Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (32 page)

But all of it changed nothing. He felt alien to himself, as if soul and body had, in less time than it took to put on his boots, been turned inside-out.

“We’ll take his confession and fling it in the faces of those toads in Kwest Mralwe . . . ”

Nanciormis shook his head. “It would do us no good.” He fastidiously wiped his face on a cotton handkerchief he’d taken from his sleeve. Even through the stench of the straw underfoot and the King’s stained and sweaty puce doublet, the Wolf could smell the aromatic vinegar with which it had been soaked. “They’ll only deny it—deny that they ever knew the sources of the power of the Witches. But as the ones who broke that power, they very well could have known how to awaken it again.” He glanced back at the Wolf. “As for this one—we have his confession. We need no more.”

He signed to the guards. They raised their crossbows again, and Nanciormis put his hand on the King’s arm, to draw him back out of the way.

Osgard remained where he was, between the barbed iron points and Sun Wolf’s chest. “After the bill for it is signed,” he said.

Nanciormis stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “What?”

The King regarded him for a moment, green eyes slit-ted. “After a bill is made out and signed for his death and posted in the city from sunrise till sunset tomorrow,” he said. “The fact that he’s a witch-bastard and a killer doesn’t mean I can break the law to kill him without a bill.”

Emotionally emptied, Sun Wolf observed with distant interest that this was one of the few times he’d ever seen Nanciormis taken off guard. Between the velvety ropes of the braids, his face turned tallowy yellow with anger, his mouth squaring hard at the corners. Then he recovered himself, stammered, “We have the man’s confession! He betrayed you, would have murdered you in your bed. He slaughtered Milkom like a sheep . . . ”

Osgard’s voice turned to flint. “Don’t talk about Milkom to me,” he said softly. “It’s only chance my uncle Tyrill named me and not Norbas his successor. It could have been either of us, because we both believed in law. A shirdar lord might have a man’s throat slit on his own say-so, in the dark, without anyone’s knowing about it, but that isn’t how it’s done here. I’m the King, but I’m King under laws, something you and your people never got around to making.”

“And my people,” said Nanciormis, viper-quiet, “are the stronger for it. Among my people, these killings would never have gone on as long as they have.”

“Your people,” retorted Osgard, his voice equally deadly, “were unable to hold these lands against folk who were united by law, Nanciormis. Remember that.”

And turning, the King strode from the cell. Nanciormis stood for a moment, watching his shadow pass across the torch-glare in the stairwell; then he turned back and studied Sun Wolf with considering eyes.

For a long moment he said nothing. Sun Wolf met his eyes through the burning smoke of the brazier that now choked the cell, acutely aware that the two guards still remained, their weapons at the ready. He was utterly weary, body and soul—yesterday’s long ride and the horrors of the night mingling with the ache of strained shoulder muscles, the hot, viscous trickle of blood down his arms from the torn flesh of his wrists, and the burn of sweat in his wounds. His only thought was how Starhawk had fought them—silent, desperate—and how in silence she had been beaten unconscious. In the strange, clear corner of his mind that was detached from any personal concerns, he was aware that, though Osgard would undoubtedly promulgate and sign the correct legal bill for his death immediately, by tomorrow there was a good chance he would be too drunk to inquire whether Sun Wolf had survived the night to be executed the following sunset. By the commander’s eyes, Nanciormis was thinking it, too. Sun Wolf knew he should be afraid, but somehow was not. He only stood, his head tipped back against the stone wall behind him, watching the commander incuriously. In spite of the almost unbearable heat of the room, he felt queerly cold.

But something of Osgard’s sober and deadly quiet seemed to have reached through the commander’s contempt for his brother-in-law. At length he signed to the two guards. “Keep watch on him. Remember he’s a wizard. Stay alert. If he either moves or speaks, kill him at once. Understand?”

The men nodded. Nanciormis paused for a moment longer, studying Sun Wolf’s chained figure, stretched between the torches, the light glancing along the crescent-shaped scabs of the demon bites, gleaming stickily on the perspiration streaming down his chest and ribs. Then his mouth hardened with some private thought; turning, he strode from the cell.

It was a long time before Starhawk found the strength even to move. The fresh pain blended with the ache of bruises several hours old, taken in the struggle when they’d arrested her as soon as the boys on the watch-tower had sighted Sun Wolf’s horse. Looking back on it, she wondered with dull disgust at herself why she had not suspected the very fact that no one had arrested her upon her return with Tazey. Of course Osgard would be readier to plant the blame on him or Kaletha, rather than on his daughter. She wondered what had finally tipped the scales.

Some circumstance of Incarsyn’s murder? She shivered, remembering the screams that had shattered the terrible silence between the end of the storm and dawn. Some piece of proof that Kaletha was innocent? Or was it just that Sun Wolf was a stranger? She cursed herself for not picking a less obvious rendezvous, for not knowing the empty quarter well enough to choose one further in, and for not being ready for a delayed arrest.

She sighed and tried to roll over on the uneven stone of the floor. It was like a cobblestone street, bumpy and filled with little pits and holes where roaches nested under crumbled straw. Its jagged edges cut into her bare arms, and she winced and lay still again.

She had to get him out, if it wasn’t too late already. Illyra had threatened the most barbarous and lingering death for the witch whose magic had slain her brother. But in the long hours of the earlier night, while she had waited with hammering heart for the guards to come for her, she had gone over every square foot of the stone-lined room. There was nothing she could use for a weapon or tool.

Sun Wolf had confessed. He might be already dead.

Her body hurt; her soul felt shaken to its marrow.

She had long known that she was willing to perjure her soul and destroy her body for Sun Wolf’s sake—it had never occurred to her that he would do likewise for her. Struggling to submerge mind and feeling to the dark silence of meditation, she had heard him cry out, and it had left her stunned. He would not have confessed, she knew, if they’d put the iron to his own flesh.

That he had done so for her sake terrified her. She was used to pain from arrows, swords, and every instrument designed to cut or break human flesh. The tears that slid in such silence down her face were from grief at his humiliation and because she understood now that he valued her above his own pride.

He had said that he loved her. Until now she had not understood that his love was of the same quality as hers.

This is weak,
she told herself angrily, weak and stupid. While you’re sniveling over how much he loves you, he could be dying. There has to be something you can do.

But the tears slid cold down her face. Even had she not been half-dead with exhaustion, she knew there was nothing she had not already investigated before.

Somewhere behind her, she heard a faint, hollow scritch.

Her muscles stiffened.

In the long waiting she had become familiar with every sound of these cells—the queer, hollow groanings of the wind in the walls, and the scrabble of rats who hunted the enormous brown jail-roaches in the corners. This was different.

Very faintly, she heard it again—the unmistakable scrape of wood on stone and the soft squeak of a hinge.

“Warlady?”

An unvoiced whisper, a scout’s in enemy territory. She moved her eyes to the judas-hole in the door. The faintest glow of reflected torchlight filtered through, but no shadow of a watching guard. She rolled over—every pulled, burning muscle of her back and belly stabbing at her—and sat up, shrugging her torn shirt back up on her shoulders again.

In the blackness of the rear wall, a small square of more velvety black had appeared and, in it, the white oval blur of faces.

As soundlessly as she could, she edged her way to the back of the cell.

Tazey was wearing her boy’s breeches and a man’s embroidered black shirt, all smutched and filthy now with mud and slime and what looked like soot. Jeryn’s usual prim, formal outfit of hose, trunks, and a stiffly braced doublet were as grimy as his sister’s.

Starhawk breathed, “Sorry, but we just had the chimney swept yesterday—come back next week.” They both put their hands over their mouths to keep from giggling with relief.

She ducked down and crawled through the narrow black slot in the wall; there was the faint scrape of wood as Jeryn replaced the hidden door. Small hands groped for hers in the darkness, and they led her, half stooping, half crawling, a few paces and around what felt like a corner. Then with a hiss and sneer of metal, a lantern-slide was uncovered to show them in a narrow passageway with a sharply sloped roof. Roaches longer than Starhawk’s thumb scrambled for cover from the light.

Jeryn whispered, “This runs behind all the cells.”

Starhawk nodded. “It’s an old trick, if a prisoner turns stubborn. Put him in a cell with his partner and station a man to listen to them talk when they think they’re alone. Or if he’s a Trinitarian, hide a man here when the priest comes to hear his confession. It looks like it hasn’t been used in years.”

They were staring at her with wide eyes; Starhawk felt her hair, sticking straight up, all stiffened with sweat and blood, and the puffy, discoloring bruises on her face and half-exposed breast. “I’m fine,” she added. “The Chief . . . ”

Jeryn whispered, “We heard. We were behind the wall.”

Tazey added softly, “Father’s gone to sign the bill of execution, but the law states it must be posted from sunrise to sunset before a man can be killed. He—” She swallowed. “He hasn’t been hurt.”

Starhawk had half guessed, from their lack of panic, that the Wolf had at least a few hours left. Exhausted and shaken as she was, the sudden release from stress made her eyes sting nonetheless and her throat ache. With an impulsive move, she hugged the girl to her, fighting to keep from breaking the armor of her calm. There was no time for it now.

“I—” Tazey hesitated, biting her lower lip. “I can use magic to get the guards away from him. I don’t think it will be hard.” She spoke swiftly, as if admitting something which hurt her; but once it was said, she relaxed a little. She looked far better than she had yesterday in Wenshar; better even than she had on the silent trip back across the desert—less withdrawn and hagridden. Starhawk guessed she’d used magic to get out of her own room—as their friend she had certainly been watched—even as she had laid sleep-spells on her watchers two nights ago. You can sometimes un-be what you are, the Hawk thought, but you can never unknow that you were it. Tazey had made her choice. For her there was now no going back, if indeed there ever had been. She went on, “We can . . . ”

Starhawk shook her head. Her mind was working fast, running ahead. Her immediate fears for the Wolf were assuaged. She was thinking like a trooper again. “No,” she said. “Listen, what hour of the night is it?”

They looked at one another, then Tazey said, “About the third.”

“All right.”
Starhawk drew the children close to her, keeping her voice low, for the tunnel would carry the smallest noise. “People are still awake—they’re still alert. We can’t make a break-in until two or three hours after midnight, when most people are asleep, and when the guards will be tired and stale—not only the guards on the Wolf’s cell, but the guards around the corrals.”

Huddled, squatting, in the narrow space beside her, they nodded, accepting her soldier’s wisdom. She could see Jeryn tucking that piece of information away in his mind for another time.

“The Chief was right. These killings aren’t going to stop until we know why they started. We need to know what the Witches of Wenshar knew. We need Kaletha’s books.” She looked at them in the upside-down glare of the shaded lantern, two grimy royal urchins sitting with their chins on their knees in the stinking spy-tunnel behind their father’s dungeon, dark eyes and green shining through the tangles of their dust-streaked hair. “Are you kids game?”

“Do you know every tunnel and cellar in Tandieras?”

Jeryn glanced over his shoulder at her and flashed her a shy grin. “Just about.” There was a trace of pride in his soft, treble voice. Broken out of its habitual sullenness, his peaked face looked more handsome and less pretty than usual. He wiped away the soot that had coated them all on their way through an old hypocaust, leaving a large, pale streak amid the general filth.

Jeryn had crossed the big, musty-smelling kitchen cellar without light, by touch in the dark; he’d flashed the lantern-slide, once, to guide Starhawk across. Long training in night scouting had taught her to take in the cleared pathways at a glance. She’d negotiated the expanse of piled sacks of potatoes and wheat, clay oil jars as tall as Jeryn was, and knobby, dangling fronds of onions and herbs without a sound that might be heard by those whose footsteps creaked over their heads. She could hear Tazey making her way softly now, moving in the dark, as the mageborn could.

The boy’s cold, fragile little fingers sought hers. “I used to hide anywhere, when Uncle Nanciormis wanted me for sword practice, or riding. And it wasn’t that I was a coward,” he added, a crack of hurt suddenly breaking his voice. “That is—it isn’t cowardly not to want to do something you can’t do if it’s dangerous, is it, Warlady? I mean, I’m not afraid of horses—it’s just I—I can’t ride the wild ones the way Tazey does, and I know it. But Uncle . . . ” He hesitated, ashamed. “Uncle told Father I was a coward for not wanting to do it and a sneak for running away from lessons. I tried, I really did, to climb ropes and scale walls and things, but I . . . I just can’t. That’s—that’s why I had to find the Chief out in the desert in Wenshar. Because he—he’s a better teacher. I mean, it’s boring, but he’s careful you won’t get hurt, you know? Sometimes I thought . . . ” He stopped himself, let go of her hand and, by the sound of it, wiped his nose hastily with a sleeve which would leave it blacker than before.