It had been tracing silver runes.
That night he dreamed about the empty pottery bowl filled with darkness. The cracks where it had been smashed to pieces against the wall showed clearly, and darkness leaked through them like smoke, to crawl out along the floor tiles of the empty dining room and seep around the seven little skulls with the candles burning inside. Dimly, Sun Wolf knew that couldn't be. He'd thrown the bits of the bowl into the kitchen midden, had put those seven skulls in one of the potting sheds and drawn the Circles around them, Light side inward, just in case. I should have checked, he thought vaguely. I knew I should have checked.
But what it was that he should have checked he wasn't sure.
He woke shivering, a sense of panic struggling in his chest, perfectly aware that the dream was only a dream, but terrified that, if he should get up now and go to the dining room, he'd see the bowl there, the darkness pouring from it to cover the floor like ground fog, the little skulls grinning their accusation at him with their glowing candle-flame eyes.
It was still dark. He had heard the bells of the Trinitarian cathedral chiming midnight just before he'd started the ritual for the last time, and it must still be an hour before dawn. Moving carefully so as not to wake Starhawk-who slept more soundly since her illness, anyway-he slipped from beneath the bedcovers and collected a wide, fur-lined robe from the lid of the chest next to the bed. It billowed gently around his naked body as he moved on bare and silent feet down the worn oak of the corridor, his eye seeing, as a wizard's do in the dark, all things in a queer violet shadowlessness-the graceful wall niches with their spare statuary which, to his barbarian tastes, looked so insipid, the delicate shaping of door arches, and what little furniture there was. Outside the rain had eased. The sense of having forgotten something, of having known what to check and passed it by, lingered naggingly in his thoughts. For some reason he had the impression of a smell of straw in the air ... coming from the dining room downstairs, he thought, faint but very clear ...
He was two steps down the wide curve of the stairs when he slipped. It was something anyone could have done, descending stairs in the dark, even a night-sighted wizard with the preternatural reflexes of a lifelong athlete. It was only his reflexes which saved him. Afterward, he wasn't sure how his feet happened to jerk out from under him, though the sensation was exactly as if one ankle had been seized from below at the same time someone had thrust him hard between the shoulders. His body was thinking, even as he fell, twisting in the air to grab for the banister. He was moving with such force that his torso swung sideways, colliding with the steps hard enough to leave him breathless and bruised as he caught the polished beechwood of the posts. It was his swearing as much as the thud of the fall that brought Starhawk running to the top of the stairs.
"Stop!" he yelled, hearing the barely detectable pat of her bare feet above him. She halted, trained to instant obedience of his voice in battle.
"You okay, Chief?"
For answer he expressed himself at some length, while climbing painfully to his feet and pulling the robe around him again. He saw her in the dark, naked and beautiful as the death goddess, sword in one hand and knife in the other, a few feet from the top of stairs. The bandages made a pale slash in the gloom. "And no, I'm not okay."
He limped up to her, pushing his thinning tawny hair back from his face. "I fell down the goddam stairs." They looked at one another for a long time in silence.
"You feel all right to travel in this weather?" Sun Wolf glanced sidelong down at the woman jostling through the crowds in the Steel Market by his side. Except for being thinner-and the close cut of the black doublet and hose she wore these days disguised that for the most part-and the cropped hair, which at the moment was mostly hidden by a tall-crowned hat with a cocky feather, Starhawk looked pretty much as she always had, like a killing weapon wrought of peeled bone and alabaster. He knew she still tired easily, though today, wandering through the stalls of the smiths and scissor grinders and weapon makers, some of the cool golden pinkness had returned to her cheekbones.
"Well, naturally I'd like to stay here and nurse my rheumatism all winter by the fire." She shrugged and glanced up between the crowding houses and tenements at the gray millrace of the sky. It wasn't raining for once, but, by the smell of the wind, it would be by nightfall. "But since, if you got killed, there'd be nobody to make coffee the way I like it, I guess I'll force myself." They split to pass on either side of a fat woman selling wheat-straw amulets and Saint's Eyes from a blanket in the middle of the street, the bright-colored tangles of yarn and bead and bone like primitive flowers against the drab gray-yellow of the street and the buildings. Though officially disapproving of such holdovers from the days of the local sorceress-gods, the Church knew better than to try and root out such things. "Let's not go back to Wenshar, though," she added, putting a languid hand to her brow. "The desert air's so hard on my complexion."
"I didn't mind the desert air so much as the ants," Sun Wolf remarked. "We could head east over the mountains or up to the Marches. Grishka of Rhu owes me some favors, and the Goshawk should still be hiding out in Mallincore, if you don't mind garlic and heresy for five months ... "
"Chief," said the Hawk softly, "we're being followed."
Sun Wolf stopped at a knife seller's stand and held a shining bodice dagger up for inspection and to look at the crowd behind him in the mirror of its blade. "Which one?" The relative niceness of the morning had brought citizens, virtually house-bound for the past two weeks by the unstinting storms, out in droves, and the Steel Market was crowded with servants in livery, beggars in rags, students in their gray gowns, and bourgeois gentlemen in the familiar black, white ruffs of varying width and extravagance nodding like dandelion puffs around their strangulated throats. But before the Hawk could reply, he spotted their shadow, cloaked in black and disguised in a blue leather carnival mask, lurking ineptly behind the ornate iron pillars of a public urinal. The cheap rings and the ancient opal signet were visible even in the chancy surface of the knife blade, and the Wolf swore under his breath.
"Right," he muttered, thanked the knife seller, and jostled on his way, turning out of the Steel Market and down a narrow lane that led back toward the river. Starhawk, tilting her hat at a casual angle and fingering her sword hilt, strolled at his heels. The lane, one of the hundreds that crisscrossed Kwest Mralwe's lower quarter like ant tunnels, ran between the high wall of a merchant palace and the grounds of an ancient chapel built, it was obvious, to honor the Mother and later taken over and refurbished when the Trinitarians had ceased to be regarded as heretics, began to be called the New Religion, and started persecuting heretics on their own. The inhabitants of the tenements of both sides had taken over the tiny square of waste ground before its crumbling porch as a drying yard and pasturage for their pigs, and Starhawk stepped deftly behind a tree full of patched sheets to wait while the Wolf strolled farther down the lane.
The black-cloaked man ducked around the end of the lane and tiptoed swiftly along it, hugging the wall and obviously hoping the Wolf wouldn't turn his head at an inopportune moment. Casually oblivious, Sun Wolf stepped around a corner and flattened to the moss-stained wall. The King of Kwest Mralwe emerged at a high-speed skulk a moment later and was seized, slammed against the wall, and unmasked before he had time to so much as gasp for breath. Starhawk materialized a moment later, effectively blocking his flight.
"There something you want to say to me?"
"I ... " the King gasped, and then, a moment after the Wolf released the bunched shirtfront he held, commanded, "Unhand me!" That already having been done, he straightened his sorry ruffles and looked from one to the other with resentment in his watery eyes. "It was necessary to meet you away from That Woman's spies," he declared, pushing back the dark hood from his face. "They are everywhere, even in your own household ... "
"Yeah, the cook and the scullery maid." Sun Wolf folded his heavy arms and regarded the King narrowly.
; The King cleared his throat. "Oh, so you know," he said lamely. Then, regaining his dramatic tone, "Then you know that you only exist here on her sufferance, that whenever she chooses, she can place you under arrest, have you imprisoned, or murdered, as she has others before you."
The Wolf glanced sidelong at Starhawk, though neither's expression changed.
"I sought you out to offer you my protection again, against her, against her servants, and against the Church that she carries like a bauble in her reticule. Can't you see the evil of That Woman? She rules this city! Now that we've conquered Vorsal, she'll have more power, and more, as other cities come under our sway. It's only a matter of time before she offers you a choice-servitude to her, or death ... "
"Like the choice you offered Moggin Aerbaldus?" the Wolf asked quietly.
The weak eyes shifted under his and the pettish mouth grew spiteful. "A useless liar," he spat irritably. "Cowardly, whining-I told him I'd protect him! He wouldn't even light a fire, wouldn't even admit that he could! Just like that filthy old hag in the Gatehouse Quarter ... "
"Skinshab?" the Wolf asked, and the pettish gaze darted back to him.
"Worthless bitch! Claimed she wasn't a witch, either, though all the neighbors knew she was. She'd witched their children during the siege, so they all died ... She even admitted it! They told me so, after the old harridan had locked herself up in that hovel of hers ... "
"And did you kill her," the Wolf asked softly, "as well?"
"She deserved it," the King flared. "We torched the house-gave her a taste of the hellfire she'd go to when she refused to come out! I thought it would drive her out," he added, with a little sigh, the viciousness fading from his eyes and leaving them again slack and a little puzzled. "Or that she'd use her magic to put the fire out. So you see," he added, reaching out one limp hand to touch the Wolf's crimson leather sleeve, "you're the only ones. And believe me, it will be only a matter of time before that poisonous virago Renaeka the Bastard turns her attention to you."
"Interesting," said the Wolf, as they made their way back up the hill toward the comfortable little house with its faithful troop of servant-spies.
"Last night could have been an accident, you know."
"You care to place a small wager on that?"
She said nothing, and they walked in silence for a time, the first, faint patterings of rain beginning to spot the leather of the Wolf's doublet, and catch like jewels in the frail white feather of her hat.
After a time the Wolf went on, "We've got twelve silver pieces and about six strat worth of copper and bits; we might be able to get another fifteen or twenty from Renaeka if we guarantee we're leaving her lands."
"You want to risk that? "
"Not really."
"There's always that bronze mermaid in the front hall," the Hawk pointed out practically. "And the mechanical clock in the study. We could get ten or twelve apiece for them. Would that be enough to keep us through the winter?" Like most mercs, Starhawk hadn't the slightest idea what household expenses ran.
"No," said the Wolf. "But we'll find something."
Her voice was calmly conversational. "I can hardly wait to learn what."
But the decision was taken out of their hands.
The rain thickened as evening drew on, beating heavily on the windows of the study where Sun Wolf sat, branches of candles blazing on either side of him, reading slowly, carefully through the Lesser Demonary. Its later chapters covered quasi-demons, golems, constructs, and elementals, including those which contained spirits-either human or demonic-trapped or drawn into them as their motivating force. It was an ugly magic, and reading it made him glance up half a dozen times at the faded tapestry window curtains to make sure they were indeed shut. He found references to the djerkas there and other, more disturbing things as well, hinted at in shapeless terms that made him curse whatever careless goon had tossed a torch into Moggin's library. In spite of the fur-lined robe he wore over his clothes, he felt cold; as the night deepened, every sound in the quiet house caught his attention like the stealthy creak of floorboards at his back. When someone pounded on the great front door shortly after the Cathedral bells spoke the fifth hour of the night, he almost jumped out of his boots.
Cocking an ear to listen, he heard a servant's voice and then, muffled by distance and weariness, another that twitched at his stomach with a sulking premonition of dread.
" ... Of course I know what time it is, I had to get in the goddam pox-festering city gates, didn't I? Now let me see the Chief and quit arguing before I burn down your outhouse."
Sun Wolf was on his feet and striding swiftly down the tiled hall toward the two figures that stood, framed in a double ring of lamplight from the sconces by the doors, in the dense shadows of the hall. He was peripherally aware of the light tread and tomcat shadow on the stairs that would be Starhawk, but most of his attention was drawn to the butler's stiff-backed shape, and, half-hidden behind it, the bedraggled form whose battered jerkin, ruinous sleeve dags, and sopping braids were dripping puddles of water onto the tiled floor.
"Dogbreath!"
"Chief!" The squad-leader brushed past the scandalized butler and strode toward him, delight beaming from squirrel eyes in a face almost unrecognizable with filth, a week's growth of black beard, and the last extremities of hardship.
"What the hell ... ?" Starhawk's voice said from the stairs.
"Chief, I hate to do this to you," Dogbreath said. "It's a bastard of a thing to ask you after everything that went on, but we're up against it for real. We need you. We need you now, fast. That curse is still on the troop."
CHAPTER 10
"I don't understand it, chief. " Ari got up and poured full the cups that stood on the camp table of inlaid ebony-the cups of green lacquer and gold, which, like the table, the tent, the gold-bound staghorn chair to which the young captain returned to slouch, had all been Sun Wolf's once. Starhawk, sitting quietly on the X-shaped black-oak seat which had customarily been hers, noted how slowly Ari was moving, like a man forced to work at the stretch of his endurance at some hard physical labor, day in and day out and far into the night-a man whose strength is fast running out. In his eyes under the heavy brows she saw he knew it. Outside, rain pounded in whirling frenzy on the canvas tent. Inside, it dripped drearily through a dozen flaws and leaks and faulty seams, making hard little splatting noises on the sodden, carpetless mud underfoot. The braziers filled the air with smoke without warming it one whit.
"Things went from bad to worse after the sack. We got the hell out of there the morning after we were paid. We didn't even wait to divvy the take, just counted it and pulled stakes. But I've never seen so many things go wrong in my life."
The liquid in the cups wasn't wine. It was White Death, the cheapest grade of gin mixed with hot water. The wine, Starhawk gathered, had all gone rancid in its skins a day or two out of Kwest Mralwe. So had most of the flour they'd bought for the journey to Wrynde, a journey intended to be accomplished in record time and which had, instead, been plagued by every delay known to equipment, beast, or humankind. "I swear, Chief, we broke seven axles in one day!" Ari gestured with one bandaged hand, a wound received in the sack and still unhealed. "After the third one, I personally went through every wagon and cart in the train, and by the Three Gods' witness, they were all sound! I've never been that close to crying and kicking my heels on the ground in my life! And three the next day, and all the time the men fighting over whose fault it was, stealing liquor and bread from each other ... Even the slaves we took from the sack of the town are fighting each other! EACH OTHER for Gods' sakes! Horses and oxen going sick like they'd been poisoned-which I'll take oath they weren't-trees falling in our path, bridges out, a bad lot of beer that kept everybody puking for two days ... We never even made it over the Narewitch Bridge before the rains began."
Sun Wolf was silent, his single eyelid drooping in speculative thought.
For herself, the Hawk recalled well the inner sigh she alwa
ys heaved when the troop had passed northbound over the three stone arches of that half-ruined bridge. The Narewitch marked the northern bounds of the Middle Kingdoms. In the twisted lava gorges of the badlands of the Gniss River and its tributaries, the going was harder-swollen streams, broken roads, rockslides-but at least the troop was out of danger of delay by some last-minute permutation of Middle Kingdom religious politics. To her, the bridge had always meant freedom-freedom to rest, to meditate, to train, to be what she was for a winter season before the summer required her to go back to her job as killer again. It was the first familiar landmark on the road home.
The thunder of the rain increased. Starhawk's practiced ear picked up the river's booming-the Gore, not the Khivas, which was the worst of the western tributaries. She and the Wolf had nearly been killed crossing that one yesterday.
The camp had been set at the high end of a bay in the red-black cliffs, where the brutal chasm of the Gore widened over a rocky ford. The shepherds of the Gore Thane's Fort pastured their sheep here in the spring, until the herdboys reported the yearly approach of the mercenaries on their way south. The Gore Thane-nominal lord of this barren corner of the badlands-left them alone, and they, in turn, forbore to molest such stray shepherds or merchants as they might encounter. In the spring, they'd be hurrying south or east to whatever war they were fighting that summer. In the fall, when this sheltered hillock was bare of the spring's grass and the Gore ran low and snarling in the rocky tangle of its ford, they'd be heading north as fast as they could to reach Wrynde before the rains began.
Once, she remembered, they'd been caught late and had to ford in the first of the floods. Oxen, horses, baggage wagons had been swept away in the white riptide; a man who lost his footing would be pulped against the boulders and washed downstream like a bug in a gutter. No one went after them to see if they survived. Any delay in the crossing would only mean the next river-the Black-would be that much more swollen.
Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt Page 18
