Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar (28 page)

“What is it?” the Wolf asked, and Nanciormis looked quickly away.

“Nothing,” he lied. Even having his heels sniffed by death didn’t seem to have shaken his sangfroid. He looked pallid and bruised from his plunge over the parapet; but in the frame of his half-unraveled braids and dusty, open shirt collar, his fleshy face had already regained its usual sardonic lines.

Incarsyn, standing beside Osgard, his unbraided hair hanging like a woman’s to his waist and their earlier quarrel passed over now in this crisis, asked softly, “Did it speak?”

The commander looked up at him, his dark eyes half puzzled, as if searching for the right words for a memory of terror and chaos. “I—I don’t exactly know. I think . . . ” He passed a hand over his mouth. “It—when it moved toward me I realized—I knew I was in danger but it was like a nightmare. But when it moved I flung the lamp at it . . . ” He hesitated, glanced at Sun Wolf again, then away. Having seen Nanciormis’ slowness to react to Osgard’s drunken attack on Incarsyn, Sun Wolf was a little surprised that the commander had gotten away at all and mentally noted that whatever it was—spell, demon, djinn—evidently it did give sufficient warning to escape, if there was anywhere to escape to.

Anshebbeth, rocking back and forth, covered her eyes with her hands and whispered, “Oh, dear Mother . . . ”

“Anshebbeth, shut up!” Kaletha’s voice cracked. Sun Wolf observed with interest that, although Nanciormis had quickly recovered, Kaletha’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. She dropped the scissors and picked them up again, her eyes downcast.

“How did you know what to do?” Osgard poured himself another cup of wine, but it was only an automatic gesture; his face was pale with shock, and he looked cold sober and ill.

“The last scion of the Ancient House of Wenshar,” Incarsyn said softly, “would know.”

Kaletha glanced sharply at Nanciormis, who only shook his head. “I—I don’t know, exactly.” He pulled up his white silk shirt once more over the bandage. Under it, the muscle of his body was still discernible, like rock half-buried in soft mud. “But yes, the stories I had heard said that—that men had escaped the Witches by running out into the storms. They were often killed that way, too, of course; it was only chance that I fell on the sheltered side of the wall.”

Sun Wolf frowned, sifting this in his mind. He guessed that Nanciormis’ account might not be entirely trusted, yet saw no reason for the commander to lie about his escape. He was, as Incarsyn said, the last scion of the Ancient House. The Wolf wondered what the commander was hiding.

Osgard wiped his stubbly face. “You’ll sleep the rest of the night here,” he said. “It—it doesn’t seem to strike when people are together . . . ”

“It struck Galdron and Milkom together,” the Wolf pointed out, leaning one arm along the tiled mantelpiece. “Though it may only have been meant to kill one. But it’s also only happened between midnight and dawn before. Now it’s getting earlier. And we have no guarantee it won’t have a second try. It’s a long way yet till day.”

Anshebbeth groaned and covered her face with long, skeletal fingers. Kaletha began “Really . . . ” Starhawk, with a glance at her that would have frozen a millpond, went over to rest comforting hands on the governess’ shoulders.

“I can’t stand this,” Anshebbeth whispered brokenly. “I can’t stand it . . . ”

“Now, Anshebbeth,” Nanciormis began, looking embarrassed and uneasy at the prospect of another fullblown bout of hysterics. And well he might, Sun Wolf thought sourly. A man might be bedding a woman in secret and still shrink from openly admitting it, particularly a woman as unprestigious as Anshebbeth. For her part, desperately as she might need comfort, the governess clearly knew better than to seek it publicly in his arms. “Perhaps you’d better go back to your room and get some sleep.”

“No!” ’Shebbeth wailed. “I want to stay here.”

“It might be better,” Starhawk put in tactfully, “if you stayed with Tazey.” She glanced at the King. “We should probably move Jeryn in there for the rest of the night as well. I’ll keep guard.”

Anshebbeth looked desperately at Kaletha for comfort, but she, too, was looking the other way, hastily gathering her things to depart. As Sun Wolf followed her more slowly out into the Hall, he heard Nanciormis say to the King, “I think I’d better have a word with you, Osgard . . . ”

The wind still sobbed in the narrow stair as Sun Wolf ascended. The noise almost masked the slithery swirl of a silk nightdress around the turning above him and the sticky pat of a bare foot on cold stone fleeing into darkness. When he reached Tazey’s room, the lamp flames were still shuddering with the wind of a body’s hasty passage, but the girl lay on her bed, rigid and pretending sleep, her hands pressed over her face.

Sun Wolf walked the darkness of the empty quarter until dawn. He sensed no evil, no danger there, yet his every instinct of a warrior prickled that there was something amiss. In the shifting sand drifts among the broken walls, he sought for signs of Kaletha’s passing, but found none. That meant nothing—the nervous after-eddies of the storm would have eradicated them. Kaletha had looked shaken to the marrow. Because Nanciormis had seen something she preferred to believe did not exist? Because it was becoming clear that the spells of the Witches of Wenshar, so casually tampered with, might contain things beyond her knowledge or control—might even turn her evil against her will? Or merely because someone had survived an attack?

Why Nanciormis? As last scion of the Ancient House of Wenshar, he might know things . . . 

Or was there a why? Sun Wolf was uneasily aware that, as a wizard himself, he, too, might know too much, but he had not been attacked.

And the cool, detached portion of his mind retorted, Yet.

The cold stars turned against the black sink of the sky. The night circled toward morning. Blazing with lights against the darkness, the Hold towered above him; behind it, black and silent, loomed the bulk of the Binnig Rock. Standing on a platform of crumbled adobe wall, he spread out his arms and sank into meditation once more, tasting, smelling the night. But there was nothing, save the breathing of the serpents and the dreams of the doves.

When he returned in the cool yellow brightness of dawn, it was to find Starhawk, Anshebbeth, and Jeryn all deeply asleep, and Tazey’s bed empty.

A note lay rolled on the pillow.

It was superscribed, “Father,” but he tore off the pink hair ribbon that bound it. Beside him, Starhawk slumped against the side of the bed, eyes sealed in stuporous sleep—Starhawk, raised to the all-night watches of convent vigils, who had never been known to sleep on guard duty in her life.

The note said:

Father—

I made Starhawk and ’Shebbeth fall asleep, please don’t be angry with them.

Incarsyn was right to put me aside. Sun Wolf and Starhawk are right. I am a witch and the Heir to the Witches of Wenshar. It is all my doing—Nexué, and Galdron, and Norbas Milkhom, and Egaldus, and Uncle Nanciormis. I know this now and I swear to you, it won’t happen again. Please, please forgive me. And please don’t look for me. Don’t blame anyone—I’m doing this by my own choice. I don’t want to become like the Witches of Wenshar, and I know that’s what would have happened to me.

I love you, Daddy; please believe that I love you. I never wanted this. I never wanted to be anything but your daughter and to love you. Please just tell Jeryn that I’ve gone away, and that I love him very much. I love you and I’m so very sorry.

Goodbye,

Tazey

Under the cruel brilliance of the late afternoon sun, Wenshar lay like an elephants’ graveyard of houses that had somehow crept to the base of the blackened cliffs to die. Wind sneered through the crumbled stone walls, unbroken even by the buzz of a rattlesnake; dust devils chased one another like lunatic ghosts. The few portions of houses still boasting roofs watched the two searchers from windows like the dark eyepits of skulls.

Starhawk’s mare started for no apparent reason, throwing up her head, long ears swinging like leaves in a gale; the woman leaned forward and stroked the sweating neck. But she made no sound.

Listen as he would, Sun Wolf could hear nothing—no echo from any of those three twisting canyons or the rock mazes beyond.

But he knew they were there, waiting.

They had been waiting for him since he had left.

Wind thrummed in his ears as he turned his horse’s head toward the wide mouth of the central canyon. Starhawk followed without a word; the blue shroud of shadow covered them as they passed the narrow gate of its mouth. In the stifling heat of the canyon, the rocks stank of demons.

Neither spoke. They had ridden together too long to need words; they both knew that whatever happened, she must not lose sight of him.

A short way past the canyon mouth, a narrow trail led up its wall, to a sort of lane above the first levels of the pillared facades fronting it. The last time he’d been here, Sun Wolf had explored it. At points along the main road up the canyon, bones were heaped, where mountain sheep, gazelles, or straying cattle had fallen from above. Near the foot of the trail lay a little pile of horse droppings. A grain-fed horse, Sun Wolf saw, pushing them apart with a twig, not a mustang scavenging on sagebrush. He pulled his head veils closer around his face and began to lead his own mount up the narrow way. Farther up, they found the tracks of shod hooves.

He felt neither surprise nor triumph at having guessed correctly. In a way, it was the only place Tazey could come, even if her only intent was to destroy herself. Though neither her mother, her grandmother, nor her grandmother’s grandmother had known the demon-haunted city, she knew herself to be its heir.

“She could be above or below,” the Hawk said. Soft as she spoke, her voice echoed hideously from those narrow, gaudy walls.

“There’s half a dozen ways down to the bottom of the canyon.” Sun Wolf glanced over the edge to the tilted pavement, half-hidden under shoals of pebbles, winding along the parched course of the old stream. “We’ll stay up top.”

Starhawk nodded. There was no question of splitting up—not in Wenshar.

Afoot and leading their nervous horses, they moved up the trail.

Sun Wolf knew from his earlier explorations that the trail was neither narrow nor intrinsically dangerous. Rose-colored spires and cupolas, cut in openwork like lace, towered above and around them; here and there, stairways arched to pillared doorways under canopies of stone vines. They led their horses to the trail’s edge and looked across the canyon to the shadowed folds of rock, the sightless doors, and down to the dead oleanders by the sterile wadi and the white heaps of bones.

“Why?” Starhawk asked softly. “Demons aren’t creatures of flesh, are they? They can’t eat what they kill, if they kill it.”

Sun Wolf shook his head. Glancing back at that calm, immobile face in its white frame of veils, he knew she couldn’t be feeling what he felt. She might sense herself watched, but not have that terrible awareness of being known. At the edges of his hearing, he could detect the demons’ whispering, like the canyon wind that turned locks of his horse’s mane, the words just too soft to make out. He feared to listen more closely. His hand tightened on the reins he held; under the veils, clammy sweat crawled down his face.

“I don’t know what they are, Hawk,” he replied. “I know there are biting-demons, so they can do some physical harm. Everyone knows demons lead men to their deaths in swamps or in the desert, but . . . no one’s ever said why they do it.”

The shriek came at the same instant that his dappled gelding flung up its head in panic. The leather of the rein cinched around his hand, and he caught at the cheek piece of the bridle. From up-trail the echo of hooves splintered the close, shadowy air. Fighting to keep his own panicking horse from bolting, he could not turn to see, so the little sorrel mare was upon them before either he or Starhawk could get out of the way.

He saw the mare from the tail of his eye, bearing down on them with flaxen mane streaming and blood pouring from her flanks. It all happened in instants—he barely slid out of the main impact as she crashed into his gelding, white eyes rolling in mad terror, flecks of foam from her muzzle stinging his face, tangling him between the two heaving bodies in a desperate thrash of hacking hooves. With his hands full of bridle and ears and his mouth choked with dusty mane, for a moment he could do nothing but hold on to his own horse’s head. Starhawk, who could be capable of great brutality when in peril, had twisted and levered against her horse’s bridle and threw the frenzied animal to its knees against the jagged canyon wall to their right. Half-crushed and lifted off his feet, the Wolf could glimpse her through a frenzy of veils and dust. The mare was on his blind side; so was the cliff edge to the rocks below. The bridle-leather cut his hands, and he braced his feet. A second later he heard a skittering crash, rocks falling, the mare’s frantic scream, then a crash, somewhere down the canyon below him, and another.

Then nothing.

He released his grip under the gelding’s chin, and the beast threw up its head with a wild snort, but made no further moves to fight or run. It stood trembling as he pushed his veils back. He was still on the trail itself, not even near the raised brink. Starhawk came hurrying up to him, still leading her stumbling horse. Had she let go to help him, he knew they’d certainly have lost her mount and probably the mare as well. In spite of the part of him that felt piqued that she hadn’t come to his aid, he realized grimly that Starhawk was never one to lose her grasp on essentials.

“You all right?” she asked.

He looked down at himself, covered with dust and filth and, he now saw, daubed with great, uneven splotches of the mare’s blood, all mixed with sweat. He wiped his face. “Haven’t felt so good since the last time I got mauled by bears.”

“Glad to hear it.” She led the way to the edge of the cliff.

The mare lay dead on the rocks below. Something like heat shimmer seemed to dance over her twisted body; but even at this time of the afternoon, the canyon’s shadows were deep. She lay on her back; a thin sprawl of white veils fluttered out from beneath.