Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  They crowded in, filling the little room with others still jostling in the entrance. Dogbreath, still clad in most of the hapless shepherd's clothes but with his long, beribboned braids hanging down his chest, waved the wineskin and called out, "We're trying to get up a poker game, Chief, but so far we've got two strats, three stallins and twenty-five coppers between us ... "

  "Hey, man, you can't play poker with a hoodoo!" Firecat protested, jabbing Dogbreath in the ribs and taking the wineskin away from him. She winked at the Wolf. As usual, jewels flashed from her ears, her wrists, her tangled hair, and in the throat of her grubby silk shirt.

  "There's an idea, if you're ever hungry in a strange town," Opium's sweet, lazy voice crooned as she snaked past the men in the doorway. Her brown eyes were warm, sparkling into his in the erratic lamplight. She'd discarded her cloak, and a creamy paradise of breast surged up against the blood-red silk of her bodice, half-hidden by the scented glory of her hair. "Or do wizards ever end up hungry in strange towns?"

  "No more than ladies with jugs like yours!" Zane laughed with joviality too prompt, too hard-edged. Opium's dusky cheeks flared with humiliated color, and she stepped swiftly back.

  "Oh, shove it, Zane," Firecast snapped angrily, and the Big Thurg rumbled, "Stop thinking with your codpiece, man."

  "C-can you really c-call c-cards?" asked Penpusher, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps only to gloss past what might have become an argument, since Zane and Firecat were both drunk and both likely to be interested in Opium for the same reasons.

  Sun Wolf sighed. It was one of the first things he and the Hawk had tried when they'd hit the road from Mandrigyn. "If I've got something to look in-a candle flame, or a jewel ... "

  "Like the crystal balls wizards have?" Little Thurg asked, perching on the edge of the room's one chair.

  Zane hooted. "Yeah, that's why wizards make so much noise when they ... "

  "Would somebody go drown him in the latrine?"

  "No, c'mon, Chief, show us," urged Ari, pulling a truly sorry pack of cards from the purse at his belt. "Beats penny-ante ... "

  "So does getting a tooth drawn," Dogbreath reminded him.

  "Watch out, man, those are the Captain's special marked cards ... "

  And from behind Dogbreath came the whisper of red silk and dark hair and the low, lazy voice asking, "Pretty-please?"

  Sun Wolf laughed, and held out his hand; for a moment it was all the same-the casual camaraderie of a thousand other nights, the taste of beer and muscle, Pen-pusher's grousing about cheap balladeers putting real minstrels out of work, Dogbreath's outrageous stories-poker, jokes, boasting, rehashes of races or cockfights or what happened at the siege of Saltyre.

  But it wasn't. For the wizard in him smelled a change in the wind, a curious prickling of the hairs at his nape, like the passage of a ghost. For a moment he considered disregarding it, and spending the evening as he used to, drinking and playing cards, maybe with Opium on his knee ...

  And the smell on the wind, the sense of change, was indeed gone.

  But it troubled him sufficiently that he shook his head and said, "Gotta be some other night, kids."

  "Aw, Daddy, please do us a magic trick?" Dogbreath begged in a schoolboy whine.

  "Yeah, I'll make you all disappear, how's that?"

  "Oh, too easy," Opium protested with a flashing laugh. "All it'd take to make Zane disappear is soap and water." And her eye caught the Wolf's, half-teasing, half-asking, coffee-warm under kohl-dark lids.

  After perhaps too long an instant he shook his head. "I might catch up with you later," he half promised, his eyes going to Ari. "There's things I got to do."

  Ari looked disappointed; the Little Thurg groused, "God's toenails, he not only risks his life to save the lousy books but he reads 'em!"

  "Watch out, Chief, that'll give you hair on your eyeballs!"

  The others craned their necks to look at the books scattered open across the bed where he'd been sitting.

  "Jealous I know the alphabet?" the Wolf shot back, and they all laughed. "I can count, too."

  "How high?" challenged the little man fiercely, drawing himself up to his full five feet of red-and-purple puff-and-slash.

  "Twenty-and without taking off my shoes."

  The Little Thurg's face fell like an abashed monkey's. In a hoarse stage whisper, Dogbreath asked Firecat, "What's twenty?"

  "It's the number that comes after 'some more.' "

  To the Wolf, she confided, "Everything past twelve is higher mathematics to him because he needs help getting his shoes off."

  Zane's next-unprintable-contribution to the conversation steered it into other channels; trading increasingly obscene banter, they jostled their way out of the tent and into the night in search of more entertaining game. Ari lingered for a moment, as if he would say something; past his shoulder, the Wolf got a glimpse of Opium's dark, regretful gaze. Then they, too, were gone.

  In the sudden quiet of the tent the Wolf felt curiously bereft.

  But an instant later the faint sibilance of breeze was audible in the silence. Without the heavy stinks of wine and sweaty wool and the women's perfumes the scent of the sea came plain. The weather had turned. The storms were coming in.

  Cursing systematically, Sun Wolf thrust aside the cluttered table, pushed the cot back, and dragged up the filthy rugs that formed the floor of the tent. On the earth beneath he scratched with his dagger the Circle of Light, as large as he could make it in the restricted room-the great curves of the powers of air leading into it, the grand and the lesser stars. He worked the pattern from memory, sinking his mind into the runes of power, whispering the words that Yirth of Mandrigyn had given him, drawing the strength of the universe like glittering plasm into the marrow of his bones. In the points of the Great Star he kindled fires with pinches of the herbs he carried these days in his saddlebags, then touched the flame in the green bronze lamp, quenching it to a ribbon of smoke and darkness. He sank down through the darkness, to where the Invisible Circle lay like a coil of shadow and light.

  Far below him, he could see the iron-gray crawl of the sea; above and before him, half-veiled with beggar-rags of cloud, was the cold arc of the waxing moon. Around him whispered and cried the voices of the winds, and in the blackness he saw them, dark and light air mixed, warm and cold. He could see the cold front moving in like a blue-gray wall, smell the ozone of the lightning, and hear the driving thunder of its rain. Reaching out toward them, he touched them, the winds flowing at his call into his hands.

  In a dream, he thought, he might once have felt this. It was both less and more than ecstasy-wholeness, the sensation of being exactly and perfectly what from the beginning of time he had been meant and longed to be. In a dream, or perhaps on certain nights when training his warriors, he had felt the whole body of them answering like a single blazing weapon forged of souls. The winds streamed through his hands, the colors of them visible through the incense smoke, palpable as rippling bolts of silk that he could weave, braid, and twist to his will. Throughout his life he had lied, claiming to revel most in the joys common to other men, knowing none would understand because he did not understand himself. But in his heart of hearts, nothing-not sex, not love, not wealth or drink or victory, had ever come remotely close to this, for which there was no word but magic.

  His soul filled with the bright darkness of it, and he put forth his shadow strength to turn the storm aside. Its power pressed on him, like a wild horse on a breaking line or a sail held in a squall, twisting him, dragging him after it. His magic was insufficient yet, untrained, without technique; he drew against the wind, collecting his strength, trying to remember everything Yirth had taught him ...

  Then he became aware of something in the wind and darkness besides himself.

  Blue like clouds, black like the cold of the air, he seemed to see it through curtain after curtain of illusions. It, too, moved beyond and through the Invisible Circle. It, too, gathered the reins of the wind. The sh
ape of it came and went, edges vanishing, melting, yet always there-in his mind, in the clouds, in the winds, he couldn't tell. But it seemed that a dark hand stretched out toward him in a universe of shadow, darkness streaming from its bony fingers.

  And in his mind he heard the whisper, A little wizardling, is it? A fledgling mage to be my slave.

  Frightened, Sun Wolf tried to draw away, but realized he was too deep within the trance he'd entered in working the weather to escape. The shadow hand moved, sketching signs woven of the storms' lightning, runes weaving a shivering net of ice. Fight! the Wolf thought, but he had no idea how to do so-it was his soul that was being trapped, through the trance, through his own magic, not his body. The runes merged, blended with one another as on a curtain of silk billowing in the dark air all around him, a shining web drawing closer, while his mind screamed No! No! and a thunderclap of voiceless, ecstatic laughter rocked the darkness with triumphant delight.

  And as if remembering a dream, it came to him that he'd seen that dark hand before, a dream-just before the fire at the inn?-of the hand reaching toward him ...

  Wake up! he screamed at himself. Break the trance, damn you! But he had no idea how to do that, either. Trailing the silvery darkness like sticky grave-bands, the hand seemed to grow enormously, the long fingers extending to close him in. Without a body he could not fight. He screamed, I will not serve you ... and laughter again whispered like a chuckle of thunder.

  Wizardling, you will have no choice.

  In the deeps of his trance he could not reach the refuge of his own body, but, like a fragment of a forgotten dream, he conjured a vision to himself, a vision he'd had first as a child, and later in the hallucinatory agonies of the Great Trial: the vision of his own right hand with the flesh seared off it from grasping the fires at the core of his mind. The fire-core, the magic, rose up like a sword in his grip, and with it he slashed at the tangling runes, cleaving them through in a swirling tatter of sparks, flame pouring out the back of his hand through the interstices of the bones. He strode forward to cut at the hand of darkness itself, but he heard-felt-the blazing explosion of an oath, of rage, of pain, and the hand was gone, and he was falling, plunging toward the sea like a black meteor ...

  He cried out, and like the snapping of a twig felt something strike his face-his real face, flesh and skull and stubble. A woman's voice cried "Captain!" and he was struck again, and this time he opened his eyes.

  He was kneeling on the dirt floor of Dogbreath's tent. The pinpricks of the herb fires had all gone out, and the air was cloying with smoke. In the dim glow of a clay lamp, Opium crouched before him.

  He swayed and almost fell, shaking as if with ague and soaked through with perspiration despite the night's cold. The sea scent, the rain scent, of the air was gone, replaced once more by the prickling weight of sullen stillness.

  "Captain?" she said again.

  Agony seared his right hand; he had to look at it to make sure the bones were still clothed in flesh, and felt almost surprised to see the heavy fingers intact, the curly gold hair on their backs not even singed. For a moment, it seemed to him that were the flesh peeled back the bones would be charred within. "Water," he managed to say. "Or tea-something ... "

  Long used to the ways of mercenaries, Opium rose with the leggy grace of an animal and went straight to Dogbreath's cache of two-bit gin. He pushed it away, the mere smell of the alcohol nauseating him. She stood irresolutely for a moment, then rummaged around in the mess and found the water jar. She dipped a cup full, opened Dogbreath's travel chest and brought out two painted tin boxes, dumping half a handful of coarse brown sugar from one and a pinch of salt from the other into the water.

  The draught cleared his head a little. He was shaking all over from the shock, but, as if he were in battle, as if he had fought with his body instead of in spirit, he was already thinking ahead.

  "What hour is it?"

  "Fourth or fifth." She knelt on the floor before him again, hair a cloak of magical darkness over the silk gown of the deep crimson which had made Kwest Mralwe's fortune. In the single lamp's wavering shadows, the golden slave-chain shone at her throat. "The others are still over at Ari's. I came back."

  Remembering the lust in Zane's eyes-whether he had another woman with him or not-Sun Wolf didn't have to ask her why. In the smoke-scented gloom her lips seemed almost purple against the creamy dusk of her skin, darkened with the lees of wine. Earrings hung with dozens of tiny gold flowers twinkled in the endless night of her hair. When she touched his hand, her soft fingers felt warm, soothing.

  "What were you doing?"

  He was aware of her as he had been in the siege tower yesterday evening, aware of wanting her; and he looked away from her and got unsteadily to his feet.

  "Working the weather." He knew now what he'd half seen, half sensed, half dreamed before the fire at the inn-the dark hand reaching toward them, the curse's darkness trailing from its fingers ...

  Her dark brows quirked down. "I thought-earlier tonight I thought ... But then the wind changed."

  "Yeah." He pushed aside the hangings over the tent door and let the night's chill burn his face and the thin soaked strings of his hair. His shirt, his elkskin breeches, and his doublet were damp, the flesh within them cold, as after a fight. Behind him the lamp flickered, and all the crazy shadows of the random hangings, the ribbon-decked bones of saints and bits of chain and straw dangling from the ridgepole, totems, dried vegetables, old embroidered gloves and hanging fragments of glass that Dogbreath collected, all seemed to stir with restless life. The memory of the web of silver runes that had seemed more real to him than his own body and the memory of the strength of that shadow hand lingered like the aftertaste of nightmare.

  But the battle had been real. The attempt to enslave him had been real. And as a fighter, he knew what should be his next, logical move.

  Against the tarry black of the night sky, only his wizard's eye could make out the lampless spires and steeples of Vorsal.

  A touch of warmth, a breathing softness of perfume, brushed his back, and a slim hand rested from behind on his sleeve. "May I stay?"

  "If you want," he said. He turned his head, to look down into her eyes. "I won't be here, though. There's someplace I have to go."

  CHAPTER 5

  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 clo
sing 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 canteloupes 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.