Free Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly Page A

boy. Since yesterday, he had his own frustration and resentment to chew at his soul.
    Kaletha’s method of training was entirely different from the brief, exhausting exercise in memorization he had undergone with the witch Yirth of Mandrigyn and from the dogged routines he had worked out for himself. He had learned to meditate from Starhawk and did so dawn and dusk, but Kaletha’s instructions in meditation were more complicated and involved her frequent intervention. “You must learn to change the harmonies of the music of your mind,” she said, kneeling before him in the latticed shade of a corner of the public gardens of the town, and Sun Wolf, to whom meditation had always been a matter of inner silence, again fought the urge to slap that smug look off her face.
    As an exercise, it seemed unbelievably trivial. But the White Witch’s other students didn’t seem to think so. In their various shaded niches along the colonnade at the top end of the public gardens where they usually met, they were all meditating with faces furrowed in either concentration or ecstasy—both, Sun Wolf suspected irritably, for their teacher’s benefit. Starhawk meditated alone and had taught him to do the same. The few times he had seen her at it, she had seemed relaxed, almost asleep. But then, he thought wryly to himself, it took more than communion with her soul to disturb the Hawk’s marble calm. He had known her for nine years and was still trying to figure out what it would take.
    He could see her, down across the blasting afternoon sunlight of the open court in the indigo arches of shade beyond, talking to the grizzled Norbas Milkom, owner of the Golden Vulture Mine. The black man’s scarred face split with a laugh; by their gestures, they were discussing the mountain campaign of eight years ago.
    In the afternoons, when the heat of the day had begun to burn itself off and the people woke from their siestas, half the population of Pardle Sho ended up in these gardens. The three acres of rambling walkways—under arbors of grape, jacaranda, and phoenix-vine, or of bare, sandy squares where occasional ancient orange and cypress trees stood but more often simply native cactus—covered the last footslopes of Mount Morian where the land was too irregular for even the builders of Pardle to put houses. Before the Revolt, the gardens had originally belonged to the governors of the slave-worked mines, and the ruins of the Palace formed their southern boundary. But now they were the favorite promenade of the town, where people came in the afternoons to talk, hear gossip, meet their friends, flirt, transact personal business, or listen to the singers who sat in their shaded corners, caps full of pennies before them. It wasn’t unusual for itinerant teachers to meet with their students there; at the other end of the colonnade Sun Wolf knew one brisk little man could always be found teaching engineering to a class of one or two.
    Kaletha’s voice came to him, measured as if each word were a precious thing to be cherished by its lucky recipient. “Purity of the body is the greatest necessity of magic,” she emphasized for the third or fourth time that day. She was speaking to Luatha Welldig, a fat, discontented-looking woman of forty or so, dressed, like all of them except the Wolf and Egaldus, the Trinitarian novice, in severe and unbecoming black, but her glance flicked to Sun Wolf as she spoke. “Without purity of the body—freedom from spiritous liquors, from overindulgence, from the crudities of fornication—” she was looking straight at him as she emphasized the word, “—the mind remains a prisoner in the maze of the senses. The body must be pure, if the mind is to be free. All magic rises from the mind, the intellect, the reason.”
    “That isn’t true,” Sun Wolf said, looking up.
    Kaletha’s pink lips lost their curves and flattened into a disapproving line. “Naturally, you’d prefer not to believe so.”
    He shook