Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (2 page)

They knew he had changed. He’d been in their winter camp in Wrynde for a week or so before Ari, the troop’s new commander, had led that band of killers south to the newest war, and he’d been very quiet then, still dealing with the fact that he would not, after all, be their commander, their Chief, anymore. Even the most disbelieving of the troop would admit that more had befallen him than the loss of his left eye and the breaking of his voice, of which now little more was left than a scraped, metallic rasp. In his remaining eye, cold amber under the long tufts of brow, was the haunted look of one who has leaned drunk over a ditch to vomit and found himself looking straight down to the bottommost depths of hell.

But knowing that he had changed, and believing what he said he had changed into, were different things.

It was clear to Starhawk from the reactions of her friends in the troop that they did not realize that she, too, had changed. But that, she reflected, was probably just as well.

Choirboy’s puzzled voice broke into her thoughts. “If he’s a hookum,” he asked, “why can’t he just make the shirdar all disappear?”

The same thought had crossed Sun Wolf’s mind.

How long he’d been walking he didn’t know; the moon had set, but through the feverish blur of pain and semi-consciousness he kept a wizard’s ability to see in darkness, though some of the things he was beginning to see he knew weren’t real. Poison on the arrow, he thought groggily; toadwort or poppy, something that would cloud the mind but not kill.

That, too, was a bad sign.

Other shirdar had joined the men who’d captured him; now and then he seemed to emerge from a black tunnel of hazy agony to find the night freezing on his face, the air burning the wound in his back, and all around him those white-robed riders who never spoke. He’d fainted once, and the shirdar had whipped their horses to a gallop and dragged him a dozen yards before stopping to kick and flog him to his feet; he was fighting hard not to faint again.

Think!
he ordered himself blurrily. Yirth of Mandrigyn taught you rope-breaking spells, dammit . . .  But the words of them couldn’t rise through the pain and the dull buzzing in his ears; only Yirth’s face, dark and ugly, with hook nose and brown birthmark and the glow of those jade-green eyes as she’d taught him spell after spell on the single night he’d spent in her teaching, patterns of power sketched in the air or on the floor; words whose sounds bridged the gap between Nothing and Something; healing, illusion, scrying, weatherspinning . . . 

And how far do you think you’d run if you could remember one?
he demanded grimly. At the moment he was perfectly well aware that the rawhide rope that dragged so excruciatingly at his wrists was the only thing holding him up.

He tried to think like the wizard he now was instead of the warrior he had been for the whole of his life. Summon fire . . . confusion . . . steal a horse . . .  And the warrior in him asked cynically, And which one of these gruts are you going to talk into helping you mount?

Yirth’s image melted, blended in his delirium with that of Kaletha of Wenshar, the only other teacher he’d been able to locate in a year of seeking, coldly beautiful in the dappled shade of the public gardens where he’d seen her first. Then that image, too, darkened, changed before his eyes to blood splattered on a mosaic floor, to screams in darkness, and to the chittering of the demons of Wenshar . . . 

He must have fallen. In the drugged black deeps of exhausted unconsciousness, he became aware that he wasn’t walking anymore, but lay on his back, stripped to the waist, flesh cold with the bitter chill of the desert night and crying out with a hundred abrasions, as if he’d been beaten with hammers of flint.

In his dreams he could feel the horror in the ground.

He had always dreamed vividly—his father, he remembered, had beaten him when he’d caught him in daytime reverie, trying to recapture the colors of the previous night. Since the ordeal of the Great Trial whereby the magic born into his flesh, the magic he had all his life denied, had blossomed in a rose of fire, his dreams had been clearer still.

He lay on the ground, cold sand gritty beneath his lacerated back and arms, the blood of the arrow wound still seeping thickly into the earth. His arms and legs were spread out, and he couldn’t move, though whether this was because he was still unconscious or because he was tied that way he didn’t know. By the utter silence, he knew it was the hushed hour preceding dawn, before the hum of insects wakes the desert. The smell of dust and blood filled his nostrils, and another smell that sent his mind screaming at him to wake up, wake up!
as if his bound flesh could feel through the earth on which it lay what was beneath it.

They, too, were waking.

In dreams he saw them, blackish-red clots like dark raspberries in the winding night of their tunnels, huddled together and stupid with cold. As big as a man’s thumb, they were like armored horses with their malignant eyes and dangling mandibles—tunnels, chambers, the caverns where bloated queens sat dully squeezing out eggs. The distant sun was already beginning to warm them. He smelled the acid of their bodies, as he knew they smelled his flesh.

With desperate effort, he wrenched his mind free of sleep. The blurry haze of the poison had lessened, which meant the pain was sharper, and with it the nauseated weakness of shock. Above him the sky was black opal, save when he turned his head to see where the blue turned to violet, the violet to pink, and then amber where it touched the cool citrine of distant sand. Moving his head again, he saw his own right arm, stretched from his shoulder to the rawhide strips that bound his wrist to a stake in the ground. A foot beyond his fingertips was an anthill four feet across, its top nearly the height of a man’s knee.

He nearly threw up with horror. There were two others visible beyond it; raising his head, a movement which sent renewed shoots of agony down every screaming muscle of his body, he could see another between his spread-eagled feet and others beyond that. It must be the same around on his blind left side.

For an instant shrieking panic swelled in him; then the calm that had gotten him out of a hundred traps and ambushes in his years as a mercenary commander forced the horror away. Calmly he closed his eye, and began sorting in his mind everything Yirth of Mandrigyn had told him, as if he had all the day before him, item by item . . . 

And the spell was there. A spell of slipping, of loosening, of the fibers of the uncured leather growing damp, gathering moisture from the air, stretching gradually . . . 

The breathless air warmed where it touched his naked belly and chest. He opened his eye to see that the sky had lightened. As he felt the rawhide that cut the flesh of his right wrist loosen a little, his glance went beyond it to the crown of the hideous hillock, and he saw the gritty sand glow suddenly gold. Each pebble, each grain, of the filigreed pit edge of its top was feathered with the long black crescent of a tiny shadow where the first sunlight hit it. The pebbles moved and shifted. Stiffly, an ant crawled forth.

Sun Wolf’s concentration failed in a second of horror, and he felt the rope bite again into the bleeding flesh. Like the clenching of a fist, he clamped his mind shut, forcing himself to think only of the spells of undoing, of the dry air turning moist on the leather, of oily knots sliding apart . . . It’ll never work in time . . . 

Other ants were moving about on the mounds now, big soldier ants, bulbous bodies an inch and a half in length, mandibles dangling from heads like shining coffee beans. Sun Wolf fancied he could feel the spiked tickle of their feet on his bare flesh, twisted at his bonds in panic, and felt the rawhide tighten again as the spell’s slow working slacked . . . Not now, pox rot it . . . !

His mind groped, slid. It would take too long; they’d scent his flesh in moments . . . 

But what would it smell like?

It wouldn’t work for long—he was too weak, the pain of his wounds too insistent, and if he blacked out again he was dead—but in a split second of clear thought he called to his flesh the searing illusion of heat, poison, fire, burning oil, anything, and threw it around him like a cloak at those tiny, vicious, mindless minds. Dust, smoke . . . that’s what they’d smell . . . the crackle of flames where he lay twisting frantically at the ropes that held him pinned over their tunnels . . . 

He saw the ants—and there were quite a lot of them—hesitate and draw back.

He knew he couldn’t keep it up, couldn’t maintain the illusion and work spells on the ropes at the same time. A wave of sick weakness clouded his thoughts, and he fought to keep them clear, fought both the pain and the panic he could sense tearing at the edges of his concentration. Either would kill him; if the ants actually started on him he’d never keep his thoughts clear . . . 

Blood,
he thought; the juices of sweat and terror; meat sugary-sweet for the tasting . . .  He had never tried a double illusion like this, but it was that or wait for the single spell to outlast his physical ability to remain conscious. Like a smell he twined this new illusion around the ropes that held his outspread hands and feet, and shut his teeth hard on a scream as the ants swarmed greedily forward. They would eat the rawhide, he told himself, they would not touch his flesh—they thought his flesh was fire—his flesh WAS fire—it was the rawhide that was his flesh . . . 

He closed his fists and turned up his hands as much as he could, though the mere effort of that made his arms shake with weakness. Ants clotted the rawhide ropes on the stakes in threshing, glittering blobs. They kept a few inches from the backs of his knuckles, and from his heels, as if his flesh were in fact the fire he projected. If he could keep it up . . . 

There was a shrill cry of rage, and the muffled thunder of hooves in the ground. The shirdar, he thought, in some floating corner of his awareness. Of course they’d stayed to watch from a safe distance. He moved his head, slowly, holding his concentration on the double spell, his whole body drenched now with sweat in the dawn cold.

The riders whirling toward him seemed to come in a slow-motion bellying of white cloaks, shouting with fury, lances raised. He thought detachedly that he probably wouldn’t be able to maintain his concentration on either spell with three spears in his belly; death would take almost as long with them as without. But he held to the spells anyway, weirdly fascinated with the mere technique of it, as if these weren’t going to be the last few seconds of his life, too taken up with his concentration as the nearest warrior raised his spear . . . 

The rider’s head snapped back, his body contorting as an arrow appeared suddenly in the middle of his breast, red blossoming over the white of his robe. Sun Wolf thought,
The Hawk must not have been killed. He couldn’t care, couldn’t let himself feel joy or fear or anything else which would distract him from a mental exercise he only barely understood. Dizziness swept him. Ants swarmed all around him now, racing back and forth over the pale earth or crawling in heaving swarms on the ropes and stakes, centimeters from the backs of his hands. Other hooves shook the ground under his back, but he dared not break the tunnel of his vision, the wordless images of the spells . . . 

Hurry it up, damn you, Hawk!

Someone screamed, a death cry of agony, at the same moment the ropes parted. Sun Wolf rolled over, shaking, aware again of the scores of open cuts, the raw flesh of his wrists and the shredded wounds on his knees beneath his torn breeches, aware of the cracked rib he’d gotten in Wenshar, the swollen, dust-clotted hole where the arrow had been pulled out, and the half-healed demon bites—another souvenir of Wenshar—on his hands. He tried to stand and fell immediately, his mind plunging toward unconsciousness. The ants swarmed forward.

Fire,
he thought blindly, fire all around my body . . . Just a few seconds more, damn it!

Starhawk saw the flames roar up in a wall around the Wolf’s fallen body and thought, Illusion. She hoped to the Mother it was an illusion, anyway. She drove in her spurs and yelled to Choirboy, “It isn’t real . . . !”

It looked damn real.

Beside her in the din—the shirdar she’d shot was still partially alive, buried under a shroud of insects and screaming like a mechanical noisemaker—she heard Choirboy yell, and from the tail of her eye saw the panic in his face at the sight of the flames.

“It’s not real, dammit!”

But panicky uncertainty had claimed him. The youth hauled on the reins, dragging his horse to a skidding halt among the ants. Starhawk felt her own mount veer at the sight and heat of the blaze and lashed it brutally with the quirt, driving it straight toward the shimmering wall. Choirboy’s horse reared and twisted as the ants, fully aroused now and covering the sandy knoll in a seething blackish-red carpet, poured up over its hooves and began tearing the flesh of its fetlocks. Choirboy screamed again as the frenzied animal flung him; then the Hawk saw no more, her own mount plunging through the pale circle of flame.

She hauled rein with the Wolf nearly under the hooves. The heat beat upon her as if she’d ridden into a furnace, and she didn’t dare dismount. The flame seemed to pour straight up out of the ground, as if the dirt itself were burning. She screamed, “Get on your feet, you stinking oaf! You waiting for a goddamned mounting block or something?!”

Reeling like a drunken man, Sun Wolf half rose. She grabbed a flailing arm, nails digging hard enough to bring blood from the bare and filthy flesh—she could only spare one hand from the dithering horse’s rein. She pitched her voice as she’d pitch a battle yell over the greedy roar of the flames, the screaming and yells of the shirdar up among the rocks. “Get your arse in the goddam saddle or I’ll goddam drag it out of here!” Through the bloody curtain of his ragged hair she could see that his one good eye was closed, his face white as a dying man’s beneath a layer of grime. Somehow he got a bare foot in the stirrup and heaved; she hooked her arm under his shoulder and hauled with all her strength, dumping him over the saddlebow like a killed pig. Then she drove in the spurs and plunged for the hills, the circle of surrounding fire sweeping after them like the head of a comet trailing flame, leaving no burn upon the ground.