Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (7 page)

“You told me you needed to go seek a teacher, if one could be found. But you’d been elbow-deep in witchery all winter, Chief. It was still on you, then. And I thought . . . ” He sighed, and looked away. “I thought you might have seen it as a way out. A way to retire, to give me the troop, to ride away before you ended up buying some little six-foot daisy farm someplace.” The steady, gray-brown gaze returned to Sun Wolf’s face. “And I was glad, you know? Glad if you wanted out you could leave instead of die. Because, face it, Chief, you could put all the fifty-year-old mercs in the world into one bathtub and still have room for the soap. I didn’t give two cow-pies together whether you found what you were looking for, really. I just—didn’t want to have to bury you. But you did find it, didn’t you?”

Sun Wolf remembered Kaletha of Wenshar, the end result of his first year of seeking—her vanity, her pettiness, her ghastly death. Then he turned to the crowded spires of Vorsal barely visible above the tangle of canvas, dirty banners, and woodsmoke. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I found it.”

“That’s good.”

He looked back at Ari, tufted brow rising over his single eye, and the young captain met the look squarely, not understanding, perhaps, but willing to accept. Just as well, thought Sun Wolf, that the Vorsal mage had made it obvious by burning the inn just where the lines were drawn.

But his mouth and eyebrows still quirked with irony as they walked on together to the open ground where the engineering park stood.

The afternoon was fading to eerie, windless twilight against which the siege engines rose up like the monsters of antediluvian tales. Sun Wolf felt a pang of grief and of renewed anger at the Vorsal mage, remembering that Gadget was dead—Gadget who’d built those machines and others, who had fiddled with new inventions during the long winters in Wrynde, and taught the Wolf and anyone else who’d listen about mathematics and engineering and the tensile strengths of steel. His anger—and for that matter his grief—he knew to be unreasonable. They all lived by death. Anyone he knew in the troop could be gone tomorrow. But still, he would miss the little engineer, and the anger made him feel better about destroying the only other mage he’d ever found.

Three men in the steel-chain nooses of slaves were finishing up their work on a broken catapult; a man the Wolf recognized as one of Gadget’s former assistants was arguing with Zane the Golden, Ari’s chief lieutenant. “Look,” Zane was saying in that reasonable tone the Wolf remembered well, “I didn’t ask you how much top-quality iron costs. I didn’t ask you how the thing broke in the first place. There’s tragedy in every life; we all have to endure it and go on. But we’re going to attack those guys on that wall over there—you see that wall over there?—four days from now and it’ll really help if we have a catapult to shoot at them with.”

Ari grinned and strode across the open ground of the park toward them. The Wolf almost followed, then thought again and stayed where he was. It was Ari’s troop now. The fact that many of the men, like Dogbreath and the Little Thurg, still regarded him as their commander wouldn’t help Ari any, and it was better not even to put himself in a position where someone could turn to him to ask his support instead of the new Captain’s.

But watching them at a distance, something in his heart smiled and warmed at Zane gesturing extravagantly, like an actor posing for a statue of himself—vain as a peacock with his shoulder-length golden curls and that small, perfect nose that everyone accused him of wearing an iron nose-guard into battle to protect—and Ari, patiently smoothing the engineer’s ruffled temper. Ari, formerly something of a smartmouth, had evidently learned tact in the year he’d been in command. Starhawk had always been the diplomat—it was good to see that Ari was learning the other things besides leading men which command involved.

Something in him sighed and settled. It was good to be home.

Then behind him, in the shadow of one of the siege engines, movement snagged at the corner of his good eye.

Not a rat, though there were far too many of them about the camp, even in daylight. This was a furtive shadow, slipping into the vast gloom of the burned siege tower’s charred skeleton. It was growing dark; the park slaves were setting up torches at a careful distance from anything remotely combustible, the night-guards coming in under the command of a pink-faced, muscle-bound woman called Battlesow.

The spells of diversion he’d used on Ari he drew about him now. A slave busied himself with a suddenly stubborn lash on a torch-holder; a guard stubbed his toe and bent down to rub it as Sun Wolf ghosted past and melted into the tangled darkness of the tower.

Within, it was like an improbable house of cards—charred beams, broken boards, and burned struts, all leaning against one another in a crazy rattrap a sharp wind could bring down. Above him, a portion of the spiral stair to the top still dangled perilously, like clots of filth on a spider strand; skeletal black rafters made a broken lattice against dun sky. It smelled of ashes and burned flesh, as the inn had done. Only here, more than just one little boy had died.

A woman was moving around the ruined inner wall, a branch of something in her hand.

She was cloaked, a hood drawn over her face. Motionless in the fey web of illusion, the Wolf smelled the perfume of her body, mingled scents of autumn flowers and womanhood, mixed with the dim pungence of what he recognized as hellebore. Now and then her cloak would move aside with the sweep of her arm as she passed the branch along the charred beams, and in its shadow jewels sparked on velvet. For a few moments he watched her in silence, big arms folded across his chest, breathing slow and soundless. Then he moved.

She gasped as his hands seized her arms above the elbows, dropping the plant she carried as she tried to turn and strike him, but didn’t go for a weapon. Her hood fell back, freeing a raven torrent of curls. “No! Let me go! Please!” His hands tightened hard, and she stood still in his grasp.

To say her eyes were brown would have been like describing those deep, volcanic lakes of the Corn Massif as blue—accurate only up to a point. In the crisscrossed darkness of the siege tower they seemed almost black, enormous in the delicate modeling of the most exquisite face Sun Wolf had ever seen. The ends of her hair tickled his wrists where he held on to her; it would spring back, he thought distractedly, were he to crush it in his hands.

“What are you doing here?” His voice, never melodious and worse since the Great Trial, sounded hoarser than ever in his ears.

She gazed up at him for a moment with scared eyes, wary as a wildcat in the gloom. Around her throat, shining against the dusky skin, lay the thin steel of a gold-plated slip-chain, a slave collar too delicate to discommode a master’s caressing hand seriously. She wore another necklace with it, a baroque pearl on a chain. Where the cloak had slipped down, he saw half-bared creamy shoulders above a bodice of blood-colored silk and the froth of chemise lace. Gently he released her and bent to pick up the herbs she’d dropped. “White hellebore,” he said softly. “They brew poison from its roots.”

Her hand, which had reached out for the branch, drew quickly back. “I didn’t know that.” Her accent was the soft drawl of the Gwarl
Peninsula, on whose western coasts they’d been fighting last year. “They said in the camp the tower was witched. My granny used to tell me hellebore would show a witch’s mark.”

“Only to another witch.”
Her brows—butterfly lines of fragile black—puckered slightly, breaking the smooth quizzical beauty of her face with something infinitely more human and tender.

“Oh, damn,” she breathed, vexed, and bit her red lower lip with small white teeth as if in thought. Then her frown deepened, and she looked quickly up at him in the gloom. “Oh, double damn! Are you the wizard?”

He grinned at the startled disbelief in her voice. “Yeah, but I left my beard and pointy hat back in the tent.”

It startled her into a giggle, swiftly suppressed; the dimples still quivered in the corners of her lips as she dropped her gaze in confusion. He fought the impulse to reach out and touch her. By the chain, she was another man’s slave. He wondered whose.

“I’m sorry.” She looked up at him again, her eyes filled with rueful self-amusement. “They did say you used to command the troop. Of course you couldn’t do that if you were . . . ” She bit her lip again, a tiny gesture that didn’t disturb the dark stain of rose petals there.

“Were old enough to look like wizards are supposed to look?”

She ducked her head again. “Something like that.”

“And you are . . . ?”

“Opium.”
The delicate brows flexed down again; something changed in her kohl-darkened eyes. As if she felt his gaze, she drew her cloak back up over her shoulders and, with a gesture almost instinctive, tucked up a stray tendril of her tumbled hair and straightened the pearl on its chain. “My man was killed by that fire.” There was a note that was not quite defensive, not quite defiant, in her voice. “He was one of the ones trapped on the wall when the tower burned, slaughtered when the others couldn’t get to them in time. They said—the ones who got out of the tower alive—that the fire started under the hides. Those hides had been soaked so the fire arrows from the walls wouldn’t catch them. I know they’ve had guards on the camp and on the park, but I thought . . . what if it’s somebody in the camp already? A spy or someone working for them? There’s been more and more talk about witchery. I just wanted to see . . . I don’t know what.”

She glanced at the hellebore still in his hand, then warily up at his face, as if trying to read what was now no more than a blurred pattern of light and darkness in the gloom. He turned the branch over, fingering the pale greenish flowers. There seemed no reason to doubt her story; after all, no one could possibly use this tower again.

“You’d better be careful who sees you with things like this,” he said softly. “Yeah, there’s more and more talk about witchery; if it goes on, things could get damn ugly here in camp. You won’t be the only one to think it might be an inside job.” He didn’t add that the thought had occurred to him the moment he’d seen her enter the tower.

The sky had gone the color of iron beyond the charred rafters overhead, and crazy slips and patches of yellow torchlight flared erratically through cracks in the wooden wall. “You’d better get on back to your tent.” If her man had been killed yesterday, he found himself thinking, she’d be sleeping alone.

She drew her hood up over those crisp curls and settled its folds around her shoulders. For a moment he thought she would say something else to him—fishing, as he found himself mentally fishing, for more words. Even in silence and uncertainty, she radiated an immense vitality, a quality of bright wildness beyond her beauty that defied description but that drew him, as the warmth of fire draws travelers in the cold. Hands tucked thoughtfully behind the buckle of his sword belt, the Wolf turned from her to step out into the wavering lake of the engineering park’s torch glare once more.

For a moment he stood watching the slaves putting away their tools. Three or four men and a woman too homely to be prostituted moved briskly about under the barked orders of the engineer. From thinking about the girl, his mind went to what she had said.

A year’s search had yielded him only one wizard, but along the way he’d now and then encountered granny magic, primitive and untrained tinkerings with the fringes of power by those who had little understanding of what they did—those who did not even know of the Great Trial which broke the barriers protecting the soul from what it was. As Opium had pointed out, the Vorsal mage might not be in Vorsal at all. There were those in camp who well might wish ill upon their masters, whether they served in one man’s bed, or every man’s, or mucked out the latrines. Among them, there could be one who knew a curse that would stick.

But in his gut, he didn’t believe it. Whatever was in the camp—whatever he had sensed in the armory tent—was greater and deadlier than that.

Ari and Zane came striding over to him, young animals in the gold-and-black light. In contrast to Ari’s metal-studded leather doublet and faded shirt, Zane had taken advantage of their presence in the Middle Kingdoms to deck himself in the brilliant colors for which their cloth was famous, a slashed blue doublet, breeches striped with scarlet that sported a codpiece decorated with a tongue-lolling demon face. “Chief!” grinned Zane with delight. “I knew you’d come!”

“You can look around here tomorrow if you want,” Ari said softly. “But this is all fakement. We’re putting together a major assault—the last one, we hope—in three days’ time, and the engines for that are being built in the big engineering park at Kwest Mralwe itself.”

The Wolf raised one tawny brow. “Whose idea was that?”

“Mine. They’re being guarded day and night, too—it’s those you really need to look at, not these.”

“Yeah,” argued Zane. “But if we’re dealing with a hookum, won’t he just be able to see them in a crystal ball or something?”

“He might.” The Wolf glanced around him, feeling again the tension in the air and hearing it in the guards’ voices and in the sharp staccato of an argument somewhere among the dark jumble of tents beyond the park’s circle of light. “But there are other ways for curses to be spread. How about the other troops? Krayth’s and the City forces?
This kind of garf happening to them, too?”

“I think so,” Ari said. “Krayth was over here two days ago—he tells me his men have started deserting. He’s had to put a guard on the horses and the money box, not that there’s much in that. If this assault doesn’t do the job, we may come to that here. Krayth’s got a longer road home than we do, too, clear the hell to Kilpithie. I’m not sure he’ll make it.”

“If I don’t find and take care of that mage before your assault,” the Wolf said quietly, “I’m not sure you will.”

Across the warm-lit circle of the open park, Sun Wolf got a glimpse of Opium’s cloaked form, heading for the voices and soft-glowing tents of the main camp. Zane turned his head as the velvet dark of her cape stirred the dry weeds with a passing gleam of white petticoat lace. Like a heat, the Wolf felt more than saw the greed and calculation in his eyes.