The Witches of Wenshar Page 10

  They moved below him through the monochrome darkness of the canyon, faint lights that shone but did not illuminate the smooth pillars, the filigree turrets, or the winding stairs cut at intervals in the fantastically eroded rock faces of the canyon wall.

  The City of Wenshar had been built where the tawny sandstone cliff-face of the Haunted Range—black with the baked mineral patina of the scorching sun—curved inward to form a shallow plain raised above the level of the desert and sheltered from the cruelty of the winds. There, three small streams flowed out of the broken mountains to lose themselves in the farther desert. On the raised plain, the City of Wenshar had spread out around its gardens of date palms and cypresses—until the invading armies of the Middle Kingdoms had crushed the Ancient House of Wenshar and taken its lands and its mines.

  Time and sand had nearly destroyed the few walls war had left standing. But up the three canyons lay a twisting maze of wadis and cuts—of square, isolated blocks and towering stone needles, valleys as wide as a street or so narrow the Wolf could span them with his arms—lit only by bright ribbons of sky three hundred feet above. Here the wealthy nobles of Wenshar had carved gem-like palaces and temples from the living cliffs themselves. Sheltered from the sun, their fantastic sandstone facades had not been darkened by the desert heat. They shone peach and amber and rose, softly banded yellows, citrine, honey. Here, time had ceased, dammed behind the enchantment of the stone.

  Sun Wolf had always loved rocks, their strength and the personality of their shapes. On the road and in Tandieras, he had missed having a rock garden in which to meditate and spend time. Hearing nothing more of Wenshar than its evil reputation, he had been awestruck by this fairy-tale beauty.

  Yet from every shadow, in every niche and doorway, he sensed the presence of demons. The city crawled with them, big and little; in the three days he had wandered here, he had felt them watching him. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had only to press his hands to the ground to hear their voices. But that was something he feared to do.

  By day he never saw them, though occasionally, in those palaces cut deeper than a single chamber into the cliffs, he heard their flitter and murmur, like dry leaves blowing over stone floors that neither wind nor plant had touched in generations. But two evenings ago, in the shadows of the central canyon, he had glimpsed them, no more than a flicker out of the corner of his eye, massing in the shadows before him as he tried to leave. He had doubled on his tracks to take a narrow wadi that rejoined the main way lower down—the mountains here were split into great, free-standing blocks in places, which enterprising ancient nobles had hollowed into whole palaces. But the demons had been waiting for him. The sun had disappeared by then from the brilliant stream of blue overhead, its rays only edging the top-most rim of the rocks. He could sense a soft, evil chittering in the shadows.

  When he’d doubled back again, he’d realized he was being driven.

  There was no lore of demons in any of the jumble of things Yirth had taught him, nor had he ever found any in his search for wizards. He knew they rose out of rocks and swamps, out of water sometimes. If they were in this land, the magic of the old Witches of Wenshar would have held them at bay until, with the Witches’ destruction, they had seeped forth like oil from the ground.

  They had no strength. Being bodiless, he doubted they could physically hurt a man much. Nor could he think of a reason they would want to, needing no sustenance. Yet in places the canyon floors were heaped with broken piles of animal bones, mouflon sheep and gazelles, driven to their deaths from the ledges above even as men were lured into marshes by the demons of the north. The bones lay whole and undisturbed.

  Standing there in the growing azure dimness of the evening, listening to the crooning whisper of the demons massing like lightning bugs in the shadows before him, he had suddenly wondered why.

  He had turned again, seeking a way out. The canyon had widened before him into a long space where a line of eroded stone needles, narrow columns as high as the canyon walls, towered gilt-tipped against an opal sky. Twisted cypress trees, a recollection of vanished wells, stood about the needles’ bases, gray trunks weathered and contorted as if they sought to swallow their own branches. Entirely across the rear of the canyon stretched the longest palace facade he had yet seen. Amber steps led up to level upon level of peach and salmon columns, fragile turrets, and strange spires, all glowing in the last of the light. But as Sun Wolf stood in the black shade beneath the undead cypresses, he’d heard voices crying out to him from the dark arches of that vast edifice, sweet as the voices of children who live upon human blood.

  He had been afraid then, unreasoningly, and had fled back down the canyon, heedless of the whistling gibber in the shadows through which he passed. He had gone to his own temple headquarters in the westernmost canyon and scrawled the ghostly scrim of runes, invisible to any eyes but his own, over the windows and doors behind him. He had no way of knowing whether they would, in fact, keep the demons from passing. He had sat awake through that night and every night since.

  Outside, they moved in the darkness still. Faint, deformed bodies drifted in shells of light, seeping in and out of the rocks, floating in the air like drifts of vagrant mist. He knew that what he saw was their true being, as a mirror will reflect the true being of a wizard cloaked in illusion, and what frightened him was that he could not tell whether they were ugly or beautiful. He could hear them whispering to one another in their piping, little voices and knew that, if he allowed himself to, he would understand—or think he understood. But that, too, he feared to do.

  Why did he feel that they would come if he bade them?

  Why this strange sense, in the inner corners of his heart, that he knew their names?

  They had tried twice more to drive him into that open space at the end of the central canyon where dark cypresses grew at the feet of the needles—tried to drive him into the cantaloupe-colored palace that lay beyond. He had gone there once, the day following the first attempt, curious as to what they wanted of him. He had chosen the hour of noon, when the burnished sun beat straight down on the gravel that covered the carved roadways and dry stream bed—the one hour when he felt safest.

  From the top of the steps he had looked into a shadowy hall, a huge, square space whose walls were covered to the height of his shoulders in places with the fine gray sand that drifted between the columns of its open facade. The room went back far deeper than any he had previously seen, its nether end hidden in shadow, and, unlike any other he had seen, its walls had once been plastered and painted. The dim shapes of the frescoes there were almost unrecognizable, yet something about their posture, the activities implied in the stiff, shadowy outlines which were all that remained, troubled him. To his right he could see a small black rectangle of shadow, an inconspicuous door to some inner chamber from which no window opened to the outside. And from that dark door, softly and distinctly, he had heard Starhawk’s voice say, “Chief?”

  After that he had not dared to go into the central canyon at all. In the heat of noon he slept; in the few morning and evening hours he searched the city, looking for any sign, any book, or any talisman that the Witches of Wenshar might have left, searching for some trace of their power among the crowding mazes of rose-colored cliffs. Only that day he had heard the desperate, feeble crying of a baby and had followed the sound to the entrance of that central canyon. He had stood there a long time, listening to that starved wailing before turning his back and walking away.

  By night he watched, and the demons watched him.

  Two nights ago, while the storm had screamed overhead and the canyons had been filled with a ghostly haze of hot dust that stirred with eddying winds, they had gathered hundreds thick outside, drifting close to the window where he stood, heart pounding, to stare at him with empty, glowing eyes.

  Now the sky above the canyon rim was paling. In an hour it would be safe for him to sleep. He prepared himself to meditate, for it was for this as well as for other t
hings that he had come here. But as he settled his mind into stillness—sharp and clear and small as in a dream—he became aware that Starhawk had entered the city.

  Like an echo in his mind, he seemed to hear the strike of hooves along the crumbling walls that spread out beyond the canyons. As he sometimes could, he called her to mind and saw her sitting her horse amid the faded tessellations of the old market square’s broken pavement, the stir of dawn wind moving in her white head veils and the horse’s flaxen mane. Then he saw her turn her head sharply, as if at some sound.

  Very quickly, Sun Wolf descended the curved flight of buttercup sandstone steps to the wide room below. Beyond the spell-written doorsill, the canyon was filled with blue silence; the hush of the place was unnatural, for, in spite of the water in its few stone tanks, birds shunned the place. His feet scrunched on the drifts of sand and gravel as he hastened down the old road. In the hours when the demons still walked, it was too dangerous to take his horse.

  As he’d hoped, Starhawk’s good sense had kept her in open ground. She sat a sorrel nag from the Palace cavy at the mouth of the narrowest of the three canyons, turning her head cautiously, listening for sounds. The first light of the desert dawn lay full over her, glinting in the silver mountings of her dark green guards’ doublet and jerkin and on the steel of sword hilt and dagger. Even as Sun Wolf saw her among the scattered ruins of waist-high walls and fallen pillars of shattered red porphyry, she leaned forward in the saddle, as if trying to catch the echo of some faint cry up in the canyon before her. Nearby, there was a sharp cracking noise, like stone falling from a great height upon stone, and her horse flung up its head, rolling a white, terrified eyed, and tried to bolt.

  Starhawk was ready, and the Wolf guessed it wasn’t the first such incident since she’d entered the ruins. She reined the frightened animal in a tight circle at the first skittish leap. Framed in the white veils, her sunburned face was impassive; but even at this distance, she looked stretched and taut, as she did when she’d been on patrol too long. As soon as she had the horse under control, he stepped from the shadows of a dilapidated archway and called out to her, “Hawk!”

  She looked up, started to spur in his direction, then reined again. Holding in the nervous horse with one hand, she fished in her jerkin pocket for something, and the new light flashed across glass as she angled the mirror in his direction. Only then, satisfied, did she nudge the horse and trot through the drifted sand and bull thorns of the street to where he stood.

  “What is it?” She would never, he knew, have come seeking him without reason.

  “It’s Tazey,” Starhawk said quietly. “You’d better come.”

  “So she’s been in a coma since then.” Starhawk held her horse in, fighting its not unnatural eagerness to put large expanses of the reg between itself and the harsh, maroon-black cliffs of the Haunted Range’s outward face. “Kaletha tried to get in to see her last night. Osgard won’t hear of it, and it was all Nanciormis could do to keep him from throwing Kaletha out of the Household entirely.” There was no change in her soft, slightly gruff voice as she added, “I think she’s dying, Chief.”

  He glanced sharply over at her. The cuts on her face from the sand and rocks of the storm still glared red and ugly; her gray eyes were fixed ahead of her on the dark notch of Tandieras Pass, barely visible across the lifeless plain of black gravel. Nine years of fighting other peoples’ wars for money had taught them both that it is difficult to ride or fight while in tears. Tears were for later.

  Sun Wolf squinted with his single eye at his horseback shadow on the pea gravel underfoot, calculating the angle of the sun. “What time did you leave there?”

  “Midnight. Osgard and Kaletha were still fighting.”

  “Wonderful.” He pulled the end of his veil up over his mouth against the dust. “I can tell he’s going to be thrilled to death to see me.”

  The shadows had turned and were beginning to lengthen again when they rode up the trail to the dark stone gatehouse of the Fortress on Tandieras Pass. “No sound of mourning,” was Sun Wolf’s laconic comment. Starhawk nodded. They were both thinking like warriors of the next thing at hand—a cold-bloodedness they understood in one another. Sun Wolf felt no obligation to express his genuine fears for the girl, of whom he’d become fond in the few days he’d known her—nor did he assume Starhawk’s enigmatic calm to spring from unconcern. If Tazey died, there would be time enough for grief.

  After three days of parched silence in the Haunted Range, it seemed strange to him to see people moving around and to smell water and cooking meats, stranger still to realize he could believe in the reality of what he saw. As they rode in under the gloom of the gatehouse, a small, waiting shadow caught his eye. He reined in, letting Starhawk precede him into the dust-hazed confusion of the stable yards. The shadow stepped forward, pitifully small and thin in his dark doublet and hose and the sorry white ruffle at his neck. The pointy white face looked pleadingly up at him through the gloom.

  “How’s your sister?” the Wolf asked quietly.

  For a moment he had the impression Jeryn would run away. Then the boy ducked his head and mumbled, “You’ve got to help her. What’s wrong with her is magic, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” Sun Wolf dismounted and stood looking down at the skinny, furtive little boy. “And I’ll do whatever I can do—but only if you get yourself back into bed. The Hawk tells me you caught one hell of a sunstroke coming out to fetch me.”

  Jeryn colored slightly. “I’m better.”

  Sun Wolf put his hand under the boy’s chin and forced the head up to look critically into Jeryn’s face. “The hell you are,” he replied evenly after a moment’s study of the too-white countenance under its short black curls. “A man who doesn’t rest his injuries isn’t just a fool—he’s a liability to his commander, because they’ll never heal properly and, sure as pox and blisters, they’ll act up when he’s needed most.” He passed his hand roughly over the boy’s hair, as if patting a dog. “I’ll take care of your sister.”

  “Captain...” Jeryn hesitated, then swallowed hard. “I—I’m sorry. It was all my fault to begin with but—but Uncle Nanciormis said I was a coward for not standing up for you to Father. He said if I didn’t like the way he taught me I should have tried to keep you here. And I—I’m not a coward,” he insisted, with the wretchedness of one who knows he will not be believed. “It’s just that...” He stopped, his lips pressed tight. Then, embarrassed to show his tears, he turned to flee.

  “Jeryn.”

  Though it spoke so quietly, the rusted voice stopped him. He turned, fighting desperately not to cry.

  “I never needed proof you were brave,” the Wolf said. In the white frame of veils, his face seemed dark in shadows, with its unshaven jaw and single, panther-yellow-eye. “And I never saw any reason to think you were a coward. What’s between your father and me is something you don’t have to concern yourself with. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “No, sir,” Jeryn whispered. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  The boy turned and started to run away when Sun Wolf asked, “Your dad with Tazey?”

  He stopped again and turned back. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then, matter-of-factly, “He’s drunk, sir.”

  Sun Wolf nodded. “Fighting drunk or passing-out drunk?”

  “Fighting drunk, sir.”

  “Wonderful.” The Wolf sighed. “Thanks, Scout. Now you get to bed.”

  “Yes, Captain.” And the boy was gone like a shadow.

  “You have to hand it to the King for stamina,” Sun Wolf grumbled, unwinding his head veils as he and Starhawk climbed the sand-drifted path up from the stables toward the black, square towers of the Hold. “A man’s got to be tough to stay fighting drunk for over twenty-four hours without moving along to the passing-out stage.”

  “I used to work for a man who could do it,” Starhawk commented, as they mounted the outside stair. Sun Wolf checked his step as if she’d pinked him with a dagger in the bac
k.

  “That was different!”

  “Different was one word for it,” she agreed mildly.

  Sun Wolf growled, “That’s the damn thing about falling in love with your second-in-command,” and resumed his stride up to the balcony with its row of arched doors, Starhawk unsmiling at his heels. “They are with you too long and they know you too well.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  Jeryn and Taswind occupied the last two rooms along the balcony shared by the King’s Household. The brazen sun slanted along the dark granite curve of the building’s southern face, hurling the shadows of the two partners like an inky scarf into room after room. Anshebbeth, sitting in one of them, sprang up with a nervous cry, her hands reaching out, her face pale and hollowed with sleepless strain. When she saw who it was, she sank back and resumed twisting her hands.

  Even out on the balcony, Sun Wolf could hear Osgard’s braying voice.

  “I won’t have it, I tell you! That foul-mouthed nag Nexué’s been all over the town, and there isn’t a man who isn’t saying my daughter’s a witch!”

  “Although I take exception to the connotations of the word witch,” Kaletha’s caustic voice said, “you cannot deny that what happened has proved that Taswind is mageborn.”

  “The hell I can’t deny it!” He turned to loom furiously over Kaletha as Sun Wolf pushed aside the patterned curtain that led into the outer chamber of Tazey’s rooms. “She’s no more a witch than her mother was! A sweeter, dearer, more obedient girl never walked the face of the earth, do you hear me?”

  Kaletha only stiffened and looked down her nose at the bloodshot, unshaven, sweaty giant before her. As usual, her dark red hair was pulled back in braids and loops as intricate as potter’s work and her plain black homespun gown spotless; her very fastidiousness a scornful rebuke. “She is mageborn,” she insisted stubbornly. “You owe it to her to let me teach her the ways of power.”

  “I owe it to her to keep her the hell away from you! I won’t have it said, and I’ll personally take and thrash you if you go near her with your sleep-spells and your weather-calling, and your filthy, stolen books! What man’s going to want to marry her, Desert Lord or no Desert Lord, if lies like that go around?”