Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (4 page)

For an instant everything was as it had been, and he understood that, as with Starhawk, he was still their commander in their hearts—and in his own.

But there was magic now in his veins. And the man who could bring it forth, give him what his soul most craved, was in Vorsal, holding it against them.

“You feel okay to sit a horse tomorrow?” Dogbreath went on, glancing up when the weight of the silence became oppressive. “It’s a week’s ride—five days if we push it . . . ”

He was expecting the Wolf to say, as he would have a year ago, So let’s push it. The Wolf still felt weak and tired, but he’d fought battles in worse shape. It was all so familiar, so easy, that he nearly made that automatic response. But after all, he thought, and said nothing. After a moment he saw that nothing change the expression in his friend’s face.

“Chief?”
It hadn’t even occurred to him, Sun Wolf thought, that he might say no.

Because they trusted him.
Trusted that he’d be there for them, to the cold gates of hell and beyond, as they were for him.

He sighed. “Yeah. I’ll be ready to go in the morning.”

Relief sprang into Firecat’s face and Thurg’s, like children when they can convince themselves after an overheard fight that their parents still love one another, that nothing has changed. Only the doubt lingered in Dogbreath’s troubled glance, as they filed out of the room to investigate the smells of roast pig that floated ever more insistently up from the common room below. As for Starhawk, rising last to follow them out the door, it had always been difficult to read her enigmatic gray eyes.

A wizard in Vorsal.

As a child, Sun Wolf had crept by night from the loft he’d shared with the household stores to steal through freezing darkness to the house of Many Voices, shaman of the village. The shaman’s house had a door which looked out onto the moor; he would crouch in the lichenous shelter of a fallen menhir and watch that dapper little man sorting his herbs, experimenting with smokes and incense, or sketching the Circles of Power in the dirt of the floor. His father had caught him at it and beaten him, more than once. Many Voices was a charlatan, his father had said, a faker whose curses were worthless unless backed with poison. Finally the big warrior, who had wanted a warrior son, had paid Many Voices to ill-wish a neighbor’s goats, and had sat out with his son most of one rainy night until they’d caught the shaman red-handed, mixing jimson with the goats’ feed.

Sun Wolf, who’d been seven at the time, had never forgotten the searing blister of shame at his own credulity, nor his father’s uproarious laughter at his cheated, helpless rage. It had been the end of his conscious dreams of magic.

Like his father—like most people in the days of Altiokis the Wizard-King’s century and a half of dominance—he had come to believe that magic was only sleight of hand or trickery and that the shadows of power and fire that haunted his own dreams were, in fact, nothing but the lurking seeds of madness. He had become what his father had wanted him to be and had been the best.

And then the seeds had blossomed. Untaught magefire had broken forth within him like glowing magma from a shell of black volcanic stone, and with it the craving, the yearning to learn and understand.

A wizard in Vorsal.
A week’s ride—five days, if they pushed it. The strategist, the fighter, the commander his men knew and trusted, might turn ways and means over coolly in his mind, but the untaught mage—like the born musician who has never been allowed to lay hands on an instrument, or the natural artist who has only heard of paint—breathed faster at the thought. He’d found one, after all those barren months!

The reflection of the firelight had changed against the common room’s ceiling, visible to him through the half-open door. The groaning of the wind about the walls waxed shriller as full darkness fell, and the dry restlessness of the air prickled his skin. Through the door and down in the commons he heard Dogbreath’s flexible bass voice ranging the hills and valleys of some tale he was spinning, broken by the braying delight of the Little Thurg’s laugh; closer, he caught the brief scatter of children’s voices as the innkeeper’s wife herded her brood up some backstair to the attics where they slept. Sun Wolf wondered if the inn stores were kept up there, and if those children woke in the night as he had done in his childhood to see the red eyes of rats reflecting the glow of the moon. Then a light creak of floorboards sounded in the gallery outside the door, a tread he identified as Starhawk’s in the same moment that he reached down with his unwounded arm to locate the sword he kept habitually by the bed. A dark form against the ruby-dyed rafters outside, a slip of brightness catching colorless hair; then she was inside. She disliked standing framed in doorways as much as she did sitting with her back to open space.

The ability to see in pitch darkness had been one of the first things that had come to him with his wizard’s power. He watched her locate her bedroll by touch after closing the door, and spread the blankets soundlessly across the threshold. She unbuckled her swordbelt and laid it on the floor beside her, removed half a dozen daggers and a spiked knuckle-duster from various corners of her person, then folded herself neatly down to a sitting position to pull off her boots.

“I’m not hurt that bad, dammit.”

Her grin was fleet and shy even in the dark. “I was afraid of getting stabbed if I startled you awake.”

“Come over here and I’ll stab you so you’ll never forget it.”

She laughed softly, collected her weapons, and came to sit on the bed. Only when she reached down to locate its edge could he tell that she was almost totally unable to see in the dense gloom. The shutters might be opened an hour a day at this time of year to air the room, but against his shoulder he could feel through the wall that the outer air was freezing. With his good hand, he guided her face down to his, and they kissed, long and deep, in the darkness.

She stripped quickly out of her jerkin and buckskin breeches, and awkwardly he turned back the blankets for her to crowd into the narrow space beside him.

“I was scared for you,” she said after a time, her soft voice husky and hesitant. “I couldn’t let myself think about it then. I can’t ever, really. They’re right when they say falling in love is a bad idea. You get scared . . . I don’t want to lose you.”

“I never did like bugs,” he rumbled, and pulled the blanket up to cover them both.

She laughed softly, putting aside the memory of that fear, and said, “Then we’ve come to the wrong inn.”

He was too weary and still in too much pain to feel much desire for her, but it was good only to lie together, to feel the warmth of that long bony body at his side, to hear her cool voice and see the faint shape of her delicate, broken nose outlined in the darkness.

At length she asked him, “You going to kill that wizard in Vorsal?”

Trust the Hawk,
he thought, and sighed heavily. The question had been cruising, sharklike, beneath the surface of his own thoughts for hours. “I don’t know.”

“You help the folks who are trying to sack his town and skrag his family and friends, I doubt he’ll feel like teaching you much, you know.” He could feel the steel in her light voice, like a finely made dagger flexing, and wished sometimes she wouldn’t put her finger so unerringly on his own thoughts.

“I didn’t say I was going to help them.”

“It’s what Ari’s asking,” she pointed out. “For you to use your magic to help them take the town.”

“No,” he said quietly. “They’re asking my help against a wizard, and against a wizard’s curse. That’s different.”

“You feel up to explaining the difference to them when you get there? Or to him?”

She paused, turning her head sharply at the sound of a swift patter of footsteps on the gallery outside the door; then relaxed as a child’s treble voice whispered urgently, “Niddy, come back here!” There was the happy giggle of a toddler, and Starhawk smiled in spite of herself, as an older child evidently caught up with its wayward sibling and hustled it, unwillingly, up several flights of creaking backstairs to the attic once again. Earlier the Wolf had seen them scurry past the door of his room, two little towheads in the clumsy white linsey-woolsey smocks of peasant children, and had heard their mother scolding them to stay away from the common room and the guests.

And well she should, he’d reflected. Dogbreath and Firecat looked as if they’d split a baby between them for supper and feed the scraps to the pigs.

Her voice soft in the darkness, Starhawk went on, “The boys aren’t going to see it that way, Chief. They’re my friends, yeah—I’d say my brothers, if my brothers weren’t . . . Well, anyhow. But in the past year I’ve been friends with the people who live in the towns we used to sack. That’s something you can’t think about if you’re a merc—and maybe that’s why mercs only hang around with other mercs. When you torch a house, you can’t explain to the woman whose kids are trapped upstairs while she’s being raped in the yard by six of your buddies that this is just your job. You do what you think best, Chief, and you know, when you finally make it to the bottommost pit of Hell, I’ll be there at your side, but I gave up war. I’m not going back.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said softly. Then, in a burst of honesty, “Well, not unless I was in trouble real bad,” and she chuckled softly, a faint vibration through the bones of his chest that stirred in him an odd, passionate tenderness. She lay on his blind left side; he had to turn his head to look down into her face. “And I need a teacher. You remember those hotshot kids who used to come to the school at Wrynde, the ones who seemed as if they’d been born with a sword in their hands. Those are the dangerous ones, the ones who leave a trail of dead and maimed until they learn what they’re doing—learn when to keep the sword sheathed.

“I’m like that, Hawk. It isn’t just that I want it, need it—need someone to show me what this magic is. Most mageborn get some kind of teaching before the Trial brings on their full power. I have power and, by all my ancestors, I saw in Wenshar what power without discipline can do. But I owe Ari. I owe my men. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for them. You too, since you couldn’t have saved me alone, and you’d probably have tried.”

She said nothing. Pillowed against the scarred muscle and golden fur of his chest, her face remained impassive, gray eyes open in the darkness, thinking. In the eight years of brotherhood which had preceded their becoming lovers, he had gotten to know those silences, the thoughts that hid so stubbornly behind the steely armor she wore locked around her heart. In the last year, he’d occasionally wondered that she had ever emerged from behind that armor to tell him that she loved him.

It was a damn good thing that she had, he reflected. He’d never have had the nerve to say it to her.

“It sounds bad, Hawk,” he said gently. “Whatever I decide when I get there, I can’t not go.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t.” She didn’t turn her face to him, only considered the darkness before her, impassive, as if Ari, Dogbreath, Firecat and the others were not also her friends and not also in danger of their lives. “But it’s going to come down to a choice for you sooner or later, Chief—him or them.”

Her hand reached up, long, competent fingers tracing idly the scabbed-over crescents of demon bites on the heavy muscle of his hands. “You always told us in training that the man who knows what he wants in a fight has it all over the man who doesn’t quite; it’s the robber who’s able to kill a man in the five seconds it takes that man to make up his mind whether he’d kill somebody to protect his goods. I just think you’d better figure out what it’s going to be soon, because there’s a good chance that, when the time comes to make that decision, he’s going to be actively trying to kill you.”

She was right, of course. She generally was, but that didn’t give him any clue as to what he should do, or make his own indecision any easier to deal with.

Starhawk’s breath sank to a nearly soundless whisper of sleep, but Sun Wolf lay awake, his one eye open in the darkness. After a time he heard the brawling laughter of his troopers as they piled up the narrow wooden stair to the gallery—why shut up for the benefit of anyone spoilsport enough to be asleep at this hour? The arrogant clamor dimmed as they settled into the next-door room they shared. Then for a time, he listened to the hushed stirrings downstairs as the innkeeper’s wife and servants, who’d stayed awake to do so, cleaned the empty tankards and the spilled beer, swept the hearth where battles had been fought with the kindling from the wood-boxes and left strewn about the floors, and banked the kitchen fires. By the dim vibration and creak, he tracked them up the stairs, across the gallery, and up still further into the high dark reaches of the upper floors.

Then he heard only the groan of the wind and the goblin pecking of branches against the shutters, felt the faint sway of the tall wooden building in the heavy gusts; the slow drift of the inn into slumber was like a great, black ship riding at anchor in the windy night. He would go to Vorsal, but what he would do when he got there he did not know.

Lying in the darkness, he remembered Ari as he’d first seen him, a puppy-fat child with rainwater streaming down his long, dark hair, standing on the edge of the training floor of the winter camp in Wrynde, with his father’s pike and arrows balanced on his shoulder; Sun Wolf remembered a thousand winter afternoons and evenings on that floor, with the rain pounding the high roof above the vaulted lattice of the rafters while he put his men through their paces or ducked and dodged the Big Thurg or Starhawk in a practice bout. He’d yelled at them, ragged them, cursed them, and, when necessary, beaten them black and blue, conditioning them to the instant obedience of absolute trust—Dogbreath, Penpusher, the Hawk, the Big and Little Thurgs, Battlesow, the Goddess, that black warrior Ryter who’d been so skilled and so easy to drink with and who’d died with an arrow in his eye at some stupid battle in Gwarl . . . 

He had made them killers, had led them to their kills—had forged of them a brotherhood as only war can forge it. It had been hard enough to leave them and to choose the solitary search for another art, another need. Now to choose again, to kill the one person who could give him what he needed in order to save their lives . . .