Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

“You feel all right to travel in this weather?” Sun Wolf glanced sidelong down at the woman jostling through the crowds in the Steel Market by his side. Except for being thinner—and the close cut of the black doublet and hose she wore these days disguised that for the most part—and the cropped hair, which at the moment was mostly hidden by a tall-crowned hat with a cocky feather, Starhawk looked pretty much as she always had, like a killing weapon wrought of peeled bone and alabaster. He knew she still tired easily, though today, wandering through the stalls of the smiths and scissor grinders and weapon makers, some of the cool golden pinkness had returned to her cheekbones.

“Well, naturally I’d like to stay here and nurse my rheumatism all winter by the fire.” She shrugged and glanced up between the crowding houses and tenements at the gray millrace of the sky. It wasn’t raining for once, but, by the smell of the wind, it would be by nightfall. “But since, if you got killed, there’d be nobody to make coffee the way I like it, I guess I’ll force myself.” They split to pass on either side of a fat woman selling wheat-straw amulets and Saint’s Eyes from a blanket in the middle of the street, the bright-colored tangles of yarn and bead and bone like primitive flowers against the drab gray-yellow of the street and the buildings. Though officially disapproving of such holdovers from the days of the local sorceress-gods, the Church knew better than to try and root out such things. “Let’s not go back to Wenshar, though,” she added, putting a languid hand to her brow. “The desert air’s so hard on my complexion.”

“I didn’t mind the desert air so much as the ants,” Sun Wolf remarked. “We could head east over the mountains or up to the Marches. Grishka of Rhu owes me some favors, and the Goshawk should still be hiding out in Mallincore, if you don’t mind garlic and heresy for five months . . . ”

“Chief,” said the Hawk softly, “we’re being followed.”

Sun Wolf stopped at a knife seller’s stand and held a shining bodice dagger up for inspection and to look at the crowd behind him in the mirror of its blade. “Which one?” The relative niceness of the morning had brought citizens, virtually house-bound for the past two weeks by the unstinting storms, out in droves, and the Steel Market was crowded with servants in livery, beggars in rags, students in their gray gowns, and bourgeois gentlemen in the familiar black, white ruffs of varying width and extravagance nodding like dandelion puffs around their strangulated throats. But before the Hawk could reply, he spotted their shadow, cloaked in black and disguised in a blue leather carnival mask, lurking ineptly behind the ornate iron pillars of a public urinal. The cheap rings and the ancient opal signet were visible even in the chancy surface of the knife blade, and the Wolf swore under his breath.

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