Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (22 page)

At Kaletha’s signal, Egaldus’ musical tenor rose to lead the chanting. The words were unfamiliar to Starhawk except for one earlier rehearsal, an ancient invocation whose hypnotic sonority numbed the mind. Kaletha’s eyes were shut. Outside, the wind muttered distant rumors of storm.

We are children of Earth,
thought Starhawk, her mind beginning to sink under the drone of the voices and of her own participation in the archaic ritual, her thoughts slipping down beneath the weight of the incense toward the point at which they would be completely stilled. Deny it though the Trinitarians might, our minds are born of our bodies, clay informed by living fire; from this comes the power of what we are, not what we do.

As her mind blended with the chant and the drug-like sweetness of the smoke, the part of her that remained a warrior tingled like a cat at sunset with the sense of power growing in the darkness beyond the protective Circle of Light.

By starlight, the empty quarter of the Palace had the disjointed appearance of a beast’s skeleton, rib and femur and tibia tracing where the walls had lain, amid a scattering of random vertebrae. The fragile whiteness picked out bleached edges and corners of wall and stone and the silken curve of miniature dunes whose crests frayed in the searching wind. Shadow swathed empty doors and windows and filled the mouths of a hundred courts and alleyways like black curtains of cobweb. The air was livid with electricity and the sulfur stench of power.

If he struck flint, Sun Wolf thought, standing in the sand-strewn court just inside the gate, the ether itself would explode.

Methodically, he began to quarter the ruins.

He carried no light, nor did he summon the foxfire of the mages, not wanting to confuse his eyes with what they saw in light and shadow. He was aware that it would be difficult in any case to see what he sought. Kaletha would have concealed the place from the casual eye, casting spells around the entrance to the cellar—if cellar it was—that would cause the glance to slip over the place, as it habitually slipped over so many things in common life. From his experience scouting and using scouts, Sun Wolf was well aware how few people could name every item in a room or tell whether a door opened outward or inward; most people, if asked, would be surprised to learn of the door. He had learned also how easy were the spells to make this happen.

So he walked through the empty courts carefully, marking with a little scribble of light each empty doorway through which he passed—temporary marks, which would fade with the sunlight and be gone. He counted on his fingers the four corners of every roofless cell he entered—old workshops with desiccated shards of benches tumbled where the sandstorms had left them along the walls, their corners deep in sand and shattered roof tiles, the dark rafters overhead murmuring with the voices of sleeping doves; what had once been kitchens, with foxes’ messes in their round little fireplaces; and roofless stables and byres filled with a whispering harlequin of shadow and the furtive scurry of nervous desert rats. The ones farther in had roof beams fallen down across them; nearer the inhabited portions of the Fortress, the beams, scarce in that treeless country, had been taken away. Even in the rare rains of the foothill winters, the thick walls, five and six feet wide at the base, were beginning to melt to shapeless lines of mud.

He made himself walk to every corner and touch the drifted mats of wood chips and sand there, knowing how illusions could make him think he had seen each shadowed corner look like every other. He knew that it was in the minute and singular checking of every detail that good siegecraft and good generalship—and, incidentally, good magic—lay, so only those with a certain methodical patience could master them.

Yet through it all, he was conscious of the magic moving in the night. The air seemed to grit upon his skin, as if all his body were a raw wound; the magic-laden silences picked and chewed at his taut nerves until even the sliding of his long hair over his scalp in the movement of hot, restless desert winds was enough to make him start. He could sense Kaletha and her disciples raising power from the bones of the earth, calling it forth from the ambient air; he knew that his own magic partook of it, drawing strength from the strength that walked free and restless in the darkness. He had visited the dyer’s workshop with its shallow, crumbling vat pits, where Nexué’s body had been found the day after her murder. But now, when he walked its four corners again, looking with particular care at the hideously stained stones of its fallen walls, he could feel the echoes of the malice and horror that had been enacted there still lingering in the ground. The bass strings of a harp will speak if the wind passes across them; so crumbling ghosts of magic vibrated around him there as he passed, a shadowless shadow in the night. In another place he felt it again, like a weak afterwhisper of sound. It took him a few moments of gazing at the black stripes of rafters overhead against a blacker sky to realize that it had been in this cell that he had found the massacred doves.

Hand knit to hand; flesh to flesh. Starhawk was aware, through the strange sparkling darkness of what was almost like meditation, of the power passing through the meat and sinew from the innermost marrow to the innermost marrow of the knotted bones within. She had never before partaken of this pooling of power, but she could sense the energy moving around the circle, greater than Kaletha’s power, or Egaldus’ fast-growing strength. It seemed to her that the flames that burned over the herbs and the incense had sunk, that shadow moved over the faces of the seven, that the lines scratched in the earth to define the pentacle and the Circle were faintly glowing, and that the faces themselves, which she had known throughout the last ten days, had changed, different and yet not unfamiliar, as if she had always known what they looked like underneath the skin.

She was chanting, repeating over and over the meaningless syllables of the unknown rite, the sound itself washing over her mind like the rhythm of sea waves; she was aware they had all begun to sway with the movement. She had no idea how long they had been chanting, nor did she care; as when she meditated, it seemed to her that time had settled and stopped, and she would have been neither surprised nor upset to walk outside and discover that the stars had not moved at all or that the sun was rising. But in meditation, she was conscious of all things, like the silence of deep water. In this, she was conscious only of the chant, the steady beat of its strength in her mind, and the scarcely controlled power slipping from hand to hand. It was like sleep, but moving sleep. The mind was released, she thought dimly—the mind that lay like a shield over the dark well beneath, from which the power came.

And just before her own mind surrendered to the chanting, she realized why all of the victims had been attacked when they were. But if that’s the case . . . she thought, and fear hit her as suddenly as if she had stepped off a cliff.

Like the whisper of wind, she heard Kaletha’s voice, though whether inside her skull or outside she could not be sure. “Don’t break the Circle . . . Don’t pull your mind from the power . . . ”

The others were relying on her. For a panicked instant she wanted to release the hands she held, flee to the empty quarter and find the Chief, tell him, warn him . . . But the disciplines of meditation were strong. She let her thoughts sink back into the nothingness of the chant, and, as if she had opened her hand, the knowledge raveled away into the dry flicker of the night wind.

Sun Wolf put his hand on the loose dune of sand-covered rubble, which dissolved before his eyes into insubstantial shadow. He saw almost at the same moment that his fingers touched it, the iron of the grillework that the spell had concealed, and he jerked his hand away in terror, as if burned. He fell back a step, the muttering dryness of the desert wind making cold the sweat that suddenly stood on his brow, his heart slamming like a smelter’s hammer . . . 

But there was nothing to be afraid of.

His mind told him that, even as his breath raced from his lips. Not even instinct, he thought,
no clue, no sign. Just fear itself.

His father’s harsh teachings had managed to make him forget for nearly forty years that he had been mageborn, but it had never quite eradicated his curiosity. The old man had said a hundred times, “You’re too nosey for a warrior, boy,” usually followed up by a clip on the ear. He stepped forward again.

He could see the spell marks now on the iron. That delicate frieze of signs, invisible to the human eye, could only have been written by Kaletha. In the living horror that whispered in every shadow of the night, he still felt fear of them and of this place, a deserted kitchen in the midst of the old quarter; but he was aware now that not only the grille, but the remains of the tiled floor and the crumbling adobe walls, had been written with fear-spells. The power that walked the night picked them up and made them resonate in his mind like the ghastly images of nightmares.

He wiped the sweat from his palms and fished in his doublet pocket for a wax writing tablet and stylus. It was only the spells of the night, he told himself, forcing his hand steady as he copied the signs as well as he could, to study them later. There was no danger . . . 

Or was there?

He clicked the tablet closed and pocketed it once again. Just because his fear was induced by a spell didn’t mean that there was no reason to fear.

Kaletha would be on the lookout for a spell mark near her hideaway; but, at a guess, she had no woodscraft. He marked the corner with three bricks, to find it again in case of some spell that confused the memory of directions, and walked out into the court.

The fear lessened as he stepped beneath the broken door-lintel. Outside, the wind was stronger—not the hard, tearing forerunner of the storms, but the shifting whisper of dry voices, playing tag among the ancient stones, like the demon voices in the canyons of Wenshar. In a corner near a dry well, he found a couple of dusty cottonwood saplings, seeded in a wet year from the old tree in the next court. They were half-dead, and it was no difficult thing to tear one of them up by its shallow roots. His nape prickling like a dog’s at the queer, rising tension of the night, he pulled his knife from his belt and began stripping the sapling into a pole, listening all the while, though for what he did not know.

He wondered if Kaletha would be able to summon the voice of the dead.

More than any artificial spell of hers, laid on this place to keep intruders away, the thought terrified him.

Cautiously, he reentered the darkness of the ruin.

The sapling was nearly seven feet long, brittle as only dry cottonwood could be. He worked its end through the metal of the grille and levered sideways. The metal grated on stone; like the swish of silk on dust, he heard something move sharply in the pitchy darkness underneath.

The iron was heavy, but no earth had settled around it—it was nearly clean of rust. He tipped the grille out of its sunken bed and reached gingerly over to topple it aside. Then he looked down into the hole beneath and felt the skin crawl along his scalp.

The pit below was alive with snakes.

Most of them were the brown-and-gray desert rattlers. When his body bulked dark against the night above them, they set up a dry buzzing as they raised their horned noses skyward. In the darkness, he could see among them the slender lead-colored rock asps and, like gross, flat-headed slugs, the big cave mambas, as long as his arm and half again as fat. Even as he watched, he saw another one slither forth from a hole in the wall of the pit, to fall with a soft, sickening plop to join its brethren. The sandy floor of the cellar below seemed to glitter with black, watching eyes.

They must have been drawn by Kaletha’s spells from all over the empty quarter,
he thought, since first I came near the place.

He felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the local attitude toward the Witches of Wenshar.

Well, pox rot you,
he thought. Two can play that game.

He hunkered down on the rim of the pit, sapling pole in hand. The vicious buzzing of the rattlers rose again; in the darkness he could make out sinuous movement and the dozenfold flicking of forked, black, questing tongues.

Reaching out with his mind, he felt the prickling of those stupid alien angers, a shortsighted rage to strike at warmth and the smell of blood. Never taking his eye from the snakes, he caressed the cottonwood pole with his big, sword-scarred hands, as if to work magic into it as he would work a lotion. He imparted his smell to it, the heat of his flesh, and the shadow of his bulk against the night. The darkness all about him seemed charged with power, intensifying in his mind the smell-feel of the reptile instincts below that woke such disturbing echoes in his own thoughts. He could feel the spells that worked on them, that had drawn them there, and that would turn them to attack a man. Those spells, too, he worked and turned into the wood, while taking into his own body the illusion of coldness and stasis and the smell of the ancient stones.

He addressed a brief prayer to such of his ancestors as might be listening and flung the pole down into the corner of the pit below.

It bounced; at the movement, the snakes were upon it, striking again and again at the spell-written wood. There was absolutely no time to lose and none to think, but it did cross Sun Wolf’s mind, as he lowered himself by his hands and dropped the few feet remaining to the sandy floor of the pit, that it was perfectly possible for him to have gotten the first part of his spells right and muffed the second.

No,
he thought. His body bloodless, smelling of stone and dust was cold to the tongues of the snakes. He was a dead thing; it was the pole that was alive and must be killed.

They continued to strike the pole.

The cellar was clean, about a dozen feet square, and low-roofed, smelling of earth and stone and of the dusty fetor of the snakes. The air there was dry and still. No dust drifted its corners—the walls above sheltered its entrance from the prevailing winds. A short ladder lay along one wall, where it could be lowered and dropped from above. In the darkness, Sun Wolf could make out a table, a reading stand, and a tall-legged stool. Beyond them, a niche was cut out of the far wall, a low ceiling beam sheltering a sort of hollow there. Deep inside it he saw two small chests of iron-bound leather, neither of them larger than a woman could carry by herself. There were no lamps. To nonmageborn eyes, even by day, the place would be dim and shadowy, and by night, a Stygian pit.