But the old shaman wasn’t there, and the fire poured upward nevertheless, though the Wolf could not see what it was that burned.
The core of the fire called him, as it had in his dreams of childhood, and his hand yearned toward it. In his ancient vision he had grasped the flame, felt the agony of it searing away his hand’s flesh, to leave only the bones that wielded the fire’s glowing core like a sword. A few nights after the fight with Purcell, when this dream had first returned to him, he had felt hope leap in him at the sight, for it was that sword which he’d used in his first vision to free himself of Purcell’s dark hand. Gritting his teeth, he had reached out and grasped the flame anew. Searing, excruciating pain cleaved into his loins like a sword, but what he had taken from the flames was not a skeleton hand grasping the magical core of his power, but only a charred and blackened stump.
The training floor was quiet when he reached it. There had been a class that morning, run by Ari as he himself had once run them, pushing and bullying and thrusting the men through the pragmatic intricacies of armed and unarmed combat, making every reflex, every reaction, every blow and parry as unthinking as the blink of the eye against dust. Working at the back of the floor, with the freezing air of the open veranda cold on his back and the steam of breath and body heat pouring out under the eaves, Sun Wolf had remembered how it had been when he had trained the men and felt the fire of their spirit moving like a finely balanced weapon in his hand.
The huge room was leaden-colored now, with the whitish reflections off the snow from its wide parchment windows dimly illuminating the dozen or so warriors still working there on their own, swinging the weighted weapons through training forms, or sparring for timing and wind.
On the far side of the vast floor he saw Starhawk, patiently instructing Moggin in the first uncertain rudiments of swordplay. The philosopher’s cough was responding, slowly, to the grannies’ herbs; he’d finally gotten rid of his slave chain, though the scars of it would remain for life on his throat and collarbone. He looked better than he had since the first time Sun Wolf had seen him back in his house in Vorsal. By selling his services as an amateur geologist to Ari and Xanchus—he was the only man in the norm with any knowledge of how to set up a kiln to bake alumstone into the white mordant itself—he’d amassed a small amount of credit; he was, moreover, making a reasonably steady living as a storyteller. Now that Gully had found his true métier as a mopper-up in the tavern, Moggin’s memory of every romance, play, and poem he’d ever read in his sheltered and bookish life was a moderate godsend during snows and rains that lasted a week at a time.
We never know, the Wolf thought ironically, where we’re going to end up. Probably Moggin would never have believed it a year ago if you’d told him he’d be working as a storyteller in a tavern on the backside of creation. Nor, undoubtedly, would he have believed it a few months ago, if you’d told him he’d live till spring—or want to.
Stripped to a loincloth and shivering in the bitter chill, the Wolf began to warm up in the dark inner corners of the room, where that morning’s accumulated heat still lingered. At one time, he’d thought he was going to remain captain of the troop, the richest mercenary in the West and the best teacher of arms in the world.
At another time he’d thought he was going to be a wizard.
He pushed aside the memory of what it had been like to wield the winds in his hands.
He took a weighted sword of split wood from one of the cedar chests and began to work through the ancient training forms, slowly at first, then with deeper and deeper intensity, driving himself like a man possessed. As his body moved, seeking precision and perfection, his mind gradually stilled, and he sank into meditation, as deep as the meditation that Starhawk had taught him all those months upon the road.
“Does he blame me?” he asked Starhawk that night as they lay on the furs they’d dragged down to the warmed bricks of the hearth. Charcoal hissed on its bed of white sand, the flame light losing itself in the woven gloom of the rafters overhead.
She shook her head, knowing of what he spoke. “You were their teacher,” she said softly, “but you weren’t the reason they were warriors, killers, in the first place. That wasn’t entirely true of me. You didn’t make me what I am, Chief—you just made me good enough to survive it.” The bones of her shoulder, delicate as the horned strength of a compound bow, moved against his pectoral. “And he knows that, even if he’d been able to use a sword last summer, his family would still have died. It’s just that, like me, he’s not going to let himself be anyone’s victim. He’s decided that his philosophic principles against taking life don’t extend to letting his life be taken because he’s too helpless to prevent it.”
And so months passed.
It was just as well, Sun Wolf thought at times, that among the other effects of the earth magic’s passing had been to hypersensitize his system to alcohol. Another time he might have dealt with the loss as he had dealt with loss before—by getting drunk and staying that way—but as it was, more than a single beer made him ill, and he did not share the desperate need that drove Gully to drink long after the puking point was reached. Likewise, he reflected once or twice, it was just as well that Ari had burned Purcell’s entire stock of hashish and dream-sugar. Aside from the doses Purcell had given him, he hadn’t tried them since his twenties, but he didn’t like to think too much about the cozy oblivion they promised.
Coping with loss without something to take the edge off it—booze, drugs, or a dozen casual affairs—was something else he found unexpectedly difficult.
He did not return to teaching, but trained under Ari’s command with the others. Mornings and evenings he’d work with Starhawk and Ari, and a few of the others who wanted to understand more about the disciplines of the sword than simply what was necessary to kill other men—Dogbreath, Penpusher, Battlesow, the slow-talking merc named Cat-Dirt and Cat-Dirt’s woman Isla who, like Moggin, wasn’t even a warrior, and Moggin himself. Some of the men grumbled, but Sun Wolf found, a little to his surprise, that what they thought of him concerned him far less than it had. He hadn’t been aware how much it had concerned him before. He found himself far less inclined to the easy camaraderie he’d once had with all his troop, but discovered that his friendships with a few, like Ari and Moggin, deepened.
He read, slowly and thoroughly, all ten of the Witches’ books, recovered unharmed from Ari’s half-burned quarters; Worked in his rock garden until the snows prevented him, arranging and rearranging the stones there, seeking the wordless tightness of a beauty for which he could find no other expression. Far into the nights, he trained and meditated by himself on the training floor, kindling small lights on the pillars because even his ability to see in darkness had left him, or talked away the evenings with his friends over beer and the maddening poker games for wood chips and IOUs that were the sole currency of the camp now that the marked money had been taken out of circulation. Many evenings he and Starhawk spent up in Moggin’s rooms, the three low-raftered lofts in the heart of the unburned section of the Armory which had once been Starhawk’s; many more, when Starhawk was off with Butcher and Battlesow, he spent there talking to Moggin of magic, of time, and of how things happen and why.
“I don’t know.” Moggin sighed. “There was so much in Drosis’ books which simply made no sense to me. Things which make no sense are far more difficult to remember clearly than things which do.” He settled back on the piles of old blankets and fleeces which served as seats, and gathered one of his half-dozen adopted cats onto the lap of his long, dirt-colored robe. His sword—which had once been Firecat’s—hung above his narrow bed, and the makeshift table was piled with an astrolabe, a broken orrery, and whatever pieces of astronomical equipment he’d been able to dig from the scrap of years of looting dumped in the Armory’s various storerooms. His long hair, hanging on the garish colors of the shawl wrapped around his shoulders, was almost completely gray now, but the pain in his eyes was less harsh than it had been.
“Damn those yammerheads for torching the house.” Sun Wolf pushed Drosis’ much-thumbed notebook from him on the cluttered floor between them. “That whole motherless library up in smoke...”
“I wonder about that.” Moggin stroked absently at the flat, red-gold head of the cat in his lap. “I’d been hit over the head and they thought I was unconscious—which I nearly was—when they started fighting over the loot from the house, so my recollection isn’t very clear, but my impression is that the house wasn’t burning when I crawled away and hid among the other captives. A lot of the city wasn’t burned until the following day, you know. It occurs to me that Purcell would have taken what pains he could to salvage the library, as he was in a better position to keep the books hidden than he was when Drosis died. When spring opens the road it might pay you to return to Kwest Mralwe and investigate Purcell’s house.”
For a split second the old excitement warmed the Wolf, the old eagerness he had felt, lying in that far-off chamber in the foothills inn, when Dogbreath had said that there was a wizard in Vorsal. It hit him like the half-forgotten illusions of childhood, followed at once by the bitter bile of disillusionment and the familiar, horrible emptiness, as if his entire chest had been gouged away, leaving only a bleeding hole. He turned away. “What would be the point?”
Later that night he thought about it, long after Starhawk had fallen asleep in the circle of his arm. It was a long and tedious journey back to the Middle Kingdoms, and the thought of dealing once again with Renaeka Strata and with the King-Council and the King reacted on him as if he’d bitten into bread and found a chip of metal grinding at his teeth. He thought about trying to tell them he had no magic anymore, and about what the King might think of to coerce him into service.
At one time he’d considered going with the troop again, not as commander—that was Ari’s position now and daily more unassailable, even if he’d wanted it—but as a sort of uninvolved elder statesman. But he’d discarded it. The arts of combat were one thing to him, a meditation, an art, a need which could not be explained to a non-warrior. War was another matter. He had seen both sides of it, loyalty and friendship and the brilliance of life on the edge of a sword, and like Starhawk, he would never take arms against the innocent again.
But without magic, he thought, looking down at the spare composite of scars and bones that was Starhawk’s sleeping face, what was left?
Master-at-arms, either at some pretty southern court or here in Wrynde? In the moonlight, he turned his hand over where it lay on Starhawk’s shoulder, seeing heavy muscle and the slowly healing scars of the demon bites, but seeing also the old vision shape of the naked bones that had grasped the fire. He had lost both what he had been and what he could have been. The empty wound of it opened again, and pain flowed out to cover him.
He forced it back, as he had forced back the pain of his many wounds. At least I’ll go see if the books are there. Better that than let the King get them. And maybe, someday...
How long would he go on hoping, before it became obvious that in freeing himself from Purcell he had ripped out the mainspring of his life?
For a moment, the memory of holding the winds in his hands consumed him—as, Moggin had said, there were nights when Moggin woke from sleep overwhelmed with the kinesthetic memory of his wife’s plump body nestled at his side.
He stroked the silk-fine skin of Starhawk’s shoulder, touched the cockled ridge of an old scar, then the wispy silk of her hair. He’d tell her tomorrow of the plan to ride south, see what she thought of it. At least it would be something to do.
She had said once that to be with him was all she had ever wanted. But he knew that if he died tomorrow, Starhawk would find something else to do—return to her life as a nun, become a master-at-arms herself, or become an assassin. Deprived of his magic, there was nothing to which he could cling, except this woman herself—and that, he knew, would be the death of the love between them as surely as betraying her with Opium would have been.
Lonely, frightened, and more helpless in the face of fate than he had ever been, he lay and looked into the latticed darkness of the rafters until he fell asleep.
He dreamed again of the fire.
It rose before him, casting its gleam back among the forest of pine poles where the eyes of his ancestors gleamed, and this time he could see what burned on the blaze: cities, he thought; cities burning on hills—Vorsal, Melplith, Laedden, and villages without count; the face of a woman he had killed in Ganskin, thin as a skeleton’s surrounded by clouds of black hair, when the women and children of the town were taking the places of the slain men on the walls; heaped bodies of men, such as they’d made outside the walls of Noh, to teach them a lesson for not surrendering promptly, swarming with ravens and rats; a merchant he and the others had beaten to death while drunk, for cheating them out of two stallins’ worth of booze; and a child he’d ridden down in street fighting, he no longer remembered where. They whirled together in the column of the fire and the crackling of the blaze was mingled with their laughter.
He wanted Starhawk with him, for, like a seer, she sometimes understood these things, but Starhawk, too, was gone.
He was alone and he had failed, not only in the things that he was good at—the things his father had demanded that he be good at—but the things he had wanted so desperately—Starhawk’s love and the magic that had been the bones of his soul. From the fire they mocked him, Opium, the child Dannah with her throat slit like a gaping red mouth, and the dark hand of Purcell, tracing runes that were consumed in the fire.
The flames burned up higher, the images vanishing into its white core, the laughter fading into its hiss. Where he stood, he could feel the heat of it scorching him. His bones were empty of marrow, hollow like a bird’s; at the touch of the blaze they would shatter and give him for his agony only the blackened stump, and a world of continued pain.
Nevertheless he reached out, knowing what would happen but knowing nothing else to do, and grasped the core of the fire.
Starhawk heard him cry out in his sleep, and jerked from the depths of her own dreams with a start. Sharing his bed for the last ten weeks had not been easy. She was not entirely used to it, even at the best of times, after her years of sleeping alone; between his ruthless dreams and bouts of desperate lovemaking in which he tried to forget his loss, his guilt, and his grief, she had been short of rest. But she responded to the crush of his grip on her and held him close against her until the storm of sobs subsided, the thin silk of his hair pressed to her lips, the long, curled tufts of his eyebrows and mustache scratching her neck where they pressed the soft skin, and the hot tears burning, shed by his hollow eye as well as his good. She did not speak—in time, she knew, she would learn.
But he put her aside and rose from their bed, walking naked in the cold moonlight that streamed through the lattice of the windows from the dirty snow outside. He stretched his arms up toward the dark voids above the rafters, furred, heavy-muscled arms crisscrossed with the scars of battle and the hands of a butcher, like big-boned lumps of meat. He cried out again as if the sound were being torn from him by an iron hook; like a clap of silent lightning, foxfire streamed up from his lifted palms to splatter against the rafters overhead and pour in viscous, glowing rivulets down all around him, flickering, dancing, filling the room with its cold blue glow and bathing him in frosty splendor.
Another incoherent cry ripped from his broken throat, and the bedside lamp, the candles beside his books, and the fire on the hearth in the other room all burst into simultaneous flame. In the shuddering frenzy of new light, she could see the pain and wild exultation twisting his upturned face. She sat up, pulled the blanket up over her shoulders—he was a wizard and above such things as warmth, she guessed, besides being a barbarian and damn near covered with fur to boot—and waited, while the light around him faded, and, after a long time of silence, he lowered his arms.
In a disappointed voice she said, “What, no earthquake?”
She was laughing like a schoolgirl when he took her in his arms.
Chapter 19
THE FOLLOWING MORNING they rode out to the ruined cellar of the villa where they’d put the money chest—Ari, Sun Wolf, Starhawk, Moggin, and at least a dozen guards. Snow half-blocked its entrance—they’d hauled away the remains of the djerkas for Hog to dismantle weeks ago—but inside, the cave was fairly dry. For the first week or so, there’d been a guard on it all the time, until it was remarked that whoever volunteered for that duty tended to lose in poker, even with wood chips, for days. Sun Wolf himself didn’t care whether the money got stolen or not, though he promised a flogging on his own account, in addition to Ari’s official one, to the man or woman who brought one silver strat back into the camp.
“I got to tell you, Chief,” said Ari, holding aloft his torch as they waded over the slushy snow and into the short tunnel, “I’m damn glad you got your power back, if for no other reason than this. It’s gonna take us the rest of the winter to sort out who owes whom what.”
“Yeah, well, I hope nobody invested too heavily in buying up Dogbreath’s poker debts.” He stood for a moment, looking down at the chest in the mingled gray and yellow of torchlight and daylight. When he had come here before, it had only been a chest of money, sitting in the dirty chamber. With the return of his magic, he was aware of the stink of the curse clinging to it like months-old decay.
“I think the Goddess did,” Starhawk remarked. “She’s taken a hell of a shine to him—says she’ll let him take out his debts in trade.”
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