The Witches of Wenshar Read online

The silence in the room was so complete Starhawk could hear the jingle of bridle bits from the horses tied outside. The young man looked around him, his face scarlet with fury and shame. A few feet away at the bar, the tough little black man leaned against the railing, his brown eyes hard with derisive challenge.

  Furious, the young man drank off his cup and hurled it at the wall behind the bar. The barkeep ducked aside—the cup itself, harder-fired than the adobe brick, did not even shatter. Silently, the four young shirdar stalked from the room, their white cloaks swirling against the jambs of the open doors as they vanished into the dusk outside.

  “Norbas, one of these days you’re going to buy yourself a shiv between the ribs,” sighed a voice, deep and half-drunken, from the next table. The black man, stepping away from the bar, whirled in surprise. Then his scarred face broke into a blazing white grin as he saw the big man sitting there.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Osgard?” He crowded his way over, followed by two or three others, wearing like him the clothes of wealthy townsmen: boned doublets and stiffened linen collars of gaudier hues than were considered good taste north of the mountains, breeches and boots rather than the more sophisticated long hose. The man at the next table was dressed the same way, though with the slight untidiness that spoke, like his slurring voice, of someone who had been drinking since just past noon.

  “Can’t a man slip out for a drink now and then?” Like Sun Wolf, the man Osgard was big, a thumb-breadth shorter than the Wolf’s six feet, fairer than the Wolf and going gray. Like the others, under the richness of his clothes, his body was the body of a man who has both worked and fought. In his broad, unshaven face his green eyes glinted with annoyance. “Maybe I knew I’d meet you here. The match has been made, Norbas, like others before it. I tell you, let it be.”

  Norbas sniffed scornfully and stiff-armed a pottery cup brimming with the murderous white liquid known locally as Panther Sweat. “I never trusted those sneaky heathens and I never will,” he stated flatly. “I bought the round to drink to Tazey’s happiness, not to that of some barbarian she has to marry.”

  “You have a right to think as you please, but you’ll come to grief carrying on about it in bars,” the man Osgard said a little grimly. “It’s for the good of the land; I’ve told you that before...” And like the wash of a sea wave, the noise of other conversations covered theirs.

  “It’s a clever choice on somebody’s part,” Sun Wolf rumbled, half to himself, half to Starhawk. “It’s sure as pox what I’d do if I ruled Wenshar.” He contemplated the man Osgard for a moment against the blurred candlelight with a narrowed eye. “Most of the shirdar lords are fallen into decay—none of them ever ruled more than a couple handfuls of people in all their hundreds of miles of sand, anyway. With one mud-walled city, a string of oases, and a couple hundred goats and camels, Hasdrozaboth’s not terribly powerful, but it’s ruinously old, like all the Houses of the Desert Lords. But it’s an in to the kin network that Wenshar could call on if Dalwirin or Kwest Mralwe invaded them again from the north.”

  Starhawk nodded, accepting this information without inquiring how Sun Wolf knew it. Back in the days when Sun Wolf had been a mercenary captain and she his second-in-command, part of his success had been due to his minute knowledge of the politics and economics of every kingdom and principality likely to hire his troops. The habit had stayed with him—he gossiped like an old woman with every tale-telling merchant they’d met on the roads. His aim these days was principally to find rumor of a wizard to teach him to use the powers so suddenly arisen within him, but he managed to pick up a good deal of knowledge of other things in the process. Curious, she asked, “If they never had more than a couple hundred warriors, why do you say they’re in decay? Decay from what?”

  “From ruling the southern trade routes through the desert to the gold mines of Kimbu,” he replied promptly. “The Lords of Wenshar—not the King now, but the Ancient House of the old Lords of Wenshar—ruled the whole desert, back when the Empire of Gwenth was still around in the north for Kimbu to trade with.”

  “Silly me,” apologized Starhawk ironically, and Sun Wolf gave her a grin, half-embarrassed at his own sudden show of erudition, and squeezed the fingers still lightly clasped in his own.

  They ordered dinner; through it Sun Wolf alternated between watching the increasing crowd in the tavern and particularly around the next table, where Osgard and Norbas were holding a sort of court for what looked like the wealthier miners, and relapsing into his own thoughts. By the look on his face, Starhawk thought he didn’t care much for them, but she had learned long ago when to keep her silence. Full dark fell outside; Osgard and his friends departed singing; the local Children of Joy, youths as well as girls, began to make their appearance. Pergemis silks of rose and violet shimmered softly in the ochre lamplight, and painted eyes teased. When the tavern girl came to clear up, Sun Wolf signed to her to stay. “Where would I find the house of the Lady Kaletha? The wizard?”

  The girl hastily sketched in the air the sign against evil. “She’ll be up at the Fortress of Tandieras,” she mumbled. “But if you need a healer or something, go to Yallow Sincress in Leatherworker’s Row. He’s...”

  “Tandieras?” asked Sun Wolf, surprised to hear her name the fortress of the King.

  The girl nodded, her dark eyes avoiding his. She was fourteen or so, gawky and plain, with the hawk features of the shirdar in the frame of her straight black braids. “Yeah. She’s part of the King’s Household.” She gathered the pottery dishes with their vivid glazes of yellow and blue onto her tray and prepared to go. Sun Wolf dug into his pouch and dropped a quarter of a silver bit into the empty bread plate. The dark eyes raised to his, startled and shining.

  “And where is the Fortress?” Sun Wolf got to his feet, readjusting the set of the sword at his hip.

  “You’re not gonna go tonight?” There was sudden, baffled fear in the girl’s plunging brows. “She’s a witch!” She used the shirdar word for it, and there was loathing in her voice.

  “Funny,” Starhawk remarked later, as they walked up Main Street, leaning into the steep slope of the hill upon which the town was built. “Most of the people we’ve met on the road figured wizards are something that died out a long time ago, if they ever existed to begin with. But she was afraid.”

  With the final sinking of the sun, the hot blast of the desert daylight had given way to dry and bitter cold. Dust hung in the air, the smell of it a constant with which they had lived for days; it blurred the lights of the inns and houses they passed, twinkling amber-gold in the ultramarine darkness. They’d added sheepskin coats to their doublets and still felt the thin lance of the desert night. They had left their horses behind at the inn—it had been a long journey, and the beasts were badly overridden.

  Above them, thready moonlight touched the gilded turrets of the Cathedral of the Triple God, triumphant fingers stretching from the highest peak of the town. Higher still, the jagged peaks of the Dragon’s Backbone loomed, massive granite domes and sugarloaves, with here and there unscalable plugs of black basalt—dry teeth goring at the stars.

  Sun Wolf nodded thoughtfully as they turned along the face of the hill. Ahead of them, a mile or so from the town, the lights of the Fortress of Tandieras winked against the rocky bulk of the spur-range on which it was built. Like a moat, darkness lay before it where the road dipped from the flank of Pardle Hill, a long stretch of gully, boulder, and sand. From the dense shadows, the topmost twigs of a desiccated acacia tree reached up into the moonlight like crooked reeds above spring floods—for the rest it was pitchy dark. Starhawk’s every nerve came alert. It was a patch of road made for robbers.

  “There may be a reason for it,” Sun Wolf said after a few moments. “But I’d fear Kaletha for different reasons. She’s arrogant. She’s young, Hawk, younger than you. I’m not saying no wizard that young can hold the kind of power she claims to hold, but, if one did, I think I’d feel it.” The rock shadows loomed darkl
y around them. Starhawk’s fingers touched the comforting hardness of her sword. Half her mind turned from the Wolf’s scratchy wheeze to the soft whisper of shadow sounds. “She should still be a student, not claiming to be able to teach the secrets of the universe to a bunch of fatuous disciples.”

  “If she teaches you anything,” Starhawk pointed out, “she’ll have...”

  Sun Wolf’s hand tapped her shoulder for silence a split instant before she heard, faint and muffled, a man’s cry and smelled the drift of kicked dust and blood on the night wind. Then there was the ringing whine of a drawn sword, and a voice thick with liquor yelled, “Rot your eyes, you scum-sucking swine...!”

  The Wolf was already scrambling up over the rocks in the darkness.

  Without a word passing between them, Starhawk knew what the plan was and moved forward at a soundless run toward the barely visible bend in the dark road. From the other side of the overhanging rocks, she heard the searing ring of steel on steel and a man’s voice shouting, “Help! MURDER!” The scrub along the edge of the road would give more away by its noise than it would conceal in that pitchy dark; Starhawk felt, rather than actually saw, the wide bay between the boulders to her right, sensed violent movement somewhere in the Stygian blackness, and heard the sounds of struggle.

  A white blur on the ground turned out to be the face and hands of a dead man amid a stench of spilled blood. She sprang noiselessly over him. Ahead of her, another man was backed to the gray-black front of a massive boulder—pale face, pale hands, the white V of a shirt visible through an unlaced doublet. Ill-defined forms danced before him. Starlight glinted on steel. Starhawk ran one of his black-cloaked attackers through the body before the man had time to realize what was happening. He let out a gasping death scream, and the other assailants turned upon her in a body.

  Then, from the top of the rocks, there was a berserker howl, and Sun Wolf was among them. Starhawk caught barely a glimpse of him as he dropped into the darkness. She found by instinct the shoulder of another dark form near to her, caught the thick cloth of his cloak, and shoved her sword up under his ribs as he turned toward the new threat. As she pulled the blade clear in a sticky gush of hot blood over her hand, she glimpsed the white robe beneath the cloak, already staining with the welling blood. Shirdar, she thought, turning and ducking the slash of a curved tulwar, cutting at breast level, and parrying steel that whined within inches of her face. The victim of the ambush had sailed into the fray, fighting like a drunken man with yells of fury. From the road behind them, hooves thudded and lanterns swayed in the darkness; reflected light showed Starhawk the gleam of a sword, and she cut in the darkness where the body would be. Her blade met nothing; the man had turned, and she heard the scrunch of his soft boots on gravel as he fled.

  Beside her, the man they’d rescued was yelling, “Here! To me!”—with, Starhawk thought wryly, considerable optimism about whose side the reinforcements were on. A blue burst of witchlight flared in the darkness, the ghostly blaze turning Sun Wolf’s craggy features and gore-slimed sword blade into a hashish vision of some barbarian berserker god. He had evidently decided that darkness was no longer to his advantage. By the faint St. Elmo’s fire, Starhawk could see the last attackers fleeing into the shadows of the rocks, leaving their dead stretched upon the thin dust of the ground. Men and women in some kind of dark green livery studded with smoked steel were urging their horses down from the road, springing from their saddles to dart in pursuit, until their captain raised his hand and called them back.

  “It’s useless—don’t get yourselves killed over it!” He reined up before Starhawk and the man beside her, the man she now recognized as Osgard from the tavern. The horseman stepped from his saddle with surprising grace for a man of his bulk. “Are you hurt, my lord?”

  “By the Three, that was fighting!” Osgard flung an approving arm around Sun Wolf as he came up to them, the heavy sheepskin of his jerkin marked with a sword slash, but apparently unwounded himself. “You never saw the like, Nanciormis! This bastard had them running like rats—like rats!” Standing that close to him, Starhawk could smell, under the reek of the blood that smeared them all, stale alcohol in his sweat.

  As tall as Osgard and Sun Wolf, the rider Nanciormis had the swarthy skin and aquiline features of the shirdar. What had once been a hawk-like beauty was blurred by a padded layer of fat. “My lord...” The other riders were closing in around them, and the torches they bore threw glints of gold on the clips that held back his waist-length black hair. “I’ve warned you before about going about the town so, unprotected and with no state...”

  “State, hell,” grumbled Osgard, bending to wipe his sword on the black robe of one of the fallen bandits and sheathing it at his side. His voice had lost its drunken slur—there’s nothing like fighting for your life, thought Starhawk, to induce instant sobriety. “It wasn’t state that got me crowned King of Wenshar.”

  Starhawk’s glance cut sharply to Sun Wolf. She saw that he wasn’t surprised.

  “It was men like Norbas Milkom and Quaal Ambergados—miners and fighters, men who know the land. Men like...” Osgard turned and regarded Sun Wolf with an arrested eye. “I know you,” he said.

  Sun Wolf nodded. “Likely you do, your Majesty.”

  “Not just from the tavern...” The green eyes narrowed. “You’re Sun Wolf. The mercenary of Wrynde. We hired you—what...?”

  “Last war but one with Dalwirin,” Sun Wolf provided. “Old Shilmarne was leading her forces down the passes...”

  “By the Three, that was it!” The King slapped Sun Wolf enthusiastically on the back, then staggered. He’d taken a thigh wound, and blood was still tracking stickily down the leg of his breeches. Sun Wolf and Starhawk caught him as his knees gave way, Nanciormis springing belatedly to help.

  Osgard made an impatient move to push them off. “I’m fine...”

  “The hell you are,” Sun Wolf rasped. He pulled from some inner pocket the silk scarf he’d long ago learned to keep handy and tied it around Osgard’s leg above the wound. With the hilt of one of the hideout daggers in his boot, he twisted it tight. In the yellow glare of the torchlight, the King’s face had gone suddenly waxen as the heat of battle died from his veins. “There a sawbones up at the fortress?”

  Nanciormis nodded. “Can you sit a horse, my—”

  “Of course I can sit a horse!” Osgard blustered furiously. “Just because I took a little scratch doesn’t mean I’m going to go to pieces like some sniveling, weakling coward...” His sandy eyebrows stood out darkly against his gray flesh, and, like a candle being blown out, he fainted.

  “Good,” Sun Wolf grunted, as they eased him gently back to lay him on the sand. “With luck he’ll stay unconscious and won’t argue about his pox-rotted manhood all the way up to the Fortress.”

  The guards looked shocked, but, in the commander Nanciormis’ eye, he caught the flicker of an appreciative grin.

  Chapter 2

  IN THE FORTRESS OF Tandieras supper was over, the trestle tables in the Great Hall put away, and the chairs and benches pushed back against the walls of the vast, granite room which was the old castle’s heart. Like the Longhorn Inn, it was lit chiefly by wall sconces whose polished metal reflectors threw back the soft beeswax glow into the room, but here the height of the ceiling, though it added to the cold, at least relieved the smoke. In addition, a huge fireplace stretched along one side of the feasting-dais at the far end, around which carved chairs were clustered, and two chandeliers dangled—unlit, massive, ominous iron wheels—in the dense shadows overhead.

  But Sun Wolf’s first impression, as he stepped through the triple archway that led from the vestibule into the Hall, was one of color, gaiety, and movement. Since it was the season of sandstorms, the big wooden shutters that guarded the line of tall windows on the room’s southern wall had been closed nearly to for the night. Servants in drab shirts and breeches, gently born retainers in colorful broadcloth and white ruffs, and guards in dark green leath
er were grouped around the sides of the Hall, clapping in time to the music of pipes, flutes, and the fast, heartbreaking throb of a hand-drum; in the center of the Hall, lit by hand-held lamps and torches all around her, a girl was doing a war dance.

  It was one of the old war dances of the Middle Kingdoms, done these days for the sheer joy of its violent measures. A young man and a girl in guard’s uniforms stood aside, sweat-soaked and panting, having clearly just finished their turn. As the dancer’s shadow flickered across them, the blades below her glinted. They were using live weapons. But for all the concern on her face, the girl might have been dancing around and over a circle of wheat sheaves; her feet, clad in light riding boots under a kilted-up skirt, tapped at will, now this side, now that side, of the blued edges of the upturned swords. She looked to be about sixteen; her sand-blond hair, mixed fair and dark, caught the light on its thick curls; the torches were not brighter than her eyes.

  Beside him, Sun Wolf was aware of Nanciormis striding through the arch into the room, his mouth open to call out the ill news. Sun Wolf caught the man’s thick arm and said softly, “Don’t startle her.”

  The guards’ commander saw what he meant and checked, then blustered, “No, of course I wasn’t going to.” He signaled one of the pages to come over and whispered hasty instructions to the boy. The young face paled in the torchlight with shock. “Go on!” Nanciormis ordered, and the page went slipping off through the crowd toward the little knot of gentlemen-in-waiting who stood between the fireplace and the door that led from the dais to the King’s solar beyond. Nanciormis glanced defensively back at Sun Wolf. “We can’t let his Majesty remain out in the cold court!”

  At that moment the music skirled to its circling conclusion; the girl stood panting and radiant in the tawny halo of the lights. A woman hastened down to her from the crowd on the dais, skinny and flustery, her narrow, white face framed unbecomingly in tight-pulled, black hair. She dressed in black, too; the harshness of the color triggered something in Sun Wolf’s memory. She had been one of Kaletha’s disciples in the public gardens that afternoon. She touched the girl’s arm and said something. Stricken, the girl turned eyes wide with shock and green as absinthe toward the doorway; without a word she strode toward them, the black-clothed governess hurrying behind like a skinny ewe sheep who has fostered a gazelle.