Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (26 page)

She turned the slave over gently and dried his face. His eyes were closed under a soaked tangle of black hair thickly streaked with gray, his forehead corrugated with pain. By the black ring of bruises under the steel slave collar, the chain had been used repeatedly to choke him.

“If there is a curse,” Butcher added quietly as she worked, “you’d better keep your wits about you, Hawk, and clear off the first time you get a headache.”

“Clear off where? The Khivas is up behind us. There’s no going back.” She hooked her hands in her sword belt and looked down at the man on the bed. Tears of exhaustion and wretchedness crawled slowly down either side of the delicate aquiline nose, and Starhawk thought she had seldom seem such abject misery on a human face. “Will he be all right?”

“No,” Butcher retorted, dousing a rag with White Death to mop at the pulpy abrasions on his arms. “Not till Zane gets that woman to haul his ashes for him or somebody manages to kill him. He had two slaves out of the loot from Vorsal, you know. Most of us did. The other one, an old woman—half-starved by the look of her, like most of ’em—died already. And she wasn’t the only slave to have been killed in a rage in this camp.” She cocked an eye up at Starhawk. “It’s crossed my mind to wonder if the mage who put the curse on us at Vorsal is doing this out of revenge. Maybe he—or she—is still here in the camp as a slave, helpless to get out, maybe, but not helpless to take what vengeance she can.”

“Interesting that you should say so.”

Butcher had turned away to fetch a dressing, so the soft, rasping voice from the entry way did not reach her.

Nor, thought the Hawk, identifying the bare-wire brokenness of it before she turned her head, was it intended to. Glancing back she saw that Sun Wolf had entered the hospital tent, silent as a tomcat, and stood leaning one shoulder against the tent pole behind her, looking down at the man on the bed. The Wolf had clearly been to Bron’s. One cheekbone was cut, and his face and his chest, where it showed through his ripped shirt, bore the marks of fingernails, teeth, and of various makeshift weapons. His eye patch, hair, mustache, and clothes were stained all over with mud and blood and gin. “I was beginning to wonder myself whether he was killed after all, or whether we’d find him here.”

“Who?” asked Starhawk, puzzled.

Sun Wolf nodded down to the man on the cot. “Moggin,” he said.

“I’m not a wizard,” Moggin whispered wretchedly. “I swear I’m not.” But he didn’t sound as if he expected to be believed.

His hands, long and delicate where they weren’t blistered raw and swollen with unaccustomed work, shook as he pressed them over his mouth, as if to hide its unsteadiness.
For a long time he didn’t look up, the filthy curtain of his hair hiding gray-green eyes sunken with fatigue. Ari’s tent, to which they’d brought him, was quiet, save for the drumming of the rain and its steady, irritating drip in the puddles beneath the leaks. Around them, the camp had calmed down. The mercs grouped around the chair—Starhawk, Dogbreath, Ari—with their scratched faces and flinty gaze looked as savage a bunch of killers as could be found from the northern wastes to the jungles of the south, but when Moggin raised his head and looked at them, the Wolf saw no terror in his eyes, only numbed exhaustion and misery.

More composedly, Moggin went on, “I realize that’s a charge it’s almost impossible to disprove, but it really isn’t true. Drosis left me his books, and some of his medical things, when he died a few years ago, that’s all. All I can say in my own defense is that if I’d had power—any power—I’d have used it to save my daughter. The—the King of Kwest Mralwe . . . ”

“We know about the King of Kwest Mralwe,” Sun Wolf said, as the scholar’s voice faltered suddenly. “I figured you were lying out of fear.”

The sea-colored eyes snapped wide. “Fear of what? Anything the Church could do to me couldn’t possibly be as bad as . . . ”

“Fear of another wizard,” the Wolf said, his scraped, rumbling voice low. “A soul stealer. He tried to enslave me while I worked one of my own spells. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have let a child of mine die rather than go through that again, since it was good odds they’d kill her anyway. And there was always the chance you might have known something I didn’t.”

The chain around Moggin’s neck clinked faintly as he looked up, a frown twitching between the dark brows. It was as if, for the first time since the taking of the town, he was emerging from a state of bludgeoned semiconsciousness. “You’re the man who tried to kill me that night, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re a mage yourself, then?”

Sun Wolf nodded. After a moment Moggin seemed to remember what he’d been doing when the trouble had started, dropped his head to his hands again, and sighed, defeated. “Oh, God.”

“And if you’re not a mage,” the Wolf went on, “you want to explain those circles you were drawing on the floor?”

“Do we need this?” Ari said quietly. He glanced across the slave’s bowed head at the Wolf, his gray-brown eyes cold and very tired. “It’s not a question of whether he is or isn’t, but of how much we can afford to risk letting him live. And with things as they are, Chief, we can’t.”

Moggin flinched a little, but didn’t look up or speak. Looking down at that bowed head, Sun Wolf guessed that things couldn’t get much worse for him, no matter what was decided. He knew Ari was right. The troop stood on the brink of disaster, and it was clear to him now that the curse, whatever its cause, was far from spent.

But if this man was a wizard—if he wasn’t the mage whose dark shadow hand had tried to enslave him in its sticky nets of silver runes—he couldn’t let him die.

And that, too, he saw reflected in Ari’s eyes.
It was one thing to refuse to help his men because Starhawk’s life was in danger. His parting from Ari had not been mentioned between them when the young captain, rain streaming down his long black hair, had met him by the horse lines with a bear hug of genuine delight. In a way, both of them knew it hadn’t really mattered.

This was another question entirely.

And he knew that whatever he said, Moggin was going to die.

The worst of it was that Ari was perfectly right. Trapped between the floods, the mutiny that he could feel through his skin brewing in the violence of the tavern and the horrifying plethora of possible misfortunes, they couldn’t risk it. If he were still commander he wouldn’t even be asking the question.

But he wasn’t commander. He was a wizard unschooled, facing an enemy he knew was beyond him, and this man was a teacher.

If, that is, he wasn’t the enemy himself.

Quietly, he turned back to Moggin. “What were you doing the night I came in to kill you, if you aren’t a mage?”

The scholar sighed, and ran his hand over the lower part of his face again, aged by two days’ growth of gray stubble and disfigured by a swollen lip under which a side tooth could be seen to be missing. In a low, beaten voice he said, “Trying to raise magic.” He lifted his eyes to the Wolf’s again, wry and hopeless but with a kind of ironic amusement at himself. “I knew it was stupid. Drosis had told me hundreds of times I hadn’t the smallest glimmering of it and that all the spells in the world weren’t going to work if I did them, but . . . I don’t know. The spells were there, in his books. For weeks, I’d been working the weather-spells, trying to summon storms—anything to end the siege. I knew what was coming . . . or I thought that I knew. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d realized then . . . ”

He fell silent, staring down at his swollen hands. Sun Wolf knew what he himself would have done, had he known in advance that the woman he loved and children he cherished would die as Moggin’s had. The scholar was, he guessed, his own age and, in those forty years, had lived in the contented comfort of his inherited riches. Without a doubt, he had never killed anyone and wouldn’t know how to go about it painlessly.

After a time, Moggin sighed and pushed back his greasy hair. “Well, I had to try—with what success you could see, because of course it didn’t rain a drop. And I must say I felt extremely foolish, standing there in the study in the middle of the night, muttering incantations with candles all around me—besides the fact that, if I was seen by anyone, it would cost me my life. Two or three people in town had already been lynched for witchcraft, and, of course, since I was Drosis’ friend, there’d been talk about me for years. Rianna . . . ” He broke off, his jaw and his blistered hands clenching tight. “My daughters used to be teased about it at school. But before the siege, it wasn’t a serious matter.”

“That wasn’t weather-witching you were doing,” the Wolf said softly.

“No.” He shook his head. “It was—was a spell to raise power out of the bones of the earth, to add to a wizard’s power in time of extreme need. In Drosis’ books, it was surrounded by warnings, but by then I—I could see our defenses weren’t going to last.” He looked over at Ari. “It wasn’t to turn against your men, you know, Captain. I—I don’t think I could do that—even now I don’t think I could. It was just to get my family to safety. In any case I doubt it would have worked . . . ”

“It wouldn’t have,” the Wolf said. “Not if you weren’t mageborn to start with.”

Moggin made a rueful, broken sound that might have been a laugh. “Even if I had been, you scotched that pretty effectively by telling the Duke—I barely got the marks rubbed out before his men returned. I was going to try it again the following night . . . ” He broke off suddenly, turning his face aside as it contorted again with grief, horror, and the effort not to weep. In bitter silence, he hugged himself, fighting not to remember the events of that last night with his family and their murders on the morrow.

Sun Wolf looked away, remembering the bodies on the terrace, and met Ari’s stony gaze.

“If he’s not mageborn he’s no threat to you,” he said quietly.

“And no use to you,” Ari replied softly. “So you shouldn’t mind, should you? Unless you’ve got a real good way of proving he isn’t lying.”

Don’t say it,
his eyes said, cold and hard as agate. Sun Wolf was silent, remembering the smothering heat of the King of Wenshar’s dungeons, and his own desperate awareness of the utter impossibility of disproving such a charge. He looked down at the man he had once thought he’d feared and hated, stripped of shadow and mystery and revealed as a pathetic, broken creature, too ill-equipped by a wealthy upbringing to make even a decent slave. The desolation he had glimpsed in almost losing Starhawk and the horror of his own near-enslavement by the unknown wizard smote him with understanding and pity far beyond his own need of a potential teacher.

But he knew how far Ari could be pushed. Moreover, he knew that as a commander, Ari was right. It isn’t fair, dammit!
he thought, but he knew in his bones that the fact that he didn’t think the man was lying didn’t prove that he wasn’t. For a moment he felt that he looked across a chasm of darkness, not at Ari, but at himself.

Ari signed to Dogbreath. Both of them drew their swords, and went to help Moggin to his feet.

For the first time, Starhawk spoke up. “Who was it you said tried to swim in the ford with a rope a day or two ago, to set up some kind of ferry?”

“Zane,” said Ari, pausing with his hand on Moggin’s shoulder to look back at her, a little startled by the non sequitur. “He’s the strongest swimmer, the toughest . . . ”

With casual grace, Starhawk stepped between them to Moggin, pushed him a quarter turn on the stool where he hunched, and pulled down his ragged and bloodstained smock, making him flinch where the dried blood stuck it to his back. “How old would you say some of those marks are?”

“Ten days,” said Ari after a moment. “Two weeks.”

“And Zane didn’t drown?” She jerked the smock back up again, covering the stooped, bruise-mottled shoulders with surprising lightness of touch. “You’ve got the wrong man. And I’d also say—and since I’m stuck here in the same danger as you are, that makes it at least partly my business—that you probably ought to think twice about snuffing one of your sources of information about hexes and hoodoos and whatnot, if, as he says, mageborn or not, he at least read all those books.”

“Thank you,” Moggin said weakly, as Sun Wolf helped him into one of the several makeshift camp beds jammed into Dogbreath’s lopsided chaos of a tent. One or two of these were already occupied—by Penpusher, from the look of the ferocious riot of curls visible above one blanket, and Firecat, by the grimy leather armor and strings of mud-crusted jewels thrown over the foot of another. Dogbreath’s random assortment of broken totems and holy relics was mostly packed away for travel, but a few dangling ribbons and a woman’s white glove still remained pinned to the inside of the tent, a rotting jungle that would eventually be replaced as it decayed. Dogbreath himself found another cot and fell asleep immediately and fully clothed, still in the garish yellow surcoat he’d taken from the siege, one tippet sticking out from beneath the blankets like the leg of a squashed bug under a brick. Sun Wolf called a faint pin of bluish light into the air above his head as he sat on the end of the cot Dogbreath offhandedly offered to Moggin. It was typical of Dogbreath, Sun Wolf reflected, that he’d been equally willing to kill the man or sleep in the same tent with him after the affair was over. On the road, the men usually slept in hammocks, but a little consideration made him realize why those had been abandoned. There were just too many things that could go wrong under the influence of so thoroughgoing a hex.

“It was the Hawk’s idea,” Sun Wolf said, as the dim phosphorescence settled itself among the dangling garlic and rags, edging all things in its pallid blue glow. “And anyhow, I owe you.” From inside his doublet he produced the bronze trephine, holding it up to the light between blunt and clumsy fingers. The bronze seemed softly radiant to his touch, warmed by ancient spells of healing and life. “I pinched this, some powders and gewgaws, and three of your friend’s books before I left that night—”

“I would have let you out, you know.” Moggin pushed his matted gray hair back from his forehead. “I’m not just saying that—I truly would have. I was terrified the Duke would put you in the lockup in the town hall, where you could give evidence against me, though I couldn’t imagine where you’d gotten your information. My one thought was to hide the books, then ‘accidentally’ leave the door open . . . ”