“It’s the only time I can be sure where she’ll be.” In the long heat of the afternoon they had made love and slept, though in his dreams Sun Wolf had seen again the cold, bodiless eyes of the demons. A little uneasily now he unrolled the shirt of chain mail he hadn’t worn since the siege of Melplith a year ago and checked the buckles and leather. The weight of it was strange in his hands after so long, the harsh, musical jingling of its rings both foreign and familiar to his ears. There was a bright patch where it had been mended on the breast—a sizeable rip, but he could not for the life of him remember what had done that or when.
“If she can kill at a distance,” Starhawk said, “that might not matter.” Behind her, a dust devil scampered across the court; a chance gust of wind groaned around the walls. From the stables nearby, Sun Wolf could hear the horses stamping nervously in their stalls. “Always supposing Kaletha is the killer.”
Sun Wolf nodded, not surprised. That thought had crossed his mind as well. “You think there might be someone else. Someone who’s hiding the fact they’re mageborn. Someone who might, at some time in the past, have had access to the books.”
“Something like that.” She braced her shoulders against the window frame, the slice of light angling through, shining white against her hair. “A witch would have to be awfully stupid to go around killing people by magic in a community where there aren’t lots of witches around, but we’ve both seen stupider things. Remember that apothecary in Laedden who poisoned his neighbors’ wells? It might almost be—I don’t know—some kind of elemental force, like a beast, killing at random. It’s hard to picture someone inflicting that kind of butchery deliberately.”
“I found it hard to picture a couple of boys killing their own mother to get the family savings to buy their way out of a besieged city,” the Wolf remarked. “We live and learn. They sure as hell offered me the money to let them through the lines at Melplith.” He pulled the heavy leather chaps he’d borrowed from one of the horse wranglers from beneath the bed, laid them alongside the mail shirt, studied the ensemble, and tried to judge whether the protection offered would be worth the limitation of his movements. The chaps would certainly protect him from the snakes if he moved fast enough, as the thick leather gloves he’d acquired would protect his hands from the scorpions. As for meeting anything else...they might keep him from being hamstrung and brought down on the first slash, but after that, nothing would prevent the whirlwind violence that had destroyed Egaldus and that had scattered pieces of the Bishop Galdron and Norbas Milkom over a dozen square yards of sand from shredding the flesh from his bones.
“Do you think you can keep Kaletha busy for the next few hours?”
If he was attacked, he reflected, hefting the stiff guards in his hands, there would be nowhere to run anyway. Feeling Starhawk’s silence, he looked up.
“Chief,” said Starhawk slowly, “I’d rather not.”
Once, he knew, he would have demanded why, quick and rather indignant. Now he let the silence lie; after a long moment she sorted out her words.
“I’ll watch her if you want and try to stop her or get word to you if she comes into the empty quarter. But I won’t use her friendship with me—her trust of me, in spite of what she knows about me and you—against her. I want to keep her friendship with me separate from my love for you.”
Her voice was, as usual, calm and uninflected, giving nothing to anyone, not even to him. But in the years he had known her, and especially since they had been lovers, he had come to listen beneath its cool tones. He remembered her on the tower, saying, But you’re pretty sure I wouldn’t, and he realized he had asked her, unthinkingly, what he had no right to ask.
In the first half second he felt anger at himself and annoyance at her for doing that to him...and a little, he realized, for choosing Kaletha’s rights over his whims. That pushed him back to sanity, and he nodded. “All right,” he said. And then, though he saw no change in the gray eyes still resting on his face, he added with a kind of stiff unfamiliarity, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that.”
She concealed her relief and her somewhat unflattering surprise equally well and only said, “I’ll do what I can.”
As it happened, the entire question became academic anyway.
Starhawk left him to look for Kaletha; the night drew on. The groan and mutter of the winds fell still, the silence even more terrible, hot and thick over the fortress on its knoll and the dusty town beyond. The night was pregnant with storm. Sun Wolf, sitting on the splintery wooden doorsill of his cell waiting for darkness, watched the shutters being put up in every window of Tandieras. The sun sank, turning the Binnig Rock to the color of old blood and flashing like threads of fire on the spires of Pardle Cathedral. He knew there were lamps being lighted in the Hall and in the line of archways on the balcony of the Household, but not even a sliver of brightness illuminated the dark bulk of the Hold. It seemed to him a dead fortress, silent as the rocks. Even the birds were hushed, seeking their own hiding places. The stillness was eerie, too like that of the dead City of Wenshar.
He tried to relax and center his mind, tried to keep it on the spells he knew he would have to work, but it strayed again and again to Starhawk. It had startled him that she would refuse to go against one of her other friends for his sake, and he was aware that he felt miffed about it, as if she should feel loyalty to no one but himself. It was unfair to Starhawk, and he knew it.
He sighed and shook his head at himself. His ancestors would die of shame. Going soft, his father would say—yielding where he should grasp tighter for his own survival. He had survived forty years by hanging on. His life had been a fist which let nothing go. It was difficult to open it to other things.
As a warrior, he had known what he was. Here, in this baked landscape of black rocks and demons’ whispers, he was seeing what he might become; and like Tazey, he found that it terrified him.
The hardness of that dreadful, motionless sky softened to a scrim of dove-colored silk. The smell of the storm was in his veins, pricking and hissing at his mind. It was not quite dark, but if he was to finish, it was best that he go now. With all the windows of the Hold shuttered, it was good odds no one would see him. He carefully closed up the windows of his own little cell and, in the semi-dark, stripped off his leather doublet, the chill startling against his ribs through the worn homespun of his patched shirt.
It wasn’t until the approaching footfalls were very close to the doorway that he realized it was not Starhawk returning. He looked up as a shadow blotted what was left of the light. Against the dusk he saw two of the white-robed shirdar, their hands on their sword hilts, motioning silently for him to come.
“So you are Sun Wolf.” The veiled woman’s hands moved on the arms of her jointed bronze camp chair. They were strong hands, white, like Incarsyn’s, moiréd with a lace of shadow in the shuttered chamber’s flickering dusk. “The barbarian mercenary.”
“My Lady.” He inclined his head and felt the scrutiny of those remarkable dark eyes. “And you are the Lady Illyra, chief of the people of the Dunes.”
Her mouth was hidden beneath the indigo veils which shrouded the faces of all deep-desert women, but the heavy lids of those dark eyes lowered. At their corners he saw the brief crinkle of appreciation at what he knew to be considerably more than an idle compliment. But she said, “It is not the way of our people that a woman should rule. It is my brother who is Lord of the Dunes.” Her voice was low and harsh, and in it was the authority of one who had never asked any man’s leave. By the dry, leathery folds of skin around her eyes, Sun Wolf guessed her age at close to his own—forty. Since her teens, according to rumor, she had ruled for her baby brother Incarsyn, commanding the armies of Hasdrozaboth without ever removing her modest veils. The thin, dark fabric puckered with her breath as she went on, “The women ruled Wenshar, and there was nothing but grief for the shirdar, for all the years of their ruling and for all the years after. I speak merely as ambassador for my br
other, who has heavier tasks at hand.”
Sun Wolf considered her for a moment—the tall, rangy body, muffled in robes and veils of black and indigo, the nose that crested out beneath the gauze of the veil, and the brilliant eyes, cold as a rattlesnake’s, on his. He wondered whether she were beautiful or ugly beneath those layers of gauze and knew that it did not matter, neither to her nor to anyone else. He said, “Matters like courting a woman of Wenshar?”
“He will not marry her.”
“He said that he would, knowing what she is.”
There was scorn in the deep voice. “He does not know what she is. He thinks magic is what the women do with feathers and herbs, to make this man or that love them or to make barren the other concubines of their husbands. He thinks it is an amusement, like dancing or zhendigo, the arts of touch, and practiced for the same reasons—to please men.” The movement of her body breathed a musky perfume which mingled with the pungence of the incense-scattered charcoal in the braziers behind her and the sting of dust stirring from the shutters of the windows. “So think all men, when first they say, ‘I will take to me a woman who knows magic.’ For this is all the magic that they will allow women in the desert. I know,” she went on softly. “I have ordered the death of more than one witch among my people.”
She took a bell from the table at her side and rang it, a tiny, piercing sound in the gloom. Sun Wolf, relaxed but battle-ready and still not certain where this interview would lead, moved a hand casually to his sword hilt as a slave came in, a good-looking young fellow with the beardless chin and soft fleshiness of a eunuch. Kneeling, the slave laid a cushion of red, embroidered wool by Sun Wolf’s feet. As he settled upon it, sitting on his knees after the fashion of the desert, Sun Wolf automatically checked all possible entrances to the room. Most of them had been curtained against drafts, which lifted the hangings uneasily, like the dark shrouds of passing ghosts. He was particularly aware of the one directly behind his back.
“Why?” he asked her curiously. “You know what it is to be a woman and to fight for power.”
“For that same reason,” she replied. “I know what I did to win the power I hold. Our ways are not the ways of the north countries, Lord Captain. The desert is harsh. It does not forgive even well-meant errors. Our ways have lasted for a hundred generations of men. They work. When one crosses a desert, one does not leave the straight path from water hole to water hole, even though people cry, ‘There is water over that dune there.’” A gust of wind bellied a curtain in the shadows beside her and stirred at the gauze veils covering her face and hair. “To change the old ways is to risk becoming lost. So the Witches of Wenshar proved.”
“Tell me,” Sun Wolf said, “about the Witches of Wenshar.”
“The rumors that brought me here to halt this match of my brother’s,” she said, “noise that you are a witch yourself. Is this true?” The word she used, with its dialectical inflection, lacking in the less formal speech of Wenshar, tugged at something in his thoughts.
He nodded slowly, unwilling to use that word, that inflection, for himself. “It is.”
“Good.” The lines around her eyes flexed again, though he had the feeling that, beneath her veil, the smile on her lips would not be a pleasant one. “Very good. Listen to me, Captain Barbarian. My brother is anxious to make this match with the daughter of the King of Wenshar, because we are a small people among the Lords of the Desert. We have never been great among the tribes, and some of our neighbors are very powerful. Particularly, we, like all the tribes, are threatened by the great lords of the north, the Middle Kingdoms beyond the mountains. They have told me that the Wizard King who held all the world in subjugation is now dead, and I have lived in the desert long enough to know that, when the great lion dies, there is much fighting among the jackals for his flesh. My people have need these days for strength.”
Sun Wolf remembered all the petty wars which throughout the spring and summer had wracked what was left of the Wizard King’s empire. “This is so.”
The hands, long and strong with their hooked nails, folded around the chair arms. The Wolf found himself wondering whether this woman had ever been married, as all women of the shirdar by custom must be, and if so, what had become of the poor bastard.
“Yet I say that my brother will not marry a witch, even though she is the daughter—and will be the sister—of the King of Wenshar, and that King, her brother, a sickly boy of no great strength. If I let the marriage go forward and permitted her to live afterwards, she would grow in strength, not having learned, as all our women do, to speak softly and in fear of men. In time she would challenge my powers, and those others who object to me would gather around her. Whether I was right or I was wrong, there would be dissensions in our people, and for those dissensions many, perhaps all, would die. If she married and died soon after, that would be worse, for her father, her brother, or her uncle, who casts his eyes on the power in Wenshar, would take it as a reason to ride against us, and again many would die.”
“And if she married and did not die in spite of your best efforts,” added Sun Wolf, “the situation would be worse still.”
The slow smile once again shivered the corners of her eyes and crept like poisoned syrup into her voice. “I see we understand one another.”
“I understand you, woman,” said the Wolf. “But I still don’t understand what you want of me.”
“No?” The level, dark brow tilted at one end, vanishing under the low band of dark silk. “Without this girl, my people still need some power, some weapon against those who threaten us. Indeed, as a witch, if she weds one of these sons of slaves who make up what passes for nobility here, we shall need it still more. And like my brother, I would not be averse to having a mage among our people, particularly one renowned in the arts of war.”
Sun Wolf’s mouth twitched a little beneath his ragged moustache. “Just so long as he’s a man.”
She nodded equably. “Just so. You would be no challenge to me, Captain. They say, even in the deep desert, that you are a man who is loyal to those who pay him and not a whore to take pay from this man and that, not caring. You are a fighter and a wizard, not a ruler of men—for if you were a ruler of men, you would have found men to rule ere this.”
Sun Wolf was silent for a time. He could feel the storm very close now, like the edge of a knife against his skin. Dimly, he heard men calling to one another outside and the snorting and stamping of the prized white horses of Hasdrozaboth, against the rising groan of the wind. After some moments he said, “I do not know what I am, Lady. When I hired myself to others to do their fighting for them, I knew what I was selling. I don’t know that anymore. I can’t say, ‘I’ll do this’ or ‘I’ll do that,’ because magic...” He paused, knowing that whatever he could say about magic, she would not understand, because he did not understand it himself. He shook his head. “Tell me about the Witches of Wenshar. What is it that walks in the ruins of Wenshar?”
Illyra rose from her chair and paced around behind it, her big hands resting on the small, flat circle of its back. Behind her the embroidered red-and-blue hangings over the windows had begun to belly and ripple with a continuous movement, as if evil things scurried invisibly behind them. Sun Wolf felt the electricity in the air crackle along the hair of his arms and begin to pound in his temples. Illyra considered him for a moment with wise, dark, cruel eyes.
“You have been there, then?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you see?”
“Demons,” Sun Wolf said. Resting easily on his folded-up knees on the red wool cushion, he looked up at the veiled woman before him. “The demons that rise out of the earth.”
“That was all?” she asked, and he nodded.
The woman sighed and paced a few feet from him, then turned back. “In the desert,” she said, “all the men revere and fear the djinns of the sand and the sky, the spirits that dwell in the rocks. But the women of the Ancient Houses have their own cults, each to its Hou
se. Each cult guards its own secrets. So with the Women of Wenshar.” Her hands rested like a vulture’s claws over the chair back, pale against the dark knurling of the grain.
“It was a poisoned cult, they say. They handed its secrets down generation after generation. They chose whom they wished to marry to their sons and brothers, to bring into the cult, and took what men they would to couple with, as men take concubines. It is said that they called up demons out of the earth and coupled with them as well. They practiced necromancy and called the spirits of the dead. Any who opposed the Witches were torn to pieces, as they say were the Bishop, the King’s friend Milkom who hated the shirdar, this priest who was the White Witch’s lover, and the old washerwoman who slandered her. They say also that any woman who betrayed the cult met a similar fate. Certainly it fell upon any man whom they hated.”
“And did this magic corrupt any who touched it?” asked the Wolf.
Illyra studied him curiously, heavy lids masking her eyes, as if asking what lay behind the question. A gust of wind took her enormous veil, swirling it so that its end nearly brushed Sun Wolf’s face where he knelt before her chair, and made the flames of the brazier twist like snakes seeking to escape the incense-strewn coals. When they subsided, the room seemed darker than before.
“So they say.” Her voice was hard and bitter. “Any girl who, seeing the rites of power, refused to embrace them, perished—but it is said that such was the skill of the Women of Wenshar in choosing and guiding their initiates that few refused.
“Thus they ruled all of Wenshar and much of the desert round about through fear. And thus it was that, when the Lords of the Middle Kingdoms rode down over the passes to destroy Wenshar and slaughtered these women with fire and sword and magic of their own, none of the Desert Lords would help the Witches, for all had suffered by their arrogance, greed, and senseless destruction.”
The Witches of Wenshar Page 20
