Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (35 page)

Sun Wolf was panting, tears of exertion, rage, and despair mixing with the sweat that tracked his filth-streaked face as he raised the knife toward his neck. White smoke was billowing from the house now, drifting on the few vagrant breezes, but no one noticed . . . They would notice, however, Starhawk thought grimly, if she broke cover to attack Purcell. She braced herself, gauging the time of her streak over the twenty feet or so of open ground that separated them, the largest of her knives ready in her hand. Sun Wolf tried to twist his face away from Purcell’s glacial gaze, his breath coming in sobs, his teeth clamped so hard on his lower lip that blood ran down in a thin trickle over his chin. Mouth parted, Zane’s face blazed with an almost sexual eagerness. The razor metal glinted as it touched Sun Wolf’s throat . . . 

Purcell dies first . . . 

“FIRE!!!”

Zane’s head snapped around. For that first, fleeting second, there was only annoyance in his eyes at being interrupted. Purcell flinched, not, Starhawk thought, at the shout from someone in the square—the stupid guards still hadn’t noticed anything amiss—but at the smell of the smoke. He whipped around, still half-lost in the icy grip of his own concentration, like a man broken from a dream, and it took him a second to react to the white smoke billowing now from Ari’s house. The look on his face, of startlement passing at once into enlightenment and then to fury, was almost funny, as he realized that the djerkas was neither going to put out the fire to protect the books, nor let anyone else enter the room to do it. With a wordless yell he flung himself toward the house, followed by Zane and his guards.

Starhawk broke cover before they were out of sight, plunged across the uneven stones to where Sun Wolf stood, dagger edge pressed to his jugular, eye closed, gasping with the effort of the strain.

She wrenched at his arm, bringing it down, though she couldn’t force the dagger from his hand. His eye stared at her blindly, black with the dilation of the pupil. She didn’t think he recognized her—Small wonder, she reflected, as she dragged him violently along the path. The skirts and petticoats tangled at her legs, hanks of hair from the wig got in her mouth, and Sun Wolf lagged and twisted at her grip like an unwilling child. From all directions men were racing toward Ari’s house, barely noticing them as they jostled past. Starhawk wondered how long it would take Purcell to realize that the fire had to be a diversion.

Moggin was waiting for her by the old brick cone of the ancient furnace, already wearing Sun Wolf’s quilted black coat and with the rope over his narrow shoulders. Grabbing Sun Wolf’s other arm he followed her, coughing heavily as he shoved and manhandled him up the broken stair that had once led to the battlements and over the uneven wall walk to the shell of a ruined turret. The rope didn’t reach all the way to the ground from here, but the final drop was less than six feet. “Thank God the place is designed to keep people out instead of in,” the Hawk muttered viciously. “Chief, get down the rope . . . The rope, pox rot your eye!” He swayed blindly on his feet, still deep in the grip of the dreamsugar and the geas, the dagger clutched in his hand. Men were milling like ants around Ari’s house down below; by the color of the smoke the fire was out already. Purcell would find the remains of the smoke ball and guess . . . 

She pushed a bight of the rope into Sun Wolf’s nerveless grip, then, with a quick foot sweep and shoulder block, shoved him over the battlement. Moggin gave a yelp of horror, but Sun Wolf, as she’d suspected he might, reacted without benefit of his numbed brain, dropping the dagger to catch himself on the rope. She thrust Moggin down the rope after him immediately, forcing the Wolf to go down instead of trying to climb back up; the uneven surface of the wall was rough enough to give even a weak and inexperienced climber little trouble.

Some rescue,
she thought wryly, hitching up her wind-ruffled turquoise skirts to follow. Two big strong men and who is it who gets to do all the work? Then something metallic flashed among the broken crenelations of the walls to her left, something moving with a fast, sidelong, crablike gait. Her stomach curled.

She swung down the wall FAST, the jolt of the final drop jarring heavily in her half-healed skull.

“The djerkas,” she gasped as she caught Sun Wolf’s arm in one hand, Moggin’s in the other, shoving them both into a run. “Can it follow him, track him? If Purcell commands both . . . ”

“Blindfold him.”

Starhawk stopped long enough to tear off one of her several gaudy sashes to tie over the Wolf’s eye. Then they were running again, stumbling down the jagged granite of the rocky fortress hill. She knew every foot of the moor that surrounded on three sides the little valley in which Wrynde, its mines, and its guardian garrison had been built and the jumble of ruins that had once been its attendant villas and farms, every rock and pit and crevice, every swollen stream and wind-crippled stand of trees.

She had intended to go to ground somewhere nearer, but with the djerkas on their heels there was only one place she could think of.

It was three miles off. It had once been a villa, the country abode of some imperial governor, in a dell below Cold Tor which had once been fertile. Of the topsoil which had grown its rye and oats and apples, nothing was left between the roaring beck and the nearby sour swamp; of the house itself, little enough. But wine cellars had been cut into the hillside behind it, and there was a small quadrangle of what had been garden where half a dozen black elms still grew, incongruous in the wasted northlands. It was the only place where they’d have a hope, the Hawk thought, as she dragged her male impedimenta into the rocky cover of a knee-deep stream cut—provided the djerkas, or Zane’s men, didn’t catch them first.

By the time they reached the place, Moggin was reeling with fatigue. For rough-and-tumble work, he was a nearly useless ally, soft-raised and suffering from the effects of prolonged malnutrition and physical abuse. Moreover, Sun Wolf, though he moved with his old enduring strength in spite of the blindfold, kept trying to stop, as if every minute it reoccurred to him that he ought to go back. Long before they reached the villa Starhawk was ready to strangle them both.

“Moggin!”
She thrust Sun Wolf ahead of her into the narrow shaft that led to the old storage cellar, caught Moggin’s arm as he sank, face chalky under the grime, to his knees on the ice-skinned rock. “Moggin, dammit, don’t faint on me now! Moggy!” She dragged him by the back of his filthy coat to the nearest rain pool, shoved his head under and dragged him up, sobbing with fatigue, freezing water running in streams from his hair. “Listen to me, damn you! Tell me about the djerkas. How do you stop them? What gives them life? Dammit, it’ll track us here . . . ”

“Crystal,” he whispered. “ . . . mage meditates on it . . . spells . . . his own blood . . . ”

His eyes closed, his body doubling over with coughs. Dear Mother, she thought, he’s dying. She shook him again, hard.

“That thing has a kind of metal turret on its back. Would this crystal be there?”

He nodded feebly. She hauled him to his feet and slammed him back against the nearest elm trunk, holding him upright with fists nearly numb from cold. “Look, you faint later, all right? You die later. Right now I’m going to need your help. We need wood, bricks, rocks, anything about so big . . . ” She let him go, to indicate something about the size of a loaf of bread. A little to her surprise, he stayed upright. “Take them into the cellar in there, put them on either side of the door and HURRY. That thing’ll be after us and this is our one chance.” Her face was white in the red frame of wig and veils, her voice cool and biting, a soldier’s voice. It seemed to reach him, for he stumbled off, catching himself for balance on the slender saplings that clustered all around the parent elms. Part of Starhawk felt a stab of pity for him, but most of her was concentrated on speed and efficiency, only stopping to think, He’ll be no help, dammit. Pulling the largest of her daggers from her belt, she began cutting the saplings. The cellar wasn’t large, but it would have to do—it was enclosed, and had only one entrance.

As she dragged the saplings down the narrow hall to the dim little chamber she wondered how heavy the djerkas was. The golems of legend had been stone, able to crush a man, but, as she’d reasoned before, they had to be impossibly heavy and difficult to maneuver. The djerkas had clearly been built to sacrifice this impenetrable power to speed and surprise. Who fabricated that deadly metal body?
she asked herself, piling up the largest of the bricks and chunks of stone to the immediate left of the chamber’s inner arch. And how long did Purcell let that craftsman survive after it was done?

Poor bastard probably died the day after Purcell got the first dunning letter for the fee.

She glanced at the Wolf, crouched where she’d shoved him, his face to the inner wall, the gaudy orange scarf still bound around his head. Through his ripped sleeve, the wound in his arm looked clotted and ugly—that would have to be seen to soon—and the bruised flesh around it nearly fuchsia with cold. He was shuddering from cold and reaction to the horrors of the last eighteen hours; she fought the urge to go over to him, circle those wide, bowed shoulders with her arms and try to let him know he was safe.

He wasn’t, of course, the practical portion of her thoughts replied. At this point, time would be better spent making sure the longest saplings she’d cut would work as levers with the makeshift fulcrum to the left of the door.

One of these days I’ll figure out how to be a tender and loving woman,
the Hawk thought, helping Moggin to stack yet another armload of broken bricks and bits of old window sills and cornices ready to hand. Till then, I’ll just work on getting us to sunset alive.

As she doused another gauze scarf with gin and wrapped a stick with it to form a makeshift torch, she outlined her plan to the scholar.

“Oh, we don’t have to wait for it,” Moggin pointed out. Muddy, soaked, and shivering, he looked infinitely wretched, but somehow his voice managed to retain its old pedagogical calm. “If you remove Sun Wolf’s blindfold he’ll recognize where he is, and the djerkas will be drawn to us.”

“Well, that’s something.” She unbuckled the Wolf’s leather jerkin, stripped it off him and tossed it onto the smaller of the two piles of debris. “If we had to wait any kind of time for the thing to attack, we’d freeze to death. I need that coat of yours,” He gave it up without demur, though, under it, his canvas smock and breeches were threadbare and torn. She added her own heavy cloak and, pulling up her frothy skirt, threw in most of her petticoats as well. It was astonishingly cold without them, colder still once she’d pulled off the wig and veils to add to the pile. Only then did she cross the cellar to pull the garish blindfold from Sun Wolf’s eyes.

He moved his head, blinked at her painfully. The run from the fortress had cleared his mind of most of the dream-sugar, but there was still an odd look in his eye—of pain and stress and horror. “Hawk?” His hand groped for hers—she took it and squeezed it briefly.

“Stay here. Stay here against this wall and whatever happens, don’t move. You’re in the cellar of the old villa under Cold Tor.”

He nodded, his teeth gritting hard. “He’s calling me, Hawk.” His grip crushed tight on her frozen hands. “He wants me to come back . . . ”

“Can you hold against him?”

Again he managed to nod, though he looked sick. “It’s Purcell,” he said thickly. “He . . . ”

“Yeah,” Starhawk said. “We figured that one out.” She squeezed his hands again, then drew away. “Just stay here. You’ll be all right.”

“That is the most appallingly optimistic untruth I’ve heard since the Duke of Vorsal assured the Senate we couldn’t lose the war,” Moggin remarked, as she came back to where he waited, shivering uncontrollably beside the levers.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a social lie?”

He started to reply, but she gestured him silent. Minutes passed in bitter and deepening cold. Outside, the wind screamed across the gray land; Starhawk wondered if they had time to collect wood for a fire, then dismissed the thought. If one of them went out and was killed, the other could never cope with the djerkas alone.

Then, barely audible in the stillness, she heard the light, swift clatter and whir, almost unrecognizable had she not been ready and listening. “There . . . ”

It came fast, a grate of razor claws in the short stone passage; she and Moggin flung themselves down on the sapling levers by instinct, before the thing was halfway through the door. It took all their weight, in a single jerking flip, to upend the djerkas like a turtle. The next second Starhawk rammed one of the levers like a pole against the thing’s underbelly, jamming it, still sideways, against the cellar wall. For all its relative lightness of construction the creature was incredibly heavy; Moggin threw himself in with a pole the next second, the thing writhing to regain its balance as Starhawk seized a shorter sapling and twisted it into the nearest of the leg cables, tangling its movement. Moggin followed suit, jamming another pole into one of the swivel joints, his white face almost unrecognizable with rage and determination.

Two limbs jammed, the creature slashed its razor claws at Starhawk. One of them ripped through the thick silk covering her back as she sprang in on top of it, wedging half a brick into one of the counterweight housings. She leaped aside, caught up another pole, and thrust in again, this time tangling the cable that controlled the claw. Moggin flung Sun Wolf’s leather doublet over the claws to give the Hawk time to jam her discarded petticoats into more of the joints, the thing bucking and heaving under her, flipping, jerking spasmodically as it flailed her with its steel limbs. Her numb hands clawed at the low metal grille she’d seen before in its center, twisting and tearing; joints dug at her belly and her sides, and a razor claw sliced her calf. Head down, she scrabbled at the hollow under the grille, the startling warmth of the cavity almost burning. Her fingers clawed something hard and slick, closed and twisted . . . 

Without even a final heave the djerkas collapsed, like a folding chair whose joints Dogbreath might have loosened for a joke. The jerk of it was like falling onto a heap of cobblestones. Starhawk lay across it, crystal clenched in bleeding fingers, heedless of the points and lumps of steel digging into her flesh through the thin fabric of bodice and chemise. She became gradually aware of the burning trickle of blood on her back and legs, startling against flesh that was freezing cold.