Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic Read Online Free PDF Page A

barely notice going down, but you notice it lots when it’s coming back up the other way half an hour before the sortie at dawn. I never seen so many roaches, chiggers, and ticks, and all the rats in the Middle Kingdoms have been living in the catapult ropes. And I’ll tell you something else—there’s not a cat in the camp anymore.
    “That’s how it started. Then the sapper tunnels started flooding. Tunnels where we’d checked the supports and didn’t see a worm or a splinter or so much as an ant—sorry, Chief, didn’t mean to mention ants—would collapse on us. One of ’em caught fire, and if you can figure out how that happened, I’ll give you a sweet. Then the horses would spook—first just in the lines at night, but these days they’ll do it in battle, or even riding back and forth to town—horses who were damn near foaled on a battlefield. We lost a dozen men including Gadget—you remember Gadget, the engineer?—when one of the ballistas collapsed. We still don’t know how that happened, but I was one of the guards on it the night before it packed in and I swear by the Queen of Hell’s corset nobody got near it.
    “There’s something going on there, Chief, and the troops are starting to spook.”
    Sun Wolf barely heard those last words. A wizard. Something inside him gave a great, excited bound, like a child who sees his father surreptitiously clearing another stall in the stables a week before his birthday feast. A wizard in Vorsal.
    For a year, since being banished from Mandrigyn, where his only potential teacher lived, he’d been seeking a master wizard, someone who had been trained in the use of those terrifying powers, someone who could train him. For a year he had traced rumors that led nowhere and run to earth every trail he could think of that might lead to another wizard, someone who could teach him what he was and what he could be. The last of those trails had ended in the dead city of Wenshar, in bloody shreds of black cloth and red hair and a staggering line of sticky red handprints leading away into dust-silted gloom.
    Across Dogbreath’s shoulder he met Starhawk’s eyes. But she said nothing, just sat at the table, silently shuffling and reshuffling the cards.
    His one eye flicked back to Dogbreath. “Why doesn’t Ari just pull out? Write it off as a lost cause, take his front money and get his rosy little backside up to Wrynde before the rains turn the badlands into a white-water death trap and strand his arse in the Middle Kingdoms for the winter?” Firecat and the Little Thurg, who’d scootched their chairs around to his bedside, looked down into their painted clay mugs and said nothing. “He did get front money, didn’t he?”
    “Well—not enough to buy food through the winter.”
    Sun Wolf cursed again, a comprehensive and hair-raising execration that included several generations of Ari’s descendants and all of his luckless ancestors.
    “It was some kind of a deal with the King-Council,” Dogbreath continued, unperturbed by his former commander’s eloquence. “Penpusher said . . . ”
    “Penpusher should have goddam known better than to get you in a position you couldn’t get out of!” He made a furious gesture and gasped as his wounded shoulder and the cracked ribs he’d acquired in Wenshar added their mite to the discussion.
    “That’s just it, Chief,” said Dogbreath. “We can’t get out of it, not now. Without the money we’re gonna starve in Wrynde, if we make it that far and, if we don’t break Vorsal soon, we’re gonna get hit by the rains anyway and stranded. Yeah, Kwest Mralwe might feed us through the winter, or they might turn against us, but either way, by spring, Laedden or Dalwirin is gonna get in the act and send an army against us that we won’t be in any shape to fight. And anyhow,” he added quietly, “if there is a hoodoo holed up in Vorsal, we might none of us make it to spring.”
    Sun Wolf leaned back against the flattened