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

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  "I know."

  "And it is, after all, the object of the siege," Purcell pointed out, hastening to back up anything the Lady might say. "Believe me, you will be well paid ... "

  "Pay isn't the reason I'm doing this!" He swung around upon the little man, stung with the knowledge of his own evil, and saw the affronted surprise in that collapsed pinkish face. "God's grandmother, don't you people ever think about anything but money?"

  "Of what use is your power, if not to give you a good living?" the Councillor inquired, with very real puzzlement. "I should think that now that you are too old to lead a mercenary troop, you would welcome another way of making an even better living without effort, something which will guarantee you a comfortable old age. Isn't that what we all do?"

  "NO!" Anger filled him, stung by the words "too old," but with it a curious cold sickness, a disgust with them and with himself. When he had been a mercenary, he realized, there had never been a wrong course-only inept, inefficient, or erroneous ones. He had been paid, and that was that. It was different now.

  "No," he said again, softly now. "That's what a bandit does."

  The banker's thin little mouth hardened, and he tucked his hands into the fur muff he carried. "Well, really ... "

  Or a merchant, he thought belatedly.

  "It isn't-It's different with power," he said clumsily, groping for what he meant and knowing they would not understand, for he did not understand it himself. It was another reason, he realized, that he needed training with an experienced wizard, not only to learn to put that rationale into words, but to have someone else who understood that it was needed. "I can't sell it ... I can't use it without knowing in myself that what I'm doing is ... is right ... " It wasn't exactly what he meant and he knew he'd lost them by the cool glint in the Lady Prince's eye.

  "And does the distinction you make mean that a thing will be right when it is done for one reason, and wrong if done for another? Particularly when the results are exactly the same?"

  "I suppose you mean," Purcell put in, tilting his skullcapped head to one side, "that you feel there's a taboo of some kind on the use of your powers. But if so, wherein lies the difference between wizards using power for what they think is worthwhile and using it for what another thinks is worthwhile, especially if that other is able to take a wider view?"

  "I don't know!" Sun Wolf said, backed into a corner now, angry, outmaneuvered, and wondering why he hadn't simply stuck to killing people for his living.

  "But that's nonsense! Really, you're like an artist refusing to buy bread by taking commissions or a skilled accountant refusing to use his skills for his own benefit by working for a wealthy man ... "

  Renaeka gestured impatiently. Purcell, though more earnest than the Wolf had ever seen him, pinched shut his mouth and looked at her protestingly, truly not understanding, as quarreling lovers say, "what the fuss is about." Awkward silence hovered for a moment, broken only by the crackle of the scented torches and the dull background of overseers' voices as they counted the slaves for the night. Then, with a kind of prim self-satisfaction and a glance at his ruler, Purcell began, "And in any case you really have no choice. We have ... "

  "Be silent!" Renaeka Strata didn't raise her voice-though she could do so with hair-raising effect if it would get her what she wanted-but the venom of her tone was even worse. Purcell flinched and seemed to look around for a small hole in the ground into which to crawl, and Sun Wolf, knowing Starhawk's name had been on his lips, balled his fists hard on a red surge of anger. Just for an instant, he caught the glance Purcell gave his mistress, a glance of protest, of resentment, in which, like a hidden glass splinter, gleamed hate.

  But if she was aware of this, she said nothing. With her usual smooth graciousness she turned back to the Wolf. "I will not ask it of you, then. But you will watch?"

  He turned his face away from them, looking past the ring of torches set up in the open space of the park, past the dull knees of the hills to the south, as if beyond them he could see the black walls, the lightless towers of Vorsal against the unnatural sky. It stood to reason that the hex marks-if the hex marks were in fact made on the machines and not somewhere else in the camp-couldn't be made by a confederate, that Moggin had to be coming into the camps himself-didn't it?

  He didn't know and cursed his ignorance, his lack of training that put not only himself but all his friends in peril of their lives. As had been the case in trying to explain magic to these two grasping and money-loving merchants, he felt helpless, awash in a sea of things he simply did not know, and anger stirred in him again, like a goaded beast's, undirected and dull.

  "Yeah," he said softly, to the hills, to the torches, to the night. "Yeah, I'll watch."

  "And was your mother a witch?"

  Renaeka Strata, standing at the half-opened curtain of the window of the small dining room, moved her head a little, her cold white profile thin and hook-nosed and suddenly very old against the dark. She had taken off her wig, covering the thin, lackluster hair of an ageing woman with a close-fitting velvet cap like a man's. Instead of the gorgeous dresses she changed into and out of all day, she wore a loose robe of equal gorgeousness, voided velvet colored as only the velvets of Kwest Mralwe could be colored, the luminous violet of sunset with a collar of shagged silk soft as fur. Only her hands were the same, incredibly long, incredibly narrow, white as a spirit's hands and thick with a lifetime's ransom of jewels.

  "I don't think so, no."

  She turned slowly and came back to the table, where Starhawk still sat like a well-mannered young boy in her petaled neck ruff and head bandages. The servants had cleared away the remains of the meal which the Lady Prince had asked her guest to share with her in privacy; the musicians who had played softly in a corner of the chamber had departed. A lute, a psaltry, and a painted porcelain flute still lay on the bright-blue cushions of their ivory stools; the candlelight that warmed the room picked out the gold spider strands of strings, the hard flicks of the bright tuning keys, softening where it cast shadows like mottled water on the molded plaster of the wall behind.

  Wine gleamed like liquid rubies in goblets of gold-mounted nacre and nautilus shell. The smell of meats was in the air, with that of the patchouli in an ornate table jar of enamel and gold. Voices and the noise of traffic jangled faintly from the street outside, for this room was close to the front of the house. In a pierced bronze brazier close by charcoal flickered, warming the room; as the Lady Prince held her hands out toward it, the amber glow edged her long fingers in rose and called secret colors from the hidden hearts of her jewels.

  Her voice, with its veined sweetness of silver and rust, was low. "Had she been a witch, she would not have staked her power, her very life, upon the lust of a man. Had she been a witch, she would not have had to. My mother was a greedy woman, wanting money, wanting power, and wanting to control men-wanting especially to control my father, and through him all that the wealth of the House could buy. With the alum mines that were his first wife's dowry, he'd become truly the ruler of Kwest Mralwe, and she wanted that. But had she been truly a witch, she'd have been able to control him with more than his lust-an evanescent bridle at best, particularly in my father's case. And had she been truly a witch, she'd have been able to keep him from learning of her infidelities far longer than she did."

  She turned her hands over, above the jewel bed of the glowing coals. "They burned her," she said after a time. "Publicly, in the square, clothed only in a rag of a white shift-though the servants who told me about it when I was four said she was naked-and in her hair, which was black and reached her knees. They do that to the mage-born in the Middle Kingdoms, you know. She'd lost most of her beauty by then, I'm told-she lost it when she miscarried my brother-and my father repudiated her, but it was noticed he didn't take his old wife back, nor return her dowry. In many ways I'm more like him than her."

  "I'm sorry," Starhawk said softly. Sun Wolf had not told her that.

  Renaeka Strata shru
gged. "It was a long time ago," she said. "And she was far too vain and taken up with fascinating every young man in the city to have much time for me, in any case. I don't think, even had she had power, she'd have known what to do with it, how to make it work for her-always provided such power exists, as your friend seems to think."

  "It exists," Starhawk said, unconsciously echoing the Wolf's assertion.

  The older woman smiled, her eyes suddenly warm. "If it does, I've never seen it. And with Church law on the subject as it is, I'll hold to that disbelief for everyone's sake. Ill luck is ill luck, and someone is always bound to benefit from it, as Purcell did when old Greambus's dye lots all turned the year of the King of Dalwirin's coronation, or as I did, when that dreadful brother of his fell down the stairs."

  "Perhaps," the Hawk said softly, "your mother merely chose to use her powers for other things-to bring her a man she wanted beyond sense or reason-and didn't look beyond that."

  That sharp face, so old in its narrow frame of colorless hair and dull purple velvet, turned toward her with a wry expression, the flames picking out all the intricate tracery of lip and eye wrinkles that cosmetics usually hid. "It scarcely explains why she'd stand by and let them burn her."

  "Maybe she wasn't a very good witch and didn't know how to escape," the Hawk pointed out, folding her bony hands together in the elongated linen flowers of her cuffs. "Maybe the miscarriage you spoke about wearied her, drained her, to the point where she couldn't summon the power. And maybe," she added more softly, "when the man she loved repudiated her, she simply didn't care."

  She winced suddenly, the fine muscles of her jaw twisting into flame-touched relief as a stab of pain in her head left her breathless. She opened her eyes and, for a moment, saw two figures, columns of damson shadow blazing in a firestorm of jewels, bending toward her, white hands reaching ...

  Then they resolved themselves into the Lady Prince.

  "Are you all right, child?"

  Starhawk managed to nod, cursing herself for showing weakness. "Fine," she whispered, wanting more than anything to lie down and not certain that she could negotiate the marble corridors as far as her room. If she were attacked now, she thought giddily, she wouldn't stand a chance. She could barely remember where she'd put her hideout knives.

  The crystal tone of the Lady's bell was like another spear going through her brain. "I just need rest," Starhawk said haltingly, and forced herself to rise. The room doubled, reeled, then stabilized again; embarrassed and feeling ridiculously shy, she started for the door. Another pain struck her, buckling her knees, and Renaeka, who had been walking close beside her, waiting for that, caught her in arms surprisingly strong, and lowered her to the floor.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the dead, waiting calm of the night Sun Wolf watched, listening to the darkness.

  All day and evening the wind had been still. He had dozed for an hour after Renaeka Strata had left, and had shared the guards' rations, but always, it seemed, with one ear cocked toward the east. When he slept, his uneasy dreams had been a confusion of cloud and storm. Later, sitting in the pooled-ink shadow of a siege tower, facing out into the night, he had cautiously conjured winds.

  Though unable to summon them against a natural inclination without sinking into the moving trance of deep magic-something he feared to do, now-he was able to herd and coax a kind of gentle push of land breezes eastward, to thrust against the cold masses over the sea. It was the most he could do, though his hands, his spirit, ached with holding back from more, and he cursed his ignorance again-his ignorance of weather; his ignorance of the healing that he was coming more and more to sense that Starhawk needed; his fatal ignorance of the magic of ill.

  He knew he shouldn't have to track down the ill-wisher like an assassin and kill him with his hands. There had to be other ways to finesse around a lack of power. His methods of healing were inefficient, he only bulled his way through on strength when he should have used skill. As a warrior and a teacher of warriors he knew that only worked until you met someone stronger.

  Worry clawed him like a rat chewing in a wall. In thirty years' experience with physical mayhem, he had seen thousands of head wounds, and he hadn't liked Starhawk's pallor that morning, or the lines of strain around her eyes. Glad as he'd been to see her out of bed, there was a part of him that had wanted to order her down again. She shouldn't have been up, shouldn't have been sitting with him ...

  But, by his ancestors, it had been good to talk to her again!

  The warm land breeze stirred his tawny hair, and he watched its footprint pass him in the nodding weeds. Far down the dark line of the coast he could see the lights of the City Troops, camped in the ruins of Vorsal's little port. By this time next year, those ruins would be replaced by warehouses, ropewalks, and the barracoons of slaves; the wharves would bristle with mastheads bearing the red-and-blue banners of the Pierced Heart.

  On the way out to the engineering park to meet Purcell, he had ridden past the decaying walls of the ancient Royal Palace. Through unguarded gates rusted open, the Wolf had glimpsed unswept courtyards and a weed-choked portico, empty of life save for one laundress taking a shortcut with a basket of washing on her arm. The contrast with the city's markets, with the lively chaos of money and fine clothes around any of the great merchant houses-the Stratii, the Cronesmae, the Balkii-was glaring. No wonder the King wanted a tame wizard, to win him back power in this land.

  Feet soughed the long grass in the windless silence, too light and furtive for the measured swish of the patrolling guard. Catlike the Wolf rose and slid into the shelter of one of the tower's wheel housings. Not Moggin already, he thought, following the dry breath with his ears. In any case he refused to believe that the master wizard's coming would be detected so easily. A confederate after all?

  Then the breeze that flowed along the side of the hill threw wide the corner of a cloak, and brought, above the stinks of raw wood and hides and smoke, a strand of dark perfume. Edging the hood as blown snow edges a drift crest, he glimpsed the unraveling tangle of hair. The dim phosphor of reflected torchlight from within the circle of the engines picked from the dense shadows a thread of golden chain.

  Or a distraction ?

  He said, "Opium?" softly, and she spun, catching her breath at finding him so near.

  He stepped from the shadow.

  "They said you were here." Black hair spilled forth as she put back her hood; again he had to remind himself not to touch. "Do you mind if I walk with you for a while?"

  "We've got to be fifteen miles from the camp," he pointed out, starting to move widdershins along the outer edge of the park, his one eye scanning the formless land where the blocky shadows of the towers and rams blurred into the darkness. "Don't walk on my right," he added, and wondered, for a brief splinter of a moment, how much he could trust this woman to walk in the darkness on his blind side. He ought, he supposed, to send her away.

  "Not if you come straight overland," Opium's voice replied, husky and a little high above the continuous soft rustle of her skirts on the grass. In Ari's company last night, he'd seen her wear her company face, bright and saucy and quick. Now, as he'd seen her first among the ruined siege engines of the camp, she was more subdued, with a kind of shy thoughtfulness behind her soft chatter. "I can go back that way. I was in the city this evening." She nodded toward the fairy-tale glitter of Kwest Mralwe's domes and turrets, spilling down the shape of its invisible hillside to throw a broken carpet of reflections on the lamp-sewn river below. "Sorry-I look a mess, I know-I barely had a moment to comb my hair ... "

  The thick braids hanging at her temples smelled of sweetgrass and herbs; kohl deepened the subtle colors of her eyes. "You look fine," he murmured.

  "I just didn't want to go back just yet."

  "You can leave, you know," the Wolf said quietly after a time. "Leave the troop, I mean, if Zane's really giving you hardship."

  "And do what? Dance in taverns where I'd have to sleep with the customers a
nd pay the innkeeper for the privilege? I've got money in Wrynde, all Geldark's-my man's-savings, and a little I saved, dancing at Bron's tavern during the winter. If I can get back there and get it, I can come south again in the spring." With a quick, wild gesture, she scooped aside the dark cloud of her hair where it snagged her cloak collar, shook it out, and with practiced fingers adjusted its delicate tendrils around her face. Sun Wolf found himself wanting very much to see her dance. "But for a woman by herself, it takes a lot of money to stay free, you know? I've seen them. Even the highest-paid women in town have keepers."

  She moved closer to him as they walked, and he forced himself to be ready for an attack from that direction, though he didn't seriously think she was Moggin's confederate-if there was such a thing-inside the camp. And that, he added to himself, was probably fortunate. It was difficult enough to watch, not only the empty lands on three sides of the engineering park but the park itself, with only one eye, without having her soft, inconsequential chatter covering possible sounds and soothing his mind with the warm pleasure of her presence. But he was loath to send her away. And he could manage, he told himself.

  At one point in their circuit of the park he said, "Look, Opium, if I tell you to run, you RUN-run screaming back to the middle of the park where the fires are and get the guards. Even if it looks like I need help, you don't help, you get help, as much of it as you can and as fast as you can. All right?"

  "But if that-that thing that attacked you last night-comes back, by the time I get guards you could be dead." She moved anxiously, to get into the line of his sight, but his face was turned away from her, watching the dark. On guard duty it was fatal to have anything block his view.

  "And so could you."