The Witches of Wenshar

by Barbara Hambly

  Brimming with shadow, the pit lay before him. He turned from it, and his own shadow brushed over the mottled sides of the broken altar. Why had he thought, for just that moment as he glimpsed it from the tail of his eye, that it stood whole again? Outside the frail glimmer of Starhawk’s little fire, the darkness seemed thicker, clotted in the corners of the vast room like the vapors of old decay which would never be cleared away.

  The demons lay in the stone, like sharks below the surface of the sea, and watched.

  The calf bellowed again, desperate with fear.

  He hated what he knew must come next.

  Starhawk had not understood it and had only been repelled when Jeryn had read in his cool little alto voice how the Witches of Wenshar had summoned their demons. Very few of them had used animals in the pit, once they’d realized more demons would come if the victim were a human child. Even back then, it seemed, orphans were cheap in the poor quarters of the city. Some of the Witches, the Book of the Cult had said, could summon the demons without sacrifice; but when Starhawk had suggested trying to do so, the Wolf had categorically refused. The book had not said it, but he had sensed what he would have to be projecting with his mind—filth and hatred and the unholiest of urges—to bring them. He’d rather kill a calf, even in the gruesome way prescribed.

  It took more nerve than he’d thought it would to walk to the edge of the pit. He wasn’t certain what he feared he would see there, with his wizard’s sight, in the swimming blackness below. But it contained only a little sand drifted in the corners, and the skeleton of what looked like a dove, white as a bit of lace dropped upon the loose gravel of its floor.

  He wondered why the sudden thought of how deep that gravel might lie over the bedrock repelled him like a nauseating smell.

  Turning back, he kindled the little heap of aromatic woods he had left on the bare stump of the broken altar and from it lit two fire-bowls which he set in place of the two missing runes on the inner Circle. Stepping carefully between them, he walked out of the Circle and over to where Starhawk sat beside her little fire.

  Without stepping over the protecting barrier, he said softly, “You all right?”

  She nodded. She had been silent for hours, watching him, gray eyes inscrutable. He had been totally absorbed in his task and wondered now what she had seen in the darkness as it had closed around him. All his nerves prickled, his mind screaming to him to beware in this vast darkness where the dry rustle of gowns and hair seemed to have only just that moment stopped in the black beyond the fire’s light.

  “Whatever you see,” he said quietly, “whatever you think is happening, don’t step out of the Circle. Once it’s broken, it will be no protection to you.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “They shouldn’t be able to get in at you.” Of that, at least, mercifully, he was now sure. “Once I draw the last two runes and complete the great Circle, they shouldn’t be able to get out. With them trapped, I should be able to work the binding-spells to hold them to the rocks of Wenshar forever.”

  She cocked her head a little. The smudgy firelight deepened the shadows of her hollowed eyes and the lines that fanned backward from them on the unswollen side of her face and scored deep marks from her nostrils to the soft corners of that calm mouth. “How long’s that going to take you?”

  He muttered a curse at her for seeing what she saw: the marks of fatigue on his face; the dark ring of weariness around his single eye and the bruised look of the lid; the taut mouth beneath its straggly mustache; and the strange pallor under the stubble of his golden beard. He was close to the edge and he knew it, nearing the point where the cumulative stresses of flight and concentration would begin to cause mistakes. Even the smallest break in his mental barriers could be fatal in dealing with the demons of Wenshar. “Until just after dawn, rot your eyes, and what the hell business is it of yours?”

  “And the sandstorm? Will that break before you’re done?”

  The Wolf hesitated. The sandstorms, as he and Nanciormis both had learned, would scatter the demons on their winds—but as they both had known also, where the demons were able to walk during the killer winds, they walked more strongly. They fed upon violence, even the violence of the air.

  As if she read his answer in his silence, she said, “Can you send it away? Or delay it?”

  He shook his head. He could feel the whisper along his bones, a crawling tingle as if his nerves were being drawn from his flesh one fiber at a time; it was coming and it was strong. His hoarse voice quiet, he said, “I haven’t the strength to spare, Hawk. Not from what I have to do. By dawn...” He shrugged and spread his hands. “We may have time. An hour would be all we need.”

  Dark wind licked the tiny fire; Sun Wolf swung around as the bull calf bellowed again, in despair as well as terror. The poor creature was jerking wildly at its rope, its bound feet bouncing and threshing, its eyes gleaming in the faint reflections of the fire. Sun Wolf was aware again of how dark it was in the temple, how the shadows seemed to creep forward, curious, questing fingers seeking to probe his body and his soul. He shifted his aching shoulders again, his heart beginning to pound at the thought of what lay ahead.

  Softly, the Hawk said, “Good luck, Chief. May the spirits of your ancestors lend you a hand.”

  “The spirits of my ancestors would disown me for messing with demons,” he replied, the levity he had intended hushed from the raven-croak of his voice. “They at least had brains.” He wanted to reach across, to touch her, like a man drawing luck from some talisman of dark-stained ivory and gold, but even that would have broken the Circle and negated the forces of protection held so tenuously in the tingling air. The little fire before her feet was sinking, and he could not even spare the power to summon witchlight to brighten that ghastly darkness for her. He wondered, as he turned from her and walked toward the terrified calf beside the door, how much of what was going to happen she would even see.

  It was going to be a hideously long night.

  The calf fought Sun Wolf’s grip on its stubby horns as best it could, bracing its bound feet, writhing as he half dragged, half carried it toward the Circle. The ghost-whispers of wind murmuring in the ventilation shafts echoed like an eerie chanting. Had they chanted, Sun Wolf wondered, as two or three of their number had dragged some poor terrified child to the altar? Chanted to summon the demons, to hold their own powers of protection against them?

  He remembered again the painted eyes of those worn frescoes and the dark cynicism of their ironic regard. A slashing hoof cut his shin; slobber from the calf’s muzzle slimed his hands and stung in the half-scabbed demon bites; its rough coat abraded the skin of his side as it flung its weight against him. In his mercenary days, he’d tortured men and taken pleasure in torturing them, if they’d hurt or betrayed him or some member of his troop. Why did slaughtering this bull calf, who’d have ended up dead at cattle-killing time before the onset of winter anyway, make his soul cringe as it did? Why did those huge brown eyes, white-rimmed with terror, seem so human, staring up into his? He dragged the animal between the two fire pots and the calf bellowed again in fear of the flames...

  And from the corner of his eye he saw movement.

  A glow that illuminated nothing flickered in the darkness behind him.

  They were coming.

  He was battered and aching in every muscle of his tired body by the time he got the calf wrestled up onto the uneven altar stone. The beast flopped like a landed fish, its pitiful, frantic bellowing for its mother turning the vast stone darkness into a ringing sound-chamber whose echoes went through Sun Wolf’s skull. He roped its hind feet together, and then to its already-bound forelegs; sweat ran down his ribs and back, sticking the torn rags of his shirt to his body and burning in the abrasions of his wrists within their filthy bindings. He worked from the front side of the altar rather than the back, hating the open, silent mouth of the pit at his back, but preferring that, for the moment, to the alternative. Where he stood no
w, panting, smelling the warm animal smell of the calf, the dirt, and the aromatic woods of the small fire beside the altar steps, he could look between the two fire pots into a Stygian corridor that seemed to run back far past the rear wall of the temple in its concealing shadows, a corridor extending into the blackness of the earth, into realms he had never known and never wanted to know—into time.

  He could see them now, far back along that corridor, bobbing like marsh-lights over swamps long dry. He could hear the whisper of their chattering laughter. The fire beside the altar seemed to wink in the glinting reflection of their eyes.

  The knife hilt pressed like an arm bone into his hand. With deliberate brutality, he slashed the tendons of two of the calf’s legs, one fore and one hind. The poor beast cried out with pain as well as terror, the smell of the blood on the knife mingling with the smoke, filling the darkness of the room. Something cold brushed Sun Wolf’s shoulder. Whirling, warrior’s muscles honed by terrors of his own, he almost cried out himself at what he saw, inches from his own face—the skeletal countenance of a demon, its head the size of a calf’s, brown eyes bulging from sockets of terror, complete even to the fringe of white eyelashes—the calf’s eyes. Under them, the unspeakable mouth smiled.

  Turning back swiftly, Sun Wolf slashed open the calf’s belly, blood pouring hot and slippery over his hand. He felt the prickle of cold claws in his back, the thin, bodiless muzzling of teeth against the skin of his neck; he forced himself not to look, not to think, not to panic. In the split second before the hot fumes of the blood and the smell of the sagging entrails choked him, he remembered being buried alive in a collapsing sapper tunnel at the siege of Laedden, remembered the torture pits of Elthien the Cruel, and remembered the floating flame speck whirling in the darkness of the dungeons of the Wizard King Altiokis, the pain of it lancing into his left eye...

  He hadn’t panicked then, and he had lived.

  The blood smell pierced his brain. His head throbbed with the frantic lowing of the tortured calf. His mind felt locked, clamped in a crystal grip that he dared not open. The Women of Wenshar had all done this, he thought dizzily.

  But they had enjoyed it.

  As if he were someone else, he watched a demon like the glass skeleton of a serpent twine down his outstretched arm, to lick the blood from his hand with a human tongue. The edges of the altar were thick with demons, seeping from the stone, floating down through the air, and whispering and giggling in straw-frail descant to the agony cries of the calf. One of them smiled at him with a mouth like Tazey’s, except for the fangs. Another had breasts like Starhawk’s, even to the scar. Their cold pressed all around him, teeth like chips of broken glass chewing at the bandages on his wrists. Worse than the cold was the knowledge, from he knew not where, that it would only take a slight giving of his mind to feel that cold as warmth.

  He dragged the calf from the altar, demons swarming and crawling over it, bouncing weightlessly free and floating in the air, limbs dangling, like monster wasps over a rotting peach. He cut free the calf’s feet and shoved it over the edge into the pit, averting his eyes from what he half-saw swarming below. The calf bellowed in agony and terror, staggering from side to side in the pit, crippled, bleeding, dying, unable to escape the things that had now begun to tear at it. Through the glittering, crawling swarm of demons, Sun Wolf could see the dusty hide matted with blood, as Tazey’s mare had been. In the darkness of the pit, demons flashed like starlight on glass, colors deepening their skeletal shapes, blood spattering them, and their eyes the dark eyes of women.

  The Witches of Wenshar had summoned demons so—and not with animals.

  From the sticky trail that led from altar to pit, he daubed up enough blood to mark the last two runes, as he knelt between the rune circle and the outer boundary of the Circle of Light. He then traced in the last markings, the calf’s blood mingling with his own where the demons had ripped the bandages from his wrists.

  The Circle was finished. It would hold the demons—for a time.

  And for a time, he could only crouch on his knees outside the Circle, his blood-slimed hands pressed together over his mouth, shaking so badly he was unable to stand, like a small child exhausted by fleeing to safety from that which whispers in the dark. He felt cold, empty, sick, and weary unto death. Yet he knew he had a night’s work ahead of him, to bind the demons permanently to the stones...And he must start at once, before the sandstorm, whose approach bit and whispered at his nerves, gave them its electric strength.

  He raised his head, and saw that Starhawk’s Circle of Protection was empty.

  Shock jolted him like a fist driven into the pit of his stomach. He stared for a moment at the tiny glow of its smoky fire and the dark flower of points, curves, and runes on the stone floor, all with the inner glow of magic gone.

  “Chief!”

  He swung around. She stood beside the darkness of the temple door, face and throat and her one bare shoulder and arm white against those horrible shadows. With her was Tazey.

  Somehow, he managed to get to his feet. The two women started to come toward him, and he waved them violently back. In the peripheral vision of his single eye, he could see the cloudy swarm of corpse-light weaving and billowing above the pit, like hornets over a burning nest. The women had no business coming anywhere near.

  He stumbled to them across the patterned sandstone of the floor. Reflected in their eyes, he saw how he must look—bloody, scratched, with the filth on his face and the dark line of the eye patch standing blackly against the pallor beneath. Starhawk put out her hand to his neck, and he flinched—for the first time he was aware that the demons had bitten him, shallow scratches, like love bites. He remembered what he had read of the Witches of Wenshar, and the simile turned him ill.

  “They came, then.”

  The Hawk had, of course, seen nothing. Even now he could see her looking toward the altar and the pit; in her eyes he could see no awareness of the evil lights floating above the glow of the pit. He fought a hysterical urge to laugh. “They came.”

  But by the horror on Tazey’s face as she stared toward the pit, he knew she saw something and he wondered obliquely if their forms looked the same to her.

  She tore her gaze from it and looked back at his face. “You have to flee,” she said quietly. “Nanciormis and his men are coming. Kaletha’s with them. They saw Jeryn coming back and followed his trail. I got the fastest horse I could. If you can get even a little ways away from here before the storm comes, it will cover your tracks.”

  “And you?” Starhawk’s arm tightened around the girl’s slim, straight shoulders.

  “I’ll—I’ll wait it out here.”

  “The hell you will,” the Wolf rumbled. “That Circle isn’t going to hold the demons forever...”

  “You could draw one around me,” she offered, clearly frightened but not about to obligate him to help her by admitting it. “I wouldn’t be in any danger then.”

  Sun Wolf put his hands on her shoulders, the blood on his fingers leaving sticky red blots on her faded pink shirt. “You’ll be in danger as long as you live, if those demons aren’t bound to the rocks that spawned them here and now,” he said quietly. “So will everyone in Tandieras—everyone in Pardle. Whoever has been calling them...” He hesitated and looked away from that absinthe gaze. “It isn’t only danger from them. If the Hawk and I ride on, and there’s another killing, you may very well take the blame. I’m sorry, Tazey. I know what they did with the Witches...”

  She flinched—evidently Nanciormis had told her that, too. But she only said, “It’s what they’re going to do to you.”

  “How long do we have?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I rode as fast as I could. I could see their dust behind me and their torches after it got dark, but I lost sight of them when I came into the ruins. An hour, two hours, maybe. They’ll be hurrying,” she added, “because of the storm.”

  It was close. He could feel it turning, far out in t
he desert—dust columns like mountains, black-bellied anger holding night and blotting dawn. His struggle to keep his mind locked against the probing lusts of the demons had left him shaky with fatigue; he had little enough power left to complete the binding-spells. Within the enchanted Circle, he could hear the demons chittering furiously over the fading wails of the dying calf.

  “I can’t turn it,” he said softly. “In any case we may need it...” He hesitated. They would need it for escape, from Nanciormis and his men, perhaps from the demons, if it came before the binding-spells were done...

  There were too many variables, pressing upon his aching mind like the collapsing weight of a tunnel roof. He could sense the anger of the demons now, as they began to scratch and whisper at the rune-circle that held them in. The light of Starhawk’s little fire, far back in the vast cavern behind them, was going, and he knew he had no strength to spare, either to make witchlight or kindle the ashes again. His hoarse voice low to hold it steady, he said, “Take care of the fire, Hawk. I’ll do what I can to finish and get us out of here, but it can’t be rushed.” If the demons got out, the Hawk and Tazey would be in danger, too.

  She said softly, “I know.” Tightening her arm around Tazey’s shoulders, she led her back toward the dying glow of the flames. Sun Wolf stood for a moment, willing strength back into his numbed muscles and shaken mind, as he had willed it on a dozen occasions in the camps of war throughout the years, rallying his men to fight or his own bruised body to haul himself out of some peril or other...They all seemed so trivial now, compared to what he must face.

  He could smell dawn coming, hours away. If there was even a little daylight between the retreating hem of night and the coming of the storm, it would help, but he sensed now there wouldn’t be. Whatever happened, it was going to be close.