Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (27 page)

“And he was picked as King by his predecessor?” Starhawk wondered quietly, glancing back at the sodden, snoring form in the chamber behind them. “It’s a wonder they haven’t been at war continually for years.”

Sun Wolf shook his head. “Drinking like that grows on them, Hawk,” he said softly. “He probably hasn’t been like this for more than a year or so. I’d bet a week’s pay it takes less now to set him off than it did, and he’d tell you himself he’s had more reason these days . . . ” Still rubbing his aching hand, he glanced down to see Jeryn at his side within the solar door. “You always that quick, Scout, or you been in tavern brawls before?”

Jeryn gave a cracked laugh and looked away so Sun Wolf wouldn’t see him sneak a hand up to wipe his eyes; the Wolf dropped a casual hand to the boy’s quilted velvet shoulder. At the foot of the dais, Nanciormis seemed to be making headway. Sun Wolf caught the shirdane word for storm. Around the clustered backs of shirdar and green-clothed Fortress guards, Incarsyn could be seen to be nodding, unwilling but mollified. In the strange dust haze of the lamplight, Anshebbeth was at Tazey’s side, holding the girl’s hand, furiously protective and nearly in tears herself. Tazey, fan trembling in her shaking fingers, looked gray around the mouth, as if she were about to be sick.

Again he caught the word for storms in the babble of the shirdane and the phrase, the season of witches. Glancing down at the boy beside him he asked softly, “How’s your etymology, Scout?”

Jeryn looked up at him, surprised.

“Can you tell me the difference between a wizard and a witch?”

“Sure,” Starhawk remarked. “A wizard is what they call you when they want to hire you, and a witch is what they call you when they’re getting ready to run you out of town.”

Nanciormis and Incarsyn made deep mutual bows. The Lord of the Dunes turned away. Her face set and white, Tazey rose from her place, handing her fan to the startled Anshebbeth and slipping through the crowd toward the two Desert Lords. In the grimy orange torchlight she looked older, haggard, and shaken; when she stopped before Incarsyn, Sun Wolf could see by the tremor of her girlish gown how badly her legs were shaking.

She began, “My Lord Incarsyn . . . ”

The Lord of the Dunes turned away from her without meeting her eyes. With his retainers behind him, he strode the length of the smoky, silent room and out the door. The wind swirled in their white cloaks, tearing at the torch flames. Then they were gone.

Only then did the noise rise again, the muted voices like the hrush of the sea.

Nanciormis walked over to his niece and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. She jerked away from him, the color that had flooded her cheeks an instant earlier bleaching away again, her eyes filmed with blinding tears. After a moment’s stillness, she, too, walked from the room.

“Having met the Lady Illyra,” the Wolf remarked softly in the brown gloom of the shadowed dais. “I think Tazey’s well out of it.”

Starhawk rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if seeking to crush out the dry ache within her skull. “She was always well out of it,” she replied. “She never wanted it.”

Beside them, a sharp, tiny noise and a gasp of pain made them turn. Anshebbeth stood staring down at her bleeding palm, where the furious clench of her hand had broken the delicate ivory sticks of Tazey’s fan. With a muffled sob of embarrassment, the governess fled the room, leaving the broken fan lying on the floor, its feathers dabbed in blood like a slaughtered bird.

“You’ve got to admit,” Sun Wolf said later, “that Incarsyn did the most tactful thing he could. The business about ‘messages from my people’ was all my granny’s second-best mail shirt, but as a reason for leaving, it would pass. If Osgard hadn’t been damn drunken fool enough to push it, people would have gotten used to the idea in six or ten months that he wasn’t coming back to wed Tazey, without ever having to insult Tazey by saying it out loud.” He picked up his cards. “Isn’t there anything in that deck below a nine?”

“Stop complaining; you dealt this hand.”

“Bloody Kaletha’s taught you how to hex decks.”

“Yeah.
And if you’d hung around with her long enough, you’d have learned it, too. How’s that for a crib?”

“Damn Mother worshipper.”

“At least I don’t worship sticks and old bottles, like some barbarian ex-commanders of mercenaries I could name but won’t, because they’re present. Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is six plus those are all the same suit . . . ”

“I see ’em.”

“ .
 . . and two for thirty-one . . . ” She moved the peg neatly around the cribbage board in the flickering ochre firelight.

Sun Wolf grumbled again, “Damn Mother worshipper.”

It was growing late, but few people had left the Hall. The storm still howled around the walls; the hot air was thick with dust and electricity and heavy with the unventilated stinks of torch smoke, cooking, and stale sweat. Underservants had taken up the trestle tables, but at least half of those who had eaten supper were still there. Now and then their voices would rise, sharp and angry, as the crackling air shortened tempers and made speech careless. Then silence would fall again as they all realized once more their unwillingness to leave, and the wind would moan among the rafters like the grieving damned.

It would be a long way, Sun Wolf reflected, down those dark corridors to rooms where they’d lie alone, listening to that wind and wondering whether Nexué and Egaldus had seen anything of their killer before they died. Even the lower servants and guards, whose dormitories opened off the main Hall, clustered still around the hazy pools of muddy torchlight, perfectly prepared to wait out the storm. Contrary to custom, the doors of both the Men’s Hall and the Women’s stood open. Upper servants—the chief cook, the dancing master, musicians, and clerks—who had their own chambers, nodded sleepily over games of cards and backgammon; the chief scribe was curled up, unabashedly asleep in a gloomy corner.

Sun Wolf stared moodily out past his unsatisfactory collection of fives, sixes, and unmatched royalty, wondering if it was the same in those halls on the fringes of the empty quarter which had been given over to Incarsyn and his retinue. He’d sized them up when he’d been taken through to Illyra’s quarters and knew them as hardened warriors who feared neither man nor the desert’s cruelty.

But this was different, this death which could be neither fought nor fled. The demons of Wenshar returned to his mind, the moony, phosphorescent forms that had flicked in the corner of his vision in the silence of the empty quarter, and the way those cold, glowing shapes had clustered during the storm, thick as bees at swarming time, beneath the windows of the temple in Wenshar.

He wondered where Kaletha was and exactly when in the confusion she had slipped from the Hall.

Starhawk was looking inquiringly at him over her flat-folded hand of cards, the slight crease of pain more marked on her forehead. He laid his own cards down quietly. “I’m going out to have a look around. The storm’s fading,” he added, as she started to protest. “The heart of it’s off south, anyway.”

“Be careful.” She said it casually, but in her eyes he saw she didn’t mean the storm.

He shook his head. “I feel—I don’t know. I don’t sense any danger—not like last night. In any case, it’s not midnight yet, or anywhere near. The other attacks were all between midnight and dawn. I won’t be long.”

“I seem to remember hunting you for two or three months after the last time you said that,” Starhawk remarked, collecting the cards and shuffling them competently. “But have it your own way.” She was laying out a hand of solitaire as, cloaked in shadow and illusion, he drifted for the vestibule.

The wind nearly jerked the great outer door from his hands as he opened it a crack to slip through. Outside, the bulk of the Hold and the courts and walkways around it offered him some protection; but even so, the force of the gale made him stagger. Like a man fighting to wade through a riptide, he thrashed his way to the pillars of the colonnade and, wrapping his arms around the nearest one, held his body tight against it. Sand-laden wind clawed his long hair back from his face and ripped at his skin with talons of gravel. The hot dust clogged his nostrils and the electricity in the air throbbed in his brain.

He could sense the moon riding high over the roiling wall of dust and chaos. With his eye squeezed shut against the savagery of the storm, he let his soul dip toward the silence of meditation, listening—seeking the Invisible Circle in which he would be free to walk everywhere in the tempest-torn citadel.

Slowly he became aware of the various currents of the searing wind streaming like water around the towers, of the weight of stone and tile on the balanced stars and chevrons of the roof beams, of nightlamp shadows beneath them, and of the open eyes of two royal children staring awake at the raving darkness. He felt the lightning flare off the Cathedral’s dry, glittering spikes and die between the Binnig Rock and Mount
Morian. He sensed how the hurricane savagery ripped and swirled around the walls in the empty quarter. Sand was scouring the broken tiles of the floor, the dust was burying the smells of decaying blood there, the snakes in their holes were dreaming of ophidian hates, and the doves in their crannies were dreaming of nameless, walking fear . . . 

Above the wind, he heard a scream.

The sound wrenched him from his contemplation. Even as it did so, his sense of it was lost, swallowed up in the demented fury of the winds. His warrior’s instinct told him to rush back at once to the Hall for help—the wizard in him forced him back into the silence of his meditation, casting through the wind-scoured halls for the direction of the sound.

Another scream and another, above him and to his right.
The balcony of the Household.

He swung around and ran for the Hall door.

As he fought it open, he heard the scream as men would hear it, surging in terror over the howling of the fading storm, directionless, from nowhere, terrifying in its uncertainty. Rising like an echo behind it, he thought he heard a second scream of horror and despair; but with the wind hammering in his ears as he heaved the door to, he could not tell. By the time he crossed the vestibule, Starhawk, sword in hand and a dozen scared servants at her back, was halfway up the interior stairs.

The little hall that ran behind the upper rooms of the Household was a vortex of winds. He flung a glowing ball of blue light before him, and it showed him all the doors tight shut. He was aware of others clambering up the narrow flight behind him: Osgard, in night clothes stinking of stale wine and vomit; two guards, ashen-faced with fear; the chief cook with a cleaver; and Incarsyn, naked under a silken bedgown, sword in hand. A door jerked open near him, and Anshebbeth ran out, fully dressed, her black eyes wide with horror, clutching the black billows of her skirts. She gasped, “On the balcony! I heard . . . ”

Sun Wolf leaned into the wind as he plunged through her room and out through the open shutters to the darkness and storm.

Up on the long balcony, the violence of the storm was terrific. Had it not been for the crenellations of the wall, the Wolf would have been swept from his feet; but feeling himself skid under the sweep of the powerful blast that scoured the south wall, he dropped to his knees and grabbed for the stone of the wall. After a moment, he put forth his strength against it, turning the main force of the blast enough to struggle to his feet. The dust in the air threw back most of the witchlight, but he could make out which of the archway shutters had been forced open from within. The great inner curtain flapped like a torn sail in the slip stream. Staggering to the parapet, he looked down.

The dark, irregular lump of a body could just be made out, huddled at the foot of the wall. Eddies of the storm, broken by the courtyard walls, rippled at the dark sprawl of bloodied robes and stirred the black, half-unraveled braids of the jeweled hair.

“Did you see it clearly?” Osgard handed Nanciormis a cup of wine.

The commander hesitated for a long moment, dark eyes traveling from Osgard’s face to Sun Wolf’s. Then he shook his head and gasped as Kaletha rinsed down the abraded wound in his arm with a scouring concoction of wine and marigolds. “But believe me, I didn’t stay for a close look.”

Sun Wolf folded his arms and leaned his back against the tiled mantel of the solar. The last, spent whispers of the storm were dying down. In the silence, Anshebbeth’s sobbing was jarringly loud. When they had carried the unconscious Nanciormis inside, she had collapsed into hysterical screams. Kaletha, appearing out of nowhere, her carnelian hair streaming disheveled down her back, had struck her disciple across the face and cursed her, from jealousy or impatience or merely the burn of the storm along her overstretched nerves. Ignored and hurt, the governess now whimpered wretchedly in a corner.

While Kaletha was ascertaining that Nanciormis was in fact still alive—due to his falling first to the roof of a small colonnade and only from there to the ground in the shelter of the wall—Sun Wolf and Starhawk had run lightly back up the inner stairs and along the narrow corridor to Nanciormis’ room. Not surprisingly, they had found nothing there. A chair had been overset, and the jointed bronze table thrust violently aside. An open book sprawled on the floor. Sun Wolf picked it up; it was a treatise on falconry. Against the stone wall, a burned patch and a ring of amber shards showed where the lamp had been hurled, the flame killed almost at once by the dust-laden violence of the wind. Dust and debris were everywhere, from when the shutters had been opened. Sun Wolf had closed and locked the door behind him, and only Starhawk’s presence at his side had prevented him from glancing repeatedly back over his shoulder at the darkness until they were in the torchlight of the solar once again.

“I don’t know what made me look up,” Nanciormis was saying quietly. “I couldn’t sleep, though, on the whole, storms don’t bother me. But there was something—some sense of evil in that room . . . ”

He glanced quickly up at Sun Wolf again and then at Kaletha, silently tidying up her poultices and dressings. A frown creased his brow.