The Dark Hand of Magic Read online

  He tried to think like the wizard he now was instead of the warrior he had been for the whole of his life. Summon fire... confusion... steal a horse... And the warrior in him asked cynically, And which one of these gruts are you going to talk into helping you mount?

  Yirth’s image melted, blended in his delirium with that of Kaletha of Wenshar, the only other teacher he’d been able to locate in a year of seeking, coldly beautiful in the dappled shade of the public gardens where he’d seen her first. Then that image, too, darkened, changed before his eyes to blood splattered on a mosaic floor, to screams in darkness, and to the chittering of the demons of Wenshar...

  He must have fallen. In the drugged black deeps of exhausted unconsciousness, he became aware that he wasn’t walking anymore, but lay on his back, stripped to the waist, flesh cold with the bitter chill of the desert night and crying out with a hundred abrasions, as if he’d been beaten with hammers of flint.

  In his dreams he could feel the horror in the ground.

  He had always dreamed vividly—his father, he remembered, had beaten him when he’d caught him in daytime reverie, trying to recapture the colors of the previous night. Since the ordeal of the Great Trial whereby the magic born into his flesh, the magic he had all his life denied, had blossomed in a rose of fire, his dreams had been clearer still.

  He lay on the ground, cold sand gritty beneath his lacerated back and arms, the blood of the arrow wound still seeping thickly into the earth. His arms and legs were spread out, and he couldn’t move, though whether this was because he was still unconscious or because he was tied that way he didn’t know. By the utter silence, he knew it was the hushed hour preceding dawn, before the hum of insects wakes the desert. The smell of dust and blood filled his nostrils, and another smell that sent his mind screaming at him to wake up, wake up! as if his bound flesh could feel through the earth on which it lay what was beneath it.

  They, too, were waking.

  In dreams he saw them, blackish-red clots like dark raspberries in the winding night of their tunnels, huddled together and stupid with cold. As big as a man’s thumb, they were like armored horses with their malignant eyes and dangling mandibles—tunnels, chambers, the caverns where bloated queens sat dully squeezing out eggs. The distant sun was already beginning to warm them. He smelled the acid of their bodies, as he knew they smelled his flesh.

  With desperate effort, he wrenched his mind free of sleep. The blurry haze of the poison had lessened, which meant the pain was sharper, and with it the nauseated weakness of shock. Above him the sky was black opal, save when he turned his head to see where the blue turned to violet, the violet to pink, and then amber where it touched the cool citrine of distant sand. Moving his head again, he saw his own right arm, stretched from his shoulder to the rawhide strips that bound his wrist to a stake in the ground. A foot beyond his fingertips was an anthill four feet across, its top nearly the height of a man’s knee.

  He nearly threw up with horror. There were two others visible beyond it; raising his head, a movement which sent renewed shoots of agony down every screaming muscle of his body, he could see another between his spread-eagled feet and others beyond that. It must be the same around on his blind left side.

  For an instant shrieking panic swelled in him; then the calm that had gotten him out of a hundred traps and ambushes in his years as a mercenary commander forced the horror away. Calmly he closed his eye, and began sorting in his mind everything Yirth of Mandrigyn had told him, as if he had all the day before him, item by item...

  And the spell was there. A spell of slipping, of loosening, of the fibers of the uncured leather growing damp, gathering moisture from the air, stretching gradually...

  The breathless air warmed where it touched his naked belly and chest. He opened his eye to see that the sky had lightened. As he felt the rawhide that cut the flesh of his right wrist loosen a little, his glance went beyond it to the crown of the hideous hillock, and he saw the gritty sand glow suddenly gold. Each pebble, each grain, of the filigreed pit edge of its top was feathered with the long black crescent of a tiny shadow where the first sunlight hit it. The pebbles moved and shifted. Stiffly, an ant crawled forth.

  Sun Wolf’s concentration failed in a second of horror, and he felt the rope bite again into the bleeding flesh. Like the clenching of a fist, he clamped his mind shut, forcing himself to think only of the spells of undoing, of the dry air turning moist on the leather, of oily knots sliding apart... It’ll never work in time...

  Other ants were moving about on the mounds now, big soldier ants, bulbous bodies an inch and a half in length, mandibles dangling from heads like shining coffee beans. Sun Wolf fancied he could feel the spiked tickle of their feet on his bare flesh, twisted at his bonds in panic, and felt the rawhide tighten again as the spell’s slow working slacked... Not now, pox rot it...!

  His mind groped, slid. It would take too long; they’d scent his flesh in moments...

  But what would it smell like?

  It wouldn’t work for long—he was too weak, the pain of his wounds too insistent, and if he blacked out again he was dead—but in a split second of clear thought he called to his flesh the searing illusion of heat, poison, fire, burning oil, anything, and threw it around him like a cloak at those tiny, vicious, mindless minds. Dust, smoke... that’s what they’d smell... the crackle of flames where he lay twisting frantically at the ropes that held him pinned over their tunnels...

  He saw the ants—and there were quite a lot of them—hesitate and draw back.

  He knew he couldn’t keep it up, couldn’t maintain the illusion and work spells on the ropes at the same time. A wave of sick weakness clouded his thoughts, and he fought to keep them clear, fought both the pain and the panic he could sense tearing at the edges of his concentration. Either would kill him; if the ants actually started on him he’d never keep his thoughts clear...

  Blood, he thought; the juices of sweat and terror; meat sugary-sweet for the tasting... He had never tried a double illusion like this, but it was that or wait for the single spell to outlast his physical ability to remain conscious. Like a smell he twined this new illusion around the ropes that held his outspread hands and feet, and shut his teeth hard on a scream as the ants swarmed greedily forward. They would eat the rawhide, he told himself, they would not touch his flesh—they thought his flesh was fire—his flesh WAS fire—it was the rawhide that was his flesh...

  He closed his fists and turned up his hands as much as he could, though the mere effort of that made his arms shake with weakness. Ants clotted the rawhide ropes on the stakes in threshing, glittering blobs. They kept a few inches from the backs of his knuckles, and from his heels, as if his flesh were in fact the fire he projected. If he could keep it up...

  There was a shrill cry of rage, and the muffled thunder of hooves in the ground. The shirdar, he thought, in some floating corner of his awareness. Of course they’d stayed to watch from a safe distance. He moved his head, slowly, holding his concentration on the double spell, his whole body drenched now with sweat in the dawn cold. The riders whirling toward him seemed to come in a slow-motion bellying of white cloaks, shouting with fury, lances raised. He thought detachedly that he probably wouldn’t be able to maintain his concentration on either spell with three spears in his belly; death would take almost as long with them as without. But he held to the spells anyway, weirdly fascinated with the mere technique of it, as if these weren’t going to be the last few seconds of his life, too taken up with his concentration as the nearest warrior raised his spear...

  The rider’s head snapped back, his body contorting as an arrow appeared suddenly in the middle of his breast, red blossoming over the white of his robe. Sun Wolf thought, The Hawk must not have been killed. He couldn’t care, couldn’t let himself feel joy or fear or anything else which would distract him from a mental exercise he only barely understood. Dizziness swept him. Ants swarmed all around him now, racing back and forth over the pale earth or crawli
ng in heaving swarms on the ropes and stakes, centimeters from the backs of his hands. Other hooves shook the ground under his back, but he dared not break the tunnel of his vision, the wordless images of the spells...

  Hurry it up, damn you, Hawk!

  Someone screamed, a death cry of agony, at the same moment the ropes parted. Sun Wolf rolled over, shaking, aware again of the scores of open cuts, the raw flesh of his wrists and the shredded wounds on his knees beneath his torn breeches, aware of the cracked rib he’d gotten in Wenshar, the swollen, dust-clotted hole where the arrow had been pulled out, and the half-healed demon bites—another souvenir of Wenshar—on his hands. He tried to stand and fell immediately, his mind plunging toward unconsciousness. The ants swarmed forward.

  Fire, he thought blindly, fire all around my body... Just a few seconds more, damn it!

  Starhawk saw the flames roar up in a wall around the Wolf’s fallen body and thought, Illusion. She hoped to the Mother it was an illusion, anyway. She drove in her spurs and yelled to Choirboy, “It isn’t real...!”

  It looked damn real.

  Beside her in the din—the shirdar she’d shot was still partially alive, buried under a shroud of insects and screaming like a mechanical noisemaker—she heard Choirboy yell, and from the tail of her eye saw the panic in his face at the sight of the flames.

  “It’s not real, dammit!”

  But panicky uncertainty had claimed him. The youth hauled on the reins, dragging his horse to a skidding halt among the ants. Starhawk felt her own mount veer at the sight and heat of the blaze and lashed it brutally with the quirt, driving it straight toward the shimmering wall. Choirboy’s horse reared and twisted as the ants, fully aroused now and covering the sandy knoll in a seething blackish-red carpet, poured up over its hooves and began tearing the flesh of its fetlocks. Choirboy screamed again as the frenzied animal flung him; then the Hawk saw no more, her own mount plunging through the pale circle of flame.

  She hauled rein with the Wolf nearly under the hooves. The heat beat upon her as if she’d ridden into a furnace, and she didn’t dare dismount. The flame seemed to pour straight up out of the ground, as if the dirt itself were burning. She screamed, “Get on your feet, you stinking oaf! You waiting for a goddamned mounting block or something?!”

  Reeling like a drunken man, Sun Wolf half rose. She grabbed a flailing arm, nails digging hard enough to bring blood from the bare and filthy flesh—she could only spare one hand from the dithering horse’s rein. She pitched her voice as she’d pitch a battle yell over the greedy roar of the flames, the screaming and yells of the shirdar up among the rocks. “Get your arse in the goddam saddle or I’ll goddam drag it out of here!” Through the bloody curtain of his ragged hair she could see that his one good eye was closed, his face white as a dying man’s beneath a layer of grime. Somehow he got a bare foot in the stirrup and heaved; she hooked her arm under his shoulder and hauled with all her strength, dumping him over the saddlebow like a killed pig. Then she drove in the spurs and plunged for the hills, the circle of surrounding fire sweeping after them like the head of a comet trailing flame, leaving no burn upon the ground.

  Fifty feet farther on, the fire flicked suddenly out of existence, and she knew Sun Wolf had fainted.

  In the rocks Dogbreath and Firecat joined them, leading four shirdar horses in a string. The Hawk glanced back swiftly at the teeming knoll and Dogbreath shook his head and gestured with the bow on the back of his saddle. She shivered, but knew he was right. He and the Cat had been busy in the rocks dealing with the rest of the shirdar. By the time they’d been able to get to Choirboy—running, rolling, tearing frenziedly at the gnawing carpet of ants that had already eaten out his eyes and ears and brain—shooting him was all they could have done.

  So the ants, she supposed, if no one else, had done well out of the day. A philosopher might take that as proof that the Mother did look out for the humblest of Her creatures, and that it was an ill wind indeed that blew nobody good.

  That was one reason she’d become a mercenary instead of a philosopher—the other, of course, being that the pay was better.

  This isn’t right, Sun Wolf thought, pulling himself stickily from the darkness of fevered sleep. He’d left the troop with Ari, left them for good... He was a mage now. He had to find a teacher, had to find his destiny... find what he should have gone looking for twenty years ago... Hadn’t he?

  But they seemed so real—Dogbreath cross-legged by a fist-sized fire built in the shelter of black granite boulders, sharpening a dagger, and Starhawk’s silhouette crouched against the blazing desert stars. Somewhere close by a horse whickered, and distant, liquid, unbearably hurtful, coyotes cried in lonely chorus at the moon.

  Had he left them? Or was he, in fact, still their commander? Was this that hellish desert summer they’d fought the armies of Shilmarne of Dalwirin back and forth through the passes of the Dragon’s Backbone? Had he just been wounded and dreamed it all—the horrors of Altiokis’ Citadel, the scorching birth agonies of magic within him... Starhawk saying she loved him?

  Maybe none of it had ever happened, he thought, sinking again into the fever’s shroud of many-colored pain. Maybe he was still commander of these people, fighting small wars for pay and for whatever loot they could steal. Maybe he had never really felt that power kindle deep fire in his flesh.

  Starhawk’s cool voice said something about it being time to ride on, if they wanted to get over the passes before the shirdar gathered for another attack. He heard the light scrunch of her boots and turned his face away, so that she would not see him weep.

  He woke clearheaded, indoors, this time. He heard the groan of dry wind in wooden eaves, the scratchy rattle of pine boughs against the wall by his head, and the petulant bang of a poorly fastened shutter. Musty straw, cooking, and woodsmoke—an inn, he thought, opening his eye, Opposite the bed where he lay, he saw an open door and, beyond it, the carved railing of an indoor gallery and high ceiling rafters dyed amber with firelight from a hearth somewhere below. Then he moved his head and saw Starhawk, Firecat, Dogbreath, and the Little Thurg grouped around a crude table across from the foot of his bed.

  “Raise you two.”

  “Come on, I saw you take three cards...”

  “You gonna see me or sit there whining about it, you sleaze-eating heretic?”

  “You should talk about heresy! I’ll see you and raise you, you pox-ridden antisubstantiationist tart...”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls...”

  “I’ve got better things to do than throw good money after bad...”

  “Who dealt this mess?”

  Gear was heaped under the table around their feet. He saw his sword, which they must have picked up in the arroyo, his boots, and the battered saddlebags containing the books of the Witches of Wenshar. He waited until Starhawk had gathered up her winnings, then said, “I thought I’d have to be pretty far off my head to hallucinate something that looked that much like Dogbreath.”

  They crowded around his bed—Starhawk carefully pocketing her money before leaving the table—all talking at once. Over Thurg’s head he met the Hawk’s eyes, cool and gray and enigmatic as always, but deep in them he read what she’d die before saying in the presence of others, her shy pleasure at seeing him once more himself, if not precisely on his feet. Idiotically, his heart did a little flip in his chest.

  “We been hunting you all around St. Gambion’s barn, Chief,” Thurg was saying.

  Firecat added, “Be a hell of a thing to catch up with you just in time to see you get et by bugs.”

  “Yeah, I thought that myself.” He struggled to sit up, shaking the long hair out of his face.

  Under a bandaged pad of dressings, the wound in his back hurt like a mother-in-law’s bite, but it was the scouring sting of poultices, no longer the burn of poison. From the feel of it, he could tell it wasn’t serious. A whore long ago had once given him worse with a pair of scissors.

  “But”—Dogbreath g
rinned, perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed, his mad eyes sparkling—“odds were damn near even we would.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Starhawk tossed him a shirt. It was his last spare from the saddlebags, patched, frayed at the cuffs, most of the points missing, and stained faintly with somebody’s blood. They’d probably got the innkeeper’s wife to patch it—no mercenary he knew, with the exception of himself, had any idea which end of the needle the thread went through. In the past year of traveling with Starhawk it had been he who had mended her shirts—a hell of a thing in a grown woman who’d presumably been raised right. He rubbed his eyepatch, readjusting the set of the leather over the empty socket.

  “And what the hell are you doing here anyway? I thought Ari would be halfway back to Wrynde by this time of year.”

  “Ari sent us, Chief,” Dogbreath said, the wicked sparkle fading from his dark eyes. “We’re in trouble, all of us—we need your help bad. We can’t be certain, but it’s looking more and more like some wizard’s put a hex on the troop.”

  Chapter 2

  “IT STARTED WITH little things.” Dogbreath shrugged and gestured helplessly with big, knuckly hands. Never a dirty man, Dogbreath was invariably ragged; under the dingy leather of his iron-plated doublet lurked a sweater that looked as if it had been knitted by a wittol on hashish, over which the grimy and horrifically parti-colored dags of a court coat’s sleeves hung like rotting kelp. “Stuff happens—it always happens, any campaign, you know that, Chief. But this time...”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Vorsal.”

  Sun Wolf swore, with considerable variety and feeling.

  It wasn’t that he felt any shock over the siege of Vorsal. He’d been expecting trouble there since its hereditary Duke had defied the economic leadership of Kwest Mralwe and started weaving and exporting local cloth via Vorsal’s own small but excellent harbor, instead of selling the fleeces to the great merchant houses of Kwest Mralwe. When anyone, let alone some two-by-three principality like Vorsal, crossed the richest cloth-trade monopoly in the Middle Kingdoms, war was strictly a matter of the King-Council’s earliest convenience. But for Ari and the mercs to still be there this late in the year...