“Why?” Starhawk asked softly. “Demons aren’t creatures of flesh, are they? They can’t eat what they kill, if they kill it.”
Sun Wolf shook his head. Glancing back at that calm, immobile face in its white frame of veils, he knew she couldn’t be feeling what he felt. She might sense herself watched, but not have that terrible awareness of being known. At the edges of his hearing, he could detect the demons’ whispering, like the canyon wind that turned locks of his horse’s mane, the words just too soft to make out. He feared to listen more closely. His hand tightened on the reins he held; under the veils, clammy sweat crawled down his face.
“I don’t know what they are, Hawk,” he replied. “I know there are biting-demons, so they can do some physical harm. Everyone knows demons lead men to their deaths in swamps or in the desert, but...no one’s ever said why they do it.”
The shriek came at the same instant that his dappled gelding flung up its head in panic. The leather of the rein cinched around his hand, and he caught at the cheek piece of the bridle. From up-trail the echo of hooves splintered the close, shadowy air. Fighting to keep his own panicking horse from bolting, he could not turn to see, so the little sorrel mare was upon them before either he or Starhawk could get out of the way.
He saw the mare from the tail of his eye, bearing down on them with flaxen mane streaming and blood pouring from her flanks. It all happened in instants—he barely slid out of the main impact as she crashed into his gelding, white eyes rolling in mad terror, flecks of foam from her muzzle stinging his face, tangling him between the two heaving bodies in a desperate thrash of hacking hooves. With his hands full of bridle and ears and his mouth choked with dusty mane, for a moment he could do nothing but hold on to his own horse’s head. Starhawk, who could be capable of great brutality when in peril, had twisted and levered against her horse’s bridle and threw the frenzied animal to its knees against the jagged canyon wall to their right. Half-crushed and lifted off his feet, the Wolf could glimpse her through a frenzy of veils and dust. The mare was on his blind side; so was the cliff edge to the rocks below. The bridle-leather cut his hands, and he braced his feet. A second later he heard a skittering crash, rocks falling, the mare’s frantic scream, then a crash, somewhere down the canyon below him, and another.
Then nothing.
He released his grip under the gelding’s chin, and the beast threw up its head with a wild snort, but made no further moves to fight or run. It stood trembling as he pushed his veils back. He was still on the trail itself, not even near the raised brink. Starhawk came hurrying up to him, still leading her stumbling horse. Had she let go to help him, he knew they’d certainly have lost her mount and probably the mare as well. In spite of the part of him that felt piqued that she hadn’t come to his aid, he realized grimly that Starhawk was never one to lose her grasp on essentials.
“You all right?” she asked.
He looked down at himself, covered with dust and filth and, he now saw, daubed with great, uneven splotches of the mare’s blood, all mixed with sweat. He wiped his face. “Haven’t felt so good since the last time I got mauled by bears.”
“Glad to hear it.” She led the way to the edge of the cliff.
The mare lay dead on the rocks below. Something like heat shimmer seemed to dance over her twisted body; but even at this time of the afternoon, the canyon’s shadows were deep. She lay on her back; a thin sprawl of white veils fluttered out from beneath.
In spite of the fact that he knew that by no stretch of the imagination could Tazey’s body be covered by that of the dead horse—even had she not, as any rider would have, fallen clear in the fifty-foot drop onto the rocks—he felt a shudder deep within him. He glanced quickly across at Starhawk.
She shook her head. “The saddle was empty.”
He looked back down at the mare. Blood ran down her flanks, lathered by the dust and sweat until her body was almost coated with it. The smell of it rose to them, on the dust-choke and the incongruous dry sweetness of the sage. Then he raised his head and saw Tazey, standing about twenty feet away.
She stood just where the trail turned around a rocky bulge in the amber stone of the canyon wall. Her hands were pressed to her mouth, her honey-colored hair was hanging in unveiled tangles over her faded pink shirt, and her boy’s breeches and boots were dusty and scratched. As he saw her, she turned to run.
“Tazey!”
She stopped, her face a blurred white oval in the blue shadow of the rocks. Her voice shook. “Please go away.”
Sun Wolf straightened up and handed his gelding’s rein to Starhawk. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I can’t...” She swallowed hard. Her eyes, in the dust and the circles of sleepless shadows that ringed them, were almost transparent. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I doubt you could, Tazey.” He walked toward her, slowly so as not to frighten her, but she did not flee him. The brooding silence of the city pressed on his consciousness, like the dead watching open-eyed from their graves. With it, he sensed the queer, terrible prickling of another warning that he had been aware of since noon. “There’s another storm coming late tonight, you know that...”
“I know,” she said softly. “I thought...” Her voice cracked. “It started with the storm. I should never have tried to stop it.”
“Since you saved the Hawk’s life as well as your own, I’m glad you did.” He reached her side. He could feel her whole body tremble as his hand touched her shoulders. She was so different, so changed from the beautiful girl who had done the war dance, that his heart ached for her. “Why would you hurt me, Taswind?”
She shook her head wretchedly. Tears tracked slowly down through the dust on her face. “I don’t know!” She wiped at them and pushed back the tangles of her hair to look up into his face. “I don’t want to, not—not consciously. The Witches of Wenshar...”
“Have you seen Kaletha’s books, then?” Starhawk inquired matter-of-factly, coming up with the two horses on lead.
That stopped the girl. Puzzlement took the place of desperation in her haunted eyes. She shook her head. “No. I...” She swallowed, and the fear and grief rushed back; with them came knowledge that no girl of sixteen should have to endure. “The Witches of Wenshar—Uncle Nanciormis used to tell me about them. He knows about them, as Mother did, a little. He said that in the cult, the coven, of the family...They didn’t always know it was them, you see. People they hated, people who crossed them, people who got in their way, would die, but they...but they didn’t know at first that it was they themselves doing it. They didn’t know they had the power. Only later, when they accepted it and used it...But it would start with dreams...”
She drew a deep breath, trying to steady herself, and wiped her face again, smearing the sweat, tears, and dust into brown smudges across her cheeks. Her fingers shook; she clasped them together, locked tight to keep them still. “I was afraid that was what was happening when—when the Bishop...and Father’s friend just happened to be with him. I had nothing against Egaldus, nothing at all, but there was such power in the air that night, such...such violence. You felt it. You know. It could have been anyone. I dreamed horrible things...”
Green eyes stared up into his. “I don’t want to become like the Witches of Wenshar. I never wanted to. And then Uncle Nanciormis—”
“If you ask me,” Starhawk remarked dryly, “Uncle Nanciormis is the only one who deserved what he almost got.”
“Don’t say that!” Tazey whispered franticly. “Don’t—”
Gently, Sun Wolf said, “I thought you liked Nanciormis.”
Her voice strangled to a thread. “I do.” She pressed her hands to her mouth. “I did. I don’t know. He...”
With careful firmness, Sun Wolf put his arm around her shoulders. There were no house fronts at this point on the trail, and, in any case, it would have been unsafe to go into one; but near the vast, jutting nose of eroded rock, a bench had been carved in a niche beneath a garland of stone
lilies. He sat down, cradling her against him, until her shaking stopped.
At last she managed to say, “Uncle Nanciormis—came to me after—after Incarsyn—last night.” She looked up and shook the hair from her eyes again. “He—he said things to me. He—he—he—” The words choked in her throat.
“About being a witch?” She shook her head violently, too quickly, Sun Wolf thought.
“But I—I hated him after that. That same night—just hours later...” She shook her head again, her hair hissing dryly against his unshaven face, tears trickling down her filthy cheeks. “It’s growing in me, Sun Wolf, and I don’t want to be that way! I’m so afraid. Everybody gets angry at people and hates people, sometimes. I do. But since the storm, since I’ve been a mage...” She clutched at him desperately, sobbing into the dusty head veils that lay in a tangle over his shoulders. He stroked the girl’s heaving back, rocking her as he would have rocked a child, waiting while her sobs subsided.
At length he asked, “Tazey, tell me this. Were you aware of directing your hate? Or do you just think it’s you because you happened to hate some of the people who died?”
She brought her head up from his shoulder, her eyes ravaged. “Uncle Nanciormis...You don’t have to know. You don’t have to do it consciously. You don’t even see it in your dreams, not at first, he said. It has to be me. It’s only happened since the storm.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “The first morning I was in Tandieras, I found some dead birds in the empty quarter. There was something growing even then, before you’d touched your powers.” He looked down into her face and with one dirty thumb wiped the smudged tears from beneath her eyes. “It was little then—it couldn’t hurt a human. Later, I think Starhawk felt something, maybe directed at her, or me—maybe just wandering loose in the dark. But now it’s grown.” He stroked back the tangled curls from her face. “Tell me one thing, Tazey. Did your mother know about the inner cult of the Women of Wenshar?”
For a long time, she sat quiet, her eyes never leaving the brass buckles of his doublet. But his words about the dead birds and the thing Starhawk had felt by the gate that night appeared to have their effect. When she spoke, her voice was very small but calm. “I don’t know. Mother died when I was seven. Uncle told me that—that girls in the family weren’t initiated into the cult until they’d had their first period. So I don’t know.”
“Do you think she knew?”
There was another long silence in which the wind boomed softly down the canyons and the horses twitched nervous ears. At last Tazey said, “Mother was—like Father keeps saying—Mother was sweet and good and kind. But...” She raised her eyes to his. “I don’t know if it’s the same way with men as it is with women. But we...I know we—women—can be two or three things, I mean really be them, sincerely, at the same time. I know what I am deep inside, and it’s—it’s not how I try to be with people. And the things I think and dream and want at night aren’t the things I want in the daytime.”
She fell silent. Sun Wolf gathered her to him again and held her like a child, but his mind moved now on other things. The wind bore the burning whisper of dust, the prickle of the far-off storm, and the sweetish back-taste of the dead mare’s blood that still blotched his clothes. During the Great Trial, he had seen the depths of his own soul, and the glimpse of what lurked there had been enough to convince him that there was no such thing as an act impossible to conceive.
Curled in his arms, Tazey whispered, “We should be going. We can make it back to Tandieras before the storm comes, if we leave now. I—I don’t have a horse...”
“You can share with the Hawk,” the Wolf said softly. “Whatever is happening, the key to it’s here, in Wenshar.” He glanced up at Starhawk, who stood silently with her shoulder to the carved sandstone pillar of the niche. “The killing isn’t going to stop until we know why it started. I’m staying the night.”
The preparations for return across the desert were made quickly. Starhawk and Tazey’s going would be slower with only a single horse between them, and the storm would come, Sun Wolf thought, before midnight.
While Tazey was filling the waterskins at the rock tanks near the canyon’s foot, Starhawk walked back up to where the Wolf sat on the eroded stump of a broken balustrade, carved like the tsuroka from the sandstone of the cliff. He glanced up at the sound of her boots on the gravel.
“What is it?” she asked softly, and he shook his head, not even certain in his own mind what it was that he had listened to in the hushed-wind murmurs around the rocks. The air already had the feeling of evening to it, though, above the high canyon rims, the sky blazed like polished steel. Perhaps the sounds had been, in fact, only the wind.
She hunkered down at his side. “Chief,” she said in her quiet voice, “I have a bad feeling about all this.”
He did not glance down at her, keeping his single eye up-canyon, but he felt the touch of her shoulder against his thigh. “My guess is the heart of the storm’s going to be south again, over the desert,” he said. “Even if you don’t make it back to the Fortress, Tazey should be able to keep you both safe.”
“It isn’t that. You remember the time we got caught in the siege of Laedden, when the plague broke out in the city? You remember the mob in the square, lynching that dim-witted boy who used to draw chalk pictures on the pavement, because somebody said it was his fault?”
Sun Wolf nodded. He’d ordered his men to stay out of the fray when two of them had wanted to rescue the boy, knowing even then that the action could have triggered all their deaths. They’d been staying in a boarded-up tavern. The contents of every bottle on the shelves hadn’t helped him much.
Starhawk went on quietly, “It felt like that in the Hall last night. If Nanciormis knows about the Witches, it’s a sure bet other people do as well.”
The polished glare of the desert came back to his mind, the sandy harshness of the wind flickering around the gatehouse walls, as he, Kaletha, and Tazey stood watching the white dust column advance from the south. The only witches left in Wenshar, he had thought: himself, the woman, the girl.
“All the more reason,” he said slowly, “for you to keep an eye on Tazey, once you get back.”
Starhawk nodded; she’d thought of that already. “When you return,” she said after a moment, “don’t come to the gates. Work your way around through the empty quarter; there’s old gateways through the back. Wait for me in the cell behind the one we’ve been staying in. It’s close enough that, if there is trouble, we can collect our things and the money we’ve stashed behind the loose brick there and get out.”
He turned his head and considered the woman hunkered at his side, ranginess folded compactly to balance on booted ankles, brown hands resting one over the other, as long as a man’s, but narrower. Her face was, as usual, expressionless, save for the shift of thoughts behind the pewter-colored eyes. “You think it’ll come to that?”
“I have no reason to, no,” she replied. “But there’s no sense taking chances.” She straightened up in one single, graceful motion. She would follow—and had followed—him to the Cold Hells and back, but he had long since given up the notion that she would ever display anxiety for his safety. “You think staying the night here will tell you what’s behind this?”
“Maybe not. But it’ll sure as hell tell me something.”
Twilight came early to the canyons, filtered gloom deepening in the mazes of the split rock walls while the sun still blazed on Starhawk and Tazey’s retreating dust. At the foot of the central canyon Sun Wolf found a small temple whose inner sanctuary could easily be barricaded with rubble and thorn. He spent an hour marking it with every spell he knew, the Circles of Light and Darkness and all the Runes of Ward. He did not know whether what he did was correct, but he worked slowly, carefully, concentrating all his powers upon their formation. He felt tired when he was done, as if he had accomplished some physical labor, and it disturbed him, when he looked up at the fading slit of
brightness high overhead, to see how much time it had taken. He watered his horse in one of the broken tanks in the westward canyon, fed it, then hobbled and tied it in the sanctuary, barricading the door and scribbling sign after sign upon the barricade—of guard, of illusion, and of light.
In the half darkness of those silent corridors of rock, he walked along the central canyon to the palace at its end.
Nothing whispered to him now from the black sockets of empty doors and windows; only silence waited in the eternal dark under the deformed cypresses. In the deepening shadows, the carved facade that stretched across the canyon’s end seemed the color of dried and ancient blood.
He climbed the steps. Here, alone in the silent city, had the conquerors from over the mountains done more than simply break doors to loot. A double line of crouching statues, lions and leopards it appeared, had guarded the stair. Their heads and forepaws had been deliberately smashed off—not only smashed, but pulverized, for no broken pieces littered the sand-drifted steps. One beast still retained part of a paw. Sun Wolf saw that it had been a woman’s hand.
There was no question in his mind where in the palace he must go. The small door to the right of the great entry hall beckoned to him, like the mouth of a tomb one sees in nightmares, knowing it for one’s own. He had heard Starhawk’s voice calling to him from its hoarded night. Now there was only silence, save for the faint reverberance of his footfalls and the distant muttering of the canyon winds.
As a wizard, he could see clearly in the interior darkness of the corridor beyond, but he summoned witchlight anyway. From the faded frescoes on the walls, women’s eyes looked down at him—dark, knowing, amused. A room opened before him, and he stopped on the painted threshold as the stench of the evil there smote him in the face.
The Witches of Wenshar Page 23