Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (43 page)

“I got to tell you, Chief,” said Ari, holding aloft his torch as they waded over the slushy snow and into the short tunnel, “I’m damn glad you got your power back, if for no other reason than this. It’s gonna take us the rest of the winter to sort out who owes whom what.”

“Yeah, well, I hope nobody invested too heavily in buying up Dogbreath’s poker debts.” He stood for a moment, looking down at the chest in the mingled gray and yellow of torchlight and daylight. When he had come here before, it had only been a chest of money, sitting in the dirty chamber. With the return of his magic, he was aware of the stink of the curse clinging to it like months-old decay.

“I think the Goddess did,” Starhawk remarked. “She’s taken a hell of a shine to him—says she’ll let him take out his debts in trade.”

Sun Wolf, well acquainted through camp rumor with the Goddess’ tastes, gave a wordless shudder. Moggin edged into the cellar behind him, muffled in the long robes of brownish wool and as many plaids and shawls as he could get in trade for his services as the Mayor’s mining engineer, his hands in their shabby mittens holding the wicker baskets containing the two black chickens that were part of the rite for this particular type of curse. His pockets bulged with phials: mercury, the last bits of the auligar powder—of which Sun Wolf, now that he could work spells again, promised himself he’d make more—and whatever else could be identified of Purcell’s effects.

Sun Wolf took off his thick sheepskin vest and his gloves, knelt gingerly on the hard-frozen dirt, and began to draw a Circle of Power around the chest.

They were still there six hours later when the daylight faded, and the torchlight flared a jumpy gold with the night drafts that blew in over the moor.

“The bastard won’t come off.”

“This isn’t time to be funny, Chief,” Ari said dangerously. He’d ridden back and forth from the camp two or three times, and every time the Wolf had come out of the cellar there’d been more people milling around the shambling ruins of the villa. Bron had lit a fire and was pouring White Death out of a goatskin flask. Opium, bundled in the purple velvet coat someone had looted years ago from an Eastern queen, was sitting on a broken foundation comparing credit records with the mayor of Wrynde, whose boots, unbeknownst to him, Helmpiddle was in the process of desecrating. Even Gully was there, breath streaming in a gold cloud from his gap-toothed smile while he cadged drinks from all and sundry.

“The time to be funny was six hours ago, when I wasn’t bone-tired and damn near frozen,” the Wolf retorted, rubbing his cold hands together and tucking them under his armpits for warmth. “We’ve worked every kind of take-off spell either of us could think of, and when we put the last of the auligar powder on a strat piece that hex is still on there like a tattoo on a sailor’s arse.”

He didn’t add the conclusion that he, Starhawk, and Moggin had come to, crouching around the ninth or tenth Circle they’d made in the privacy of the cellar—that it was beyond a doubt the mad strength of the earth magic which had fixed the curse to the money for good. “After all,” Starhawk had pointed out when they’d agreed not to break this particular piece of news to Ari, “there’s about six more weeks of winter to go.”

“You mean now you can’t even tell whether the curse is off the money or not,” said Ari.

“Sure you can,” supplied Dogbreath, who, under the Goddess’ watchful blue eye, was the only one looking slightly relieved. “After every try, just play a hand of cards next to it. That’ll tell you fast enough how well it worked.”

“Well, unless you want to pony up the cost of some more chickens,” Sun Wolf growled, “that’s out, too.” Three of the rituals of cleansing had called for blood sacrifice, and, in the middle of winter, chickens did not come cheap. “I’m telling you, we’ve tried every method either of us ever heard about. That curse is on that money to stay.”

“You let that bastard die too easy,” Ari muttered viciously. “So what are we going to do? We owe half the camp to old Xanchus over there.”

“Well, you better not pay him with that money if you’re planning to operate the mines in partnership with him.”

“Let’s give it to the Mother’s shrine at Peasewig,” suggested Dogbreath brightly. “Those heretics deserve it.”

“Could we melt it down?” suggested Opium, coming over to the group by the arched tunnel-mouth and delicately readjusting a jeweled comb in her hair. “Melt it down and sell the silver?”

“And let whoever buys it deal with the taint?”

She shrugged. “Melting might take it off.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Her voice got defensive. “That isn’t our business.”

He suddenly found he loved her considerably less than he had.

“Not in my forge, you’re not,” Hog put in, coming over to them like a polar bear in his great white coat. Helmpiddle, waddling at his heels, sniffed inquiringly at the chest which rested upon the threshold, but backed hastily away and forbore any further attentions.

Incontinent he may be,
the Wolf thought, the only one who noticed, but not stupid.

“All right,” Opium said. “When Penpusher goes south to buy mining equipment and set up the initial trade treaties with Kwest Mralwe, that’s the money he can use. You said yourself curses go home to roost.”

“He’d never make it south,” the Wolf pointed out, and there followed another awkward silence as they all digested the fullest implications of the hex.

Ari swore for fifteen minutes.

Then they all rode back to camp.

A bitter northeast wind sprang up later that night, while Ari was explaining to the troops gathered in the training floor that the IOU’s they’d been trading all winter were universally worthless, and it started to sleet a few hours later. During the winter this was no great struggle to accomplish; it would have done so by the following afternoon anyway, but Sun Wolf was taking no chances, and wanted a night’s sleep. It sleeted all the next day.

The site of the ruined villa, when he and the Hawk returned to it a few hours after sunset, was like an outpost of the Cold Hells, a frozen morass of dirty ice, with a few broken pillars and a granite bench or two barely recognizable where they rose from the crusted muck of old snow and iron-hard mud. By the faint glow of the ball lightning that drifted over Sun Wolf’s head, he could see his own breath, Starhawk’s, and that of the heavily blanketed pack pony they’d brought, skirling away in white rags. Through the shaggy robe he wore over his jacket and the mantle over that, the cold went through him like a battle lance.

Good,
he thought. No competition. He half wished the Mayor of Wrynde, whom he didn’t like, would try stealing it, but the money—and the curse it bore—would filter back to the troop very quickly in that case, besides devastating the entire alum-digging project, which promised to bring a good deal of wealth to the impoverished north.

Gingerly, using a pewter cup as a scoop, even though he knew he could now with little trouble take the dim slime of the hex off his hands, he transferred the money from the chest to the packs and saddlebags they’d brought, Starhawk carrying them out to the horse. When he’d told her what he planned to do, her only comment had been, “Then we’d better not get caught, because if we do, it’s gonna look like hell.”

Thinking about it, he had to agree.

When he was done, he lit the chest on fire, picked up the last two bags, walked down the short tunnel that led to the freezing outer air, and stepped out smack into Ari.

“Chief,” Sun Wolf’s pupil said reproachfully, “I’d never have thought it of you.”

But the rank disapproval in his voice was a caricature, as was the lofty expression on what the Wolf could see of his face, muffled by scarves and hood in the dimly flickering light of the lantern that hung from his staff.

“Yeah?
So what are you doing out here? Going to buy yourself a villa in Dalwirin and retire?”

“I don’t even want to think about the size of the termites the place would get,” Ari returned with a grin. In the background, Sun Wolf could see Starhawk standing near the pack pony, and beside her another, slightly taller form and one of the transport mules. Then, more soberly, Ari said, “What were you going to do with it?”

“Take it up to the Kammy Bogs and scatter it in the quicksand. Not all in one place. It’s a week’s journey, this time of year, but that should be safe. Nobody would be unlucky there but the demons.”

The winds were fading. Here in the shelter of the hillside the air was nearly still, save for a flinty gust now and then that stirred the rags of the Wolf’s long mantle, and bit his ears through his hood.

Ari nodded. “I’d figured the river at Amwrest, but the bogs are better. There’s just too many people in the camp who’d want to risk passing it along to someone else.”

Like Opium, the Wolf thought. Getting to know her over the last two months, he’d come to realize she was both vain of her beauty—not without cause, certainly—and rather mercenary. Considering the fact that money was her protection against the vagaries of fate, this attitude was understandable. But the knowledge had, like the growing confidence that let her stop trying to be all things to all men, eroded his romantic desire for her. A pity, he thought regretfully, but there it was.

“Can you explain my being gone?” he asked. “The Hawk was going to stay and cover for me, but . . . ”

“Chief,” said Ari reasonably, “if you disappear, and somebody comes out here and looks for the money, and it’s gone—and it was your word in the first place that the hex wouldn’t come off it—no. There’s no way I could explain that.” He shrugged, and gestured . . . Starhawk and the other muffled figure approached, leading the laden mule. “But if Dogbreath disappears for a couple of weeks, with the Goddess beating the camp for him, nobody’s gonna be surprised.”

In the jumping dimness of the lantern glow, Dogbreath’s teeth gleamed in a grin. His black braids blew out from between scarves and hood like raveling bell ropes, the bullion braided into them sparkling faintly. “I’m willing to deal with the hex on the way to the bogs, Chief,” he said, “but I tell you, if I get set on by bandits, I’m gonna let them have the festering money. Personally, I still think we should donate it to the Mother’s shrine at Peasewig.”

“That,” Starhawk said darkly, “is only because you’ve never had the Mother sore at you personally. You wouldn’t like what happens next.”

“You gonna be all right?” the Wolf asked.

Dogbreath shrugged. “My whole life’s been one long run of lousy luck. It’s nothing I can’t cope with. See what you can do about the Goddess by the time I get back.” And he disappeared into the sleety darkness, leading the depressed-looking pack mule by the bridle. Sun Wolf had sufficient technique to turn aside a storm’s effects from his own immediate area, but not to dismiss one altogether at will, particularly not during the time of storms; he returned with Ari and the Hawk in secret to the camp. By the time he had brought down the winds to a dreary fall of thin show, everyone’s tracks were sufficiently covered to prevent whoever in the camp might have been interested from knowing what had taken place.

“I was damn naive.” Sun Wolf settled back on the fur-covered brick of the bench and laid his great arms along the chipped rim of the pit which surrounded the bricks. “All that altruistic hogwash I spent the last year spouting, about how I had to find a teacher because I didn’t want to hurt or kill anyone out of ignorance . . . My ancestors must have been laughing themselves into seizures. What I need is a teacher who’ll keep me from getting enslaved again, maybe worse next time—maybe for keeps.”

“If,” Starhawk pointed out, propping herself up on her elbows in the thick furs of the bench, “the next teacher you pick doesn’t try to enslave you himself.”

Sun Wolf regarded her accusingly and picked up his mug of beer. “You know, I could have gone all night without hearing a remark like that.”

Though winter solstice was over two months past, the dark still fell early. The last of the gray daylight was dying outside the few window lattices undefended by shutters, and the small, bare room was nearly dark. Outside, torches were lit along the ruined colonnade and in the training floor, where the remains of that afternoon’s class were still bashing one another with wooden swords and poles, their voices penetrating faintly through the western wall. Sun Wolf was peripherally aware of other voices—the slaves packing up after working on the rebuilt Armory, women chatting about the cut of sleeves as they crossed the hard-frozen square toward Hog’s mess hall, and two wranglers in front of Ari’s longhouse loudly admiring the thick-sinewed bay horse of a messenger from the south who’d ridden into the camp two hours ago. The wind made a little humming through the rafters and across the cedar tiles of the steep roof and sang through the scaly-backed granite boulders of Sun Wolf’s stone garden outside. It was the time of thaw, before March’s granny winter that would lead, in turn, to genuine spring.

“It’s what I’d do,” she commented, rolling over to lie stomach-down, her chin on her hands, her slippered feet protruding from beneath the billowy robe of white wool she’d put on after her bath, “if I were selfish and greedy, and had spells whereby I could enslave other mages. Now that Altiokis isn’t out there to make me fall off a wall someplace, I’d start putting the word around that I’m ready to teach all you tender little fledglings.”

“You really are a damn nasty woman.”

She shrugged. “Hey—nine years in a convent makes you tough.” With her baby-fine quiff of ivory hair falling down over eyes smoke-gray in the shadows, she had never looked less tough. He handed her the beer and turned his head to the soft, familiar clump of Moggin’s footfalls on the wood veranda outside.

“Come!” he said, and a moment later the philosopher entered, huddled in his dirt-colored burnoose and plaid cloak and looking, as usual, like a house plant someone had accidentally left outside during the first snow. He was carrying a weighted wooden training sword, and looked as if he’d definitely gotten the worst from whoever had been sparring with him.

“At my current rate of learning,” he said with dignity, sinking cross-legged onto the hearth, “I have estimated that by the time I’ve trained long enough to withstand one of your men, I shall have been dead for forty-three years.”