Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (40 page)

“Don’t listen to her!” shouted the commander. Sun Wolf could see him, staggering to his feet and fighting with all his strength not to hunch over. “She’s under this wizard’s spell.”

“I thought Kaletha’s bonds rendered his spells harmless,” Starhawk retorted, and Nanciormis slapped her with furious brutality. Blood trickled from her lip, but she raised her head to meet his eyes nevertheless.

“Kill them both.”

“No!”

He caught Tazey as she tried to spring forward and held her in a grip of iron. The guards hesitated, weapons in hand, their edges glinting in the shaken firelight. Sun Wolf, panting, his every breath now as if a knife were being driven into him, tried to move, and one of the several guards on top of him twisted his arm and ground his cheek against the stone of the floor. Through his agony, even then, he sensed the demons, whispering a name.

Nanciormis said, “Do it.”

Sun Wolf felt a knee crush his back and a hand take a killer’s grip of his thin, sweat-soaked hair. Then he felt it, like fire along his mind, driving out even the death that would come in the next instant—the rush and whisper of the demons, the surge of horror and power. A woman screaming—for an instant he believed he was the only one who heard.

The weight pressing his body to the floor flinched, then slacked, frozen. The knife dropped past his face, clattered unnoticed on the stone.

The screams went on, reverberating through the mazes of that haunted labyrinth, but no one in that firelit hall moved. Above the shrieking he thought he could hear other things: the shrill chittering of the demons, a soft whisper of terrible laughter like an echo from the end of a lightless corridor. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear a second voice, somewhere distant, screaming, too.

Then Tazy said softly, “Let them up. Cut them loose. We’re going to need whatever magic we can get.”

They found Anshebbeth, sitting on the altar within the fragments of the broken Circle of Darkness. The air here was hot, thick with filtered dust, and reeking of smoke and fresh blood. Anshebbeth’s gown was matted and dabbed with it where she sat on the stone, and, by the faint witchlight he and Tazey were able to summon between them, Sun Wolf saw finger-runnels of it marking the woman’s white cheeks under her half-uncoiled tangle of hair.

She turned her eyes toward them, huge and luminous in the shadows, as they stopped in the inner doorway of the temple. Sun Wolf saw that she was mad.

“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?”