Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

stunned. No, please . . . ! He shut his eye, as if that would blot from his mind the image of the Hawk walking away from him, black rolls of smoke closing her in . . . 
    Then he heard the Little Thurg swear and a woman scream and opened his eye once more.
    The shutters of the inn’s highest gable were kicked out from within. Smoke rolled forth, its underside catching the glare of flames from below like reflected sunlight on a summer tree against the sullen blackness of the sky. Something dropped from the window, whirling and twisting as it fell—a pair of saddlebags. As they plunged, a book fell free, to splat face-down in the wet muck of the yard. Sun Wolf barely noticed.
    Like everyone else in the inn yard, his gaze was riveted to the window as Starhawk emerged, carefully straddling the sill.
    A boy of about four was clinging like a monkey to her back, naked but for a rag of shirt, his flesh showing burned beneath it. Starhawk gently reached into the black maw of smoke behind her and helped out a girl of eight or nine, naked but unburned, with a baby tied to her back in the torn remains of her nightshirt. The Hawk pointed at the timbering and beam ends, lit by the flames pouring out of every window of the four storeys which separated them from the ground.
    Above the horrified silence, Dogbreath’s harsh voice yelled, “Somebody get a blanket, dammit!”
    The little girl began to descend.
    Only the Hawk, thought Sun Wolf, could have given a child like that confidence to do something most adults he knew would have thought twice about. The smoke in the window behind Starhawk was lit from within by the bloody glare of fire—sparks swirled out and onto the wind. The ochre light showed her scarred face black with a mask of smoke and grime and oily with sweat, but calm, as he had seen it for years in battle. Against the filth her eyes seemed very pale. The thatch overhead was already in flames. It couldn’t be very many minutes before the rafters collapsed, taking all the floors in between and very likely the wall with them . . . 
    She was giving the little girl all the time she could, in case she herself fell.
    When the girl had gone down far enough so that the odds were good a fall wouldn’t kill her, Starhawk swung herself cautiously out the window and started down. She moved slowly, overweighted by the child on her back—in many places the timbers and beam ends were smoking, the window sills flaming streaks against the soot-blackened plaster of the wall.
    There was a shrill scream and the girl beneath her slipped, skidding and falling, grabbing like a little animal at the beam ends of the first floor as they struck her. Nobody in all that chaos in the yard had managed to come up with a blanket and she hit the ground hard. A knot of people swallowed her up at once, one woman’s sobbing howls rising above the others. Starhawk, still up on the wall, stopped for a moment, her blackened face pressed to the plaster, the hot wind of the fire flattening her smutched white shirtsleeves and the pale flutter of her hair. Neither she nor the little boy clinging to her back made a sound. Then the baby’s crying sliced through the noise, wailing in terror and pain. The firelight splattered the mouthing faces, the line of buckets abandoned in the welter of puddles and mud.
    Dogbreath’s bass voice boomed, “She’s okay, just get her the hell out of the way . . . ”
    The crowd broke, milling uncertainly. Someone carried the girl, someone else the baby, back away from the wall that was now in flames.
    Somehow the Wolf got to his feet. Wobbly-kneed and shedding straw and muck from his patched breeches, he staggered from the midden toward the billowing heat of the blazing inn wall. Dogbreath, Firecat, and a fat woman who must have been the children’s mother still stood close enough to the wall to be scorched, but would not run away. As Sun Wolf joined them, the little girl, still naked, ran back out of the crowd to