The Witches of Wenshar Read online

  She wondered if it was watching her and what movement she could make that might do any good.

  Years of war had given her an instinct for danger. Whatever was in the room with her, she had no doubt whatsoever that it was utterly evil.

  She lay on the inner side of the wide bed, under a black bearskin and two quilts against the freezing night of the desert foothills. In her fear there was none of the child-terror that wants only to pull the covers over the head, secure in the knowledge that the evil will not violate that sanctuary; her fear was adult. To reach the door, she would have to roll across the width of the bed; to reach the window, she must dive over the foot. The sense of evil strengthened, localized; there should have been a shadow there, crouching just beyond the foot of the bed where the moonlight struck the brightest, but there was none.

  Outside in the stables, the dogs began to howl.

  She felt a tweak and a jerk and saw the blankets move.

  Then clear and distant, she heard Sun Wolf’s voice, like metal scraping in the cold, still night; and Nanciormis’ rich laugh. Nothing moved, nothing changed in that terrible still life of empty moonlight, but she felt the stir and shift of air and heard a sound no louder than the scratch of a cockroach’s hard claws on the granite lump of the threshold. Through the open door, she saw dust swirl in the court outside, though no wind stirred the camel-bush just beyond.

  She rolled from the bed, pulling the topmost blanket off and around her body. Automatically, she caught up her sword, knowing it would be useless. The court outside was drenched in liquid-silver moonlight that shadowed every pebble, every stone of the little well-head, every leaf of the camel-thorn and sedges clustering around. Not even an insect moved, but the dogs howled again, desperate, terrified; from the stables, she heard the stamp of frightened hooves. She forced herself still, hidden in the shadows of the door. Across the court, an adobe gate made a pale blur in the shadows surrounding the Hold—across that granite monolith, a line of shuttered windows marked the Hall like a row of sightless eyes. Above them, a balcony ran the length of the building, every arched doorway looking onto it rimmed in the silvery glow of the moon. In the checkered maze of shadow between Hall and gate, Sun Wolf’s voice echoed on the stone, bidding Nanciormis good night. Though she could clearly see there was nothing by the moonlit gate, still terror filled her. She stepped into the fragile splendor of the moon, cried out desperately, “Chief, look out!” and her voice echoed against the high wall of the silent Hold.

  Hating to, but knowing if the Wolf were in danger she must be closer, she gripped her sword and ran forward into the court—and stopped suddenly.

  There was nothing beside the gate.

  Of course, there never had been anything beside the gate—but it was gone, now.

  Slowly, not trusting her instincts, she moved again, her naked sword in her hand, her other hand clutching tight the blanket wrapped around her. Her heart was thudding in her chest, the air cold in her nostrils against the warmth of her breath, the dust chill beneath her feet.

  She stood beside the gate. There was nothing there, nor anywhere else in the night.

  The soft scrape and rustle in the shadows made her turn sharply, in time to see Sun Wolf drop over the low wall that bounded the empty quarter, some distance from the little gate. He hesitated for a moment, and she signaled him to come. Her arm, where it held the blanket over her, was a mass of gooseflesh—she was trembling, though not entirely with cold.

  He had his sword in hand, the moonlight bitter as frost on its edge and point. “What is it?”

  She hesitated, not certain what to say. “I—I don’t know. I didn’t see anything, but...”

  But what?

  He studied her white, sharp face in the moonlight, with her baby-fair hair, flattened by the pillow, sticking in all directions, her gray eyes alert and watchful as a warrior’s, but puzzled, troubled. “Tracks?”

  She shook her head. She sensed that she ought to feel foolish, like one who had wakened screaming from a nightmare about hens or rabbits, but she didn’t. The danger had been real, that she knew. And the Chief, may the Mother bless his balding head, accepted it as such. They had fought shoulder-to-shoulder for a long time and knew that, while their observations might be inexplicable, they were at least not inaccurate. He looked around him at the deserted court, as if scenting the air for some trace whiff of evil, his single yellow eye gleaming almost colorless in the ripe moonlight. The aftershock was coming over her with the memory of the fear; she was conscious of a desire for him to hold her, for the rough, knobby feel of sword hilt and belt buckle through the blanket, crushing against her flesh. She told herself not to be stupid. In an emergency that kind of activity tied up one’s sword arm. Her instincts told her the danger was over, but her mind and the habits of a lifetime of war refused quite to trust.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “Whatever it is, it seems to be gone.” He began to move toward her, then stopped himself and led the way back down the stony path, a sword-length apart, like scouts on patrol. Starhawk felt surprised at how sharply the rocks in the court cut her bruised feet. She had not even noticed them, before. She and the Chief flanked the dark slot of the cell doorway, entered—ready for anything—though both were almost certain that there was nothing inside. And there was not.

  While Sun Wolf was checking the room, Starhawk turned to look back over her shoulder at the gate. It stood innocent under the blaze of moonlight, no shadow touching its sand-worn pine lintels, nothing moving the weeds around it. Something white drifting along the balcony of the Hold made her raise her eyes; she could see a figure there, the crystal glory of moonlight glinting in the gold clips that held his long black braids. He was gliding from archway to archway, as if seeking a room—she remembered he and the Chief had been drinking and remembered, also, the telltale tracks of broken veins that at close distance marked the commander’s elegant nose.

  But even though he seemed to have trouble finding which room was his own, he moved with his usual steady grace. He pushed aside the curtain within one dark arch, and Starhawk thought she heard the soft, startled cry of a woman’s voice from within. But no scream followed it; he stepped through into the darkness, and the darkness hid him.

  Chapter 4

  SUN WOLF’S TERM of employment as instructor in manliness to the Heir of Wenshar lasted slightly less than twelve hours—something of a record, even for Sun Wolf.

  He had the weedy, sullen boy slathered with herbed grease to protect his virginal skin from the sun, and protesting all the way, out of the fortress between dawn and sunup, running on the lizard-colored ranges of scrub and camel-bush that spread out below the black granite knoll of Tandieras. The blue dawn periods between the freezing cold of night and the breathless daytime heat were brief; though, as autumn advanced, they would lengthen. As it was, Sun Wolf thought disgustedly when Jeryn stumbled to a gasping halt after a quarter of a mile, they were more than lavish.

  “This isn’t safe, you know,” the boy panted sulkily and jumped aside, lashing his hand at an inquisitive bee. He wiped at the sweat tracking through the grease; stripped to a linen loincloth, with dust plastering his scrawny legs and snarly hair, he was a sorry sight. “If a sandstorm came up now, we couldn’t get back.”

  “True enough,” the Wolf agreed. And indeed, three days ago, on the ride in from the distant coast, he and the Hawk had been trapped in a cave in the black cliffs of the Dragon’s Backbone by a sandstorm. He had felt it coming—the breathless rise in temperature and the throbbing in his head—long before the Hawk had, and that had saved them, allowing them to reach cover in time. From the moment the cloudy line of white had become visible on the desert horizon until all the world had been swallowed by a screaming maelstrom of wind-driven sand had been literally minutes. After the blinding brown darkness had passed, they’d found the desert littered with the ruined corpses of prairie dogs and cactus owls, the flesh literally filed from their bones by the pebbles and sand in the wind. In Ta
ndieras it was said that even wearing the protective white head veils of a desert rider, a man could be smothered and dried to a mummy in a drift of superheated dust within half an hour.

  “But I can read the weather; feel the storms before they hit, before they even come into sight. I know there’s nothing on the way.”

  The boy shot him a look of sullen disbelief from black eyes that looked far too big for his pointy white face and retreated again behind his wall of silence. Sun Wolf had already found that, protest though he might, the boy would never ask for help. Perhaps it was because he had early learned that doing so would only worsen any situation with his father.

  Jeryn tried again. “Nanciormis never made me do this.”

  “And that’s why you got winded after two minutes of exercise.” Sun Wolf pushed back his long hair—he had barely broken sweat. “We’re going to do this every morning at this time, and it’s going to be hateful as hell for about three weeks, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Let’s go.”

  “I’m still tired!” the boy whined.

  “Kid, you’re gonna be tired for months,” the Wolf said. “You’re going to run back to the fortress and lift your weights and work a little with a stick with me, sometime before breakfast this morning. Now you can either do it fast and have time to do other things you’d like, or slow. It’s up to you.”

  The boy’s full, soft mouth pursed up tight to hide the resentful trembling of his lips, and he turned furiously away. He began to race back toward the Citadel at an angry, breakneck pace calculated, Sun Wolf thought, following with a hunting lion’s dogtrot, to exhaust him before he’d gone a third the distance.

  He couldn’t say that he blamed the boy. Since yesterday, he had his own frustration and resentment to chew at his soul.

  Kaletha’s method of training was entirely different from the brief, exhausting exercise in memorization he had undergone with the witch Yirth of Mandrigyn and from the dogged routines he had worked out for himself. He had learned to meditate from Starhawk and did so dawn and dusk, but Kaletha’s instructions in meditation were more complicated and involved her frequent intervention. “You must learn to change the harmonies of the music of your mind,” she said, kneeling before him in the latticed shade of a corner of the public gardens of the town, and Sun Wolf, to whom meditation had always been a matter of inner silence, again fought the urge to slap that smug look off her face.

  As an exercise, it seemed unbelievably trivial. But the White Witch’s other students didn’t seem to think so. In their various shaded niches along the colonnade at the top end of the public gardens where they usually met, they were all meditating with faces furrowed in either concentration or ecstasy—both, Sun Wolf suspected irritably, for their teacher’s benefit. Starhawk meditated alone and had taught him to do the same. The few times he had seen her at it, she had seemed relaxed, almost asleep. But then, he thought wryly to himself, it took more than communion with her soul to disturb the Hawk’s marble calm. He had known her for nine years and was still trying to figure out what it would take.

  He could see her, down across the blasting afternoon sunlight of the open court in the indigo arches of shade beyond, talking to the grizzled Norbas Milkom, owner of the Golden Vulture Mine. The black man’s scarred face split with a laugh; by their gestures, they were discussing the mountain campaign of eight years ago.

  In the afternoons, when the heat of the day had begun to burn itself off and the people woke from their siestas, half the population of Pardle Sho ended up in these gardens. The three acres of rambling walkways—under arbors of grape, jacaranda, and phoenix-vine, or of bare, sandy squares where occasional ancient orange and cypress trees stood but more often simply native cactus—covered the last footslopes of Mount Morian where the land was too irregular for even the builders of Pardle to put houses. Before the Revolt, the gardens had originally belonged to the governors of the slave-worked mines, and the ruins of the Palace formed their southern boundary. But now they were the favorite promenade of the town, where people came in the afternoons to talk, hear gossip, meet their friends, flirt, transact personal business, or listen to the singers who sat in their shaded corners, caps full of pennies before them. It wasn’t unusual for itinerant teachers to meet with their students there; at the other end of the colonnade Sun Wolf knew one brisk little man could always be found teaching engineering to a class of one or two.

  Kaletha’s voice came to him, measured as if each word were a precious thing to be cherished by its lucky recipient. “Purity of the body is the greatest necessity of magic,” she emphasized for the third or fourth time that day. She was speaking to Luatha Welldig, a fat, discontented-looking woman of forty or so, dressed, like all of them except the Wolf and Egaldus, the Trinitarian novice, in severe and unbecoming black, but her glance flicked to Sun Wolf as she spoke. “Without purity of the body—freedom from spiritous liquors, from overindulgence, from the crudities of fornication—” she was looking straight at him as she emphasized the word, “—the mind remains a prisoner in the maze of the senses. The body must be pure, if the mind is to be free. All magic rises from the mind, the intellect, the reason.”

  “That isn’t true,” Sun Wolf said, looking up.

  Kaletha’s pink lips lost their curves and flattened into a disapproving line. “Naturally, you’d prefer not to believe so.”

  He shook his head, refusing to be angered. Slowly, stammeringly, not certain how to explain and oddly conscious of his scraped-out croak of a voice, he said, “The intellect may learn to guide magic, but it doesn’t spring from the reason, any more than water is generated by the pipe it flows through.”

  “Nonsense,” Kaletha said briskly. “Reason and the ability to control the base passions are the sole province of humans, and humans are the only living creatures to possess magic.”

  “But they aren’t.”

  The dark red brows climbed. “Oh? Are you telling me that camels can turn sandstorms? Or house cats can read oracle-bones? Or do you believe in funny little people we can’t see who hide in cellars and clean up the kitchens of deserving goodwives?”

  Sun Wolf felt the anger stir in him, and with it a deep unwillingness to argue the point. He felt in his heart she was wrong, yet lacked the technical expertise to prove himself right—and lacked, still more, any desire to pick and unravel at the smoky whole of his instincts.

  Into his silence, Anshebbeth said timidly, “Kaletha, when you speak of purity—surely there are different sorts of—of physical love.” She spoke as if she could barely get the word out of her throat. Sun Wolf stared at her in surprise, startled that she would defect from her teacher’s slightest utterance, much less do so to take up his side of the question. In the harlequin sunlight of the vine’s shade, her thin, white cheeks were blotched with embarrassed red. “Can’t—can’t true love be—be freeing to the soul as well as to the body?”

  Kaletha sighed. “Really, Anshebbeth.” She turned away.

  The governess fell silent, her thin hand stealing up to touch her throat in its high collar, as if to massage away some dreadful tightness.

  Sun Wolf considered her thoughtfully for a moment. She had surely had little to say to him, falling in obediently with Kaletha’s contempt. But he remembered the look she’d once given him: covert lust plunging immediately into scalding shame; he’d seen her, too, hungrily following Nanciormis with her eyes. He wondered how that sharp, tense white face would look if it relaxed into laughter, and what the masses of tight-braided black hair would feel like unraveling under a man’s caressing hand. But her gaze had already gone back to Kaletha, and she leaned to catch what the White Witch was saying to Egaldus. No man, he realized, would stand a chance of gaining Anshebbeth’s undivided attention if Kaletha were in the room—supposing that he’d want it.

  Manlike, he had simply considered her contemptible. Now, realizing what she had all her life given up for the sake of this woman’s bare approval, he saw her as pathetic.

  Across
the court a kingfisher glitter of brightness caught his eye. The Bishop Galdron had joined Norbas Milkom; the two men talked gravely, the white-bearded patriarch with his glittering gold tabard and the tough, scarred mine owner, the diamonds from his rings flashing. Starhawk had left them. A moment later he saw her walking along the colonnade with Nanciormis. Both the Bishop and the mine owner watched the big Guards Commander disapprovingly. If Nanciormis was aware of their looks or their disapproval he didn’t show it; he moved like a king, serene and elegant in his slashed red-velvet doublet and flowing desert cloak, his dark hair knotted up on the back of his head against the afternoon’s heat.

  During their drinking bout last night, Sun Wolf had observed that, although Nanciormis, like most of the men of the desert, tended to treat women with a combination of courtliness and patronage, he recognized the women of his guard as colleagues in the arts of war and only flirted with them with their tacit permission. He wasn’t flirting with the Hawk, Sun Wolf could see. Flirtation was an art Starhawk had never understood. She would still occasionally give Sun Wolf a blank look when he complimented or teased her, which amused him. Beneath that lioness facade, she was in some ways a startlingly innocent girl.

  And yet...

  Last night came back to him, the sharp fear in Starhawk’s voice as she’d called to him from beyond the moonlit gate. She was not a woman to run from shadows. Her fear had not been the timidity of a woman asking a man’s reassurance, but a warrior’s fear of a very real danger. There had been neither tracks nor marks in either the yard or the little cell they shared.

  Starhawk had not had any explanation, but, with a shiver, he recalled the dead doves.