The Dark Hand of Magic

by Barbara Hambly

  At least a mercenary didn’t have to fight all year round, he thought abstractly, stroking the corner of his mustache. There were no winter quarters for the rulers of trading cities, no off-season for banker-queens. He wondered how long it had been since she’d allowed herself to trust one of the young men whom Wool Market tittle-tattle ascribed as her numerous lovers.

  “What about the land barons?” he inquired, curious. “They going to sit down under it when you annex all Vorsal’s land? The Duke of Farkash has a claim on that town from his aunt’s marriage—so do the Counts of Saltyre. It’s damn near the only decent crop land left in this part of the world.”

  She smiled, the easy playfulness slipping back into her usual catlike malice; the pendant pearls on her vast lace collar quivered like dew on a monstrous rose as she shrugged. “It was Vorsal who first attacked us,” she pointed out. “Their troops started the war...”

  “In a tavern brawl here that I’ll bet you gold to garlic bulbs you set up.”

  “Nonsense.” Again the coquette’s sliding intonation, denying she’d dropped a handkerchief on purpose while four swains battled for the honor of returning it. “The Duke of Vorsal is a proud man, but he could have stopped the proceedings at any time with an apology and the smallest of reparations. And in any case, what’s done is done. By the laws of the Middle Kingdoms, Vorsal is the proved aggressor. Any land baron, or any city, dispatching troops to its assistance is liable to attack by me or my allies.”

  He noticed the unconscious use of the word “me.” The King had used it, too. Needless to say, should Saltyre, Skathcrow, or Farkash decide to jump into the fray on behalf of the beleaguered town, it was also gold to garlic bulbs that their ancestral enemies—Dalwirin, heretical Mallincore, Grodas, or any of a dozen other Kingdoms—would fall over themselves in their speed to dig up an ancient alliance with Kwest Mralwe to attack while their foes’ armies were away. At this time of the year it was far too late for one of the cities of the Gwarl Peninsula to send an ally’s help to Vorsal before the storms hit. And by spring, of course, it would all be over.

  At least, the Wolf knew Renaeka Strata and the other members of the King-Council were fervently hoping it would all be over.

  As for the land barons, and the Duke of Vorsal was nominally one of in spite of his connections with the trading houses, the Wolf knew that, powerful as those rulers were in their own territory, none of them would risk getting on the bad side of Kwest Mralwe. Some of them had formidable private armies, but they also had investments. Even if they found another market for their wool, the risk of boycott in other goods was too great.

  And Renaeka Strata, bastard, slut, and witch’s daughter, was notorious not only for her wealth, but for the length of her memory and the coldhearted implacability of her revenges.

  He admired her as a woman and a ruler, but the thought of Starhawk, ill and helpless in this delicate pink fortress, made him profoundly uneasy.

  The page returned. A pair of the Lady Prince’s bodyguards—picked, uncharitable hearsay ran, for their good looks and amorous abilities as much as for their skill with arms—escorted them down pillared breezeways and across cool salons whose every arch and vault clustered thick with the filigreed stalactites fashionable in these warm lands. The room Starhawk had been given looked onto the gardens at the rear of the house, far from the noise of business carried on closer to the street. He saw her from the shadows of the pillared breezeway that separated forecourt from gardens, seated on a bench of honey-colored sandstone on the broad terrace, watching water trickle down a stair-step fountain among the brown mazes of topiary below. She was dressed as a young gentleman of the Middle Kingdoms, and the stiffly boned black doublet, frilled ruff, black hose and paned trunks made her face seem more white and haggard by contrast. She looked around at the swift scrunch of his boots on the gravel, but didn’t rise. The hand she held out to him and the mouth he bent quickly to kiss felt cold.

  Her gray gaze had lost none of its shrewd quickness as it took in the bruises and cuts. “You all right, Chief?”

  “Compared to what I might have been, yeah, I’m fine.” He flung a glance back at the Lady Prince and her brace of stallions, and lowered his voice to a faint, scraping rasp as he bent toward her. “I’ll tell you later. You?”

  She nodded, and turned her hip a little to show the long dagger there. Her low court shoes couldn’t conceal a blade, and her doublet sleeves fit closely with their little frills of white shirt, but he’d have bet his family jewels she had at least two other knives somewhere on her person, plus something innocuous-looking which could double as a garrote. Probably the bandages on her head, he decided, looking down at her. The pale hair stuck up through them like a child’s, and he was seized by an embarrassing tenderness at the sight of it, a desire to touch. Instead he hooked his hands through the buckle of his sword belt and said, “She says you’re free to go if you want.”

  Starhawk glanced past him at that gorgeous pink rose of a woman, both of them remembering the land baron who’d tried to set up competition against Kwest Mralwe’s silk monopoly by smuggling in his own silkworms from the East. There was still a shade of ruby crimson ironically named after him, to commemorate the grotesque “accident” which had claimed his life. She lifted her voice a little. “That true?”

  The Lady Prince inclined her golden-wigged head. “I shall give you a horse, clothes, money, whatever you feel you need. But I repeat, I do not advise it.”

  “How much money?”

  The Lady Prince looked nonplussed, but said, “Twenty silver pieces, Stratus weight,” in the voice of one who expects to have to fight for that ridiculously low figure.

  “Forty,” the Hawk said promptly.

  “My dear Warlady...”

  “I’ll think about it.” With a gesture she forestalled further haggling, and, graciously though with a slightly militant glint in her old eye, Renaeka and her guards departed. “I think the offer’s genuine. She’d have said fifty if she didn’t intend really to pay up.”

  “Grasping old witch...”

  “Now what happened?”

  The Wolf settled himself beside her on the bench and related last night’s events: his attempt to turn back the storms; the King’s offer; the hand full of darkness; and the creature that had attacked him below Vorsal’s walls. “This morning I had a look through the books of the Witches,” he went on quietly, his big fingers clasped lightly through hers. “They talk about something called a djerkas in the shirdane tongue. It’s a kind of golem—an animate statue controlled by a wizard’s will.”

  “I always wondered about golems.” The lines printed in the fragile flesh around her eyes deepened as she considered the thread of the fountain among its allegorical bronze nymphs. “I mean, suppose you did breathe life into a statue. It wouldn’t do you a damn bit of good unless you gave it some joints as well. The djerkas sounds as if it were constructed specifically for the purpose of killing.”

  “Wonder why we haven’t heard about it before?” The Wolf turned his head a little to consider her with his single eye—as usual, she was sitting on his blind side. “If Moggin’s got that thing out patrolling the walls...”

  “The obvious answer is that he doesn’t,” the Hawk replied calmly. “Metal or not, it’s not a war machine. One swat with a battering ram or dump a load from the ballista on it and you’ve got scrap iron. Same story if he uses it as a killer-scout. Once our boys know it’s out there, all it’ll take is six or seven gruts with long pikes and a big sack of sand to grit up its joints.”

  Sun Wolf laughed, Starhawk’s deadly insouciance lifting the fear of the thing from him like a cloud shifted from the sun.

  She shrugged. “And why should it patrol outside, when they’ve got guards on the walls? If I were Moggin and had only one of those metal bugs—and with fuel and iron as short as they are in that city you can bet they’re not going to tinker up another—I’d put it patrolling the inside of the wall, to mince up anything that gets p
ast the guards. If, that is, I wanted the people in the town to know I was a wizard, which is a piece of news I’d think real carefully about advertising in a town under siege.”

  Sun Wolf nodded, remembering the siege of Laedden—the lynchings, the hysterical accusations, the neurotic confessions and impossible charges that had turned its later weeks into a bizarre hell of paranoia and death.

  After dawn he’d gone back to Dogbreath’s tent and slept for a few hours, exhaustion imprisoning him in nightmares he was too tired to escape, while Dogbreath, Firecat, and the Little Thurg traded off lackadaisical guard. He didn’t seriously think the djerkas would come near the camp in daylight, but the thought of lying alone in the tent didn’t appeal to him much either. He had drawn the Runes of Ward around his cot, but had dreamed again and again that he hadn’t done it properly—that he had forgotten something, or there was some spell he had not known—and the shadow of a dark hand could be seen upon the tent wall, weaving its silvery net.

  Awakening after two hours’ sleep, ghastly as it was, had been an improvement.

  Then he had ridden to the Convent of St. Dwade, to hear from the Sisters that Starhawk had been taken away in the night.

  “They want me to ride out and look over the new siege machines for the day after tomorrow’s assault,” he said after a time. “Her Ladyship’s sent to every apothecary in town for mercury and powdered hellebore, but that doesn’t mean we’ll find squat. There’s something called auligar powder used in hexes—that isn’t all it’s good for, but it’ll bring up an Eye—but it takes about a week to make, even after you’ve got all the ingredients.”

  “What’s in it?” inquired the Hawk curiously.

  “Not much—staghorn and dried violets and mistletoe and a little silver. Yirth told me how to make it. Kaletha mentioned it, too. Silver alone can be used to read some kinds of marks as well...”

  “Bet me Renaeka’ll make you use your own.”

  “Or count it real good when she gets it back from me,” he grunted. “Something in one of the Witch books makes me think you can use blood as well.”

  “She’d probably make you use your own for that, too.”

  “More likely find some perfectly legal reason to volunteer the man who’s been underselling her prices on ammoniated salts. The woman doesn’t miss a trick, Hawk.”

  “If she did she’d be dead.” Starhawk shrugged, her long fingers stroking at her wrist ruffles. “The Sisters told me about her rivalry with the Cronesmae when Purcell’s brother was alive. That nearly came to a trade war over the alum diggings. He ended up falling down a flight of stairs one night and breaking his neck. To this day, nobody can figure out how she managed it, because, by all witnesses, the house was absolutely empty and the stairs weren’t high, but there’s nobody in the town who thought it was an accident. Poor old Purcell might be one of the richest traders in the Middle Kingdoms these days, but if she says ‘Jump’ he’s the first man on his feet asking ‘How high?’”

  Sun Wolf nodded, remembering other things he’d been told about the intricate, bloody machinations of Middle Kingdoms politics. He thought about it later, when he was met at the engineering park to the northeast of the city by Purcell himself, thin, gray, elderly, and self-effacing to the point of invisibility, huddled in the windruffled fur collar of his black velvet gown as if, like a turtle, he felt safer within its shell.

  “I’ve been asked to accompany you, to send for whatever you might need,” he said in his apologetic voice.

  To keep an eye on me, you mean, the Wolf thought. Despite Purcell’s air of being Renaeka Strata’s footstool, the man was the head of one of the fastest-rising trading houses in the Middle Kingdoms; the guards who followed a few paces behind them wore the yellow livery of the Cronesmae, not the green and gold of the Stratii. Sun Wolf wondered, as he crossed the trampled grass of the hilltop on which the park stood, how much of the man’s timid diffidence was natural and how much had been adopted as protective coloration in dealing with the redoubtable mistress of the Council. If there was no respite for banker-queens, still less was there a respite from them for the poor bastards they ruled.

  Wind snagged at his hair, flattening his dull crimson doublet sleeves, rippling Purcell’s black gown and the brown hackle feathers which tufted the guards’ turbaned helms. The engineering park overlooked the marshy estuary where the Mralwe River flowed into the sea. Unlike Vorsal, Kwest Mralwe had no separate harbor, but was built where the Mralwe River bent around the jutting granite promontory upon which the city had originally been built. Oceangoing vessels could sail inland as far as its ancient bridge, its great pool with its massive stone quays, perhaps seven miles from the open sea. It was valuable shelter during the winter storms, but, the Wolf observed cynically, nothing compared to Vorsal’s cup-shaped bay. Gazing at Kwest Mralwe, the cluster of ancient citadels on the hillside and the newer suburbs spread downward in a succession of pillars, turrets, and protective walls over the hill’s feet like petticoats of pink and white, he wondered how much that had to do with the final decision to provoke Vorsal to war. Something certainly had been involved; the two cities had existed in a state of uneasy truce for years. Someone on the Council had clearly wanted something, but what it was impossible to know.

  From this trampled hilltop, by turning, the Wolf could see across the slaty river to the rolling brown lands on the other side, the gaggle of fishing villages along the estuary, the thin stringers of bare trees marking stony farmlands beyond. Far out over the ocean wavered the slanted purplish curtains of rain squalls; the sea itself was green, running high to meal-colored hills. The air felt very still.

  Like sleeping ruminants, the siege engines towered all around them, as they did in the smaller park by the camp. Local flurries of rain had darkened their raw yellow wood and the burnt orange of hastily cured hides. In the strange calm, the whole place reeked of sawdust, carrion, and the latrine trenches of the slaves. The smoke of the forge on the lee side of the hill rose straight in the leaden sky. The metal clink of hammers punctuated the thud of mallets, the rasp of saws, and the clamor of men stretching ropes. Artisans in leather aprons and slaves in coarse canvas smocks swarmed everywhere over those five monstrous constructions: the ram like an ambulatory long-house; a turtle, ridiculously like its namesake under a heavy shell of hides; two towers, their flying bridges extended like blunt tongues protruding rudely against the cold sky; and a half-built ballista. Guards were everywhere, the red and blue of the City Troops an incongruous garland ringing the hill’s dull brow. The rise of the ground to the south just hid this hill from where Vorsal’s poppy-bright turrets would be.

  “You needn’t have bothered building the machines out here, you know,” he grunted to Purcell as they ducked to enter the close, smelly shadows of the ram. The Councillor, gingerly holding up the hem of his gown, seemed to be trying to walk without touching the ground with his expensive kid-leather shoes. “If there’s a wizard in Vorsal, he could conjure the image of this place in a crystal.”

  The elderly man’s eyes flared with alarm, then vexation. “Oh, dear,” he fussed, and Sun Wolf laughed.

  Patiently, thoroughly, Sun Wolf went over the ram, running his hands along the great hanging beam, the ropes that held it and its iron head. As Yirth had taught him, he squinted sidelong at them, conjured the words of power from the half-forgotten tangle of remembered spells, hoping he remembered aright. It had been a year—he’d periodically repeated everything he’d learned that night to refresh his memory, but there had never been anything against which to check it, and he had been, he knew, slack about it when other matters demanded his time.

  He touched the ropes, and then all around the engine’s hide and canvas walls, inside and out, up as far as his arm could reach, then untied and removed the leather sleeves of his doublet, rolled his shirt sleeves to his biceps, and went over it all again, first with his hands smeared with powdered hellebore, then with a flour-sifter in which he’d put a powder of mercury cut with f
lour to make it go farther.

  “Must you just dump it on that way?” twittered Purcell, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Mercury’s over a silver piece an ounce! It’s getting all over the ground...” He pulled off his silk skullcap and held it ineffectually under the beam, the gray dust falling over it like a film of ash. In the chill, shadowy light his thin pink face and almost-naked scalp, covered with its fluff of gray wisps, looked like an anxious bird’s.

  Sun Wolf swung lightly down from his perch among the struts and handed him the shaker. “You want to save money, fine. I won’t use it.”

  The little man dithered a moment, cap in one hand, sifter clutched inexpertly in the other, as the Wolf started to stalk out of the ram. “Wait... no... Do—do as you think best. Please.”

  In other years Sun Wolf had seen Renaeka Strata’s famous tantrums when she thought one of her generals had been wasting her money—which wasn’t hers at all, but the King-Council’s. He understood Purcell’s concern.

  After that he went over all the other machines, one by one. It was his own troop—now Ari’s troop, but still his friends, men he had trained and had led into a hundred battles—who’d be spearheading this assault. They were the best, the toughest, the shock troops. It was for that he’d trained them, and for that they’d been hired—for that they could command the highest prices, when, he reflected irritably, they could pry the money out of certain tightfisted employers. If the siege towers went down, if those flying bridges that stuck out over the dizzying gulfs of nothing collapsed, it was Ari, Dogbreath, Penpusher, and Zane who’d be on them when they did. The forced, extended concentration wearied him, coupled with his lack of sleep; his mind stumbled on the endless repetitions, and he forced himself not to wonder whether he was doing it right. Between spells, between muttered incantations to focus himself into the floating state of half meditation where the Eyes could be read, he cursed Moggin Aerbaldus for a gutter-festering bastard hoodoo.