The Witches Of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-04-23T20:39:21+00:00

By starlight, the empty quarter of the Palace had the disjointed appearance of a beast’s skeleton, rib and femur and tibia tracing where the walls had lain, amid a scattering of random vertebrae. The fragile whiteness picked out bleached edges and corners of wall and stone and the silken curve of miniature dunes whose crests frayed in the searching wind. Shadow swathed empty doors and windows and filled the mouths of a hundred courts and alleyways like black curtains of cobweb. The air was livid with electricity and the sulfur stench of power.

If he struck flint, Sun Wolf thought, standing in the sand-strewn court just inside the gate, the ether itself would explode.

Methodically, he began to quarter the ruins.

He carried no light, nor did he summon the foxfire of the mages, not wanting to confuse his eyes with what they saw in light and shadow. He was aware that it would be difficult in any case to see what he sought. Kaletha would have concealed the place from the casual eye, casting spells around the entrance to the cellar—if cellar it was—that would cause the glance to slip over the place, as it habitually slipped over so many things in common life. From his experience scouting and using scouts, Sun Wolf was well aware how few people could name every item in a room or tell whether a door opened outward or inward; most people, if asked, would be surprised to learn of the door. He had learned also how easy were the spells to make this happen.

So he walked through the empty courts carefully, marking with a little scribble of light each empty doorway through which he passed—temporary marks, which would fade with the sunlight and be gone. He counted on his fingers the four corners of every roofless cell he entered—old workshops with desiccated shards of benches tumbled where the sandstorms had left them along the walls, their corners deep in sand and shattered roof tiles, the dark rafters overhead murmuring with the voices of sleeping doves; what had once been kitchens, with foxes’ messes in their round little fireplaces; and roofless stables and byres filled with a whispering harlequin of shadow and the furtive scurry of nervous desert rats. The ones farther in had roof beams fallen down across them; nearer the inhabited portions of the Fortress, the beams, scarce in that treeless country, had been taken away. Even in the rare rains of the foothill winters, the thick walls, five and six feet wide at the base, were beginning to melt to shapeless lines of mud.

He made himself walk to every corner and touch the drifted mats of wood chips and sand there, knowing how illusions could make him think he had seen each shadowed corner look like every other. He knew that it was in the minute and singular checking of every detail that good siegecraft and good generalship—and, incidentally, good magic—lay, so only those with a certain methodical patience could master them.

Yet through it all, he was conscious of the magic moving in the night.

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