and dark hair and the low, lazy voice asking, “Pretty-please?”
Sun Wolf laughed, and held out his hand; for a moment it was all the same—the casual camaraderie of a thousand other nights, the taste of beer and muscle, Penpusher’s grousing about cheap balladeers putting real minstrels out of work, Dogbreath’s outrageous stories—poker, jokes, boasting, rehashes of races or cockfights or what happened at the siege of Saltyre.
But it wasn’t. For the wizard in him smelled a change in the wind, a curious prickling of the hairs at his nape, like the passage of a ghost. For a moment he considered disregarding it, and spending the evening as he used to, drinking and playing cards, maybe with Opium on his knee . . .
And the smell on the wind, the sense of change, was indeed gone.
But it troubled him sufficiently that he shook his head and said, “Gotta be some other night, kids.”
“Aw, Daddy, please do us a magic trick?” Dogbreath begged in a schoolboy whine.
“Yeah, I’ll make you all disappear, how’s that?”
“Oh, too easy,” Opium protested with a flashing laugh. “All it’d take to make Zane disappear is soap and water.” And her eye caught the Wolf’s, half-teasing, half-asking, coffee-warm under kohl-dark lids.
After perhaps too long an instant he shook his head. “I might catch up with you later,” he half promised, his eyes going to Ari. “There’s things I got to do.”
Ari looked disappointed; the Little Thurg groused, “God’s toenails, he not only risks his life to save the lousy books but he reads ’em!”
“Watch out, Chief, that’ll give you hair on your eyeballs!”
The others craned their necks to look at the books scattered open across the bed where he’d been sitting.
“Jealous I know the alphabet?” the Wolf shot back, and they all laughed. “I can count, too.”
“How high?” challenged the little man fiercely, drawing himself up to his full five feet of red-and-purple puff-and-slash.
“Twenty—and without taking off my shoes.”
The Little Thurg’s face fell like an abashed monkey’s. In a hoarse stage whisper, Dogbreath asked Firecat, “What’s twenty?”
“It’s the number that comes after ‘some more.’ ”
To the Wolf, she confided, “Everything past twelve is higher mathematics to him because he needs help getting his shoes off.”
Zane’s next—unprintable—contribution to the conversation steered it into other channels; trading increasingly obscene banter, they jostled their way out of the tent and into the night in search of more entertaining game. Ari lingered for a moment, as if he would say something; past his shoulder, the Wolf got a glimpse of Opium’s dark, regretful gaze. Then they, too, were gone.
In the sudden quiet of the tent the Wolf felt curiously bereft.
But an instant later the faint sibilance of breeze was audible in the silence. Without the heavy stinks of wine and sweaty wool and the women’s perfumes the scent of the sea came plain. The weather had turned. The storms were coming in.
Cursing systematically, Sun Wolf thrust aside the cluttered table, pushed the cot back, and dragged up the filthy rugs that formed the floor of the tent. On the earth beneath he scratched with his dagger the Circle of Light, as large as he could make it in the restricted room—the great curves of the powers of air leading into it, the grand and the lesser stars. He worked the pattern from memory, sinking his mind into the runes of power, whispering the words that Yirth of Mandrigyn had given him, drawing the strength of the universe like glittering plasm into the marrow of his bones. In the points of the Great Star he kindled fires with pinches of the herbs he carried these days in his saddlebags, then touched the flame in the green bronze lamp, quenching it to a ribbon of smoke and darkness. He sank down through the darkness, to where the Invisible Circle lay like a coil of shadow and light.
Far below him, he could see
Sun Wolf laughed, and held out his hand; for a moment it was all the same—the casual camaraderie of a thousand other nights, the taste of beer and muscle, Penpusher’s grousing about cheap balladeers putting real minstrels out of work, Dogbreath’s outrageous stories—poker, jokes, boasting, rehashes of races or cockfights or what happened at the siege of Saltyre.
But it wasn’t. For the wizard in him smelled a change in the wind, a curious prickling of the hairs at his nape, like the passage of a ghost. For a moment he considered disregarding it, and spending the evening as he used to, drinking and playing cards, maybe with Opium on his knee . . .
And the smell on the wind, the sense of change, was indeed gone.
But it troubled him sufficiently that he shook his head and said, “Gotta be some other night, kids.”
“Aw, Daddy, please do us a magic trick?” Dogbreath begged in a schoolboy whine.
“Yeah, I’ll make you all disappear, how’s that?”
“Oh, too easy,” Opium protested with a flashing laugh. “All it’d take to make Zane disappear is soap and water.” And her eye caught the Wolf’s, half-teasing, half-asking, coffee-warm under kohl-dark lids.
After perhaps too long an instant he shook his head. “I might catch up with you later,” he half promised, his eyes going to Ari. “There’s things I got to do.”
Ari looked disappointed; the Little Thurg groused, “God’s toenails, he not only risks his life to save the lousy books but he reads ’em!”
“Watch out, Chief, that’ll give you hair on your eyeballs!”
The others craned their necks to look at the books scattered open across the bed where he’d been sitting.
“Jealous I know the alphabet?” the Wolf shot back, and they all laughed. “I can count, too.”
“How high?” challenged the little man fiercely, drawing himself up to his full five feet of red-and-purple puff-and-slash.
“Twenty—and without taking off my shoes.”
The Little Thurg’s face fell like an abashed monkey’s. In a hoarse stage whisper, Dogbreath asked Firecat, “What’s twenty?”
“It’s the number that comes after ‘some more.’ ”
To the Wolf, she confided, “Everything past twelve is higher mathematics to him because he needs help getting his shoes off.”
Zane’s next—unprintable—contribution to the conversation steered it into other channels; trading increasingly obscene banter, they jostled their way out of the tent and into the night in search of more entertaining game. Ari lingered for a moment, as if he would say something; past his shoulder, the Wolf got a glimpse of Opium’s dark, regretful gaze. Then they, too, were gone.
In the sudden quiet of the tent the Wolf felt curiously bereft.
But an instant later the faint sibilance of breeze was audible in the silence. Without the heavy stinks of wine and sweaty wool and the women’s perfumes the scent of the sea came plain. The weather had turned. The storms were coming in.
Cursing systematically, Sun Wolf thrust aside the cluttered table, pushed the cot back, and dragged up the filthy rugs that formed the floor of the tent. On the earth beneath he scratched with his dagger the Circle of Light, as large as he could make it in the restricted room—the great curves of the powers of air leading into it, the grand and the lesser stars. He worked the pattern from memory, sinking his mind into the runes of power, whispering the words that Yirth of Mandrigyn had given him, drawing the strength of the universe like glittering plasm into the marrow of his bones. In the points of the Great Star he kindled fires with pinches of the herbs he carried these days in his saddlebags, then touched the flame in the green bronze lamp, quenching it to a ribbon of smoke and darkness. He sank down through the darkness, to where the Invisible Circle lay like a coil of shadow and light.
Far below him, he could see
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