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

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  Nothing. Only a whisper of wind turning a strand of his hair against the ragged black linen of his shirt collar, and a half-heard flitter, like blown leaves.

  Must have been rats.

  Mustn't it?

  In the black overcast another man would have been groping with his hands. To the Wolf's odd, colorless night vision the ruins round him were clear, shadowless, black within black within black-walls and shattered beams, furniture and siege equipment, weapons and dishes, all pulped together into a barely recognizable mass, all stinking, all rotted, all swarming with vermin. This close, he could smell the smoke and carrion of the city, the overwhelming stench of night soil dumped from the walls. Even the pools and puddles of standing water did not gleam, but looked like flat patches of blackness on black ground. Without light to reflect, the eyes of the rats did not flash.

  So he saw no glint, no slip of light along metal ... he didn't know what it was that caught his eye. Perhaps a sound, metal scraping on stone, soft and vicious-perhaps the faint, sudden mustiness of oil.

  Then it moved again, and he saw the thing clearly.

  For one single, shocked second, he knew why some women screamed.

  The thing was as big as the biggest dog he'd ever seen, almost the size of a man. But its body was slung low, round and flat to the ground like a monster cockroach, the knees of its four angular legs rising high above the oily black metal of its back, its arms protruding in bars of jointed metal, slipping cable, and razor-tipped, articulated claws. It resembled nothing so much as a giant spider, headless, eyeless, like a vast metal puppet frozen for a suspended instant at the lip of a defensive trench.

  Then it moved.

  With a yell of terror Sun Wolf sprang back over the wall behind him, fumbling for his sword even as the logical portion of his mind asked what target he should strike for on that steel carapace. The thing flung itself at him over the trampled ground of no-man's-land, moving with blinding speed, leg cables scissoring, razored claws snatching, all its metal joints whispering with an oily hiss. He ran back toward the higher ruins at the edge of the battlefield, and it scooted after him, oblivious alike to trenches and spikes, the articulated claws of its feet cutting little crescents in the rucked earth. Don't be stupid, he thought, it can outrun you, it'll never tire and you will ... The low ruins around him offered no cover-the taller shapes of the burned-out houses seemed impossibly far away.

  The thing was only a dozen yards behind him when he plunged into the first of the standing ruins. He tripped over something soft that stank and rolled in the shadow pools of a shattered kitchen, flung himself toward the crazy ruins of what had been the stair to the skeleton of the upper floor. The thing sprang after him, long legs twisting nimbly over the nameless muck on the floor. The Wolf knew he had to be fast, deadly fast, for the thing was faster than he ... if it caught him he was a dead man, and he had only seconds ...

  The crazy stair lurched under his weight, scorched beams reeling drunkenly down from the darkness at him. The creature swarmed up after him like a roach up a wall, jointed metal knees pistoning faster than his own flesh and bone. Seconds ...

  A razor claw ripped his back, cold metal, colder air, the steaming heat of his own blood. He grabbed a beam and threw himself over the side of the stair, swinging his weight full into the supporting struts, praying he hadn't miscalculated and wouldn't break his leg when he hit the floor. His body crashed into the fire-weakened joists that held the stairway up, a hundred and ninety pounds of whipping muscle and bone. The burned-out wood collapsed like a house of cards, bringing a torrent of seared timbers, rotted thatch, and startled rats down with it.

  The creature-spider, monster, killing machine-fell in the midst of the tangle, landing on its back, half-buried in debris. A metal arm snatched and claws whined as Sun Wolf ducked, grabbed the heaviest rafter he could find and heaved it on top of the waving legs. Broken timbers bucked with the thing's struggling strength and he sprang back and ran, heart pounding, all weariness forgotten. He barely heard the shouts of the guards on the wall, the zing of the arrows they sent flying after him-the most viciously barbed warhead now no more terrifying than a flea bite. He stumbled, fell, muck and water and worse things splattering him, and scrambled to his feet faster than he'd ever have thought possible, running on, running for his life as he'd never run before.

  He reached the camp sick, nauseated with exertion and terror, lungs splitting and pulse hammering. Ari, Dog-breath, and the Little Thurg-the only poker players still futilely pushing the same twelve coppers back and forth among a musky frowst of sleeping concubines and empty winecups-didn't even ask what pursued him, but at his gasped command seized whatever pole arms were handy and grouped around him, waiting ...

  And waiting.

  Still standing around him, they listened over their shoulders while he told what had attacked him in the ruins of the houses. After half an hour they relaxed enough to produce some food-the bread had not risen and the beans were crunchy-and after an hour, they returned, watchfully and with one guard always posted, to the poker game. Though he was exhausted, and, by this time, they were tired as well, Sun Wolf stayed awake, playing poker in Penpusher's wet and filthy black clothes, until dawn.

  Nobody ever got more than two of a kind.

  And the creature, whatever it was, made no appearance at the camp.

  For a long while after she woke Starhawk lay in darkness, wondering where she was.

  Her woozy disorientation frightened her-the knowledge that if trouble came she was in no shape either to fight or run. Her head hurt her, as it had since ... since something that for a moment eluded her ... but the pain focused and intensified itself until she was almost nauseated, and her battered limbs felt weak. And there was something else, some sense of terrible danger, something that had wakened her in this darkness ...

  Where?

  The convent? In her dreams she'd heard the small silver voice of the bells speaking the holy hours, calling the nuns to their reverences. For a moment she felt a flash of guilt that she lay still abed. Mother Vorannis would miss her at the chapel ... though she felt sick, she had never missed the deep-night vigils ...

  No, she thought. If this was the convent where she'd grown from girl to woman, she'd be able to hear the throb of the sea mauling at the cliffs below, see the moonlight where it lanced cold and patchy through the smoke hole of her stone beehive cell. The night would smell of the rock barrens and ocean, not be thick with the scent of a hundred thousand hearths and privies, nor weighted with this dreadful, louring closeness.

  Then the bells chimed again, near and sweet. She sensed somewhere the soundless pat of feet in stone passageways and the murmur of nuns chanting the Mother's ancient names. Beyond the darkness she felt the Circle that turned, eternal and invisible, through the Being that was both Life and Death.

  It was a convent, then ...

  Mother Vorannis' face returned to her as her eyelids slipped shut again. In a gray frame of her shabby veils, the long nose, the V-shaped, agile lips, and the bright green eyes seemed overlaid with the spin of the years, at once young and middle-aged, like ivory slowly turning color. She realized she didn't even know whether Mother Vorannis still lived.

  The pain hit her, making her head throb so that she wanted to wrench it off her spine and throw it away. Very clearly, she saw Mother Vorannis, standing in the corroded limestone arch between two cells, like a too-thin standing stone herself in the wan daylight, talking to a man ...

  And Starhawk-though that had not been her name then-had been walking across the mossed stone and heather of the overgrown court, her colorless habit smudged all over with dirt and a pruning knife in her hand. The smell of the sky that day filled her, wet and cold with the coming of the storms, the salt pungence of the ocean, and the musky reek of damp earth. She'd been cutting the convent rose trees. Alien to the north, they were her particular care; she'd looked after them for ten bitter winters, wrapping them against the cold, begging dead fish from the
kitchens to bury in the stony soil at their roots, caring for them as she'd once cared for her mother's gardens. And it struck her, as she gazed back into the past at that tiny crystal scene, that she hadn't so much as asked anyone to take care of her roses when she left.

  Or to take care of Mother Vorannis.

  Because the man Vorannis was talking to had turned and stepped into the watery glitter of the pale day, red-blond hair a flaring halo around the craggy, broken-nosed face. His beer-colored eyes had met hers, eyes she felt she had known-should have known, would know-all her life.

  She had said nothing. Never in her life had she known what to say. But when he'd ridden on the next day, scrounging food from the villages and farms of the cold northwest, she'd been with him. At the time she had never thought to ask someone else to tend the roses and not to let them die, had never asked how badly it had hurt Mother Vorannis to have the gawky, inarticulate Sister she had taught and cared for since girlhood turn her back upon her with no more words than a muttered "I have to go."

  But as the nuns all said, one may run for years along the track of the Invisible Circle, and the Invisible Circle will always lead home.

  Then she heard it again, in the night's deep silence, and remembered what had happened to her, why she was here, and what it was that had waked her with sweat standing cold on her face.

  It was the creak of a leather strap and the faint, ringing brush of steel armor against the arch that led onto the balcony outside her cell.

  The pound of her pulse for a moment threatened to sicken her, crushing like a nutcracker on her brain. Then it steadied-she made it steady-and she listened again. Earlier in the night, she could have sworn it was going to rain, but the wind slept once more. The night was still, overcast and dark as if a blanket had been thrown over her head, but she remembered the layout of the tiny room. The thick archway with its squat pilasters was to her left; the doorway into the corridor, to her right.

  Without a sound her hand slid under her pillow, and came up empty. It didn't even occur to her to curse, for whatever was happening might limit her time to seconds, and she was already turning, with the soft murmur of sleep, to slip her hand under the mattress. The Chief, may the Mother bless his balding head, hadn't forgotten where she habitually stowed her weapons. The Sisters had probably insisted on putting her sword and larger dagger away, but he'd managed to leave her with one of her hideouts, a six-inch blade with barely a ripple of a tang to the grip.

  That in hand, she muttered again and turned once more, humping the covers over her and sliding like an eel to the floor. The room was a box of night. Even the night rail she wore, the bleached homespun woven in all the Mother's convents-including those in the greatest cloth-making city in the west-would be invisible. As she bellied soundlessly over the tiles, she wondered if she'd be able to stand. Her legs felt weaker than they had even this afternoon. Odds on there'd be men in the corridor ... Did this mean the Chief was in trouble, too?

  Somehow she groped her way to her feet, breathless with the exertion, found the door in the dark and pressed her ear to it. An oiled lantern slide hissed. Yellow light struck her, blinding her in a momentary explosion of pain that seemed to blast to the back of her skull as she swung around, knife in hand. For a disorienting second she thought there were a dozen men in an endless colonnade of window arches. Then they solidified into three men, one arch, and one smaller figure whose white hand on the lantern slide flashed with gems.

  "Don't go out that way, Warlady," said a voice she recognized from years gone by as that of Renaeka Strata. "My men are in the corridor. I think you'd probably be safer in my house than you would be here."

  CHAPTER 6

  " 'Kidnap' is a hard word, captain. " Against the queer, dead dun of the morning sky visible through the trefoiled points of the study windows, Renaeka Strata had the appearance of an exotic flower in her gown of pink and white. Entirely apart from the pearls which covered it, the gown itself was an advertisement for her wealth. Kwest Mralwe's silks, the Wolf knew, with their vivid delicacy of coloring, cost a fortune on the market, and there had to be thirty yards of the stuff hung around that skinny frame.

  He growled, "So's 'extort' and 'assassinate,' words which rumor also attribute to the Lady Prince."

  She raised her ostrich-plume fan modestly, like a woman who simpers "Oh, this old rag," of a dress which cost some poor grut the price of a good farm and everything on it. "Well," she purred deprecatingly, "we all do what we must." The fan retreated, and the hazel eyes lost their coquettishness, becoming again the eyes of a king. "I spoke only the truth, Commander. She is safer here than she would be among the Sisters."

  Sun Wolf opened his mouth to retort, then remembered his conversation with the King, and shut it again. His eye narrowed as he studied this thin, erect woman, in her pearl-crusted gown and preposterous maquillage, and he wondered how far she could be trusted. "May I see her?"

  "But of course." She rang a bell, the note of it silver and small among the plaster arabesques of the study's pendant ceiling, and a girl page appeared. "See if the Lady Starhawk is able to receive visitors," she instructed coolly, and the girl bowed and hurried away in a dragonfly flash of green and gold. "She may even leave here with you, if you both insist. I don't advise it and I won't permit you to take her out of here against her will. My physicians tell me she isn't well." Those cool dappled eyes raked him, taking in the deepening of the lines that bracketed mustache and mouth, the bruise of sleeplessness that turned his one eye pale as yellow wine, and the scabbing-over abrasions on his high forehead he hadn't even felt last night. "You look less than rampant yourself."

  "A touch of the vapors."

  Her thin mouth flexed with amusement, and she offered him her smelling salts in the bottle of cut rose crystal half the size of his fist. With a grin he waved them away, the wizard in him wondering what spices had gone to scent that aromatic vinegar while the mercenary priced the bottle at nearly two gold pieces-three, if your buyer was honest. He was interested to note how the Lady Prince's smile etched a whole new network of lines in her face under the heavy plaster of cosmetics, the wrinkles of ready humor eradicating for that fleeting instant the deep gravings of sleeplessness, stress, and cruelty. It was the first time he'd seen her truly at ease.

  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 a
ny 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.