Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (21 page)

Dogbreath shrugged again. “That was pretty nasty,” he said. “I guess the King remembered the talk about it in the Council, and was still after getting a tame wizard all for his own. There hadn’t been much fighting up in that end of the city, but the pickings were rich. A bunch of us were going through old Moggin’s house when his Royal Etcetera showed up, with a gang of his own boys. Some of the guys had done the woman and the older girl before we showed up, but this Moggin pook and the little girl had barricaded themselves in the cellar. We figured, hell, they could stay there—neither would be any use as a slave and we were going to torch the house when we were done—but the King and his bravos hauled ’em out into the yard.”

Dogbreath was quiet for a moment, his wide mouth flexing with distaste. “Hell, I don’t know why it was worse. We’d have croaked ’em both anyway. Maybe because it was done in cold blood. You’re sacking a town, you kill somebody who gets in your way, it’s like battle, you know? But the King gets this Moggin—he looked like a pretty harmless old pook to me, and God knows, if he’d had any magic, he’d have used it to keep the goons from snuffing his wife when they were done with her—down in the yard, and he says to him, ‘I want you to do magic for me.’ Oh, first he said, ‘Are you Moggin Aerbaldus,’ and that’s when we found out that was the grut you’d thought was the hookum.

“So Moggin says, ‘There must be some mistake, I’m not a wizard.’
He was pretty steady about it, though he was shook up bad. He had the little girl hangin’ onto his coat like it was her last hope of dinner. So him and the King do this yes-you-are, no-I’m-not routine for a little bit, and finally the King says, ‘I’ll protect you from the Church if you’ll work for me, and we’ll rule the Middle Kingdoms together and so on and so forth.’ And Moggin says, ‘I swear I’m not a wizard.’ And the King says, ‘We’ll see about that.’

“So he gets his men to haul the little girl over to the other side of the courtyard—it took two of ’em to get her away from Moggin. Then he takes one of the books from the study, and rips out a couple of pages for tinder and puts them in a heap on the pavement, and says, ‘If you don’t light that, they’ll slit her throat.’ Figuring I suppose that if he could get Moggin to admit he’s a wizard, it’s the first step. It was pretty raw. The little girl was sobbing, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ and Moggin fought the guards holding him for a minute, then begs the King to let her go, goes on his knees, cries, pleads, the whole parade, says he can’t do it, swears he isn’t a wizard . . . ”

Dogbreath shrugged. “So they slit her throat. That’s when I left. And while all that was going on, damned if Zane hadn’t been going through the house while everyone else was out in the courtyard, watching to see if he’d really be able to make a fire to save the kid’s life, and bagged all the loot worth having. So I guess we were wrong. But it was damn ugly all the same.”

From the darkness of a near-by colonnade, a voice called out Dogbreath’s name. He glanced down the terrace in that direction, where a confusion of musicians and acrobats were preparing to go into the dining room among a mill of servants. Then he turned back and regarded the Wolf with beady black eyes. “Ari asked me to ask you, Chief . . . Can you work the weather for about six days more? Long enough for us to get through the badlands around the Khivas and the Gore? We’ll be moving fast now.”

Baffled and sickened at the scene of the child’s murder, Sun Wolf pulled his mind back from the desperate puzzle of why Moggin would allow it, what it was that he feared. He’d been drawing the spell-wheels on the study floor, dammit . . . ”Yeah,” he sighed, though the marrow of his bones ached already at the thought of turning aside the storms that he could feel, even now, drifting in from the Inner Sea. “He couldn’t ask me himself?”

The squad-leader’s brown, simian face grew taut, and the dark eyes shifted. “He doesn’t want to see you, Chief.”

Rage stirred in him, like a surge of heat, only to trickle away almost at once, leaving a bleached weariness behind. He glanced up at Dogbreath, to meet the deep concern in his eyes when there was no explosion, no tirade of curses, no bellowed threats. But Sun Wolf had made his choice. Starhawk was alive, and there was very little to say.

“Pox rot it,” was all he whispered.

“Hey . . . ” The quiet seemed to bother Dogbreath, who patted his arm with curious gentleness, as if realizing that his Chief was very far gone indeed. “He’s not gonna die of it,” he said cheerfully. “I’d probably feel different if the wizard—whoever it was—had been up on that wall throwin’ fire-breathing elephants at us, but as it is, I’m glad you stayed here and took care of the Hawk.” His eyes, bright and a bit inhuman, warmed somewhat. “She’s a damn good lady, Chief. I’m glad she’ll be around awhile longer.”

“Thanks.” He leaned against the archway behind him, his head bowed and his long, thinning hair hanging down around his scarred face, feeling drained and bitter and very alone. Part of him hated Dogbreath, with his bloody boots and the dead child’s pink ribbon tied in his straight black braid—hated him the way he hated himself for what he had been. He knew that Dogbreath could be no different from what he was—what he, Sun Wolf, had made him. They had seen combat together, had put their lives on the iron altar for the gods of war to take if they wanted, and he knew that what was done in war was done as in a different life, tainted with terror and the battle rush that was the only way to survive.

Starhawk was right, he thought wearily. He should have let nothing drag him back to the way life was lived in war. He had gone for his friends, his troop, and for the captain who was like a son to him. And they’d turned their backs on him, when he’d chosen . . . what? A single woman’s life over theirs?
Or life over death?

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Tell him I’ll work the weather for him. I’ll give him a week, if I can.”

“Thanks. You watch your blind side, Chief.” Dog-breath clasped his hand briefly, then strode jauntily away down the evening-dark corridor, the pink bow on the end of his braid a jogging blur in the gloom.

Sun Wolf turned back, weary beyond speaking, to the darkness of Starhawk’s room. The place smelled of old blood, dressings, herbs, and smoke, a sickroom smell he hated. He wanted to leave the place, to find a tavern, get roaring drunk and resoundingly laid, and forget that he was a wizard now, forget that he had responsibilities, forget everything he was and knew. The troop would be celebrating tonight, as he had celebrated with them a score of times, in the torchlight and smoke beneath a city’s broken walls. The memory came back vivid and bloody-golden; rowdy obscenities and violent horseplay blurred behind a rosy-gold screen of drunken well-being, the crazy elation of being alive when others were dead, the heat of alcohol in his veins and the joy of being with friends who understood him, who looked up to him, who had survived hell and fire with him—his fellow killers, Ari, Zane, Dogbreath, Penpusher, and Hawk . . . 

If he turned back and listened, stretching out his wizard’s senses in the louring night, he could probably hear the noise of the camp over the cheap carnival clamor of the town.

He slumped back into the carved chair in the shadows of the bed curtains. He saw the drinking contests, the food fights, the wrestling matches, the nights when they’d bring in and rape all the prettier girls among those taken in the sack, the games of making the captive city fathers run humiliating gauntlets of thrown garbage or grovel for coppers in the muddy dirt of the tent floors, and saw them for what they were—the cruel and abusive sports of victors, hysterical with delight and relief that they were not dead, were not maimed, and were able to do these things to those who had opposed them.

But still he missed the gay violence of celebration and missed the closeness, like a pack-dog missing the smell and warmth and fleas of his pack.

They had left him, and he was alone. He had never before been so aware of what seizing his magic, following the path of his destiny, had done to him. He was no longer what he had been. He could not go back.

Cold fingers touched his hand, then closed around it, firm for all their lightness. Lonely, hurting, he squeezed them in return and, looking down in the dimness, met Starhawk’s sleepy gray eyes.

They spent almost three weeks in Kwest Mralwe, in a grace-and-favor house near the city wall on the edge of the University Quarter. It belonged to the Stratii and, Sun Wolf guessed, was close enough to the great House of Stratus for guards to be sent if there was trouble . . . if, for instance, the King or any other member of the King-Council decided to make a bid at acquiring a tame wizard. The house itself had been built by one of the old noble families, who had ruled the land from the time of the Empire. In Kwest Mralwe these ancient clans had mostly married into the great houses of the merchant bankers, though there were some that held aloof, selling the wool from such ancestral lands as remained to them, going formally masked to one another’s parties, and brooding on the injustices of the modern world. Modest by merchant standards and ruinously old, the house was nevertheless perfectly proportioned, quiet, and filled with an antique peace. Its garden was badly overgrown, and Sun Wolf spent a number of afternoons clearing it of weeds, coaxing its tiny artificial springs to run again, and rearranging the rocks that were its bones.

It was a quiet time.

Starhawk recovered quickly, sleeping much, eating well if little—the despair of Renaeka Strata’s second-best cook, who had been lent to them, with two or three other servants, by the Lady Prince. For the first week or so, she had violent headaches, but, once Sun Wolf got her to admit the fact, they yielded to what little healing magic he was by that time again able to work. For the rest, the weather consumed his strength.

Daily at first, then twice, and latterly, three and four times a day and far into the nights he performed the spells and rites. With an obscure caution, he still dared not sink into the deep trance, dared not seek the winds in their own wild quarters, but instead concentrated on holding the dead heaviness of the warm air where it was, over Kwest Mralwe and the long coastline of the north. This took far more of his own energy than guiding the winds did, and, as the pressure of the seasons and of the turning earth built up, left him with a constant, gnawing headache that wore still further at his strength.

Moreover, for each spell, each rite, he had to make anew the full panoply of protective circles, leaving no crack through which evil might come. As the days went by, he grew weary of the tedious ritual of cleansing the long, tile-floored summer dining room and writing the runes of aversion and guard, of light and darkness, in each corner, across each crevice and doorsill and window, knowing that they must all be scrubbed out afterward and all to do again. It was servants’ work, patient and pointless and dull, and the warrior in him raged bitterly against it, as his body had raged at his choice not to take the woman Opium when she stood in his arms.

The gray cloud cover, the dense and louring pressure, held, but he could feel it draining his strength day by day of that first week. There were nights when, working alone in the leaden stillness, the strength of the storms seemed to crush him; dawns when he would emerge, sweat-soaked and shaky, knowing he would have to return to his task within hours and wanting nothing so much as to beat to death the first servant who crossed his path.

This, he supposed, was what it was to be a wizard.

He ate little, for the exertion made him sick. In spite of his weariness, he forced himself to exercise, hacking at a striking post he’d set up in the overgrown garden or throwing the knife or the ax, right-handed, then left-handed, at the far wall of the empty upstairs gallery. He meditated in the crumbling summer house, the thick stillness of the air prickling at his skin, or catnapped on top of the bed’s coverlet at Starhawk’s side, prey to uneasy dreams.

He had abandoned Ari to face the Vorsal mage alone. Protection from the killing storms was the least he could offer by way of amends. There were times when, knees aching from the uneven tiles of the floor, back aching from bending to call forth in chalk and silver and auligar powder the great sweeping lines of strength, the stars of defense, and the closing rings of the vortex of power, he was obliged to remind himself of this fact at intervals of five minutes or less.

On the seventh night, he let the rains begin. Sitting in the window embrasure with Starhawk, their arms locked around one another’s waists, he felt the cold ferocity of the air beat his face and listened to the waters pouring down in the blackness outside. The great bedroom where they sat was in the front of the house, its windows looking out into the street; by the glimmer of oil lamps in scores of windows up and down the rocky hill, they watched the waters churn over the cobblestones in a hurly-burly of brown silk, the air alive with blown rain.

Starhawk’s voice was barely audible in the darkness. “You gave me this night. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here. Thank you.”

“If it wasn’t for you,” the Wolf replied in his rusted growl, “I wouldn’t have the brains to be here either.”

Ari would be somewhere in the Silver Hills by this time, he thought, staring out into the storm; backside-deep in any of the hundred streams and sour ponds that pockmarked that broken land. The memory of the bitter north returned like the recollection of a voice or a face: eroded valleys that had once held the Empire’s farms, now black with standing pines; hillsides that would support nothing but heather; reefs of lichened granite and basalt and rotting lava; and here and there a broken farmhouse, or the crumbling subsidences that marked where ancient mine-workings had been. And back of it all, on the crest of a harsh gray hill that dominated the countryside for a hundred miles around, lay the walled and broken fortress that had once ruled the north.

He wondered if Ari was up to it.

Probably
, he thought. If he could hold that band of bastards together through the siege, when every mother’s son of ’em was scared spitless, waiting to see where the curse would land next, he’s sure as hell got the juice to lead them back to Wrynde alive.