Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  It wasn’t the Archmage who came.

  Pomegranate Woman tried to see his face and couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t have one. It was like trying to see into the heart of a moving storm. Cold wind flowed out of that blackness, and she saw blue light flicker, flashing as if far off and creeping over the stones.

  Pale hands held a thing that glittered as it moved.

  What the girl on the table saw Pomegranate Woman didn’t know. But she began to fight, trying to thrust herself away; dark blood bloomed on her bare heels where they scraped and shoved at the granite. Hips and back arched, head thrashing from side to side, and that dark shape within the darkness watched her, silhouetted against the searing stars, lambent with invisible fire and holding the moving thing of gold and crystal close at its breast.

  Pomegranate Woman thought, No. No, leave her alone . . . .

  And then Wake up. I have to wake up.

  Because she knew that what she was going to see was hideous, was something she wouldn’t want to remember, ever, dream or no dream.

  The white hands set the glittering thing on the stone between the girl’s knees, reached back within the darkness of itself to emerge with a knife. The girl’s body bucked and twisted as she screamed, but her voice rebounded from those scraggy bare hills, the dead obsidian sky.

  And the glittering thing moved, tiny, like a jeweled scorpion, flashing its barbed pincers, its four-jawed glittering tail.

  Its jointed iron legs moved like a spider’s, as it climbed up on the girl’s bare thigh. Its claws left beads of blood.

  Wake up! Wake up, girl—you don’t want to see this.

  Was there a way to wake the poor girl on the table?

  But Pomegranate Woman knew—more clearly than many things she knew in waking life—that to cry out, to call attention to herself, would bring that horror upon herself as well.

  It’s only a dream, she thought desperately—and understood that this was not true.

  Somewhere this is actually happening. Why don’t the Sun Mages hear? Why don’t they come and stop this?

  A second white hand took the girl by the hair, twisted her head to one side. The knife pierced the flesh just beneath her shuddering breasts, the blood spilling out blackly as the blade drew down. Pomegranate Woman saw the thing crawling up the girl’s slim white leg, over her bucking hip and belly. Saw it only distantly and in the confusion of starlight, heaving shadow, wrenching terror. It crept to the bleeding wound and crawled in. Blood fountained out, as if the thing had found the heart, and the girl’s scream ripped the night, her last breath shrieking to the stars that heard, but did not care.

  Pomegranate Woman jerked awake with a sensation like falling, to find Pontifer Pig shoving at her feet with his flat round snout. Gasping, she sat up, and the pig planted his hooves on the bed and regarded her worriedly with those bright, too-intelligent black eyes. Hand trembling, Pomegranate Woman pulled the blankets tight to her sagging breasts and tried to rid her brain of images that would not disappear.

  When she opened her eyes again the room seemed dark. For a moment she wondered if she was forty again, and Deem still alive. Would she have to grind his breakfast corn for him in an hour or so, and then go out herself into the lively early-morning streets to sell pomegranates? When she opened the door would she see the Salt-Pan Quarter as she remembered it, the streets brisk with vendors’ cries and the jingle of donkey bells?

  Would she have to face Deem again, knowing he was going to miss his footing while repairing Lord Nahul-Sarn’s rain tank and drown?

  Knowing that she’d have to go through all those weeks and months of madness again, of sorrow that no healer could lift from her, of lying quietly in the dark talking to Pontifer?

  No. She touched her long gray hair, the badge and reminder of her years.

  He saw me hiding behind the wall. He’s looking for me.

  Pomegranate Woman scrambled out of bed, pulled from the top of her blankets all the rest of her clothes—dresses of wool and camel hair and quilted cotton and a heavy old robe of silk given to her by a merchant’s wife—put them all on, one on top of another, and thrust her feet into her old boots. Without bothering to latch them she shot open the door bolt, hurried out into the etiolated dimness of the street, Pontifer trotting soundless at her heels. Drifts of sand and tumbleweed heaped the north-facing walls, and the dead, bare, gray tangles of vines hanging from roof garden and terrace scratched and fumbled in the predawn wind. Pomegranate Woman stopped long enough to latch up her boots, then hurried again not toward the city, whose wall rose blank and lightless at the end of the avenue, but outward to the open desert.

  She glanced toward where the Citadel was hidden by the towering bluff, black on the ashen sky. The moon’s nearly down—first light will be in an hour. Against the somber bulk of the city wall, specks and sprinkles of gold gemmed the Slaughterhouse District, which lay outside the Eastern Gate and between these ruined villas and the city. Wives lit breakfast fires, ground corn in the flickering light. Sheep bleated plaintively as they were driven to the markets. Pigs squealed in the shambles, a sound she hoped Pontifer didn’t understand. A cock crowed.

  At one time the whole Salt-Pan Quarter had been a comfortable and stylish suburb where villas stood among groves of date palm and tamarisk and even willows, fed by their own rain tanks, or by wells along the foot of the cliffs. The Slaughterhouse District had lain farther off, south of the road. But now even the beggars had abandoned these streets. The wind blew cold across the open desert, and it was a nuisance to walk all the way back to the Bronze Leopard Fountain for water—not to mention paying Xolnax and his thugs their fee.

  There was a law, of course, against enclosing public fountains, but the kings had never bothered much with the Slaughterhouse. She wondered, as she passed among the square brick pillars of this new construction they were building—this aqueduct—whether the water bosses would find a way to take it over as well.

  Beyond the suburbs, when first she’d lived here with Deem, there had been a strip of market gardens salvaged from the desert. When the rains were summoned the whole vast Valley of the Seven Lakes drank the blessing, out onto the ranges and scrubland of the desert’s edge. Wildflowers grew almost to the feet of the cliffs, and those who served the House Sarn and its subsidiary clans—which owned all this land to the northeast of the city around the bluffs—would farm a little, though personally Pomegranate Woman had always thought the wild pomegranates that grew in the canyons to be sweeter. Now, like the suburb, those market gardens were gone. Only little ridges marked where the fences between them had stood.

  Still, she found where Deem’s orchard had been. She could still feel under her fingers the prickly echo of the melon leaves that had grown there; still taste the sweetness of the new-picked corn at summer’s end. Still hear the women singing thanks to Darutha, god of rain, as they decked themselves with flowers. Sand filled the ridges of the ground as she walked over them, slid beneath her boots. Sand skated in over the lift of the desert and hissed across the ground.

  There wasn’t even a god who ruled the desert; the desert was a place where the gods didn’t go.

  Far out on the sand beneath the dimming stars, Pomegranate Woman gazed into the darkness. The darkness was clear, like something viewed through a polished sapphire, and she could see what looked like little fingerlets and flickers of greenish fire flashing among the sagebrush and ocotillo. She’d heard all her life about djinni, the Beautiful Ones, creatures of starlight and wind. The ones who did rule the desert. Mages could speak to them, and sometimes they went for a time to live in their crystal palaces, in their realms built all of magic, invisible to all but mage-born eyes.

  But this she had never heard of, these green whispers of light.

  She sat down and put her arm around Pontifer’s neck, trying not to think about the knife, and the girl, and the blood bursting out after that foul insect of crystal and gold had wriggled into the curled-back lips of the wound. Tried not to think a
bout the way the girl had screamed.

  There was nothing, she thought, in all she had ever heard, in all the stories she had absorbed from walls and stones and people, about this.

  Pomegranate Woman hugged her little friend in the bitter cold, taking comfort from his round, solid warmth, and wondered if she were the only one who knew.

  She stayed sitting on the desert’s edge with her pig until full dawn came and the clamor of the market carts could be heard entering the city’s gates.

  THREE

  So, just how long, exactly, are we to wait?”

  Oryn Jothek II, lord of the Seven Lakes and high king of the Yellow City, folded plump, bejeweled hands and considered the lords around his council table, mentally laying out a gaming board and putting wagers on each man’s response.

  Lord Sarn: His brother Benno’s the rector at the College of the Sun Mages and in line to become Archmage when dear old Hathmar steps down. A first-quality ruby and a thousand bushels of wheat that he’ll find some really good reason to give the Sun Mages more time. And he’ll take all the lesser Sarn landchiefs with him.

  Lord Jamornid: Five hundred bushels and a hundred yards of second-quality silk says he’ll go along. Can’t give dancing girls as take-home presents to your guests after a feast if he’s paying the extra taxes my plan will require. The rangeland sheikhs will back him because he controls their rights-of-way to the lakeshores.

  I’d wager a thousand acres of prime agricultural land and the teyn that work it that Lord Akarian will throw up his hands and refer the entire matter to the Prophet Lohar, the Mouth of the Great God Nebekht—provided I could find a taker. And perhaps the guild sergeants will go with him—Nebekht has many followers in the city—though it’s a safe bet the priests will find some reason to say nothing at this time.

  Lord Mohrvine . . .

  Oryn turned to consider his uncle’s profile, generally spoken of as hawklike but actually much more reminiscent of a trained cheetah who’s just killed your dog and hidden the body where you won’t find it until later.

  There is never any telling what Mohrvine will say.

  “Has it ever occurred to you . . .” Lord Akarian leaned forward, balding brow furrowed with earnestness. “Has it ever occurred to you, my lord, that these events—the delay of the rains, the death of wizards’ powers—are all part of a vast single intent, a great test, to which mankind is being put?” He had a narrow face like a mummified camel and the curiously clear skin and attenuated appearance of a strict vegetarian. In the course of twelve years’ reign and the some twenty-two years of life that had preceded it, Oryn had heard from Lord Akarian all about divination from lizard dung, the wisdom gained through lying in vats of tepid water (with and without rare herbs added), clarification of the thought processes by the burning of still other rare herbs in one’s navel, and petitioning the djinni for advice about field re-allotment—a notion that still made Oryn shudder almost as profoundly as did the half-cropped hairstyles affected by his lordship’s current cult. Each time he thought he had plumbed the depths of the great clan lord’s credulity, more was revealed.

  He said, “I beg your pardon?” Quite politely, he thought.

  “For centuries,” intoned Lord Akarian, clasping his fussy, brown-spotted hands before his chest, “mankind has been given the opportunity to learn, to grow and develop spiritually, under the sheltering care of a great commander who rules all the universe.” He used the same words—and precisely the same delivery—that Lohar, the Mouth of Nebekht, boomed out when proselytizing in the temple courtyards of every other god in the Yellow City. Oryn wondered if he’d taken notes or had been given a script by his mage.

  “But instead of using this time of shelter to seek out and do the bidding of that mighty power, we have ignored it, and turned to sorcery to heal our sick and protect our families. Now that the Iron-Girdled Nebekht has taken away these toys as a wise and loving parent will take a dagger from the hand of a foolish child . . .”

  Hathmar Enios, the white-haired old Archmage of the Sun, straightened up sharply on his leather cushion. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “And I suppose you didn’t have those ten court mages living in your house all those years mixing elixirs to make you wise?” retorted Lord Sarn. “Or rich, or able to see djinni, or whatever it was you were after in those days?”

  “I too was deceived.” Lord Akarian leaned back on the divan and turned sunken eyes ceilingward, as if to address Nebekht in his heavens. “Now that I have seen the ineffable truth that Nebekht has revealed through his holy Mouth . . .”

  “You were born deceived.” Lord Sarn’s sharp blue glance flicked to Hathmar, then on to Oryn, who sat on peacock-embroidered cushions at the head of the low table of purple bloodwood. “Your father was my best friend, my lord,” Lord Sarn said—which wasn’t true, but Oryn had better manners than to call him on the lie before the clan lords, landchiefs, and rangeland sheikhs assembled in the pavilion—“and I set you on your first horse as a child.” That was something else Sarn never failed to bring up, though the event had taken place thirty years ago and the poor pony had been heavily drugged. Even at four years old, Oryn had known the difference—had known, too, that he was being patronized. But his soldierly father had been delighted, considering his son far too taken up already with music, kittens and flowers.

  “So I think I may speak freely,” the big lord went on, “when I tell you that you may be over-hasty in this scheme of yours to build a whatever-it-is you want . . . .”

  “An aqueduct,” said Oryn with the scrupulous politeness that had been his only defense against his father’s murderous rages.

  Sarn gestured impatiently, as if the word—and the concept—were too ephemeral for him to waste valued brain space on. Not that he need have worried, reflected Oryn—he quite clearly had empty acres to spare. He reminded Oryn a great deal of his father, being built, like the dead king, along the lines of a granite cube on which a thin crop of yellowing grass had grown. “That’s understandable—you’re young.”

  “Well, I keep trying to think so.” Oryn picked up his peacock-feather fan, an affectation he’d begun in his youth to annoy his father but had kept up—why should women enjoy portable breezes while men sweated in stoic dignity? “As it happens, I’m not too young to know how to count, and by my count the Sun Mages have been singing for the rains for seven days now. Isn’t that so, my lord wizard?”

  He hated to hurt old Hathmar’s feelings, but the Archmage nodded matter-of-factly. “That is so, lord.” His long hair glistened like marble in the soft light that came down through the pavilion’s windowed dome and suffused the room from the screens of oiled paper and lattice that covered the terrace door.

  “Nor am I unable to read,” Oryn went on, rising in a great whisper of pleated teal-green silk and going to the door. “And never—not back to the beginnings of the Sun Mages’ records—have the rains been this late in coming, or taken so long to be called.”

  He slid the screen aside with a light hiss. Beyond the thin lacework of leafless vines, past the inlaid pink-and-gold marble of the terrace pillars, stretched the Lake of the Sun. As far as the eye could see, its banks were fringed with the spinach-green barrier of trees, the brown patchwork of waiting grain-fields. Between the fields, darker smudges marked the beds of canals. But no glint of water threaded the snuff-colored earth. Bucket hoists, just within the line of the fruit trees, ranked naked and awkward looking fifty feet inland from the water’s edge, dipping up and down with the pale stirrings of the teyn who worked them. Like lines of beggars waiting for a handout, smaller makeshift hoists stretched across the intervening distance, the water poured from trough to trough. The pale, shelving shore was already beginning to blow as dust.

  “Never have the waters of the lakes fallen this low.” Oryn turned back to his gathered lords, a tall, stout, curiously graceful man whose foppish clothing and carefully arranged chestnut lovelocks should have made him ridiculous. Stepping into the shoes o
f the fearsome Taras Greatsword—not that Oryn would have ever contemplated donning anything so clumsy as the old ruffian’s war boots in his life—he was aware that he could not be regarded as other than a poor second to that terrible old man. Greatsword’s attempts to make him other than he was, to kill his fondness for exquisite food, beautiful silks, perfect blossoms and interesting books, had only exaggerated his determination to make his reign a work of art in itself, an elegant balance of scholarship and dissipation.

  And so he would have, Oryn reflected. Had not, ten years ago, magic begun to fail.

  “For ten years now we’ve faced the possibility”—he would have said “fact,” but with Hathmar sitting at the table the word would have been both an insult to the college and hurtful to the old man—”that magic is changing. That what once we had we have no more.”

  He looked around the Cedar Pavilion’s council chamber. The great clan lords occupied the nearer ends of the cushioned divan that circled the chamber on three sides; the lesser landchiefs of each clan, sergeants from the guilds and families that owed them allegiance, and the priests of the Great Gods—Ean of the Mountains, Darutha of the Rains, Oan Echis, the lord of law—farther away—audience, not participants. The rangeland and near-desert sheikhs, and the representative of the merchants, occupied cushions of dyed leather at the end of the room. They’d have stood in his father’s time.

  No one contradicted. Mohrvine folded slim brown hands on his knees, his narrow face inscrutable. Though, like Oryn and Taras Greatsword, Taras’s younger brother Mohrvine had been raised in the palace called the House of the Marvelous Tower, these days Mohrvine affected the style and manners of the nomad sheikhs of the deep desert, among whom the House Jothek had many allies. He wore their simple white robes and wound back his silver-streaked dark hair on ebony sticks as they did. His jade-green eyes slid sidelong to Oryn, considering him with watchful contempt. Greatsword too had affected the same simplicity—and spoke loudly of the deep-desert nomads’ reputation for manliness, which Oryn took to mean abstention from bathing—without ever trusting them.