Good gods, how many of them are there? he thought in shock, putting the glass to his eye, and a moment later was glad he hadn’t said anything. “Nomads?”
There was a confused suggestion of movement all through the dust cloud, a bobbing that had to be beasts, and then the tall upright necks of camels.
“They’ll have to be Rai an-Ariban’s tribe.” Bax stood in the stirrups, sun flashing from the brass mountings of his telescope. “Best we be moving. An-Ariban would kill a dozen men, if he thought he could get away with it, to keep his advance on the lakes quiet until it was too late for us to marshal a force against him. Only reason he wouldn’t is if he thought we had a mage watching over us back in the city, as was done for years with patrols. And it may be the nomads know as well as we do that that isn’t done anymore. Kiner . . .”
The corporal spurred up to his commander’s side.
“Get back to the city, fast as you can go. Watch your back—the nomads will have patrols out ahead of them. Let Lord Barún know we’ve got nomads moving in our direction, start him marshaling a patrol. One thing that brother of yours knows how to do, it’s put together warriors,” added Bax as the guardsman caught up a couple of remounts from the cavvy and headed back toward the city in a very small cloud of saffron dust. “We’ve plenty of time. There should be no trouble.”
“No,” said Oryn quietly, troubled nevertheless by this first evidence that the nomads were starting to move in toward the arable land along the lakes. “No, he’s quite good at that. My father always said he’d make a better king than I. But then again, my father seemed to think that the average camel driver would make a better king than I.”
“If all we needed of a king was patrols along the rangelands and fathering more kings, I’d agree.”
“Oh, so would I,” said Oryn, quite earnestly. “Only my feelings in the matter are complicated by the fact that since I am the elder, sooner or later Barún would have to kill me . . . . It’s just what’s done, you know, in our social circles.”
And Bax laughed.
In the cave beneath the overhanging cliff they found where the teyn had clustered: scuffed concentric rings of knee and buttock marks, deepened at the sides where they’d swayed. Three little zigzag scrapes in the dry sand at the side of the cave showed where the captives had lain.
“The hoot knelt here in the middle of the rings.” Bax held low the torch that one of the men had kindled for him. Oryn came to his side, trying to disturb the tracks as little as possible. “You ever seen teyn cluster?”
“Oh, yes.” Oryn squatted to study the marks, wondering if he’d be able to straighten his knees again to rise and deciding to deal with that challenge when the time came. With the restless orange glow supplementing the wan daylight from the front of the cave he could pick out the crooked little toe prints, the heel marks and traces where fingers had stirred the silk-fine dust. “Village teyn, that is. I used to sneak away from the palace at night when I was a child and climb a tree near the compound wall. A lot of lords have their minders break them up when they cluster, but I never saw the harm of it. They just sit in those circles and sway together . . . . I’ve seen them carry on for most of the night, then return to the fields in the morning, without even benefit of coffee. Can’t imagine how they do that. Do the wildings cluster?”
Oryn stood up—without even crying out in pain, on which he congratulated himself.
“Again, you’ve got me.” Bax moved back, stooping lower and lower with the shelving of the roof, to hold the torch into that thin crack of ultimate darkness. Myriad furious rattling sounded in the crack, though the torchlight only showed more than a dozen tortoises—some of them the size of shields—plodding patiently away from the light.
By the tracks, as far as Oryn could see, none of the teyn had ventured anywhere near the crack. But again, how would they know? Most of them had never been away from their village and the Dry Hill diggings in their lives. Even if teyn did speak to one another, how would they have learned the language of the wildings to understand information about the desert?
“Soth have anything to say about it?” Bax asked.
Oryn remembered the reek of sherab, the stuffy dark of the study, the drawling, wretched voice of the man who had taught him to love the life of the mind even above the swooning delights of the senses. He felt the same grief he’d felt watching his father burn his books of poetry and tales. As if something beautiful were disappearing out of the world.
He still had a patch of red flesh on the side of his right hand where he’d tried to snatch The Song of the Moon Prince out of the blaze. Stupid, of course; it had earned him nothing but a whipping. He would gladly take another whipping—and the pain of the burn—if some god would show him what blaze it was that was consuming his friend’s soul.
But he only said, “Only that he’d never heard of teyn stealing children either. Surely they would have realized that taking children would guarantee pursuit?”
“Their escape has guaranteed pursuit.” Bax led the way out of the cave and thrust the torch into the thick sand at its mouth to kill the flame. Milk vetch and dandelion grew there. Oryn could see where the stalks and leaves had been freshly plucked, but nowhere in or around the cave had he seen the broken pieces. “And if they don’t know that, it’s a lesson all the others will have to learn.” He glanced down the hillside at the men regrouping by the horses near the trail of scuffs and scratches that marked the teyns’ retreat southeast again.
His blue eyes met the king’s, studying him. Knowing, Oryn thought unhappily, that he, Oryn, was a keeper of cats and finches, who had had a servant beaten for sticking halved walnut shells on Black Princess’s paws and setting her on a slick tile floor to watch her slither and slip. That he had a reputation for softheartedness, and poems about roses and moonlight. Gauging him.
Oryn sighed, understanding that he was right and hating it. Hating being king.
“I shall rely on your judgment,” he said, in an almost inaudible voice.
They saw the vultures circling above the Singing World shortly before the fall of the early winter darkness on the land.
The Singing World itself was astonishing enough on first sight, and Oryn would have laughed aloud with amazement at the delicate spires and domes, the layered swirls of color, the smooth curved holes, bridges, tunnels—if he hadn’t been seeing things now with the eyes of a tracker, a father, a king. He thought, Bax will never find the teyn. And now the light’s going.
His heart ached at what the buzzards told him they would find.
The dark birds wheeled around a rock promontory near the north end. As the riders approached across the featureless desert, Oryn could hear the birds’ cries. They left the horses where the rocks first rose in a wall the color of ripe peaches, scrambled up the wind-smoothed cliff and then among the maze of faults and crevices for perhaps another mile. When they finally climbed the eroded golden dome, the highest in the whole huge formation, Oryn saw where the rocks had been marked, circles and crosses daubed with mud, plant sap or blood.
As they neared the top there was a great deal of blood.
The rock knob where the children lay commanded the desert like a watchtower. Even as Oryn stood, panting and light-headed, over the three mangled little corpses someone shouted, “Down there! I saw ’em move!” and the men went scrambling in pursuit. Oryn signed to two of them to remain.
“Wrap them in blankets. Treat them gently. They’ll want to burn them decently in the village when we get back.”
“The girl too, sir?”
“The girl too.”
The buzzards screamed, flapped their dark wings and hopped off the rock, swooping and veering as the guardsmen gathered up those three small bodies. Though the children had been crudely butchered with knives taken from the raided village, Oryn noted how calm their faces were. As if they’d been deeply asleep when the cutting started and simply had not waked. He prayed this was the case.
Sprigs of milk vetch and da
ndelion had been scattered around and over them, and stuck in the cracks of the rocks. Wilted—they’d been carried for many miles from the cave where they’d grown. Circles and Xs were scratched on the rock, in rude approximation, he thought, of the marks wizards made around the villages to control the thoughts and fears of the teyn. The scratches looked fresh.
“Have you ever seen anything like that before.?”
The commander shook his head; his heavy-lipped mouth shut hard.
Men were calling out now that they could see the teyn fleeing. On this god walk above all the aisles and crevices of the Singing World, Oryn saw them clearly, like roaches darting along cracks in a wall. Saw the men pursuing them, through the rocks and over the twelve-foot golden wall, down to the gray desert floor.
He knew he couldn’t hope to keep up with either the pursuers or the quarry, so he took his tablets from the satchel Geb had packed for him and in the slanting mellow light meticulously copied everything he saw: the position of the bodies, every twig and stem of the plant sprigs and where they lay, each rude symbol and dribbled line of blood. Scarcely the activity a bold hero king would undertake, he supposed with a sigh. On the other hand, at least Bax wouldn’t have to worry about guarding him through all those caves and gullies.
Soth should know this, he thought.
He wouldn’t even articulate to himself that it might be useful to have notes of the first occurrence, should there be a second.
Wouldn’t let himself look at their faces. One boy was four, Illyth’s age when he’d died. Another looked about eight. The girl was probably five or six. He’d have to tell their parents. He couldn’t imagine handing the job to some palace official.
Two soldiers, bows in hand, remained beside him, and whatever they thought of what they saw they kept to themselves.
Some of the teyn reached open ground, began to run. Here they showed themselves for the novices they were, without skill at cover or experience in evading pursuit. The men rode them down, then dismounted to butcher them like sheep. The smell of the blood came to Oryn in his high place, from the open desert and from the rocks where the men massacred the cornered teyn in every crevice and hole.
“Weird.” Bax clambered up the rocks to him, sword in hand. “Did you have a look at the blood of those kids? At the bodies? Ants had got to them already; that blood was dried almost black. They were killed hours ago, midafternoon. Yet the teyn were still here.”
Oryn looked at the blood again. To him, blood was blood, something to be avoided if possible and washed out of linen with cold water before the stain set. Geb had told him that. He supposed his father, like Bax, would have been able to classify it in terms of wetness, stickiness, slickness, dryness. That was a warrior’s job, a warrior’s knowledge. “They had to know we were on their trail,” he said at last. “From up here they must have seen us miles away.”
At the fringe of the Singing World, a dark cluster of movement marked where men and horses were reassembling, preparing for the ride back to Dry Hill. Torches were lit, pale as fireflies in the final light. The dead teyn made shapeless dark blots on the sand. Blood spattered Bax’s boots and pantaloons as if he’d splashed through puddles of it.
“What were they waiting for?”
The commander shook his head. “Best we get out of here,” he said. “There’s light up here, but it’ll be full dark by the time we get to the horses and dark isn’t when you want to be down in the cracks of this land.” He was clearly still thinking about the nomads. Oryn had some concerns in that direction himself.
At Bax’s command, the men cut up the carcasses of the teyn and scattered the pieces. They were all village teyn: boars, jennies and pips. Oryn supposed that if they had been joined by wildings in their flight, the desert dwellers would have been the ones to escape. But somehow he didn’t think that had been the case.
Could they communicate with the wildings in the hills?
Was that what they were doing—somehow—when they “clustered”? When they sat in rings around one of their hoots, patted the earth, their thighs, one another’s hands, softly and rhythmically while they swayed! Soth—and other mages—had assured him repeatedly that there was no magic involved. And surely, Oryn thought, if the hoots—the cluster leaders— had been able to generate magic, they’d have used it to escape before this.
So what were they doing?
Why children?
Why remain beside the bodies while the pursuit drew near?
Come morning that little corner of the Singing World would be a horror of ants and flies and vultures. Already Oryn could hear the skitter of foxes in the rocks, the yik of jackals creeping close. The rocks flung back the day’s heat around him, a tall fat man in rumpled blue velvet and borrowed armor that was gouging him mercilessly in the ribs, watching the vultures gather in the dimming sky.
Far to the east, miles distant across the darkening infinities of sand, Oryn could see, as he had last night, a distant flicker of greenish flame.
If he rode out to the place, he wondered, would it be there still when he arrived?
And would that be a fortunate thing for him, or not?
He ached in every bone, and almost stumbled down the bare, yellow knob of rock to the horses, wondering what it meant—and what he or anyone would do if this happened again.
ELEVEN
I’d like to go back.” Raeshaldis propped herself on one elbow and reached languidly for her glass of hot mint tea. “Something happened in that room, I know it.” She moved languidly because after being massaged and oiled and scraped in the hot room of the Baths of Mastra’ar—and returning the favor upon the Summer Concubine, beside whose skill she felt hopelessly inept—and a half hour sweating in the steam room, there was no other way to move. The sugared tea, she suspected, would revive her only long enough for her to walk back to the Citadel and collapse.
She felt supremely at rest and at peace.
After Jethan’s departure, the two women finished their coffee and betook themselves to the nearest bath, for the mud of the Slaughterhouse clung to their clothing and the stink of dung and rotten vegetables to their hair. It had been eighteen months since Shaldis had truly bathed, as opposed to washed in a tub of water lugged from the kitchen to her rooms. She hadn’t even been aware of how badly she’d missed it. Not just the sensual warmth of the heated chambers, the aching relaxation of every muscle and tendon under a stinging scrub and massage; the Summer Concubine was a lot stronger than she looked. She had missed the camaraderie of soft chatter—the only time she’d been able to relax with Twosie and her cousins—as they worked on each other with sponges, scrapers and oil, as much as the timeless enervation of the steam. The Baths of Mastra’ar were not luxurious; it was an ordinary well-kept bathhouse of the Flowermarket District. The Summer Concubine had had to pay extra for the best-quality tea and for clean sheets on the couches. But Shaldis felt reborn.
Reborn into the world of women after eighteen months of trying to live among the Sun Mages and be what she wasn’t . . . not quite.
“The first attack on me was the night of the full moon,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows and looking across at the Summer Concubine, who lay on the next couch. She sipped her tea, sweet and soothing; across the room a foursome of shopkeepers’ wives giggled over gossip and combed each other’s hair. “The night before last. It was early in the night, probably less than two hours after sunset. Last night’s was much later, close to dawn. I was still awake when the rain began. Something woke me up just after midnight, a dream . . . .”
She shook her head, trying to remember more about it. Someone calling her name? Calling for help? “I remember lying awake for hours before it . . . it came.”
The Summer Concubine whispered, “Yes. It was in the deep of the night that I dreamed.”
“Your friend—Corn-Tassel Woman—couldn’t have disappeared much before the third hour of the night because the household would have been awake. And Turquoise Woman has been missing fo
r five days.”
They braided each other’s hair and donned their clothing, which they’d paid to have brushed while they bathed, and walked back toward the House of the Marvelous Tower through the late afternoon hush. “Shaldis,” said the Summer Concubine, as they jostled through the crowds in the square before the Temple of Rohar, god of women, anonymous in their veils. “Will you do something for me? With me?”
At this hour the whole district was changing its complexion and character, waking up, as it were—even as the high-class courtesans who dwelled in its tall, rambling houses were doing, putting up its hair and donning its nighttime paint.
“Of course.” Though she still felt in awe of the older woman’s poise and beauty, Shaldis spoke with the unthinking promptness of friendship. “What is it?”
“Will you make a Sigil of Sisterhood with me? Soth showed me how the master wizards form sigils to unite their minds with those of their apprentices in order to teach them . . . .” She paused to let a charcoal seller and his donkey pass; late sunlight through the awnings that covered the narrow street dyed her face pink and her veils the orange of raw flame. “We—Corn-Tassel Woman, and Turquoise Woman, and Pebble Girl, and I—formed with our blood, our minds, our hearts, a sigil made of the runes of twin sisters. Put a piece of ourselves into one another’s souls. I hoped—we all hoped—that if something happened to one or the other of us—and I was mostly thinking of Turquoise Woman’s husband, frankly—at least I would sense that something was wrong.” She passed her hand wearily over the small breadth of white brow between eyebrows and veil. “Obviously that didn’t happen.”
“Have you tried redrawing the sigil and meditating in a power circle with it? That’s how the master wizards touch the sigil to find out if something’s happened to their apprentices,” she added, when the Summer Concubine shook her head. “Or how they access their power over their apprentices when they want to keep them in line, though they’re not supposed to do that. Sigils like that—Sigils of Mastery—give a mage access to . . . to the mind and the magic of another.”
Sisters of the Raven Page 15
