Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  He has no fear, had said Meliangobet. He’d been friend to Hathmar’s master Gemmuz, ninety years ago in the days of the Akarian kings. According to the Citadel records, he—or it—had been friend to Gemmuz’s master’s master Wrotyn Rainlord before that. His appearances were attested to by records stretching back six hundred years.

  Best you learn it, little prince, said Naruansich. In records he was described sometimes as a jeweled snake, or as a young boy; sometimes only as a burning light. Oryn remembered him as being white as lilies and fire. You will need the lesson.

  Then they were gone. Looking back to the rock where Hathmar had drawn the circle and made the summons, the child Oryn saw that he’d come much farther from it than he’d thought, two or three hundred feet. His father, running toward him over the rocky dust, was pale as a sick man, though of course once he had his son safe in hand again he grabbed his arm and struck him, leaving bruises that lasted weeks.

  Returning to that same turtlebacked stone hillock with the Summer Concubine under the white, full midnight moon brought the memory back as if it had been yesterday. Amazement that no ill had befallen him. The lingering sweetness of Meliangobet’s smile.

  “Soth wasn’t angry, was he?” The Summer Concubine slipped from her saddle, tied the rein to one of the palm stumps near the rock’s foot. Oryn guessed there had been a water hole here once. The horses pawed and snuffed in vain. The flat miles stretched in all directions, the Lake of the Sun no more than a thread of silver, the city walls a dark rumple, like dropped velvet with a gold spangle or two still catching the light. The bluffs were black loaves, the cliffs of the true desert’s edge a long black knife blade slitting the pale land. Jackals howled. “Angry that I’m able to do the summoning? When I tried it at the last full moon he seemed to accept.”

  “He isn’t angry.” Oryn helped her take from the saddlebags the things Hathmar had used for the summoning all those years ago, which had been brought down by the old man that morning before the council. In the past eight years, with the rains coming later and later, with the rumors of magic’s fading blowing like poisoned dust through the marketplaces and alleys, Hathmar had come out here—and to other places in the wastelands—at least a dozen times, calling on the name of his friend. Or the spirit who he thought had been his friend, and his master’s friend before. There had been no response.

  “He isn’t angry at you, anyway.” He carried the implements up onto the broad curved rock. They were beautiful things, old and mellow and sweet with years: lamps of gold whose light shone forth through circles of cabochon gems, water vessels carved of blue amber no bigger than thimbles, rough fragments of crystal woven round with silver wire and knots of iron containing the bones of hares. Each element, metal or jewel, was tuned to some unknown note of the secret harmonies of power. Each object held power of its own.

  By moonlight bright as the glow of lamps, the Summer Concubine laid out the circle of power, drew hands of salt around the crystals and power rings around the candles and the frankincense, around the vessels of iron and gold. Powdered silver and animal bone, and three caged doves, to be killed for their blood. Other mages used other methods to summon other djinni—it was said the Eyeless One favored human blood, dribbled from the summoner’s arms down onto the sand—but in eight years Oryn had not heard of a single mage whose attempt to speak to the djinni had succeeded.

  Why?

  The last time he had seen Meliangobet—to the best of his knowledge, almost the last time any mage had seen any of the spirits—had been twelve years ago. You have lived to be a king, little prince, that sweet voice had said into his mind. And you have won by your patience the flower you sought. Oryn was less surprised that the djinn knew about his love for the Summer Concubine, for the Beautiful Ones were popularly believed to be able to see into men’s dreams, than that Meliangobet felt any concern about the matter.

  There were more of them on that second occasion than on the first, a great convocation of the spirits of the night and the sand and the wind. Oryn had never been able to see more than two or three at a time, but he sensed the others all around, as if they stood behind curtains of blowing black gauze. Mocking a little, especially the strange ones like the Eyeless One, or the thing men called Smoke of Burning, as if they read something in his face that amused them, like adults who hear a child boast of subduing armies with a wooden sword. Most had merely studied him. A few, Oryn had thought, looked profoundly sad. That might only have been his imagination. Later Hathmar had said, “I’ve never seen so many come to see a new king.”

  Now, twelve years later, wrapped in his sable cloak and straining his eyes for the far-off glitter of their coming, Oryn wondered if they’d known.

  Is that why they won’t come? Because they know we’re dying, and know we’ll ask them about it?

  A dozen feet from the protective circle she’d drawn around him, the Summer Concubine raised her arms, face wreathed with smoke, hair loosened and eyes shut in a trance.

  Or was it just that, like men, the djinni didn’t care for spells woven by womankind?

  Oryn pressed his hands to his eyes, praying that when he opened them again it would be to see the far-off whirlwind of jeweled magic coming toward them across the endless sand, faster than a horse could run. It can’t be true that we’re all going to die, he told himself. There has to be some way out of this. Some way of buying time enough to finish the aqueduct—and others like it—before the lakes shriveled away and people began to starve.

  He’d thought the tall, skinny sixteen-year-old girl who’d come to the College of the Sun Mages in boy’s clothing a year and a half ago might be the answer, or an answer anyway. But so far she seemed to have lent nothing to the bringing of the rain. Seven days, he thought, aghast. And nowhere near enough grain in storage to last through a year like last year and provide seed.

  The sweet scent of the candles, burning behind the crystals that magnified their light, seemed to fill the night. He thought of the other women who had come forward, shyly—whom the Summer Concubine had tracked down by rumor and gossip in the city, or who had come to her of their own accord, each as different and as fascinating as a new strain of rose. Oryn couldn’t fathom how men could scorn women for age or unfashionably shaped noses when each woman was like an unread book: voice and hair and the color of her eyes.

  Their power wasn’t the same as that of the male wizards. They often couldn’t make spells work, or couldn’t make them work the same way. And of course they were completely untrained.

  But they had power. And so many wizards didn’t anymore.

  Did Ahure the Blood Mage, who’d so condescendingly offered to add his spells to those of the college tonight?

  Or Aktis, glancing around the council chamber with those bright, black cynical eyes?

  Did Lord Sarn’s brother Benno, who’d had to forswear his heritage as the Lord of House Sarn all those years ago when his powers had first been discovered?

  Or even Lohar, the mad prophet of Nebekht of the Iron Girdle? A former Sun Mage who’d claimed to have been visited in dreams by the minor war god of his home village, whom he now alleged to have created the universe?

  Oryn opened his eyes. Far away he thought he saw something like green flame, rags of whitish mist, among the shadows of the northern dunes. But he couldn’t be sure. In any case, it was nothing like the wonder and glory of the djinni. Nothing like anything he’d heard of before at all. And that, too, was disconcerting. Things were not as they had been, and there was no way to know whether they would ever be so again.

  And overhead he saw the moon riding in mid-heaven, surrounded now by thin streaks of gathering cloud.

  SIX

  Who is it?” Shaldis sat up in the darkness, heart punching at her ribs. She pulled the blanket tight to her chin against the brittle cold.

  Silence, and the thin skate of blown sand along the shutters of her window.

  A dream.

  She’d dreamed someone was calling her, call
ing for help.

  The words skirled away down the corridor of sleep and were swallowed.

  Shaldis lay back down. The rock-cut cubicle at the end of the novices’ row was narrow. At any time of the day or night she could hear the smallest whisper in the passageway outside. Since last night’s attack she’d put every spell of ward and guard she’d learned from the shadowmaster on the shutters and doors, not just the minor cantrips that sometimes kept the boys out and sometimes didn’t. No one in the Citadel was supposed to use this type of spell. She’d felt guilty about placing them, as if she were betraying the order. But the malice that had searched for her last night had no business in the order either. No one had chided her so far. Could it be there was truly no one left in the college with the power to detect them?

  Except the attacker, of course.

  Why did he still have power, if no one else did? And if he had such power as she’d felt last night, why that bitter rage?

  The worst of it was, she wasn’t certain the ward spells would do any good. Certainly her earlier wards had only worked against the other novices about half the time, though she knew they had no power. The memory of her attacker’s terrible strength came back to her, that crushing, alien cold.

  All day, standing among the other novices in the Ring, exhausted from last night’s terror, she had scanned the faces of the masters wondering about each man, Is it him?

  Benno Sarn the rector, administrator of the Citadel? That broad, red face framed by the flowing hair pale and brittle as bleached straw, those cold blue eyes that always looked so angry at having been forced to enter the order when he had been firstborn of the House Sarn. Had his powers not manifested when he was ten, old enough to know himself the heir, he’d be a clan lord now instead of a mage.

  Is it him?

  Old Rachnis the shadowmaster, a white, fragile spider that has spun its webs in the dark too long, his pale eyes blinking as he swayed. He’d long ago ceased trying to demonstrate the illusions he taught. At the last new moon of summer, when Shaldis was the only novice able to conceal herself with the spells of the white cloak or the gray cloak, the only one who could conjure shadows into the semblance of cats and flowers and frogs, he had seen the faces of the boys in the class and declared that he would henceforth teach each novice separately.

  Is it him?

  Maybe Brakt the loremaster, who handed Shaldis the grimoires and list books in the library in such rigid, disapproving silence? At the conference concerning her admission, he had inquired whether the presence of her body alone—“female flesh,” was how he’d put it—in the Citadel would shatter the essential magic of every spell wrought there and complete the ruin they hoped to avert.

  What about Hathmar himself, standing at the center of the great loops and intersecting lines of power, calling out the chants while the great horns sounded against the golden cliffs?

  Is it him?

  And if it is him, to whom can I go for help?

  Go to sleep, Shaldis told herself. You can’t do anything about this tonight.

  But she could not sleep. And as the wind groped at the shutters above her bed, she realized that she feared to sleep. There was magic somewhere. Far off, she thought, wispy like smoke . . . palpable as the dim jingling of shaken chains.

  Terrible magic. Magic alive, and awake. Magic that listened for her. Magic of a kind she had felt at no other time but last night.

  She must not go to sleep.

  How long she lay awake between the dream and the first stealthy rattle at her window shutter she didn’t know. Many hours, she thought. She had been taught to estimate the position of the stars, and of the sun beneath the earth, even when she could not see them, so that she could properly source their power. She had waked not more than an hour after full dark, and it was probably midnight when she realized that she could no longer see in the darkness of her room. If she had thought before of seeking help or comfort—From whom?—she shrank from it now, fearing what might be outside should she open the door. The window shutter rattled, though the wind had ceased an hour ago. Shaldis’s breath jammed in her lungs and she drew away from the stout wooden slabs, but she dared not make so much as the noise of getting out of her bed.

  Go away! she thought. Go away!

  It was outside the window, pressing against the wood. In the back of her mind she heard a whisper: Shaldis . . .

  The voice was that of her sister, Habnit’s Second Daughter. Twosie they’d called her, like most second daughters. Shaldis pressed her hand to her mouth.

  Shaldis . . . Big sister . . .

  Silence, prolonging itself to the edge of sleep again. The weight of sleepiness on her mind, and beyond that sleepiness the dream of going to the window, of opening it and seeing her sister outside, smiling with love. Her father holding out his arms to welcome her. Just outside the window.

  Shaldis pushed the dream, and the sleepiness, away from her mind. The hinges creaked, as if at weight so immense that the wood groaned and the bolts that held the lock squeaked as they pulled in the wood. The shutter was inches from the head of the bed and she didn’t dare get up, didn’t dare fly to the door, knowing that whatever it was, it might very well be outside the door waiting for her to do just that.

  Eldest daughter . . . The nickname her father had had for her, and longing to see him again twisted around her heart. Old One . . .

  No! she thought, almost weeping. No, go away!

  She smelled his malice, like rancid smoke. Smelled sulfur and lightning and acrid cold. She spread her hands before her in the dark and called into them the power of the sun. It was hidden away now under the earth, but the light imbued the sand, the stone, the veins of iron and gold deep in the earth. She called that residual power from those, as she’d called upon it all day, to Summon the rains.

  Drive away evil. Fill this man with dread.

  She heard him curse and felt the jabbing wrench of his counterspell on her mind, like iron pincers clamped suddenly and twisted on her hand. Bitch . . .

  Raeshaldis threw back the covers and got to her feet. Standing in the darkness, she faced the window, called spells of blazing light. Of cramps and migraine, spells that would stop the breath or trip the feet or dig at the belly. The counterspells jabbed at her again but she thought, He has to be tired too. He’s been at the Summoning all day, the same way I have.

  The knowledge that she might have stood next to him made her skin creep.

  I won’t let you drive me from this place. I wont surrender what I have. It’s mine.

  Bitch.

  Thieving bitch.

  Then he was gone.

  Cautiously she probed at the night outside, but in fact he did seem to be gone. She could see in the darkness again, make out the shapes of the shutters. The wood all around the hinges and the bolt hasps was splintered where the blue scribbles of light that marked her spells flickered, deep within the wood. She saw again the small wooden chest at the bed’s foot, the washstand with its vessels of ancient red pottery, the spare quilts folded on the shelf.

  She sank down on the bed, trembling so violently she wondered if she’d be sick. She’d have to get up soon—it was only an hour short of first dawn—and face another day of Summoning.

  Face another day of exhausted fasting, of the knowledge that she might be standing next to him.

  Knowing what he was, but not who.

  SEVEN

  Torchlight transformed the kitchen gate to an oven mouth of ember-hued gold.

  “Something’s happened.” The Summer Concubine nudged her mount to a hand gallop through the last stretch of road among the market gardens.

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  Cressets had been lit all around the walls of the kitchen’s vast court. Huge shadows fluttered on the heavy stone arch-ways of the laundries and the weaving rooms where the palace’s silk was loomed, and on three stories of shuttered slave barracks above. Men clustered in the arch of light, mostly in the red livery of palace servants or the
crimson cloaks of palace guards. Barún stood in the forefront, like a statue of a king, looking as solemn and noble as if he hadn’t been blackmailed over sexual shenanigans by a succession of handsome beggar boys and cattle drovers for most of Oryn’s reign. “I told everyone there was nothing to worry about,” he called out as Oryn reined to a halt. “I can ride out there in the morning. I’m sure It’s nothing.”

  “A band of teyn burned out the village of Dry Hill at sunset.” Bax, the burly, dark-browed commander of the palace guard, stood at Barún’s side. Under a single shelving brow his blue eyes struck one with surprising ferocity. With eyes like that, Oryn reflected, one could scarcely help being commander of the guards. “The runner said it was village teyn from the mine.”

  Dear gods. It’s started. So soon . . .

  “Which is ridiculous,” said Barún, shaking his close-cropped, curly head. His eyes, hazel like Oryn’s, were set close and gave him a look of stupid ferocity that was entirely justified. A close-clipped, soldierly beard concealed a weak rosebud mouth. “It has to be wild teyn.”

  “As my lord says.” Bax’s neutral tone almost shouted Imbecile! “Permission to take a squad and see what we can do.”

  “Granted. Yes. Of course.” Panic and disorientation, or perhaps shortage of sleep and coffee, made Oryn feel slightly giddy. “And Bax . . .”

  The commander had turned away, already calling out orders—he was armored, Oryn saw, and not in just the light leathers that men wore on teyn hunts, either—but he looked back with the combination of impatience and the respect owed grudgingly to Taras Greatsword’s son.

  The words You’d best take Barún with you died on Oryn’s lips. Barún hadn’t seen the cat sleeping on the village wall, wouldn’t understand what he was seeing if he had. Oh, I’m sure there’s an explanation for it . . . .