Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (41 page)

“You want me to die, Purcell, you’re coming with me. Now. Do it, Hawk.”

Whether she understood what he was doing or not he didn’t know, but she had never disobeyed his command. Her hand shaking, she picked up the weapon again, and swaying, forced herself to her feet.

“What are you doing?” screamed Purcell. “I forbid this! I command you to . . . to . . . ”

“Release you?” said Sun Wolf softly. Perhaps he did not say it—he couldn’t tell. Perhaps the words sounded only in his mind. But he knew the master wizard heard. “No. You release me—or you come with me. Do it, Hawk.” He felt the geas bite, rip, twist like a terrified bullock on a rope. But its very nature twisted it around his mind and soul, and he held it fast.

Beside him the Hawk drew herself up, her eyes dilated, delirious with the pain gouging at her skull. “You’re insane!” Purcell was yelling. “Let me go . . . ”

Sun Wolf made no reply, watching the Hawk, willing her to find the strength against the pain in her own head. He had taught her that strength, and taught her obedience to the Cold Hells and beyond. Shadowed black against the flames in the doorway behind her, the Cold Hells of pain and madness were in her eyes. The earth magic was evaporating from his flesh; he could feel his strength going, and tightened his grip still further on Purcell’s geas, on the silver mind entangling his, to drag it down with him into death.

Wearing her cold, soulless battle face, Starhawk raised the ax. Purcell screamed, “Let me go . . . ”

You let me go, dammit,
he thought, but all he could manage to cry was “Do it, Hawk! NOW! That’s an order!”

She screamed her battle yell and swung with all her strength at his skull.

The snapping of the geas from his mind was like a rope breaking, disorienting in its suddenness; he barely twisted aside in time. But the Hawk’s reflexes, even in pain and madness, were as fast as his own. Her momentum was broken, even as he snatched the ax from her hand. He was turning as he did so, turning and throwing, and even with one eye—if he aimed with his eye, and not by instinct and magic and hate—his aim was true.

The ax took Purcell right where it should, at the base of his spine. He seemed to break at the waist and fold backward, collapsing in the archway where he had first stood; at the same moment there was another crashing, and a beam from an upper floor ploughed down from above, setting the rafters overhead on fire. Sparks rained down, igniting the wooden floor. Sun Wolf caught the Hawk by one arm as she staggered, and together the two of them ran through the falling sparks and choking blur of smoke, through the furnace of the two chambers behind them, to the white rectangle of the outer door.

He knew the stairway outside was gone and was long past caring. He and the Hawk flung themselves through the door, and for endless minutes, it seemed to him, they floated outward and down . . . to land in a tangle of mud, lumber, and the bodies of the slain.

The earth magic left him as he jumped. He hit the waste of struts and boards limp and muscleless as the last of that black torment vanished like vapor, taking even its memory with it. His own magic, the power that had slept in his bones since his childhood, the power to weave the winds and to call back the living from the shadow-lands of death, vanished, too. He felt nothing inside him but a vast white hollow, an emptiness that filled the world. Later it would hurt. He knew that even then.

For a long time, he lay on his back, wondering if he would die, and looking up at the smoke pouring up out of the burning Armory into the gray belly of the sky.

Then Starhawk’s voice asked, “You okay, Chief?” Her hand reached down to help him to his feet; she had to put her shoulder under his arm to help him cross the square to where Ari and his men waited for them beside the gate.

Zane had never made his appearance to rally his men or to give any kind of direction to the fighting in which they so greatly outnumbered their attackers. Without Purcell, Louth, or any other leader, they had given up quickly. Once Ari and his forces had broken through the postern gate, there had been relatively few casualties. A number of these, the Wolf was told later, had been in fights between members of Zane’s own forces, over booze or whetstones or fancied thefts, or all the meaningless trivia over which they’d fought all summer—fights which had broken out immediately after the departure of the relief force for Wrynde.

Zane himself they found in his bed. Sun Wolf looked up from the eyeless and sexually mutilated corpse sprawled among the gory welter of the sheets in time to see Ari turn away, gray-lipped and sick. “I knew Zane was a bastard,” the young commander said softly. “But Holy Three, he didn’t deserve a death like that from any man.”

Others had crowded into the room to see—Hog, still in Louth’s armor with the faithful Helmpiddle waddling behind; Penpusher, with a bandage torn from some corpse’s clothing wrapped around his arm, and Dogbreath, limping, holding onto a halberd to stay on his feet and grinning like a golliwog through a mask of dirt and blood. Behind them in the doorway Sun Wolf saw Opium, clothed in a very plain blue dress that was too big for her, obviously borrowed from someone else, the velvet profusion of her hair not quite concealing the livid brown bruises on her face.

“What makes you think it was . . . ” began Starhawk; but her eyes followed his; after regarding Opium for a thoughtful moment, she raised her eyebrows, shoved her hands behind the buckle of her sword belt, and held her peace.

“That’ll be five coppers. “

“Goddam highway robbery, that’s what it is,” Sun Wolf growled to himself, but watched Opium’s backside appreciatively as she reached down the credit book from the shelf behind the bar and marked his page. “Worth it,” he added, as she glanced back at him with teasing eyes through the tendrils of her hair, “for a drink of real beer.”

“Sure be nice,” muttered Dogbreath, raising Penpusher four wood chips at the poker table nearby, “if we could pay for it with real money.”

Sun Wolf said nothing. He knew the remark had been directed at him, though not with any particular malice.

Opium folded shut her credit book. “The credit you’ve been spreading all over camp is more money than you’ve seen in your life, Puppylove, so make the most of it.” She pulled the lever on the keg, loosing a stream of nut-brown silk into the pewter tankard Sun Wolf maintained on the premises, and set the beer on the plank bar before him. For a moment their eyes met. She was still heart-stoppingly beautiful, but he was growing used to that. The fact that she was now living with Bron helped, satisfying some male territorial instinct in him that took offense at the thought of an unclaimed female. Though he might toy with the notion of dragging her down and ravishing her under the bar whenever he walked into the place, he no longer had to fight to keep from doing so. At least not much.

It might have been that she was more content with her life now, happy with Bron and making money—or at least what would be money when currency became once more available in the camp—hand over fist. Since Bron and Opium actually had wares to sell, a good portion of the fund of credit in the camp was slowly making its way into their ledger books, and the always-active camp gossip had it that Opium was one of the chief investors in the consortium that would run the alumstone diggings. Some of the men added that she’d turned bitchy since she’d gotten rich—meaning that she no longer danced in the tavern, and the dark flightiness, the vulnerability that had drawn the Wolf’s protective instincts, was gone, replaced by a calm and confident peace. But if Sun Wolf missed the romance of that hunted helplessness, he at least did not grudge her what she’d gained instead.

She still moved with a dancer’s lightness as she brought him his beer, pausing for only a moment before the little mirror back of the bar to adjust the silk flower in her hair. “And you?” she asked softly. “Is it going better, Wolf?”

He was silent, staring down at the marble-white froth in the tankard cupped between his scarred hands. Was it ‘going better’?

He made himself nod. “Fine,” he said. “All right.”

Her dark brow puckered with a friend’s concern. “Do you think you’ll ever be able to . . . ”

“I said I’m fine.”

Her breath drew in to apologize, or query, or express her very genuine worry for him, and he concentrated on keeping his hands on the tankard and not slapping her and telling her to shut the hell up. But she let her breath out unused. After an awkward pause, he drained his beer and gave her a smile he hoped didn’t look manufactured. “Thank you,” he said, and left.

His magic had not returned.

Winter had locked down on the camp. As he crossed the square, the frozen mud crunched treacherously beneath his boots, blotched with trampled and dirty snow. Wind moaned around the fortress’ rubble walls, low now, but rising in the nights to dismal shrieking in the high rafters of Sun Wolf’s house, in the lofts of Bron’s tavern and the makeshift ceilings of the hospital and stables. In the hospital it scarcely mattered. Those who had not died of the plague, no matter how ill they were, had begun recovery almost from the moment Purcell had perished in the burning Armory.

Xanchus, Mayor of Wrynde, had sent two midwives to help with the nursing until Butcher recovered. Neither was mageborn or had the healing power in her hands, but both understood granny magic, and Sun Wolf had humbly boiled water and sorted herbs for them in order to learn whatever they could teach. Moggin had volunteered all the lore he’d accumulated about medicine, but the older of the two grannies confided to the Wolf one day while grinding elfdock that in the main, the Wolf’s assistance was by far the most useful. The few men who had laughed at his helping the old ladies had quickly regretted being heard. Later, when Sun Wolf had suggested that they go a few training bouts with him with wooden swords after one of Ari’s classes, they had regretted being born. When the weather cleared a little between storms, the Wolf still rode the ten miles into Wrynde to improve his herb lore. He understood now that this and the healing he was studying with Butcher might be the closest he would ever come to magic again.

By day, he understood that he was lucky to have survived the earth magic at all.

Waking in the night was different.

In dreams he returned, again and again, to his first, ancient vision of magic; to the little wooden naos behind the village long-house where the Ancestors dwelled. In the dreams he was a man, not the boy he had been, but the place had not changed. In the shadowy forest of spirit poles on the other side of the stinking blood trench he could still see the faint gleam of the skulls racked along the rear wall and pick out the names of ancestors crudely carved on each stained trunk. The tokens of their mortal lives—usually a knife or helmet, but sometimes only a few scraps of hair, a bit of braided leather, or a tuft of woven straw—seemed to move restlessly with the leap of the fire on the stone altar, where it blazed as it did on the Feasts of the Dead. It was higher, hotter, fiercer than he’d ever seen it in life, blazing wildly up toward the rafters as if old Many Voices had dumped powdered birch bark into it from his trailing sleeves.

But the old shaman wasn’t there, and the fire poured upward nevertheless, though the Wolf could not see what it was that burned.

The core of the fire called him, as it had in his dreams of childhood, and his hand yearned toward it. In his ancient vision he had grasped the flame, felt the agony of it searing away his hand’s flesh, to leave only the bones that wielded the fire’s glowing core like a sword. A few nights after the fight with Purcell, when this dream had first returned to him, he had felt hope leap in him at the sight, for it was that sword which he’d used in his first vision to free himself of Purcell’s dark hand. Gritting his teeth, he had reached out and grasped the flame anew. Searing, excruciating pain cleaved into his loins like a sword, but what he had taken from the flames was not a skeleton hand grasping the magical core of his power, but only a charred and blackened stump.

The training floor was quiet when he reached it. There had been a class that morning, run by Ari as he himself had once run them, pushing and bullying and thrusting the men through the pragmatic intricacies of armed and unarmed combat, making every reflex, every reaction, every blow and parry as unthinking as the blink of the eye against dust. Working at the back of the floor, with the freezing air of the open veranda cold on his back and the steam of breath and body heat pouring out under the eaves, Sun Wolf had remembered how it had been when he had trained the men and felt the fire of their spirit moving like a finely balanced weapon in his hand.

The huge room was leaden-colored now, with the whitish reflections off the snow from its wide parchment windows dimly illuminating the dozen or so warriors still working there on their own, swinging the weighted weapons through training forms, or sparring for timing and wind.

On the far side of the vast floor he saw Starhawk, patiently instructing Moggin in the first uncertain rudiments of swordplay. The philosopher’s cough was responding, slowly, to the grannies’ herbs; he’d finally gotten rid of his slave chain, though the scars of it would remain for life on his throat and collarbone. He looked better than he had since the first time Sun Wolf had seen him back in his house in Vorsal. By selling his services as an amateur geologist to Ari and Xanchus—he was the only man in the north with any knowledge of how to set up a kiln to bake alumstone into the white mordant itself—he’d amassed a small amount of credit; he was, moreover, making a reasonably steady living as a storyteller. Now that Gully had found his true metier as a mopper-up in the tavern, Moggin’s memory of every romance, play, and poem he’d ever read in his sheltered and bookish life was a moderate godsend during snows and rains that lasted a week at a time.

We never know,
the Wolf thought ironically, where we’re going to end up. Probably Moggin would never have believed it a year ago if you’d told him he’d be working as a storyteller in a tavern on the backside of creation. Nor, undoubtedly, would he have believed it a few months ago, if you’d told him he’d live till spring—or want to.