Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (3 page)

Fifty feet farther on, the fire flicked suddenly out of existence, and she knew Sun Wolf had fainted.

In the rocks Dogbreath and Firecat joined them, leading four shirdar horses in a string. The Hawk glanced back swiftly at the teeming knoll and Dogbreath shook his head and gestured with the bow on the back of his saddle. She shivered, but knew he was right. He and the Cat had been busy in the rocks dealing with the rest of the shirdar. By the time they’d been able to get to Choirboy—running, rolling, tearing frenziedly at the gnawing carpet of ants that had already eaten out his eyes and ears and brain—shooting him was all they could have done.

So the ants, she supposed, if no one else, had done well out of the day. A philosopher might take that as proof that the Mother did look out for the humblest of Her creatures, and that it was an ill wind indeed that blew nobody good.

That was one reason she’d become a mercenary instead of a philosopher—the other, of course, being that the pay was better.

This isn’t right,
Sun Wolf thought, pulling himself stickily from the darkness of fevered sleep. He’d left the troop with Ari, left them for good . . . He was a mage now. He had to find a teacher, had to find his destiny . . . find what he should have gone looking for twenty years ago . . . Hadn’t he?

But they seemed so real—Dogbreath cross-legged by a fist-sized fire built in the shelter of black granite boulders, sharpening a dagger, and Starhawk’s silhouette crouched against the blazing desert stars. Somewhere close by a horse whickered, and distant, liquid, unbearably hurtful, coyotes cried in lonely chorus at the moon.

Had he left them? Or was he, in fact, still their commander? Was this that hellish desert summer they’d fought the armies of Shilmarne of Dalwirin back and forth through the passes of the Dragon’s Backbone? Had he just been wounded and dreamed it all—the horrors of Altiokis’ Citadel, the scorching birth agonies of magic within him . . . Starhawk saying she loved him?

Maybe none of it had ever happened, he thought, sinking again into the fever’s shroud of many-colored pain. Maybe he was still commander of these people, fighting small wars for pay and for whatever loot they could steal. Maybe he had never really felt that power kindle deep fire in his flesh.

Starhawk’s cool voice said something about it being time to ride on, if they wanted to get over the passes before the shirdar gathered for another attack. He heard the light scrunch of her boots and turned his face away, so that she would not see him weep.

He woke clearheaded, indoors, this time. He heard the groan of dry wind in wooden eaves, the scratchy rattle of pine boughs against the wall by his head, and the petulant bang of a poorly fastened shutter. Musty straw, cooking, and woodsmoke—an inn, he thought, opening his eye. Opposite the bed where he lay, he saw an open door and, beyond it, the carved railing of an indoor gallery and high ceiling rafters dyed amber with firelight from a hearth somewhere below. Then he moved his head and saw Starhawk, Firecat, Dogbreath, and the Little Thurg grouped around a crude table across from the foot of his bed.

“Raise you two.”

“Come on, I saw you take three cards . . . ”

“You gonna see me or sit there whining about it, you sleaze-eating heretic?”

“You should talk about heresy! I’ll see you and raise you, you pox-ridden antisubstantiationist tart . . . ”

“I bet you say that to all the girls . . . ”

“I’ve got better things to do than throw good money after bad . . . ”

“Who dealt this mess?”

Gear was heaped under the table around their feet. He saw his sword, which they must have picked up in the arroyo, his boots, and the battered saddlebags containing the books of the Witches of Wenshar. He waited until Starhawk had gathered up her winnings, then said, “I thought I’d have to be pretty far off my head to hallucinate something that looked that much like Dogbreath.”

They crowded around his bed—Starhawk carefully pocketing her money before leaving the table—all talking at once. Over Thurg’s head he met the Hawk’s eyes, cool and gray and enigmatic as always, but deep in them he read what she’d die before saying in the presence of others, her shy pleasure at seeing him once more himself, if not precisely on his feet. Idiotically, his heart did a little flip in his chest.

“We been hunting you all around St. Gambion’s barn, Chief,” Thurg was saying.

Firecat added, “Be a hell of a thing to catch up with you just in time to see you get et by bugs.”

“Yeah, I thought that myself.” He struggled to sit up, shaking the long hair out of his face.

Under a bandaged pad of dressings, the wound in his back hurt like a mother-in-law’s bite, but it was the scouring sting of poultices, no longer the burn of poison. From the feel of it, he could tell it wasn’t serious. A whore long ago had once given him worse with a pair of scissors.

“But”—Dogbreath grinned, perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed, his mad eyes sparkling—“odds were damn near even we would.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Starhawk tossed him a shirt. It was his last spare from the saddlebags, patched, frayed at the cuffs, most of the points missing, and stained faintly with somebody’s blood. They’d probably got the innkeeper’s wife to patch it—no mercenary he knew, with the exception of himself, had any idea which end of the needle the thread went through. In the past year of traveling with Starhawk it had been he who had mended her shirts—a hell of a thing in a grown woman who’d presumably been raised right. He rubbed his eyepatch, readjusting the set of the leather over the empty socket.

“And what the hell are you doing here anyway? I thought Ari would be halfway back to Wrynde by this time of year.”

“Ari sent us, Chief,” Dogbreath said, the wicked sparkle fading from his dark eyes. “We’re in trouble, all of us—we need your help bad. We can’t be certain, but it’s looking more and more like some wizard’s put a hex on the troop.”

“It started with little things.” Dogbreath shrugged and gestured helplessly with big, knuckly hands. Never a dirty man, Dogbreath was invariably ragged; under the dingy leather of his iron-plated doublet lurked a sweater that looked as if it had been knitted by a wittol on hashish, over which the grimy and horrifically parti-colored dags of a court coat’s sleeves hung like rotting kelp. “Stuff happens—it always happens, any campaign, you know that, Chief. But this time . . . ”

“Where are they now?”

“Vorsal.”

Sun Wolf swore, with considerable variety and feeling.

It wasn’t that he felt any shock over the siege of Vorsal. He’d been expecting trouble there since its hereditary Duke had defied the economic leadership of Kwest Mralwe and started weaving and exporting local cloth via Vorsal’s own small but excellent harbor, instead of selling the fleeces to the great merchant houses of Kwest Mralwe. When anyone, let alone some two-by-three principality like Vorsal, crossed the richest cloth-trade monopoly in the Middle Kingdoms, war was strictly a matter of the King-Council’s earliest convenience. But for Ari and the mercs to still be there this late in the year . . . 

“Does he know how close the rains are?” Sun Wolf rasped, appalled. “What the hell’s he been doing all summer? God’s Grandmother, the Hawk and I between us could take that town in two weeks with a troop of nuns and a performing dog act!”

“It’s not that easy, Chief.” Dogbreath drew up his knees and wrapped his long arms around them, his simian brow puckered as he tried to marshal thoughts he was uncertain how—or if—to express. “I never believed in all that garf about hoodoos,” he continued after a moment. “I mean, yeah, I laid out a dozen summer nights watching for the fairies when I was a kid, and all I ever saw was the older kids canoodling in the woods. But now they say you—you’ve turned into some kind of hoodoo, and there might be others—wizards, witches—hoodoos who’ve been on the bunk all these years, coming out now Altiokis the Wizard-King isn’t around to snuff ’em. And damn if I know what to believe.”

Through the open door, voices drifted up from the common room below the gallery, the innkeeper’s wife’s raised in exasperation above the chirping giggles of her assorted offspring. This close to the coming of the winter storms, few travelers were on the road. Sun Wolf guessed the woman wouldn’t have permitted her children into the common room in the busy season. By their voices, at least one of them was old enough to be made a slave, either as a pit-brat in the Wenshar silver mines, or—if pretty—he knew brothels that took boys and girls as young as eight.

“It’s not just the usual bellyaching during a siege, Chief,” Dogbreath went on. “It’s not just soldiers’ luck or that kind of stupid thing. This is different. I can’t say how.” He slouched back against the wooden wall behind him and seemed to concentrate all his attention on plaiting and unplaiting the last three-inch tuft of hair at the end of his left braid as he spoke.

“It isn’t just some of the arrows being warped, or the glue on the fletch rotting—it’s every motherless arrow you touch, and especially the one you use to try to pick off the guy who’s about to dump molten lead on your buddy. Motherlovin’ boxes of ’em that were fine in Wrynde. It isn’t just the food’s bad—it’s either tryin’ to climb out of the cask or it’s got this back-taste that you barely notice going down, but you notice it lots when it’s coming back up the other way half an hour before the sortie at dawn. I never seen so many roaches, chiggers, and ticks, and all the rats in the Middle Kingdoms have been living in the catapult ropes. And I’ll tell you something else—there’s not a cat in the camp anymore.

“That’s how it started. Then the sapper tunnels started flooding. Tunnels where we’d checked the supports and didn’t see a worm or a splinter or so much as an ant—sorry, Chief, didn’t mean to mention ants—would collapse on us. One of ’em caught fire, and if you can figure out how that happened, I’ll give you a sweet. Then the horses would spook—first just in the lines at night, but these days they’ll do it in battle, or even riding back and forth to town—horses who were damn near foaled on a battlefield. We lost a dozen men including Gadget—you remember Gadget, the engineer?—when one of the ballistas collapsed. We still don’t know how that happened, but I was one of the guards on it the night before it packed in and I swear by the Queen of Hell’s corset nobody got near it.

“There’s something going on there, Chief, and the troops are starting to spook.”

Sun Wolf barely heard those last words. A wizard. Something inside him gave a great, excited bound, like a child who sees his father surreptitiously clearing another stall in the stables a week before his birthday feast. A wizard in Vorsal.

For a year, since being banished from Mandrigyn, where his only potential teacher lived, he’d been seeking a master wizard, someone who had been trained in the use of those terrifying powers, someone who could train him. For a year he had traced rumors that led nowhere and run to earth every trail he could think of that might lead to another wizard, someone who could teach him what he was and what he could be. The last of those trails had ended in the dead city of Wenshar, in bloody shreds of black cloth and red hair and a staggering line of sticky red handprints leading away into dust-silted gloom.

Across Dogbreath’s shoulder he met Starhawk’s eyes. But she said nothing, just sat at the table, silently shuffling and reshuffling the cards.

His one eye flicked back to Dogbreath. “Why doesn’t Ari just pull out? Write it off as a lost cause, take his front money and get his rosy little backside up to Wrynde before the rains turn the badlands into a white-water death trap and strand his arse in the Middle Kingdoms for the winter?” Firecat and the Little Thurg, who’d scootched their chairs around to his bedside, looked down into their painted clay mugs and said nothing. “He did get front money, didn’t he?”

“Well—not enough to buy food through the winter.”

Sun Wolf cursed again, a comprehensive and hair-raising execration that included several generations of Ari’s descendants and all of his luckless ancestors.

“It was some kind of a deal with the King-Council,” Dogbreath continued, unperturbed by his former commander’s eloquence. “Penpusher said . . . ”

“Penpusher should have goddam known better than to get you in a position you couldn’t get out of!” He made a furious gesture and gasped as his wounded shoulder and the cracked ribs he’d acquired in Wenshar added their mite to the discussion.

“That’s just it, Chief,” said Dogbreath. “We can’t get out of it, not now. Without the money we’re gonna starve in Wrynde, if we make it that far and, if we don’t break Vorsal soon, we’re gonna get hit by the rains anyway and stranded. Yeah, Kwest Mralwe might feed us through the winter, or they might turn against us, but either way, by spring, Laedden or Dalwirin is gonna get in the act and send an army against us that we won’t be in any shape to fight. And anyhow,” he added quietly, “if there is a hoodoo holed up in Vorsal, we might none of us make it to spring.”

Sun Wolf leaned back against the flattened and rather dirty hay pillow wadded behind him, his big arms folded, his one eyelid drooping low over the chill amber glitter of his eye. The winter storms were late already; the desert sandstorms had started weeks ago. In his bones, in the dim extended senses of wizardry and animal watchfulness, he could feel the weather, hear the moan of distant tempests whispering behind the wind as it shook the heavy window shutters. He studied them all—the thin brown man sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed in a messy welter of sleeve dags; the sturdy red-haired woman in the chair beside him, sipping her beer and watching his face anxiously; the Little Thurg, looking down at his blunt, folded hands; even the Hawk, seemingly absorbed in getting every card in the two halves of the divided pack to interleave exactly, one to one. He’d spent years with these people and knew them far better than any of the parade of lovely young concubines who had filed through his bed. He’d trained them to fight, crossed swords with them at the school he’d operated for so many years in Wrynde, and drunk with them after battles; he knew their flaws, their jokes, their loves, and the minutest timbres of their voices. The day before yesterday was far from the first time they’d saved his life, at the risk—and sometimes, as in Choirboy’s case, at the cost—of their own.