The Witches of Wenshar

by Barbara Hambly

  “Come in,” she said, and smiled, as the demon had smiled when Sun Wolf disemboweled the calf. “Come in.”

  Nanciormis and the guards hung back, but Sun Wolf walked forward into the shadowy temple, his steps putting soft fingerholes in the silence. With a cat’s fastidious tread, Starhawk followed him. A moment later, Tazey shook free her uncle’s staying grip and moved out also, her breeches and boot tops, like the stained rags of the Hawk’s shirt, mere blurs of white in the gloom. Everywhere now, Sun Wolf could sense the demons, smell them, and feel their greedy expectancy, half-slaked but craving more to satiate. The dust caught the bluish-white glare of the witchlight, filtering it into a ghostly fog; in places it seemed to glow, though he could see nothing further—reds and a certain shade of blue that reminded him of Kaletha’s eyes. Beyond the altar, the pit radiated a rotted light which permeated the darkness and dust; against it, Anshebbeth’s thin, dark shape stood up like a corroded spike.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she? Kaletha.”

  The blood trail, sprayed over walls and floor, had wound for almost a hundred yards among the twisting corridors and painted rooms. “Yes,” the Wolf said. “She’s dead.”

  Anshebbeth moved convulsively, clapping her hands over her face. When she took them down, tacky-dry blood smudged her eyelids and the sides of her thin nose. “I had to,” she said in a strangled voice. “She was jealous of me. She only wanted me to—to follow after her. She said I should come to help her carry her books back. She didn’t trust anyone else. She didn’t care that there was danger here, that I’d be afraid. But I’m not afraid anymore.”

  She smiled again, like a skull. “Now I can make other people afraid.”

  “If that’s what you want,” he said. He stood with his arms at his sides, the rough golden hair on them prickling with the hot weight of evil in the room. They’d taken the chains from his wrists, but the magic in him was kitten-weak. He was aware of that more than of anything else, staring into the madwoman’s dark eyes.

  “Now Nanciormis will have to love me.” She dangled her feet from the altar, kicking them back and forth, as a child might, and twisted a lock of her straight black hair into a sticky ringlet with her forefinger. “I can give him whatever he wants. I saved him from Galdron’s hate and plotting. Now he doesn’t have to marry Tazey. Now he’ll marry me.”

  “Anshebbeth...” Tazey began, and her governess turned toward her, pointy face blazing with spite.

  “I will marry him!” she insisted furiously. “You don’t want him! I saved you from having to marry Incarsyn, after all those cruel things that Nanciormis told me he said about you! You’re just jealous of me!”

  “No,” the girl said quietly. The witchlight slipped like electrum along her thick curls as she shook her head. “No, Anshebbeth, I’m not jealous of you.”

  “Well, you should be!” The thick air sifted with the dry whisper of demons. Light flicked in the corner of Sun Wolf’s vision—he turned his head quickly, but there was nothing there. At the same moment Nanciormis and his small knot of guards stepped quickly away from the dark door, as if they had heard something in the blackness of the corridor behind them that they feared more than they feared the haunted temple ahead.

  Anshebbeth stretched out her hands, thin and white as bone. “Nanciormis,” she whispered, and the sibilance of it was picked up by echo and shadow.

  Sun Wolf could see the white rim of terror all around the irises of the shirdar lord’s dark eyes. The last Prince of the House of Wenshar knew the tales of what had taken place on that altar and what had happened to the men afterward.

  Anshebbeth’s face clouded. “What’s the matter?” she asked softly. “You don’t need to be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”

  In the corners all around her, the demons stirred. Sun Wolf moved his head again, sharply, but that skeleton flick of light was gone. They know your blind spots, he thought, and stand in them...

  He saw Tazey whirl like a startled fawn and look back at him with frightened eyes. Still Nanciormis did not move.

  “I love you,” Anshebbeth insisted, hurt in her voice. “I did it all for you.” Then the note in her voice changed, and there was a sliver of anger there. “It was all for you.”

  The glow behind her changed into a kind of shivering glitter, and the Wolf thought he saw bright flecks of color begin to swirl in the air above the pit like sparks over a fire.

  “Come to me!”

  His face a mask of marble, Nanciormis stepped forward. He stopped, swallowed hard, and cast a quick glance of terror and pleading at Sun Wolf.

  All his life, the Wolf thought, Nanciormis had never thought of long-range consequences to himself or anyone else, except where they served his ends. Now he was like a man wading in the ocean who steps off the underwater cliff to find himself suddenly struggling in deep water, fearing the things that swim in it beyond his knowledge. He whispered helplessly, “Please...”

  “You’re afraid of me,” Anshebbeth said softly. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.” In the frame of her disheveled hair, her blood-marked face was horrible, the rage that had come easier and easier to her in the last weeks flaring suddenly in her eyes. “Say you love me!”

  He was fighting desperately to keep face and to grip his slipping hold on even the pretense of self-command. Barely audible, he whimpered, “I—I love you, Anshebbeth.”

  Her face contorted again. “Liar! You lied to me!” Terrified, Nanciormis fell to his knees, raising supplicating hands. He knew, the Wolf thought through the pounding of his head and the dagger-thrust of each indrawn breath, just what she could do.

  “You all lie to me!” Anshebbeth swung around, staring with wild, mad eyes at them all. “None of you loves me! You all love each other.” Tazey had stepped almost unconsciously into the protective circle of Sun Wolf’s arm, sensing the horror that was gathering in the corners of the temple. Starhawk, typically, had moved off to the left, widening the target distance between them and giving herself more room.

  Anshebbeth’s voice broke with self-pity. “But no one loves me! And no one ever will.”

  Hands uplifted, Nanciormis gabbled, “Of course we love you, ’Shebbeth. We all love you.”

  “It’s hard to love hate, Anshebbeth,” the Wolf said, like a thin swirl of sand in the darkness. In the face of her rage, the blue glow of witchlight over his head had dimmed to a small, flat pearl, like the sun on a foggy day; he could see the demons now, melting out of the ghostly blur of dust. Their eyes were the dark eyes of shirdar ladies, their lips like women’s lips running with blood. “You’ve become addicted to hate, even as the demons are. It warms you, as it does them.”

  “It isn’t my fault!” she screamed. Her skinny finger jabbed out, and Nanciormis shrank back from it, his fat face tallow-colored, as if he were about to vomit with terror. “It’s his! He did this to me! He made me like this! And now no one will love me ever!”

  She buried her face in her hands again, the white fingers twisting her hair as her whole bony body shook with sobbing. His nerve breaking, Nanciormis turned on his knees and crawled, scrabbling over his stained white cloak, for the dark doorway back into the labyrinth of the palace. But as he reached it, he stopped, and the sickly magelight showed the sweat pouring down his face between his hanging braids. The guards were already crowding farther from the door, pressing into the wall in a tight little group, back to back, their weapons pointing outward. The fat man scrambled ungracefully to his feet, stumbled toward them for protection, and the corpse-light glow flashed on the sword points as they turned toward him. The wrath of the demons clung like the stink of plague to his flesh and his garments. None of them was willing to let him come among them. “Sun Wolf, help me!” He turned his tear-streaked face back toward the dark figure on the altar, fighting for an echo of his former mastery. “Anshebbeth, I—I didn’t mean to. Truly. I’m—I’m sorry...”

  “You made me do it!” she screamed. “I wanted to be mageborn, so Kaletha would love me,
would treat me as her equal! But you made me hate people! You whispered to me and whispered to me about this person said this and that person said that. And then I’d dream about them—dream about their deaths, and when I heard about it the next morning I’d be glad...”

  Nanciormis covered his face, giving at the knees and crumpling, as if his whole body were rotting with terror. Anshebbeth rose to her feet, her face working, the winds stirring the eldritch shimmer of dust around her, flicking the darkness of her dress and hair. The adepts did not always at first know their power, Sun Wolf remembered, but there was always a moment when they did. What ritual had they used, what final twisting of the soul, what dreadful self-justification, to temper and seal and harden the girl into their numbers? Had many of them had resisted and cried out as Anshebbeth was crying now?

  Tears were streaming down her face, tears of fury and utter wretchedness tracking through the gummy blood. Shrill and barely human, she sobbed, “I feel them here—I hear them whispering. It was like my dreams, but I wasn’t asleep! Kaletha—Kaletha—”

  She turned on Nanciormis like a rabid weasel, and he buried his face in his arms and groaned. “You made me be this! You made me hate!”

  The air seemed to burn around Sun Wolf’s flesh. Wind that came from nowhere knifed in his hair and the rags of his shirt and fingered Nanciormis’ cloak and long braids as he lay groveling on the stone. Tazey gasped, her hand tightening on Sun Wolf’s bare arm, as glowing shapes began to pour up out of the pit, flowing along the stone floor, around the altar, and over Anshebbeth’s feet. They drifted dangle-footed in the air, like monster wasps with Anshebbeth’s eyes. Nanciormis scrambled to his feet and started to back away, batting blindly at the air around him, then screamed as one of them laid his arm open to the bone.

  “No!” he shrieked. “Sun Wolf! Anshebbeth! I’m sorry! I’ll do anything—please, help me!”

  Hate doesn’t stop, Sun Wolf thought, strangely calm. When it’s done with him, it will take us all.

  Swiftly, he disengaged Tazey’s hands from his arm and strode empty-handed toward the altar where Anshebbeth sat. He felt the tiny slip of light that glowed above his head die. Only the dim glint of Tazey’s power shimmered across on those blue, skeletal backs, and on the halo of greedy fangs surrounding the dark shape of the Witch.

  Nanciormis screamed again, running desperately as the demons began to harry him around the room as they had harried the calf in the pit. Flesh gleamed opal white, bulging through claw-rents in his clothes, bouncing almost comically as he ran; blood oozed, glittering down his trouser legs and boots. He was sobbing, tears of terror pouring down his cheeks.

  Sun Wolf seized Anshebbeth by the arms, and she looked up into his face, startled, so intent upon her hatred that she had not seen him come. Her countenance was scarcely human, streaked with tears and snot and blood; from a frame of coarse black hair that flowed down over his hands, she stared unseeing. “No one makes you hate, Anshebbeth. They can only ask you to. You can always say no.”

  “It isn’t like that!” She was gasping, clutching at her throat as if it were strangling her. “I love him, and he did this to me, made me like this...”

  Darkness closed on them, a vortex of power and terror whirlpooling into those stretched black eyes. Sun Wolf shook her, violently, furiously, trying to break that rigid centeredness of hate, and her head lolled on her shoulders, her mouth open in a soundless shriek. In the blackness, he knew the demons were around him and he felt the soft nibble of fangs against his neck. “Do you love him?” he demanded. “Or do you love your hate more than him?”

  “I don’t!” she sobbed. Then something broke in her, and she gasped, “I don’t want to!”

  Pressed to the stone of the wall, Nanciormis was screaming, begging as he fought with the bleeding air.

  “Say it!” the Wolf commanded.

  Anshebbeth stared up at him like a hysterical child, unable to speak or draw breath. He shook her again, her neck snapping back like a white, corded stem in the black wrack of her hair. A sob ripped her, as if it would tear her body in two. He saw the madness retreat from her eyes and knowledge take its place—knowledge and horror at what she knew she had become.

  As though torn from her with a knife, her scream rent the air. “I don’t want it! Let him go! I don’t want this!”

  Nanciormis shrieked again, huddled against the wall as the glowing ring closed around him. In Sun Wolf’s grip Anshebbeth’s body felt as fragile and skeletal as theirs.

  Despairing, Anshebbeth screamed, “I can’t let it go! I can’t let it go! I want to but I can’t...” She twisted away from him, burying her face in her skeletal hands.

  Then she screamed—not the tense, tight shrillness of her strangled shrieks before, but loud, aching, louder and louder as the torrent of freed sound seemed to rip apart the containing flesh. Like startled hornets the demons rose from Nanciormis, shining horribly in the dark air. Sun Wolf flung himself aside as they descended upon the altar in a whistling swarm, knowing he had been too late. Anshebbeth did not raise her head, but screamed on and on, rocking like a hurt child, as if some last rag of sanity had slipped finally from her grip. He caught a glimpse of Starhawk running toward him, as he turned back weaponless, magicless, to face the phosphorescent storm of death.

  Anshebbeth’s scream scaled upward, twisting the darkness as the demons settled over her. In a flash of terrible enlightenment, Sun Wolf understood that she had regained, rather than lost, her sanity. She knew what she had done.

  Blindly, striking with her hands at the glowing fangs that ripped her flesh, she ran forward, the demons driving her into the pit. Starhawk reached the Wolf’s side at the same moment that Anshebbeth fell, the glowing ghost shapes swirling down after her, shriek after shriek ripping the air.

  It took her twenty minutes to die. When it was over silence settled on the dark temple, as it had lain for a hundred and fifty years.

  “You awake, Chief?”

  Sun Wolf started to roll over, then ceased with a gasp of pain. Vaguely, he remembered Starhawk wrapping a makeshift field dressing over his cracked ribs as he was sliding into sleep in the sickly yellow post-storm light, but the recollection was cloudier than the dreams that had followed. He felt chilled, sticky, and bone-tired, hurting in every limb, with dust gummed in his eyelashes, moustache, and the stubble of his beard.

  He felt someone bend over him, light and very swift, and lips touched his. Opening his eye, he saw Starhawk just straightening her body where she knelt beside him.

  “Well, that fairy tale does work after all,” she remarked.

  She was wearing the dark-green leather doublet of the Tandieras guards over a black shirt which made her sun-gilded fair skin shine like ivory. She had bathed and looked clean, calm, and, except for the black handspan of bruise on her face, utterly unruffled. Squinting past her, he saw over the broken wall of the ruined house in which he’d slept, the cliff faces of Wenshar, blackish maroon in the polished sunset light, guarding their treasure of rose and apricot within. Like strange and far-off music, he heard the hushed voices of Nanciormis’ guards and the comfortable nicker of horses.

  The storm had ended shortly after noon. In spite of an exhaustion so deep that he could barely stagger, Sun Wolf had insisted on moving down from the canyons to the piled debris and crumbled walls of the Lower Town before he would sleep. It had taken him and Tazey two hours to work all the binding-spells to hold the demons forever within the rocks of Wenshar; exhausting, nerve-wracking hours, while he had listened, with as much of his mind as he could spare, to hear the demons wakening again from the pit where Anshebbeth’s mangled body lay.

  They had not wakened. Like drunkards, they were satiated, wallowing in the afterglow. He hadn’t wanted to expose Tazey to the full knowledge of what the demons were and of the terrible powers necessary to hold them to the stones, but he had had no choice. He had been simply too weary, too drained, to pass through the ritual a second time alone. Later, the girl had been
very silent as she had walked beside him down the sand-drifted canyon in the after-hush of the storm, but he suspected that she was less shocked by the vileness of the demons than she would have been even twenty-four hours ago.

  With the demons bound to the rock that had given them birth, it would have been possible to sleep safely, even within the temple, but Sun Wolf had not wanted to risk the dreams that might come.

  He mumbled, “What is it?” By the color of the light, he knew he’d slept four or five hours.

  “Riders on their way,” she said. “Still a couple hours out on the desert, but my guess is it’s reinforcements.”

  “Good.” He sat up. Starhawk, as usual, refrained from helping him; he didn’t know whether he should be miffed or pleased with the implied compliment of superhuman stamina. The jab of the hardened dressing was almost as bad as the cracked ribs underneath. “They can take Nanciormis back.”

  Starhawk shook her head. “He’s gone,” she said. “You’d started the binding-rites already when his guards took him out of the temple. He was cut to pieces, you know, and bleeding like a flayed steer. For a long time he just cried in a corner....”

  “Don’t tell me,” the Wolf said wearily. “They thought the poor bastard was pretty harmless where he was.”

  Starhawk shrugged. “After what went on in the temple, they weren’t anxious to search the canyons for him. I’d have the lot of them flogged, myself, but it’s not my business.”

  Sun Wolf sighed and sat quietly, his back to the crumbling house wall. Dry wind curled across his naked chest, bearing the smell of dust and horses.

  He wondered why, in spite of everything—the memory of his humiliation at the commander’s hands, the beating they’d given Starhawk, the pain in his wrists and side—his only anger toward the man stemmed from what he had done to Anshebbeth and what he had tried to do to Jeryn—not even so much trying to murder him, but planting in his mind the fear that he was a coward and turning his father against him.