The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  He shook his head. “You bought me plenty on the road.”

  The guard by the mess hall door called an obscenity to her as she passed. She felt a twinge of an unfamiliar panic, wondering what she’d do if he came after her; totally aside from her disguise of implied willingness, she was badly outnumbered, if it came to a fight. Though no trooper was fool enough to rape a woman trooper—if she didn’t get him herself, the next time they went over a city wall her women friends or Butcher undoubtedly would—but the female soldiers generally looked upon the whores as a different matter.

  But the man only laughed at his own wit and remained where he was. The fog outside was burning off, the day growing colder. Her sodden skirts slapped wetly at her boots as she crossed the square and climbed the rough brick steps to the door of Sun Wolf’s little house.

  As she’d feared, the books were gone. Ari’s place, she thought, collecting the coil of rope the Chief habitually hid under the bed, and a heavily quilted coat for Moggin. Of course Purcell, as a wizard, would have taken them.

  Tying the food bundle to the back of her belt beneath the cloak, she crossed the strip of waste ground that backed both Sun Wolf’s house and Ari’s. Sun Wolf had formed his rock garden in part of it, but behind Ari’s was only an empty plot of heather, rubble, and weeds in which the ruins of broken furniture and garbage had been left to decay. From it, she identified Ari’s bedroom window and, after listening and hearing nothing, scrambled up a half-ruined buttress to look in.

  She stopped, frozen with her knee upon the sill.

  The djerkas crouched in the middle of the room.

  If she hadn’t known from Sun Wolf’s description what it was, she’d probably have gone straight in, for she had no sense of the thing’s being alive at all. It looked like nothing more than a big piece of steel machinery, a loom or an experiment with pulleys, dully gleaming in the cool daylight, its razor claws tucked neatly out of sight behind the maze of cables and counterweights. Beyond it, on the low table that stood near the opulent, gilded fantasy of Ari’s curtained bed, she could see Sun Wolf’s books.

  She swore, with considerable vividness, and swung herself back down the broken granite into the stony garden again. There she continued to swear for some moments.

  “All right, you want to play the game that way, we’ll play it that way.”

  Keeping to the garden, the waste ground, and the walls as much as possible, she made her way to the old furnace where Moggin was to meet her later and stowed the rope and the coat. The food bundle she kept tied to her belt, with an instinctive regard for priorities in the event of unexpected flight. From the midden behind the kitchen, she abstracted rags and wet straw; from Sun Wolf’s house a flask of gin and a horn fire carrier, in which she placed a few glowing coals from the hearth and enough dried moss from the tinderbox to ensure they’d keep going for some hours. She tried to locate a projectile weapon of some kind—bow, crossbow or throwing ax—but everything along those lines had been confiscated, not much to her surprise. It remained only to slip back into the waste ground near the corner of Ari’s house, settle herself behind a broken wall, and wait.

  It wasn’t even noon when she heard the din of the returning company. All day the cold had been increasing, the blowing gray cloud ceiling rising to a sullen roof high overhead, and in the sharp air it was possible to detect them at a great distance. By the sound she knew at once that their conquest had been successful. Not, she reflected dourly, that it was likely that the folk of Wrynde could have put up much of a fight, even after they realized that Sun Wolf had betrayed them.

  She took a pull on the gin and held her half-frozen fingers around the heated horn, trying not to think of all the excellent reasons Purcell would have for disposing of the Wolf immediately after the taking of the town, always supposing the Chief had survived the fighting. From the brief glance she’d had of him during the battle in the camp, it didn’t seem that the geas had impaired his fighting skills. Listening, she couldn’t hear the deep, gravelly bellow of his voice rising above the general clamor—but then it had changed drastically since last she’d heard him returning with his troops from battle.

  Still, the leaden fear inside her did not ease until she leaned cautiously around the corner of the broken colonnade and saw him, standing behind Purcell, a little apart from the boisterous mob that surged in through the gate.

  The men were laughing, bussing the prostitutes who’d gathered to meet them, waving the sacks of food, bottles of liquor and beer, and cloaks of fur and wool they’d looted from the town. Some of them had women with them, too, beaten and exhausted, their clothes torn and their skirts bloodied. Louth pulled a girl of eighteen or so whom Starhawk knew slightly out of the crowd and thrust her at Zane, who laughed nastily and shook his head. Then Purcell and Zane started across the square for Ari’s house. At a snap of Purcell’s fingers, Sun Wolf followed, trailed by four of Zane’s guards.

  As they approached, Starhawk could hear Purcell saying, “...of course not. I had picked you out as a possible partner all the way along, Zane. It was obvious that I needed a trusted confederate within the band and equally obvious that you were the only one strong enough to hold them together and dispose of Ari.”

  Yeah? Starhawk thought cynically. Next you’re going to tell us you didn’t mean for anyone to be hurt. As they drew nearer, she could see that Sun Wolf had been wounded in one arm, though he didn’t seem to notice it himself. He moved more slowly than he had after the battle in the camp, and stumbled once on the slippery goo of the square’s mud. His clothing was covered with blood and filth, and his head swayed unsteadily.

  Was Moggin wrong? she wondered, suddenly panicked, not liking the way he moved. Did the geas eat out his mind after all? Did it just take time...?

  “You could have contacted me earlier, you know,” Zane said, a hint of sulkiness in his voice. “I mean, I could have got killed anytime during the siege, or the journey up to the Gore, or...”

  “Zane.” There was a father’s tolerant patience in Purcell’s voice, gentle amusement in his smile. They had come around the corner of the colonnade, not more than a dozen yards from Starhawk’s hiding place. But Zane’s guards, loitering at a little distance in the colonnade’s shadows, were armed with crossbows—it was clear Zane still worried about sleepers among the turncoats of the troop. Moving carefully, Starhawk slipped back around the rear of the house and into the shelter of the ruined buttress. Purcell’s voice drifted to her ears as she kindled a few dried twigs from the horn at her belt, dripped gin onto the ball of rags and straw... “Do you think I wasn’t watching out for you? Why do you think you didn’t come to harm?”

  “Really?” There was boyish gratification and wonder in Zane’s voice; Starhawk wanted to slap him for such gullibility. Only Zane was conceited enough to believe he’d have been excepted from the general disaster because of who he was. She lit a corner of the rag ball, which proceeded to smoke and burn fitfully, and scrambled up the ragged stone projection to lob it through the window. It rolled easily across the tile floor, past the djerkas, who had clearly been set to guard against human intruders and nothing else, and came to rest against the gilt-embroidered, jewel-stitched curtains of that ridiculous bed Ari had looted from the Duke of Warshing’s palace five years ago. “I never guessed that,” Zane was saying, even as she did so. “You picked me all along, hunh?”

  “Please forgive me the deception,” Purcell was saying, obsequious with years of practice on the King-Council, as the Hawk slipped down into the weeds again and made her cautious way back toward them. At a guess, she thought, Purcell had approached Zane as soon as the band had split, before Zane could carry out the suicide of an attack on the Gore Thane’s Fort—as soon, in fact, as it had become clear to Purcell that he’d need military assistance to get rid of the band that currently controlled the immediate vicinity of the alumstone diggings, instead of simply waiting for the curse to do its work. “Men are stubborn, Zane, especially about men who’ve been
their teachers. You’re wise enough to know that. They’d never have followed you until they were absolutely fed up, absolutely convinced of the uselessness of Ari’s weak leadership... for his sake.” And he nodded toward Sun Wolf, standing, swaying slightly on his feet, staring sightlessly into the twisted laurel trees that half hid the rocks of the stone garden he had made in earlier winters.

  “You want to get him fixed up,” Zane said, with a jerk of his thumb. “I guess crocking him up with dream-sugar before the battle wasn’t such a good idea after all, hunh?”

  “On the contrary, it was quite necessary,” the wizard replied, with a hint of sharpness that the man who stood like a golden cock pheasant beside him would dare criticize his judgment of the situation. A far cry, the Hawk thought interestedly, from Renaeka Strata’s rabbity yes-man, for all the fawning voice. In spite of his businesslike patience, how he must hate the Lady Prince—how he must look forward to crushing her power.

  Purcell lowered his voice to exclude the guards in the colonnade. “As his powers recuperate, now that they’re not being expended on healing and weather-witching, he would become unruly if he weren’t drugged. I wasn’t about to enter into a battle of wills with him when we had the town to take.”

  “You mean he might break out of this—this geas you’ve got on him?” Zane threw a sudden, worried glance at his former teacher.

  “Of course not!” Purcell snapped. “He hasn’t the skill or the training. But he does have the strength to make him unpredictable and difficult to control.”

  “So you’re gonna have to keep him under sugar?” Zane had stepped a pace toward the Wolf, studying him as he would study some remarkable statue. But with hatred in her heart, the Hawk saw in the set of his broad shoulders and graceful back that he was nervous, afraid even now of what the Wolf might do, like a boy walking in front of a chained bear, before he quite gets up his nerve to begin teasing.

  “No,” Purcell said thinly. “I’m going to kill him.” He reached under his vast, fur-lined mantle, and drew out a dagger. He held it out to Zane. “Or you may do it, if you’d like.”

  Twenty feet away, under cover of the broken buttresses, Starhawk’s heart froze. The distance was too great—she’d be dead the minute she broke cover. Strain her senses though she might, she could smell no smoke from the inside of the house. Dammit, she wondered desperately, it can’t have gone out!

  A queer, bright gleam flared into Zane’s eyes, an adolescent expression, like a boy attending gladiatorial games for the first time or witnessing public execution by torture. “No,” he said softly. “I want to see you make him do it.”

  In Purcell’s smile Starhawk saw him mentally noting other ways of holding Zane’s interest.

  “Very well,” he said. “Sun Wolf...”

  Starhawk threw a fast glance back at Ari’s window; a little whitish smoke had begun to leak out, but hung motionless in the still air. Damn, she thought. Damn, damn, damn...

  Sun Wolf looked down at the dagger Purcell held out to him. His hand flinched, then balled tight into a fist. She could hear the ragged tear of his breath.

  “Take it,” said the wizard softly.

  Sun Wolf’s head twitched, as if he fought to look away from those cold gray eyes and could not. Despite the cloudy vapor of his breath in the air, a film of sweat had sprung to his face. Against the blood and grime, his eye, flared wide and almost black with the dilation of the drugs he’d been given, showed white all around the pupil. His hand jerked, reached out, drew back. The smell of smoke stung Starhawk’s nostrils—it was curling thinly out of the house now, but Purcell’s concentration was locked in the struggle with his victim’s clouded will, and Zane and all four guards were too absorbed in watching to notice much else. You cheese-brained fools! Starhawk screamed silently at them, can’t you smell a fire under your noses! If you guarded my house that way, I’d have you trimmed and flogged...

  “Take it,” Purcell whispered, and Sun Wolf gasped, his body buckling as if with the twisting rip of inner pain. A thin, desperate sound escaped his clenched teeth; the hand that reached out was shaking as if with palsy. Fight him! willed the Hawk desperately. Buy us some time, damn you! They’ve got to smell the smoke sometime... The shaking stopped as his fingers closed around the dagger’s hilt.

  Sun Wolf was panting, tears of exertion, rage, and despair mixing with the sweat that tracked his filth-streaked face as he raised the knife toward his neck. White smoke was billowing from the house now, drifting on the few vagrant breezes, but no one noticed... They would notice, however, Starhawk thought grimly, if she broke cover to attack Purcell. She braced herself, gauging the time of her streak over the twenty feet or so of open ground that separated them, the largest of her knives ready in her hand. Sun Wolf tried to twist his face away from Purcell’s glacial gaze, his breath coming in sobs, his teeth clamped so hard on his lower lip that blood ran down in a thin trickle over his chin. Mouth parted, Zane’s face blazed with an almost sexual eagerness. The razor metal glinted as it touched Sun Wolf’s throat...

  Purcell dies first...

  “FIRE!!!”

  Zane’s head snapped around. For that first, fleeting second, there was only annoyance in his eyes at being interrupted. Purcell flinched, not, Starhawk thought, at the shout from someone in the square—the stupid guards still hadn’t noticed anything amiss—but at the smell of the smoke. He whipped around, still half-lost in the icy grip of his own concentration, like a man broken from a dream, and it took him a second to react to the white smoke billowing now from Ari’s house. The look on his face, of startlement passing at once into enlightenment and then to fury, was almost funny, as he realized that the djerkas was neither going to put out the fire to protect the books, nor let anyone else enter the room to do it. With a wordless yell he flung himself toward the house, followed by Zane and his guards.

  Starhawk broke cover before they were out of sight, plunged across the uneven stones to where Sun Wolf stood, dagger edge pressed to his jugular, eye closed, gasping with the effort of the strain.

  She wrenched at his arm, bringing it down, though she couldn’t force the dagger from his hand. His eye stared at her blindly, black with the dilation of the pupil. She didn’t think he recognized her—Small wonder, she reflected, as she dragged him violently along the path. The skirts and petticoats tangled at her legs, hanks of hair from the wig got in her mouth, and Sun Wolf lagged and twisted at her grip like an unwilling child. From all directions men were racing toward Ari’s house, barely noticing them as they jostled past. Starhawk wondered how long it would take Purcell to realize that the fire had to be a diversion.

  Moggin was waiting for her by the old brick cone of the ancient furnace, already wearing Sun Wolf’s quilted black coat and with the rope over his narrow shoulders. Grabbing Sun Wolf’s other arm he followed her, coughing heavily as he shoved and manhandled him up the broken stair that had once led to the battlements and over the uneven wall walk to the shell of a ruined turret. The rope didn’t reach all the way to the ground from here, but the final drop was less than six feet. “Thank God the place is designed to keep people out instead of in,” the Hawk muttered viciously. “Chief, get down the rope... The rope, pox rot your eye!” He swayed blindly on his feet, still deep in the grip of the dreamsugar and the geas, the dagger clutched in his hand. Men were milling like ants around Ari’s house down below; by the color of the smoke the fire was out already. Purcell would find the remains of the smoke ball and guess...

  She pushed a bight of the rope into Sun Wolf’s nerveless grip, then, with a quick foot sweep and shoulder block, shoved him over the battlement. Moggin gave a yelp of horror, but Sun Wolf, as she’d suspected he might, reacted without benefit of his numbed brain, dropping the dagger to catch himself on the rope. She thrust Moggin down the rope after him immediately, forcing the Wolf to go down instead of trying to climb back up; the uneven surface of the wall was rough enough to give even a weak and inexperienced climber little trouble.
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br />   Some rescue, she thought wryly, hitching up her wind-ruffled turquoise skirts to follow. Two big strong men and who is it who gets to do all the work? Then something metallic flashed among the broken crenellations of the walls to her left, something moving with a fast, sidelong, crablike gait. Her stomach curled.

  She swung down the wall FAST, the jolt of the final drop jarring heavily in her half-healed skull.

  “The djerkas,” she gasped as she caught Sun Wolf’s arm in one hand, Moggin’s in the other, shoving them both into a run. “Can it follow him, track him? If Purcell commands both...”

  “Blindfold him.”

  Starhawk stopped long enough to tear off one of her several gaudy sashes to tie over the Wolf’s eye. Then they were running again, stumbling down the jagged granite of the rocky fortress hill. She knew every foot of the moor that surrounded on three sides the little valley in which Wrynde, its mines, and its guardian garrison had been built and the jumble of ruins that had once been its attendant villas and farms, every rock and pit and crevice, every swollen stream and wind-crippled stand of trees.

  She had intended to go to ground somewhere nearer, but with the djerkas on their heels there was only one place she could think of.

  It was three miles off. It had once been a villa, the country abode of some imperial governor, in a dell below Cold Tor which had once been fertile. Of the topsoil which had grown its rye and oats and apples, nothing was left between the roaring beck and the nearby sour swamp; of the house itself, little enough. But wine cellars had been cut into the hillside behind it, and there was a small quadrangle of what had been garden where half a dozen black elms still grew, incongruous in the wasted northlands. It was the only place where they’d have a hope, the Hawk thought, as she dragged her male impedimenta into the rocky cover of a knee-deep stream cut—provided the djerkas, or Zane’s men, didn’t catch them first.