Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “I’ll do as you suggest as soon as I’m back at the pavilion,” said the Summer Concubine, and Shaldis heard again the uneasiness in her voice. “And if I . . . if I can’t feel their presence, their thoughts—Corn-Tassel Woman or Turquoise Woman—would that mean that . . . that something has happened to them?”

  A surge of voices from where the Street of the Goldsmiths ran into Rohar’s Square made both women turn their heads. Shaldis saw Lord Mohrvine, the king’s uncle, riding in the direction of the Eastern Gate, unguarded as he usually was and bending from the saddle to greet this person or that with his easy friendliness. At his side rode Aktis, whom Shaldis had watched with envious admiration back in the days when she’d still been running around the markets dressed as a boy. Though he’d been Mohrvine’s court mage for many years, he’d still come to her grandfather’s house, and to other houses in the district, to write mouse wards on the walls or lay healing hands on the sick. Like his master, he was now greeted from all sides—by laborers who came out of the cafés, and beggars who propped their crutches against the nearest wall to stroll over and say hello, and though in the glare of the late-afternoon sun he looked exhausted, Shaldis could see he smiled.

  “It might mean something has happened to them,” Shaldis replied after the riders had gone by; she felt the gray cloak that the Summer Concubine called about herself, subtly, to shield herself from Mohrvine’s eyes. Good thing Jethan isn’t here: You couldn’t miss him, crowd or no crowd. “It could also just mean the spell wasn’t working. There are a lot of spells that either I can’t make work or that work sometimes and don’t work others. I can feel the magic there,” she added, frustration creeping into her voice. “I just can’t . . . can’t grasp it. Can’t grip it.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. That happens to me all the time.” The favorite sounded relieved. Was she relieved to know she wasn’t the only one that happened to? Or to have some other reason, if she couldn’t touch the minds of her friends, than that they were dead?

  They turned along Slippermaker Alley, a shortcut away from the noise and pickpockets around the markets. Lamps were being lit behind the projecting latticed window guards. Cats prowled insouciantly above dog level on the tops of courtyard walls.

  “Would you like to come and stay at the palace tonight, dearest?” the Summer Concubine asked. “Would you feel safer? You could still go up to the Citadel in the morning.” She glanced up at the dove-blue sky, clear and hard as metal. Shaldis guessed that at supper that night Hathmar would announce that the Summoning would recommence at dawn.

  It was tempting. The thought of the darkness of her narrow room, not to mention the debilitating wariness of just being around the other novices, made Shaldis cringe inside. But after a moment she said, “I don’t think so. For one thing, if it is the person who attacked me who has something to do with your friends’ disappearance, I’d like him to go on thinking that I think this is all just hazing. For another . . .”

  She hesitated, wondering if she sounded like a fool or a stubborn boy. “I worked hard to get into the college. I don’t want to give anyone a reason to come to me and say, Oh, I think you’re not working out here. Besides,” she added quickly, making her voice light as she saw the look of worry on her new friend’s face, “after the Song is over tomorrow I’m going to spend some time in the library going through spell books to see if I can come up with other spells of deep listening.

  “The magic I felt when I was attacked—the energy it generated—felt . . . strange. Alien. Like nothing I’ve encountered or read about. Cold and . . . and shaking, as if I were trying to push through a room filled with chains . . . its hard to describe. But I’d know it again if I felt it. And I want to see if it’s the same that I’d feel in that room.”

  “Would that be an effect of ijnis?”

  “It could be. The only time I was near someone using ijnis either I didn’t have power or he didn’t. I’m not even completely sure Redbeard was using it, but looking back I think so. He was acting pretty strangely by that time. I wish there were someone at the Citadel I could ask, but since it could be anyone there who attacked me . . .”

  They had reached the Gate of Kings, which opened into the Golden Court, the semipublic square that actually comprised the outer compound of the House of the Marvelous Tower. It was the hour of sunset, and a hundred sweet-tongued bells were ringing within the Temple of Oan Echis; the daily procession of white-robed priests crossed through the crowd of vendors and strollers to make sacrifices for the realm. Flower sellers under the arcade that surrounded the court were packing up their wares; vendors of lemonade called out to the two women, urging them to buy. Those who’d remain into the evening were lighting cressets and lamps, so that the whole arcade glowed like a luminous flower bed in the clear indigo dusk. Not a puddle of the morning’s rain remained. A few shredded streamers and trampled flower petals from the morning’s celebration made a bright-hued mockery in the dust.

  They traced the sigil on the tiled space before the terrace garden’s shallow pool. The rising moonlight cast soft, strange shadows among the bare vines, and the gray cat watched gravely from the balustrade. Shaldis wasn’t sure, as she and the Summer Concubine drew out the power circles and the curving lines of limitation, balance and strength, whether the magic they wrought would in fact help or protect either of them against the evil she had felt. Her own power, and that which she felt in the favorite, seemed small things before the vile hugeness of that storm of icy hatred. Even linking the strength of the vanished sun into the sigil didn’t feel like adequate protection against what had been outside her window last night.

  But it had gone away, she thought. She had stood against it. And as the glowing lines of her name and the favorite’s hung in the air above the circles, she thought, At least I won’t be alone, Neither of us will be alone.

  And that, she thought, as she walked back by herself—again in her novice’s white, cloaked against the stares of passersby in the intersecting alleyways of her private shortcut—was a joy to be treasured in itself, whatever came after.

  Torchlight again in the arch of the gateway, the color of marigolds. Oryn made himself sit straight on his horse and adjusted the hang of his cloak to cover the handspan of gap where extra lacings held together his borrowed armor across an embarrassingly wide gap of blue velvet tunic. The cut of the armor in his side was agony, and he prayed he’d be able to walk when he dismounted. He had never, ever been so sore in his life, and Geb would die of humiliation when he saw the state of his master’s sunburned nose and sadly uncurled hair.

  “Would it create much of a scandal if I had four of your warriors carry me to the baths?” he inquired of Bax, and the old warrior shot him his sidelong grin.

  “I thought your aim was to create scandal, my lord. It’d make your father turn in his tomb, that’s for sure.”

  “Ah, then start picking which of your men we’ll ask.”

  “You’ll do, you know.” Bax drew rein to let the guards at the city gate open the huge panels of bronze-faced cypress wood. Torches flared against the green tile of the passageway, the smell of the smoke thick and choking. The clatter of hooves echoed skull-piercingly, voices shouted, “The king . . . the king . . .” like the sickening clamor of a dream.

  It was nearly dawn. Beyond the gate the Yellow City lay silent. The Southern Gate would be open shortly, to admit market gardeners and the sellers of milk and fish. For the moment the air was clean of dust and smelled of sewage and the dung burned by the poor who could afford neither charcoal nor wood. In a very short time the horns of the Citadel would begin again, as would the bleating and screaming of the beasts in the Slaughterhouse District. Bits of flowers and paper banners lay crumpled by the walls, the reminiscence of the day’s celebrations of the rain.

  Oryn experienced a deep but momentary regret for the party he had missed. The thought I would kill for a gazelle-horn pastry drifted through his mind, but the recollection of the blood on the stones of th
e Singing World washed that flippancy from his mind. He wondered what things he truly would kill for, and couldn’t think of many.

  “I watched you through the day,” Bax said as they urged their horses on into the Avenue of the Sun. “You’ve got a brain in your head—which can’t be said of your brother—and an eye for what’s important. You did well.”

  “Er . . . thank you,” said Oryn, surprised and a little touched.

  “I don’t envy you what you’re going through.”

  “I assure you I don’t envy myself. I don’t think anyone does.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my lord.”

  Oryn glanced sideways at the saturnine face, the ice-pale eyes.

  “I think there’s some—with less brain that you, but more cunning—who envy you the rule of this realm. Who’d take it from you. And I’d be sorry to see it, for I think you’re right. Magic is fading—the light is fading—and if we’re to live in the night that’s coming we’d better live differently than we do now. You’re one of the few that sees that. I’d hate to see you go the way of the last four Akarian kings and any number before them, put out of the way because some blockhead liked the sight of other men bowing to him.”

  In the torchlight the lined, dark face was harsh with bitter memory.

  “But if you’re to survive you’ll need to know how to use a sword and you’ll need to know how to use a knife. Maybe other things as well.”

  Oryn winced at the very thought of physical training. “Surely at my time of life . . .” He then realized Bax was probably twenty years his senior and said, “I’m grateful for your protection . . . .”

  “You’re a scholar, lord.” The cold blue eyes pricked him like knives. “You’ve studied all the old chronicles. How many of the Akarian kings, or the Durshens before them, were killed when they were where they could call their guards?”

  “Oh,” said Oryn. “Well . . . er . . .”

  “You wouldn’t be a warrior for your father,” said Bax, “And I understand that, because I wouldn’t be a farmer for mine. But I’m telling you this: You’re a smart man, and I think you have what can save us. But get you alone and come at you with a knife and you’re like a turtle on its back. Will you come to the guards’ court tomorrow and let me teach you how to use a sword and a knife?”

  Oryn shivered, all sleepiness, all weariness, sponged away by the memory of Lord Sarn warning him his uncle Mohrvine posed a danger—was it only yesterday morning?—saying, You’ll have to have him killed . . . .

  Cressets flared in the Gate of Kings. Guards and grooms came to take the spent horses, to help companions unpack gear. Iorradus strode across the Golden Court like the hero of a ballad, with Geb fussing along at his heels. No sign of Barún, but other household officers swarmed like the vultures above the Singing World, big with news about nomads, Sun Mages, aqueducts, bucket hoists and silk production, determined to be delivered of their business now or die.

  “I will come, yes,” Oryn said, turning again to Bax in that enclave of stillness that yet remained about them. “Er . . . not this morning but tomorrow. I seriously don’t think I’ll be able to acquit myself at all creditably. But I will come. And I thank you.”

  Bax touched the edge of his dented black helmet. “My pleasure.”

  Oryn gritted his teeth and swung down from the saddle—it was every bit as agonizing as he’d feared it would be. A dozen voices around him said, “My lord . . . my lord . . .” And by the time he looked back to speak to Bax again, the commander of the guards was gone.

  Someone was calling her name.

  Pomegranate Woman’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. She felt the clothing and blankets piled up on top of her shift as Pontifer Pig clambered over them; in the darkness she could see every detail of the stone-flagged stillroom behind what had once been the villa of the Tarshab-Jamornids, cousins to the present lord of that name. Saw the places where the plaster had crumbled from the brick, the long marble counter where servants of the house had brewed syllabubs and dried garden herbs. Her daughters and granddaughter in the city, when she talked to them, seemed to think that with all the empty villas of the old oasis to choose from, she’d naturally spread her blankets in the marble-floored pavilions where the lords had slept, or in the garden kiosks of the favored ladies.

  But when the walls whisper tales to you of the things they’ve seen, and the voices of people long dead murmur about old loves and old sorrows in the shadow zone between waking and sleep, you pick carefully the places in which you lie down. The rooms where lords lay turning in fear of their own sons and grandsons, or where their women dreamed of those they’d rather have wed had they been free to choose, do not make for easy sleeping.

  Better to lie here and smell the scents of the herbs dried two generations ago, and touch with her mind those sweet, simple kisses of servants and gardeners.

  Someone, somewhere, was in pain, in pain and terror.

  Like her dream of the Citadel Ring, but more distant now. She could smell the blood and the lightning, but could see nothing of the woman. But she could hear her scream, as if when she closed her eyes she stood at one end of a long dark passageway. . . .

  And when she opened her eyes, silence, and the moonlight blanching the marble of the old counters and tracing on them the thin patterns of the desiccated vines.

  I have to tell someone this, she thought. I have to save her.

  It might even be someone she knew, someone she’d spoken to in the market or the street. But who would believe her? Everyone in the Slaughterhouse knew she’d gone mad. Everyone had heard of her, curled day after day in the back room of the little house she’d shared with Deem, unbathed, uncombed, neither eating nor drinking, only holding on to the shirt he’d had on when he’d fallen off the ladder in Lord Nahul-Sarn’s garden. Who was going to accept as truth a story about a black cloud with a blue light in it that killed women!

  And by the time day dawned and she was able to seek help, the woman would be dead.

  Pomegranate Woman wrapped her arms around her skinny knees and sat up, her back propped against the corner in which she slept—as she’d slept in a different villa last night, not daring to return to her own house for fear she’d find the darkness waiting for her there. Pontifer crept to her lap, as if he trusted that she could defend him against the horror that moved, somewhere, in the night.

  Would that I could, my child, she whispered, stroking the little white head. Would that I could.

  It was a long time until dawn.

  TWELVE

  Raeshaldis.” Even after eighteen months Benno Sarn pronounced the name as if thinking it should by all rights still be Habnit’s Eldest Daughter.

  Shaldis had seen him making his way through the lamplit gloom of the refectory toward the novices’ table but assumed he had words for the clutch of boys at the other end. After months of occasionally disgusting and unbelievably petty conflict, Soral Brûl, who’d inherited Seb Dolek’s mantle as the chief instigator of the mockery, had finally responded to Hathmar’s command that he neither speak to nor go near Shaldis. But the stocky, dark-browed boy never let a morning go by without some stage-whispered remark to his friends. After eighteen months Raeshaldis still ate alone, and ate warily.

  She looked up now from the list she’d been studying—forms of clouds, this one, and the names of the wind’s twelve quarters. The rector stood with hands folded, his usual expression of angry peevishness overlying the haggard look of too little sleep. How this could be during the days of the Summoning, when everyone fasted and stood from before first light until the final glimmers had died from the sky, Shaldis couldn’t imagine, but she’d heard that many of the mages in fact slept poorly in these dragging, exhausting, fruitless days.

  She also couldn’t imagine how anyone could feel resentment at being mage-born. How could anyone choose the position of clan lord, even clan lord of one of the greatest houses, over the powers of a mage?

  Unless of course those powers disa
ppeared. And you were too proud to admit they had.

  She rolled shut her scroll of notes. “Yes sir?”

  “You’re to work in the scrying chamber today.” The rector kept his narrow lips in a neutral expression, but spiteful satisfaction glimmered in his pale blue eyes. “It has been eight days since anyone was there; too long for it to go unwatched.”

  Shaldis felt herself go pale; first cold, then scalded with a flush of anger. At the other end of the table the boys exchanged glances and grins, and she fought to keep from reacting, from staring at Benno Sarn, from leaping to her feet and shouting, What?

  “I told you,” she heard Soral Brûl say to Minktat. “Took them long enough to figure out that’s why the rains haven’t come. With a bitch up there at the ring, sucking up everything we can do?”

  And Mekwa said, “We’ll get it now.”

  “If the scrying chamber’s far enough away.”

  They didn’t even bother to lower their voices. Benno Sarn must have heard them, but he only watched Shaldis, waiting for her to speak.

  She took a deep breath and forced her voice to steady friendliness, like the Summer Concubine speaking to Barbonak the Glassblower. “Yes sir. You understand that my languages aren’t very good yet, not even Shore dialect.”

  “I understand.” The rector’s voice had a patronizing note to it, as if there weren’t masters in the college who had no more idea of how to speak the tongue of the folk beyond the distant mountains—let alone the strange languages of the Otherwhere wizards—than Shaldis had. “If images arise in any of the crystals or mirrors, any images at all, take careful notes of them and report them to Yanrid at the end of the day.”

  He sounded like he didn’t think her capable of even that, and the heat that burned beneath her sternum flamed hotter. She had to lower her eyes in order to say, “Yes sir.” She was almost shaking with anger.