Zane had never made his appearance to rally his men or to give any kind of direction to the fighting in which they so greatly outnumbered their attackers. Without Purcell, Louth, or any other leader, they had given up quickly. Once Ari and his forces had broken through the postern gate, there had been relatively few casualties. A number of these, the Wolf was told later, had been in fights between members of Zane's own forces, over booze or whetstones or fancied thefts, or all the meaningless trivia over which they'd fought all summer-fights which had broken out immediately after the departure of the relief force for Wrynde.
Zane himself they found in his bed. Sun Wolf looked up from the eyeless and sexually mutilated corpse sprawled among the gory welter of the sheets in time to see Ari turn away, gray-lipped and sick. "I knew Zane was a bastard," the young commander said softly. "But Holy Three, he didn't deserve a death like that from any man."
Others had crowded into the room to see-Hog, still in Louth's armor with the faithful Helmpiddle waddling behind; Penpusher, with a bandage torn from some corpse's clothing wrapped around his arm, and Dogbreath, limping, holding onto a halberd to stay on his feet and grinning like a golliwog through a mask of dirt and blood. Behind them in the doorway Sun Wolf saw Opium, clothed in a very plain blue dress that was too big for her, obviously borrowed from someone else, the velvet profusion of her hair not quite concealing the livid brown bruises on her face.
"What makes you think it was ... " began Starhawk; but her eyes followed his; after regarding Opium for a thoughtful moment, she raised her eyebrows, shoved her hands behind the buckle of her sword belt, and held her peace.
CHAPTER 18
"That'll be five coppers. "
"Goddam highway robbery, that's what it is," Sun Wolf growled to himself, but watched Opium's backside appreciatively as she reached down the credit book from the shelf behind the bar and marked his page. "Worth it," he added, as she glanced back at him with teasing eyes through the tendrils of her hair, "for a drink of real beer."
"Sure be nice," muttered Dogbreath, raising Penpusher four wood chips at the poker table nearby, "if we could pay for it with real money."
Sun Wolf said nothing. He knew the remark had been directed at him, though not with any particular malice.
Opium folded shut her credit book. "The credit you've been spreading all over camp is more money than you've seen in your life, Puppylove, so make the most of it." She pulled the lever on the keg, loosing a stream of nut-brown silk into the pewter tankard Sun Wolf maintained on the premises, and set the beer on the plank bar before him. For a moment their eyes met. She was still heart-stoppingly beautiful, but he was growing used to that. The fact that she was now living with Bron helped, satisfying some male territorial instinct in him that took offense at the thought of an unclaimed female. Though he might toy with the notion of dragging her down and ravishing her under the bar whenever he walked into the place, he no longer had to fight to keep from doing so. At least not much.
It might have been that she was more content with her life now, happy with Bron and making money-or at least what would be money when currency became once more available in the camp-hand over fist. Since Bron and Opium actually had wares to sell, a good portion of the fund of credit in the camp was slowly making its way into their ledger books, and the always-active camp gossip had it that Opium was one of the chief investors in the consortium that would run the alumstone diggings. Some of the men added that she'd turned bitchy since she'd gotten rich-meaning that she no longer danced in the tavern, and the dark flightiness, the vulnerability that had drawn the Wolf's protective instincts, was gone, replaced by a calm and confident peace. But if Sun Wolf missed the romance of that hunted helplessness, he at least did not grudge her what she'd gained instead.
She still moved with a dancer's lightness as she brought him his beer, pausing for only a moment before the little mirror back of the bar to adjust the silk flower in her hair. "And you?" she asked softly. "Is it going better, Wolf?"
He was silent, staring down at the marble-white froth in the tankard cupped between his scarred hands. Was it 'going better'?
He made himself nod. "Fine," he said. "All right."
Her dark brow puckered with a friend's concern. "Do you think you'll ever be able to ... "
"I said I'm fine."
Her breath drew in to apologize, or query, or express her very genuine worry for him, and he concentrated on keeping his hands on the tankard and not slapping her and telling her to shut the hell up. But she let her breath out unused. After an awkward pause, he drained his beer and gave her a smile he hoped didn't look manufactured. "Thank you," he said, and left.
His magic had not returned.
Winter had locked down on the camp. As he crossed the square, the frozen mud crunched treacherously beneath his boots, blotched with trampled and dirty snow. Wind moaned around the fortress' rubble walls, low now, but rising in the nights to dismal shrieking in the high rafters of Sun Wolf's house, in the lofts of Bron's tavern and the makeshift ceilings of the hospital and stables. In the hospital it scarcely mattered. Those who had not died of the plague, no matter how ill they were, had begun recovery almost from the moment Purcell had perished in the burning Armory.
Xanchus, Mayor of Wrynde, had sent two midwives to help with the nursing until Butcher recovered. Neither was mageborn or had the healing power in her hands, but both understood granny magic, and Sun Wolf had humbly boiled water and sorted herbs for them in order to learn whatever they could teach. Moggin had volunteered all the lore he'd accumulated about medicine, but the older of the two grannies confided to the Wolf one day while grinding elfdock that in the main, the Wolf's assistance was by far the most useful. The few men who had laughed at his helping the old ladies had quickly regretted being heard. Later, when Sun Wolf had suggested that they go a few training bouts with him with wooden swords after one of Ari's classes, they had regretted being born. When the weather cleared a little between storms, the Wolf still rode the ten miles into Wrynde to improve his herb lore. He understood now that this and the healing he was studying with Butcher might be the closest he would ever come to magic again.
By day, he understood that he was lucky to have survived the earth magic at all.
Waking in the night was different.
In dreams he returned, again and again, to his first, ancient vision of magic; to the little wooden naos behind the village long-house where the Ancestors dwelled. In the dreams he was a man, not the boy he had been, but the place had not changed. In the shadowy forest of spirit poles on the other side of the stinking blood trench he could still see the faint gleam of the skulls racked along the rear wall and pick out the names of ancestors crudely carved on each stained trunk. The tokens of their mortal lives-usually a knife or helmet, but sometimes only a few scraps of hair, a bit of braided leather, or a tuft of woven straw-seemed to move restlessly with the leap of the fire on the stone altar, where it blazed as it did on the Feasts of the Dead. It was higher, hotter, fiercer than he'd ever seen it in life, blazing wildly up toward the rafters as if old Many Voices had dumped powdered birch bark into it from his trailing sleeves.
But the old shaman wasn't there, and the fire poured upward nevertheless, though the Wolf could not see what it was that burned.
The core of the fire called him, as it had in his dreams of childhood, and his hand yearned toward it. In his ancient vision he had grasped the flame, felt the agony of it searing away his hand's flesh, to leave only the bones that wielded the fire's glowing core like a sword. A few nights after the fight with Purcell, when this dream had first returned to him, he had felt hope leap in him at the sight, for it was that sword which he'd used in his first vision to free himself of Purcell's dark hand. Gritting his teeth, he had reached out and grasped the flame anew. Searing, excruciating pain cleaved into his loins like a sword, but what he had taken from the flames was not a skeleton hand grasping the magical core of his power, but only a charred and blackened stump.
The training floor was quiet when he reached it. There had been a class that morning, run by An as he himself had once run them, pushing and bullying and thrusting the men through the pragmatic intricacies of armed and unarmed combat, making every reflex, every reaction, every blow and parry as unthinking as the blink of the eye against dust. Working at the back of the floor, with the freezing air of the open veranda cold on his back and the steam of breath and body heat pouring out under the eaves, Sun Wolf had remembered how it had been when he had trained the men and felt the fire of their spirit moving like a finely balanced weapon in his hand.
The huge room was leaden-colored now, with the whitish reflections off the snow from its wide parchment windows dimly illuminating the dozen or so warriors still working there on their own, swinging the weighted weapons through training forms, or sparring for timing and wind.
On the far side of the vast floor he saw Starhawk, patiently instructing Moggin in the first uncertain rudiments of swordplay. The philosopher's cough was responding, slowly, to the grannies' herbs; he'd finally gotten rid of his slave chain, though the scars of it would remain for life on his throat and collarbone. He looked better than he had since the first time Sun Wolf had seen him back in his house in Vorsal. By selling his services as an amateur geologist to Ari and Xanchus-he was the only man in the north with any knowledge of how to set up a kiln to bake alumstone into the white mordant itself-he'd amassed a small amount of credit; he was, moreover, making a reasonably steady living as a storyteller. Now that Gully had found his true metier as a mopper-up in the tavern, Moggin's memory of every romance, play, and poem he'd ever read in his sheltered and bookish life was a moderate godsend during snows and rains that lasted a week at a time.
We never know, the Wolf thought ironically, where we're going to end up. Probably Moggin would never have believed it a year ago if you'd told him he'd be working as a storyteller in a tavern on the backside of creation. Nor, undoubtedly, would he have believed it a few months ago, if you'd told him he'd live till spring-or want to.
Stripped to a loincloth and shivering in the bitter chill, the Wolf began to warm up in the dark inner corners of the room, where that morning's accumulated heat still lingered. At one time, he'd thought he was going to remain captain of the troop, the richest mercenary in the West and the best teacher of arms in the world.
At another time he'd thought he was going to be a wizard.
He pushed aside the memory of what it had been like to wield the winds in his hands.
He took a weighted sword of split wood from one of the cedar chests and began to work through the ancient training forms, slowly at first, then with deeper and deeper intensity, driving himself like a man possessed. As his body moved, seeking precision and perfection, his mind gradually stilled, and he sank into meditation, as deep as the meditation that Starhawk had taught him all those months upon the road.
"Does he blame me?" he asked Starhawk that night as they lay on the furs they'd dragged down to the warmed bricks of the hearth. Charcoal hissed on its bed of white sand, the flame light losing itself in the woven gloom of the rafters overhead.
She shook her head, knowing of what he spoke. "You were their teacher," she said softly, "but you weren't the reason they were warriors, killers, in the first place. That wasn't entirely true of me. You didn't make me what I am, Chief-you just made me good enough to survive it." The bones of her shoulder, delicate as the horned strength of a compound bow, moved' against his pectoral. "And he knows that, even if he'd been able to use a sword last summer, his family would still have died. It's just that, like me, he's not going to let himself be anyone's victim. He's decided that his philosophic principles against taking life don't extend to letting his life be taken because he's too helpless to prevent it."
And so months passed.
It was just as well, Sun Wolf thought at times, that among the other effects of the earth magic's passing had been to hypersensitize his system to alcohol. Another time he might have dealt with the loss as he had dealt with loss before-by getting drunk and staying that way-but as it was, more than a single beer made him ill, and he did not share the desperate need that drove Gully to drink long after the puking point was reached. Likewise, he reflected once or twice, it was just as well that Ari had burned Purcell's entire stock of hashish and dream-sugar. Aside from the doses Purcell had given him, he hadn't tried them since his twenties, but he didn't like to think too much about the cozy oblivion they promised.
Coping with loss without something to take the edge off it-booze, drugs, or a dozen casual affairs-was something else he found unexpectedly difficult.
He did not return to teaching, but trained under Ari's command with the others. Mornings and evenings he'd work with Starhawk and Ari, and a few of the others who wanted to understand more about the disciplines of the sword than simply what was necessary to kill other men-Dogbreath, Penpusher, Battlesow, the slow-talking merc named Cat-Dirt and Cat-Dirt's woman Isla who, like Moggin, wasn't even a warrior, and Moggin himself. Some of the men grumbled, but Sun Wolf found, a little to his surprise, that what they thought of him concerned him far less than it had. He hadn't been aware how much it had concerned him before. He found himself far less inclined to the easy camaraderie he'd once had with all his troop, but discovered that his friendships with a few, like Ari and Moggin, deepened.
He read, slowly and thoroughly, all ten of the Witches' books, recovered unharmed from Ari's half-burned quarters; worked in his rock garden until the snows prevented him, arranging and rearranging the stones there, seeking the wordless lightness of a beauty for which he could find no other expression. Far into the nights, he trained and meditated by himself on the training floor, kindling small lights on the pillars because even his ability to see in darkness had left him, or talked away the evenings with his friends over beer and the maddening poker games for wood chips and IOU's that were the sole currency of the camp now that the marked money had been taken out of circulation. Many evenings he and Starhawk spent up in Moggin's rooms, the three low-raftered lofts in the heart of the unburned section of the Armory which had once been Starhawk's; many more, when Starhawk was off with Butcher and Battlesow, he spent there talking to Moggin of magic, of time, and of how things happen and why.
"I don't know." Moggin sighed. "There was so much in Drosis' books which simply made no sense to me. Things which make no sense are far more difficult to remember clearly than things which do." He settled back on the piles of old blankets and fleeces which served as seats, and gathered one of his half-dozen adopted cats onto the lap of his long, dirt-colored robe. His sword-which had once been Firecat's-hung above his narrow bed, and the makeshift table was piled with an astrolabe, a broken orrery, and whatever pieces of astronomical equipment he'd been able to dig from the scrap of years of looting dumped in the Armory's various storerooms. His long hair, hanging on the garish colors of the shawl wrapped around his shoulders, was almost completely gray now, but the pain in his eyes was less harsh than it had been.
"Damn those yammerheads for torching the house." Sun Wolf pushed Drosis' much-thumbed notebook from him on the cluttered floor between them. "That whole motherless library up in smoke ... "
"I wonder about that." Moggin stroked absently at the flat, red-gold head of the cat in his lap. "I'd been hit over the head and they thought I was unconscious-which I nearly was-when they started righting over the loot from the house, so my recollection isn't very clear, but my impression is that the house wasn't burning when I crawled away and hid among the other captives. A lot of the city wasn't burned until the following day, you know. It occurs to me that Purcell would have taken what pains he could to salvage the library, as he was in a better position to keep the books hidden than he was when Drosis died. When spring opens the road it might pay you to return to Kwest Mralwe and investigate Purcell's house."
For a split second the old excitement warmed the Wolf, the old eagerness he had felt, lying in that far-off chamber in the
foothills inn, when Dogbreath had said that there was a wizard in Vorsal. It hit him like the half-forgotten illusions of childhood, followed at once by the bitter bile of disillusionment and the familiar, horrible emptiness, as if his entire chest had been gouged away, leaving only a bleeding hole. He turned away. "What would be the point?"
Later that night he thought about it, long after Starhawk had fallen asleep in the circle of his arm. It was a long and tedious journey back to the Middle Kingdoms, and the thought of dealing once again with Renaeka Strata and with the King-Council and the King reacted on him as if he'd bitten into bread and found a chip of metal grinding at his teeth. He thought about trying to tell them he had no magic anymore, and about what the King might think of to coerce him into service.
At one time he'd considered going with the troop again, not as commander-that was Ari's position now and daily more unassailable, even if he'd wanted it-but as a sort of uninvolved elder statesman. But he'd discarded it. The arts of combat were one thing to him, a meditation, an art, a need which could not be explained to a non-warrior. War was another matter. He had seen both sides of it, loyalty and friendship and the brilliance of life on the edge of a sword, and like Starhawk, he would never take arms against the innocent again.
But without magic, he thought, looking down at the spare composite of scars and bones that was Starhawk's sleeping face, what was left?
Master-at-arms, either at some pretty southern court or here in Wrynde? In the moonlight, he turned his hand over where it lay on Starhawk's shoulder, seeing heavy muscle and the slowly healing scars of the demon bites, but seeing also the old vision shape of the naked bones that had grasped the fire. He had lost both what he had been and what he could have been. The empty wound of it opened again, and pain flowed out to cover him.
He forced it back, as he had forced back the pain of his many wounds. At least I'll go see if the books are there. Better that than let the King get them. And maybe, someday ...
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