Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (12 page)

Between the torches that flared on either side of the doors into the Hall, Osgard, Nanciormis, and the handsome young Incarsyn stood, their faces a study in shocked noncommitment. Incarsyn, particularly, looked simply confused, as if struggling to select the most appropriate emotion out of a rather small natural stock.

Starhawk dismounted. None of the guards seemed eager to go near the litter, so she helped Tazey to stand. Dusty, scratched, her blond hair hanging like a dried broom around her scorched face, the girl wavered unsteadily on her feet, and Jeryn, stumbling, staggered to support her other side. In dreamlike weariness, they moved through the haze of torchlit dust toward the steps, where a bloodshot, tear-streaked Osgard waited, his untidy doublet smeared with liquor stains. The silence was absolute, but Starhawk could feel it around her, worse than the weight of the storm.

Then into that silence, old Nexué’s voice cawed like canvas ripping. “A witch! She’s a witch!”

Tazey raised her head, her green eyes transparent with horror. “No,” she whispered, pleading for it not to be so. Then her voice wailed, crackling “No!”

Kaletha had started to bustle forward, but Nexué pushed before her, skinny finger pointing. Tazey could only stare at her, blank with shock, a rim of white showing all around her pupils in the torchlight. There was triumph and distorted glee in the old woman’s face, as if the damnation and ruin of the Princess were some kind of personal victory. “A witch! A—”

With a kind of calm rage Starhawk turned and backhanded the old woman across the mouth with her closed fist, knocking her sprawling to the dirt. She was too late. Tazey whimpered again, “No . . . ” Covering her face with her hands, she slowly collapsed. Osgard, Nanciormis, and Incarsyn all hesitated to step forward, and it was Starhawk who caught the fainting girl in her arms.

From the window of the temple, Sun Wolf could see the lights bobbing in the canyon below.

He had seen them last night, when he had looked out into the black violence of the killer winds. Later, when the rock-cut palaces of the vanished city, carved from the very sandstone of the canyon walls, had lain cold and colorless under the ghostly moon, they had been there still. They flickered at him now from empty doorways, from black eye sockets of wide square windows, and from the shadows of the peach-colored columns of the carved facades. The whisper of their bodiless voices braided into the wail of the desert winds.

He knew what they were.

In the north, as a child, he had seen demons, the only person he had ever known who could do so. His father, he remembered, had beaten him the one time he had spoken of it—for telling lies, he’d said. Sun Wolf wondered now whether it had actually been for telling what the old man did not want to accept as truth. He had wanted a warrior son.

In all his years of hearing tales about demons, the Wolf had never heard that they could hurt people much. He knew their thin, whistling voices called from the hollow places of the earth, luring men to their deaths in marshes or over gullies in the dark of the moon. But they fled men and bright lights. No man who knew what and where they were should be in danger from those cold, incorporeal spirits.

Yet he knew himself to be in danger, though danger of what he did not know.

He had scribbled in the dust of the rose-hued sandstone temple he had taken for his quarters the few patchy demonspells Yirth of Mandrigyn had taught him and drawn all the Runes of Light on the doorpost and on the sills of the great upper window.

And still he did not feel quite safe.

They moved below him through the monochrome darkness of the canyon, faint lights that shone but did not illuminate the smooth pillars, the filigree turrets, or the winding stairs cut at intervals in the fantastically eroded rock faces of the canyon wall.

The City of Wenshar had been built where the tawny sandstone cliff-face of the Haunted
Range—black with the baked mineral patina of the scorching sun—curved inward to form a shallow plain raised above the level of the desert and sheltered from the cruelty of the winds. There, three small streams flowed out of the broken mountains to lose themselves in the farther desert. On the raised plain, the City of Wenshar had spread out around its gardens of date palms and cypresses—until the invading armies of the Middle Kingdoms had crushed the Ancient House of Wenshar and taken its lands and its mines.

Time and sand had nearly destroyed the few walls war had left standing. But up the three canyons lay a twisting maze of wadis and cuts—of square, isolated blocks and towering stone needles, valleys as wide as a street or so narrow the Wolf could span them with his arms—lit only by bright ribbons of sky three hundred feet above. Here the wealthy nobles of Wenshar had carved gem-like palaces and temples from the living cliffs themselves. Sheltered from the sun, their fantastic sandstone facades had not been darkened by the desert heat. They shone peach and amber and rose, softly banded yellows, citrine, honey. Here, time had ceased, dammed behind the enchantment of the stone.

Sun Wolf had always loved rocks, their strength and the personality of their shapes. On the road and in Tandieras, he had missed having a rock garden in which to meditate and spend time. Hearing nothing more of Wenshar than its evil reputation, he had been awestruck by this fairy-tale beauty.

Yet from every shadow, in every niche and doorway, he sensed the presence of demons. The city crawled with them, big and little; in the three days he had wandered here, he had felt them watching him. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had only to press his hands to the ground to hear their voices. But that was something he feared to do.

By day he never saw them, though occasionally, in those palaces cut deeper than a single chamber into the cliffs, he heard their flitter and murmur, like dry leaves blowing over stone floors that neither wind nor plant had touched in generations. But two evenings ago, in the shadows of the central canyon, he had glimpsed them, no more than a flicker out of the corner of his eye, massing in the shadows before him as he tried to leave. He had doubled on his tracks to take a narrow wadi that rejoined the main way lower down—the mountains here were split into great, free-standing blocks in places, which enterprising ancient nobles had hollowed into whole palaces. But the demons had been waiting for him. The sun had disappeared by then from the brilliant stream of blue overhead, its rays only edging the top-most rim of the rocks. He could sense a soft, evil chattering in the shadows.

When he’d doubled back again, he’d realized he was being driven.

There was no lore of demons in any of the jumble of things Yirth had taught him, nor had he ever found any in his search for wizards. He knew they rose out of rocks and swamps, out of water sometimes. If they were in this land, the magic of the old Witches of Wenshar would have held them at bay until, with the Witches’ destruction, they had seeped forth like oil from the ground.

They had no strength. Being bodiless, he doubted they could physically hurt a man much. Nor could he think of a reason they would want to, needing no sustenance. Yet in places the canyon floors were heaped with broken piles of animal bones, mouflon sheep and gazelles, driven to their deaths from the ledges above even as men were lured into marshes by the demons of the north. The bones lay whole and undisturbed.

Standing there in the growing azure dimness of the evening, listening to the crooning whisper of the demons massing like lightning bugs in the shadows before him, he had suddenly wondered why.

He had turned again, seeking a way out. The canyon had widened before him into a long space where a line of eroded stone needles, narrow columns as high as the canyon walls, towered gilt-tipped against an opal sky. Twisted cypress trees, a recollection of vanished wells, stood about the needles’ bases, gray trunks weathered and contorted as if they sought to swallow their own branches. Entirely across the rear of the canyon stretched the longest palace facade he had yet seen. Amber steps led up to level upon level of peach and salmon columns, fragile turrets, and strange spires, all glowing in the last of the light. But as Sun Wolf stood in the black shade beneath the undead cypresses, he’d heard voices crying out to him from the dark arches of that vast edifice, sweet as the voices of children who live upon human blood.

He had been afraid then, unreasoningly, and had fled back down the canyon, heedless of the whistling gibber in the shadows through which he passed. He had gone to his own temple headquarters in the westernmost canyon and scrawled the ghostly scrim of runes, invisible to any eyes but his own, over the windows and doors behind him. He had no way of knowing whether they would, in fact, keep the demons from passing. He had sat awake through that night and every night since.

Outside, they moved in the darkness still. Faint, deformed bodies drifted in shells of light, seeping in and out of the rocks, floating in the air like drifts of vagrant mist. He knew that what he saw was their true being, as a mirror will reflect the true being of a wizard cloaked in illusion, and what frightened him was that he could not tell whether they were ugly or beautiful. He could hear them whispering to one another in their piping, little voices and knew that, if he allowed himself to, he would understand—or think he understood. But that, too, he feared to do.

Why did he feel that they would come if he bade them?

Why this strange sense, in the inner corners of his heart, that he knew their names?

They had tried twice more to drive him into that open space at the end of the central canyon where dark cypresses grew at the feet of the needles—tried to drive him into the cantaloupe-colored palace that lay beyond. He had gone there once, the day following the first attempt, curious as to what they wanted of him. He had chosen the hour of noon, when the burnished sun beat straight down on the gravel that covered the carved roadways and dry stream bed—the one hour when he felt safest.

From the top of the steps he had looked into a shadowy hall, a huge, square space whose walls were covered to the height of his shoulders in places with the fine gray sand that drifted between the columns of its open facade. The room went back far deeper than any he had previously seen, its nether end hidden in shadow, and, unlike any other he had seen, its walls had once been plastered and painted. The dim shapes of the frescoes there were almost unrecognizable, yet something about their posture, the activities implied in the stiff, shadowy outlines which were all that remained, troubled him. To his right he could see a small black rectangle of shadow, an inconspicuous door to some inner chamber from which no window opened to the outside. And from that dark door, softly and distinctly, he had heard Starhawk’s voice say, “Chief?”

After that he had not dared to go into the central canyon at all. In the heat of noon he slept; in the few morning and evening hours he searched the city, looking for any sign, any book, or any talisman that the Witches of Wenshar might have left, searching for some trace of their power among the crowding mazes of rose-colored cliffs. Only that day he had heard the desperate, feeble crying of a baby and had followed the sound to the entrance of that central canyon. He had stood there a long time, listening to that starved wailing before turning his back and walking away.

By night he watched, and the demons watched him.

Two nights ago, while the storm had screamed overhead and the canyons had been filled with a ghostly haze of hot dust that stirred with eddying winds, they had gathered hundreds thick outside, drifting close to the window where he stood, heart pounding, to stare at him with empty, glowing eyes.

Now the sky above the canyon rim was paling. In an hour it would be safe for him to sleep. He prepared himself to meditate, for it was for this as well as for other things that he had come here. But as he settled his mind into stillness—sharp and clear and small as in a dream—he became aware that Starhawk had entered the city.

Like an echo in his mind, he seemed to hear the strike of hooves along the crumbling walls that spread out beyond the canyons. As he sometimes could, he called her to mind and saw her sitting her horse amid the faded tesselations of the old market square’s broken pavement, the stir of dawn wind moving in her white head veils and the horse’s flaxen mane. Then he saw her turn her head sharply, as if at some sound.

Very quickly, Sun Wolf descended the curved flight of buttercup sandstone steps to the wide room below. Beyond the spell-written doorsill, the canyon was filled with blue silence; the hush of the place was unnatural, for, in spite of the water in its few stone tanks, birds shunned the place. His feet scrunched on the drifts of sand and gravel as he hastened down the old road. In the hours when the demons still walked, it was too dangerous to take his horse.

As he’d hoped, Starhawk’s good sense had kept her in open ground. She sat a sorrel nag from the Palace cavy at the mouth of the narrowest of the three canyons, turning her head cautiously, listening for sounds. The first light of the desert dawn lay full over her, glinting in the silver mountings of her dark green guards’ doublet and jerkin and on the steel of sword hilt and dagger. Even as Sun Wolf saw her among the scattered ruins of waist-high walls and fallen pillars of shattered red porphyry, she leaned forward in the saddle, as if trying to catch the echo of some faint cry up in the canyon before her. Nearby, there was a sharp cracking noise, like stone falling from a great height upon stone, and her horse flung up its head, rolling a white, terrified eyed, and tried to bolt.

Starhawk was ready, and the Wolf guessed it wasn’t the first such incident since she’d entered the ruins. She reined the frightened animal in a tight circle at the first skittish leap. Framed in the white veils, her sunburned face was impassive; but even at this distance, she looked stretched and taut, as she did when she’d been on patrol too long. As soon as she had the horse under control, he stepped from the shadows of a dilapidated archway and called out to her, “Hawk!”

She looked up, started to spur in his direction, then reined again. Holding in the nervous horse with one hand, she fished in her jerkin pocket for something, and the new light flashed across glass as she angled the mirror in his direction. Only then, satisfied, did she nudge the horse and trot through the drifted sand and bull thorns of the street to where he stood.