Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (8 page)

In the afternoons, when the heat of the day had begun to burn itself off and the people woke from their siestas, half the population of Pardle Sho ended up in these gardens. The three acres of rambling walkways—under arbors of grape, jacaranda, and phoenix-vine, or of bare, sandy squares where occasional ancient orange and cypress trees stood but more often simply native cactus—covered the last footslopes of Mount Morian where the land was too irregular for even the builders of Pardle to put houses. Before the Revolt, the gardens had originally belonged to the governors of the slave-worked mines, and the ruins of the Palace formed their southern boundary. But now they were the favorite promenade of the town, where people came in the afternoons to talk, hear gossip, meet their friends, flirt, transact personal business, or listen to the singers who sat in their shaded corners, caps full of pennies before them. It wasn’t unusual for itinerant teachers to meet with their students there; at the other end of the colonnade Sun Wolf knew one brisk little man could always be found teaching engineering to a class of one or two.

Kaletha’s voice came to him, measured as if each word were a precious thing to be cherished by its lucky recipient. “Purity of the body is the greatest necessity of magic,” she emphasized for the third or fourth time that day. She was speaking to Luatha Welldig, a fat, discontented-looking woman of forty or so, dressed, like all of them except the Wolf and Egaldus, the Trinitarian novice, in severe and unbecoming black, but her glance flicked to Sun Wolf as she spoke. “Without purity of the body—freedom from spiritous liquors, from overindulgence, from the crudities of fornication—” she was looking straight at him as she emphasized the word, “—the mind remains a prisoner in the maze of the senses. The body must be pure, if the mind is to be free. All magic rises from the mind, the intellect, the reason.”

“That isn’t true,” Sun Wolf said, looking up.

Kaletha’s pink lips lost their curves and flattened into a disapproving line. “Naturally, you’d prefer not to believe so.”

He shook his head, refusing to be angered. Slowly, stammeringly, not certain how to explain and oddly conscious of his scraped-out croak of a voice, he said, “The intellect may learn to guide magic, but it doesn’t spring from the reason, any more than water is generated by the pipe it flows through.”

“Nonsense,” Kaletha said briskly. “Reason and the ability to control the base passions are the sole province of humans, and humans are the only living creatures to possess magic.”

“But they aren’t.”

The dark red brows climbed. “Oh? Are you telling me that camels can turn sandstorms? Or house cats can read oracle-bones? Or do you believe in funny little people we can’t see who hide in cellars and clean up the kitchens of deserving goodwives?”

Sun Wolf felt the anger stir in him, and with it a deep unwillingness to argue the point. He felt in his heart she was wrong, yet lacked the technical expertise to prove himself right—and lacked, still more, any desire to pick and unravel at the smoky whole of his instincts.

Into his silence, Anshebbeth said timidly, “Kaletha, when you speak of purity—surely there are different sorts of—of physical love.” She spoke as if she could barely get the word out of her throat. Sun Wolf stared at her in surprise, startled that she would defect from her teacher’s slightest utterance, much less do so to take up his side of the question. In the harlequin sunlight of the vine’s shade, her thin, white cheeks were blotched with embarrassed red. “Can’t—can’t true love be—be freeing to the soul as well as to the body?”

Kaletha sighed. “Really, Anshebbeth.” She turned away.

The governess fell silent, her thin hand stealing up to touch her throat in its high collar, as if to massage away some dreadful tightness.

Sun Wolf considered her thoughtfully for a moment. She had surely had little to say to him, falling in obediently with Kaletha’s contempt. But he remembered the look she’d once given him: covert lust plunging immediately into scalding shame; he’d seen her, too, hungrily following Nanciormis with her eyes. He wondered how that sharp, tense white face would look if it relaxed into laughter, and what the masses of tight-braided black hair would feel like unraveling under a man’s caressing hand. But her gaze had already gone back to Kaletha, and she leaned to catch what the White Witch was saying to Egaldus. No man, he realized, would stand a chance of gaining Anshebbeth’s undivided attention if Kaletha were in the room—supposing that he’d want it.

Manlike, he had simply considered her contemptible. Now, realizing what she had all her life given up for the sake of this woman’s bare approval, he saw her as pathetic.

Across the court a kingfisher glitter of brightness caught his eye. The Bishop Galdron had joined Norbas Milkom; the two men talked gravely, the white-bearded patriarch with his glittering gold tabard and the tough, scarred mine owner, the diamonds from his rings flashing. Starhawk had left them. A moment later he saw her walking along the colonnade with Nanciormis. Both the Bishop and the mine owner watched the big Guards Commander disapprovingly. If Nanciormis was aware of their looks or their disapproval he didn’t show it; he moved like a king, serene and elegant in his slashed red-velvet doublet and flowing desert cloak, his dark hair knotted up on the back of his head against the afternoon’s heat.

During their drinking bout last night, Sun Wolf had observed that, although Nanciormis, like most of the men of the desert, tended to treat women with a combination of courtliness and patronage, he recognized the women of his guard as colleagues in the arts of war and only flirted with them with their tacit permission. He wasn’t flirting with the Hawk, Sun Wolf could see. Flirtation was an art Starhawk had never understood. She would still occasionally give Sun Wolf a blank look when he complimented or teased her, which amused him. Beneath that lioness facade, she was in some ways a startlingly innocent girl.

And yet . . . 

Last night came back to him, the sharp fear in Starhawk’s voice as she’d called to him from beyond the moonlit gate. She was not a woman to run from shadows. Her fear had not been the timidity of a woman asking a man’s reassurance, but a warrior’s fear of a very real danger. There had been neither tracks nor marks in either the yard or the little cell they shared.

Starhawk had not had any explanation, but, with a shiver, he recalled the dead doves.

A shadow fell across him. He looked up to see Nanciormis. “I see you’ve joined the would-be Summoners of Storm.” The big man braced one thick shoulder against the arbor post with its twisting of thick, scraggy vines and looked genially down at Sun Wolf. “A useful skill for a warrior to acquire, now that there’s no Wizard King to hunt you down and kill you for it—but your time could be better spent.”

“If I were looking for skills to augment war,” the Wolf replied, “I don’t doubt it. But I have quick-and-dirty wizardry already.”

“Have you?” The coffee-dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I know the servants all say you do. I only thought that meant you’d managed to impress the Lady Kaletha in some fashion—not easy, I’ll admit. What then do you seek here?”

Sun Wolf was silent for a long time, looking up into that fleshy, handsome face with its high cheekbones and aquiline nose already flecked with broken veins. The dark eyes, with their shadows of pouches and wrinkles, were both wise and cynical, but there was no dismissal in them.

After a few moments he said, “I don’t know. If I knew, it would be easier. A man can learn to fight in the streets and taverns, but against a warrior, trained and disciplined, he’s no match in a long fight; and he can’t use that knowledge for anything else.”

Nanciormis’ brow puckered. He clearly did not understand. Sun Wolf had guessed already, from the sloppiness with which Jeryn had been trained, that he would not. Sun Wolf guessed that in Nanciormis’ younger days—and he couldn’t be much above thirty-five now, though his portliness made him look older—he had been a notable warrior. But his very abilities, like his natural charm, had spared him from having to learn discipline. Never having had to learn anything beyond what he already knew, he was a man who lived on the surface of things—adept but unimaginative. Having never been defeated, he operated on the unconscious assumption that he never would be. A professional would destroy him.

There was a small stirring among Kaletha’s disciples now, as she moved across to speak to Starhawk. Beyond her, Sun Wolf could see Egaldus fade unobtrusively into the shadows. A little to his surprise, he realized the novice was using a cloaking-spell, a means of nonvisibility, to avoid the notice of his master, the Bishop, on the other side of the garden. It was one of the first magics Sun Wolf had learned to use, and the young man did it with considerable skill. Only by concentrating could the Wolf keep him in sight; the shadows of the twisted grapevines lay like a blind over the bright hair and the embroidered blue and white of his robes. Anshebbeth, too, the Wolf noticed, had grown very quiet, gazing down at her thin hands.

Nanciormis beckoned him, and the Wolf rose to follow down the shaded aisle of cracked and uneven tiles. The commander glanced back at Starhawk—leaning against a gnarled wisteria vine, her head a little on one side as she talked to Kaletha—then across at Milkom and the Bishop again. “I’d advise you to be a little careful who sees you here,” he said softly. “Witches have a bad name in Wenshar, as I told you last night. Whatever you think Kaletha might give you may not be worth what you’ll have to pay for it.”

That morning, across the speckled range land, Sun Wolf had seen the dark, jagged line of the Haunted
Mountains, guarding the secrets of the ancient city of Wenshar
. But Kaletha had grown angry when he’d asked her about it and had spoken of other things. It struck him now that though, with the decline of the day’s heat the gardens were filling up with off-shift miners, cattle herders, and young people of the town, no casual strollers came up this far from the gardens below. He had enough experience with human nature to realize that this was not from tolerance. If fear had not kept them away, he thought, they’d be gawking and heckling like bumpkins at a fair.

Fear of Kaletha?
he wondered. Or—of what?

“I see you managed to catch my nephew for sword practice this morning,” Nanciormis went on, his eye trailing appreciatively after a fair-haired girl strolling down the colonnade on the other side of the court until the shadows at its end swallowed her. “What do you think of him?”

What Sun Wolf thought of him was that he’d been very poorly taught. But he only said, “You can’t tell anything on the first day. They’re always eager to impress you with how much they already know.” That applied to himself, he thought ruefully a moment later, as well as to Jeryn.

Nanciormis laughed. “If you do as well tomorrow you’ll be lucky. The boy has a certain quickness, but he’s lazy and, I suspect, a coward. I’ve tried to push him into courage, or at least put him in situations where he’d be forced to master his fears, but he’s clever at hiding. He can disappear for hours when there’s something afoot he doesn’t want to do. I’ve tried to get him onto something a bit more manly than that pudding-footed slug of a pony he’s had since he was a toddler—Tazey rides other horses with no trouble, but he won’t. And as for venturing even a few yards out onto the desert . . . ”

“Has anyone ever taught him to survive in the desert?”

“How, when he won’t poke his nose outside the library?” demanded Nanciormis, amused. “In any case, he’s so afraid of going out there that he’s not likely to need the knowledge. If you can do anything to increase his nerve, we’ll all be grateful—his father most of all. His father’s never had much use for him.”

“Even though he’s the first heir born to Wenshar since the Ancient House of Wenshar failed?”

The dark eyes slid sharply sidelong to him, then flicked away. “Osgard’s always been in an ambivalent position about Jeryn. He is, as you say, the heir, and Osgard has enough pride in the realm that he wants the boy to be able to hold it after him. But Ciannis died bearing him. I’m told it was a bad pregnancy, and she nearly lost him twice. Osgard saw then and sees now that in some fashion he was obliged to trade a woman he loved for a child who was like a sickly rabbit in his infancy and who turned bookish the minute he learned to read. Book learning is all very well in a ruler, but there are other things, as there are other things besides war—not that the citizen-kings, the war-kings before Osgard ever understood style, beauty, or respect for the ancient ways. But Jeryn’s sneaky and furtive as well as cowardly.”

“I expect, if my father drank himself maudlin and hated me for killing my mother, I’d be sneaky and furtive, too.”

Nanciormis gave him a sharp look. “Osgard never used to drink himself sodden that way before Ciannis died.”

“No,” the Wolf said, “I don’t expect he did.” They had reached the end of the colonnade; the lengthening of the afternoon light had shifted the shade of the trellises overhead, and bars of puma-colored light sprawled across the worn tile of the walkway. Across the court, he could catch the faint burring of a mandolin badly played and a nasal voice singing snatches of a popular song. In an hour he’d have to locate Jeryn again for another lesson before dinner and he had the feeling this wasn’t going to be as easy as this morning had been. The novelty had definitely worn off.

He glanced back in Kaletha’s direction. The Bishop of Pardle having taken his leave, Egaldus was standing at her side, listening to her conversation with his heart in his sky blue eyes. Kaletha asked him something. He gestured with the grace of one trained to the theatrics of Trinitarian liturgy and plucked a ball of greenish light from the air. It shone softly against his fingers in the shadows. Kaletha laid a hand on his shoulder and nodded approvingly. Anshebbeth looked away, her thin lips pursed.

“What about his sister?” Sun Wolf asked. “It would do him good to have a sparring partner. I think she’s a sensible girl, and she’s enough older than he that he won’t feel belittled if she beats him. She looks as if she’d be good, too. I watched her in the war dance. She moves like a warrior.”