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

stand with them, looking up. Starhawk edged down another few feet, the wall clearly burning hot to her touch.
    A voice yelled, “WATCH OUT!”
    And with a roar like the booming of blasting powder, the inn roof collapsed. The wall bulged, cracked, split-fire spewed from the cracks. Men and women fled in all directions, black against torrents of flame. In the slow-motion unreality of horror, Sun Wolf watched the whole building cave in, swallowing Starhawk and the child she carried in a firefall of burning beams.

Chapter 3
    “I’ll kill him,” whispered the Wolf. “I swear it by my ancestors.”
    He set down Starhawk’s limp hand, his own fingers shaking with fatigue, leaned against the carved proscenium that framed the cupboard-bed and closed his eye. Behind him, Dogbreath and Firecat exchanged a worried glance. In the doorway of the closetlike second-best bedroom, the woman of the house—the innkeeper’s fat wife’s sister—stood silent, her hands tucked beneath her apron for warmth, for in the long night and cold morning the fire in the room’s tiled hearth had burned low. In spite of it being nearly midday now the house was very still, save for the far-off sounds of a woman crying. The innkeeper’s wife’s sister bore the tracks of tears on her own thin cheeks. Though the single window was closed, a stench of ashes lingered on the air.
    Cautiously, Firecat said, “It looks like it was an accident, Chief.” She scratched her tangled red hair, her pointy face grave—she had been drinking buddies with Starhawk for years. “We all saw the potboy knock over the kindling basket early in the evening. When we helped him pick it up we probably missed some, that’s all.”
    The wood-paneled room had been long disused; it felt damp and cold and smelled faintly of mildew. The light that came through the thick, yellowish panes of the shut window had a sickly cast, and through the bumpy glass could be seen the still-smoldering ruins of the inn and the blackened acres of pine woods on the mountain behind. Sun Wolf raised his head slowly, the dust-colored stubble of his beard glittering and his yellow eye gleaming malevolently. “Potboy, hell!” His voice was the grate of a rusty nail. Though Dogbreath and Firecat had washed, their clothes looked as if they’d been through some particularly nasty street fighting; the Wolf’s face was still smeared with soot, against which the thong of his eyepatch had cut a pale streak, like a scar.
    From the bed beside him, a faint voice breathed, “Chief?”
    “Yeah?”
    Starhawk’s eyes remained shut, sunk in black hollows in a face chalky beneath its windburn and tan. Bits of her ivory-colored hair stuck out through the bandages around her head, strands so fine that they hung limply down like a child’s. Though she hadn’t been much burned, he had found neither breath nor pulse when they’d carried her here last night; in the darkness of the Invisible Circle, the deepest spirals of meditation where life begins and ends, it had taken him hours of seeking to bring her back. Too scoured to feel either victory or elation, he only reached out to gather her fingers into his again, to take comfort from the touch of her living flesh.
    Her lips barely moved. “Children?” she asked.
    “Baby and the girl are fine,” he said softly. “The little boy’s dead.”
    “Pox.”
    The child had been dead, his neck broken, when they’d dug him out of the rubble. It had saved Sun Wolf a decision—he had been, so far, only able to work healing magic on one person at a time. He didn’t know whether having proper training would have made a difference or not.
    Wearily, he looked around him. The small room faced north, dim and cold even in daylight, and the fire in its beehive hearth of blue and yellow tiles did little to warm it. The sister of the innkeeper’s wife—departing now to look after her kin—had married the town miller, and the house was commodious, given the size of the