Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (41 page)

“I don’t!” she sobbed. Then something broke in her, and she gasped, “I don’t want to!”

Pressed to the stone of the wall, Nanciormis was screaming, begging as he fought with the bleeding air.

“Say it!” the Wolf commanded.

Anshebbeth stared up at him like a hysterical child, unable to speak or draw breath. He shook her again, her neck snapping back like a white, corded stem in the black wrack of her hair. A sob ripped her, as if it would tear her body in two. He saw the madness retreat from her eyes and knowledge take its place—knowledge and horror at what she knew she had become.

As though torn from her with a knife, her scream rent the air. “I don’t want it! Let him go! I don’t want this!”

Nanciormis shrieked again, huddled against the wall as the glowing ring closed around him. In Sun Wolf’s grip Anshebbeth’s body felt as fragile and skeletal as theirs.

Despairing, Anshebbeth screamed, “I can’t let it go! I can’t let it go! I want to but I can’t . . . ” She twisted away from him, burying her face in her skeletal hands.

Then she screamed—not the tense, tight shrillness of her strangled shrieks before, but loud, aching, louder and louder as the torrent of freed sound seemed to rip apart the containing flesh. Like startled hornets the demons rose from Nanciormis, shining horribly in the dark air. Sun Wolf flung himself aside as they descended upon the altar in a whistling swarm, knowing he had been too late. Anshebbeth did not raise her head, but screamed on and on, rocking like a hurt child, as if some last rag of sanity had slipped finally from her grip. He caught a glimpse of Starhawk running toward him, as he turned back weaponless, magicless, to face the phosphorescent storm of death.

Anshebbeth’s scream scaled upward, twisting the darkness as the demons settled over her. In a flash of terrible enlightenment, Sun Wolf understood that she had regained, rather than lost, her sanity. She knew what she had done.

Blindly, striking with her hands at the glowing fangs that ripped her flesh, she ran forward, the demons driving her into the pit. Starhawk reached the Wolf’s side at the same moment that Anshebbeth fell, the glowing ghost shapes swirling down after her, shriek after shriek ripping the air.

It took her twenty minutes to die. When it was over silence settled on the dark temple, as it had lain for a hundred and fifty years.

“You awake, Chief?”

Sun Wolf started to roll over, then ceased with a gasp of pain. Vaguely, he remembered Starhawk wrapping a makeshift field dressing over his cracked ribs as he was sliding into sleep in the sickly yellow post-storm light, but the recollection was cloudier than the dreams that had followed. He felt chilled, sticky, and bone-tired, hurting in every limb, with dust gummed in his eyelashes, moustache, and the stubble of his beard.

He felt someone bend over him, light and very swift, and lips touched his. Opening his eye, he saw Starhawk just straightening her body where she knelt beside him.

“Well, that fairy tale does work after all,” she remarked.

She was wearing the dark-green leather doublet of the Tandieras guards over a black shirt which made her sun-gilded fair skin shine like ivory. She had bathed and looked clean, calm, and, except for the black handspan of bruise on her face, utterly unruffled. Squinting past her, he saw over the broken wall of the ruined house in which he’d slept, the cliff faces of Wenshar, blackish maroon in the polished sunset light, guarding their treasure of rose and apricot within. Like strange and far-off music, he heard the hushed voices of Nanciormis’ guards and the comfortable nicker of horses.

The storm had ended shortly after noon. In spite of an exhaustion so deep that he could barely stagger, Sun Wolf had insisted on moving down from the canyons to the piled debris and crumbled walls of the Lower
Town before he would sleep. It had taken him and Tazey two hours to work all the binding-spells to hold the demons forever within the rocks of Wenshar; exhausting, nerve-wracking hours, while he had listened, with as much of his mind as he could spare, to hear the demons wakening again from the pit where Anshebbeth’s mangled body lay.

They had not wakened. Like drunkards, they were satiated, wallowing in the afterglow. He hadn’t wanted to expose Tazey to the full knowledge of what the demons were and of the terrible powers necessary to hold them to the stones, but he had had no choice. He had been simply too weary, too drained, to pass through the ritual a second time alone. Later, the girl had been very silent as she had walked beside him down the sand-drifted canyon in the after-hush of the storm, but he suspected that she was less shocked by the vileness of the demons than she would have been even twenty-four hours ago.

With the demons bound to the rock that had given them birth, it would have been possible to sleep safely, even within the temple, but Sun Wolf had not wanted to risk the dreams that might come.

He mumbled, “What is it?” By the color of the light, he knew he’d slept four or five hours.

“Riders on their way,” she said. “Still a couple hours out on the desert, but my guess is it’s reinforcements.”

“Good.” He sat up. Starhawk, as usual, refrained from helping him; he didn’t know whether he should be miffed or pleased with the implied compliment of superhuman stamina. The jab of the hardened dressing was almost as bad as the cracked ribs underneath. “They can take Nanciormis back.”

Starhawk shook her head. “He’s gone,” she said. “You’d started the binding-rites already when his guards took him out of the temple. He was cut to pieces, you know, and bleeding like a flayed steer. For a long time he just cried in a corner . . . ”

“Don’t tell me,” the Wolf said wearily. “They thought the poor bastard was pretty harmless where he was.”

Starhawk shrugged. “After what went on in the temple, they weren’t anxious to search the canyons for him. I’d have the lot of them flogged, myself, but it’s not my business.”

Sun Wolf sighed and sat quietly, his back to the crumbling house wall. Dry wind curled across his naked chest, bearing the smell of dust and horses.

He wondered why, in spite of everything—the memory of his humiliation at the commander’s hands, the beating they’d given Starhawk, the pain in his wrists and side—his only anger toward the man stemmed from what he had done to Anshebbeth and what he had tried to do to Jeryn—not even so much trying to murder him, but planting in his mind the fear that he was a coward and turning his father against him.

He still found it difficult to hate Nanciormis. After seeing Anshebbeth’s death, he found it difficult, at the moment, to hate anyone.

Thinking back, he realized that he always had—and in that he was like Nanciormis himself.

“He was only playing the game, you know,” he said after a time. “It was only selfishness and greed, with no hate in it. He couldn’t have summoned the demons if he’d wanted to, and maybe he knew it. There was nothing personal in it at all. None of them, not Tazey nor Anshebbeth nor Incarsyn, was real to him. Only himself and his wants.”

“It’s what tipped me off, you know.” The Hawk settled back on her heels, a bar of sunlight slanting through the broken roof, turning her hair to platinum but leaving that cool, scarred face in shadow. “You saw Nanciormis as a man, but I saw him as a woman sees him. He was a man who used women. He used other people, too—their hates, their loves, their fears—and their magic. In a way, his evil was deeper than Anshebbeth’s hate or Kaletha’s vanity and irresponsibility with what she’d found in the books that had lain forgotten for centuries in the library. And, of course, poor Ciannis knew less of the cult than Nanciormis did. If she had known, she might have warned Kaletha about it—if she ever knew Kaletha had found the old books at all. But Nanciormis simply didn’t care.”

Sun Wolf nodded. “The worst of it is,” he said quietly, “that it was my evil as well. That was what being a mercenary was all about. Like killing that poor calf—you do what you have to do, like an animal eating. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed, not for a kingdom or for love or pride or for anything, really—just because some politician was paying me to take a city they happened to be living in.”

The corner of her mouth moved slightly, less ironic than simply rueful.
“Yes, I know,” she said. Their eyes met. In hers he saw the understanding that he had done evil and that she had known it for evil at the time and had still followed him into battle as his second-in-command. It was, he understood then, what Nanciormis had done to Anshebbeth. It was how she had known.

It was some time before he could say anything. When he did, it was only, “I’m sorry, Hawk.” In her eyes he saw that she knew for what.

She only shook her head. “It’s history,” she said, meaning it. “Like Anshebbeth, I had the choice. Unlike her, I don’t hate myself for the choice I made.” He remembered that she had remained Kaletha’s friend.

“You understood that?”

“Oh, yes. She knew in the end what she had become—and the one she most hated was herself. I suppose it’s what happened to all the girls, when they came to an understanding of what was happening to them.” She uncoiled her whipcord body and rose to her feet, watching with her usual mild detachment as Sun Wolf agonizingly followed. “It was only the evil ones that survived.”

“I can’t say that I blame those that didn’t,” he said.

They passed through a gap in the wall, which might or might not once have been a door, and walked across the trampled, dusty side of a sand dune toward where one of the old rain tanks hid in the niche of a rock, away from the prevailing wind. “Would you have done the same in her position? If you learned it was you?”

Sun Wolf glanced up at the dark, eroded cliffs of the Haunted
Range, guarding their rainbow labyrinth of evil within. “I’d like to think I would.”

There was water in three of the old tanks; Sun Wolf bathed in the shallowest of them; Starhawk joined him there and later on the spread-out blanket that he’d worn flung over his shoulders like a cloak. “No wonder soldiers’ women have to be versatile and creative,” she commented, when he flinched at the pain of his ribs.

In time they both dressed in the clothes that were part of the bundle Tazey had brought to Wenshar with her to further their escape. The bundle also contained some food, their weapons and mail, but not the little cache of money. “Cheer up,” Starhawk said, slipping various hideout daggers into her boots with the air of one resuming a much-loved garment. “With the demons laid for good, they’ll have to give us some reward—an exorcist’s fee if nothing else.”

“Bets?” the Wolf grumbled.

They rode out of Wenshar as darkness began to fall and met, an hour and a half later, the oncoming party from Tandieras in a circle of torchlight on the pebbled desolation of the wind-scoured reg.

As they got close, Sun Wolf could see Osgard’s coarse blond-gray hair by the torchlight and, beside his great horse, the fat, trotting figure of Walleye and his small rider. Tazey cried out, “Daddy!” and spurred her buckskin gelding, riding like a mad antelope to throw herself into her father’s arms.

“It seems I’ve you to thank that I’m not going to find scorpions in my blankets some night.” By the campfire’s windblown light, Osgard looked sober and better than he had since the Wolf had come to Tandieras. The veils that swathed his coarse, stubbly face were pushed back, falling over his sand-colored cloak behind. With his rough shirt and battered boots, he might have been just another range hand, as he had been before his warrior-uncle had made him King. “Oh, I knew he was dangerous, but . . . ” He hesitated, then looked into the amber heart of the fire, his thick mouth pursing with embarrassment. “I suppose I was like the owner of a dog trained for killing. You get careless.”

Sun Wolf nodded. “I know.” On the other side of the campfire, a guard told a joke, but the laughter was subdued. Out on the asphalt blackness of the reg, it was less easy to dismiss the demons and djinns of desert lore as mere superstition, no matter what the priests of the Triple God might say. “He did, in a way.”

“He always was careless,” Osgard said. “He was a good fighter, but irresponsible—he never thought anything could touch him. I’m not sure being publicly broken and turned out like a beaten dog in the desert wasn’t something to which he’d have preferred death. He had a conceit of himself, besides liking his pleasures. But I wouldn’t have let him put a hand on Tazey . . . ” He paused, and the bluster died out of him again. Off by the other campfire, Tazey and Jeryn sat together, conversing quietly with Starhawk, their arms around her. Past Osgard’s shoulder, the Wolf could see Jeryn’s dark eyes shining with a boy’s gruesome enthusiasm as Tazey spoke of what had happened in the temple.

The King sighed. “But God knows I’d have sworn I’d never have let matters go this far. Damned witches with their stinking magic . . . ” He stopped again, looking over at the Wolf, as if he’d spoken slightingly of sand in the tents of the shirdar.

Sun Wolf shook his head. “Magic had nothing to do with it,” he said. “Nanciormis was the kind of man who’d have used any weapon. He’d made attempts on your life—and Jeryn’s—before he learned Anshebbeth’s mind had been touched by the demons. Her power was just the readiest weapon at hand. If she’d been mageborn and not simply the victim of her own and Kaletha’s vanity, she’d have understood what was happening to her and been able to control it. I felt it—I think Tazey did, too. If you have power, you must face it, touch it, and learn to use it, or it rots within you like an abscessed wound.” He fell silent, regarding the King across the campfire, and Osgard, knowing his thoughts, looked away again.

He muttered, “I—I know.” Unwillingly, his eyes returned to the Wolf. “But you can’t blame me, can you? I wanted a daughter I could be proud of . . . ”

“Good God, man,” Sun Wolf said angrily, “you’ve got one of the finest natural wizards I’ve ever heard of for a daughter and a son who’ll politic and finesse and treaty-make rings around the shirdar and the Middle Kingdoms, and all you can do is complain because they’re not a brainless brood mare and a beef-witted ox like you and me? I can only think of two things in my life that I wouldn’t trade for those children of yours. Can’t you be proud of them for what they are and not for what you want them to be?”