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

by Dark Hand of Magic [lit]

  Home, he thought, and for an instant understood the raw physicality of the bond that achieved through the wordless contact of violence what dancers achieve through dance, what lovers-sometimes-achieve through sex. But at the same time, he saw the burning walls, the carrion crows eating dead women in the streets, Moggin's daughter with her throat slit to the neckbone only because she lived in the wrong place at the wrong time, and disgust and horror sickened him, both at it and at himself for never having seen it before.

  The realization passed in an instant, as his concentration went back to what Ari was saying, Ari, who was commander now. But having seen what the bond had sprung from, he finally understood in his heart that this was his home no more.

  "The damn thing is that they know the territory as well as we do, Chief," Ari went on. "Zane's got nearly two hundred of the original troop on his side, plus Louth's boys, and every postern, well shaft and low place in the walls are gonna be guarded. We thought about getting help from the village; but, if what you say is true, the men there'll be locked up under guard."

  "C-candy," grunted Penpusher. "Two people c-could bust 'em out of the town hall jail, easy."

  Ari nodded. "Yeah, standard stuff. Routine Three-riot, diversion, Zane sends out a troop, we ambush them at Dingle Creek because they'll be ready for it at Crow Rocks, steal their horses and arms, and so on. But there's still ninety of us riding back into a camp of damn near five hundred of them, plus a goddam hoodoo. I don't see how we can do it."

  "The same way they did us," said Sun Wolf quietly. "Didn't your mama ever tell you that curses fly home to roost? I know where those Eyes are now, and I know what they look like. I'm gonna take and shove that hex down their goddam throats."

  Quietly, Dogbreath asked, "And the wizard?"

  The wizard. Purcell. Sun Wolf had a momentary vision of those colorless eyes, devoid even of cruelty, and of the knife outstretched in his hand. Cold, clinging, like nooses of glowing wire, the geas whispered of its presence as the growing strain of holding it from him twitched at his every thought, like the pain of the wound in his arm. He knew the time was short, that he dared not even sleep now until it was done. "I'll have to meet him." His voice sounded smaller than he intended.

  He glanced across at Moggin, standing next to Star-hawk, as if for protection, in the thick shadows near the door. "I'll need your help, Moggy."

  "I thought you said he was a fake," protested the Goddess, and Moggin shut his eyes with a kind of weary, ironic patience at this interpretation of his nonpowers.

  Ari's eyes flicked from the white-faced and bedraggled philosopher to the Wolf, worried-not as a commander gauging a potentially weak link, which was what, the Wolf thought tiredly, should have been his concern, but as a son anxious for the overstretched strength of the man he most cared for. The anger between them, the quarrels, even the betrayal, Sun Wolf realized, were largely peripheral to that care. In spite of the fatigue, in spite of the pain of his arm and the cold dread of what he knew was yet to come, he felt warmed. "Can you do that?"

  He shook his head. "I guess we'll all find that out."

  CHAPTER 16

  "You know the one we need." Moist echoes carried the Wolf's words away into the claustrophobic darkness. Moggin paused in the act of fixing the torch into an old socket cut in the rock of the mine's walls, his bowed shoulders stiffening.

  Then Moggin sighed, and all the tension seemed to go out of him, taking with it what little strength he had left. He whispered ironically, "Of course." Then he leaned his forehead against the slimy rock face, and Sun Wolf saw the whole gaunt body shiver. "What rise would we use?"

  At the cracked, sobbing note in Moggin's voice the Wolf crossed the distance between them, a matter of a stride or two between the rock face and the edge of the slimy water which drowned the remainder of the mine tunnel as it turned down, seeking still further darkness. The Keep-Awakes Sun Wolf had gotten from Ari-drugs on which most of the men had been living for the last twenty-four hours-filled him with a tinselly restlessness under the growing pain of the geas, but didn't impair the bone-bred instincts of a commander who hears one of his men breaking under prolonged fatigue and exhaustion.

  He caught Moggin's shoulders in his big hands as the other man began to laugh hysterically.

  Had it been one of the troop, the Wolf would have shaken him, struck him, and cursed back the wave of broken sobs following hard upon that uncontrolled laughter. They hadn't time for it-that much Sun Wolf knew. He could feel the geas growing in him, and knew it would get worse when Purcell woke up again and started working it consciously. It was getting harder and harder to cling to the half-understood protection of the Sishak Rites. When the Keep-Awakes wore off he would, he knew, sleep like the dead, and the geas would devour him in his sleep. There wasn't time for any of this.

  But he only held Moggin tight against him, while the other man wept.

  Because, as they both knew, the ritual he would have to work was the one he had seen Moggin working the last night Moggin had spent with his family before their murders, the spell that had convinced him, and everyone else, that Moggin was indeed the mage who had raised the curse-the spell of the summoning of power from the bones of the earth.

  Gently, gradually he sank down to his knees, bringing Moggin down with him, to sit with their backs to the wet surface of the alum-bearing rock. All the while, Moggin sobbed as the tight controlled hardness of everything he had endured broke to pieces at once: the flight from the camp before the djerkas; Zane's sadism; and the rape and murder of his wife and daughters before his eyes. Sun Wolf remembered their voices drifting down the kitchen stairs while he himself stood in the dark of the cellar, frantic with fear for Starhawk's life and for his own enslavement. He knew that was in Moggin's mind now-the two fair-haired girls and the woman whose smile had still been sweetly serene after five months of siege, all in their white nightdresses in the dark kitchen while Moggin did some fast explaining about why everyone suddenly seemed to think he was a wizard.

  Without quite knowing how, the Wolf knew it had been the last time he'd spoken with them.

  He'd seen men come to pieces like this under the stress of combat or prolonged physical hardship, and Moggin didn't have either the physical or emotional toughness of the troops. Feeling the geas stir within him, flexing the terrifying strength of those glittering tendrils, he wondered if he were getting soft, letting the most vital link of his plan break down like this and delaying things who knew how long when his own endurance could be measured in hours.

  But having so nearly lost Starhawk, he wasn't about to say to another man, Suck it in, soldier. If his ancestors didn't like it, they could go look for another descendant.

  Which they might have to do in any case.

  At length, Moggin's weeping subsided, and the philosopher turned away from him, wiping his bruised face with shaking fingers that merely served to smear the tear-tracked filth into mud. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and coughed, deep and agonized. "It's just that ... "

  "I know," said the Wolf softly. And for the first time in his life, he did know.

  "I know I'll get over it." Moggin leaned his shoulder against the wet stone of the wall, his back half-turned to the Wolf, like most men, ashamed to be seen weeping by another man. "I mean, people do." He wiped clumsily at his gray-stubbled cheeks and sniffled loudly. His voice went on, speaking into the darkness beyond the grubby glare of the torch in its socket above their heads. "I did think I was going to die on the journey. I rather hoped I would, in fact. It sounds stupid to say that all this ... " He gestured around him, not at the dripping dark of the narrow tunnel's end, but, Sun Wolf knew, meaning the hellish journey north, the exhaustion of fatigue and slavery, the killing exertion of escape, the long nightmare of Purcell, the curse, and the strain of living with the point of a sword at his back. "All this has made it easier to go on living." He turned back to face the Wolf, the ghost of his old philosophical detachment back in his eyes. "One doesn't meditate much abou
t dying when one is trying like hell to save one's life, you know."

  The Wolf smiled, and said again, "I know."

  Moggin sighed, his breath a pained and heavy drag. Then, after a moment of weary stillness, he wiped his face again with his blistered fingers, and pushed back the long, greasy strings of his hair. "I'll draw out the pattern of the circle and tell you the ritual of its making, but you have to do the actual rite yourself, you know. It was different from the other Circles of Power in the books ... "

  "It's different from any that I've ever seen," the Wolf said quietly. "That's one reason I never liked it. It's in the oldest of the Wenshar demonaries, a broken circle, twisted. My guess is its source is some older magic, an alien power. You get a feel for these things, and I never liked the feel of that one."

  "I see." Moggin paused, the chalk stub he'd fished from his coat pocket poised in his delicate hand. "So that's why ... It was surrounded by warnings, you know, in Drosis' book."

  The page in the demonary seemed to shape itself in the darkness beyond the sputtering glow of the torch; the dull black lines of common lettering, and around them, the brownish, spidery trail of line after line of faded ink, handwritten notes in the shirdar tongue. He had guessed without being able to read them that these were warnings. It was one of the spells he had resolved to stay well away from. Sun Wolf felt his skin turn cold. "Warnings of what?"

  "It said: The power runs both ways. The mage must be stronger than the pull of the earth. And Drosis had written, When the earth magic is spent, all will be gone, and he will go out like a candle snuffed to smoke."

  Sun Wolf was silent, thinking about that. "Yet you tried it anyway."

  Moggin nodded, the pain of that last night and the desperation he had felt coming back into his eyes. "I suspected that, starting out with no power, the ritual itself would kill me. I just wanted power enough to get my family out of the city." He managed a shaky smile. "So even an assassin was met with not unmixed emotions."

  Sun Wolf had to chuckle at that, but at the same time he shivered. "And there's no way of guarding against that possibility?"

  "If there is," Moggin said, "Drosis never wrote it down."

  The Witches of Wenshar might have, but he could not read the shirdane; in any case, Purcell now had the books. The thought of what he might get out of them turned the Wolf even colder. But all he grumbled was, "Pox rot it."

  Moggin rose, and with the chalk began sketching from memory upon the nearest rock face the shape of the crescent that served in this case for a protective circle, the swooping lines of power that spread and vanished disturbingly all around it. Drawing it now-and doubtless when he had drawn it back in his study in Vorsal-Moggin clearly was only reproducing what was in the old wizard's notes. But Sun Wolf, who had worked a little with the Circles of Power and Protection, with the lines that summoned strength and the lines that dispersed it, felt his skin creep at the sight of a pattern so clearly rooted in chaos, whose every curve, every shape, whispered of wildness, irrationality, and unpredictability beyond his or any mage's control.

  In the demonary, it had specified that the spell must be raised within the womb of the earth-something Drosis hadn't mentioned. This tunnel, the farthest extent of the mines before bandits, land wars, and religious strife had broken the back of the Empire's trade in the north, was as deep as they could get. All around them in the listening darkness, Sun Wolf could sense the presence of powers and entities unknown to man in the dripping volcanic rock, in the leaden and evil waters, and in the weight of the darkness itself. The perilous lines Moggin showed him would draw up the black and lambent magic of the earth, like an enormous beast that must be bridled with no more than a slip of silver thread and ridden to the edge of doom.

  Moggin went on, his breath a faint mist in the flickering glare, "I suppose that, to make the spell, a wizard must first decide how badly he needs what the power will buy him, and if it is worth the risk of ending his life."

  Maybe, the Wolf thought, standing to look over Moggin's shoulder, arms folded as he studied the small circle written on the wall, so that he could draw it, large, about himself for the summoning of the power. But in addition to the possibility of killing him, there existed an equal possibility that it wouldn't-that it would merely strip away his powers with its passing, and leave him helpless, the slave of Purcell's geas, this time for good.

  "That's the last of them," Ari's voice breathed out of the dark. "They'll shiver for a couple hours, but at least, if Zane sends out a party, he's not going to catch us all in the same room."

  Starhawk, standing beneath the black lintel of the mine, nodded. She hadn't the mageborn power to see in darkness, but her night vision was good; the abandoned alumstone diggings stretched around her in grimy and sodden desolation, eroded, half-flooded, and blotched with lichen and twisted, untidy stands of heather and whin. Even in daylight, she was willing to bet, no one would have guessed that ruined landscape concealed a miniature army.

  "How many?"

  "The last group made a hundred and eighty. We can count on maybe a hundred or more switching sides in the battle, plus camp followers-wranglers, sutlers, that kind of thing-and whatever we can get from the town."

  Starhawk's level dark brow tilted a little, but she made no comment. Troopers loyal to Ari had been drifting silently in all night, either drawn by the logic of using the old mine as a headquarters, or, latterly, guided there by small parties sent out to hunt stragglers who might not know the moor so well.

  It was the fact that so many of them guessed exactly where to come which had prompted Ari's evacuation-that, and his refusal to tell any of the newcomers the extent of the plan. One of the groups, Starhawk had been interested to note, had contained three of Zane's guards who'd witnessed Sun Wolf's forced attempt at suicide in the garden.

  "I mean, hell," one of them had said, when they'd spoken to Ari and the Hawk in the flickering darkness of the pit chamber. "I got nuthin' against Zane, but damned if I'll stay in the same camp with a hoodoo. Holy Three, if he could do that to the Chief, what's to say he wouldn't do that to me the next time he didn't like the way I spit on his terrace?" And the man had spat, as if to illustrate the harmlessness of the act, into a corner of the room, and scratched his crotch.

  "Not bad," she murmured now. Many of them, like Hog, with Helmpiddle tucked protectively under his arm, had only been waiting their chance to escape. Others, it was true, had come simply to learn what Ari's plans were-whether they had the strength to attack the camp, or whether they were simply going to disperse and make their own livings as free mercs, having found the thought of Purcell's command more than they could stomach. But when Ari had pointed out to them the unlikelihood of Purcell either passing up cheap slave labor or allowing word to reach his rivals on the King-Council, they had thought again, and most of them, whether they'd liked it or not, had agreed that an attack on the camp was their only choice.

  "We can pass the word the minute the Chief gives us the go-ahead," he went on, folding his arms and glancing back over the ruined floor of the ancient diggings. Down here in the open dell, the moor winds were less fierce, only riffling at the heavy black fur of his bearskin collar and turning the braided scalp locks he wore on his shoulders-the hair of the men who'd killed his parents when he was eleven in one of the endless northlands border squabbles over land that was useless to anyone now. Up above them, the wind screamed over the desolation, smelling of rain and sleet. Then he looked back at her in the gloom, his eyes troubled.

  "Can we trust him? Can we know if we can trust him?"

  Starhawk met his steady gaze, and shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know if we'd be able to tell or not if Purcell gets control over him again. I don't know how we'd be able to be sure we aren't walking slap into a trap." By his expression she could tell that Ari-and probably every other soldier in the troop-had thought of that one or would think of it sooner or later.

  The Goddess had already pointed out the alternative of simply sel
ling Sun Wolf to Purcell. If he defeated the master wizard, aces; if not, they could still go ahead with the ambush, diversion, and the rest of Routine Three. "Fine," Ari had said. "Only then, Zane'll know something's up-and the Chief'll be dealing with a whole campful of goons who have nothing else to think about." The Goddess hadn't exactly admitted she was wrong, but had muttered a lot of things about Zane's ancestors and personal habits, and had let it go at that.

  However, Starhawk had to concede the woman had a point. The plan depended on Sun Wolf's being strong enough to defeat Purcell head-to-head-on his being strong enough, at the very least, to prevent the more skilled wizard from forcing his way into his thoughts again and reading there the entire plan. She shrugged. "We'll know when we count the dead. It's trust or die."

  "It's always trust or die," Ari said softly, hooking his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt-as Starhawk habitually did, and as most of Sun Wolf's students came to do. His breath blew out in a wry chuckle, the cloudy puff of steam fraying from under his mammoth mustache. He produced a flask of battered tortoise-shell from beneath his cloak and offered it to her, the gin searing, warming her down to her icy toes. "Hell, if it was anyone else, we'd be hitting each other over the head screaming, 'Don't trust him, you lamebrain!' "

  The Hawk laughed, loving him-loving them all. In some ways, the year she'd been on the road with Sun Wolf had been a very lonely one. "Aw, hell-if either of us had any brains we'd be in a different line of business. But when you ambush that relief party, for the Mother's sake, kill somebody my size and get me some real clothes! I feel like a female impersonator in this skirt!"

  Ari frowned, studying her, with her sword belted on and the froufrou of gold-stitched ruffles kilted up around her knees. "I been meaning to ask you, Hawk-What're you doing dressed like a woman anyway?"