The Witches of Wenshar

by Barbara Hambly

  A shadow fell across him. He looked up to see Nanciormis. “I see you’ve joined the would-be Summoners of Storm.” The big man braced one thick shoulder against the arbor post with its twisting of thick, scraggy vines and looked genially down at Sun Wolf. “A useful skill for a warrior to acquire, now that there’s no Wizard King to hunt you down and kill you for it—but your time could be better spent.”

  “If I were looking for skills to augment war,” the Wolf replied, “I don’t doubt it. But I have quick-and-dirty wizardry already.”

  “Have you?” The coffee-dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I know the servants all say you do. I only thought that meant you’d managed to impress the Lady Kaletha in some fashion—not easy, I’ll admit. What then do you seek here?”

  Sun Wolf was silent for a long time, looking up into that fleshy, handsome face with its high cheekbones and aquiline nose already necked with broken veins. The dark eyes, with their shadows of pouches and wrinkles, were both wise and cynical, but there was no dismissal in them.

  After a few moments he said, “I don’t know. If I knew, it would be easier. A man can learn to fight in the streets and taverns, but against a warrior, trained and disciplined, he’s no match in a long fight; and he can’t use that knowledge for anything else.”

  Nanciormis’ brow puckered. He clearly did not understand. Sun Wolf had guessed already, from the sloppiness with which Jeryn had been trained that he would not. Sun Wolf guessed that in Nanciormis’ younger days—and he couldn’t be much above thirty-five now, though his portliness made him look older—he had been a notable warrior. But his very abilities, like his natural charm, had spared him from having to learn discipline. Never having had to learn anything beyond what he already knew, he was a man who lived on the surface of things—adept but unimaginative. Having never been defeated, he operated on the unconscious assumption that he never would be. A professional would destroy him.

  There was a small stirring among Kaletha’s disciples now, as she moved across to speak to Starhawk. Beyond her, Sun Wolf could see Egaldus fade unobtrusively into the shadows. A little to his surprise, he realized the novice was using a cloaking-spell, a means of nonvisibility, to avoid the notice of his master, the Bishop, on the other side of the garden. It was one of the first magics Sun Wolf had learned to use, and the young man did it with considerable skill. Only by concentrating could the Wolf keep him in sight; the shadows of the twisted grapevines lay like a blind over the bright hair and the embroidered blue and white of his robes. Anshebbeth, too, the Wolf noticed, had grown very quiet, gazing down at her thin hands.

  Nanciormis beckoned him, and the Wolf rose to follow down the shaded aisle of cracked and uneven tiles. The commander glanced back at Starhawk—leaning against a gnarled wisteria vine, her head a little on one side as she talked to Kaletha—then across at Milkom and the Bishop again. “I’d advise you to be a little careful who sees you here,” he said softly. “Witches have a bad name in Wenshar, as I told you last night. Whatever you think Kaletha might give you may not be worth what you’ll have to pay for it.”

  That morning, across the speckled range land, Sun Wolf had seen the dark, jagged line of the Haunted Mountains, guarding the secrets of the ancient city of Wenshar. But Kaletha had grown angry when he’d asked her about it and had spoken of other things. It struck him now that though, with the decline of the day’s heat the gardens were filling up with off-shift miners, cattle herders, and young people of the town, no casual strollers came up this far from the gardens below. He had enough experience with human nature to realize that this was not from tolerance. If fear had not kept them away, he thought, they’d be gawking and heckling like bumpkins at a fair.

  Fear of Kaletha? he wondered. Or—of what?

  “I see you managed to catch my nephew for sword practice this morning,” Nanciormis went on, his eye trailing appreciatively after a fair-haired girl strolling down the colonnade on the other side of the court until the shadows at its end swallowed her. “What do you think of him?”

  What Sun Wolf thought of him was that he’d been very poorly taught. But he only said, “You can’t tell anything on the first day. They’re always eager to impress you with how much they already know.” That applied to himself, he thought ruefully a moment later, as well as to Jeryn.

  Nanciormis laughed. “If you do as well tomorrow you’ll be lucky. The boy has a certain quickness, but he’s lazy and, I suspect, a coward. I’ve tried to push him into courage, or at least put him in situations where he’d be forced to master his fears, but he’s clever at hiding. He can disappear for hours when there’s something afoot he doesn’t want to do. I’ve tried to get him onto something a bit more manly than that pudding-footed slug of a pony he’s had since he was a toddler—Tazey rides other horses with no trouble, but he won’t. And as for venturing even a few yards out onto the desert...”

  “Has anyone ever taught him to survive in the desert?”

  “How, when he won’t poke his nose outside the library?” demanded Nanciormis, amused. “In any case, he’s so afraid of going out there that he’s not likely to need the knowledge. If you can do anything to increase his nerve, we’ll all be grateful—his father most of all. His father’s never had much use for him.”

  “Even though he’s the first heir born to Wenshar since the Ancient House of Wenshar failed?”

  The dark eyes slid sharply sidelong to him, then flicked away. “Osgard’s always been in an ambivalent position about Jeryn. He is, as you say, the heir, and Osgard has enough pride in the realm that he wants the boy to be able to hold it after him. But Ciannis died bearing him. I’m told it was a bad pregnancy, and she nearly lost him twice. Osgard saw then and sees now that in some fashion he was obliged to trade a woman he loved for a child who was like a sickly rabbit in his infancy and who turned bookish the minute he learned to read. Book learning is all very well in a ruler, but there are other things, as there are other things besides war—not that the citizen-kings, the war-kings before Osgard ever understood style, beauty, or respect for the ancient ways. But Jeryn’s sneaky and furtive as well as cowardly.”

  “I expect, if my father drank himself maudlin and hated me for killing my mother, I’d be sneaky and furtive, too.”

  Nanciormis gave him a sharp look. “Osgard never used to drink himself sodden that way before Ciannis died.”

  “No,” the Wolf said, “I don’t expect he did.” They had reached the end of the colonnade; the lengthening of the afternoon light had shifted the shade of the trellises overhead, and bars of puma-colored light sprawled across the worn tile of the walkway. Across the court, he could catch the faint burring of a mandolin badly played and a nasal voice singing snatches of a popular song. In an hour he’d have to locate Jeryn again for another lesson before dinner and he had the feeling this wasn’t going to be as easy as this morning had been. The novelty had definitely worn off.

  He glanced back in Kaletha’s direction. The Bishop of Pardle having taken his leave, Egaldus was standing at her side, listening to her conversation with his heart in his sky blue eyes. Kaletha asked him something. He gestured with the grace of one trained to the theatrics of Trinitarian liturgy and plucked a ball of greenish light from the air. It shone softly against his fingers in the shadows. Kaletha laid a hand on his shoulder and nodded approvingly. Anshebbeth looked away, her thin lips pursed.

  “What about his sister?” Sun Wolf asked. “It would do him good to have a sparring partner. I think she’s a sensible girl, and she’s enough older than he that he won’t feel belittled if she beats him. She looks as if she’d be good, too. I watched her in the war dance. She moves like a warrior.”

  Nanciormis grinned. “She should. When she was a little girl there wasn’t a boy in the town she couldn’t trounce in either a fight or a ball game. She can ride anything with four hooves and dances like a bird on the wing. I’m afraid it wouldn’t do, though.”

  “No. The boy doesn’t like her?” Sun Wolf guessed.r />
  “Worships her—or at least he did, up until a year or so ago. He tolerates her now, as boys do with older sisters.” A gust of swallows swirled down into the central court, perching on the stone rim of the nearly dry fountain there to drink. Bees were coming out as well, dipping down to the water that was fed by springs welling from the harsh stones of the Dragon’s Backbone. Sun Wolf guessed there would be water in these fountains year-round.

  Nanciormis went on, “No, it isn’t a problem with Jeryn. But as you know, Tazey’s going to be married to Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth. He’ll be here tomorrow for the final negotiations. And while among my people there is the occasional warlady, it certainly would not do for their lord to marry one, or for Osgard to—shall we say?—foist one off upon him as a wife. Nor would Incarsyn want such a woman—certainly his sister would not and she’s the true ruler of the Dunes. The marriage is a political expedient to tie these—” He paused, catching himself up over some epithet he had been about to apply to the sons of slaves imported from the north to work the silver mines, who had taken the best of the foothills land from the Desert Lords and pushed them deeper into the wastes of the K’Chin. Then he concluded the phrase. “—these new realms to the Ancient Houses, even as his own was. But, as with Osgard’s marriage to my sister, there can be romance in it as well. Incarsyn is young and comely, but he is a man of the shirdar and not apt to take to a woman who is too adept in wielding a sword.”

  Sun Wolf glanced along the colonnade. Like sheets of opaque gold, the sunlight lay between the arbor pillars now, blinding and stiflingly hot where it struck. The contrast with the twisted shade of the vine-sheltered bay where Kaletha and her small group of students sat was dazzling. Their dark robes blended with the shadows, the faces only a white blur like cutouts from paper. Kaletha was speaking to them all, her voice a soft, hypnotic drone, whispering hidden secrets of magic and power. Beside them, leaning on the pillar, Starhawk stood listening, the shearing brilliance of the sunlight lying dappled over her square shoulders and close-cropped hair like wind-scattered petals.

  He smiled a little to himself and said simply, “That’s his loss.”

  “Captain.”

  Sun Wolf, whose single eye was good enough to distinguish in the polished brass of a shield on the armory wall the reflection of the man who stood in the doorway shadows said, “My Lord?” before turning. “Keep at it, boy,” he added, as Jeryn automatically lowered his sword. “An enemy’s not going to give you time to rest your arm, so neither will I.”

  The red-lipped little mouth tightened angrily, but the boy turned back to the ironwood hacking-post. His strokes against it barely splintered the wood. Down, backhand, forehand—down, backhand, forehand—each blow with its laborious windup and finish was a separate action, with no carry-through of momentum from one blow to the next. Sun Wolf turned to face the King.

  “I’d like a word with you.”

  “You’re paying for my time,” the Wolf responded, walking over to the broad arch of the door. The faint, uneven tup...tup...of steel on unyielding wood echoed softly in the stone vaults of the round room with its high-up ring of windows, a muted percussion behind the words they spoke.

  “Damn right I’m paying for your time,” Osgard said. He stood foursquare, his shoulders broad in their straining doublet of dull bronze, the wide gold chain over his shoulders catching little chips of light on its S-shaped links. As usual, the King’s neck ruff was undone and lay in limp disorder under his chin; also, as usual, he smelled faintly of stale wine. “And what I’m not paying for is to have it said that my son’s being taught by witches.”

  Sun Wolf hooked his thumbs over the broad leather belt of his war kilt. Salty droplets of sweat hung from the ends of his thin, wet-dark hair and trickled down through the gold rug of hair on his back. His rusted voice was soft. “Who says this?”

  “Are you denying it?”

  “No. I’m just curious to know who says it.”

  “I have that carrot-headed bitch in my Household out of respect to my dead wife and because I’d rather, if we do have a witch in Wenshar again, that she was under my eye rather than scheming in the pay of the shirdar lords or the Middle Kingdoms. But I’ve told her to keep her distance from my children. I’m not having talk start about them, and, God knows, there’s been talk enough, with that sleek little tomcat Egaldus sneaking here from the Bishop’s palace and Galdron all in a snit over it. Well, I won’t have it, I tell you!”

  His face was scarlet with its mottled network of broken veins; his voice, in the stone vaults of the room, was like thunder. The chop of sword against wood had ceased.

  “Nobody in my life ever asked me what I’d have or I wouldn’t have,” Sun Wolf replied, his single eye narrowing, “and I’ll lay odds nobody ever asked you, either. Now, you can push your son into being what you want him to be, but what I am and who I spend my time with is no affair of yours.”

  “I’m not pushing anyone!” Osgard roared. “Don’t play the sophist with me! I get enough of that from Kaletha and that damned Bishop! My son is my affair, and my Household is my affair, and I won’t have it said there are witches teaching the Heir of Wenshar!”

  Goaded, Sun Wolf snapped, “I’m teaching him swordsmanship, rot your eyes, not poxy divination—I couldn’t teach him divination if I wanted to!”

  “I’d better not hear of you keeping company with that damned woman again...”

  “If you don’t want to hear of it, then you’d better stop gossiping with your laundry women!”

  The guess was evidently correct, for the King’s face went redder, if that were possible, and Sun Wolf set himself for a side step and a blow. But the King only drew deep ragged breaths, his thick, liquor-scarred face working with rage. “Get out of here.”

  Forcing down his own anger, Sun Wolf turned in silence and went. Aside from the fact that it was a stupid quarrel, he knew that calm acquiescence would be more annoying to Osgard than reciprocated wrath—and he was right. As he walked past him into the trapped heat of the stone corridor, Osgard bellowed, “GET OUT OF HERE!” The shout rang in the groins of the roof like beaten steel. A moment later he heard the singing clatter of metal and knew that the King must have strode to snatch the boy-sized sword from his son’s hand and hurl it in rage against the wall. But he did not look back to see.

  In the little adobe room on the edge of the empty quarter he left a note: Gone to the hills. Then he singled his own dappled gelding from the palace cavy, saddled up, and left Tandieras as the sun touched the broken edge of the Dragon’s Backbone like a phoenix settling to rest.

  Chapter 5

  FOR HER PART, Starhawk was not unduly disconcerted by Sun Wolf’s disappearance. She had long experience with his habit of storming off in a rage to be by himself for hours, days, or sometimes a week or more—and she had her own suspicions about where he had gone. From the open watch-station on the highest tower of the Citadel of Tandieras where she stood guard duty, she could look across the flatlands to where the isabelline scrub country faded into the vast plain of blackish, pea-sized gravel called the reg—treeless, waterless, lifeless, stretching away to join the ergs, the dune seas of the south. Though the sun had barely cleared the shoulders of Mount Morian, the desert had already begun to shimmer with the heat. Through the wavering air could be seen, like the dark spine of a half-buried skeleton, the Haunted Range, which guarded the dead city of Wenshar at its feet.

  With Starhawk this morning was Taswind of Wenshar, the dry wind flicking at her tawny hair as it stirred in the turban of white veils that Starhawk, like the other guards, wore to protect her head from the desert sun. Instead of her usual boy’s riding clothes, Tazey wore a gown of rose-colored wool; following the girl’s absent gaze, Starhawk could guess why. Around the tower, the Citadel lay spread out like a peasant’s counterpane of blackish grays and maroons and a dozen faded hues of homespun buff, stitched here and there with the dull green of dusty bullweed and cactus. The square block of the Hold lay almo
st directly underfoot—the Hall, the King’s solar and his bedchamber beyond, the long balcony which connected the rooms of his Household, the sprawl of Women’s Hall and Men’s, and the brighter quadrangle of the kitchen gardens.

  From up here, Starhawk could see the small cell where she and the Wolf had stayed and the little gate that led from the empty quarter to the dark, granite courts beneath the balcony of the Household. The empty quarter beyond lay like a picked skeleton—a jumbled chaos of adobe walls, five and six feet thick, decaying back into the mud of which they were formed, a tangle of shadows over which doves stirred like windblown leaves.

  Starhawk, neither sentimental nor concerned about proving her courage to herself or anyone else, had slept last night in a bunk in the Women’s Hall with the laundresses, scullery maids, and female guards, and had slept well.

  Where the stables ran into the vacant quarter there was a harshness of new yellow wood and unweathered tiles. A row of old shops and halls had been converted into stabling for the white horses of the shirdar lord, Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth, and quarters for his servants and guards. Elsewhere, more repairs marked the rooms where he himself was housed. A scrap of red bunting from yesterday’s welcome stirred in the tepid morning wind like a strayed hair ribbon. It was to these rooms that Tazey’s eyes were drawn.

  “New earrings,” Starhawk commented after a moment, not adding that Tazey had also done up her hair differently to complement the tiny, lustrous teardrop stones. “Were they part of his groom-gift?”

  The girl’s face went pink like a deep-desert sunset. “No,” she said, and shyly met the Hawk’s eyes. “He sent these to me this morning all on his own, not because he had to—I mean, they weren’t heirlooms of his house or anything. He bought them new in the market, just for me. They’re sand-pearls.”

  Starhawk studied the odd, pearl-like stones found so rarely in the wasteland stream beds. “And, if you’ll forgive me for being crass,” she said, “not cheap.”