Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (36 page)

But if nothing else, Tazey would be safe. If he could not engineer her happiness, at least he could give her that.

“I don’t like this, Chief,” Starhawk said softly, as she watched the Wolf trace the final signs of the Circle of Light around her on the smooth-swept temple floor. The bleached smudge of daylight that lay like a rumpled carpet by the nearer door was fading. The gloom seemed thicker beyond the wavering rings of a dozen small fires whose smoke, in spite of the old air shafts hidden in the darkness of the ceiling, stung and burned the eyes. It would soon be night.

Sun Wolf sat back on his knees and used the ragged hem of his torn shirt to daub loose charcoal and ochre from his scabbed fingers. “I don’t like your even being here,” he retorted. He wiped sweat from his face with the back of his hand, leaving long smudges of black and rust. The vast silence of the dark temple around them picked up the echoes of his broken voice. “But I’d like it a hell of a lot less of you were where I couldn’t see you.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Looking across the lines of the Circle at the thin, strong face, with its old scars and rock-crystal eyes and sun-whitened hair, warmed to honey by the light of the small fire enclosed with her in the enchanted ring, Sun Wolf knew too well what she did mean.

They had both been a dozen times over the rite of summoning in the Demonary and the Book of the Cult of Wenshar. Near the lighter doorway into the entry hall the bull calf lowed plaintively, as if it knew it had reason to fear the slow gathering of darkness.

The central canyon, as they had walked up it, dragging the unwilling calf between them, had been dead silent. The crunch of their feet on the gravel, the slip and scrape of the calf’s hooves, and its frightened bawling, had echoed in that horrible stillness, prickling the hair on the Wolf’s nape with the sensation of being watched. Now and then, from the tail of his eye, he had glimpsed movement. Several times he had turned his head, knowing there would be nothing when he did so. And there was not. Familiar as he had come to be with the haunted canyons and the not-quite-empty black eyes of the stone-cut houses, still his heart thumped hard against his ribs, and the sweat crawled clammily down his backbone at those soft, scritching movements and the touch of those unseen eyes.

What little light filtered into the temple from the entry hall was fading.

He and the Hawk, working together and as swiftly as the unfamiliar rituals would let them, had swept and ritually cleansed the temple. Sun Wolf had repeated the archaic spells learned from the Demonary as he had drawn the runes in the temple’s four corners, first slowly and clumsily, checking the moldering black book to make sure they were right, then with more certainty in his harsh, scraped voice. It would take him longer to form and consecrate the greater Circle, which was his ultimate goal, without her help—longer, as the weariness grew on his stiff and aching arms and tired mind; but he was not having her unprotected once night came.

His back and arms smarting all over again, his mind fighting the strange sleepiness of concentration held too strictly and too long, he paced and marked out the biggest Circle of all, encompassing the stone altar and the pit before it in the floor. Meticulously, he drew the signs on the stone floor with lumps of charcoal, with sticks of red ochre, and with thin lines of powdery white sand like the finest sugar—Circle within Circle, Darkness within Light, points oriented like a compass rose to the corners of the universe, long curves sweeping to enclose power within. Instead of marking the rune circle on the outside of the defensive points, he marked the runes on the inside, to imprison rather than repel. And, deliberately, he left two of the runes unwritten.

He flinched, and looked up. He’d left his doublet and head veils crumpled in the corner near Starhawk’s small Circle, and the chill air crept through the holes in his bloodstained shirt to touch the damp hair on his back. It was now utterly dark. Repeating the words of the rune-spells over and over to himself, he had let his mind slip into the trance of concentration. He had no idea how much time had passed.

Outside, the canyon lay submerged in chilled obsidian darkness. Of the half-dozen little fires lit around the temple floor, all had died but the one small blaze in the Circle with Starhawk. By the dim throb of that orange light he saw the glint of her eyes, the pale blur of her shirt-sleeved arms still wrapped around her drawn-up knees. In the utter silence, he could hear her breathing, steady and calm. Then the calf bleated again, desperate fear in the sound.

Sun Wolf got to his feet, like a man startled by some other sound than that. His stiff back muscles stabbed like a hidden stiletto. He was aware of his own hunger and thirst, the stink of his unwashed body, and the dark heavy odor of spent wood smoke, the smell of the rock, of dust, of . . . incense? Through the darkness, for a moment, it was as if he smelled myrrh burned two centuries ago, like scents caught in women’s hair. Through his skin he was aware of a sandstorm, building somewhere out in the darkness of the desert. Though cold, the air felt suddenly stifling, hushed with expectation. In the terrible silence, he nearly jumped out of his skin at the whisper of one breath of wind, trailing over the stone like the hem of a woman’s silk gown.

Brimming with shadow, the pit lay before him. He turned from it, and his own shadow brushed over the mottled sides of the broken altar. Why had he thought, for just that moment as he glimpsed it from the tail of his eye, that it stood whole again? Outside the frail glimmer of Starhawk’s little fire, the darkness seemed thicker, clotted in the corners of the vast room like the vapors of old decay which would never be cleared away.

The demons lay in the stone, like sharks below the surface of the sea, and watched.

The calf bellowed again, desperate with fear.

He hated what he knew must come next.

Starhawk had not understood it and had only been repelled when Jeryn had read in his cool little alto voice how the Witches of Wenshar had summoned their demons. Very few of them had used animals in the pit, once they’d realized more demons would come if the victim were a human child. Even back then, it seemed, orphans were cheap in the poor quarters of the city. Some of the Witches, the Book of the Cult had said, could summon the demons without sacrifice; but when Starhawk had suggested trying to do so, the Wolf had categorically refused. The book had not said it, but he had sensed what he would have to be projecting with his mind—filth and hatred and the unholiest of urges—to bring them. He’d rather kill a calf, even in the gruesome way prescribed.

It took more nerve than he’d thought it would to walk to the edge of the pit. He wasn’t certain what he feared he would see there, with his wizard’s sight, in the swimming blackness below. But it contained only a little sand drifted in the corners, and the skeleton of what looked like a dove, white as a bit of lace dropped upon the loose gravel of its floor.

He wondered why the sudden thought of how deep that gravel might lie over the bedrock repelled him like a nauseating smell.

Turning back, he kindled the little heap of aromatic woods he had left on the bare stump of the broken altar and from it lit two fire-bowls which he set in place of the two missing runes on the inner Circle. Stepping carefully between them, he walked out of the Circle and over to where Starhawk sat beside her little fire.

Without stepping over the protecting barrier, he said softly, “You all right?”

She nodded. She had been silent for hours, watching him, gray eyes inscrutable. He had been totally absorbed in his task and wondered now what she had seen in the darkness as it had closed around him. All his nerves prickled, his mind screaming to him to beware in this vast darkness where the dry rustle of gowns and hair seemed to have only just that moment stopped in the black beyond the fire’s light.

“Whatever you see,” he said quietly, “whatever you think is happening, don’t step out of the Circle. Once it’s broken, it will be no protection to you.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“They shouldn’t be able to get in at you.” Of that, at least, mercifully, he was now sure. “Once I draw the last two runes and complete the great Circle, they shouldn’t be able to get out. With them trapped, I should be able to work the binding-spells to hold them to the rocks of Wenshar forever.”

She cocked her head a little. The smudgy firelight deepened the shadows of her hollowed eyes and the lines that fanned backward from them on the unswollen side of her face and scored deep marks from her nostrils to the soft corners of that calm mouth. “How long’s that going to take you?”

He muttered a curse at her for seeing what she saw: the marks of fatigue on his face; the dark ring of weariness around his single eye and the bruised look of the lid; the taut mouth beneath its straggly mustache; and the strange pallor under the stubble of his golden beard. He was close to the edge and he knew it, nearing the point where the cumulative stresses of flight and concentration would begin to cause mistakes. Even the smallest break in his mental barriers could be fatal in dealing with the demons of Wenshar. “Until just after dawn, rot your eyes, and what the hell business is it of yours?”

“And the sandstorm?
Will that break before you’re done?”

The Wolf hesitated. The sandstorms, as he and Nanciormis both had learned, would scatter the demons on their winds—but as they both had known also, where the demons were able to walk during the killer winds, they walked more strongly. They fed upon violence, even the violence of the air.

As if she read his answer in his silence, she said, “Can you send it away? Or delay it?”

He shook his head. He could feel the whisper along his bones, a crawling tingle as if his nerves were being drawn from his flesh one fiber at a time; it was coming and it was strong. His hoarse voice quiet, he said, “I haven’t the strength to spare, Hawk. Not from what I have to do. By dawn . . . ” He shrugged and spread his hands. “We may have time. An hour would be all we need.”

Dark wind licked the tiny fire; Sun Wolf swung around as the bull calf bellowed again, in despair as well as terror. The poor creature was jerking wildly at its rope, its bound feet bouncing and threshing, its eyes gleaming in the faint reflections of the fire. Sun Wolf was aware again of how dark it was in the temple, how the shadows seemed to creep forward, curious, questing fingers seeking to probe his body and his soul. He shifted his aching shoulders again, his heart beginning to pound at the thought of what lay ahead.

Softly, the Hawk said, “Good luck, Chief. May the spirits of your ancestors lend you a hand.”

“The spirits of my ancestors would disown me for messing with demons,” he replied, the levity he had intended hushed from the raven-croak of his voice. “They at least had brains.” He wanted to reach across, to touch her, like a man drawing luck from some talisman of dark-stained ivory and gold, but even that would have broken the Circle and negated the forces of protection held so tenuously in the tingling air. The little fire before her feet was sinking, and he could not even spare the power to summon witchlight to brighten that ghastly darkness for her. He wondered, as he turned from her and walked toward the terrified calf beside the door, how much of what was going to happen she would even see.

It was going to be a hideously long night.

The calf fought Sun Wolf’s grip on its stubby horns as best it could, bracing its bound feet, writhing as he half dragged, half carried it toward the Circle. The ghost-whispers of wind murmuring in the ventilation shafts echoed like an eerie chanting. Had they chanted, Sun Wolf wondered, as two or three of their number had dragged some poor terrified child to the altar? Chanted to summon the demons, to hold their own powers of protection against them?

He remembered again the painted eyes of those worn frescoes and the dark cynicism of their ironic regard. A slashing hoof cut his shin; slobber from the calf’s muzzle slimed his hands and stung in the half-scabbed demon bites; its rough coat abraded the skin of his side as it flung its weight against him. In his mercenary days, he’d tortured men and taken pleasure in torturing them, if they’d hurt or betrayed him or some member of his troop. Why did slaughtering this bull calf, who’d have ended up dead at cattle-killing time before the onset of winter anyway, make his soul cringe as it did? Why did those huge brown eyes, white-rimmed with terror, seem so human, staring up into his? He dragged the animal between the two fire pots and the calf bellowed again in fear of the flames . . . 

And from the corner of his eye he saw movement.

A glow that illuminated nothing flickered in the darkness behind him.

They were coming.

He was battered and aching in every muscle of his tired body by the time he got the calf wrestled up onto the uneven altar stone. The beast flopped like a landed fish, its pitiful, frantic bellowing for its mother turning the vast stone darkness into a ringing sound-chamber whose echoes went through Sun Wolf’s skull. He roped its hind feet together, and then to its already-bound forelegs; sweat ran down his ribs and back, sticking the torn rags of his shirt to his body and burning in the abrasions of his wrists within their filthy bindings. He worked from the front side of the altar rather than the back, hating the open, silent mouth of the pit at his back, but preferring that, for the moment, to the alternative. Where he stood now, panting, smelling the warm animal smell of the calf, the dirt, and the aromatic woods of the small fire beside the altar steps, he could look between the two fire pots into a Stygian corridor that seemed to run back far past the rear wall of the temple in its concealing shadows, a corridor extending into the blackness of the earth, into realms he had never known and never wanted to know—into time.

He could see them now, far back along that corridor, bobbing like marsh-lights over swamps long dry. He could hear the whisper of their chittering laughter. The fire beside the altar seemed to wink in the glinting reflection of their eyes.

The knife hilt pressed like an arm bone into his hand.