Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (23 page)

But even in the darkness, he could see the skittery movement swarming along the lids of the chests.

He threw a quick glance back at the crawling heap of loathsomeness around the pole. His instincts told him that wouldn’t last much longer; it was a fight to keep his concentration on the illusions that kept them attacking the wood and blocked their awareness of the heat of his own veins. He understood then why meditation was so essential, strengthening and freeing the concentration. He knew he could maintain two illusions at once, but never three.

The lids of the chests were crawling with scorpions.

Slow with loathing, his hand went to the pocket of his doublet for his gloves. But even as he did so, movement caught his eye on the overhanging beam and on the earth and stones it carried. He’d have to duck his head under it to reach the chests. Even as he watched, a scorpion dropped down from the beam into the niche—one of the big, shiny brown ones, long as a man’s hand, whose stings could pierce all but the toughest leather. The sweat was cold on his face as he passed his hand nervously across the back of his neck, and he understood then that he couldn’t do it. The boxes were locked. Given time, he could force a lock, but he could not pick up a trunk that size, filled with the weight of books, without crawling halfway under that lintel.

Kaletha had defeated him.

Anger and resentment surged up in him, but the sensible part of him, the strategist that had come more and more to the fore as he grew older, told him not to be stupid. He had been in situations where he would rather have died than admit that a woman had defeated him, but the stupidity of the acts to which he had let himself be driven in that kind of rage had never been worth it. She had power. Though he could feel that his own powers were heightened with the sorcery stirring through the night, something told him not to push his luck.

His hyperquick hearing picked up the stir and swish of movement behind him. Turning, he saw the snakes had finally realized that what they bit was dead wood. For the most part they were still milling, but a mamba as big around as his leg was crawling toward him like a swollen, dirt-colored worm.

Snakes would strike at sudden movement; he glided away from the chests, glancing everywhere and cursing his blindness on his left side. It might have been the heat of his anger at Kaletha that shivered the wall of illusions that covered him, merely the cumulative pressures of maintaining the spells, or the uncanny power that filled the night like hallucinatory flame—he did not know. But other snakes swung their heads toward him, tongues flicking. He flipped the ladder cautiously over with the toe of his boot, and a single scorpion—the small, whitish-gray kind whose sting was no worse than the sting of a bee—darted to safety in a corner. He jerked his foot aside as the mamba struck at his boot heel and he shoved the ladder into position. If he panicked, he knew the spells would crumble. Before the snake could strike again, he was scrambling up out of the pit, to the wind and shadows above.

When he reached the top, his hands were shaking so badly he could barely push the ladder down through the hole again and replace the grille.

“And when was that?” asked Starhawk, her voice quiet in the gloom of the little cell beyond the stables.

Sun Wolf shook his head. They lay together in the makeshift bed of pine poles and faded quilts, flesh against chilled flesh, but neither had moved to make love. Their kisses had been those of comfort against fears and thoughts neither could quite define, and they held each other, not as lovers do, but like brother and sister, frightened of the dark. “I don’t know. I came back here; it was at least an hour before you did.” He moved his head, to look down at the browned, delicate face in its short frame of ivory hair, where it lay on the hard pillow of his pectorals. “Why?”

Her gray eyes seemed transparent in the thin glow of the magelight that burned like a lamp around the tip of one bedpost. “Because I—I’m not sure, but I think that’s when there was a break in the power of the Circle. It’s like—I can’t tell what the Circle was like. Like a tug of war, maybe, or—or rising to the climax of lovemaking. I don’t know. But there can be no break in it, no slacking. The power has to feed on itself.”

Sun Wolf nodded, understanding. “What you may not be strong enough to get from yourself, you can achieve by combining many minds—if you can get those minds to pull together. Yes. But if one stops pulling, they all slack.”

“And they all did,” said Starhawk. “It was like a harness trace breaking, or like falling out of love. Kaletha tried to recover it, but . . . we never did, completely.”

She moved her weight slightly against him, hard muscle and hard bone, the ridges of scars breaking the silk of the flesh.

He asked, “Did Galdron come?”

Starhawk shook her head and moved again, pressing closer to him under the mottled, sand-colored homespun of the worn quilts. By the witchlight, he could see the deepening of the scratchwork of fine lines around her eyes; through his arm around her body, he felt the tension of her muscles.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head again, and Sun Wolf, sensing not only her fear but his own, drew her tighter yet against him. “The concentration broke, or it never peaked. Nothing. But I could feel it—” She looked around her at the darkness crowding onto the blue witchlight and the velvet night beyond the window, charcoal black and still with the predawn drop of the wind, as if all the world held its breath. “And I feel it still.”

“I know,” the Wolf said softly. “So do I. And I’m wondering why. Power was built up, Hawk—it’s still here, hanging over the empty quarter like a miasma. Something . . . ”

She frowned suddenly, as some word of his tugged at her mind.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something you said . . . Something I thought during the summoning . . . it was important, but damned if I can remember what it was or why. Only . . . ”

Something beyond the windows snagged the corner of his vision. His head whipped around, and the Hawk, feeling the sudden flinch of his muscles, was silent, as he killed the blue glow of the witchlight and they lay together, staring out of darkness into the dark.

There was movement in the empty quarter.

He rolled silently out of bed and walked naked to the window, holding to the velvet density of the shadows around the wall. The air was freezing on his flesh. Like a ghost, Starhawk joined him, the quilt thrown over her shoulder, carrying her sword.

Neither spoke. Around them the power was palpable in the night, the hideous tension that had grown, not lessened, as those who had formed the Circle had sought their beds.

Sun Wolf was not sure, but he thought he saw the bluish flicker of demon light among the labyrinth of skeleton walls.

Silently he turned away and found his boots, war kilt, and sword. As he pulled them on, Starhawk joined him, locating her own clothing as she had located her weapon by touch in the dark. By the time she was ready, Sun Wolf had gone to the door and was looking out across the little court toward the empty quarter. He was sure of it now. There were demons there.

This is none of my affair,
he told himself. But he felt his heart quicken with the same fear he had felt in the carved canyons of Wenshar, a fear unlike—deeper than—a man’s fear of death or harm. Fear of what?
the calm, detached portion of his mind wondered impersonally. It has nothing to do with me.

But in a queer way he knew that it did.

His hand tightened around the greasy old hilt of his sword. The Hawk was like an armed shadow behind him as he moved silently across the starlit court.

In the labyrinth of the old courtyards, the presence of the demons was stronger. He could sense them, feel their malice prickle along his skin, and hear their thin, piping voices calling to one another among the stones. Why here?
he wondered. Why tonight? Did they follow the smell of power, gravitating to this place for the same reasons that they haunted the ruins of Wenshar? Was that what they wanted of him when they had hovered through those moonless canyon nights outside the window of the rock-cut temple, waiting for him? Was it the revived power of the old Witches that drew them now, like vultures to the stink of dying things?

He could hear their voices, sometimes little piping cries or a low crooning, like a child singing over and over to itself the only line of a song that it knew. For an instant it crossed his mind that it was a child, lost somewhere in the mazes; then he shook his head and thrust the thought aside. Like their voices, it was only bait in a trap.

What kind of a trap? he wondered. A trap for whom and why? Except for the occasional biting-demon, they couldn’t harm humans—could they? As in the ruins of Wenshar, he felt cold with fear of them, fear not for his body, but fear of he did not know what. He wondered suddenly about the Witches of Wenshar and about what had become of those who had refused to use their power for evil—or if they had ever had a choice.

Faint and confused among the walls, he heard a voice calling, “Kaletha! Kaletha!”
Egaldus, he thought . . . or a demon’s voice that sounded like his. Had Kaletha run to check her cache, as soon as she could rid herself of her disciples? Was that why the concentration of the Circle had given way when she had somehow felt his spells against her snakes?

“Kaletha!” he bellowed, and the echoes mocked him, Kalethakalethakaletha . . .  “If you can hear me, stand still and call!” call . . . call . . . call . . . 

“Kaletha!” came the other voice, like a desperate echo.

Sun Wolf strode forward, his eye sharp along the ground before him, the tops of the walls, and the few remaining buildings on all sides. They crossed through what had been a stable court, then hurried down a roofless colonnade where the sand drifted knee-deep along the back wall. Through an eyeless window gap, he saw the flicker of something bright and moving, a discarded insect-chitin of light, save for those greedy, unhuman eyes . . . then it was gone. He realized that he still had his sword ready in his hand and that Starhawk did, too, though neither weapon would do them the slightest good. The very air seemed weighted with evil, ready at a word to take shape . . . 

Why did he feel that, in the back of his mind, he knew that word?

“Kaletha!” he roared. “Egaldus!”

Farther off now, but recognizable as the young acolyte’s, the voice called out, “Kaletha? Kal . . . ”

And then the word turned to a scream.

“The demons were there. I know, I saw them.”

“Are you saying you think they did it?” Incarsyn asked from his place on Osgard’s left.

Nanciormis sneered, “Don’t be an ass, man.”

Osgard’s bloodshot green eyes narrowed. “If you saw them, they couldn’t have been demons, Captain. Demons are . . . ”

“Invisible,” Sun Wolf finished, slouching back in his black oak chair at the fireplace end of the High Table and studying the three men facing him across the length of the dark board. “I know.” Through the line of tall southern windows the sun slanted in hard bars of horizontal gold, but around them, the Fortress of Tandieras was unwontedly quiet. Not until sunup would any man or woman of the guards venture into the empty quarter to fetch forth Egaldus’ remains, but the rumor had swept the place like a chaparral fire after a dry summer. Sun Wolf could hear the murmur of it, breathing like wind in the corners of the servants’ halls; he could feel the silence as he or Kaletha passed.

He went on, “I don’t know why I’ve always been able to see them, but I have. It may come of being mageborn . . . ”

“Kaletha can’t,” Nanciormis pointed out promptly. “Nor, to the best of my knowledge, can . . . ” He just barely broke off the word Tazey at a furious glare from the King.

“It is said among my people,” Incarsyn put in, “that those who can see demons do so because they are themselves demon-spawned.”

“That’s rubbish,” the King snapped.

“So there are those among you who can do it?” Sun Wolf asked thoughtfully, raking the Lord of the Dunes with his single golden eye.

The young man nodded, but he didn’t look comfortable about the whole subject. Since yesterday, he had the pale, shaken appearance of one in the grip of some heavy and unaccustomed thinking.

At Osgard’s invitation, the Lord of the Dunes had come to this council, but Sun Wolf, feeling the subpulse of politics between the three men, sensed that the request had been a false one. He had sat there through Sun Wolf’s recital of his second investigation of the empty quarter last night and of the finding of what was left of Egaldus’ body, looking handsome and exotic and a little puzzled in his gold-stitched tunic and snowy cloak. Neither Nanciormis nor Osgard had much to ask him—he was there simply, Sun Wolf guessed, to remind him that he was still pledged to become Osgard’s son-in-law, no matter what afterthoughts might be now churning through his mind.

Nanciormis said, “In any case it’s foolish to believe it was demons. They are incapable of harming man.”

“Not necessarily,” the Wolf said. “There have been biting-demons, stone-throwers . . . ”

“But certainly none capable of doing that kind of damage.”

Incarsyn folded one white hand upon the other and appeared to study for a moment the circle of glinting fire thrown by the facets of his ruby ring. Then he looked up again. “Among my people, it was said that such things happened to those who ran afoul of the Witches of Wenshar.”

“Old wives’ tales!”
Osgard’s voice was harsh as the crack of a whip in the warm blaze of the morning heat.

“Were they?” Sun Wolf asked softly and turned to look at the young Lord of the Dunes. “Tell me, Incarsyn, were all the Witches of Wenshar evil? Was there none among them who used her power for something other than selfishness and lust?”

The young man frowned and shook his head. Obviously the concept of a good witch had never crossed his mind. Perhaps in the shirdane in which he thought, such a concept was linguistically impossible. In the crystalline brilliance of the morning sunlight after the sleepless alarms of the night, his youth and hardness contrasted even more sharply with Nanciormis’ slack cheeks and double chin—the more so because of the racial similarity of those two hawk-boned sets of features framed in the flowing darkness of their braided hair. “None,” he said simply and then smiled a little, lightening up his face. “They were, you understand, women. A woman will, by nature, put first in her considerations, the things that immediately affect her whether they be material goods or satisfaction.” He spoke as one who forgives a simple-minded child for soiling itself, and Sun Wolf suppressed an unexpected urge to get up and knock his handsome head against the wall.