mark something...” From his pocket Sun Wolf pulled the glass phial he’d taken from Moggin’s cellar, three-quarters full of auligar powder. Uncorking it, he dipped his fingertips in, and rubbed the tiniest speck of the powder on his skin. Then he reached out and lightly brushed the nearest sagging tent pole.

  He hadn’t quite known what to expect; in the almost-darkness the sticky film of greenish ectoplasmic slime showed very clearly, gumming to his fingers as he brought them away. Disgusted, he wiped them on his breeches before he thought about it and they left a faint, gluey residue, like foxfire.

  That’s fine, he thought, annoyed with himself. Let’s wash our hands before we unlace our codpiece, shall we? He looked around, and wiped them on a corner of Moggin’s quilt, but the residue still clung, a ghostly skin of dirty light.

  He was aware that both Starhawk and Moggin were staring at him, wearing the expressions of people trying to be polite while watching a lunatic converse with a tree.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  Moggin shook his head, baffled. Starhawk said, “See what? You mean you’ve found the Eye already?”

  “Not the Eye. But the hex itself shows in a kind of glow, like rotten wood. It’s probably everywhere in the camp. Every time someone touches the hex mark—or marks, because I’m willing to bet there’s more than one...”

  “It isn’t just by touch,” Moggin put in diffidently. The two mercs looked at him, and faint color tinged the white cheeks under the grime and bruises. “Maybe it’s incriminating myself to know what was in those books, but... I did read them. I read everything, you know, and my memory’s always been good. The influence of the hex spreads from the marks, you see. Without the marks it would eventually be worn away by the friction of the life-energies of the people in the camp. But as long as the marks—and it’s the usual practice to put a number of Eyes in the victim’s house—are there, it keeps renewing itself.”

  “Sound like a case of the clap,” muttered Starhawk.

  “It is, as you so elegantly put it, very like a case of the clap. Or like lice, or roaches...” Sun Wolf had already seen that both Ari’s and Dogbreath’s tents—and probably every other tent in the tight-packed camp, wildly uncharacteristically for winter—were infested. “It has to be tracked to all its sources and stamped out.”

  “Well, we can use the auligar powder tomorrow and see what we can find,” the Wolf said, shifting to another cot and pulling off his boots. The ground squelched nastily underfoot; outside, rain continued to thunder on the leaky, compacted tents. “If the river doesn’t rise another two feet in the night and wash us out.”

  “Don’t give God ideas,” Starhawk cautioned, beginning to undo the buckles of her doublet. “What about Zane, by the way? He’s going to want his slave back.”

  “Stuff Zane,” the Wolf said. “We’ll deal with that in the morning.”

  But in the morning Zane had organized a mutiny, and the camp was in armed revolt.

  In the deeps of the night Sun Wolf heard the rain ease and a few hours later, still in the wet and freezing dark, he woke, wondering what had roused him. Starhawk, since her injury, had slept more heavily than formerly, but either that, too, was passing, or the atmosphere of nameless peril in the camp was more conducive to wakefulness than had been the soothing restfulness of a town house and servants. In any case, her soft, husky voice came out of the darkness. “The river’s going down.”

  “Aces.” He was already groping for his breeches.

  Her breath was a drift of murk, even in the relative warmth of the tent. “The Mother only knows how much time we’ll have. You roll Ari out. I’ll wake the others and get packing.”

  In the black scag end of the night, the camp began to break. “It could begin to rise again any time,” Ari said, as he and the Wolf stood on the yard-wide band of shoal pebbles beyond the first of the tight-packed shelters, pebbles which four hours ago had been under a foot of racing white froth. In the dark across the river, the striated cliffs could just be seen, thin tortuous bays, columns, and talus slopes flattened to a single darkness. Overhead, the late-riding moon made a muzzy smear on the clouds. The cold took away Sun Wolf’s breath.

  “Damn! It’s at least a couple of hours till sunrise. The water could start up again by that time... Even with torches it’s too dangerous to get a line across...”

  “I can see.” The Wolf squinted out over the water, not liking it much. Though falling, the river was going like a riptide, the rocks below the ford stabbing like broken teeth through a mad froth of black in the darkness. “You start breaking down the wagons into ferries. Get a couple of the men here with a cable, some grease, and torches, and I’ll take it across. I need a bath anyway.”

  “Your year up?”

  Sun Wolf shoved him. “And double-check
that damn cable!” he added, as Ari turned and began to pick his way back through the dense snarl of tents, pegs, and guy ropes. “This isn’t the time to find out that hex was written on it!”

  In the event, taking the cable across the river was less dangerous and exhausting than fording the Khivas on their way to the camp from Kwest Mralwe the day before yesterday. Even upriver the canyon of the Gore was shallower and wider-spread, and whatever storm had fed this latest flood in the chewed uplands to the west had evidently exhausted its fury. Moving from boulder to boulder, Sun Wolf was able to keep his head just above the water most of the time, though the undercurrent twice knocked him off his feet. He reached the far shore battered and freezing in his loincloth, eye patch, and coat of grease, made the cable fast and double-fast to the small stand of oaks and boulders clinging to the foot of a talus slope they frequently used when the river was high, and, holding to it, swam back with nothing worse than the conviction that he’d never be warm or dry again.

  But there was no half-assembled ferry waiting for him on the pebbles, no piled stores, or hastily bundled tents-only an uneasy mob of men, milling about in the waning flicker of yellow torchlight, and the bass rumble of voices that spoke of trouble more loudly than the noise of the river grinding over its stones. Half a dozen of those who stood nearest the cable were armed. His mind registered this at the same moment he heard Zane’s clear, cutting battle voice slice through the murky grumbling of the crowd.

  “And I say to hell with trying to ford it! We’ve got clearing weather and a clean shot at the Gore Thane’s fort upriver—this side of the river! That river could start rising again any minute! We’ve seen it go down a couple feet a dozen times since we been here, eating up the supplies that should have taken us north while you tried to make up your goddam mind! I say, why bet on what’s going to happen once we cross the river—if we can get across—when we can hole up for the winter in a strong fort and make a living raiding the countryside?”

  “We bet on it,” Ari said, as Sun Wolf—shivering violently with his long hair water-slicked to his naked shoulders—pushed his way through the crowding backs of the men between him and the halo of the torches, “because we couldn’t take that fort if it was a sunny day in April, and we’d never survive a winter with the countryside against us.”