Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (8 page)

Her man was dead, the Wolf thought, who had bought her and used her and had held the legal claim to her. There would probably be a lot of men looking at her like that now. He wondered how she’d make her living, once her man’s front money ran out, assuming there was any left of it by this time. It was something he had never thought about, when he’d bought women for himself.

Full dark had fallen, the night eerily still for this late in autumn and turning cold. The flare of campfires and torches ruddied the sky above the camp; on the dark and shapeless land, ten thousand watchfires sprinkled the darkness, a slave collar of fire around Vorsal’s throat. But Vorsal itself was dark, save for the tiny lights of the guards on its walls, its turrets and balconies and ornamented roof-trees a dead black filigree on the windless sky.

“Come on over to Bron’s tavern,” Zane offered, turning his eyes quickly, once Opium had blended with the darkness. “All his beer blew up a couple weeks ago, but that old White Death still of his works fine. It’ll be just like old times.”

Old times—more nights than he could count in that shabby ambulatory pothouse with which Bron followed the troop every summer, night breeze and torchlight filtering in from the maze of marquees and open walls, the talk going around of horses, of women, of the art and the technique of war, conclusionless and absorbing until late in the lamplit nights. He wondered if Opium would be there, and the thought made him shake his head, remembering other things. “Tomorrow, maybe,” he said. “It was a rough road up here. The Hawk had a bad time of it, worse than she said, I think. Something tells me I ought to ride back to town, and make sure she’s all right.”

Zane looked startled, puzzled, and a little hurt, but Ari nodded and said, “Tomorrow, then. You watch your blind side, Chief.”

She’d be asleep when he got there, he knew. Even so, he rode back to Kwest Mralwe under an evil sky, listening to the dim singing at the camp fade into darkness behind him.

“A wizard in Vorsal?”
Renaeka Strata, Lady Prince of the largest banking house in Kwest Mralwe, folded her well-groomed hands on the pearl inlay of the council table and considered the matter with narrowed hazel eyes.

“That’s what it looks like, my Lady.”

The great Guild Hall in Kwest Mralwe was designed to accommodate the Grand Council, a comprehensively representative body whose laboriously elected ward and craft stewards balanced their votes against those of the ancient houses of the local nobility. But whenever matters of actual policy had to be decided, it was the King-Council which met in the small chamber upstairs. Having worked for the King-Council before, the Wolf knew them and the Small Council Chamber well: the heads of the greatest merchant houses plus the Trinitarian Bishop—a cadet member of the House of Stratus himself—assembled in a pastel jewel box of a room, whose wide windows, with their twisted pilasters of pink marble, overlooked the teeming pool of the Mralwe docks. It was a chill day; the crystal-paned windows were shut. Even so, the din of the harbor was faintly audible in the hush—the clamor of stevedores, the braying of pack asses, and the thin mew of circling gulls. This late in the season, the deep-water traders that plied the Inner Sea were long since moored for the winter, but the more foolhardy of the coasting vessels were still in operation, trying to sneak through one last run of timber or wheat before the storms closed the sea lanes for good.

The Lady Prince held her silence a few moments more, and none of the other members of the King-Council, grouped about her like the wings of a particularly inefficient battle array, had the temerity to interrupt. Certainly the King didn’t, seated immediately to her left, his stiff, archaic robe of Mandrigyn silk all but hiding the shabby doublet beneath. When he poked his hand out surreptitiously to pick his nose, Sun Wolf could see that his ruffleless cuff was frayed.

“Since the death of Altiokis of Grimscarp, there has been a good deal of talk about wizardry,” the Lady said after a time. “He was said to be a wizard—certainly he had some secret to his longevity, if in fact he was the same man to whom my grandfather and great-grandfather lent money.”

“He was the same man, my Lady.” Sun Wolf tucked his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt. “And he was a wizard. A powerful one, too, before he started drinking himself silly—court wizard of the Thane of Grimscarp, before he put the Thane away and took the power himself. Before he died, he had a century and a half to murder his competition.”

The cold light of the windows before which he stood pricked at the tarnished bullion trimming his doublet of dark-red pigskin. With his scuffed eyepatch, thinning shoulder-length hair, and ragged mustache, he had the appearance of a rather mangy and bitten old rogue lion. But if any of the King-Council thought he had come down in the world from the days when he had stood there, armored and with a dozen of his men loitering in the anteroom, they forbore to say so. Even alone, there was something formidable about him.

“As his ‘competition,’ as you term it,” the Bishop said grimly, “consisted of wizards, witches, and other such tools of Hell, one can only comment on the wondrous ways in which God uses Evil against itself.”

“Oh, I’m not denying you helped him,” rumbled the Wolf, more to see indignant fire flash in the prelate’s lackluster eyes than for any other reason.

The Bishop, a young man whose few strands of limp ecclesiastical beard were totally inadequate to cover what chin he possessed, started to protest, but the Lady Prince silenced him with a lifted finger, the great emerald of her ring flashing like a warning beacon in the steely light.

“Yet Altiokis has been dead little less than a year—surely too short a time for anyone to master the powers with which Captain Ari seems to think he deals.”

“It only means this wizard studied magic in secret. I’ve come across those who have—a woman in Mandrigyn, whose teacher was snuffed by Altiokis, and another woman in Wenshar, who had access to ancient books.” The Bishop looked affronted, but clearly wasn’t about to incur the Lady’s annoyance by commenting on the spread of Evil down the years.

Sun Wolf went on, “Wizardry is an inborn skill, a calling like art or music. But like perfection in art or music, it needs years of teaching, of discipline, and of technique.” What else it needed, it was best not to say. The Lady Prince was a tall, sword-thin woman in her fifties who gave an impression of great beauty without actually possessing any; he could see her thoughts being sorted and shuffled like cards. “The wizards I’ve met have been incomplete half wizards, trying to piece together what they need out of lore that’s been cut to pieces over the years. Maybe this one in Vorsal is the same. Maybe not.

“But wizardry’s not something that can be hidden. The people of Vorsal might not have known this person was a mage, but there’s a good chance they’ll have known something. And it’s likely that this wizard learned from a master before him. Is there any rumor, any tradition, any gossip, about someone in Vorsal? Maybe someone who’s dead already . . . ” Turning his head slightly, his one eye caught the expressions of the King-Council—the Bishop almost sputtering with righteous indignation, but the merchants’ attention already beginning to wander, like men settling themselves to hear too-familiar quibbles over something that has neither the immediacy nor the importance of real life.

“Personally,” sighed the head of the House of Balkus, a fat man with eyes like locked money boxes, “I have better things to do than listen to the gossip of the marketplace. The simple folk are always accusing some hag or other of witchcraft. It gives them occupation, I suppose, and target practice. Presumably they do so in other towns than this.” He folded his hands before him like a round white suet pudding, stuck all over with diamonds. “But I have always wondered why, if those poor deluded old witches truly had power, they live in hovels, dress in rags, and allow brats to throw dung at them in the first place.”

“Maybe because their idea of what’s important goes beyond their next meal,” Sun Wolf retorted, with a pointed glance at the bulging mountain of flesh beneath the well-tailored black doublet and robe.

The flabby jowls reddened, but before Lord Balkus—who controlled most of the wool trade from the inland nobles—could decide what to reply to this, the Bishop inquired silkily, “And have you yourself become a wizard these days, Captain Sun Wolf?”

“Purcell,” the King said, leaning toward the elderly head of the House of Cronesme, “you were the agent for your brother’s interests in Vorsal before his death. Do you recall anyone in that city who was accused of being—er—unusual in any way?”

“It is difficult to say, Majesty,” replied the old man with punctilious politeness somewhat rare in the Council members’ dealings with their king. Balkus and the head of the Greambii were already conversing in low voices, like men during the uninteresting scenes of a play, negotiating about next year’s fleeces or space on one another’s trading ships. “The simple folk always look upon scholars with mistrust and accuse them of evil powers merely because they are literate. Likewise, as Lord Balkus has pointed out, ill-favored or eccentric old women tend to be pointed at as witches, whether their powers extend beyond mere herbalism or not, just as women who . . . ” He stopped himself short so suddenly Sun Wolf wondered for an instant if he’d been stabbed, and his nervous glance cut to the head of the table, where the Lady Prince sat with her white hands still folded but her face like a catapult’s trigger rope and poison in her pale eyes. “Er—that is—what I meant to say . . . ”

“And were there such people in Vorsal?” inquired Sun Wolf, after it became clear that the old man’s panicked silence was not going to be broken without help.

Councilor Purcell, who had seemed momentarily hypnotized with terror, fumbled to retrieve his train of thought; a little man of sixty or so, lean and birdlike in the boned black wool doublet and fur-lined over-robe characteristic of the respectable folk of those lands. The white ruffle around his neck was starched linen, not the three-strat-per-foot lace that prickled stiffly under Lord Balkus’ bottommost chin; the Lady Renaeka, Sun Wolf thought, was getting ready to swat this little man like a fly. He made a mental note to inquire what that was all about, later.

“Er—As I said, there is always talk . . . ”

“About whom?”

Purcell seemed to be trying to make himself the same color as the pink-and-white inlay of the wall behind him. His voice, always soft, faded to a colorless little murmur, as if apologizing for speaking on the unpleasant subject at all. “There was an old scholar named Drosis, who died several years ago; not a wealthy man, you understand, but respectably off. I would put his income at five hundred a year. The street mongers used to threaten their children with his name, and not a child in the town would walk past his house. He was friends with one Moggin Aerbaldus, a philosopher, to whom he left his library when he died. Aerbaldus has never had a word said against him since, though. He is the author of the treatise ‘On the Nature of Responsibility’ and ‘On the Divisions of the Universe’—perfectly respectable and orthodox, as our good bishop will attest. He has an income of approximately . . . ”

“And is there a witch?” Sun Wolf cut off this pecuniary information—Purcell looked rather surprised that he wouldn’t be interested in a catalogue of the man’s investments.

Again Purcell rolled a frightened eye toward the quietly. glittering Renaeka. “A—a woman named Skinshab,” he said, almost stammering in his haste. “Ugly—very ugly—and vulgar—I’m not even sure she still lives. Goodness knows how she made her living; several mornings I saw her through my office window picking through the garbage bins and had to summon my servants to chase her away.”

“Why?” Sun Wolf demanded curiously. “Were you planning to sell the garbage?”

“Er . . . ” Purcell blinked at him, then laughed hesitantly. “You will have your little joke, Captain.”

“Yeah,” the Wolf muttered and turned his attention back to the Lady Prince. “Let’s understand one another from the start, my Lady. It’s to your advantage to give me what help I ask for, to pay me at least the cost of my own keep and that of my friend who’s ill. She’s staying at the Convent of the Mother—”

“Since the Sisters take in supplicants,” interposed the Bishop, disapproval of the Old Faith heavy in his voice, “it hardly behooves us to contribute to their cult. Do they know you’re a witch?”

The Wolf’s breathless, scratchy voice hardened—he didn’t spare the Bishop so much as a glance. “I think a donation of some kind would be in order. Eight silver pieces a day isn’t too much to . . . ”

“My lord Captain,” the Lady Prince said suavely. She seemed to have recovered her poise—heavy lids thick with gilding drooped lazily over those brilliant eyes. “We agreed to meet with you today to give you information regarding the possibility of a magician in Vorsal. It is Captain Ari who is hiring you to find and destroy this man—if he indeed exists. It is to him you should apply for money.”

“After paying his men enough to keep them fighting your damn war, you know he’s got little enough of that. I’ll need money when I go into the city to buy information or get myself out of trouble.”

She spread her lovely hands helplessly. Among mercs, the Lady Renaeka was notorious for her parsimony, a hardfistedness which didn’t seem to extend to her dresses—the pounced green silk that made her stand out from the soberly dressed Councilors like a peacock among ravens must have cost seventy gold pieces, several times what one of the dyers in her employ would have made in his life. “I absolutely agree with you, Captain. But that is between yourself and Captain Ari. Personally, I have no proof that a wizard even exists in Vorsal. The misfortunes that have plagued the army camped before its gates are nothing much out of the way, after all. If the Captain attributes them to an evil magician, and believes you to be a magician and able to win him victory . . . ”

“We’re a week and a half past the time the rains started last year, and they were late, then,” Sun Wolf cut her off. Several of the Councilors looked scandalized at this lese majeste, but, he reflected, if they refused to pay him they couldn’t very well fire him for impudence. “You want Ari to pull up stakes and head north while he can still make it over the Khivas
River gorges?”