The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  IT TOOK THE WOLF ten minutes to sober Penpusher up enough to borrow his least tatty black doublet and breeches, the bookkeeper owlishly insisting that hose and short trunks were the proper wear for evening visits. Ari, too ingrained in the habit of command now ever to get completely drunk on campaign, watched this interchange in silence, but when Penpusher reeled out into the night, still muttering about the decay in sartorial standards, the captain made his way across the tent to the Wolf. Behind them, against a tarnished jewel box of filthy peacock tent hangings, the poker game continued. Under cover of Dogbreath’s extravagantly voiced offers of sacrifice to all the saints of chaos Ari asked softly, “Why?”

  Sun Wolf glanced sharply at him.

  “You ought to look at yourself.” Ari’s broad shoulders bulked dark against the dirty glow of the grease lamps as he folded his arms. “You look as if you just went five rounds with an earthquake and lost. What happened? Why go into the city now?”

  “Because he won’t be expecting it.” The Wolf pushed back the sweaty strings of his hair and rubbed his unshaven chin. “I hurt him some—I don’t know how bad. I can’t afford to give him a chance to recover. He knows he hurt me and he’ll be off his guard. If I go after him cold, head to head, power against power, he’ll make sauerkraut of me.”

  “Yeah, well, your resemblance to what my mother used to spoon over the sausages is pretty strong right now.”

  Sun Wolf growled, knowing Ari was right. But he knew, too, that a day’s rest wouldn’t make him any more able to defeat Moggin Aerbaldus—and that now, Moggin knew there was another wizard working against him. A wizard, he reflected uneasily, whom it was to his advantage—and within his power—to enslave.

  The memory of that dark hand closing around him and of that sticky net of silver runes turned his flesh cold. To cover his fear he went on roughly, “He’ll be ready for more magic tomorrow, but it’s my guess he won’t be ready for an assassin tonight.”

  “You garlic-eating heretic...!” Little Thurg’s voice rose from within the tent.

  “Aaah, better we eat garlic than perform ritual acts with cantaloupes and tender little piggies the way you people do...”

  The voices were good-natured; Sun Wolf glanced back over his shoulder to see Zane dozing like a disheveled orchid on the divan while Dogbreath, the two concubines, and the Big and Little Thurgs pushed the same twelve coppers dispiritedly back and forth among themselves. Nobody seemed to be winning much—Sun Wolf wondered if the hex had extended itself to the cards.

  Ari pointed out doggedly, “It was your guess that Laedden’s armies would be able to cope with the invasion from Ambersith without falling back on the city, remember? That time we ended up trapped in the siege? And it was your guess nobody would join the K’Chin coalition twelve years ago when we invaded...”

  “Everybody’s entitled to a few mistakes,” the Wolf retorted defensively. “And I don’t need some smart-mouthed kid to tell me...”

  “Chief.” Ari’s hand stayed him as he let the door’s filthy brocade curtain fall to shut out the night. “You watch your back in there. You need backup?”

  He said it as an afterthought, a courtesy, like the offer of a bed for the night to a guest already bent upon returning home. The Wolf gestured it aside. Entering the besieged city would be difficult enough for a lone assassin who had the power to turn aside the eyes of the watchers on the walls; companions would only increase his risk of detection without adding much to his chances of escape, and they both knew it.

  “Captain?” The Wolf had been aware of the dry crunch of approaching footfalls outside; Battlesow poked a helmeted head through the curtains. “Some grut here to see the Chief.” There was disbelief in her incongruous, little-girl voice. “Claims to be the King of Kwest Mralwe.”

  “He does, does he?”

  Dogbreath looked up from his cards. “He wearing a crown?”

  “Rot the crown,” the Little Thurg chipped in. “Find out if he’s wearing a purse.”

  “How much ransom you figure they’d pay?”

  “If he’s really the King of Kwest Mralwe,” the Wolf rumbled, “you’d better not count on much.”

  “You want to see him, Chief?” Ari asked quietly. “We can get rid of him...”

  He shook his head, though part of him wanted to start at once for Vorsal, to strike quickly while surprise would still be a weapon—to start before he had time to get cold feet. “I better see what he wants. I asked them for information—he may have some he didn’t want the others to hear.” Privately, having seen the King of Kwest Mralwe on a dozen occasions over the years—whenever Renaeka Strata had permitted the rightful monarch to attend Council meetings—he didn’t think that any too likely. But he’d dealt with peril too many years to disregard even the most unlikely help.

  The poker players left, one of the women and the Little Thurg toting the snoring Zane between them, and Dogbreath thoughtfully collecting the wine jar and all the remaining coppers on the table. Ari left last, holding up the tent curtain for Raven Girl. As he went out he said, “I’ll get Penpusher to leave the black clothes in your tent. Good luck, Chief.”

  “If that’s your idea of humor,” Sun Wolf grumbled back, slouching into Ari’s favorite chair—once his own—of gold-bound staghorns and ebony, “I don’t think it’s very funny.”

  Ari laughed, and left him. Curious, the Wolf turned over the cards that scattered the table amid the shell and ebony winecups, and saw he’d guessed right about the extent of the curse.

  Then the tent flap opened. Derisively, Battlesow announced, “His Royal Majesty King Hontus III of Kwest Mralwe.”

  He knew the gawkish shape and the peering squint, even before the King pushed his cheap corduroy hood back from his face and removed the black domino mask. “Captain Sun Wolf?”

  “Nobody’s been impersonating me since this afternoon, so I guess it still is.”

  The King laughed nervously, as if uncertain that it really was a joke. Though in his mid-thirties, the King of Kwest Mralwe had the unwrinkled countenance of a child who has never bothered himself with learning the right and wrong of matters to which he lent his name. This, the Wolf supposed from his years of dealing with the King-Council, might have to do with the fact that those hardfisted bankers and merchants weren’t about to let a mere hereditary ruler have anything to do with the running of a complex mercantile economy. But studying the weak chin and petulant lips, the jittery restlessness of those big-boned hands, and the aimless gaze of the squinting eyes, he concluded that there were other, better reasons for this exclusion. In reigns gone by, the King-Council’s power, he knew, had been more equitably divided. He himself wouldn’t have divided the running of a two-cow farmstead with this gam-handed dolt.

  “I’ve come to ask you—there were things said in the council this afternoon, you know... Oh, of course you know, you were there, haha... That is, I realize it’s all supposed to be superstition, and of course wild rumors are always circulated... You see...”

  The King coughed, laughed again as a sort of punctuation to his own remarks, then unconsciously picked his long nose and wiped his fingers on the threadbare panes of his trunk hose. Uninvited, he took the chair Dogbreath had recently vacated, changing position almost continually as he talked, like a restive child. “Well, I’m not quite sure how to put this—not wishing to give offense... But at the Council today, the Bishop said something about—well, about you being a wizard. Is that true? I mean, is it true that you’re a wizard—of course we both know that it’s true that the Bishop said it, hahaha...”

  Sun Wolf leaned back in his own chair, his solitary eye narrowing. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well...” The King put his feet on the floor and sat forward, clasping his hands; he wore some of the cheapest rings Sun Wolf had ever seen, as well as a flat, worn gold signet carved from an opal the color of ice. Pulled back in a sandy pigtail, his hair was unwashed. “Your men did call you back out of retirement to deal with a magician in Vor
sal, didn’t they? And I’ve heard rumors, you know. Sometimes I go about the marketplace in disguise...”

  Sun Wolf shuddered at the mental picture that conjured up.

  “You are going to destroy this wizard in Vorsal, aren’t you? To let my men take the city?”

  Though this was exactly what Sun Wolf proposed to do, the way it was phrased, in that eager, whining voice, set his teeth on edge. “Yes,” he said, and added pointedly, “that is, as soon as I’m free to do so.”

  “Oh, you have my permission, of course.” The King gave a magnanimous wave, the sarcasm zipping over his head like a badly aimed catapult bolt. “The man is obviously a threat to my realm. But I want to speak to you about what you will do...” He paused, wriggled, and dropped his voice portentously. “...Afterwards.”

  “Afterwards.” As if he had kicked a carpet and seen its entire pattern unroll before his feet, Sun Wolf saw the King’s proposal open up in his mind in a blinding panorama of the obvious. He barely restrained himself from sighing as the King, with numerous circumlocutions, nervous giggles, and absentminded peeps into the few winecups which remained on the table—all of them empty, and Sun Wolf was sure he would have helped himself to them if they hadn’t been—laboriously unfolded his proposition as if he were the first man in the history of the world to have ever had the idea of hiring a wizard to put him into the position of power he felt he deserved.

  “You see,” the King went on, “it’s all the fault of that witch’s bastard Renaeka. That’s why she glared at old Purcell today. Her mother was a witch, who used her powers to get the Prince of the House of Stratus to fall in love with her. Of course he’d married a land baron’s daughter—that’s how the House of Stratus got control of the alum mines in Tilth and, through it, control of the whole cloth trade, since there isn’t another source of alum closer than the Gwarl Peninsula, and that one’s tied up tight by Ciselfarge. The old prince put his true wife aside for his paramour, and when it looked as if her family was going to give trouble and take the diggings back, the witch Renaeka’s mother tried to poison Lord Stratus’ true wife. But of course in spite of everything—her mother was burned in the end, when Lord Stratus turned against her—That Woman is now the head of the House of Stratus, and controls the only source of alum for cloth dyeing in the whole of the Middle Kingdoms. She can charge what she pleases, call the tune for them all. They all toady and crawl to her, the painted whore! But if I had a wizard on my side...”

  “...that wizard would run the risk of getting the ax from the House of Stratus the same way this alleged witch did,” Sun Wolf finished. “In case it’s slipped your mind, the Bishop is Renaeka’s cousin, and the Triple God takes a damn dim view of hookum.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” the King said. “I’ll protect you.”

  Sun Wolf sighed and pushed with one blunt forefinger at the pitiful collection of Dogbreath’s cards. “Your Majesty, I doubt you could protect your own head in a rainstorm.” He stood up; the King, who’d been peering inquiringly into a rejected cup to see how much wine was left, raised his head in hurt surprise. “And I’ve got plenty of better things to do with what powers I have than waste them rigging ward elections in a snake pit like the Middle Kingdoms, always supposing you didn’t start distrusting me and slip something into my drink.”

  “Never!” The King leaped melodramatically to his feet, knocking over his own chair, then the winecup as he grabbed unsuccessfully to catch it. Mopping at the spilled dregs, he straightened up and squinted shortsightedly into Sun Wolf’s face. “We would make a pact! Together we would rule...”

  Patiently, Sun Wolf caught the fragile cup just before it rolled off the edge of the table. He set it upright with a small click on the inlaid ebony tabletop. “And what would be the first act of this pact?” he demanded quietly. “To poison Renaeka?”

  Their eyes held for an instant; then the King’s shifted away. “Well—I thought something more subtle than that.”

  “You mean something less easy for the Church to trace? To ill-wish her, to mark her with an Eye, so one day her horse would stumble, or a fish bone would lodge in her throat, or one of her lovers would strangle her with her own pearls?”

  “She deserves it,” the King pointed out righteously. “She’s the daughter of a witch—she’s probably a witch herself. If we had a true bishop in this town and not one of the Stratus lapdogs he’d say the same. He’d be on my side. They all would be, if they weren’t afraid of her, but she controls the alum mines, and all the money—she really does deserve to die. They’re usurpers, all of them, thieves of what belongs to others...”

  “Like the power in this kingdom?”

  “Yes!”

  “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 fire, 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 lèse majesté.

  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-lead
er 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.