Vultures circled constantly overhead or invigilated the passing crowds from the edges of every roof.
“Now, that is outside of enough!” cried the Summer Concubine indignantly as they passed through the narrow right-of-way that snaked around the side of a mostly barricaded public square. She craned her neck to look back through the stout fence that had been built around the well head, where two of Warfin Xolnax’s bullyboys were shoving an old woman with a yoke of buckets away from the well.
“It was five coppers yesterday, Granny,” one of the thugs was saying. “It’s a silver bit today. If five coppers is all you got, you shoulda come yesterday. . . .”
A trough had been built next to the well extending back to the nearby shambles where sheep, goats, pigs and a few steers were penned. The woman fought against their grip, struggling to get to the water and cursing like a stevedore. “This is outrageous!” When one of the men threw the woman’s yoke and buckets into the street, the Summer Concubine showed signs of thrusting her way through the gate to confront them, but Shaldis and Jethan both stepped in her path. Shaldis rather nervously thickened the spells of inconspicuousness about them until another market woman nearly walked slap into them, unseeing.
“It’s done all over the Slaughterhouse,” said Shaldis, gently herding the indignant favorite away. “You’re never going to get anybody to testify before the king about it. Not if they want to use that well, or any other hereabouts, again. And since nobody here owes allegiance to a house or a clan, there’s no order. All the water bosses are friends, when they’re not fighting. And they’ve got damn long memories.”
Between the tenements—either tall, rickety warrens of bleaching wattle raised on the foundations of crumbling villas or rambling heaps of half-decayed adobe and rubble that had been the painted temples of gods—the noon heat condensed, breathless and sickening with the fetor of garbage and pigs. As she’d changed into the cheap cotton dress the Summer Concubine had sent one of her maids to fetch, Shaldis had advised also that they take pomander boxes, strong-smelling herbs and camphor held up under the veils to combat some of the worst fumes. These worked in most of the poor districts of the city, but in the Slaughterhouse it only served to make one sick. She could barely get the words out as she further explained, “Everybody else in the city—inside the walls, I mean—has catch jars on their roofs because it’s handier than going to the wells. But here it’s to put off dealing with the water bosses until the end of the season. Right now Xolnax is making a killing. This is Pig Alley,” she added, turning down a still narrower way between a squalid café and two of the biggest slaughterhouses of the quarter. The stench of blood was nearly suffocating. Under ramadas of pine poles and palm fronds pigs complained ear-piercingly. Under others, head-high clay jars swarmed with flies in the shade: blood to be sold for puddings. “This used to be called the Avenue of Niam, for the big Temple of Niam down at the end. The priests left when the temple wells went dry. Then for a long time it was empty, until Lohar and the True Believers took it over. A family of thieves was living in it, and a brothel set up under a tent in the courtyard—”
“Cutpurse! Cutpurse!” shrieked someone in a tenement courtyard that seemed also to be set up as a market, though what it was selling was difficult to determine. A youth crashed past them, followed by an angry swarm of men waving fists and sticks. Jethan’s hand went to his bare side in search of a weapon that wasn’t there.
“You see?” he said accusingly, as if Shaldis should have been more careful.
Pig Alley joined Chicken Lane in a sort of irregular square in front of the temple, which like all of Niam’s houses was spartanly plain—in keeping with the god of wealth’s known stinginess—and built like a fortress. Down a dogleg of Chicken Lane men were lined up by a side gate into the temple’s narrow yard, some bearing yoke poles with buckets, others carrying baskets or pots. A young man with his hair half shaved in the manner of the True Believers sat in the gateway like a porter in a rich man’s lodge. In the high-walled courtyard beyond, a man’s voice could be heard, snatches of oratory echoing shrilly but with the formal intonation of a Sun Mage.
“Lohar must have dug one of the wells deeper and hit water again.” Shaldis angled her head, curious, trying to see past the jostling backs. A man came out past them, flies buzzing around the hunk of raw meat he carried. His hair, too, had been hacked and shaved in the pattern prescribed by the Mouth of Nebekht. “It’s cheaper than paying Xolnax’s prices, I suppose. How long has Turquoise Woman lived here, did you say’
“Six months,” said the Summer Concubine softly. “Making her living as a healer, mostly.”
I bet she gets lots of customers, reflected Shaldis wryly. Between territorial fights among the water bosses, fights of the inhabitants with the bosses’ bullyboys over the cost of drawing water, drunken brawls in the cafés and taverns that decorated nearly every intersection of the winding street and the number of children attacked by jackals among the middens, there was probably as much human blood shed here as there was animal.
“She can’t do much, for fear word will get to her husband. If this water boss Xolnax chose to kidnap her—hold her prisoner, or even blackmail her with the threat of returning her to her husband—I’m not sure she’d have the strength to fight him, particularly not if his daughter is Raven-wise herself. The king is trying to get the laws changed, about both women-who-have-power and women in general, but at the moment almost no one will admit that women have these powers—or the right to live by themselves. And so many women themselves are raised to believe . . . Here!” she cried suddenly at two unveiled slatterns emerging from an alleyway barely wider than a door. “That dress belongs to Turquoise Woman!”
She stepped forward—to Jethan’s protesting gargle—and seized the first, taller, woman by the arm. “Where did you get that dress?”
The woman, big and stringy and nearly toothless from childbearing, grabbed the favorite’s wrist and twisted her hand free. “You a pal of hers, baba cake?” She glanced past the Summer Concubine at Jethan—the concubine’s activity had effectively swept away any spell of concealment—and smiled ingratiatingly. “Told me herself, she did. She says, ‘Rosemallow Woman,’ she says, ‘if ever I be gone for more than three days, you come on in and take what you like, for it’ll mean some ill has befallen me, and I ain’t comin’ back.’ Now, how can a poor woman like me tell . . .?”
“Three days?” Raeshaldis interposed herself in front of the other woman, who though short and swarthy had bleached her elaborately dressed hair a virulent reddish blond.
“Well, it’s five now. And we weren’t the only ones that took her things.” added the girl self-righteously. “That old drunkard Zarb that lives across the court, and Grapot the candy seller, they were in there the very first night she didn’t come home, helping ’emselfs to the larder and sayin’ as how it was for money she owed ’em.”
“Me and Melon Girl,” provided the older woman with the air of one martyred to friendship, “we watched Preket and those sons of his just about clean the place out. And the folks from Nebekht’s Temple messed up the place bad. Lohar, he hated Turquoise Woman like poison, and he’d never see her on the street but that he’d spit at her. ’Course, he done that with lots of folks. Where he gets all that spit from I don’t know.”
“What happened?” asked the Summer Concubine. “To Turquoise Woman, I mean.” A man driving a herd of goats down Chicken Lane yelled “Outa the way, sluts!” and everyone crowded back into the mouth of Little Pig Alley except Jethan, who tried to stride over and take the man to task and was nearly trampled by goats for his trouble.
“Done a bunk, bet me,” said Melon Girl, and unselfconsciously scratched her bottom. “Preket—he’s the landlord for all those little rooms on Greasy Yard—he charged her somethin’ cruel for that stinkin’ chicken coop he rented her, and she never would get her hands dirty.” She jerked her head toward a red-painted arch about halfway down the alley, which had clearly once been t
he kitchen gate into a villa whose front, larger half had since burned. The remains of the kitchens, laundry and stables had been, Shaldis guessed, partitioned into rooms and let for whatever they’d bring. “I talked to her the night she left . . . . What night was it, Rosemallow Woman? Five nights ago? Six nights?”
“Five,” said her friend. “Xolnax did his hog-slaughterin’ that night. Usually it quiets down here after dark, but you could hear ’em squealin’ all over the district ’til damn near moonset.”
“That’s right.” Melon Girl nodded briskly. “Turquoise Woman had some kind of run-in with Lohar; she was standin’ in the gate there tryin’ to clean herself up. That very dress Rosemallow Woman’s wearing now,” she added, cocking a bright eye at her friend. “Which as you can see is too short on her and not her color.”
“Not yours, either,” returned Rosemallow Woman. “And it’s good linen.”
“You look like a cow in it.”
“A damn well-dressed cow, and better’n you.”
“Did Lohar make any threats?” asked the Summer Concubine, since the two women showed signs of escalating into physical combat over the garment.
Melon Girl shrugged her plump shoulders dismissively. “The holy Mouth of Nebekht always threatened her. Called her a she-demon and a trans-passer on the laws of the gods.”
“Transgressor?”
“That’s what I said. But that’s what he says about everybody that does magic, for all he used to be a wizard himself. Poor Turquoise Woman was cryin’ over it—she cries a lot, though—and scared, ’cause he said righteousness would rise up and destroy those who went against the will of Nebekht. I said, Get a grip, girl! It’s all talk, talk and shit. But she went on into her room and shot the bolt.”
“How do you know she shot the bolt?” asked Shaldis. The four women had turned down the alley, picking their way single file along the walls to avoid the marsh of garbage and slops in the center of the way, with Jethan glowering in their wake as if he wanted to attack and slay the smells with his sword for daring to inconvenience his king’s dear friend.
“ ’Cause she always did.”
“I can’t think why,” muttered Jethan sarcastically.
“You shut up,” said Rosemallow Woman. And to the Summer Concubine, “I think she was afraid Lohar would tell her husband where she was. Three!” she yelled as a little brown-haired girl came darting out of the courtyard at a run, a broken doll in her hand. “You give that back to Little Sister! I swear—” And she strode off in pursuit.
Melon Girl shook her head. “My man’d beat the daylights out of me if I went around latchin’ myself in my room.” She shrugged again. “And he’ll beat the daylights out of me if I’m out loiterin’ much longer.” She led the way into the court, where half a dozen children played with chips of adobe brick in the dust. For the rest, it was pretty much as Shaldis had guessed: In the open door of what had probably been a tack room a couple of men sat sharing a gourd bottle of sherab, talking in the long, pointless, drunken spiral of men who had long ago said to each other whatever they had to say. “Big Sister,” Melon Girl called to the oldest of the children, “get me my shawl, and tell your mama I had to get going . . . . You tell Turquoise Woman we’ve got all her stuff safe,” she added self-righteously to the Summer Concubine. “But if you’re lookin’ for her, I’d go check with that husband of hers. Fergit, his name is—he’s in the Weavers Quarter.”
“But don’t tell him where she was,” put in Rosemallow Woman, coming into the court with Number Three Daughter gripped hard by an unwilling arm. “She said he’d kill her if he found her. And she’d never hurt a fly, poor thing . . . .”
“Would Xolnax have taken her?” Raeshaldis asked, and Rosemallow Woman looked first startled, then thoughtful, then finally shook her head.
“What would be the sense of it?” she returned. “This whole street’s his territory. He could pay her for whatever little this-and-that he wanted, not that he ever has—has proper wizard friends of his own, I expect. None of Rumrum’s boys dare come this far, and even if they did, poor Turquoise Woman knew enough to know not to do favors for no other boss unless she was willing to move out. And I know she didn’t do that.”
No, thought Shaldis, considering the purple linen dress—which, as Melon Girl had stated, was both too short and the wrong color for her informant.
“Myself . . .” Rosemallow Woman’s voice sank as she trailed Shaldis across the sand and garbage of the courtyard to the door of what had once been a storeroom, “I think she bolted. That last day she was nervous as a rabbit, barely coming out to use the privies . . . .” She gestured at the shed in the corner of the yard, quite unnecessarily, for they would have been easily identifiable as privies by the smell in complete darkness at the distance of a mile.
“Nervous of what?” asked the Summer Concubine, turning in the door of what had been Turquoise Woman’s room.
Rosemallow Woman shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe she didn’t either, since she didn’t seem to know which way to look when she did come out. But I know fear when I see it. And she was afraid.”
“Wouldn’t she have told you?” asked Shaldis as Rosemallow Woman strode off across the court hauling her daughter by the arm, leaving the Summer Concubine, Shaldis and Jethan alone.
“I’m not sure she could have.” The Summer Concubine looked around the tiny chamber, stripped now even of its bedstead. Scrapes in the dirt floor and marks in the crumbling plaster showed where the bed had been; more scuffs marked where a table and chair had crowded for space near the hearth under the room’s sole window. The open shutters revealed an alley even narrower and more noisome than Little Pig.
DEMON HAG DIE had been chalked on the wall—properly spelled, Shaldis noticed.
“Turquoise Woman did not have a particularly strong power,” the Summer Concubine went on, walking slowly around the room, her fingers trailing lightly along the filthy wall. “Sometimes she could not sense it when I tried to call her to a mirror to scry, or to water or fire. Sometimes she would try to call on me, and I would not hear, not even after we made a Sigil of Sisterhood between us. I worried about her.”
Shaldis walked to the window. The bolts on the shutters were intact. They’d been written over with wards: Shaldis could feel them in the wood. The Summer Concubine was right: The woman who had written those marks of protection had not had a great deal of power, and had not learned to focus what she had.
But she could feel, through those uncertain sigils, the love Turquoise Woman had had for animals and birds; the residue or spells to call sparrows to her hand was still resonant in the wood, spells to heal them of their strange ills and fevers and mites. She felt her love of cooking, and of flowers—amid the debris the looters had left there were flower petals strewn all along the base of the wall, scraggy lupine and squash flowers and the poppies that sprouted in the cracks of broken walls. Somehow Shaldis knew the woman had had a garden in her husband’s house.
She felt the woman’s loneliness. Even after her grandfather’s tyranny and the anxiety of the college, Shaldis found the thought of living completely alone for six months unnerving.
She moved along the wall, passing her hands over the plaster, probing into it with her mind. Outside, Rosemallow Woman’s children shrieked at one another and one of the two men drinking in the other doorway screamed at them to shut up. In the mud brick—mixed with layered confusions of other people’s tears and giggles and fright and lust over a dozen generations—Shaldis thought she sensed the sound of this single young woman’s weeping, alone in this strange place.
The sense of her was like a perfume. She probed deeper.
A light foot scrunched on the dirt floor behind her. “What is it, dear!”
“I don’t know. Sometimes you can sense what’s gone on in a place, especially a place where magic is worked. There are rooms in the Citadel where great spells were done that have had to be shut up for hundreds of years. You go in them and you hear voices muttering
in the air.” Her eyes slipped closed. It was like trying to distinguish a tune through a wall, or to follow conversation in the market on market day.
“But there’s something here,” she said softly, softly as the darkness whispered to her out of the plaster and mud of the wall. A whisper . . . or screaming, heard a long distance away. “Something happened here. Something . . . something cold.”
“Did she have books, lady?” Jethan knelt by the hearth, rummeled the ashes with a stick.
The shadow, the darkness—the far-off echoes of terror—vanished with the sound of his voice, and if the room hadn’t been comprehensively stripped, Shaldis would have thrown something at him in sheer annoyance.
“Some.” The Summer Concubine looked down at the crude brick shelf with an expression of pain and regret. “And she was making notes for me. I taught her the spells Soth taught me, to protect them . . . .”
“They must have worked.” Shaldis came to stand by her. “That ash is mostly wood and charcoal, not paper ash. And I don’t see any wax, which there would be if note tablets were burned. That doesn’t mean they didn’t get burned elsewhere, or that the neighbors didn’t take them for kindling.”
A voice shouted in the courtyard. “Demon sluts!” and a rain of brick fragments and dog excreta rattled against the wall.
“Curse.” said the Summer Concubine, and Shaldis made a remark considerably stronger: “It’s the Mouth of Nebekht.”
“Sluts! Devils! Transgressors upon the will and the patience of Nebekht, commander of the universe! You pitiful fool”—he was now addressing Jethan, who had gone to loom in the doorway, fists doubled, mostly filling the narrow space—“deluded by wicked women! I marvel that such as they would even trouble themselves with a man’s countenance at all!”
Past Jethan’s shoulder. Shaldis could see the Mouth of the god. She’d seen him around the marketplaces and in the Grand Bazaar in her days of boy’s disguise, and had always despised him, partly because he never failed to jeer at wizards—he was one of the first to shout that they were losing their powers—and partly because he also seldom missed a chance to jeer at any woman he saw, veiled or unveiled. He was a sturdy little man with a round, red pug face, balding—No wonder he requires the True Believers to cut their hair—and dirty as a Blood Mage in his sleeveless brown laborer’s tunic and bare legs.
Sisters of the Raven Page 13
