Sun Wolf jerked to his feet, pole arm ready, and flung himself with his back to the nearest wall. If he could flip the thing on its back, he thought grimly, it would buy him time to make it to his horse ...
But the scuttering thing of metal and spikes that flashed forth in the gloom from the darkness of the half-collapsed mine entrance didn't come at him. It went for the horse.
Maddened, the beast flung its head up again, breaking the tether, wheeled on its hind legs and bolted. His back to the lichenous rubble of the old shed, the Wolf watched in horror as the djerkas whipped over the stones in pursuit, springing with greater and greater bounds until one final leap put it on the frenzied animal's rump, its hooked razor claws burying themselves in the shoulders. The horse screamed and fell, rolling, hooves threshing, but could not shake off the lead-colored metal shape. Unconcerned, the djerkas pulled its way almost leisurely along the convulsing body to rip the throat.
As blood fountained quickly out to splatter the colorless landscape with red, Sun Wolf understood what was going to happen-understood, and knew there wasn't a damn thing he could do. There was no time to make any kind of protective circle or rite. In any case his magic was spent, ground away to exhaustion by his endless battle against the weather, the plague, the curse. As the vicious, bounding thing of black metal wheeled and scurried toward him like a monstrous roach, he knew that he couldn't spare a second's concentration from it anyway. Hopeless, he braced the butt of the pole arm against the rock behind him, readying himself as he would for boar and knowing either way he was doomed.
It stopped inches short of the pike, slashed at him with twelve-inch crescents of bloodied steel. As he whipped the halberd blade to catch and pivot the claws, he glimpsed a darkness, a kind of smoke, emerging from the mine shaft which had hidden the djerkas. It snagged at his attention-a shadow hand floating in the twilight, reaching out to him ...
Then that hand was in his mind, pouring like smoke through his one remaining eye, through his skull, through his nerves. As with an inner vision, he saw it flow into his body, the dark hand's skeletal fingers tracing silver runes as it went, runes that streamed like silver liquid down the screaming fibers of his nerves, freezing to them in tendrils of quicksilver ice. He was barely aware of the djerkas ripping the pike from his nerveless grip; in his numbed, dreaming horror, he could raise no hand against it, nor did he need to. His mind bellowing, twisting in despair against the absolute lassitude of his flesh, a detached part of him thought, No. It won't be that easy. The djerkas didn't move-slow and soft, the chuckle of triumph whispered all around him and grew.
He felt the dark hand flex, curling its fingers around his brain. The whisper of laughter swelled to the roll of summer thunder as the hand stretched and coiled, a black worm now tightening its evil strength like thick and living rope around the fibers of his spine, the silver runes becoming tendrils that lodged, stuck, and clung to bones, bowels, heart.
The djerkas stepped aside.
"So, wizardling," whispered a voice he knew, "now you are mine."
Slowly, numbly, in spite of the bonfire rage tearing him to pieces, he dropped to his knees. He fought to scream, to curse, to bellow at the gray form emerging from the dark of the mine shaft, walking toward him with calm deliberation, the silver darkness of runes and power like a halo around it, the shadow hand almost visible, binding him to his new master's mind and will.
CHAPTER 13
"You seen the chief?" Starhawk had to yell the question at Dogbreath, her hands cupped around her mouth to make herself heard over the screaming of the wind. The freezing storm had swept down from the northern hills a few hours after sunset, turning the rain to sleet, the mud underfoot to bitter slush. Looking down into the square from the lee of the gate tower, she could see shadows moving back and forth across the chinks of light below, where men still worked at repairing the hospital and the barns. It made her uneasy. True, there wasn't much likelihood of an attack under these conditions, but Dogbreath was the only other guard she'd met on her circuit of the wall walk's dozen stumpy towers.
"He was in the Armory earlier!" Dogbreath yelled back, the ends of his braids whipping crazily where they stuck out from beneath the several colored woolen scarves wrapped around his neck. "Went there when he came in around sunset. Gods know where he is now!"
She frowned, peering through the swirling dark at that blind and massive tower. Sun Wolf could, she supposed, be on the trail of some clue as to the hex's origins, for most of the campaign gear was now stored in the tangled complex of galleries and lofts. Or he could simply be seeking solitude.
For the last four years of her tenure in the troop, Starhawk herself had lived in one of the Armory lofts. That was after the last of her brief and uneasy love affairs had terminated with her partner's death in the siege of Laedden. Sleeping there, she'd been aware that men and women, warriors and camp hangers-on, had frequently gone to simply sit in one of those dim little rooms, among crowded shelves and racks, working alone on some project-new straps on a cuirass, sharpening a knife, or throwing a hand ax at a target in the long main gallery-for hours at a time in the quiet.
But the memory of what had happened in the pink stone house in Kwest Mralwe came back to her, and she felt uneasy at the thought of the Wolf being too long alone.
Thus, when she came off duty at midnight, she descended the slippery twist of battlement stair and worked her way around the square in the lee of the wall. Leaving the shelter of the crumbling old colonnade, she fought her way against the wind across open ground to the Armory. The only door into the square stone tower and its mazes was ten feet off the ground, low and narrow enough that big men like Penpusher and the Big Thurg had to snake in sideways, and reached by a narrow flight of rickety wooden stairs that shook and swayed under her with the blasts of the arctic gale.
Inside, the air was still and very cold. The moaning of the wind through the rafters of the lofts overhead was eerily reminiscent of the stone halls of the haunted city of Wenshar, when demons walked in the season of storms. Starhawk pushed the green leather hood back from her cropped hair, and raised the small bronze lantern she'd brought with her to shed stronger light. The Chief, she guessed, carried nothing of the kind. Once you would never have found him without flint and tinder or more commonly a little horn fire carrier filled with smoldering tinder and a couple of coals. He'd been slipping out of that habit as the senses of a wizard had grown in him.
Metallic glints answered the movement of her light-racks of swords, halberds, pole arms, and the locks of chests and bins. The Armory contained not only weapons and the campaign gear, but most of the fort's supplies of hardware: nails bought in the south, or salvaged with meticulous care from the beams of anything in the fort that was torn down; rusted chains and scrap that could be loaded into the ballistas; and vast coils of rope like somnolent snakes. In inner rooms, she knew hides were stacked-if they hadn't rotted, which, given their current run of luck, was more than likely. Near them were rivets, hammers, tongs, cutters, and buckles looted from every city-they'd sacked and every merchant they'd robbed, bits of chain mail which Hog-whose forge nestled round on the west side-could patch in to repair larger hauberks and coifs. Elsewhere there were targets of wood and straw, quintains and striking bags, and all the leather and metal needed for their repair; pack frames, wheel rims, and vast, dark tangles of pulley and cable.
The muddied scuff of crusted tracks led through the small anteroom to a narrow inner door. Starhawk followed them down a half-dozen creaky plank steps to the great gallery, a long room curtained in shadow where the hacking-posts and targets loomed in shadow like deformed and mindless sentinels. The smell of mildew breathed upon her as she held the lantern high. "Chief?"
Movement in the darkness brought her heart to her throat. She saw a massive shape in the dark arch at the room's far end and the flash of one yellow eye. For an instant it was as if she had encountered a stranger lurking in these dark chambers which had but one exit. Her pulse fro
ze, lurched, and slammed. But then she saw that it was, in fact, Sun Wolf, tawny hair hanging in damp strings over his craggy face, eye gleaming strangely beneath the curled grove of brow.
His voice was slow, its rhythm halting, almost stammering, as if against some strangling impediment in his throat.
"I'm here, Starhawk."
She made a move in his direction, but he threw his hand up and stepped back. "NO!" For a moment she thought he flinched. Then he pulled a dragging breath. "I just-need to be alone." He rubbed at his eye patch, and went on more easily, "I wanted to have another look at some of the gear, that's all. I've been over every motherless inch of it with mercury, auligar, hyssop and fire, and there isn't a mark on it I can find. I may be late. Don't wait for me."
"You want some company?" Scared as she had momentarily been-and the uneasiness was already vanishing from her mind-she didn't like the idea of his being here alone.
He shook his head again. "Not just now."
She hesitated. He was shivering, very slightly-she could see the vibration in all the hanging rags of the robe he wore over his doublet. True, the room was deadly cold; his breath and hers made puffs of frail steam in the amber lamp beams. But white gleamed all around the topaz pupil of his eye; pain and tension there were all at odds with the easiness of his voice. "You be careful, okay?" she said cautiously, and turned away. As she did so she faked dropping the lamp, and stumbled as she grabbed for it, falling to one knee. Cursing, she bent to pick it up and used the movement as a cover to slip a metal-backed mirror from the purse at her belt, angling it toward him as she rose.
But the reflection showed her only Sun Wolf, standing in the black maw of the arch.
Troubled, she turned to face him again. More clearly than before, she saw the pain in his eye, grief and horror and a haunted look she had never seen. In spite of the cold that made his breath smoke from his lips, sweat stood out on his high forehead. She started to speak and he shook his head impatiently, and waved her away.
"I'm fine, dammit." His hoarse voice grew curt. "It's just that ... I'm fine."
For a moment she wondered if he could be covering something to keep her out of danger. That wasn't terribly like him, but then, who could tell what he might have discovered?
She decided to trust him and slowly walked back down the length of the gallery, her boots creaking on the worn boards and the echoes mingling with the groaning of the wind overhead.
The hospital was quiet when she entered it. Men were still working down at one end, mostly those camp slaves who had survived the march north. They were stuffing rags around the patches and caulking them with clay, but the bulk of the work was done. It was warmer here. Braziers dotted the intense gloom with fitful domes of ochre light that fluttered now and again with the sneering drafts, and there were more water buckets around the walls than she'd ever seen. Ari was taking no chances. Down at one end of the room, Big Nin and two of her girls were scraping soiled straw out from under the worse-off patients and replacing it with more-or-less fresh. Earlier that evening, Dogbreath had broken the news to her about Firecat. She glanced over at the bed where she'd spent an hour earlier that day, sitting by her friend. Firecat hadn't known her. The younger woman's death was no real surprise to her-still, she felt a bitter pang to see the cot occupied by someone else. Though she hadn't seen the Cat for nearly a year before they'd met in the dry foothills of the Dragon's Backbone, for a while it had seemed that they'd never been apart.
Pushing back the hood from her hair, she walked with instinctive quiet between the aisles of stinking cots.
Halfway down, Ari was sitting on the edge of Raven Girl's bed, holding her hand and trying awkwardly to spoon some gruel between her pustuled lips. The dark-haired girl, seventeen and always skinny, was gaunt and wasted as an old woman now, her long hair cut off because of the hospital lice, her face, bereft of it, naked and tiny on the pillow. For a moment, Starhawk stood watching, while the girl dribbled the gruel away and Ari, with infinite patience, blotted up the mess with a rag and spooned up a little more.
She waited until he finished and had put the basin and spoon aside. He sat blindly staring at nothing for a time in the grimy mottling of the shadows. Then she asked softly, "How is she?"
He looked up, startled, and instinctively hid rag and spoon under a corner of the sheet. "Better, I think," he said. "I just came in to see how she's doing." He hadn't known she'd been watching him. "Old Moggy lanced the boils today. It seemed to help."
It hadn't helped Firecat, she thought resentfully, then let the thought go. It could have happened in battle, any of the last six summers. "Have the men turned in?"
His eyelids creased in annoyance. "Hawk, in case you weren't noticing, everybody's had their backsides run ragged ... "
"I think there's something wrong."
An edge of exhausted anger flicked on his voice. "I think there's gonna be something wrong if I haul a full watch out of their sacks because you think ... "He hesitated, then shook his head, rubbed his big hand over the black stubble of his face. "Like what?"
"I don't know. The Chief ... He's shut up in the Armory-he knows something he's not telling, I think. Maybe he feels something on its way."
At the mention of Sun Wolf's name something changed indefinably in Ari's eyes. "When it gets close enough, I'm sure he'll tell us."
"He may want to keep us out of it." Then, seeing the stubborn dismissiveness in his face, she added, "Ari, don't be a cheesebrain. If we lose him Mother knows what'll happen, to you, to her ... " She gestured to the sleeping girl on the bed. "To this whole troop. We haven't figured out what's behind this hex and I for one don't want to take chances."
"Fine." Ari jerked to his feet, shaking back his long hair. In the lamplight, his face was still smutted with soot from last night's disastrous fire, his chest, bared by the torn-out points of his faded shirt, blistered in places from the flames. "I'll tell that to the men when I haul them out of bed, shall I? Hawk, I haven't slept more than three hours in as many days and neither have they. You're getting as bad as he is with this business of looking out for each other, no matter what it costs everybody else."
Starhawk studied him for a moment in silence, angry and at the same time aware that they were both far too tired to be having this discussion. She, too, had only had a few hours of sleep between bathing and going back on guard duty. The burns on her own arms and neck smarted damnably beneath the sheepskin and iron of her doublet and the several shirts she had layered on underneath. Her eyeballs felt as if they'd been rolled in sand, her bones as if the marrow in them had all been sucked out, leaving only hollowed straws.
But the animal prickle of warning at her nape remained.
Ari sighed, his compact body relaxing a little. "All right," he said quietly. "I'll see who I can round up. I'll get another man on the main gate, and whoever else I can on the walls. But I'm gonna let them know they have you to thank for it tomorrow at breakfast."
"Suits me fine if we're all able to sit down and eat it," the Hawk returned, hearing under the weariness the anger go out of his tone.
He grinned under his singed mustache and made her a half salute, both of which she returned. She picked up her lantern beside the door, cursing herself mildly for the wolflike paranoia that would now force her to miss a night's sleep over something which might not exist.
And from the darkness of the colonnade, she saw Sun Wolf cross the court.
She saw him in only the dimmest possible way, for the night was pitch black, the torches that sometimes burned under shelter around the camp long ago put out and the raging sky invisible under a Gotterdammerung of cloud. But the brief stab of her lantern beam and the dim brownish light from the hospital door outlined the massive figure as it made its way from the Armory to the covered colonnade in front of Ari's house, leaning into the wind, headed toward the main gate. He was muffled in his fur-lined robe with a scarf around his .face, but, from the first moment she had seen him, she had never mistaken any ma
n's walk for his.
With the clarity of lightning it came to her what must have happened. He had had some sign from the other wizard, some portent, some challenge. He was going to meet him, and had gotten rid of her to keep her out of danger. He was going to meet him alone.
You gaum-snatched blockhead, after a week fighting the plague you don't have the magic to light a candle! Furious, Starhawk pulled her own hood up over her head and ran down the pillared terrace of the hospital to intercept him at the gate. The scene in the Armory returned to her. Of course he would have gone there to make his conjuration, some other dark spell from the Witches' books ... He hadn't wanted her or Moggin to know. Damn cod-proud pigheaded clodhopper ...
Wind buffeted the lantern from her hand as she left the sheltered colonnade. She cursed perfunctorily, whirled around and half blinded by the sleety gusts. She struggled on, followed the hospital wall by touch toward the thin slip of the gatehouse light. If the Wolf got out onto the moors before she reached him, she'd never find him until it was too late. Wait for me, you brainless barbarian oaf ...
She reached the Gatehouse just in time to see him slit the guard's throat.
The man had obviously been totally unprepared. He'd risen, leaving his weapons-sword, crossbow, and throwing ax-on the bench with his cup of White Death to greet with a grin the man whom they all still half regarded as their Chief. Sun Wolf had grabbed his hair with one hand and slashed his throat to the neckbone with the dagger he'd held in the other; from the blackness of the gateway shadows Starhawk could see, through the burst of flying blood, the nacreous white of the spine. The Wolf threw the spasming body down casually and went to unbar the gate.
"Chief!" Starhawk yelled.
For the first confused instant she had the impossible, irrational impression he was going out and wanted no one to know. But when he turned, caught up the guard's ax and flung it at her straight and hard, she knew. The reflexes he'd trained into her were the only thing that saved her-that, and her paranoid readiness. The ax whizzed close enough to her chest to snag her metal shoulder plates as it went clattering into the dark beyond the squat arch of the inner gate. Then the sword was in Sun Wolf's hand and he was coming for her, cold murder in his eye.
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