Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic (38 page)

“It’s different from any that I’ve ever seen,” the Wolf said quietly. “That’s one reason I never liked it. It’s in the oldest of the Wenshar demonaries, a broken circle, twisted. My guess is its source is some older magic, an alien power. You get a feel for these things, and I never liked the feel of that one.”

“I see.” Moggin paused, the chalk stub he’d fished from his coat pocket poised in his delicate hand. “So that’s why . . . It was surrounded by warnings, you know, in Drosis’ book.”

The page in the demonary seemed to shape itself in the darkness beyond the sputtering glow of the torch; the dull black lines of common lettering, and around them, the brownish, spidery trail of line after line of faded ink, handwritten notes in the shirdar tongue. He had guessed without being able to read them that these were warnings. It was one of the spells he had resolved to stay well away from. Sun Wolf felt his skin turn cold. “Warnings of what?”

“It said: The power runs both ways. The mage must be stronger than the pull of the earth. And Drosis had written, When the earth magic is spent, all will be gone, and he will go out like a candle snuffed to smoke.”

Sun Wolf was silent, thinking about that. “Yet you tried it anyway.”

Moggin nodded, the pain of that last night and the desperation he had felt coming back into his eyes. “I suspected that, starting out with no power, the ritual itself would kill me. I just wanted power enough to get my family out of the city.” He managed a shaky smile. “So even an assassin was met with not unmixed emotions.”

Sun Wolf had to chuckle at that, but at the same time he shivered. “And there’s no way of guarding against that possibility?”

“If there is,” Moggin said, “Drosis never wrote it down.”

The Witches of Wenshar might have, but he could not read the shirdane; in any case, Purcell now had the books. The thought of what he might get out of them turned the Wolf even colder. But all he grumbled was, “Pox rot it.”

Moggin rose, and with the chalk began sketching from memory upon the nearest rock face the shape of the crescent that served in this case for a protective circle, the swooping lines of power that spread and vanished disturbingly all around it. Drawing it now—and doubtless when he had drawn it back in his study in Vorsal—Moggin clearly was only reproducing what was in the old wizard’s notes. But Sun Wolf, who had worked a little with the Circles of Power and Protection, with the lines that summoned strength and the lines that dispersed it, felt his skin creep at the sight of a pattern so clearly rooted in chaos, whose every curve, every shape, whispered of wildness, irrationality, and unpredictability beyond his or any mage’s control.

In the demonary, it had specified that the spell must be raised within the womb of the earth—something Drosis hadn’t mentioned. This tunnel, the farthest extent of the mines before bandits, land wars, and religious strife had broken the back of the Empire’s trade in the north, was as deep as they could get. All around them in the listening darkness, Sun Wolf could sense the presence of powers and entities unknown to man in the dripping volcanic rock, in the leaden and evil waters, and in the weight of the darkness itself. The perilous lines Moggin showed him would draw up the black and lambent magic of the earth, like an enormous beast that must be bridled with no more than a slip of silver thread and ridden to the edge of doom.

Moggin went on, his breath a faint mist in the flickering glare, “I suppose that, to make the spell, a wizard must first decide how badly he needs what the power will buy him, and if it is worth the risk of ending his life.”

Maybe, the Wolf thought, standing to look over Moggin’s shoulder, arms folded as he studied the small circle written on the wall, so that he could draw it, large, about himself for the summoning of the power. But in addition to the possibility of killing him, there existed an equal possibility that it wouldn’t—that it would merely strip away his powers with its passing, and leave him helpless, the slave of Purcell’s geas, this time for good.

“That’s the last of them,” Ari’s voice breathed out of the dark. “They’ll shiver for a couple hours, but at least, if Zane sends out a party, he’s not going to catch us all in the same room.”

Starhawk, standing beneath the black lintel of the mine, nodded. She hadn’t the mageborn power to see in darkness, but her night vision was good; the abandoned alumstone diggings stretched around her in grimy and sodden desolation, eroded, half-flooded, and blotched with lichen and twisted, untidy stands of heather and whin. Even in daylight, she was willing to bet, no one would have guessed that ruined landscape concealed a miniature army.

“How many?”

“The last group made a hundred and eighty. We can count on maybe a hundred or more switching sides in the battle, plus camp followers—wranglers, sutlers, that kind of thing—and whatever we can get from the town.”

Starhawk’s level dark brow tilted a little, but she made no comment. Troopers loyal to Ari had been drifting silently in all night, either drawn by the logic of using the old mine as a headquarters, or, latterly, guided there by small parties sent out to hunt stragglers who might not know the moor so well.

It was the fact that so many of them guessed exactly where to come which had prompted Ari’s evacuation—that, and his refusal to tell any of the newcomers the extent of the plan. One of the groups, Starhawk had been interested to note, had contained three of Zane’s guards who’d witnessed Sun Wolf’s forced attempt at suicide in the garden.

“I mean, hell,” one of them had said, when they’d spoken to Ari and the Hawk in the flickering darkness of the pit chamber. “I got nuthin’ against Zane, but damned if I’ll stay in the same camp with a hoodoo. Holy Three, if he could do that to the Chief, what’s to say he wouldn’t do that to me the next time he didn’t like the way I spit on his terrace?” And the man had spat, as if to illustrate the harmlessness of the act, into a corner of the room, and scratched his crotch.

“Not bad,” she murmured now. Many of them, like Hog, with Helmpiddle tucked protectively under his arm, had only been waiting their chance to escape. Others, it was true, had come simply to learn what Ari’s plans were—whether they had the strength to attack the camp, or whether they were simply going to disperse and make their own livings as free mercs, having found the thought of Purcell’s command more than they could stomach. But when Ari had pointed out to them the unlikelihood of Purcell either passing up cheap slave labor or allowing word to reach his rivals on the King-Council, they had thought again, and most of them, whether they’d liked it or not, had agreed that an attack on the camp was their only choice.

“We can pass the word the minute the Chief gives us the go-ahead,” he went on, folding his arms and glancing back over the ruined floor of the ancient diggings. Down here in the open dell, the moor winds were less fierce, only riffling at the heavy black fur of his bearskin collar and turning the braided scalp locks he wore on his shoulders—the hair of the men who’d killed his parents when he was eleven in one of the endless northlands border squabbles over land that was useless to anyone now. Up above them, the wind screamed over the desolation, smelling of rain and sleet. Then he looked back at her in the gloom, his eyes troubled.

“Can we trust him? Can we know if we can trust him?”

Starhawk met his steady gaze, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’d be able to tell or not if Purcell gets control over him again. I don’t know how we’d be able to be sure we aren’t walking slap into a trap.” By his expression she could tell that Ari—and probably every other soldier in the troop—had thought of that one or would think of it sooner or later.

The Goddess had already pointed out the alternative of simply selling Sun Wolf to Purcell. If he defeated the master wizard, aces; if not, they could still go ahead with the ambush, diversion, and the rest of Routine Three. “Fine,” Ari had said. “Only then, Zane’ll know something’s up—and the Chief’ll be dealing with a whole campful of goons who have nothing else to think about.” The Goddess hadn’t exactly admitted she was wrong, but had muttered a lot of things about Zane’s ancestors and personal habits, and had let it go at that.

However, Starhawk had to concede the woman had a point. The plan depended on Sun Wolf’s being strong enough to defeat Purcell head-to-head—on his being strong enough, at the very least, to prevent the more skilled wizard from forcing his way into his thoughts again and reading there the entire plan. She shrugged. “We’ll know when we count the dead. It’s trust or die.”

“It’s always trust or die,” Ari said softly, hooking his hands behind the buckle of his sword belt—as Starhawk habitually did, and as most of Sun Wolf’s students came to do. His breath blew out in a wry chuckle, the cloudy puff of steam fraying from under his mammoth mustache. He produced a flask of battered tortoise-shell from beneath his cloak and offered it to her, the gin searing, warming her down to her icy toes. “Hell, if it was anyone else, we’d be hitting each other over the head screaming, ‘Don’t trust him, you lamebrain!’ ”

The Hawk laughed, loving him—loving them all. In some ways, the year she’d been on the road with Sun Wolf had been a very lonely one. “Aw, hell—if either of us had any brains we’d be in a different line of business. But when you ambush that relief party, for the Mother’s sake, kill somebody my size and get me some real clothes! I feel like a female impersonator in this skirt!”

Ari frowned, studying her, with her sword belted on and the froufrou of gold-stitched ruffles kilted up around her knees. “I been meaning to ask you, Hawk—What’re you doing dressed like a woman anyway?”

“I am a woman, dammit! I couldn’t . . . ” From the dark of the mine shaft behind her came the soft crunch of feet. She turned, her sword in her hand.

It was Moggin, alone. He was hugging himself for warmth in the Chief’s baggy black jacket; against the abyss behind him, his dark form was stooped, as if he were tired beyond description, but when he spoke his voice sounded better than it had since the attack on the camp. “The Chief says to begin. He’ll revive the hex the moment the relief party is sent out from the camp to quell the riot in Wrynde. He says he’ll meet you on the road back to the camp, once the relief party has been ambushed and taken.”

“Is he all right?” the Hawk asked. She, too, remembered the unintelligible warnings written in the ancient demonary, and Sun Wolf’s uneasiness about some of those eldritch spells.

Moggin hesitated for a long time before replying. “It’s—difficult to tell,” he temporized. “He survived the rising of the power, which I gather not everyone does.” His voice wavered a little, as if still shaken by what he had seen.

Ari glanced at the sky, slate and charcoal above the broken iron teeth of the rim of the dell. “How long will it last?” he asked softly. “It’ll take the Hawk at least two hours to get into Wrynde, skrag the guards, and free the men there to start the riot—say another hour or two for whomever they let get away to reach the camp, depending on whether the chump is smart enough to steal the horse they’re going to leave standing around unguarded. By the time the relief party hits our ambush, will he still be able to help us?”

That was the trouble with war, the Hawk thought detachedly: she, too, was considering the Chief in terms of the cold economies of his strength, suppressing the part of her that screamed To hell with that! Is he going to live through all this? It was something Moggin wouldn’t know anyway, and something that, in a way, didn’t matter at this point.

“I think so,” Moggin’s soft voice said out of the shadows.

“He need more Keep-Awakes?” Ari cared about him, too, the Hawk knew. But at this moment, what he really cared about—what he had to most care about—was his men, and the success of the exercise as a whole. There would be time to grieve afterward, if Sun Wolf’s contribution to all this turned out to be his life.

A small part of her still wanted to slap him for the callousness of his tone.

“No,” the philosopher said. “No, that’s all been . . . eaten up in the power of the spell.” He coughed, the sound of it bad, and fell silent for a long moment, while Ari gave the wordless signal to the Little Thurg, the closest of the relay messengers, to start the men for the ambush point.

Then Moggin said, “He asked me to tell you both that he loves you, in case he doesn’t see you again.”

Purcell was aware of him now. Somewhere, Sun Wolf knew, the cold little business mage was stretching forth his dark hand, locked in the grip of a magic trance, sitting in the predawn shadows of the half-burned room which had been Ari’s, rocking back and forth among the burned curtains of the bed, whispering the words that never quite surfaced in Sun Wolf’s consciousness—the words of weakness, of defeat, of subservience to his will. But that Sun Wolf knew only abstractly.

What he knew, what he saw, what he felt, was the darkness all around him, the darkness within his own body and mind—the darkness where the dark hand twisted and clutched and dragged at the strands of spell that cut his every nerve and bone like heated wire. He could feel, could smell almost, Purcell’s mind holding on to his, and hated it like an animal hating the smell of death.

And within him, around him, as if he burned in a halo of roaring black flame, the earth magic consumed his mind.

He was only dimly aware that he knelt still on the slime of the mine shaft’s floor. His senses were magnified, screaming out of proportion to anything he had known; every pebble was a knife blade, stabbing the flesh of his knees, every crease in the leather of his breeches and fold of his shirt where his doublet pressed it tight to his flesh dragged like a binding rope; Ari’s footsteps and Starhawk’s, retreating away on the surface overhead, ground through his bones and entrails, and he fought not to scream with pain and blind rage. The earth magic had risen through his hands, through the ground, and through the chalked rings on the tunnel floor, pouring over him and through him like a pounding torrent of blackness, ripping free the guy wires of his soul until he felt his mind flapping like a tent in unnamable winds. Only by clenching his mind like a bunched fist of light on the center of his being could he remember who he was and why he had wanted this power in the first place; and at that center, gripped with the grip of his life, was the geas.