The Witches of Wenshar

by Barbara Hambly

  Exasperated at the man’s obtuseness in spite of how shaken he was, Sun Wolf growled, “And don’t bother showing me the instruments of torture. I’ve seen ’em plenty of times, and they don’t impress me.” Why? he thought, his mind racing—how could that be possible? But for answer, all he saw were the demons’ golden eyes. They didn’t always know, Tazey had said. Suddenly, horribly, he understood the girl’s secret terror, worse because of what he had learned in the ruins last night.

  Nanciormis paused and turned back toward him. “Perhaps not,” he said. “You are a strong man, Captain. If you are being paid, I hope it is sufficient.”

  There was a jostling around the door—the cell had been excavated and lined with stone back in the days when Tandieras was merely the administrative center for the governors of Pardle, and the room wasn’t a large one. It was crowded already with Osgard, Nanciormis, two guards with crossbows, the brazier, and the Wolf himself. The other guards who entered, two men and a woman, made it all the worse. The instruments that the woman carried were those of what was called ironically “small torture”—a thumbscrew, an assortment of iron rods, which the woman placed in the brazier to heat, razor-edged pincers, the sight of which always turned the Wolf’s stomach, the thin-bladed probe for prying under the fingernails, and tie-frames to hold the hand open while balls of burning cotton and oil were dripped onto the palms.

  The two men led Starhawk between them.

  Everything within Sun Wolf contracted to a single, cold ball of horror.

  Absurdly, he wondered why he hadn’t seen this coming. He’d certainly forced enough information from captives during campaigns by the same method. Perhaps because of the hundreds of concubines who’d filed through his bed, there’d never been one for whom he’d have put a campaign, or any one of his men, in danger. Had one of his friends in the troop been tortured in the same fashion, he’d have felt sorry, but he’d have known that whichever of them it was would understand.

  This was different.

  Starhawk’s face was brown with dust through which tracked runnels of sweat; her eyes seemed the color of white ice against that darkness. A bruise covered half her face, running back under the pale, sweat-matted hair of her temple. By the scabbed edges, it looked like the flat of a sword; that was probably what had knocked her out. Her throat, visible through the open neck of her torn shirt, was marked as well, under a choke-noose of chain. It had undoubtedly been one hell of a struggle.

  Nanciormis said softly, “Who paid you, Sun Wolf? The King-Council of Kwest Mralwe?”

  “Nobody paid me,” he said. The words came out queerly level and quiet. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  But he knew despairingly it would do him no good. He felt paralyzed, as if he had been knifed in some unarmored spot; his only thought was that Starhawk must not suffer for this.

  His mouth felt dry, his lips as if they belonged to someone else. “If you’ll listen I’ll tell you...”

  “We’re not interested in your lies.” Nanciormis’ silky voice turned cold. “We know what’s happening. We want a confession.”

  Anger flared in him at this man’s stubborn stupidity, like the criminal incompetence which had nearly killed Jeryn, the blind selfishness with which he satisfied his lusts for his niece’s governess without any thought to its consequences to her. But he held his rage in check. Whatever he did, the Hawk would be the one who paid.

  Carefully, he said, “There’s nothing to confess. Unless it was without my conscious knowledge—”

  “That’s a lie!” Osgard surged forward, face crimson. His hands wrenched at the collar of Sun Wolf’s shirt, nearly strangling him. “The Witches all knew what they were doing! It’s a lie they use to excuse themselves!”

  Beyond the King’s massive shoulders, Nanciormis watched the scene in silence. Of course, thought the Wolf dizzily, he was too much of a politician to contradict a man whose daughter might be accused. “My Lord,” the commander stepped smoothly forward and put a hand on the King’s arm. “I think we can get the truth easily enough.”

  Turning, he walked back to Starhawk. With the deliberateness of a physician, he tore open her shirt to the waist, pulling the thin rags of the fabric down over her arms. Under the bruises, Starhawk’s face was as uncaring as a prostitute’s. The two guards holding her arms shifted and tightened their grip; the third, coming up behind her, took hold of the slip-chain and drew it tight around the flesh of her throat.

  Sun Wolf twisted against his own bonds, the manacles tearing unnoticed at the flesh of his wrists. “She has nothing to do with this, damn your eyes!”

  Nanciormis took one of the metal rods from the heart of the fire in the brazier, its end cherry-red with heat. “Of course she doesn’t,” he remarked, and twirled it a little in his hands. “A pity, isn’t it?”

  As the glowing end came near Starhawk’s breast, Sun Wolf saw her relax, turn her head aside and, still expressionless, shut her eyes. She was sinking into meditation, fast and deep, like a porpoise sounding in the sea, trying to dive beyond the reach of pain...

  “Stop it!” The crossbows raised again as he flung himself against the chains, but he scarcely noticed. All he saw was the glow of heat near the white skin of the Hawk’s breast, and how the sweat poured down her calm face. “STOP IT! All right, I did it! The King-Council of Kwest Mralwe paid me—five hundred pieces of gold! For God’s sake let her go!”

  He was shaking, his body drenched with sweat, gasping as if he, not the Hawk, were facing the heated iron. Starhawk’s eyes snapped open, shocked—she hadn’t been so far into her trance that she wouldn’t have felt it. “Don’t be a fool, Chief, we haven’t been near Kwest Mralwe.”

  Even as the choke-chain jerked tight around her throat, he roared over her, “They contacted me before we ever left Wrynde, dammit! Shut her up and get her out of here. She doesn’t know a thing about it!”

  Starhawk was struggling now, fighting for air against the strangling loop of metal around her windpipe. The agony of panic and terror the Wolf felt as he watched them systematically club and strangle her into semiconsciousness was nothing he had ever experienced—something for which he had never even thought to prepare himself in all his years of war. He found himself roaring hoarsely over and over, “Stop it! Stop it!” His whole body trembled as they finally dragged her from the room. There were tears as well as sweat running down his face, and he was aware of Nanciormis watching his humiliation with interest, disgust, and a certain smug satisfaction, as if this proved that Sun Wolf was not, in fact, a better man than he.

  Another time, the Wolf would have felt fury. Now he was too sickened and shaken to care. He was aware he had broken, as he’d broken other men, and that they’d done it by the simplest of means. Some detached portion of his mind was mildly interested in the fact that he didn’t care about even that; the rest of him was thinking illogically that Starhawk hadn’t made a sound.

  The commander’s thick lips curled in a little smile.

  “So the Lords of Kwest Mralwe paid you to murder the Bishop Galdron and Egaldus and Incarsyn?”

  “Yes.” He was panting, sobbing, as if he had run miles. So much, he thought, with strange detachment, for the hardened warrior who can take anything his enemies dish out.

  “Why?” Osgard grabbed him furiously again by the shirt-front and dragged his face close. Green eyes like bloodshot rotten eggs glared into his. “And Norbas Milkom died just because he happened to be with Galdron, is that it?” His breath was like a cesspit; the Wolf fought nausea. “A man who’d never harmed a soul—a man who was my friend and the best friend this country ever had!” His big hands tightened as he slammed the Wolf back against the wall. “You stinking, murdering traitor, I took you into my Household—”

  “Get out of the way, you fool!” Nanciormis wrenched the King’s hands free and shoved him impatiently aside. He turned back to the Wolf, speaking quickly, as if to get this over with. “You did this to cause disruption of the alliance between Wen
shar and the shirdar?”

  “Yes.” Sun Wolf swallowed, grasping for what was left of his thoughts. “I don’t know,” he amended, realizing this was likelier—anything, he thought, to make them believe. He had seen torture, seen the torture of women. Anything, he thought, to spare the Hawk that. “They didn’t tell me. They knew I was mageborn, knew I could get control of the demons...”

  The dark eyes narrowed in their pads of flesh. “So that’s how it’s done,” he murmured. Then, with a glance at the King, “And the King would have been your next victim.”

  Sun Wolf nodded. He felt drained and strange to himself, emptied of the pride he’d once held in his own strength. It had all happened so quickly. He understood then why men who held out through the pain at the torturers’ hands would weep after it was over.

  “You stinking traitor.” The King’s breath hissed thickly in his nostrils. “You took my money, you ate my bread—I entrusted you with the life of my son.” He spoke quietly, his anger coalescing into a hardness far beyond his usual pyrotechnic wrath. “Witch-bastard—you have no more pride nor honor than a camel-skinner’s whore.” Stepping close, he spat in Sun Wolf’s face.

  Sun Wolf was aware, as the spittle ran warm and slimy down his chin, that there had been a time when he would have struck at the man for that, even if they killed him for it. But not even anger was left him—only numbness and fear for the Hawk. I would never have hurt Jeryn, he wanted to say, but could not. He’d seen the abject and stupid hopes of men once he’d broken them, clinging to straws of self-deception and the delusion that if they licked their torturer’s boots sufficiently clean, no further harm would be done to those they loved. He remembered, too, his scorn of such men and what he’d done to those loved ones out of spite and pique and sheer perverseness, if the victim’s pleas had been too fulsome. There was that, too, in Nanciormis’ eyes.

  But all of it changed nothing. He felt alien to himself, as if soul and body had, in less time than it took to put on his boots, been turned inside-out.

  “We’ll take his confession and fling it in the faces of those toads in Kwest Mralwe...”

  Nanciormis shook his head. “It would do us no good.” He fastidiously wiped his face on a cotton handkerchief he’d taken from his sleeve. Even through the stench of the straw underfoot and the King’s stained and sweaty puce doublet, the Wolf could smell the aromatic vinegar with which it had been soaked. “They’ll only deny it—deny that they ever knew the sources of the power of the Witches. But as the ones who broke that power, they very well could have known how to awaken it again.” He glanced back at the Wolf. “As for this one—we have his confession. We need no more.”

  He signed to the guards. They raised their crossbows again, and Nanciormis put his hand on the King’s arm, to draw him back out of the way.

  Osgard remained where he was, between the barbed iron points and Sun Wolf’s chest. “After the bill for it is signed,” he said.

  Nanciormis stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “What?”

  The King regarded him for a moment, green eyes slitted. “After a bill is made out and signed for his death and posted in the city from sunrise till sunset tomorrow,” he said. “The fact that he’s a witch-bastard and a killer doesn’t mean I can break the law to kill him without a bill.”

  Emotionally emptied, Sun Wolf observed with distant interest that this was one of the few times he’d ever seen Nanciormis taken off guard. Between the velvety ropes of the braids, his face turned tallowy yellow with anger, his mouth squaring hard at the corners. Then he recovered himself, stammered, “We have the man’s confession! He betrayed you, would have murdered you in your bed. He slaughtered Milkom like a sheep...”

  Osgard’s voice turned to flint. “Don’t talk about Milkom to me,” he said softly. “It’s only chance my uncle Tyrill named me and not Norbas his successor. It could have been either of us, because we both believed in law. A shirdar lord might have a man’s throat slit on his own say-so, in the dark, without anyone’s knowing about it, but that isn’t how it’s done here. I’m the King, but I’m King under laws, something you and your people never got around to making.”

  “And my people,” said Nanciormis, viper-quiet, “are the stronger for it. Among my people, these killings would never have gone on as long as they have.”

  “Your people,” retorted Osgard, his voice equally deadly, “were unable to hold these lands against folk who were united by law, Nanciormis. Remember that.”

  And turning, the King strode from the cell. Nanciormis stood for a moment, watching his shadow pass across the torch-glare in the stairwell; then he turned back and studied Sun Wolf with considering eyes.

  For a long moment he said nothing. Sun Wolf met his eyes through the burning smoke of the brazier that now choked the cell, acutely aware that the two guards still remained, their weapons at the ready. He was utterly weary, body and soul—yesterday’s long ride and the horrors of the night mingling with the ache of strained shoulder muscles, the hot, viscous trickle of blood down his arms from the torn flesh of his wrists, and the burn of sweat in his wounds. His only thought was how Starhawk had fought them—silent, desperate—and how in silence she had been beaten unconscious. In the strange, clear corner of his mind that was detached from any personal concerns, he was aware that, though Osgard would undoubtedly promulgate and sign the correct legal bill for his death immediately, by tomorrow there was a good chance he would be too drunk to inquire whether Sun Wolf had survived the night to be executed the following sunset. By the commander’s eyes, Nanciormis was thinking it, too. Sun Wolf knew he should be afraid, but somehow was not. He only stood, his head tipped back against the stone wall behind him, watching the commander incuriously. In spite of the almost unbearable heat of the room, he felt queerly cold.

  But something of Osgard’s sober and deadly quiet seemed to have reached through the commander’s contempt for his brother-in-law. At length he signed to the two guards. “Keep watch on him. Remember he’s a wizard. Stay alert. If he either moves or speaks, kill him at once. Understand?”

  The men nodded. Nanciormis paused for a moment longer, studying Sun Wolf’s chained figure, stretched between the torches, the light glancing along the crescent-shaped scabs of the demon bites, gleaming stickily on the perspiration streaming down his chest and ribs. Then his mouth hardened with some private thought; turning, he strode from the cell.

  It was a long time before Starhawk found the strength even to move. The fresh pain blended with the ache of bruises several hours old, taken in the struggle when they’d arrested her as soon as the boys on the watchtower had sighted Sun Wolf’s horse. Looking back on it, she wondered with dull disgust at herself why she had not suspected the very fact that no one had arrested her upon her return with Tazey. Of course Osgard would be readier to plant the blame on him or Kaletha, rather than on his daughter. She wondered what had finally tipped the scales.

  Some circumstance of Incarsyn’s murder? She shivered, remembering the screams that had shattered the terrible silence between the end of the storm and dawn. Some piece of proof that Kaletha was innocent? Or was it just that Sun Wolf was a stranger? She cursed herself for not picking a less obvious rendezvous, for not knowing the empty quarter well enough to choose one further in, and for not being ready for a delayed arrest.

  She sighed and tried to roll over on the uneven stone of the floor. It was like a cobblestone street, bumpy and filled with little pits and holes where roaches nested under crumbled straw. Its jagged edges cut into her bare arms, and she winced and lay still again.

  She had to get him out, if it wasn’t too late already. Illyra had threatened the most barbarous and lingering death for the witch whose magic had slain her brother. But in the long hours of the earlier night, while she had waited with hammering heart for the guards to come for her, she had gone over every square foot of the stone-lined room. There was nothing she could use for a weapon or tool.

  Sun Wolf had confess
ed. He might be already dead.

  Her body hurt; her soul felt shaken to its marrow.

  She had long known that she was willing to perjure her soul and destroy her body for Sun Wolf’s sake—it had never occurred to her that he would do likewise for her. Struggling to submerge mind and feeling to the dark silence of meditation, she had heard him cry out, and it had left her stunned. He would not have confessed, she knew, if they’d put the iron to his own flesh.

  That he had done so for her sake terrified her. She was used to pain from arrows, swords, and every instrument designed to cut or break human flesh. The tears that slid in such silence down her face were from grief at his humiliation and because she understood now that he valued her above his own pride.

  He had said that he loved her. Until now she had not understood that his love was of the same quality as hers.

  This is weak, she told herself angrily, weak and stupid. While you’re sniveling over how much he loves you, he could be dying. There has to be something you can do.

  But the tears slid cold down her face. Even had she not been half-dead with exhaustion, she knew there was nothing she had not already investigated before.

  Somewhere behind her, she heard a faint, hollow scritch.

  Her muscles stiffened.

  In the long waiting she had become familiar with every sound of these cells—the queer, hollow groanings of the wind in the walls, and the scrabble of rats who hunted the enormous brown jail-roaches in the corners. This was different.

  Very faintly, she heard it again—the unmistakable scrape of wood on stone and the soft squeak of a hinge.

  “Warlady?”

  An unvoiced whisper, a scout’s in enemy territory. She moved her eyes to the judas-hole in the door. The faintest glow of reflected torchlight filtered through, but no shadow of a watching guard. She rolled over—every pulled, burning muscle of her back and belly stabbing at her—and sat up, shrugging her torn shirt back up on her shoulders again.