Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (12 page)

“Your Majesty,” the Wolf said, tipping his head a little on one side to study with his good eye the stringy figure before him, “the Kings of Kwest Mralwe haven’t held power since the wars of your great-grandfather’s day. And from what I’ve heard of the slaughters they perpetrated, quarreling over the crown and over how many gods constitute God and what sex they are, it’s no wonder the merchants and bankers took the power away from them and their land barons, so they could make money without it being confiscated every time the ruler had a religious experience and everybody could raise their children in peace. Now why don’t you get your backside back to Kwest Mralwe, if you can remember the way there, and let me do the job I came here for.”

“But I’ll make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams!” protested the King, as if he hadn’t reiterated this point a number of times in his opening narration. “Together we’ll rule Kwest Mralwe! We’ll go on to conquer all the Middle Kingdoms . . . ”

Wearily, Sun Wolf took him by one bony elbow and pushed him toward the tent flap. The King, never a man to give up easily, clutched his sleeve.

“You don’t understand! I’m offering you money, power—all the women you want . . . ”

Sun Wolf stopped, and turned to face the King, close enough to get a noseful of the man’s rancid breath. “There’s only one woman I want,” he said softly. “And it’s for her sake, not for yours or anyone else’s, that I’m going into Vorsal tonight. Now air yourself.”

“But I’ll make you rich . . . ”

At this point Sun Wolf committed an act of the grossest sort of lese majeste.

Dogbreath materialized as if by magic at the sound of the body hitting the dirt. “Got a problem?”

Sun Wolf flexed his hand. “The whole Middle Kingdoms are going to have a problem if this grut ever comes to power around here,” he remarked. “But I don’t think they need to worry much. Get somebody to take him back to Kwest Mralwe.”

The squad-leader gave him a grin and a cockeyed salute, and bent to pick up the monarch’s recumbent form. “Wake up, your Majesty—you and I are going to take a little ride . . . ” The King’s arm slung across his shoulders, he paused, regarding the Wolf with bright, demented eyes oddly sober for once. “You going to be all right?”

“Yeah.”

“You need backup as far as the walls?”

The Wolf hesitated, considering the matter. From Bron’s makeshift tavern, a bard’s voice lifted in a ballad of some more ancient war, singing of sacked towers and crumbled walls as if they had nothing to do with men killed, lives twisted askew, or children sold as slaves to the stews and the mines. The camp’s ill luck seemed to extend to bards; this was the worst Sun Wolf had heard in his life. Across the small open space between the tents he watched Hog the Cook’s dog Helmpiddle waddle deliberately over to a pile of battle armor someone had left outside his tent to let the sweat-soaked lining dry and lift one short leg solemnly at the helmet. Damp as the lining already was, Sun Wolf guessed the owner would not be aware it had been baptized until the next time he went into combat. He sighed and shook his head.

“No,” he said at last. “It’s not likely I’ll be seen, and you might be—in fact with the way luck’s going, it’s damn sure you would be.”

“Same goes for you, Chief,” the squad-leader pointed out, renewing his grip on the sagging King with one hand and relieving him of his purse with the other. Then his eyes returned to Sun Wolf’s face. “What do I tell the Hawk?”

What indeed?
He wondered what Moggin Aerbaldus would have done with him, once his soul had been drawn into that softly shining web.

I escaped him,
he reminded himself doggedly, pushing the cold terror aside. I did get away.

“Tell her to send the books to Princess Taswind at Mandrigyn,” he said, knowing he could not speak to any but the Hawk herself of his deepest fear. “And tell her to keep a mirror handy.”

Opium was still at his tent when he returned there to change into Penpusher’s black clothing. She lay curled on Dogbreath’s disorderly cot beneath the cloak of her hair, watching him with onyx eyes. He was burningly aware of wanting her—aware, too, for the first time in his life, of not being able freely to take a woman he desired. He knew perfectly well that the desire had nothing to do with love; unquestioningly, to the bottom of his soul, he knew that Starhawk was the only woman he would ever love. He was barely acquainted with Opium, didn’t know what kind of person she was and, so far as wanting to bed her was concerned, didn’t really care. But knowing this didn’t lessen his desire, and the fact that he knew it was mere lust was like terming a week’s starvation “mere” hunger. Love might conquer many things, he reflected, changing clothes self-consciously under that silent, beautiful gaze, but evidently there were elements of his nature impervious to its effects.

He was heartily glad to leave the tent and melt into the anonymous dark of the night.

The noises of the camp had subsided, though somewhere he could hear men still quarreling: “I told you to go through them and throw all the rotten ones away!” “I did throw them away, pox rot your muck-picking eyes!” “Then what do you call this, you festering whoreson . . . ” “Are you calling me a liar?” The smell of burnt flesh and ashes stung his nose as he passed the engineering park on his way out of camp, reminding him of the men who had died in that inexplicable fire.

In the distance, beyond the lightless towers, thunder-heads rose like a black wall. Eerily, he felt neither wind nor cold from that direction—only darkness waiting, and the cold rain emptying itself into the sea.

I did hurt him,
he told himself again, and conjured to mind the dim echo of the pain where the fire-sword of his power had seared his hand. Physically he’ll be off his guard. Yirth had said wizards couldn’t call the images of other wizards to crystal, fire, water. He knows there’s a wizard, but not a trained warrior. He’ll be expecting magic, not a knife.

But he knew it had better be a clean kill. If Moggin escaped, and survived, that shadow hand would always be there, reaching out for him.

What had once been the crop lands, the small farms and market gardens whose richness in the dry lands of the eastern Middle Kingdoms had made Vorsal a target of Kwest Mralwe’s greed, had long since been trampled and burned. Raw stumps showed where orchards had been felled for firewood and to make siege engines after the houses themselves had been plundered of their beams; rotting corpses dangled from the few trees that remained, seven and ten men all hanged together and now swollen and black. The battlefield stench of carrion lay over the place like ground-mist.

His wizard’s sight caught the scurry of fat, insolent rats among the gutted farmhouses. A patrol passed him in the dark, steel back-and-breasts and turbaned helms proclaiming them Kwest Mralwe’s troops. He faded into the shadows of a half-ruined dovecote until they were gone, then moved on toward rising ground strewn with broken arrow shafts, fouled rags, and here and there a severed hand or finger that the rats hadn’t got. Though still some distance away, he could see the dim topaz specks of the watch fires along the town walls, now and then blotted by the movement of weary sentinels.

Another skitter caught his ear, away to his right. More rats, he guessed. Another reason not to become a wizard—it made one think about things, like what battlefield rats fed on, something he’d been pretty much inured to in the days when he was one of the chief suppliers of rat food in the West.

Before him stretched the open ground most towns kept around their walls, crisscrossed with trenches to slow down the big siege engines and lines of sharpened stakes to break massed charges. Here and there, like suppurating sores, rucked patches of light and shadow marked the places where clay jars had been buried, an old defender’s trick that would bear the weight of men but would collapse and strand a turtle or a ram. Ground water had collected in the bottom of the trenches, and Sun Wolf turned away from the thought that the torn land had the unsettling appearance of the dead body of the victim of torture.

The open ground had probably once been much wider—wide enough to have permitted the digging of defense emplacements out of bowshot of potential enemy cover—but had been whittled down through the years by men who wanted villas more spacious than could be had within the city walls, but close enough to town to be convenient. A line of ruins ran right up to the main gates, flattened now by the battles that had swept over them all summer, but still offering cover to the attackers. Sun Wolf wondered how many city councilmen had been bribed by merchants and home owners to permit that.

As he advanced along that line of ruined walls, the smell was worse, for his own archers and Krayth of Kilpithie’s had a habit of shooting at those who tried to collect the enemy dead—mostly to keep them from gathering up the slain horses for food—but the cover was good. He was glad of this, for his struggle with the shadow hand had left him depleted and weak, and he was putting off using a cloaking-spell for as long as possible. Once under the ramparts, he’d be able to scout a low place to toss a grapple. He was ragingly hungry, too.

Fine,
he thought, with dour humor. I’ll just buy fritters from a street vendor in the city when I get there. And again movement caught his eye, on his left, his blind side—he turned quickly to look.

Nothing.
Only a whisper of wind turning a strand of his hair against the ragged black linen of his shirt collar, and a half-heard flitter, like blown leaves.

Must have been rats.

Mustn’t it?

In the black overcast another man would have been groping with his hands. To the Wolf’s odd, colorless night vision the ruins round him were clear, shadowless, black within black within black—walls and shattered beams, furniture and siege equipment, weapons and dishes, all pulped together into a barely recognizable mass, all stinking, all rotted, all swarming with vermin. This close, he could smell the smoke and carrion of the city, the overwhelming stench of night soil dumped from the walls. Even the pools and puddles of standing water did not gleam, but looked like flat patches of blackness on black ground. Without light to reflect, the eyes of the rats did not flash.

So he saw no glint, no slip of light along metal . . . he didn’t know what it was that caught his eye. Perhaps a sound, metal scraping on stone, soft and vicious—perhaps the faint, sudden mustiness of oil.

Then it moved again, and he saw the thing clearly.

For one single, shocked second, he knew why some women screamed.

The thing was as big as the biggest dog he’d ever seen, almost the size of a man. But its body was slung low, round and flat to the ground like a monster cockroach, the knees of its four angular legs rising high above the oily black metal of its back, its arms protruding in bars of jointed metal, slipping cable, and razor-tipped, articulated claws. It resembled nothing so much as a giant spider, headless, eyeless, like a vast metal puppet frozen for a suspended instant at the lip of a defensive trench.

Then it moved.

With a yell of terror Sun Wolf sprang back over the wall behind him, fumbling for his sword even as the logical portion of his mind asked what target he should strike for on that steel carapace. The thing flung itself at him over the trampled ground of no-man’s-land, moving with blinding speed, leg cables scissoring, razored claws snatching, all its metal joints whispering with an oily hiss. He ran back toward the higher ruins at the edge of the battlefield, and it scooted after him, oblivious alike to trenches and spikes, the articulated claws of its feet cutting little crescents in the rucked earth. Don’t be stupid, he thought, it can outrun you, it’ll never tire and you will . . .  The low ruins around him offered no cover—the taller shapes of the burned-out houses seemed impossibly far away.

The thing was only a dozen yards behind him when he plunged into the first of the standing ruins. He tripped over something soft that stank and rolled in the shadow pools of a shattered kitchen, flung himself toward the crazy ruins of what had been the stair to the skeleton of the upper floor. The thing sprang after him, long legs twisting nimbly over the nameless muck on the floor. The Wolf knew he had to be fast, deadly fast, for the thing was faster than he . . . if it caught him he was a dead man, and he had only seconds . . . 

The crazy stair lurched under his weight, scorched beams reeling drunkenly down from the darkness at him. The creature swarmed up after him like a roach up a wall, jointed metal knees pistoning faster than his own flesh and bone. Seconds . . . 

A razor claw ripped his back, cold metal, colder air, the steaming heat of his own blood. He grabbed a beam and threw himself over the side of the stair, swinging his weight full into the supporting struts, praying he hadn’t miscalculated and wouldn’t break his leg when he hit the floor. His body crashed into the fire-weakened joists that held the stairway up, a hundred and ninety pounds of whipping muscle and bone. The burned-out wood collapsed like a house of cards, bringing a torrent of seared timbers, rotted thatch, and startled rats down with it.

The creature—spider, monster, killing machine—fell in the midst of the tangle, landing on its back, half-buried in debris. A metal arm snatched and claws whined as Sun Wolf ducked, grabbed the heaviest rafter he could find and heaved it on top of the waving legs. Broken timbers bucked with the thing’s struggling strength and he sprang back and ran, heart pounding, all weariness forgotten. He barely heard the shouts of the guards on the wall, the zing of the arrows they sent flying after him—the most viciously barbed warhead now no more terrifying than a flea bite. He stumbled, fell, muck and water and worse things splattering him, and scrambled to his feet faster than he’d ever have thought possible, running on, running for his life as he’d never run before.

He reached the camp sick, nauseated with exertion and terror, lungs splitting and pulse hammering. Ari, Dogbreath, and the Little Thurg—the only poker players still futilely pushing the same twelve coppers back and forth among a musky frowst of sleeping concubines and empty winecups—didn’t even ask what pursued him, but at his gasped command seized whatever pole arms were handy and grouped around him, waiting . . .