Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (11 page)

Her dark brows quirked down.
“I thought—earlier tonight I thought . . . But then the wind changed.”

“Yeah.”
He pushed aside the hangings over the tent door and let the night’s chill burn his face and the thin soaked strings of his hair. His shirt, his elkskin breeches, and his doublet were damp, the flesh within them cold, as after a fight. Behind him the lamp flickered, and all the crazy shadows of the random hangings, the ribbon-decked bones of saints and bits of chain and straw dangling from the ridgepole, totems, dried vegetables, old embroidered gloves and hanging fragments of glass that Dogbreath collected, all seemed to stir with restless life. The memory of the web of silver runes that had seemed more real to him than his own body and the memory of the strength of that shadow hand lingered like the aftertaste of nightmare.

But the battle had been real. The attempt to enslave him had been real. And as a fighter, he knew what should be his next, logical move.

Against the tarry black of the night sky, only his wizard’s eye could make out the lampless spires and steeples of Vorsal.

A touch of warmth, a breathing softness of perfume, brushed his back, and a slim hand rested from behind on his sleeve. “May I stay?”

“If you want,” he said. He turned his head, to look down into her eyes. “I won’t be here, though. There’s someplace I have to go.”

It took the Wolf ten minutes to sober Penpusher up enough to borrow his least tatty black doublet and breeches, the bookkeeper owlishly insisting that hose and short trunks were the proper wear for evening visits. Ari, too ingrained in the habit of command now ever to get completely drunk on campaign, watched this interchange in silence, but when Penpusher reeled out into the night, still muttering about the decay in sartorial standards, the captain made his way across the tent to the Wolf. Behind them, against a tarnished jewel box of filthy peacock tent hangings, the poker game continued. Under cover of Dogbreath’s extravagantly voiced offers of sacrifice to all the saints of chaos Ari asked softly, “Why?”

Sun Wolf glanced sharply at him.

“You ought to look at yourself.” Ari’s broad shoulders bulked dark against the dirty glow of the grease lamps as he folded his arms. “You look as if you just went five rounds with an earthquake and lost. What happened? Why go into the city now?”

“Because he won’t be expecting it.”
The Wolf pushed back the sweaty strings of his hair and rubbed his unshaven chin. “I hurt him some—I don’t know how bad. I can’t afford to give him a chance to recover. He knows he hurt me and he’ll be off his guard. If I go after him cold, head to head, power against power, he’ll make sauerkraut of me.”

“Yeah, well, your resemblance to what my mother used to spoon over the sausages is pretty strong right now.”

Sun Wolf growled, knowing Ari was right. But he knew, too, that a day’s rest wouldn’t make him any more able to defeat Moggin Aerbaldus—and that now, Moggin knew there was another wizard working against him. A wizard, he reflected uneasily, whom it was to his advantage—and within his power—to enslave.

The memory of that dark hand closing around him and of that sticky net of silver runes turned his flesh cold.
To cover his fear he went on roughly, “He’ll be ready for more magic tomorrow, but it’s my guess he won’t be ready for an assassin tonight.”

“You garlic-eating heretic . . . !” Little Thurg’s voice rose from within the tent.

“Aaah, better we eat garlic than perform ritual acts with canteloupes and tender little piggies the way you people do . . . ”

The voices were good-natured; Sun Wolf glanced back over his shoulder to see Zane dozing like a disheveled orchid on the divan while Dogbreath, the two concubines, and the Big and Little Thurgs pushed the same twelve coppers dispiritedly back and forth among themselves. Nobody seemed to be winning much—Sun Wolf wondered if the hex had extended itself to the cards.

Ari pointed out doggedly, “It was your guess that Laedden’s armies would be able to cope with the invasion from Ambersith without falling back on the city, remember? That time we ended up trapped in the siege? And it was your guess nobody would join the K’Chin coalition twelve years ago when we invaded . . . ”

“Everybody’s entitled to a few mistakes,” the Wolf retorted defensively. “And I don’t need some smart-mouthed kid to tell me . . . ”

“Chief.”
Ari’s hand stayed him as he let the door’s filthy brocade curtain fall to shut out the night. “You watch your back in there. You need backup?”

He said it as an afterthought, a courtesy, like the offer of a bed for the night to a guest already bent upon returning home. The Wolf gestured it aside. Entering the besieged city would be difficult enough for a lone assassin who had the power to turn aside the eyes of the watchers on the walls; companions would only increase his risk of detection without adding much to his chances of escape, and they both knew it.

“Captain?”
The Wolf had been aware of the dry crunch of approaching footfalls outside; Battlesow poked a helmeted head through the curtains. “Some grut here to see the Chief.” There was disbelief in her incongruous, little-girl voice. “Claims to be the King of Kwest Mralwe.”

“He does, does he?”

Dogbreath looked up from his cards. “He wearing a crown?”

“Rot the crown,” the Little Thurg chipped in. “Find out if he’s wearing a purse.”

“How much ransom you figure they’d pay?”

“If he’s really the King of Kwest Mralwe,” the Wolf rumbled, “you’d better not count on much.”

“You want to see him, Chief?” Ari asked quietly. “We can get rid of him . . . ”

He shook his head, though part of him wanted to start at once for Vorsal, to strike quickly while surprise would still be a weapon—to start before he had time to get cold feet. “I better see what he wants. I asked them for information—he may have some he didn’t want the others to hear.” Privately, having seen the King of Kwest Mralwe on a dozen occasions over the years—whenever Renaeka Strata had permitted the rightful monarch to attend Council meetings—he didn’t think that any too likely. But he’d dealt with peril too many years to disregard even the most unlikely help.

The poker players left, one of the women and the Little Thurg toting the snoring Zane between them, and Dogbreath thoughtfully collecting the wine jar and all the remaining coppers on the table. Ari left last, holding up the tent curtain for Raven Girl. As he went out he said, “I’ll get Penpusher to leave the black clothes in your tent. Good luck, Chief.”

“If that’s your idea of humor,” Sun Wolf grumbled back, slouching into Ari’s favorite chair—once his own—of gold-bound staghorns and ebony, “I don’t think it’s very funny.”

Ari laughed, and left him. Curious, the Wolf turned over the cards that scattered the table amid the shell and ebony winecups, and saw he’d guessed right about the extent of the curse.

Then the tent flap opened. Derisively, Battlesow announced, “His Royal Majesty King Hontus III of Kwest Mralwe.”

He knew the gawkish shape and the peering squint, even before the King pushed his cheap corduroy hood back from his face and removed the black domino mask. “Captain Sun Wolf?”

“Nobody’s been impersonating me since this afternoon, so I guess it still is.”

The King laughed nervously, as if uncertain that it really was a joke. Though in his mid-thirties, the King of Kwest Mralwe had the unwrinkled countenance of a child who has never bothered himself with learning the right and wrong of matters to which he lent his name. This, the Wolf supposed from his years of dealing with the King-Council, might have to do with the fact that those hardfisted bankers and merchants weren’t about to let a mere hereditary ruler have anything to do with the running of a complex mercantile economy. But studying the weak chin and petulant lips, the jittery restlessness of those big-boned hands, and the aimless gaze of the squinting eyes, he concluded that there were other, better reasons for this exclusion. In reigns gone by, the King-Council’s power, he knew, had been more equitably divided. He himself wouldn’t have divided the running of a two-cow farmstead with this gam-handed dolt.

“I’ve come to ask you—there were things said in the council this afternoon, you know . . . Oh, of course you know, you were there, haha . . . That is, I realize it’s all supposed to be superstition, and of course wild rumors are always circulated . . . You see . . . ”

The King coughed, laughed again as a sort of punctuation to his own remarks, then unconsciously picked his long nose and wiped his fingers on the threadbare panes of his trunk hose. Uninvited, he took the chair Dogbreath had recently vacated, changing position almost continually as he talked, like a restive child. “Well, I’m not quite sure how to put this—not wishing to give offense . . . But at the Council today, the Bishop said something about—well, about you being a wizard. Is that true? I mean, is it true that you’re a wizard—of course we both know that it’s true that the Bishop said it, hahaha . . . ”

Sun Wolf leaned back in his own chair, his solitary eye narrowing. “Why do you ask?”

“Well . . . ” The King put his feet on the floor and sat forward, clasping his hands; he wore some of the cheapest rings Sun Wolf had ever seen, as well as a flat, worn gold signet carved from an opal the color of ice. Pulled back in a sandy pigtail, his hair was unwashed. “Your men did call you back out of retirement to deal with a magician in Vorsal, didn’t they? And I’ve heard rumors, you know. Sometimes I go about the marketplace in disguise . . . ”

Sun Wolf shuddered at the mental picture that conjured up.

“You are going to destroy this wizard in Vorsal, aren’t you? To let my men take the city?”

Though this was exactly what Sun Wolf proposed to do, the way it was phrased, in that eager, whining voice, set his teeth on edge. “Yes,” he said, and added pointedly, “that is, as soon as I’m free to do so.”

“Oh, you have my permission, of course.” The King gave a magnanimous wave, the sarcasm zipping over his head like a badly aimed catapult bolt. “The man is obviously a threat to my realm. But I want to speak to you about what you will do . . . ” He paused, wriggled, and dropped his voice portentously. “ . . . Afterwards.”

“Afterwards.”
As if he had kicked a carpet and seen its entire pattern unroll before his feet, Sun Wolf saw the King’s proposal open up in his mind in a blinding panorama of the obvious. He barely restrained himself from sighing as the King, with numerous circumlocutions, nervous giggles, and absentminded peeps into the few winecups which remained on the table—all of them empty, and Sun Wolf was sure he would have helped himself to them if they hadn’t been—laboriously unfolded his proposition as if he were the first man in the history of the world to have ever had the idea of hiring a wizard to put him into the position of power he felt he deserved.

“You see,” the King went on, “it’s all the fault of that witch’s bastard Renaeka. That’s why she glared at old Purcell today. Her mother was a witch, who used her powers to get the Prince of the House of Stratus to fall in love with her. Of course he’d married a land baron’s daughter—that’s how the House of Stratus got control of the alum mines in Tilth and, through it, control of the whole cloth trade, since there isn’t another source of alum closer than the Gwarl
Peninsula, and that one’s tied up tight by Ciselfarge. The old prince put his true wife aside for his paramour, and when it looked as if her family was going to give trouble and take the diggings back, the witch Renaeka’s mother tried to poison Lord Stratus’ true wife. But of course in spite of everything—her mother was burned in the end, when Lord Stratus turned against her—That Woman is now the head of the House of Stratus, and controls the only source of alum for cloth dyeing in the whole of the Middle Kingdoms. She can charge what she pleases, call the tune for them all. They all toady and crawl to her, the painted whore! But if I had a wizard on my side . . . ”

“ . . . that wizard would run the risk of getting the ax from the House of Stratus the same way this alleged witch did,” Sun Wolf finished. “In case it’s slipped your mind, the Bishop is Renaeka’s cousin, and the Triple God takes a damn dim view of hookum.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” the King said. “I’ll protect you.”

Sun Wolf sighed and pushed with one blunt forefinger at the pitiful collection of Dogbreath’s cards. “Your Majesty, I doubt you could protect your own head in a rainstorm.” He stood up; the King, who’d been peering inquiringly into a rejected cup to see how much wine was left, raised his head in hurt surprise. “And I’ve got plenty of better things to do with what powers I have than waste them rigging ward elections in a snake pit like the Middle Kingdoms, always supposing you didn’t start distrusting me and slip something into my drink.”

“Never!”
The King leaped melodramatically to his feet, knocking over his own chair, then the winecup as he grabbed unsuccessfully to catch it. Mopping at the spilled dregs, he straightened up and squinted shortsightedly into Sun Wolf’s face. “We would make a pact! Together we would rule . . . ”

Patiently, Sun Wolf caught the fragile cup just before it rolled off the edge of the table. He set it upright with a small click on the inlaid ebony tabletop. “And what would be the first act of this pact?” he demanded quietly. “To poison Renaeka?”

Their eyes held for an instant; then the King’s shifted away. “Well—I thought something more subtle than that.”

“You mean something less easy for the Church to trace? To ill-wish her, to mark her with an Eye, so one day her horse would stumble, or a fish bone would lodge in her throat, or one of her lovers would strangle her with her own pearls?”

“She deserves it,” the King pointed out righteously. “She’s the daughter of a witch—she’s probably a witch herself. If we had a true bishop in this town and not one of the Stratus lapdogs he’d say the same. He’d be on my side. They all would be, if they weren’t afraid of her, but she controls the alum mines, and all the money—she really does deserve to die. They’re usurpers, all of them, thieves of what belongs to others . . . ”

“Like the power in this kingdom?”

“Yes!”