Барбара Хэмбли: A Night with the Girls

She hoped she'd have time to do what she needed to do. Sun Wolf was a lot more convincing at this kind of thing than she was.

Prince Chare was no happier about being wakened in the smallest hours of the morning than Brannis Cornmonger had been. "Sign the Articles of Compromise?" he blustered. "Nonsense! The city is mine, to do with as I please. Who let you in here? Guards!"

"Your guards are taking a little nap right now." Battlesow touched a taper to the single candle Starhawk had lit at the Prince's bedside and went about the tent lighting lamps. Given the cost of oil and candles-beeswax, not tallow-the Prince was as extravagant about lights as he was about everything else. Gorgeous hangings of the bright-colored silks for which the Middle Kingdoms were famous covered the canvas walls; chairs of expensive inlay and enamel punctuated tufted rugs. Starhawk saw Battlesow pause by the dressing-table and pocket the Prince's emerald neck-chain and several of his rings.

"The city is not yours," said Councillor Toth indignantly. "You can't tax us as if we were a trading municipality and govern us as if we were a village of serfs. That recognition is all we ask."

"That's not all we ask!" retorted Cornmonger. "We demand-"

"I demand," said Starhawk, raising her usually soft voice to a cutting battle edge, "that you sign the Articles of Compromise-both of you-now. You, Cornmonger, summoned a wight, and you, Prince, knew of its existence. According to Butcher you've been covering up the disappearances of outpost guards for days. You don't care whether the people in the city or the soldiers who're fighting for your lands are being slaughtered by this thing, as long as you think you'll each get your way. Now sign the Articles and end the siege, or you will both pay-personally-for the situation you're letting continue."

She fished in the pouch at her belt and held up one of the broken brown fragments she'd dug from the mud: visibly a tooth. In the halo of candleflame her scarred, narrow face was stern and cold, anger and disgust at the waste and violence of war repeated a hundredfold, like the tongues of the wavering fires, in her gray eyes.

"By this I have summoned her," she said, in her best imitation of the Mother at the convent where she'd been raised when she told the girls why they had to be good. In fact it was only the native greediness of wights that would draw the creature, but these men didn't have to know that. "She's going to be here in about a minute and a half. What do you say?"

Prince Chare and the Mayor of Horran stared at one another in blazing defiance, two proud and wealthy men who had never had to pay personally for the consequences of their own actions. Chare opened his mouth to retort, then wrinkled his nose and said, "By the Three, what is that smell?"

Outside someone let out a yell, and the side of the tent billowed, sagged, and ripped. Brannis Cornmonger screamed. Battlesow and Starhawk sprang towards the wight-which had increased in size again-but before they reached it the Prince siezed the iron lampstand beside his bed-

"NO!" screamed Starhawk.

— and shoved the blazing ring of candles into the things distorted face.

The wight exploded into flame and kept on coming, reaching out five mismatched arms and a writhing mass of snake-heads. Starhawk slashed, stepped back, the oily heat beating against her face. Battlesow caught up the inlaid night-stand next to her and hurled it at the thing, scattering combs and prayer books in all directions but breaking its first rush to let Starhawk spring clear. Chare and Cornmonger fell over one another in their scramble for the door, Chare wearing the shocked expression of one who believed that fire would discourage almost any kind of attack and Cornmonger yelling at him "You mammering dolt!" Elia slashed with her halberd at the burning bones within the whirling fire, then snatched up the Articles of Compromise a moment before the carved table on which they lay caught fire, and fell back, still guarding Starhawk, to the tent door.

Moaning and howling, the wight kept coming, trying to claim its stolen teeth. Warriors came running, half-armed and naked, from their tents, camp slaves rushed to hurl water on the Prince's burning pavilion, and Starhawk fell back, slashing now with her sword, now with a soaked hanging she'd pulled from the tent wall and soused in a horse-trough, fighting to keep the wight off her while she made a retreat. Battlesow and Elia followed her example, fending off the blazing attacker with pole-weapons and dripping rugs while Butcher, with what Starhawk thought astonishing foresight, retreated behind her towards the place where they'd prepared the pyre, clearing her way of tent-ropes, camp debris, cookpots and firewood. The wight was a twenty-foot tower of flame, dry bones, and dripping flesh devoured and absorbed, leaving only an armature of fire, and the fire strode through the camp's darkness howling and crying its rage.

This plan better work, thought Starhawk. She had no idea if it would and wanted to knock together the heads of Prince and Mayor for getting her into this situation. Where the hell was Sun Wolf when you needed him anyway? He was the one who knew about magic, not her.

"We got it!" yelled someone-Dogbreath, she thought-"We got it, Hawk, we'll save you!"

She didn't dare turn her head until the last second, when her mercenary pals Dogbreath and Penpusher crossed the line of her vision hauling one of the wheeled water-butts from which they watered the mules. She yelled "Don't…!" too late as they levered the thing over, three hundred gallons spewing forth over the wight…

… which rose in a heaving column of animate liquid and poured over her in a wave.

She sprang sideways, coughing, drowning, water forcing itself into her nose, her mouth. Water surged around her, slowing her steps, dragging her back, water that shrieked in her ears and blinded her eyes and ripped and tore at her hands.

Battlesow yanked her out of the maelstrom by main force and dragged her in the direction of the pyre, a riptide heaving and pulling at their feet, slowing them while the cresting, thrashing waterspout pursued them through the camp. Coughing, Starhawk gasped, "Don't let anybody else help me! I know what I'm doing!"

Back at the convent I'd have been doing pennance till Yule for a lie like that.

The pyre lay ahead of them. Teryne and a group of the mercenaries grouped around it, men and women dangerously quiet, muttering. Like Battlesow, they were perfectly willing to face war and weapons but not the vileness of black magic in the dark. Too many had seen the heads and faces of the dead the wight had absorbed, and rumor was running fast. Barely able to breathe and half-blinded by spray, Starhawk saw on the pyre the thing she had sent Teryne to get, a burlap sack containing what appeared to be a collection of rags and sticks. The unfired wood glittered in the orange glare of the flaming brand in Terynes hand, and the smell of Blue Ruin, the cheap mere gin manufactured by Bron the quartermaster and his wife Opium, almost drowned the charnel stink of the wight. Starhawk wondered what the hell Bron had charged them for the gin. Knowing Bron-or more specifically knowing Opium-she was certain it hadn't been free.

The drag on her feet increased and she felt the spattering of spray on the back of her neck, heard the rattling, metallic roar in her ears. She stumbled, the pressure of the water incredibly strong, dropped her useless sword to yank from her belt the two brown fragments of tooth, closing them tight in her fist against the cold suction. "Torch it!" she yelled, and Teryne thrust the fire into the pyre's wood.

The alcohol-soaked tinder caught in a searing explosion of white heat, and in that second, Starhawk flung the teeth. The waterspout roared over her, throwing her to the soaked mud. A second explosion as the water struck the superhot flame, and billowing steam, scalding, flame-colored itself in the glare. Printed incandescent on her eyes, Starhawk had a vision of the sorry little sack on top of the pyre being consumed.