Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (27 page)

Sun Wolf sniffed. “And I thought you looked so pleased because you had me in your power. But I remembered they said Drosis was a healer. That’s the only reason the Hawk’s alive today. So we both owe you.”

Moggin breathed a sound that might have been a laugh and whispered, “I’ll remember to mention this to the Elteraic philosophers the next time they contend there’s no God.”

Sun Wolf tucked the tiny drill away again, and folded his massive arms. “Did Drosis have a student?”

Moggin nodded, gathering about him the dirty silk quilt Starhawk handed him. Though the tent was warm with the frowst of body heat, he was shivering. He fingered the chain on his neck in its ring of bruises as he spoke. “A girl named Kori, a laundress’ daughter, I think. That was nearly twenty years ago, when I first knew him. She died in an accident—fell off the city walls. He never took another.”

The Wolf and Starhawk exchanged glances. The Hawk said, “Altiokis, at a bet.”

“No odds.” He turned back to Moggin. “He ever mention his master?”

“I’m sure he did, but I simply don’t recall it.” With everything that had happened to him, Sun Wolf wasn’t surprised. What did surprise him slightly was that Moggin could be as coherent as he was, but then, even in the face of an unexpected accusation of wizardry, he had kept his head. “I think most of the books originally belonged to him, but Drosis cut or inked his name out of them so he wouldn’t be traced. Drosis lived in fear of Altiokis, far more than of the Church. I must have known him for three years before I even realized he was truly a wizard at all. He was a sort of cousin of ours—Myla’s—my wife’s—and mine.” His voice stumbled on the unthinking habit, when there was, in fact, no more “ours,” but he steadied himself, and went on. “He was a physician. The local bishop was always suspicious of him, but never could prove anything. I just thought it was gossip, myself, like that wretched woman Skinshab down by the Gatehouse who was supposed to be a witch.”

“Was she?”

He shook his head. “I asked him that once. He said no. She was just a nasty-tempered old hag who hated children and was always telling them she’d put the Eye on them. I was surprised no one lynched her during the siege—surprised no one lynched her years ago, in fact. It was only a matter of time, I suppose . . . ”

One point for the King,
Sun Wolf thought ironically.

Thoughtfully, Starhawk said, “You know, if she was a witch, she might very well be one of the camp slaves. The King’s account of killing her didn’t sound very efficient. She could have survived. Would you recognize her, Moggin?”

“Oh, yes. But I haven’t seen her among the slaves . . . ”

“If she was enough of a witch to put a hex this strong on the troop,” Sun Wolf said, “you wouldn’t see her.”

“You mean—she could be here all the time, invisible?” Moggin cast a nervous glance around the witchy, dripping darkness of the tent.

Starhawk propped one muddy boot on the end of the cot. “Don’t let that one get around.”

“Not invisible, no. If you were really looking for her, knew already what she looked like, yeah, you might be able to recognize her. But if not, you’d know you’d seen someone, but you’d have the impression you’d never seen her before, or that it really didn’t matter. Your mind would just gloss on past her. That’s how those things work.”

“Fascinating,” Moggin said. “I knew about nonvisibility from the books, you see, but it never explained how it worked.”

“This is getting better all the time.”

“That hoodoo doesn’t need to be in the camp, you know. All he’d need to do is mark something . . . ” From his pocket Sun Wolf pulled the glass phial he’d taken from Moggin’s cellar, three-quarters full of auligar powder. Uncorking it, he dipped his fingertips in, and rubbed the tiniest speck of the powder on his skin. Then he reached out and lightly brushed the nearest sagging tent pole.

He hadn’t quite known what to expect; in the almost-darkness the sticky film of greenish ectoplasmic slime showed very clearly, gumming to his fingers as he brought them away. Disgusted, he wiped them on his breeches before he thought about it and they left a faint, gluey residue, like foxfire.

That’s fine,
he thought, annoyed with himself.
Let’s wash our hands before we unlace our codpiece, shall we? He looked around, and wiped them on a corner of Moggin’s quilt, but the residue still clung, a ghostly skin of dirty light.

He was aware that both Starhawk and Moggin were staring at him, wearing the expressions of people trying to be polite while watching a lunatic converse with a tree.

“Can’t you see it?”

Moggin shook his head, baffled. Starhawk said, “See what? You mean you’ve found the Eye already?”

“Not the Eye. But the hex itself shows in a kind of glow, like rotten wood. It’s probably everywhere in the camp. Every time someone touches the hex mark—or marks, because I’m willing to bet there’s more than one . . . ”

“It isn’t just by touch,” Moggin put in diffidently. The two mercs looked at him, and faint color tinged the white cheeks under the grime and bruises. “Maybe it’s incriminating myself to know what was in those books, but . . . I did read them. I read everything, you know, and my memory’s always been good. The influence of the hex spreads from the marks, you see. Without the marks it would eventually be worn away by the friction of the life-energies of the people in the camp. But as long as the marks—and it’s the usual practice to put a number of Eyes in the victim’s house—are there, it keeps renewing itself.”

“Sound like a case of the clap,” muttered Starhawk.

“It is, as you so elegantly put it, very like a case of the clap. Or like lice, or roaches . . . ” Sun Wolf had already seen that both Ari’s and Dogbreath’s tents—and probably every other tent in the tight-packed camp, wildly uncharacteristically for winter—were infested. “It has to be tracked to all its sources and stamped out.”

“Well, we can use the auligar powder tomorrow and see what we can find,” the Wolf said, shifting to another cot and pulling off his boots. The ground squelched nastily underfoot; outside, rain continued to thunder on the leaky, compacted tents. “If the river doesn’t rise another two feet in the night and wash us out.”

“Don’t give God ideas,” Starhawk cautioned, beginning to undo the buckles of her doublet. “What about Zane, by the way? He’s going to want his slave back.”

“Stuff Zane,” the Wolf said. “We’ll deal with that in the morning.”

But in the morning Zane had organized a mutiny, and the camp was in armed revolt.

In the deeps of the night Sun Wolf heard the rain ease and a few hours later, still in the wet and freezing dark, he woke, wondering what had roused him. Starhawk, since her injury, had slept more heavily than formerly, but either that, too, was passing, or the atmosphere of nameless peril in the camp was more conducive to wakefulness than had been the soothing restfulness of a town house and servants. In any case, her soft, husky voice came out of the darkness. “The river’s going down.”

“Aces.”
He was already groping for his breeches.

Her breath was a drift of murk, even in the relative warmth of the tent. “The Mother only knows how much time we’ll have. You roll Ari out. I’ll wake the others and get packing.”

In the black scag end of the night, the camp began to break. “It could begin to rise again any time,” Ari said, as he and the Wolf stood on the yard-wide band of shoal pebbles beyond the first of the tight-packed shelters, pebbles which four hours ago had been under a foot of racing white froth. In the dark across the river, the striated cliffs could just be seen, thin tortuous bays, columns, and talus slopes flattened to a single darkness. Overhead, the late-riding moon made a muzzy smear on the clouds. The cold took away Sun Wolf’s breath.

“Damn! It’s at least a couple of hours till sunrise. The water could start up again by that time . . . Even with torches it’s too dangerous to get a line across . . . ”

“I can see.” The Wolf squinted out over the water, not liking it much. Though falling, the river was going like a riptide, the rocks below the ford stabbing like broken teeth through a mad froth of black in the darkness.

“You start breaking down the wagons into ferries. Get a couple of the men here with a cable, some grease, and torches, and I’ll take it across. I need a bath anyway.”

“Your year up?”

Sun Wolf shoved him. “And double-check that damn cable!” he added, as Ari turned and began to pick his way back through the dense snarl of tents, pegs, and guy ropes. “This isn’t the time to find out that hex was written on it!”

In the event, taking the cable across the river was less dangerous and exhausting than fording the Khivas on their way to the camp from Kwest Mralwe the day before yesterday. Even upriver the canyon of the Gore was shallower and wider-spread, and whatever storm had fed this latest flood in the chewed uplands to the west had evidently exhausted its fury. Moving from boulder to boulder, Sun Wolf was able to keep his head just above the water most of the time, though the undercurrent twice knocked him off his feet. He reached the far shore battered and freezing in his loincloth, eye patch, and coat of grease, made the cable fast and double-fast to the small stand of oaks and boulders clinging to the foot of a talus slope they frequently used when the river was high, and, holding to it, swam back with nothing worse than the conviction that he’d never be warm or dry again.

But there was no half-assembled ferry waiting for him on the pebbles, no piled stores, or hastily bundled tents—only an uneasy mob of men, milling about in the waning flicker of yellow torchlight, and the bass rumble of voices that spoke of trouble more loudly than the noise of the river grinding over its stones. Half a dozen of those who stood nearest the cable were armed. His mind registered this at the same moment he heard Zane’s clear, cutting battle voice slice through the murky grumbling of the crowd.

“And I say to hell with trying to ford it! We’ve got clearing weather and a clean shot at the Gore Thane’s fort upriver—this side of the river! That river could start rising again any minute! We’ve seen it go down a couple feet a dozen times since we been here, eating up the supplies that should have taken us north while you tried to make up your goddam mind! I say, why bet on what’s going to happen once we cross the river—if we can get across—when we can hole up for the winter in a strong fort and make a living raiding the countryside?”

“We bet on it,” Ari said, as Sun Wolf—shivering violently with his long hair water-slicked to his naked shoulders—pushed his way through the crowding backs of the men between him and the halo of the torches, “because we couldn’t take that fort if it was a sunny day in April, and we’d never survive a winter with the countryside against us.”

“So you think a bunch of bumpkin farmers can beat us—pansy boy?”

There was little room on the wet strand of rocks and puddles that was now the only clear ground around the camp, but it was jammed with mercs, mostly men, but a sprinkling of women under arms. Across the cleared space around Ari and Zane, the Wolf glimpsed Starhawk with Ari’s supporters. She was in the plated metal jerkin of the King of Wenshar’s guards, a chain coif over her cropped head and her sword in her hand. The mutineers stood in huddled knots, with the man Louth at their head—heavyset, sullen, his hairless eunuch’s face like a floured potato. There were a lot of them: the men who’d left Krayth’s troops; the free-lance mercs and bandits who’d joined the troop on its way north; and a generous dollop of members of the troop itself. Standing in the torchlight before them, Zane seemed to glow in his gilded armor, his parti-colored crimson breeches, and his gold-stamped boots, his sword already in his hand. Ari, his frayed shirt unlaced as he dropped his cloak, unarmed save for his sheathed knife, watched him with the eyes of a calculating stranger.

“Don’t be a yammerhead, Zane.”

“I’d be a yammerhead to . . . ”

And Ari struck—neat, fast, gauging Zane’s unshakable need to have the last word. He smashed the sword from Zane’s hand with the back of his bandaged fist, elbowed him across the face at the same moment he swept his foot from under him, and dumped him to the wet cobble of pebbles like a fallen meteor of red and gold.

Zane swept his legs, knocking him backward and rolling for his sword, neat, catlike, and deadly. Ari was before him, kicking it out of the way; someone flung him a blade from the crowd. Zane came up off the ground to meet him, a knife glinting in his hand. Ari parried, twisted, and struck it aside, every move succinct and sure, as they had fought hundreds of times on the training floor under Sun Wolf’s barked directions, like dancers who feel one another’s minds, each knowing what the other will do.

Beside Sun Wolf, Dogbreath said cheerily, “Six bits on Ari.”

“No odds,” said the Wolf, and accepted from him a rather grubby plaid cloak, since he was still soaking wet and all but naked from the river. He was beyond noticing the cold, however. Though Ari might lack Dogbreath’s lunatic savagery or Starhawk’s cold killer instinct—there had been times when the Wolf had despaired of making the young man mean enough to be a true warrior—Sun Wolf knew him to be strong, coolheaded, and technically perfect. Having trained Zane, sparred with him, and led him in battle, he knew quite well that at heart, in a one-on-one fight, Zane was a coward.

The ground was uneven, sloping sharply and slippery with puddled water and mud. Cod-proud fools, the Wolf thought bitterly, frittering away what could be only hours of low water! But his instincts told him now that if he bellowed at them to stop, only Ari would obey. The troop was no longer his to command. Ari’s foot slipped, and Zane ducked in, ripping the young captain’s sword arm from shoulder to elbow—not a deep wound, but bloody; the crowd exploded with yells and oaths. The Wolf had a momentary, hideous vision of a general riot erupting, as had taken place at Bron’s. But Ari rolled back as Zane pressed in on him with knife raised to kill and lashed at Zane’s legs with precise timing. Zane staggered, slipping in precisely the same wet patch that had felled Ari, and Ari dove upward inside his reach, hurling the sword aside and twisting the knife from Zane’s hand.