Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (31 page)

But it was not Starhawk who waited for him in the gloom of the abandoned cells. It was Nanciormis, with Kaletha and over a dozen guards and shirdar warriors, to arrest him for the murder, by means of sorcery, of Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth and all those who had gone before.

“If you tell us who paid you and why,” Nanciormis said quietly, “you could spare yourself a lot of pain.”

“The hell I would.” The shackles that held Sun Wolf’s wrists extended out to either side of him clinked faintly against the stone of the wall as he tried to shift his shoulders. About the only thing that could be said for the dungeons under Tandieras—stinking of old excrement, crawling with roaches, foul with smoke from the brazier in the corner of his cell—was that they weren’t damp. His single eye glinted in the choking murk. “You know as well as I do that Illyra’s going to spare nobody pain who was responsible for killing that wooden-headed brother of hers. Without him she can’t go on ruling the Dunes. Confessing would only buy me her hate instead of her suspicion.”

The Desert Lord folded his heavy arms, his thick lips pressing taut. “You have more than her suspicion, Captain,” he said. “Your bluff is over. We know.”

“You what?”

Behind him, Osgard, sober for once, his sweat like pig muck in the close heat of the cell, said, “It wasn’t until you came to Tandieras that this started. Nexué didn’t die until you’d come back from Wenshar—by the Three, why we didn’t realize then it was you—”

“It wasn’t me, rot your eyes!” the Wolf stormed. At the angry jerk of his chains, the guards who crowded in the narrow doorway raised their crossbows. Sun Wolf realized belatedly that, as a wizard, his slightest movement could be grounds for death. He sensed already Kaletha’s spells on the manacles, like a blindfold over certain parts of his mind. Evidently someone believed in taking precautions, anyway.

Osgard’s face reddened at the contradiction, but Nanciormis merely raised one white-gloved hand. “There’s no need to maintain the charade any longer, Captain,” he said quietly. “I saw you, the night you tried to murder me.”

“WHAT?” Even in that first shocked instant, Sun Wolf remembered how Nanciormis had evaded certain questions after the attack, had looked away from his eyes, and had spoken to Osgard afterward. “Dammit, man, I was in the Hall when it happened! A dozen people saw me . . . ”

“No one saw you leave,” Osgard said, his voice thick. “But a dozen people saw you come running back in, Johnny-Behind-The-Fair, when the screaming started. You seemed to know where it would be, and be damned to the noise of the wind.”

“And even had you not,” the commander put in, “it is witchery we deal with.” He stepped closer, the amber glow of the brazier making pinpoints of fire far back in his somber eyes. “When I felt the horror coalescing in the darkness of my room, when I understood what was happening, I flung the lamp at it. And for an instant, outlined in the flame, I saw it. It had your face, Captain.”

Sun Wolf stared at him, shocked into silence. When he could speak, the words came out as a whisper. “It couldn’t have.” But the demons in Wenshar had had his eyes. And Tazey had said that the Witches did not always know.

Cool even through the shock and horror, he thought, I would have known. He shook his head slowly. “No,” he began, and Nanciormis struck him across the mouth.

“Do you deny you were in Wenshar last night?” The gloved fingers took him by the chin and forced his head back again; torchlight glanced over the overlapping crescents of dried blood that marked Sun Wolf’s face and neck. Close to his own, the Wolf could see the broken veins on that elegant nose, smell wine and mint on his breath. “Do you deny that you had to do with the demons in Wenshar?”

He had to fight the urge to boot the man’s testicles halfway up to his solar plexus. “I was in Wenshar, yes. If you’ll listen to me—”

Nanciormis struck him again, casually, but with a force that slammed his head back against the wall. Stepping back, he said softly, “They say that all the Witches of Wenshar had such scars, from coupling with the demons in that city. I hope for your sake, Captain, that you were paid to do what you did by the enemies of Wenshar, and that you are not simply a madman acting from his lust for blood. For if you tell us who hired you to destroy all hope of an alliance with the shirdar, you may look forward to the mercy of a slit throat after the torturers are through.” He turned and signed to one of the guards.

Exasperated at the man’s obtuseness in spite of how shaken he was, Sun Wolf growled, “And don’t bother showing me the instruments of torture. I’ve seen ’em plenty of times, and they don’t impress me.” Why?
he thought, his mind racing—how could that be possible? But for answer, all he saw were the demons’ golden eyes. They didn’t always know, Tazey had said. Suddenly, horribly, he understood the girl’s secret terror, worse because of what he had learned in the ruins last night.

Nanciormis paused and turned back toward him. “Perhaps not,” he said. “You are a strong man, Captain. If you are being paid, I hope it is sufficient.”

There was a jostling around the door—the cell had been excavated and lined with stone back in the days when Tandieras was merely the administrative center for the governors of Pardle, and the room wasn’t a large one. It was crowded already with Osgard, Nanciormis, two guards with crossbows, the brazier, and the Wolf himself. The other guards who entered, two men and a woman, made it all the worse. The instruments that the woman carried were those of what was called ironically “small torture”—a thumbscrew, an assortment of iron rods, which the woman placed in the brazier to heat, razor-edged pincers, the sight of which always turned the Wolf’s stomach, the thin-bladed probe for prying under the fingernails, and tie-frames to hold the hand open while balls of burning cotton and oil were dripped onto the palms.

The two men led Starhawk between them.

Everything within Sun Wolf contracted to a single, cold ball of horror.

Absurdly, he wondered why he hadn’t seen this coming. He’d certainly forced enough information from captives during campaigns by the same method. Perhaps because of the hundreds of concubines who’d filed through his bed, there’d never been one for whom he’d have put a campaign, or any one of his men, in danger. Had one of his friends in the troop been tortured in the same fashion, he’d have felt sorry, but he’d have known that whichever of them it was would understand.

This was different.

Starhawk’s face was brown with dust through which tracked runnels of sweat; her eyes seemed the color of white ice against that darkness. A bruise covered half her face, running back under the pale, sweat-matted hair of her temple. By the scabbed edges, it looked like the flat of a sword; that was probably what had knocked her out. Her throat, visible through the open neck of her torn shirt, was marked as well, under a choke-noose of chain. It had undoubtedly been one hell of a struggle.

Nanciormis said softly, “Who paid you, Sun Wolf? The King-Council of Kwest Mralwe?”

“Nobody paid me,” he said. The words came out queerly level and quiet. “I had nothing to do with it.”

But he knew despairingly it would do him no good. He felt paralyzed, as if he had been knifed in some unarmored spot; his only thought was that Starhawk must not suffer for this.

His mouth felt dry, his lips as if they belonged to someone else. “If you’ll listen I’ll tell you . . . ”

“We’re not interested in your lies.” Nanciormis’ silky voice turned cold. “We know what’s happening. We want a confession.”

Anger flared in him at this man’s stubborn stupidity, like the criminal incompetence which had nearly killed Jeryn, the blind selfishness with which he satisfied his lusts for his niece’s governess without any thought to its consequences to her. But he held his rage in check. Whatever he did, the Hawk would be the one who paid.

Carefully, he said, “There’s nothing to confess. Unless it was without my conscious knowledge—”

“That’s a lie!” Osgard surged forward, face crimson. His hands wrenched at the collar of Sun Wolf’s shirt, nearly strangling him. “The Witches all knew what they were doing! It’s a lie they use to excuse themselves!”

Beyond the King’s massive shoulders, Nanciormis watched the scene in silence. Of course, thought the Wolf dizzily, he was too much of a politician to contradict a man whose daughter might be accused. “My Lord,” the commander stepped smoothly forward and put a hand on the King’s arm. “I think we can get the truth easily enough.”

Turning, he walked back to Starhawk. With the deliberateness of a physician, he tore open her shirt to the waist, pulling the thin rags of the fabric down over her arms. Under the bruises, Starhawk’s face was as uncaring as a prostitute’s. The two guards holding her arms shifted and tightened their grip; the third, coming up behind her, took hold of the slip-chain and drew it tight around the flesh of her throat.

Sun Wolf twisted against his own bonds, the manacles tearing unnoticed at the flesh of his wrists. “She has nothing to do with this, damn your eyes!”

Nanciormis took one of the metal rods from the heart of the fire in the brazier, its end cherry-red with heat. “Of course she doesn’t,” he remarked, and twirled it a little in his hands. “A pity, isn’t it?”

As the glowing end came near Starhawk’s breast, Sun Wolf saw her relax, turn her head aside and, still expressionless, shut her eyes. She was sinking into meditation, fast and deep, like a porpoise sounding in the sea, trying to dive beyond the reach of pain . . . 

“Stop it!” The crossbows raised again as he flung himself against the chains, but he scarcely noticed. All he saw was the glow of heat near the white skin of the Hawk’s breast, and how the sweat poured down her calm face. “STOP IT! All right, I did it! The King-Council of Kwest Mralwe paid me—five hundred pieces of gold! For God’s sake let her go!”

He was shaking, his body drenched with sweat, gasping as if he, not the Hawk, were facing the heated iron. Starhawk’s eyes snapped open, shocked—she hadn’t been so far into her trance that she wouldn’t have felt it. “Don’t be a fool, Chief, we haven’t been near Kwest Mralwe.”

Even as the choke-chain jerked tight around her throat, he roared over her, “They contacted me before we ever left Wrynde, dammit! Shut her up and get her out of here. She doesn’t know a thing about it!”

Starhawk was struggling now, fighting for air against the strangling loop of metal around her windpipe. The agony of panic and terror the Wolf felt as he watched them systematically club and strangle her into semiconsciousness was nothing he had ever experienced—something for which he had never even thought to prepare himself in all his years of war. He found himself roaring hoarsely over and over, “Stop it! Stop it!” His whole body trembled as they finally dragged her from the room. There were tears as well as sweat running down his face, and he was aware of Nanciormis watching his humiliation with interest, disgust, and a certain smug satisfaction, as if this proved that Sun Wolf was not, in fact, a better man than he.

Another time, the Wolf would have felt fury. Now he was too sickened and shaken to care. He was aware he had broken, as he’d broken other men, and that they’d done it by the simplest of means. Some detached portion of his mind was mildly interested in the fact that he didn’t care about even that; the rest of him was thinking illogically that Starhawk hadn’t made a sound.

The commander’s thick lips curled in a little smile.

“So the Lords of Kwest Mralwe paid you to murder the Bishop Galdron and Egaldus and Incarsyn?”

“Yes.” He was panting, sobbing, as if he had run miles. So much, he thought, with strange detachment, for the hardened warrior who can take anything his enemies dish out.

“Why?” Osgard grabbed him furiously again by the shirt-front and dragged his face close. Green eyes like bloodshot rotten eggs glared into his. “And Norbas Milkom died just because he happened to be with Galdron, is that it?” His breath was like a cesspit; the Wolf fought nausea. “A man who’d never harmed a soul—a man who was my friend and the best friend this country ever had!” His big hands tightened as he slammed the Wolf back against the wall. “You stinking, murdering traitor, I took you into my Household—”

“Get out of the way, you fool!” Nanciormis wrenched the King’s hands free and shoved him impatiently aside. He turned back to the Wolf, speaking quickly, as if to get this over with. “You did this to cause disruption of the alliance between Wenshar and the shirdar?”

“Yes.” Sun Wolf swallowed, grasping for what was left of his thoughts. “I don’t know,” he amended, realizing this was likelier—anything, he thought, to make them believe. He had seen torture, seen the torture of women. Anything, he thought, to spare the Hawk that. “They didn’t tell me. They knew I was mageborn, knew I could get control of the demons . . . ”

The dark eyes narrowed in their pads of flesh. “So that’s how it’s done,” he murmured. Then, with a glance at the King, “And the King would have been your next victim.”

Sun Wolf nodded. He felt drained and strange to himself, emptied of the pride he’d once held in his own strength. It had all happened so quickly. He understood then why men who held out through the pain at the torturers’ hands would weep after it was over.

“You stinking traitor.”
The King’s breath hissed thickly in his nostrils. “You took my money, you ate my bread—I entrusted you with the life of my son.” He spoke quietly, his anger coalescing into a hardness far beyond his usual pyrotechnic wrath. “Witch-bastard—you have no more pride nor honor than a camel-skinner’s whore.” Stepping close, he spat in Sun Wolf’s face.

Sun Wolf was aware, as the spittle ran warm and slimy down his chin, that there had been a time when he would have struck at the man for that, even if they killed him for it. But not even anger was left him—only numbness and fear for the Hawk. I would never have hurt Jeryn, he wanted to say, but could not. He’d seen the abject and stupid hopes of men once he’d broken them, clinging to straws of self-deception and the delusion that if they licked their torturer’s boots sufficiently clean, no further harm would be done to those they loved. He remembered, too, his scorn of such men and what he’d done to those loved ones out of spite and pique and sheer perverseness, if the victim’s pleas had been too fulsome. There was that, too, in Nanciormis’ eyes.