Why did he feel that, in the back of his mind, he knew that word?
“Kaletha!” he roared. “Egaldus!”
Farther off now, but recognizable as the young acolyte’s, the voice called out, “Kaletha? Kal...”
And then the word turned to a scream.
Chapter 11
“THE DEMONS WERE THERE. I know, I saw them.”
“Are you saying you think they did it?” Incarsyn asked from his place on Osgard’s left.
Nanciormis sneered, “Don’t be an ass, man.”
Osgard’s bloodshot green eyes narrowed. “If you saw them, they couldn’t have been demons, Captain. Demons are...”
“Invisible,” Sun Wolf finished, slouching back in his black oak chair at the fireplace end of the High Table and studying the three men facing him across the length of the dark board. “I know.” Through the line of tall southern windows the sun slanted in hard bars of horizontal gold, but around them, the Fortress of Tandieras was unwontedly quiet. Not until sunup would any man or woman of the guards venture into the empty quarter to fetch forth Egaldus’ remains, but the rumor had swept the place like a chaparral fire after a dry summer. Sun Wolf could hear the murmur of it, breathing like wind in the corners of the servants’ halls; he could feel the silence as he or Kaletha passed.
He went on, “I don’t know why I’ve always been able to see them, but I have. It may come of being mageborn...”
“Kaletha can’t,” Nanciormis pointed out promptly. “Nor, to the best of my knowledge, can...” He just barely broke off the word Tazey at a furious glare from the King.
“It is said among my people,” Incarsyn put in, “that those who can see demons do so because they are themselves demon-spawned.”
“That’s rubbish,” the King snapped.
“So there are those among you who can do it?” Sun Wolf asked thoughtfully, raking the Lord of the Dunes with his single golden eye.
The young man nodded, but he didn’t look comfortable about the whole subject. Since yesterday, he had the pale, shaken appearance of one in the grip of some heavy and unaccustomed thinking.
At Osgard’s invitation, the Lord of the Dunes had come to this council, but Sun Wolf, feeling the subpulse of politics between the three men, sensed that the request had been a false one. He had sat there through Sun Wolf’s recital of his second investigation of the empty quarter last night and of the finding of what was left of Egaldus’ body, looking handsome and exotic and a little puzzled in his gold-stitched tunic and snowy cloak. Neither Nanciormis nor Osgard had much to ask him—he was there simply, Sun Wolf guessed, to remind him that he was still pledged to become Osgard’s son-in-law, no matter what afterthoughts might be now churning through his mind.
Nanciormis said, “In any case it’s foolish to believe it was demons. They are incapable of harming man.”
“Not necessarily,” the Wolf said. “There have been biting-demons, stone-throwers...”
“But certainly none capable of doing that kind of damage.”
Incarsyn folded one white hand upon the other and appeared to study for a moment the circle of glinting fire thrown by the facets of his ruby ring. Then he looked up again. “Among my people, it was said that such things happened to those who ran afoul of the Witches of Wenshar.”
“Old wives’ tales!” Osgard’s voice was harsh as the crack of a whip in the warm blaze of the morning heat.
“Were they?” Sun Wolf asked softly and turned to look at the young Lord of the Dunes. “Tell me, Incarsyn, were all the Witches of Wenshar evil? Was there none among them who used her power for something other than selfishness and lust?”
The young man frowned and shook his head. Obviously the concept of a good witch had never crossed his mind. Perhaps in the shirdane in which he thought, such a concept was linguistically impossible. In the crystalline brilliance of the morning sunlight after the sleepless alarms of the night, his youth and hardness contrasted even more sharply with Nanciormis’ slack cheeks and double chin—the more so because of the racial similarity of those two hawk-boned sets of features framed in the flowing darkness of their braided hair. “None,” he said simply and then smiled a little, lightening up his face. “They were, you understand, women. A woman will, by nature, put first in her considerations, the things that immediately affect her whether they be material goods or satisfaction.” He spoke as one who forgives a simple-minded child for soiling itself, and Sun Wolf suppressed an unexpected urge to get up and knock his handsome head against the wall.
He started to retort, but Osgard’s heavy voice drowned them both. “The Witches of Wenshar have nothing to do with it!” he thundered. “It’s clear as daylight what happened! Egaldus was tampering with heresy and magic last night with that bitch Kaletha, trying to raise spirits, they say, and got what was coming to him. They both had every reason to wish Galdron ill, since the old hypocrite was threatening to exile him—”
“And so he raised up a spell that backfired on himself?” Sun Wolf demanded. “Talk sense, man.”
“Kaletha and Egaldus were lovers,” Nanciormis added scornfully, but his dark eyes, regarding Sun Wolf, were narrow with thought. “She’d never have harmed a hair of his golden head.”
“Which isn’t necessarily true,” remarked Starhawk later, when the Wolf was sitting cross-legged on the parapet of the watchtower, a hundred feet above the granite courts of the Hold, peeling an orange. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can’t fear and hate and resent them as well.”
“People couple for all kinds of reasons.” In the stifling stillness of the desert air, the orange’s perfume was shockingly sweet. “You can lie with someone you hate, if it gives you a chance at them.”
“True, but that’s not what I mean.” Starhawk turned her gaze from the brazen emptiness of the desert. Framed in the white veils, her face had a stripped look—bones, scars, and ice-gray eyes like a man’s—but for the softness of the lips. “Love isn’t an easy thing to define. You can resent people you love—enough to want to kill them, or at least hurt them badly. People do it all the time. Not the least reason is because they hold that power over you.”
Sun Wolf was silent for a moment, thinking about that and wondering if the Hawk spoke from personal experience on that score. He offered her a segment of the orange, and she shook her head—she never ate on duty, he remembered, even if it was only watching the dead landscape of the desert for motion that never came. From up here, the Haunted Mountains were visible, a stained and broken knife blade over the heat shimmer of the reg. Had she resented him—hated him, even—in the years she’d been the second-in-command of his mercenary army, loving him and watching him bed a steady parade of eighteen-year-old concubines? In those days he had seldom thought of her as a woman. Perhaps neither had she.
But looking up, troubled, he met the smile in her eyes, so he asked instead, “You think Kaletha resented Egaldus enough to kill him?”
“You’re a teacher.” The Hawk made a sweeping scan of the desert horizon, then turned her eyes back to him again. “Would you train a student who was strong enough to defeat you? Not just to give you a good fight—but to whip you, crush you, kill you maybe?”
Again Sun Wolf fell quiet for a time. The sun, warm on his own loose-draped veils and the leather of his shoulders and thighs, had lost its summer intensity, but the air still felt thick and electric, charged with storms. At last he said, “I never have done so. I don’t know.” He hesitated, then added truthfully, “I’d like to think I’d have more pride as a teacher than I would have vanity as a warrior, but...I don’t know.”
Starhawk smiled a little and resumed her steady watching, presenting him with the smooth line of her profile, somehow delicate in spite of the high cheekbones and too-strong chin. “And you’re forty now and a wizard,” she said. “I can lay you money you wouldn’t have when you were twenty-eight. Would you have trained me to be able to defeat you?”
The words were slow and hard to say.
“I’d like to think you could.” But even as he said them, he knew he didn’t, not really.
You are greedy, like Egaldus, Kaletha had said. And to her Egaldus had said, You still wish to keep it all to yourself. He had held Kaletha in contempt for doing it—it wasn’t a particularly pleasant thing to realize about himself.
“But you’re pretty sure I wouldn’t,” said Starhawk, her voice gentle. “I understand Kaletha, Wolf. And in spite of herself, I rather like her. I think she’s wrong to be hoarding the books of power, but I can understand why she’s doing it—why she keeps her disciples under her thumb the way she does—maybe why she let Egaldus seduce her. She knows she’s never had proper teaching; she knows now about the Great Trial, which she didn’t know about before. Whatever she says about it, she knows you’ve gone through it and she hasn’t. She’s fighting to hang onto her power—over you, over them, over Egaldus.”
“You think she’d have killed him to keep him away from the books?” Then he frowned, his blunt fingers pausing in mid-motion, sticky with red orange juice like droplets of blood. “But I went after the books, too. Hell, I went down into the pit. Nothing happened to me.”
“It may not have been an impersonal trap,” Starhawk said quietly. “Whatever destroyed Egaldus...” She turned back to him, dark, level brows tugging down over her nose. “Could Kaletha have summoned up that kind of power, specifically? Or...?”
“I don’t know!” Sun Wolf swung his hand in frustration. “Incarsyn said the Witches of Wenshar did, but...” He looked up and saw the woman’s face suddenly puckered with a far-off look, as if she listened for some sound beyond the range of hearing. “What is it?”
She shook her head. “I—I can’t remember.” She leaned on the battlement, a rangy cheetah-shape of dark green leather and white shirt sleeves against the endless speckled dustiness of barren scrub land. “It’s on the edge of my mind, something about how the power was summoned...I don’t know.” She made a wry face. “I’ll remember it in the middle of the night sometime.” Even those words seemed to catch a loose thread in her memory, and she paused again. Then her eyes turned back to the desert, and all concentration on dreams or half-memories vanished in sudden sharp alertness.
Sun Wolf slewed around on his precarious perch on the battlement to follow her gaze.
On the hard desert horizon a gray plume of dust floated, glittering in the morning air.
“It can’t be a storm.” Tazey shaded her eyes and gazed out over the desert. She was still dressed, as her father had ordered, in girlish ruffles and curls for the benefit of her suitor; pinks and lavenders that looked garishly incongruous around the strained and hagridden face.
“Of course it can,” Kaletha snapped, glancing sidelong at her. “I have sensed one on its way since morning...”
“If it’s a storm, it’s got a damn narrow base.” Sun Wolf turned, as Starhawk and Nanciormis appeared on the thin flight of stone steps that led down to the courtyard below the gatehouse balcony where they stood, both with brass spyglasses in their hands. “The winds won’t hit till this evening.”
Kaletha’s nostrils flared with tired loathing at this contradiction of her words. Like Tazey, she looked rather white around the mouth, though Sun Wolf could not see from her eyes if she had been crying. She looked haggard, as if the magic that had weighted the air last night had been drawn from her veins. Sun Wolf found himself remembering that Egaldus had died calling her name.
The Witches of Wenshar, he thought, and realized that the three of them standing there on the gatehouse, gazing off across the desert toward the advancing column of dust, were the only witches in Wenshar now.
Starhawk handed him his spyglass, made by the best instrument-maker in Pergemis; he unfolded it with a snap as Nanciormis extended his own and set it to his eye. In the dust and heat haze, the shapes of horsemen and dromedaries were clearly visible, as were the white burnooses of the shirdar and the brightly dyed curtains of a swathed litter. He took his eye from the glass at the sound of footsteps on the stair behind him in time to see Osgard, Incarsyn, and Anshebbeth hurriedly mounting the stairs to crowd onto the gatehouse platform.
Anshebbeth hurried straight to Kaletha. “You shouldn’t be out here,” she fussed. “You should be resting, you’ve had a terrible shock.”
Kaletha shook her off impatiently. Snubbed and hurt, the governess turned to Tazey. “And you, dear—You were awake all night, practically...”
“Please, ’Shebbeth...”
Nanciormis handed his spyglass to Incarsyn and said, “Is that who I think it is?”
The young man stood gazing like some beautiful statue, the loose sleeves of his crimson tunic flattened to his arm muscles by the hot eddy of wind which rolled the knot of curls at the nape of his neck. A crease of consternation appeared on his brow. “The Hasdrozidar,” he said at last. “My own people.” He lowered the spyglass from his eye, the curves of his mouth set tight with apprehension.
Nanciormis said silkily, “They will be led, I believe, by your sister, the Lady Illyra.”
Even at this distance, Sun Wolf could now make out unaided the swaying shape of the great litter in the midst of its circle of mounted outriders. They were moving fast. Either they, too, sensed the onset of the storm that would hit the Fortress a few hours after nightfall, or they simply had the desert dweller’s instinctive uneasiness about being in open ground in the season of witches. Beside him, he was aware of the look of sick fright on Tazey’s face and of the slow flush of anger to Osgard’s.
Incarsyn’s voice was tight but steady. “So it seems.” He hesitated for a moment, as if figuring out what his next action should be, then turned and placed a comforting hand on Tazey’s shoulder. “Have no fear, my Princess. She is only a woman. She cannot separate me from the wife that I will have.” He bowed with his usual lithe grace, then strode away down the stairs.
Osgard rumbled, “She’d damn bloody well better not,” and followed after, his white surcoat billowing in the hot winds that had begun to shift along the Fortress’s parched granite walls.
Tazey still stood looking out across the desert, her face like something boarded against storms worse than that which she had parted with her hands. Her fingers, where they rested on the parapet, where shaking.
“Only a woman,” Nanciormis quoted derisively. At a glance from him, Anshebbeth fell back from her protective hovering at Tazey’s side. The big shirdar lord’s voice was soft, but carried clearly to those who remained on the parapet beneath the tall shadows of the Hold. “When that young man decides he wants the alliance with Wenshar’s silver mines, there isn’t much that shakes him. Don’t be deceived, Tazey. He knows your esteem will only pave his way.”
“Let her alone,” Starhawk said quietly.
Nanciormis glanced at her, impatient. She had stood where the shadows fell most densely, without saying anything, her hands tucked behind her sword belt—it was easy to forget she was there. “I don’t want my niece deceived into something she’ll regret,” he said roughly. “Incarsyn cares less for her than he cares for his horses. He’s told me that.”
Tazey did not look at him, but Sun Wolf could see in the burnished sun-glare the swim of tears in her eyes. “I haven’t been deceived,” she said in a small, steady voice. “I’ve been pushed and bargained for and cozened and threatened with everything from a good beating to eternal damnation...” Her voice shivered, but did not break. “The only thing that’s helped me to bear it is that he’s been kind enough to try and deceive me.”
“In Pardle Sho,” her uncle retorted with smooth brutality, “there’s a woman who raises rabbits for meat. She goes out every morning when she feeds them, picks them up, pets them, cuddles them, and calls each by its own name, so that they will come to her and she doesn’t have to chase after them at slaughtering time.”
Tazey swung around, looking up at the tall bulk of the man beside her. The sun glimmered in the tear that lay on her face and on the pink opalescence of the sand-pe
arls dangling from her ears. She whispered, “I hate you.” Turning, she gathered up her absurd, ruffled skirts and ran after her father down the narrow steps.
The sun slanted over toward evening; the wind began to rise. It talked to itself in thin, whistling sneers around the corners of the Fortress, in and out of the thick, decaying adobe walls of the empty quarter; it smelled of sand and electricity and burned the sinuses with dust. Tempers shortened as the grip of the drying air crushed brains and nerves; people too often spoke their minds or acted without considering consequences; small hatreds and angers flared. In the courts of the cordillera towns, a storm was considered mitigating circumstances in cases of assault and murder.
The caravan from the far-off oasis city of Hasdrozaboth had arrived. Its hundred or so lean, sun-hardened riders had stabled their horses and camels in the hastily fitted dormitories on the edges of the empty quarter and joined to crowd the bodyguard, already formidable, of their Lord. From his little cell near the stables, Sun Wolf could hear them talking to one another in the lilting singsong of the shirdane and smell their cook fires and the spiced greasiness of their meals as he unrolled his armor from its wrappings.
“She’ll know if you aren’t at supper,” Starhawk said quietly. She folded her arms and looked out past the half-furled window shutters to the sulfurous light in the little court. A man dressed like a groom, his black, curly hair proclaiming him one of the shirdar—though he had, like most of the Wenshidar, cut off his braids when he had gone to work for the new rulers of the land—passed along the path from the gate, heading for the privies. Starhawk saw him glance nervously at the parched, silent walls of the empty quarter and hurry his steps.
The Witches of Wenshar Page 19
