The Witches of Wenshar Page 9

  “Your father,” began Starhawk, looking at the jittery, restive bay. Then she sighed, and let the observation go unmade. “Fan out,” she ordered the guards. “Looks like poor old Walleye picked up a stone. See if you can find any more traces.”

  There was more blood, further on. When, a mile and a half later, they came to a wide patch of gray sand left by last week’s storm, even the eternal sweep of the desert winds had not been able to eradicate wholly the marks which indicated that Jeryn had still been riding his pony. Starhawk cursed again—the visceral oaths that only worshipers of the Mother can contemplate.

  “He doesn’t know any better,” Tazey pleaded unhappily.

  “Then he shouldn’t have charge of a defenseless brute,” Starhawk retorted. “He probably thought the poor thing’s gait was out because of the gravel.”

  She straightened up, to scan the hot, southern horizon for the fiftieth time that afternoon. But the earth lay silent. The dividing line between black and blue was sharp and clean as if cut with a knife and a rule. The shadows lay over toward the east, kohl-dark and lengthening. They had come nearly twenty miles from the foot of Tandieras Pass, with nearly ten more to go toward the shallow inward curve of the eastward cliffs of the Haunted Range where the City of Wenshar had lain.

  Uneasily, Shem said, “We’re not going to find Jeryn in the ruins before dark.”

  Beneath his veils, Pothero’s dark eyes shifted. Stories, Tazey had said. What stories, concerning a city a century and a half dead?

  “He’ll know we’ll be looking for him,” Shem offered encouragingly. He unwound his veils a little to take a drink from one of the water skins. His teeth flashed in an uneasy grin. “Hell, he’ll probably be waiting for us on the edge of the ruins, or be starting back, lame pony or no lame pony. He won’t want to be in that place when night comes any more than—”

  “If he made it that far.” Starhawk walked a few paces forward and picked up something from the ground—a single thread of white muslin, but bright as a banner against the leaden gravel. She held it up. “He must have torn up his headcloth to tie around the pony’s foot. That’s worse than stupid—he can’t have known he shouldn’t let the sun get to his head—but it’s my guess he’d make for the nearest shelter.” She glanced up at Tazey. “He isn’t stupid, is he? Just ignorant as hell.”

  The girl nodded wretchedly.

  “Those rocks?” Shem pointed toward the north, where a weathered gray flatiron of rocks broke the sand like a beached ship half-heeled over in heavy seas.

  Starhawk considered them, then looked away to the southeast, where, some five miles off, stood three tsuroka, crumbling, cinder-colored columns dyed maroon by the afternoon glare. “I think he’d have turned back first, figuring he could make it back to Tandieras. By the time he realized he couldn’t, he’d be closer to those. You boys ride north—we’ll check south. Send up a smoke if you find him.”

  It was Starhawk who found him when her horse whinnied as they neared the decaying heaps of talus and rubble that surrounded the tsuroka and was answered by a faint, neighing reply. Jeryn was curled in the long purple shadows of an overhanging boulder. His bare face was sunburned red and blistered in spite of the coating of the Wolf’s sunburn grease, tear-tracks cutting the dust and slime like water runnels on the desert’s face. He was asleep, but woke up, crying, when Tazey called his name and came scrambling down the rocks to him; brother and sister clutched each other desperately, and Starhawk could see the boy was dehydrated and feverish from the sun. He kept sobbing, “Don’t tell Father! Promise not to tell Father!”

  “We won’t,” Tazey whispered reassuringly, as the hot, desperate hands clutched at her shirt sleeves and veils. “We’re all sworn to secrecy, you know we are...”

  “I didn’t make it,” Jeryn sobbed. “But I’m not a coward—Uncle said I was a coward not to fetch him back, if I didn’t like the way Uncle was teaching me. But I’m not—I’m not. Is Walleye going to be all right?”

  Starhawk, aware of the priorities, had already checked the miserable pony’s split and bleeding hoof. She caught the beast’s hanging head and dumped most of her spare water down its throat, knowing that, though Jeryn might have remembered to take water for himself, he had undoubtedly forgotten that horses drink, too. “I don’t know,” she said roughly, still angry about the pony’s suffering. “He’ll need one hell of a farrier to fix that hoof.”

  “I did as best I could,” the boy sobbed miserably, still huddled in his sister’s arms. “He can’t die....It’s all my fault...”

  Starhawk opened her mouth to deliver some well-chosen words about ignorance which had in times past raised blisters on the hides of toughened mercenaries, then shut it again. Whatever else could be said, Jeryn, having gotten his poor pony into this mess, hadn’t left him in it; and considering how frightened the boy must have been, there was a good deal in his favor for that. So she only said, “If we can get him back to Tandieras, he should be all right.”

  She glanced back out at the hot, black flatness of the reg, then at the two children, the boy sobbing, his burned face pressed to Tazey’s shoulders. “And I think your uncle deserves to be horsewhipped, and your father as well. This wasn’t brave—it was criminally stupid.”

  “Uncle didn’t mean—” began Tazey, more frightened by the mercenary’s perfectly level, conversational tone than by all her father’s roaring bluster.

  “Your uncle,” returned Starhawk, with quiet viciousness, “never means much of anything by what he says or does. Most people who sow harm don’t. He’s like a nearsighted man, seeing clearly only what he wants and not much caring to think about the rest.” She scrambled out of the shadowed cleft, the rock burning through her boot soles as she returned to the horses and collected a broken handful of mesquite and acacia branches tied to the back of the saddle. She’d gathered them at the edge of the reg, knowing that, if a signal was needed, out there she would find nothing to burn. It is just soldier’s luck, she thought, hunkered over a handful of bark peelings and cracking flint and steel, that the sun is just past the strength required to use a burning-glass.

  When she’d coaxed the spark into a smoldery thread of smoke, she looked back. Tazey had pulled off her veils, soaked them from the waterskin and wrapped them around her brother’s swollen face. “You know your father will be searching by now.”

  The girl nodded miserably. Jeryn, clinging to her waist, broke into frightened, half-delirious sobs. Starhawk checked the southern horizon again, gauging the tiredness of the horses, her recollection of the look of last night’s moon, and the state of their water. The skyline was clean, unblurred by the telltale line of dust, but her hackles prickled at the sight of it. Across the reg to the north, the sun gilded a plume of dust as Shem and Pothero rode back toward them.

  “Come on,” she said softly. “We’ve pushed our luck already. It’s a long way back.”

  The storm appeared on the southern horizon when they were seven miles from the rocks. Starhawk had sensed the growing uneasiness of the horses, the heat, and the close, pounding feeling in her head and had turned her eyes, again and again, to the blank southern quarter of the sky. Now she saw it, a deadly glitter like gold tumbling in a hopper, darkness and lightning underneath. Her horse flung up its head, terror overriding its weariness. She twisted its face back into the wind, and heard Shem cry out and the clatter of retreating hooves even as she yelled, “Make for the rocks!” Through a blur of dust and the wind-torn ends of her veils, she saw he’d been thrown. The cloud before them swelled with unbelievable speed, the oven-heat of the storm surrounding them, and brown darkness began to fall.

  The horses were frantic, even the lame Walleye fought to escape and run before the storm, though they could not hope to outrace it. Pothero tried to pick up Shem, and his piebald gelding threw them both and went galloping north amid a stinging whirlwind of flying sand and stones.

  The air was laden with dust, hot and smothering. Flying gravel tore at Starhawk’s fac
e as she wrenched her horse to a stop. Electricity tightened like a vise around her skull—in the howling fog of approaching darkness, she could see the dry lightning leaping from earth to sky. She swung down from her saddle, trying to yell to Tazey, “We can kill the horses for a windbreak!” knowing it to be a last resort and nearly useless. The scream of the winds ripped her words away. She dimly saw Tazey’s horse rear, overbalanced by the two children on its back. Something black and huge, the flying trunk of a deep-desert acacia tree, she thought, came whirling out of the gloom like a malevolent ghost and struck the horse broadside. They toppled, Tazey dragging her brother clear. In panic Starhawk’s horse jerked its head, snapping the reins in her hands. Then it, too, was gone.

  Darkness covered them, a black wing of death. An uprooted cactus came flying out of the darkness to strike her, the spines tearing through the steel-studded leather of her doublet as if it were silk. But worse than that was the heat and the dust, winding them already in a baking shroud that would drain the moisture from their bodies and leave them mummified. Shem and Pothero stumbled to her, heads wrapped in their veils like corpses, blind with dust. Jeryn grabbed her from out of the darkness, sobbing something about Tazey...

  Her head throbbing unbearably, her body aching already with desiccation, Starhawk squinted through the flying black fog of smothering dust. A flicker of dry lightning showed her the girl’s dim outline, walking into the storm, her unveiled hair flying back as she raised her hands.

  For the first instant, Starhawk thought it was to protect her eyes from the dust. But a second burst of ghostly light outlined Tazey’s hands as she stretched them into the wind, fingers pressed together like a wedge. And, as if they had been a wedge, the winds parted around them.

  In her first, bursting glare of enlightenment, Starhawk’s chief thought was, So that’s how she knew where her brother would be.

  The force of the storm curled back from Tazey’s hands like waters breaking over a rock, leaving an arrowhead wake of stillness. In that eerie wake, only tiny puffs and eddies of wind touched Starhawk’s face, but she could see the dust on either side in heaving curtains and hear the screaming keen of flying sand over gravel. The two young guards stared, dumb with shock and horror, at that blade-slim figure in the choking gloom; but when one of them opened his mouth to cry out something obvious, Starhawk, Jeryn still clinging to her waist, strode over to him and said quietly, “Don’t say it.”

  The young man stared at her, blood from blown gravel and debris trickling down his face, staining his veils. “But—”

  “You break her concentration, and we’re all dead.”

  Starhawk had dealt with wizards before; the two youths had not. They turned horrified eyes back to the girl they’d grown up with, as if she had been transformed before them into some dreadful monster. Like theirs, her face was scratched and torn, matted with dust. In the ghostly darkness, Starhawk could barely distinguish her features—her eyes shut, her lips moving occasionally, her hair tangled with blown twigs and gray with dust, her outstretched hands bleeding. She seemed locked in some dreadful trance, focusing all her mind, her soul, her life, upon turning the winds, as she had been told witches could do. The pony Walleye, reeling like a drunken thing, had staggered into the wedge of stillness behind her and collapsed. The young guards, staring at her, seemed to waver between doing the same and taking their chances with the storm.

  Seeing the horror on their faces, Starhawk added grimly, “And you had damn well better keep your mouths shut about this afterward as well.” She turned and led the stumbling Jeryn back close to his sister. After long hesitation, the two young guardsmen followed.

  It was almost dawn before they returned to Tandieras, but nearly the whole of the Fortress was grouped by torchlight around the gate. Runners from the search party that had found their small fire after the storm died had carried rumors as well as demands for water and medical attention. Starhawk, her body hurting from dehydration and sheer weariness, saw from afar the carpet of firefly lights against the charcoal bulk of the Fortress knoll and cursed.

  She reined the horse she had been given by the searchers over close to Tazey’s makeshift litter. Jeryn, in exhausted sleep, stirred fitfully in her arms and sobbed, “I promised not to tell...I promised...don’t tell Father...” Starhawk tightened her grip around the boy’s scrawny body and reflected, with calm anger, that, beyond a doubt, some officious fool had told his father.

  The men of the search party had all been very quiet. Tazey herself, though she had seemed only very dazed after the passing of the storm, had not spoken at all and now, under the light of the searchers’ torches, seemed to have drifted into a vague sleep. Starhawk remembered how, once during the past summer, Sun Wolf, driven by frustration and rage at his own impotence to tap the wellsprings of his power, had worked at calling the lightning throughout one northlands storm. Perhaps he had thought that, like the physical skills of which he was such a master, the power could be increased with violent and steady use—and perhaps, if the wielder knew what he was doing, it could. He had lain in a fitful half-trance of black and hopeless depression for days, as if his soul as well as his body and his power had been drained.

  Rest would cure it, the Hawk thought. If, that is, she were allowed to rest.

  The crowds by the gate were very still, as the rescuers had been, when Shem and Pothero whispered of what they had seen.

  In the cold dawn light, the yellow torch glare altered the faces of the crowd—awed, frightened, confused. Starhawk saw the Bishop Galdron, lips pressed in arctic anger, as if Tazey had chosen to be mageborn instead of desperately hiding her suspicions about her powers. Beside that small, glittering figure, Egaldus was keeping his thin face carefully expressionless, but he radiated barely concealed triumph and glee—glee that on Kaletha’s face was transformed into smug satisfaction as she tried to push her way forward through the crowd in the broad court before the steps of the Hold. Starhawk, knowing Kaletha saw herself already as Royal Instructress in Magic, felt a twinge of weary anger. Anshebbeth, closely buttoned as usual despite the earliness of the hour, wore a tight expression, her genuine concern for Tazey’s injuries fighting with naked jealousy, as if what the girl possessed had been taken away from her.

  Between the torches that flared on either side of the doors into the Hall, Osgard, Nanciormis, and the handsome young Incarsyn stood, their faces a study in shocked noncommitment. Incarsyn, particularly, looked simply confused, as if struggling to select the most appropriate emotion out of a rather small natural stock.

  Starhawk dismounted. None of the guards seemed eager to go near the litter, so she helped Tazey to stand. Dusty, scratched, her blond hair hanging like a dried broom around her scorched face, the girl wavered unsteadily on her feet, and Jeryn, stumbling, staggered to support her other side. In dreamlike weariness, they moved through the haze of torchlit dust toward the steps, where a bloodshot, tear-streaked Osgard waited, his untidy doublet smeared with liquor stains. The silence was absolute, but Starhawk could feel it around her, worse than the weight of the storm.

  Then into that silence, old Nexué’s voice cawed like canvas ripping. “A witch! She’s a witch!”

  Tazey raised her head, her green eyes transparent with horror. “No,” she whispered, pleading for it not to be so. Then her voice wailed, crackling “No!”

  Kaletha had started to bustle forward, but Nexué pushed before her, skinny finger pointing. Tazey could only stare at her, blank with shock, a rim of white showing all around her pupils in the torchlight. There was triumph and distorted glee in the old woman’s face, as if the damnation and ruin of the Princess were some kind of personal victory. “A witch! A—”

  With a kind of calm rage Starhawk turned and backhanded the old woman across the mouth with her closed fist, knocking her sprawling to the dirt. She was too late. Tazey whimpered again, “No...” Covering her face with her hands, she slowly collapsed. Osgard, Nanciormis, and Incarsyn all hesitated to step forward, and it w
as Starhawk who caught the fainting girl in her arms.

  Chapter 6

  FROM THE WINDOW of the temple, Sun Wolf could see the lights bobbing in the canyon below.

  He had seen them last night, when he had looked out into the black violence of the killer winds. Later, when the rock-cut palaces of the vanished city, carved from the very sandstone of the canyon walls, had lain cold and colorless under the ghostly moon, they had been there still. They flickered at him now from empty doorways, from black eye sockets of wide square windows, and from the shadows of the peach-colored columns of the carved facades. The whisper of their bodiless voices braided into the wail of the desert winds.

  He knew what they were.

  In the north, as a child, he had seen demons, the only person he had ever known who could do so. His father, he remembered, had beaten him the one time he had spoken of it—for telling lies, he’d said. Sun Wolf wondered now whether it had actually been for telling what the old man did not want to accept as truth. He had wanted a warrior son.

  In all his years of hearing tales about demons, the Wolf had never heard that they could hurt people much. He knew their thin, whistling voices called from the hollow places of the earth, luring men to their deaths in marshes or over gullies in the dark of the moon. But they fled men and bright lights. No man who knew what and where they were should be in danger from those cold, incorporeal spirits.

  Yet he knew himself to be in danger, though danger of what he did not know.

  He had scribbled in the dust of the rose-hued sandstone temple he had taken for his quarters the few patchy demonspells Yirth of Mandrigyn had taught him and drawn all the Runes of Light on the doorpost and on the sills of the great upper window.

  And still he did not feel quite safe.