Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  In these days, with the drought spreading and the nomads pressing in on the rangelands all around the Seven Lakes, Oryn suspected they could be trusted still less.

  At Oryn’s side, his younger brother Barún looked thoughtful and scratched something on the wax note tablet he took from his trim military tunic. Probably, reflected Oryn sadly, a memorandum to himself about ordering golden arrowheads rather than silver for the palace guards to carry at the next ceremonial parade. Lord Nahul-Sarn, Lord Sarn’s cousin and most important landchief, whispered something to the merchant.

  “This isn’t just a matter of having no more cascades of fire at parties, no more clouds of butterflies dancing to the music in our gardens,” Oryn went on. He gestured with his fan to the corner of the pavilion, where Mohrvine’s court mage, an Earth Wizard named Aktis, sat next to the somberly brooding Blood Mage Ahure, who for many years had been Lord Jamornid’s adviser and pensioner. Beside him on the divan, Gray King, the biggest of the palace cats, sat up gravely and began to wash his paws. “It’s not even a matter of having to sleep in gauze tents nowadays because mosquito wards no longer operate, nor of finding herbal medicaments for what could once have been cured by the laying-on of a healer’s hands. Each year the rains have come later. Each year they have been thinner when they came. A man may walk across the Lake of Roses, and the Lake of Gazelles is barely a quarter the size it was in my father’s reign—a bare twelve years ago! Most of the Lake of Reeds is a marsh now and parts of it not even that.”

  “They are always thus, in dry years, my lord,” retorted Sarn.

  “How many dry years can we endure?” Oryn replied. “It takes longer for the Sun Mages to summon the rains, and it takes more mages each year—isn’t that so, Hathmar?”

  “It is, King.” The Archmage met his eyes squarely from behind spectacle lenses of ground and polished rock crystal whose use had become necessary to him, suddenly and terrifyingly, one morning eight years ago. Wizards’ eyes did not age like the eyes of ordinary men. Most mages routinely laid spells on them when letters began to blur with time or when the light began to seem less bright than it had.

  Hathmar looked exhausted, Oryn thought with a stab of pity. Eyesight was not the only thing mages preserved by means of their spells. With the silk-backed lattice drawn aside, the drift of voices from the Citadel floated faintly on the Golden air—the melancholy whisper of frankincense, the echo of sonorous horns. The Song had recommenced with the first lift of the sun above the horizon, and would continue until light was gone from the sky.

  Oryn guessed why Hathmar had decided that his presence among the singers could be dispensed with in favor of the council, and his heart ached for the old man. It would be, thought Oryn, as if his own hands had been cut off, so that he couldn’t play music anymore. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to pick up his harp one day and have only silence in his heart.

  “Last year the rains appeared on the fifth day of the singing,” the Archmage went on. His light, sweet voice could hold a note for a minute together, then leap into the illuminative scales of power without drawn breath. Even in normal conversation it was a joy to hear. “In the later years of your father’s rule they would come on the following morn, or afternoon at latest. In those days only the core of the singers went up to the Ring. The rest of us went about our business.”

  Ocher, gold dust, gypsum and doves’ blood stained his fingers as he gestured toward the sterile sky. “We have tried everything that we know to do,” he said. “Last year a longer ceremony seemed to work. The year before, greater numbers of mages. We have even admitted a woman-who-does-magic to our ranks . . . .” His tongue stumbled awkwardly over the construction of contradicting terms. “But nothing has changed.”

  “Exactly!” Lord Akarian lifted a portentous finger. “Nothing has changed because magic is against the will of Nebekht.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” snapped Lord Sarn—possibly because the House Sarn had been at odds with House Akarian over the vineyards along the shore of the White Lake, but more probably because his brother was heir to rulership of the college. “If it was against the will of Nebekht why didn’t Nebekht say something about it before? Nebekht isn’t even the god of wizards! Or the god of rain. Or the true god of war, for that matter, just the one they worship in the City of White Walls.”

  “Iron-Girdled Nebekht is the god of all things and commander of the universe,” pronounced the old lord piously. “He has always been. But for many centuries he hid himself among the ranks of the gods, pretending to be merely a war god.”

  “Why would he do a stupid thing like that?” demanded old Lord Nahul-Sarn, whose quarrels with the lord of the House Akarian stretched back to their mutual boyhood and an uncle’s preemptive marriage of an heiress. “You’re full of—”

  “Gentlemen!” Oryn cut in, having heard this argument many, many times before. “Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the rains are harder to bring. The fact also remains that we must find another way to bring water to the fields and the cities else we perish.”

  “We must trust wholly in Nebekht. Only by doing nothing, by casting ourselves utterly on his mercy—”

  “Remind me never to travel with you through bandit country.”

  “We can trust,” said Oryn. “And we will. But while we trust we must work on the aqueduct.” He crossed back to the table, where note tablets lay scattered like roof tiles after a storm. “And after it, others like it. We must.”

  “My lord!” Nahul-Sarn threw up his hands impatiently. “How do we know it will even work?”

  “It’s only a canal, after all,” reasoned Oryn. “They seem to work quite well between the lakes, and from the lakes to the fields. The Towns of the Coast have transported water this way from the mountain springs quite successfully in centuries past.”

  “For a dozen miles,” protested Sarn. “And only according to some notes your wizard found the gods alone know where. The men of the coast no longer use such things.”

  “The Springs of Koshlar are two hundred miles to the east!” put in Marsent-Jothek, the wealthiest of the rangeland sheikhs. “That thing you’re building extends only a dozen miles so far! The country beyond the Dead Hills crawls with nomads and robber barons and bands of wild teyn where it can support any life at all. We’ve already expended tens of thousands of bushels of corn, uncounted gallons of oil, fish and horses and supplies and herds, just in surveying the route, in preparing the ground. Now you’re asking us for more?”

  “I’m asking for more because I think we have less time than I at first believed.” The king looked around the pavilion again, saw Lord Sarn stubbornly disbelieving, Lord Akarian only waiting for his moment to resume his sermon. The lesser landchiefs, players in the endless negotiations over water rights, grazing rights, rulership of the clans and families who made up the Realm of the Seven Lakes, watched their lords, their lords’ rivals, and one another: the lords of the Nahul and Gathement branches of the Sarn; the lords of the Marsent, Terrnyi and Troven Jothek; Akarian’s two warrior sons with their heads cropped, like their father, in the striped pattern required by conversion to the True Way. All—and most especially the rangeland sheikhs—watched the nomad sheikhs whom Mohrvine had brought, wondering if Greatsword’s alliance with the deep-desert riders would hold through a rainless year.

  “And I’m saying there will be other aqueducts because we will need more than a single source. What if the rains never come?” Oryn had a deep voice, like dark brown velvet, strong and insistent at need. Up until a few years ago it had never occurred to him to use it as a tool, as a means of making men listen to anything other than the punch line of an elaborately told after-dinner tale.

  He missed those days. Missed being a scandal and a disgrace. Standing before his vassals—before the rivals of his house—he had a terrible sense of being an actor in a farce who has walked onstage into the most deadly of dramas scriptless and not at all properly costumed for the part. He would have laughed had
not lives been at stake.

  And all of this, he thought, they did not see.

  “What if the lakes sink away to nothing? It is happening—it has happened, in the north.”

  “Hundreds of years ago.” Jamornid’s jeweled fingers flicked impatiently.

  “And what if the sand-wights that inhabit the desert waste decide they don’t want your”—Lord Sarn deliberately mispronounced the word—“aqueduct coming through their haunts? What if the djinni take it into their heads to destroy the work crews, or the caravans that provide for them? They’ve destroyed caravans before. They can call sandstorms, bring the illusion of water to lead men astray. They can call men out of the night camps with the voices of their family and friends and lead them to their deaths in the waste. They can bring on plagues among man and beast. All these things djinni have done in the past. You take mages away from the Summoning to put wards of protection on the camps and heal the workers, and it’s no wonder they haven’t the strength to bring the rains. Just let them do what they’re best able to do.”

  “My lord.” The Blood Mage Ahure rose from his place on the divan and salaamed. His rich, portentous voice easily filled the Cedar Pavilion, at odds with the scabbed and crusted cuts that crisscrossed his shaved head and the stink of his un-cleaned black robes. “If my lord will permit me, I shall lend my Voice, my power, to this Summoning.”

  “The very thing!” Lord Jamornid bounced to his feet in a coruscation of topaz and gold. “Traditionally, of course, only the Sun Mages are involved in the Summoning—”

  “As they should be!” cut in Hathmar, rising to look up with indignation at the tall Blood Mage. “The sourcing of blood spells is completely incompatible! It would waste your time at best. At worst, it would interfere with the sourcing in the sun’s power.”

  “As if having a female-who-does-magic doesn’t?” retorted Sarn.

  “Oh, folly!” Lord Akarian flung up his hands in theatrical despair. “When will we learn to trust utterly in the bounty of Nebekht?”

  “When he sends some, I suppose.” Oryn never could pass up a good opening but, fortunately, Akarian wasn’t listening.

  “This isn’t only a question of the mages, you know.” Mohrvine’s cool voice sliced through the rising din, soft as always, and with the judicious tone of one who has cogitated deeply on aspects of the problem overlooked by all except his wise and long-suffering self. “Nor simply of getting the aqueduct to the Springs of Koshlar. Levies of guards will be needed to keep the robber sheikhs from piercing the pipes to water their camels. We’ll have to fight one war at least, and possibly more, with the tribesmen of the Koshlar Oasis who will object, once they notice how the springs diminish when we’re drawing off a river’s worth of water for our cities. And those armies too will need to be supplied, and the supply caravans to them guarded. For all I know the Koshlar tribesmen have mages, who may not have suffered a diminution of their powers, and in any case I cannot imagine the djinni letting armies and caravans pass unmolested. Yet no one has ever managed to get an arrangement of any sort with the djinni, or even to know whose side they would favor. Is that not so, Lord Soth?”

  He lifted one inquiring eyebrow—a trick Oryn had tried for years to imitate—and turned for confirmation not to his own court mage Aktis, but to Lord Soth, the man who for twenty years had been court mage to Taras Greatsword, until his powers left him, and then to his son. It had been one of the griefs of Oryn’s life to see that alert and scholarly old gentleman grow sloven and silent, sinking into his own private darkness.

  Now Soth Silverlord looked up and said, “The djinni look human sometimes—if it amuses them.” He looked as bad as Hathmar did, and nearly as old, though he was fifteen years younger; though his gingery hair had retreated from the top of his head and grayed down to his shoulders, the end of the long braid was still bright. Behind thick lenses of crystal his blue eyes were tired, and their color too seemed pale, as if rinsed away with weariness and pain. “It is true they do not think like humans. I’m not sure they would even appear if asked.”

  “I have had some degree of success,” intoned Ahure, “in summoning the spirits of the sands.” He threw a note of modesty into his voice, rather as Horbecht, the god of the sun’s rising, might have said I have had a little experience with Light. “I place my powers at my lord king’s disposal.”

  “Someone catch the king before he faints with joy,” muttered Aktis, who like most Earth Wizards had little use for Blood Mages. Ahure turned to glare, and Oryn said smoothly, “Thank you, my lord wizard. We’re extremely grateful.”

  “I’m sure we are,” put in Mohrvine, in his cheetah purr. “But surely it would be better to ask ourselves if we are overstraining our resources to meet a threat that is no threat at all? Isn’t it true, Lord Hathmar—Lord Soth—that during the reign of the last of the Akarian kings there was a period of—what was it, twenty years?—when the rains were slow in coming? When in fact it took longer, and more mages, to bring them?” And he raised one eyebrow again.

  “That was a matter of two days, of three at most.” The Archmage spoke grudgingly, for he had never liked Taras Greatsword’s youngest brother. “Not seven. And it was seventy years ago.”

  “But there was a time of diminution. And the rains did return. Was there any record at that time of the might of wizards becoming less powerful? Perhaps having greater difficulty in bringing the rains? Of their spells requiring more repetitions to work?”

  The pale eyes blinked warily behind their heavy rounds of crystal. “That I do not know, my lord.”

  Mohrvine made a small gesture as if his point were proved, and smiled.

  “And the fact that something of the kind may have taken place seventy years ago,” put in Soth irritably, “doesn’t explain why now certain women are beginning to manifest power.”

  “I’m sure that many of these ladies are convinced that their abilities are genuine.” The royal uncle inclined his head condescendingly, carefully keeping from looking anywhere in the vicinity of the pavilion’s latticed and silk-curtained inner wall. “But I’m sure that if you investigated each case carefully, you’d find a real wizard somewhere in the background.”

  “For what purpose?” Oryn’s plucked eyebrows shot up not at the implication, but at the number of lords in the room who murmured agreement and nodded wisely to one another. “Why on earth hide behind a woman’s skirts if you have power yourself? Particularly these days?”

  His uncle widened jewel-green eyes at him. “My lord, I’m only a simple soldier. What men think will bring them power is frequently beyond my ken. But I’ve seen enough dogs and horses and teyn doing mathematical proofs in marketplaces to know how those tricks are worked”—he glanced at the men around him, the dry quirk of his lips inviting them to share the jest—“and I don’t think anyone really believes Banzoo the Wonder Camel actually knows the square root of four. If you ask me, nephew, the teyn you’re putting to work on your aqueduct—which is a good idea, by the way, if you can find a closer source—would be more efficiently utilized in digging new wells and deepening the existing ones to last us through this dry period until the rains return in strength.” He gathered his gloves, his ivory-handled riding whip, and brought his feet under him. “Was there anything further?”

  This was insolence, but Oryn knew better than to invent a final item in council simply to assert his power to keep them there. He’d spent his childhood watching Mohrvine use his charm, his hospitality and his air of injured reasonableness to make Taras Greatsword appear to be a brainless braggart and to imply that Greatsword’s sons were, respectively, an obese poltroon and a gorgeous blockhead.

  The fact that there was truth in those portrayals only played into his hands, of course, reflected Oryn ruefully. His uncle was a caricaturist, like most political men. It is always easier to snicker at a caricature than to study a portrait in detail.

  “Far be it from me to keep you from your dinner, my lord.” Oryn gestured graciously toward th
e door with his fan. “And you, Lord Hathmar,” he added immediately, cutting off whatever riposte his uncle might unsheathe. “Will you take anything before returning to the singing?” He offered the old man his arm. “I know you’re eager to return.”

  The Archmage shook his head. Oryn guessed Hathmar would consume nothing until full dark; the mages who participated fasted through the Summoning. The cup of coffee and the small plate of heavenly morsels—dumplings, kebabs, moonjellies and the divinely delicious confection known as gazelle horns—that servants had set before him had gone untouched. Even as he spoke Oryn kept a corner of his eye on the various lords and landchiefs as they rose from the divan, and after helping Hathmar to his feet went to the door, to open it himself for their departure.

  As he was bowing the first man out—Lord Akarian, owing to that house’s ancient royal blood—Mohrvine paused and salaamed deeply to the latticed inner wall. “Madam, my best regards to you.” Head high, he took his proper place in the line and strolled from the pavilion and into the garden beyond.

  FOUR

  You know the man can’t be permitted to live.” Lord Sarn placed a broad, red hand on Oryn’s arm as the king moved to escort old Hathmar out of the pavilion and through the long Green Court, the outermost and greatest of the palace gardens, to the Golden Court and so to the outermost gates. “I’ve said so before and I don’t care who knows it.”

  “My dear Lord Sarn”—Oryn widened his hazel eyes at the man—“I can’t possibly do away with every man who’s insolent to the woman I love; I’d have to start by executing my cook.”