The Sun Wolf and Starhawk Omnibus

by Barbara Hambly

  The fire in the hearth was dying, but Moggin had illuminated the eight candles, burning in their queer, asymmetrical shape. The whisper of his chanting rose, in some unknown tongue that was neither the shirdar nor the common speech of Gwenth. He could see the sweat of concentration on the man’s pale face, the candle shadow curved and fragile on the lashes of the shut eyes. The Wolf threw one quick glance at the still-open cabinet and thought, He’ll have books of healing there... and moved forward with his ax.

  It would have to be quick, while all Moggin’s concentration was focused, riveted on the summoning of that unhallowed power...

  This is too easy...

  “DADDY!”

  Sun Wolf lunged sideways and back into the hall behind him, catching only the briefest glimpse of the child Dannah standing horrified in the room’s other door, her hands raised in terror to her mouth. Moggin spun, green eyes wide with shock, but the Wolf was already out the rear door of the house. A stride took him to the edge of the terrace...

  The hoe on which he stepped slammed up and hit him with unbelievable force in the side of the head, dropping him to his knees among the rakes, flowerpots, and baled thornbushes waiting their turn for the fire. Torchlight blazed over the garden wall; a voice yelled “There he is, lads!” and half a dozen archers appeared along its top, bows bent. Sun Wolf turned, stumbling, and made a run through the frenzied shadows for the opposite wall, leaped, grabbed, and found himself looking down into the street where the line for the grain store was.

  Only the line wasn’t passively waiting along the wall anymore. They were grouped beneath him in a seething mob, more running up to join them, even as he heaved himself up to the top of the garden wall. They stood with makeshift weapons of kitchen knives and cleavers and clubs in their hands and naked murder in their eyes.

  “STOP!” shouted a voice from the dark garden below. And then, as the Wolf froze, feeling the eyes of the archers trained on his torchlit figure silhouetted against the black of the sky, it continued tautly, “Or go ahead. Jump. Then you’ll find out what happens to people in this city who try to steal grain.”

  Sun Wolf said, “Pox.”

  Chapter 8

  “FOR THE LAST TIME, I didn’t come here to steal your goddam grain.”

  The Commander of the City Troops who had taken him struck him—not hard, but the man’s gold signet ring gouged his lip, bringing a slow trickle of blood. “If you keep insisting that, I may begin to believe you,” the Commander said softly. “After all these months, I assure you I know every face in this city, and yours is not familiar. You look too well-fed to have been living on half a measure of corn a day for the last eight weeks.” His face was gaunt with starvation, his dark eyes cold and haunted, but the Wolf recognized him—barely—as the young Duke of Vorsal.

  Diffidently, Moggin spoke from near the doorway that led from his firelit study into the rest of the house. “I believe the men who tried to go over my wall to the granary two nights ago were from this city, your Grace.” Beyond him, in the dark of the hall, the Wolf could glimpse the white blur of nightgowns where Moggin’s daughters had stolen down the stairs to listen.

  “Then shame on them,” snapped the Duke bitterly. His glance cut back to Sun Wolf. “And shame on you, for robbing women and children of the only food they’ll get to make us give up our freedom all the quicker. How did you get into the city?”

  “I have a magic rope,” Sun Wolf said thickly. “It let me down from the sky.”

  One of the men who surrounded him—angry skeletons in shabby rags—raised his hand to strike, but the Duke shook his head. “We’ll hoist you back to the sky soon enough,” he said, and the Wolf could see the gaps where malnutrition had begun to claim his teeth. “But our rope isn’t magic. Who...?”

  “Then why don’t you ask him for a magic rope?” the Wolf demanded deliberately and jerked his head at Moggin. “He’ll have one.”

  Moggin went white as the Duke’s cold glance slewed to him, narrow with sudden suspicion. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s—that’s absurd,” the philosopher stammered. “This man doesn’t know what he’s talking about...”

  “Don’t I?” the Wolf said, realizing he’d guessed right about the local feeling regarding hoodoos in the besieged town. Need wizards they might—need anything to help them they certainly did—but the Law of the Triple God was adamant and these were Their lands.

  Moggin wet his lips uncertainly. By the way the Duke and the scarecrow-ragged men of the watch were looking at him, it wasn’t the first time the idea had crossed someone’s mind. “Drosis—Drosis left me his books and medical implements, of course,” he said finally, his voice regaining its steadiness. “But Drosis was never a real wizard, either, you know, and you can’t deny how many lives he saved with his...” He visibly bit back the word “powers” and substituted “...his learning and skill. But he never used magic.”

  “No?” the Wolf said, shifting his arms against the ropes that twisted them so painfully around the shafts of the guards’ spears. When they’d dragged him back to the study he’d seen at once that the rugs had been hastily pulled down to cover the half-made patterns of power on the floor, the implements and the black book bundled away, the cabinet locked. That, if nothing else, had told him what he needed to know. “Then haul up the rugs.”

  The guards looked at each other, paranoia in their hollow eyes. One of them stepped to obey, and Moggin interposed himself quickly in front of the man. “This is ridiculous,” he stated in his quiet voice. At first glance a mildly retiring man, still he had a kind of quiet authority to him that stopped the guard in his tracks. “I’ll answer any accusation this man cares to make when I can be sure he isn’t simply trying to keep you all busy while his confederates escape.”

  “He’s right,” the Duke said, as the guards hesitated. “Attis, Rangin—take four men and search the neighborhood. I take it you have no objection to our using your wine cellar as a jail until we return from doing a circuit of the walls?”

  “Not at all,” Moggin said, inclining his head deeply so that the young Duke would not see the pleased gleam in his eye.

  Sun Wolf saw it, however. With a bellowed oath he wrenched at the ropes that bound him, lunged toward the door again, dragging three of the half-starved guards, like a bear dragging a hunter’s dogs. Anything was better than that, he thought; to be bound in darkness, waiting for those silver ruins to glimmer into being again around him; to hear that triumphant laughter...

  He was almost to the door when the rest of the guards brought him down. He had a foggy glimpse of the young Duke of Vorsal, standing with arms folded across the gilded cuirass that was now far too large for him, dark eyes fixed speculatively on Moggin’s carefully expressionless face. Then lights exploded in his skull, followed by roaring darkness.

  He wasn’t out for long. The damp cold of the wine cellar brought him to while the guards were still tying his wrists to the dusty racks that had once contained bottles of the household vintage. They were muttering to themselves as they ascended the stairs; he heard the name Drosis, and an uneasy whisper of witchery. Then the slits of light around the locked cellar door faded, and he was in darkness again.

  He wouldn’t have long, he knew. It was good odds Moggin had never expected to be holding prisoners in his cellar and hadn’t laid magic guards upon the place. He could sense no spells at work in the black air around him. Though his head ached—his face was swelling too, where that damn hoe had connected—the spells to loosen the knots and stretch the fibers of the ropes came easily to him this time. At least there’s no ants, he thought, giving his mind over to them, feeling the slow tingle of power shivering against his skin. And you’re not groggy with poison and trying not to think about how badly you’re going to die. All he needed was time.

  But he saw the fulvid slits of light outlining the heavy door long before he was able to free his hands.

  Gutter-nosed festering goddam rope-spells, he thought viciously,
the spells themselves flicking away as anger and frustration broke his concentration and he braced himself to meet the enemy wizard. I will not become his slave. I will not... His breath came fast with dread.

  But the light dimmed around the door, as if the lamp that made it were carried a door or two past the small room in which he was bound. The clack of a lock, loud in the darkness as a headsman’s ax, was not from the door before him, but from another. Then came a scraping and a furtive rustle; the lamp brightened again, then dimmed away as it was carried back from whence it had come.

  He’s hiding the books, thought the Wolf, before the guards come back.

  So Moggin’s fear was real. The Duke wouldn’t protect him if he knew. Madness, yes, but then the Triple God was very strong in these parts, and there might be other factors as well, anything from local politics to some ancient grudge in operation.

  His ancestors really were listening tonight.

  There were two solid shelves of books, plus various implements, adding up to half a dozen trips’ worth down the hall from the study, through who knew how many rooms and passages—he cursed the guards for stunning him to bring him here, forgetting it was he who’d tried to flee. By the pleased look in Moggin’s eyes, the wizard very likely knew who he was, but this unexpected result of his accusation bought him time. How much time?

  He was distantly aware that Moggin’s feet had passed the door three more times, before the ropes around his wrists slacked away. Counting, he found each trip took slightly less than four minutes.

  The lock on the door itself was candy. He counted Moggin’s retreating footsteps up the stairs, then slipped out into the low-ceilinged passage which connected the cellar’s various storage rooms and paused, listening stretching his senses out through the pitch-black house.

  Muffled by the earth of the walls and floor, the girl Rianna’s voice came soft to him from somewhere above: “Daddy, what is it? Who was that man? Why are you moving Drosis’ books...”

  Keep him talking, honey, the Wolf thought, and ducked through the half-open door into the next rock-cut, earth-smelling chamber. It held the family food stores, a few half-empty sacks of flour and corn looking pitifully small in the bottoms of the big, tin-lined wooden bins. One of the bins had been pulled aside to reveal a sort of safe set into the floor underneath. The flagstone that concealed it lay by the side of its square entry hole. Kneeling, Sun Wolf could see twenty or more books stacked neatly at the bottom, and with them, a small basket containing boxes, phials, chalk, and one or two pieces of equipment that he recognized as medical.

  Medical implements, Moggin had said. Drosis had been a healer.

  Straining for the sound of Moggin’s returning footfalls, Sun Wolf reached down into the hole.

  Three books were all he could carry, shoved into his doublet against his body and belted tight—two books of medicine and what looked like a casebook of notes. Into the purse at his belt—cursing because he hadn’t brought a larger one—he shoved a phial half-full of what he recognized as auligar powder, and the smallest, most delicately balanced bronze trephine he’d ever seen. Stretching out his mageborn senses, he could hear Moggin still making excuses, reasoning with both of his daughters now and his wife and, by the sound of it, two or three servants as well.

  He hadn’t told them, then. They didn’t know. The man must have been living a double life for years. Well, if the local feeling against hookum was such that at this point in the siege they’d kill a mage instead of ask his help, that made sense, Sun Wolf reflected as he glided soundlessly up the cellar steps. For years past, Altiokis had killed every wizard he could find. Or perhaps they merely knew Moggin well enough to see through that scholarly gentleness and the respectable and orthodox philosophical treatises.

  How many other wizards, he wondered, slipping through the kitchen door and across the dark garden, were doing that and had done that down the years? How many had made a living of dissimulation, gone to Church, and faked humility, deliberate chameleons as opposed to those, like himself, who had refused to admit at all what the mad intensity of those visions might mean.

  If there was one, there were probably others. If he could find one...

  Another like Moggin? He shivered as he stepped through the narrow gate and into the alley once more. Who’ll try to snare your soul in silver runes for some purpose of his own?

  He drew the shadows around him still more thickly, his boots making no sound on the cobbled streets that led to the city wall.

  It was past midnight when he reached the House of Stratus. The house, like the city around it, blazed with torches and lamps. Riding swiftly up the narrow lanes of the University Quarter, the Wolf hadn’t been so naive as to suppose that the oil burning behind all those luminous golden squares of window parchment, the lantern-light streaming from taverns where gray-robed students argued metaphysics at the top of their voices, and the firefly cressets darting along in the hands of hundreds of blue-uniformed linkboys had anything to do with the assault on Vorsal at tomorrow’s dawn. It was the shank of the evening; nobles of the ancient landed families had parties to attend, reclining masked behind the curtains of their sedan chairs as their slaves bore them up and down the slanted streets; the wives and sons and brothers of the great merchant houses were still abroad, surrounded by battalions of liveried bravos as they, too, moved from card parties to balls to rounds of delicious gossip about the nobles through whose front doors they were not permitted to pass. Costermongers were shouting their wares at half price to empty their barrows of herring or pies; whores in red and gold with their fantastic purple headdresses strolled the lanes, masked also or smiling behind elaborate feather fans, their own slaves in front of them sometimes, carrying their night lamps and cosmetics; young clerks with tinted lovelocks curling down over their shoulders promenaded with giggling shopgirls, out to see the sights.

  Guiding his horse through the press, the Wolf wasn’t sure why he felt such anger at them. It might have sprung from his own fear that he’d return to find Starhawk already dead and what remained of his life echoing empty before him—a fear that had ridden beside him, with hoof-beats almost audible, all the way from Vorsal. It might have been his own frustrated despair as he’d come to realize that finding a master wizard who would freely teach him and not try to enslave or use him—or destroy him, perhaps—might not be as easy as he’d so innocently hoped; and all this riotous bourgeois joy around him irritated him by its contrast.

  But mostly, he thought, it was because, for these people, it wasn’t war. The man who’d died of cold creeping out in the night to line up for half a cup of corn, whose neighbors had pushed his body into the gutter rather than lose their own places in line; the ten-year-old whore he’d passed, hawking her emaciated and shivering body outside a tavern for the price of enough dreamsugar to forget where she was and what would become of her; the old women patiently digging through the garbage in the streets in search of food; those were all nothing to these people. They made enough money to hire their soldiering done. They voted into city office the nobles who owned the land they lived on; the nobles obeyed the merchant houses who had supported them in their ancient style for the last two generations; the merchant houses needed corn lands, or a wool monopoly, or a deep-water harbor; and so there was war.

  Renaeka Strata was cagey enough not to let the war inconvenience her supporters.

  Except, of course, people like Starhawk, who’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Ari was waiting for him in the lambent blaze of the courtyard lights. He was in his battle armor already, leather plated with steel, the joints of his elbows and shoulders bristling with savage spikes whose edges glittered where the black paint that kept it from rusting had been chipped off in battle, and the ax that was his primary weapon strapped already to his back. His black hair hung to his shoulders, and the gold emblem of the Triple God, a child’s medal, glinted in the pit of his throat with the rise and fall of his breath. In the delicate marbl
e and fragile archways of the court, he looked alien and savage, and the grooms who came to take the Wolf’s horse gave him wide berth as he came striding across, holding out his hands.

  “Don’t tell me you beat him up in an alley!” he grinned, with forced lightness, nodding at the bruises and cuts that mottled Sun Wolf’s face like an overripe fruit. Sun Wolf, pulling down the saddlebag that contained the three stolen books, the phials and powders and the trephine, didn’t answer, and Ari’s smile faded, his hazel eyes hard. “You skrag him?”

  “No.”

  The Wolf had already begun to stride toward the colonnade that led around to Starhawk’s rooms by the terrace; Ari’s grip in his plated glove was like an iron band, forcing him to stop. Their eyes met.

  Quietly, Ari said, “The siege engines are already on the road to Vorsal; that’s why I’m here. Zane’s back at the camp getting the men into final formation. In three hours we’re going to be under that wall, with that wizard on top of us.” By his tone he already guessed what the Wolf was going to say.

  Their eyes held; it was a long time before the Wolf could speak. “I’m sorry.”

  “They’re gonna be killed, Chief. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it.”

  Ari, thought the Wolf. Penpusher, Dogbreath, Zane, Firecat... all his friends. This young man whose clear hazel eyes were so furious, so desperate, glaring into his. The dark hand reaching out of the storm’s darkness, the wild laughter of triumph shaking the skies... He remembered the eldritch horror of the patterns on that tiled study floor, the strength he’d felt on the night of the weather-witching as the spells closed around him.