Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar

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THE WITCHES OF WENSHAR

Barbara Hambly

[19 sep 2002-scanned for #bookz]

[26 sep 2002-proofed for #bookz]

CHAPTER 1

"You may be a wizard, my lady," Sun Wolf said, tucking his big

hands behind the buckle of his battered sword belt, "but you're also the

biggest damn fool I've ever met in my life."

Every man has a gift, Starhawk sighed to herself. Why do I

choose to travel with a man whose gift is to be able to talk audibly

with his foot in his mouth up to the knee?

For one instant the sun-blasted garden with its small citrus trees

and hard, clayey red soil was utterly silent. Beneath the sharp black

lattice shadows of the bare arbor, the face of the Lady Kaletha, the

White Witch of Wenshar, went rigid with an indignation which was

three parts shock that anyone, let alone some roving barbarian in a

dusty sheepskin doublet and scarred boots, would dare speak so to

her. Her face paled against the dark red coils of her hair, and her

protuberant blue eyes blazed, but for the first moment she was literally

speechless. One of the little cluster of her ostentatiously black-clothed

disciples, misinterpreting, opened her mouth. Kaletha waved her silent.

"You barbarian pig." She had a voice like the clink of a dropped

gold coin upon stone. "Are you slandering me out of fear of what I

am-or jealousy of what I have?"

Behind her, her disciples murmured, nodding wisely to one

another. The gardens of Pardle Sho were public, occupying the

grounds of what had been the Governor's Palace back when the land

of Wenshar had been ruled by the Lords of the Middle Kingdoms;

across the vast open square of sand, two children chased each other

through the zebra shadows of the cloister, their voices shrill as birds in

the hot air.

After a moment Sun Wolf said, "I fear what you are, Lady."

She drew breath to make some final point, but he cut in over her

words in a voice like the rasping of a rusted-out kettle. "What you are

is an armed idiot-if you're not simply a liar."

Turning, he walked away. The dark lace work of the vine

shadows rolled like the foam pattern on a wave along the lion-colored

leather of his doublet, and the Lady Kaletha was left with the

uncomfortable choice of giving him the last word or shouting her own

rebuttal in an undignified fashion after his retreating back.

Thumbs hooked in her sword belt, Starhawk followed him down

that hot, shaded colonnade and across the gardens to the street.

"You know, Chief," she remarked later, coming over with two tin

tankards of beer to the intense gloom of a corner of the Longhorn Inn's

common room, "sometimes your facility with words leaves me

breathless."

His single eye, amber as a tiger's under a long, curling tuft of fading

red-gold brow, flicked suspiciously up at her as she stepped casually

over the back of the chair next to his and settled into it. The leather

patch that covered the empty socket of his other eye was already

scuffed and weathered to the same shade as his sun-gilded skin, but the

telltale groove of years had not yet been worn across his forehead by

its buckskin thong.

Starhawk's face, as usual, was inscrutable as she handed him his

beer; features that would have been delicate, had not her original

uncomeliness of a long jaw and a square chin been added to, in the

course of nine years as a mercenary soldier, by a broken nose and

three inches of whitening scar that decorated one high, fragile

cheekbone. For the rest, she was a tall, rangy cheetah of a woman,

dressed in a man's leather breeches, embroidered shirt, and sheepskin

doublet. Her baby-fine blond hair was cropped short and, like Sun

Wolf's thinning red-gold mane and faded mustache, bleached out by

the sun of the K'Chin Desert, along whose northern edge they had been

traveling for four days.

Sun Wolf grumbled, correctly suspecting that what lay behind

those water-gray eyes was a deep and private amusement. "The

woman is a fool." His voice was like the wheezy creak of an unoiled

hinge, as if his vocal chords had all the flesh stripped from them, leaving

nothing but bare wire.

Starhawk took a sip of her beer. It was bitter, like all the beer in

the Middle Kingdoms, the color of mahogany, and very strong. "She's

also the only thing we've seen that remotely resembles a wizard since

we left Mandrigyn," she reminded him after a moment. "And since we

can't go back to Mandrigyn ... "

Sun Wolf brushed aside the reminder of his banishment from the

city that was known as the Jewel of the Megantic Sea. "The Wizard

King Altiokis lived and ruled for a hundred and fifty years," he growled.

"He destroyed any wizard with even a guess of the power that might

have challenged him. If this Kaletha woman has the powers she claims,

he'd have destroyed her, too."

Starhawk shrugged. "She could have kept them hidden until his

death. That was only nine months ago. Altiokis got much of his silver

from the mines of Wenshar-it's a sure bet Pardle Sho and every little

mining town along the cordillera was riddled with his spies. She has to

have remained silent, like Yirth of Mandrigyn did, in self-defense."

Sun Wolf wiped the beer foam from his thick, raggedy mustache

and said nothing.

Though the air in the common room was hot, still, and strangely

dense-feeling, not one of the half-dozen or so miners and drifters there

made a move to leave its indigo shadows for the striped

black-and-primrose shade of the awning of peeled cottonwood poles

outside. It was the season of sandstorms, as autumn drew on toward

winter. In the north, sailors would be making fast their vessels till spring

opened the sea roads again, and farmers re-chinking the thatch of their

roofs. Throughout the north and west and on to the cold steppes of the

east, all life came to a standstill for four months under the flail of those

bitter storms. Here in Wenshar, the southernmost of the Middle

Kingdoms on the borders of the desert, even the few hardy herds of

cattle grazing the patches of scrub that passed for oases were chivvied

in to closer pastures near the foothill towns, and the silver miners strung

lines of rope from their dwellings to the pitheads, lest the burning

sand-winds rise while they were between one point and another, and

the darkness come on so swiftly that they would be lost.

Deceptively idle-seeming, Starhawk scanned the room.

Like half the buildings in Pardle Sho, the Longhorn was adobe

brick and about fifty years old. Its low roof, thirty-five feet long and

less than ten from side to side, was supported by rafters of stripped

scrub pine whose shortness gave every adobe building in the town the

appearance of a hallway. The older buildings of the town, erected of

stone when Pardle Sho was the administrative center through which the

Lords of Dalwirin ruled the Desert Lords of the wastelands beyond,

were spacious and airy. According to Sun Wolf, who knew things like

that, the smallest of those stone houses fetched seven times the price of

any adobe dwelling in the town. Looking up at the blackened lattices of

rafter and shadow over her head, Starhawk had to concede that the

buyers had a point. Adobe was cheap and fast. The men and women

who'd come over the mountains, first as slaves, then as free

prospectors, to work the silver mines and eventually to wrest them and

the land of Wenshar from those who had held them before, often could

afford no better.

One of the first wars Starhawk had fought in, she recalled, had

been some border squabble between Dalwirin, closest of the Middle

Kingdoms north of the mountains, and Wenshar. She remembered

being a little surprised that, approached by both sides, Sun Wolf had

chosen to take Wenshar's money. She'd been twenty-one then, a silent

girl only a year out of the convent which she'd abandoned to follow the

big mercenary captain to war; a few weeks of defending the black

granite passes of the Dragon's Backbone had shown her the wisdom of

taking defense rather than attack on such terrain.

Sipping her beer, she remembered she hadn't had the slightest idea

what to do with the prize money after the campaign. Sun Wolf, if she

recalled correctly, had used his to buy a silver-eyed black girl named

Shadowrose who could beat any warrior in the troop at backgammon.

She glanced across at the man beside her, his gold-furred

forearms stretched before him on the table, picturing him then. Even

back then, he'd been the best and certainly the richest mercenary in the

length and breadth of the old boundaries of the fallen Empire of

Gwenth. He'd had both his eyes then and a voice like a landslide in a

gravel pit; the thin spot in his tawny hair had been small enough that he

could deny its existence. His face had been a little less craggy, the

points of bone on the corners of his bearlike shoulders a little less

knobby. The deep silences within his soul had been hidden under the

bluster of crude sex and physical challenge, which some men used to

conceal their vulnerabilities from other men.

He sat now with his back to the corner of the room, as usual, his

blind left eye toward her. She was the only person he allowed to sit on

that side. Though she saw no more of his face than the broken-nosed

profile against the brilliance of the open door, she could feel the thought

moving through him, the tension in those heavy shoulders. "Face it,

Chief. If this woman Kaletha doesn't teach you how to use your

powers, who will?"

He moved his head a little, and she had a glimpse of the amber

glint of his eye. Then he turned away again. "She's not the only wizard

in the world."

"I thought we'd just established there weren't any at all."

"I don't like her."

"When you had the school at Wrynde, did the people who came

to learn the arts of war from you need to like you?" When he didn't

answer, she added, "If you're starving, do you need to like the baker

from whom you buy your bread?"

He looked back at her then, a deep flame of annoyance in his eye

that she'd read the truth in him. She drank off her beer and set the

tankard down; her forearms, below the rolled sleeves of her

blue-and-white embroidered shirt, were muscled like a man's, marked

with the white scars of old wars. Across the common room under the

glare of the bar lamps, a couple of women in the dusty clothes of

miners were flirting with a lovely young man in brown silk, their voices a

low mixture of sound, like a perfume of roses and musk.

"If you want to move on, you know I'll ride with you. You know I

don't understand wizardry, or the needs of power. But you called

Kaletha an armed idiot for having power and not using it wisely. What

does that make you?"

Anger flared in that slitted yellow eye-she was reminded of a big,

dusty lion baited in its lair and about to growl. But she met his gaze

calmly, challenging him to deny what she said, and, after a moment, it

fell. There was a long silence.

Then he sighed and pushed his half-finished tankard from him. "If it

was battle, I'd know what to do," he said, very quietly, in a voice she

seldom heard him use to her and never to anyone else. "I've been a

soldier all my life, Hawk. I have an instinct of fighting that I trust,

because it's been borne out in battle after battle. But I'm mageborn.

Whether I like it or not, there's a wizard inside of me-not buried and

whispering, as it is with the mageborn when their powers first stir, but

grown and wild as a dragon. I passed through the Great Trial into the

fullness of power without getting even the teaching that most mageborn

managed to pick up in secret from the local grannies when Altiokis was

alive and killing off wizards. It's like being born, not as a baby, but as a

man-having no more mind than a baby, but wanting what a man wants."

Broodingly, he cradled the tankard between his blunt-fingered

hands. Away from the lamplight near the bar, the shadows were

darkening; the wind that ghosted through the door was cooler now than

the trapped, stuffy-smelling heat, scented with dust and the wildness of

the desert evening.

"There are times when the want consumes me. In the nine months

since I came to the power, it's been like a fire inside me, burning me up.

That patchwork of learning I was able to pick up in Mandrigyn before I

was banished makes no sense to me. I have instincts shouting at me

that mean nothing to me, and I don't know whether they're right or will

lead me to a quick death and the Cold Hells. Sometimes I wish by all

the spirits of my ancestors I'd been born like my father, just a great

crafty beast; and other times ... " He shook his head, with the nearest

admission to helplessness Starhawk had seen from him in all the years

since they had met.

Impulsively, she leaned across to him and put her hand on his; his

fingers closed warm and rough around hers, accepting a comfort

neither of them would even have considered a year ago. His hoarse

voice was like the scrape of blown sand in the gloom. "There's a vision

in me of myself, from long before I came to my powers-one I had as a

child, though I couldn't speak of it then. But it's come back to me since

I passed through the Great Trial. It's a vision of looking at a great

blazing fire and wanting to grasp the core of the flame in my bare hand,

knowing it will hurt-but knowing that when the flesh is all burned off, I'll

be able to wield that core like a sword."

Behind the long bar of sleeve-polished pine, the owner of the

Longhorn was lighting candles-dented tin lusters throwing back a rancid

light. Outside, shadows of the spur-ranges of the Dragon's Backbone

had covered the town, the hem fringe of the garment of night. Miners,

townsmen, and those who rode herd on the tough, long-horned cattle

were coming in, dusty and cursing from work. They were mostly the

fair-skinned, blond, or red-haired stock of the north, whence the

Middle Kingdoms had acquired their slaves, but with a fair sprinkling of

the dark-haired people of the Middle Kingdoms themselves, and the

black folk of the long, golden coastlines of the southern Megantic.

Among them, striking in their white robes and head veils, were the

swarthy shirdar, the desert dwellers, who recognized not the King of

Wen-shar, but the Ancient Houses of the old Desert Lords. Voices

jostled in the warm dimness against the smells of old sweat of

work-soiled garments, of white or amber liquor, and of the milky

sweetness of beeswax. A round-shouldered little black man in his

sixties, the tracks of some ancient battle overlying old ornamental

scarring on his face, his body hard as twisted ebony from work in spite

of the richness of his clothes, ordered drinks for everyone in the place

to thunderous applause.

As the owner's boy and girl began circulating with a tray of beer

and whiskey, the little man raised his hands. Candle flame caught on his

rings. Starhawk, though never much of a looter in her years as a

mercenary, had acquired a professional soldier's quick eye; she

reckoned each of them at five gold pieces, a staggering sum to be

carrying around on one's hands, particularly on the cordillera. In a voice

several times the size of his tough little body, the man bellowed, "This

drink is for the honor of the Princess Taswind! We'll serve it and we'll

fight for it, come what may!"

Though Starhawk had no idea who the Princess Taswind was, she

took a blunt pottery cup of liquor the color of henna from the tray the

barboy offered her. Sun Wolf shook his head at the offer of another

beer. After passing through the Great Trial, it had been months before

he'd been able to touch alcohol at all. There was a chorus of cheers,

some woman's raucous whoop riding up over them like a descant.

Beside the bar one of the brown-faced shirdar warriors pushed back

his head veils and raised his cup as the noise subsided a little. "And

drink also to her lord and husband to be, Incarsyn of Hasdrozaboth,

Lord of the Dunes!" Under the veils, black hair, long and thick as a

woman's and braided against the dust, framed a hawk-thin face that

was handsome, proud, and very young.

The three warriors with him-all young men and none of them

over twenty, Starhawk thought-put aside their veils and lifted their

cups. Their piercing cry rang against the sudden silence of the room like

the discordant clatter of a dropped tray.

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 ... "

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摘要：

THEWITCHESOFWENSHARBarbaraHambly[19sep2002-scannedfor#bookz][26sep2002-proofedfor#bookz]CHAPTER1"Youmaybeawizard,mylady,"SunWolfsaid,tuckinghisbighandsbehindthebuckleofhisbatteredswordbelt,"butyou'realsothebiggestdamnfoolI'veevermetinmylife."Everymanhasagift,Starhawksighedtoherself.WhydoIchoosetotra...

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Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar

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