The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  By the time they reached the place, Moggin was reeling with fatigue. For rough-and-tumble work, he was a nearly useless ally, soft-raised and suffering from the effects of prolonged malnutrition and physical abuse. Moreover, Sun Wolf, though he moved with his old enduring strength in spite of the blindfold, kept trying to stop, as if every minute it reoccurred to him that he ought to go back. Long before they reached the villa Starhawk was ready to strangle them both.

  “Moggin!” She thrust Sun Wolf ahead of her into the narrow shaft that led to the old storage cellar, caught Moggin’s arm as he sank, face chalky under the grime, to his knees on the ice-skinned rock. “Moggin, dammit, don’t faint on me now! Moggy!” She dragged him by the back of his filthy coat to the nearest rain pool, shoved his head under and dragged him up, sobbing with fatigue, freezing water running in streams from his hair. “Listen to me, damn you! Tell me about the djerkas. How do you stop them? What gives them life? Dammit, it’ll track us here...”

  “Crystal,” he whispered. “...mage meditates on it... spells... his own blood...”

  His eyes closed, his body doubling over with coughs. Dear Mother, she thought, he’s dying. She shook him again, hard.

  “That thing has a kind of metal turret on its back. Would this crystal be there?”

  He nodded feebly. She hauled him to his feet and slammed him back against the nearest elm trunk, holding him upright with fists nearly numb from cold. “Look, you faint later, all right? You die later. Right now I’m going to need your help. We need wood, bricks, rocks, anything about so big...” She let him go, to indicate something about the size of a loaf of bread. A little to her surprise, he stayed upright. “Take them into the cellar in there, put them on either side of the door and HURRY. That thing’ll be after us and this is our one chance.” Her face was white in the red frame of wig and veils, her voice cool and biting, a soldier’s voice. It seemed to reach him, for he stumbled off, catching himself for balance on the slender saplings that clustered all around the parent elms. Part of Starhawk felt a stab of pity for him, but most of her was concentrated on speed and efficiency, only stopping to think, He’ll be no help, dammit. Pulling the largest of her daggers from her belt, she began cutting the saplings. The cellar wasn’t large, but it would have to do—it was enclosed, and had only one entrance.

  As she dragged the saplings down the narrow hall to the dim little chamber she wondered how heavy the djerkas was. The golems of legend had been stone, able to crush a man, but, as she’d reasoned before, they had to be impossibly heavy and difficult to maneuver. The djerkas had clearly been built to sacrifice this impenetrable power to speed and surprise. Who fabricated that deadly metal body? she asked herself, piling up the largest of the bricks and chunks of stone to the immediate left of the chamber’s inner arch. And how long did Purcell let that craftsman survive after it was done?

  Poor bastard probably died the day after Purcell got the first dunning letter for the fee.

  She glanced at the Wolf, crouched where she’d shoved him, his face to the inner wall, the gaudy orange scarf still bound around his head. Through his ripped sleeve, the wound in his arm looked clotted and ugly—that would have to be seen to soon—and the bruised flesh around it nearly fuchsia with cold. He was shuddering from cold and reaction to the horrors of the last eighteen hours; she fought the urge to go over to him, circle those wide, bowed shoulders with her arms and try to let him know he was safe.

  He wasn’t, of course, the practical portion of her thoughts replied. At this point, time would be better spent making sure the longest saplings she’d cut would work as levers with the makeshift fulcrum to the left of the door.

  One of these days I’ll figure out how to be a tender and loving woman, the Hawk thought, helping Moggin to stack yet another armload of broken bricks and bits of old window sills and cornices ready to hand. Till then, I’ll just work on getting us to sunset alive.

  As she doused another gauze scarf with gin and wrapped a stick with it to form a makeshift torch, she outlined her plan to the scholar.

  “Oh, we don’t have to wait for it,” Moggin pointed out. Muddy, soaked, and shivering, he looked infinitely wretched, but somehow his voice managed to retain its old pedagogical calm. “If you remove Sun Wolf’s blindfold he’ll recognize where he is, and the djerkas will be drawn to us.”

  “Well, that’s something.” She unbuckled the Wolf’s leather jerkin, stripped it off him and tossed it onto the smaller of the two piles of debris. “If we had to wait any kind of time for the thing to attack, we’d freeze to death. I need that coat of yours.” He gave it up without demur, though, under it, his canvas smock and breeches were threadbare and torn. She added her own heavy cloak and, pulling up her frothy skirt, threw in most of her petticoats as well. It was astonishingly cold without them, colder still once she’d pulled off the wig and veils to add to the pile. Only then did she cross the cellar to pull the garish blindfold from Sun Wolf’s eyes.

  He moved his head, blinked at her painfully. The run from the fortress had cleared his mind of most of the dreamsugar, but there was still an odd look in his eye of pain and stress and horror. “Hawk?” His hand groped for hers—she took it and squeezed it briefly.

  “Stay here. Stay here against this wall and whatever happens, don’t move. You’re in the cellar of the old villa under Cold Tor.”

  He nodded, his teeth gritting hard. “He’s calling me, Hawk.” His grip crushed tight on her frozen hands. “He wants me to come back...”

  “Can you hold against him?”

  Again he managed to nod, though he looked sick. “It’s Purcell,” he said thickly. “He...”

  “Yeah,” Starhawk said. “We figured that one out.” She squeezed his hands again, then drew away. “Just stay here. You’ll be all right.”

  “That is the most appallingly optimistic untruth I’ve heard since the Duke of Vorsal assured the Senate we couldn’t lose the war,” Moggin remarked, as she came back to where he waited, shivering uncontrollably beside the levers.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a social lie?”

  He started to reply, but she gestured him silent. Minutes passed in bitter and deepening cold. Outside, the wind screamed across the gray land; Starhawk wondered if they had time to collect wood for a fire, then dismissed the thought. If one of them went out and was killed, the other could never cope with the djerkas alone.

  Then, barely audible in the stillness, she heard the light, swift clatter and whir, almost unrecognizable had she not been ready and listening. “There...”

  It came fast, a grate of razor claws in the short stone passage; she and Moggin flung themselves down on the sapling levers by instinct, before the thing was halfway through the door. It took all their weight, in a single jerking flip, to upend the djerkas like a turtle. The next second Starhawk rammed one of the levers like a pole against the thing’s underbelly, jamming it, still sideways, against the cellar wall. For all its relative lightness of construction the creature was incredibly heavy; Moggin threw himself in with a pole the next second, the thing writhing to regain its balance as Starhawk seized a shorter sapling and twisted it into the nearest of the leg cables, tangling its movement. Moggin followed suit, jamming another pole into one of the swivel joints, his white face almost unrecognizable with rage and determination.

  Two limbs jammed, the creature slashed its razor claws at Starhawk. One of them ripped through the thick silk covering her back as she sprang in on top of it, wedging half a brick into one of the counterweight housings. She leaped aside, caught up another pole, and thrust in again, this time tangling the cable that controlled the claw. Moggin flung Sun Wolf’s leather doublet over the claws to give the Hawk time to jam her discarded petticoats into more of the joints, the thing bucking and heaving under her, flipping, jerking spasmodically as it flailed her with its steel limbs. Her numb hands clawed at the low metal grille she’d seen before in its center, twisting and tearing; joints dug at her belly and her sides, and a razor c
law sliced her calf. Head down, she scrabbled at the hollow under the grille, the startling warmth of the cavity almost burning. Her fingers clawed something hard and slick, closed and twisted...

  Without even a final heave the djerkas collapsed, like a folding chair whose joints Dogbreath might have loosened for a joke. The jerk of it was like falling onto a heap of cobblestones. Starhawk lay across it, crystal clenched in bleeding fingers, heedless of the points and lumps of steel digging into her flesh through the thin fabric of bodice and chemise. She became gradually aware of the burning trickle of blood on her back and legs, startling against flesh that was freezing cold.

  Then a slim hand took her arm, gently got her to her feet. The aftermath of adrenaline and the pain of a truly awful hammering made her knees weak, and she held onto Moggin’s shoulders for support, his arm circling her waist with surprising firmness. She had tangled with men before, but only now she let herself realize how insane it had been to go after this creature of metal and magic.

  Moggin coughed, then said judiciously, “That was very nice. Have you ever thought of going into the hero business full time?”

  Chapter 15

  VOICES. VOICES CALLING his name.

  Demons? he wondered. The demons of Wenshar? Bodiless blue shapes whispering to him from the vibrating darkness of another dreamsugar hallucination?

  Or Purcell?

  Not again, he thought, closing his eye as he had closed his mind, burying himself in the black pit of his inner darkness. Please, by all the gods of hell, not again.

  “Chief, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

  No. No, no, no.

  But wherever he turned in the black refuge of his mind were the runes, tangling silver tendrils binding him to Purcell. They tore at him, drinking of his strength, twisting tighter and tighter around his bones and brain and heart. And in the darkness between them waited the memory of what he had done.

  “I’m not getting to him...”

  Starhawk’s voice? Or only one that sounded like hers, as the demons used the voices of friends? Clouded, twisted with pain and horror and dreamsugar, he half remembered her wind-burned face framed in the darkness of the doorway, damp, fair hair sticking all ways like an urchin child’s; he remembered flinging the ax at her heart. He didn’t remember whether it had struck or not.

  There were too many other memories, too many other men he had seen, shoulders bowing forward, heads snapping down as that flower of blood burst from around the thrown ax’s blade. It was too easy to see her face on them, to see the shock in those wide gray eyes...

  The pain tightened on him again, dragging at him, hurting in a way he had no name for, and he curled himself tighter against it. A measure of his power had come back, like earth-water seeping into a dry well. But it wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. His mind was clouded, a fragmented chaos of pictures: Ari’s shocked eyes when they had met face-to-face before the torch-lit bulk of the Armory, cutting the throats of Rubberface, the gate guard, and that harmless militiaman in Wrynde who used to sell mules to the troop, horrified and trying to stop himself, as he’d tried to stop his hand from taking Purcell’s dagger and raising it to his own neck. But clearest of all was the memory of Purcell’s will forcing its way past his defenses, of the breathless paralysis of his limbs, the agony compressing and burning all his organs, the horror of watching his own hands move without his volition, in spite of his desperate efforts to stop them...

  His whole being felt befouled by this rape, and he understood why women killed themselves after they’d been passed around among the troop. And he understood, for the first time, the hatred they bore afterward to any who had the power to do that to them again.

  He squeezed his mind shut, trying to sink down further into darkness, where the voices would not reach. But always there were those silver threads of power tangling his mind, pulling and twisting, murmuring to him that there was no hope of escape.

  “Don’t go down, Chief,” the Hawk’s voice said. “Come up.” Then there was an aside: “Is that right?”

  “Yes.” That voice barely impinged on his consciousness, vaguely familiar, but he pushed it aside. Purcell’s?

  All voices sounded a little like Purcell’s.

  Fearing that it was, he tried to sink down still further, but her voice followed him, echoing in the blackness of his fogged mind. “Follow my voice, Chief. Try to—to see light if you can, but follow my voice. Come up, don’t go down. You can make a shelter for yourself, make it out of the—” Indistinct muttering... “—the second and seventh signs of the Sishak Rites. They’re written here—open your eye, look...”

  He’d never heard of the Sishak Rites and didn’t want to. He wanted only darkness, and peace where gnawing pain and the blind horror of remorse couldn’t touch him. It was a trick, he thought bitterly, a trick to trap him, to make him do things still worse than he had done...

  “Open your eye, pox rot you, and look at the goddam signs, you barbarian ape!”

  Starhawk?

  His tongue felt thick and swollen upon the word. “Starhawk?” He was conscious of her touch on his wrists.

  “Open your pox-festering eye, Chief, or I’ll damn well poke that one out, too, damn you!”

  He opened his eye. He saw her face, weirdly distinct, as if in some new and beautiful angle of light, but meaningless as something dreamed. And perhaps it was all only dreamed. He thought he should know the man with her... thought he should be wearing a black scholar’s robe with a shagged silk collar, not that vaguely familiar, mud-crusted black coat... younger... his hair should be black, not gray... he didn’t know why. As in a dream, he had no sense of heat or cold, though the Hawk’s breath made a faint steam in the dim glow of the tiny fire. A rude shelter of elm poles and heather caught the flickering light, inches beyond the tips of her cropped hair. Looking down, he saw incomprehensible signs scratched in the muddy dirt before his knees.

  The other man—the man he didn’t recognize—said something he barely heard, a vague distorted murmuring, as most voices were. Hesitantly, Starhawk said, “Can you see the signs, Chief? Their names are Enyas and Ssa—the Nothing-Cloak and the Strength of Air. You can make a shelter of them, you can protect yourself with them against the runes, but you have to put your magic into them. Can you do that?”

  Magic. The geas made it hard for him to remember that he had magic. His mind moved toward them and at once the pain of the geas tightened, crushing his brain, his heart, his genitals. He gasped, dropping back for the darkness within him, but her hands closed hard on his collar and she jerked him into a brutal slap across the face.

  “Come on, you gutless weakling, there were nuns at the pox-festering Convent tougher than you! Look at them, damn you!”

  Bands of iron were crushing him, swords ripping into his lungs. He gasped, tried to cry out, impotent rage filling him, rage at Purcell, at Starhawk, at his father... He saw how the signs could be linked together into a shield, how the sounds of them could be used. Twisting, scraping inwardly at the marrow of his bones, he traced them with his fingers, and they glowed to life with a shivering plasmic light in the smoky gloom. The ghostly glow seemed to feed back into his fingers, drawing out more. The silver runes within his mind stuck and pulled, like a badly healed wound, cutting, crushing...

  With a sob he woke, and opened his eye. He didn’t know when he’d shut it again, or if it had ever been open.

  He was in a shelter built in a sort of dip in the ground near boulders he recognized from their striatums of quartz as those on Pulvren Tor—a shelter built of elm poles and heather, just as he’d dreamed. It was freezing cold, even with the tiny fire, and outside it would be killing cold. Through the blinding smoke—he wondered that it hadn’t stung like this before—he could dimly make out Starhawk and Moggin crouched before him, and the wide scratch-work of signs crisscrossing the damp dirt. His arm hurt like the devil; he was unshaven and stank like a civet cat in heat.

  “Purcell,” he whispered, his
lips feeling as if he’d borrowed them from Gully. “It’s Purcell. Those mines north of the village...”

  “Alum, we know,” the Hawk said, with her old, fleet grin. “Old news. Purcell must have found the ancient records of it somewhere, though back in those days they must have kept it as much a secret as they would now. He figured all he had to do was get rid of the troop. He didn’t count on you.”

  “I’m sorry.” And for a moment it seemed to him that the shame of what he had done—tried to kill her, betrayed his friends, given over the village to Zane’s men—was beyond what he could endure and live.

  “I’ll beat the innards out of you when we’ve got time,” she promised.

  Then they embraced, crushing one another, the shudder of her breath going through his body like lightning.

  “Ari and some of his boys got out,” she said, after several minutes during which Moggin politely pretended he wasn’t there—not easy in a shelter five feet by five feet. “I saw you in the Armory and thought there was something weird about you—Ari was rousting up the men already when the trouble hit. It’s my guess they’ll be regrouping at the mines, since those are the only places that could be held, now Zane’s taken the village.”

  “Huh.” Sun Wolf scratched a corner of his filthy mustache. For the first time he realized that the Hawk must have gotten out of the camp dressed as one of the whores. Kohl smudged her eyes as if she’d been slugged, and the cloak over her shoulders was a color he’d never seen her wear in his life, the few bits of tawdry jewelry still clinging to it incongruous against the cropped bristle of her skull and the jagged red X of the scar over her left ear. “Whether he knows it or not, he’ll be damn safe there—Purcell’ll never cave those in. I guessed what was going on and went out there to have a look at those things we always thought were smelting furnaces. They were really kilns to bake the raw stone into alum for shipping.”

  “How’d you guess it was him?”