Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “He’s not a bad man,” Sheep Woman said, putting back her veils and accepting the teacup. “Please don’t think that of him. But when he drinks it’s like he turns into someone else. And he spends more and more of each day in the cafés, and it seems he’s always drinking now. I went to a wizard”—her voice hushed with respect—“but he said it wasn’t something he could do, to put a spell on a man’s heart so he wouldn’t drink so much. Then I heard about you.”

  “Isn’t that just like wizards.” Corn-Tassel Woman shook her head, exasperated, and grated a little more sugar from the heel of the loaf. She was a tall, stout woman, the blond hair for which Enak had named her at their marriage returning, slowly, to its original brightness under the influence of little cantrips and spells. Of course Enak would never hear of her bleaching it, though he had plenty to say about graying old mares who couldn’t give a man a decent ride anymore. Her movements were brisk, but her big hands were gentle as they patted the other woman’s bowed shoulder. “They can’t do this and they can’t do that, and nowadays they can’t even make a mouse ward that works, or keep the mosquitoes out of the house.” Old ward signs, the ocher faded with years and overlaid with generations of kitchen soot, ringed the windows and stretched across the thresholds of the kitchen’s three doorways: one into the yard, another into the tiny storeroom, and a third into the seryak—the public area of the house. Only the outside one had a wooden door. The others were curtained with weaving of Corn-Tassel Woman’s own bright, lively work.

  “Don’t you worry, doll baby,” she added kindly, giving the smaller woman a hug. “I’ve been thinking about Vorm’s drinking, and what I think is this: I’ll put a spell on him”—she held up a little tube of copper into which a rolled-up paper could be tucked in the manner of Earth Wizards’ spells that she’d observed—“so that when he drinks he’ll get sick: headache, throwing up, joints hurting, itching—everything I can think of. Ordinarily I wouldn’t put those kinds of bad spells on anyone, of course, but in this case I think it’s justified. That would be enough to stop anyone from drinking, don’t you think?”

  Sheep Woman nodded eagerly, eyes swimming with relief. The majority of the folk of these poorer quarters were of the neat-boned desert breed, like the farmers whose villages thickly dotted the shores of the Seven Lakes. Corn-Tassel Woman, like her husband’s family, was of the taller and fairer stock of the High Houses and the old merchant clans. “The wizards all say—I’ve been to them before—that it’s a man’s own decision whether he wants to drink or not,” Sheep Woman said. “But that isn’t right. There has to be some way to stop him.”

  “Well, if this doesn’t,” Corn-Tassel Woman said with a grin, taking her special bag of powders—ocher and silver and lamp-black and ash—from its hiding place beneath the hearth, “he can’t be stopped. And if he knew, he’d thank us.”

  Sheep Woman’s smile of gratitude was all the reward Corn-Tassel Woman needed. She felt a bright glee in herself as she spread out a slip of papyrus paper on the hearth. She was always happy to help, as she wished she could have helped her mother in the face of her father’s drunken violence—both had died long before Corn-Tassel Woman had realized she could make crying children sleep with a word and could take the sickness off the kitchen cats.

  Briefly she consulted the almanac for her own moon aspects and those of her friend, then whispered spell words as she ground a little ink onto the stone and mixed in water and spit. Sheep Woman huddled beside her in her thick, bright-colored shawl as Corn-Tassel Woman took up her quill, watching in fascination by the glow of the tiny fire.

  Corn-Tassel Woman thought for a time, pulling the magic out of the secret part of herself—the magic women weren’t Supposed to have, had never had . . . .

  Never until now.

  At last, she thought, marking the paper with those few High Script glyphs she’d been taught, at last I can help people. Can make people what they ought to be, for their own good.

  Maybe that’s why the gods are taking magic away from the wizards and giving it to us.

  Raeshaldis remembered very clearly when first she heard the rumor that magic was dying. She’d been nine then, old enough and big enough to climb over the stable-yard gate and walk about the market in her brother’s clothes. She’d been tall and thin even as a girl, and in the baggy trousers and embroidered shirt, tunic and short coat, with her delicate, rectangular jaw and her hair braided up under a rough hat, she’d looked enough like a boy to be taken for one. That was when she’d taken a boy’s name, calling herself Raeshaldis if anyone asked.

  The news that magic was dying had made her want to weep.

  Isna Faran, the gruff, elderly Earth Wizard who healed the sick in the Grand Bazaar and laid wards to keep mice from the granaries, had bristled his black whiskers and sworn it wasn’t true. Others agreed. How could it be true? That was like saying dogs would cease to be dogs—what else would they be, if not dogs? Like saying all the musicians in the world would simultaneously forget what tunes were. That birds would lose the ability to fly.

  A hundred contrary anecdotes were produced. Only last week Khitan Redbeard, the old Blood Mage over in the Tannery District, had written wards for the new king on the city granary, and everything over there was well. And Urnate Urla, another Earth Wizard who was court mage for Lord Sarn, had cured two of Lord Sarn’s teyn children of scorpion sting just by laying his hands on them. Of course magic lived.

  Well, there were charlatans—more every day, it seemed. Their spells wouldn’t work, that went without saying. But that didn’t mean magic itself was dying.

  Then Isna Faran hanged himself in his house. And Urnate Urla was called to lay words of healing on the Quail Concubine, Lord Sarn’s favorite, just to take a little summer fever off her. After tossing in delirium for three days the girl died, as had the next person the healer had tried to cure, and the next.

  People began to look more closely at their neighbors.

  If spells were less efficacious—nobody dared to say more than that at first—how would the landchiefs keep control of the teyn who tilled the grainfields and worked in the silver mines, who picked and milled the cotton? Teyn had no magic—there was even debate about how much of anything the slumped, white-furred humanoids understood—but they did have cunning. In addition to the thousands domesticated around the Seven Lakes, there were wild bands that roved the desert. How would they be kept at bay?

  How would the sick be healed if the hands of the wise men lost their power to cure?

  How would mice be kept from the great clay storehouses of the city’s grain? What would happen the next time black clouds of locusts billowed down from the desert wastes?

  And, most critically, how would rain be brought each spring, to fill the Seven Lakes and quicken the growing crops along their shores?

  The new king, fat and lazy and bejeweled, roused himself from among his concubines and called a meeting of his land-chiefs, of the other great clan lords and of the lesser rangeland sheikhs, and of the mages from all the cities around the Seven Lakes that comprised the realm. But nothing much was done.

  It simply wasn’t true. And it couldn’t be true.

  Walking about near the Southern Gate, where the camel trains came in from far-off Ith and the Towns of the Coast with their loads of fine porcelains, of amber and pig iron, or from the deep-desert nomad sheikhs with longer-lived and hardier wild teyn, Raeshaldis one day heard shouting and cursing and ran to see. She was eleven by that time, and knew all the wizards around the Bazaar District where her grandfather’s house was—Urnate Urla, and Aktis, and old Ghroon the Pyromancer—and those from other districts of the Yellow City as well. She was careful around them, well aware that if she called attention to herself they could probably see through her boy’s disguise. They had always fascinated her, and when she heard the rumors about magic failing she’d felt horrible, as if something were being taken away from her. Of course that was absurd, since women had no magic and never had.


  She ran down the little crooked street near the southern wall where the crowd was gathered, and so was in front and saw everything clearly. It was the street of the dyers, and everything stank of dye and soap and the piss that the dyers used to set the color: a tangle of little houses, white or brown or pink-washed stucco piled up on top of each other, all marked with mouse runes in ocher and indigo, with ladders and little windows and sometimes vegetable gardens growing on the roofs. The gutters flowed bright with streams of blue and red and green from the round dye-yard vats.

  A woman was sitting on the threshold of a dye yard making fire without touching the wood.

  The sight went through Raeshaldis like the blade of a knife. Like the noon blare of sun unshuttered suddenly into a darkened room.

  The woman looked to be about thirty, chubby and ordinary. Like most women of the working people, she didn’t veil her face, and the veil that covered her hair didn’t hide its coarse, black straggles. Her sleeves were rolled back, her brown arms and legs bare, her breasts saggy under a couple of layers of rough linen and goat hair. The bunch of friends gathered around her were of much the same type. She’d made a little pile of sticks and cotton fluff before her on the yard’s wide stone threshold, and she pressed her hands together and looked at the wood, and the wood caught fire.

  Then she scooped up a handful of dust and smothered the flame and scattered the wood. And rebuilt the pile and looked at it again. First smoke curled forth, then pale bright tongues of light, almost invisible in the day.

  A boy named Seb Dolek, Urnate Urla’s apprentice, who was fifteen then and had been the god of his father’s house since his powers first became evident when he was five, jeered, “Yeah, you right—” marketplace slang to express his mocking disbelief. “Show me another, Mama.” Someone else went into the nearby house to find the wizard there who was really starting the fires, but he came out shaking his head and said, “Place is empty.” Other men—fair-skinned merchants from the cotton market, some of the dyers and a silversmith from the next street—looked in every house on the street.

  But even then Raeshaldis knew.

  And the whole core of her quivered with wonderment, and she thought, It’s true.

  Young Seb Dolek kicked the burning twigs into the street, scuffed them out with booted feet. The woman looked up at him with her dark wondering eyes, then looked at the charred twigs lying around in the widened circle of the spectators . . . . And all the twigs burst into flame again.

  “You see?” The woman’s smile was gap-toothed with child-bearing, brilliant with relief. “Magic isn’t dead! It isn’t dying!”

  Shaldis felt that she would throw up, or weep, or laugh.

  It was the first time she had seen a woman work magic.

  The first time anyone present had.

  There was a word for men who weren’t wizards—kyne, they were called, though she’d learned later at the college that wizards called them Empties among themselves. There wasn’t a word for women who weren’t wizards, because magic was a thing that had never appeared in women before. It was like asking for a word for a woman who wasn’t a man. And there definitely wasn’t a word for a woman who did magic. Looking around her in the crowd, Shaldis—aged eleven, in her brother’s clothes—saw in the faces of the men all the expressions she’d later see when men looked at her. Disbelief, mostly, and annoyance that she’d say it was so.

  And anger.

  The anger of the other novices in the college, cheated of the birthright they’d come to take for granted.

  The anger of the Master of Novices, who hadn’t been able to work a spell in seven years. Shouldn’t a student of your great abilities . . . ?

  A man came out of the crowd, parted the front of his pantaloons and pissed on the fire, putting it out. The woman looked up in shock, and Shaldis saw her face change from joy to terror, and knew this was the husband. He grabbed the woman by the arm and slapped her, said, “I told you not to go running around the town playing these tricks! Making me a laughingstock!” And men began to call out jovially, offering to buy her—“Bet she had to learn magic just to get your sword in battle order!”

  There was laughter all around them as he shoved her away down the street.

  Shaldis didn’t know what ever became of her.

  But she had thought of her today, whoever she had been. Had thought of her the day before, and for the four days prior to that, in the chill brittle glory of the Citadel Ring, from sunrise to the final fading of the light.

  Thought of her as she’d focused all her energy, all her magic, on calling the rain, in a ceremony that according to college records had not taken more than two hours, sixty years ago. Not more than half a day as recently as thirty.

  Shaldis had come back from the market that day six years ago not knowing whether to laugh or to weep, and had told her father that magic wasn’t dying. It was only turning into something that women could work, instead of men. Her father had slapped her for lying and sent her back to the women’s side of the house with instructions for her mother to beat her.

  But what you know, you cannot unknow.

  TWO

  Pomegranate Woman dreamed about the Citadel of the Sun Mages, and a girl with amber eyes.

  She’d never been to the Citadel, of course. Up until a few years ago no women were even admitted past its outer gates. But she’d dreamed about it for as far back as she could recall.

  Back in the days when she’d been married—when she’d been the mother of girls, and had lived in a regular house, albeit a tiny one, near the great Eastern Gate, and had gone about the streets selling pomegranates from her husband’s orchard—she’d had a game with her daughters at bedtime. They’d bring her an object, an old earring found near the local baths, or some neighbor’s slipper, or a piece of broken pottery, and she’d make up a story about it. About the woman who wore the earring, and how she’d wanted to marry a handsome young neighbor but her father had given her instead to a fat middle-aged merchant who came to love her dearly; about the cobbler who made the slipper, and how he’d worked long and hard to buy a beautiful dog in the market from the caravans that came across the desert, two months’ journey, from the towns of the barren coast. After the girls went to sleep, Pomegranate Woman would sometimes dream about these people, seeing their lives go beyond the borders of her tale. Occasionally, she’d see people in the market who could be them.

  On the days of the Rain Song, when the antiphony of the Sun Mages’ chants flickered on the wind, when the slow, atonal crying of the horns whispered in every corner of the city and the air smelled of ozone and frankincense, she would dream of the Citadel Ring. See the novices in their white robes and the adepts in gold-figured blue, the masters burning like flame in panoplies of sapphire and crystal. See every gesture and sign, every sigil written on the peach-colored sandstone flooring, each cloud as they gathered in the infinite sky.

  So she felt she knew the Ring, and wasn’t surprised to find herself walking there again.

  It was empty at this hour. The full moon balanced a hand-breadth above the quicksilver waters of the Lake of the Sun, the stars just beginning to lose their intensity above the cliffs in the east. She was a little surprised in fact that the mages weren’t there already, laying out anew the sigils and runes, the glyphs and lines and triangles on the stone to focus the power of the air and the light. Though in all her other dreams the Ring was an open circle of space, tonight she saw a shoulder-high stone block there, like the altar of some unknown god.

  “That isn’t right,” said Pomegranate Woman to Pontifer Pig, who trotted at her side as he had trotted for years. He cocked his big, white, silky ears at her, regarded her with bright black eyes. “That shouldn’t be there.”

  She walked over to investigate, even though she knew this was only a dream.

  A girl lay on the stone block, her thin silk shift torn half off her and her flesh gleaming like the petals of a lily. Soft straight hair, dark gold like sage honey, rippled down
off the edge of the block, hanging nearly to the ground.

  Bright scarves or rags bound her hands above her head and roped her ankles to the corners of the block. She must have heard the rustle of Pomegranate Woman’s shabby garments, the click of Pontifer’s little cloven hooves on the stone, for she turned her head and her eyes were honey colored like her hair, and wide with terror and pain.

  “Don’t be afraid, dearest,” said Pomegranate Woman, though she herself was profoundly uneasy. “This is only a dream.”

  But she looked around her at the cold stillness of the dawn and thought, This isn’t right. It isn’t the right dream. The Ring looked all right, but now there was no Citadel around it. The cliffs of wind-carved golden sandstone had vanished, replaced by strange rock-strewn hills half seen in darkness. Pomegranate Woman often argued with her dreams: It had driven poor Deem to distraction, the Good God bless his faithful heart.

  Wondering if, when she woke, Deem would be there alive again, Pomegranate Woman searched through her mismatched assortment of dresses and shirts for the scissors she usually carried, to cut this poor girl free. But she couldn’t find them, and she couldn’t wake up, and someone was coming.

  If it was the Archmage she’d be in trouble. They wouldn’t want to see any woman here, much less a raggedy old beggar-crone whose unruly cloak of ash-gray hair hung about her shoulders unveiled. But if it was the Archmage she’d have to go over and tell him that the poor young girl had no business in this dream that was frightening her so, and then they’d cast a spell on her, Pomegranate Woman, that would prevent her from dreaming about this place ever again. And that would be worse than anything.

  This was the reason she hurried to one of the three stairways that led down from this high place and crouched behind a baluster at the edge of the down-plunging cliff. She snapped her fingers for Pontifer, who’d stood on his hind legs with his forehooves against the stone block, sniffing worriedly at the girl with his pink snout; the white pig dropped down and ran to join her, crouching at Pomegranate Woman’s side.