Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “Good girl.” Benno Sarn went back to the masters’ table at the other end of the low-arched chamber, its walls half cut from the living sandstone of the bluff, melon pink in the lamplight. For a moment Shaldis sat very still, not trusting herself to move. The muted murmur of voices seemed to roar in her ears with the clink of pottery vessels, the scents of coffee and couscous, yogurt and fruit. Braziers burned among the tables, the smoke of the charcoal adding to the lamplight haze; it was the cold hour before first light and the room was freezing.

  “Hey, you think it was something real simple, like she’s on her period or something and that’s why the magic hasn’t been working?”

  Shaldis stood up, all appetite for breakfast gone. “I think most wizards’ magic is a little stronger than that,” she said. “But you’d know best about yours.” She walked out of the lighted refectory into the night’s blue cold.

  The scrying chamber! Indignation and betrayal almost took her breath away. Like a shepherd, like a child! “Good girl” indeed! “Take careful notes . . . .” Did he think she’d be too lazy to write down every detail if some image were to appear—after all these years!—in any of the scrying crystals, the mirrors of silver or gold or quicksilver, the bowls of fresh water, in which for years the Sun Mages had spoken with those other wizards who inhabited other parts of the world?

  There had been no flicker of life in those devices, no sign, for close to eight years.

  Eight years ago, when Hathmar’s sight had failed and it was clear that something was terribly amiss, the king had sent messengers with the trading caravans to the scattered towns that clung to the waterless rock mountains in the west. There were mages on that barren coast who for lifetimes had been in communication with the great population centers around the Seven Lakes: a little colony of Sun Mages in a town called the Sun Above Fog, a line of Earth Wizards in the village of Black Giants, who passed from master to pupil the wisdom they’d learned through the scrying crystals from the mages of the Yellow City. It was a journey of three months going and three coming, and when the messengers returned it was with the word that the mages of the coastal villages were losing their powers too.

  Whether women in that place were finding those powers, Shaldis had not heard.

  She paused in the little courtyard before the scrying chamber, cloak wrapped tight around her, shivering in the cold. The library bulked above her, and the domed head of the Citadel bluff above that. Between the House of the Adepts and the rector’s house—where robes, bedding, papyrus paper and parchment for copying were stored—the Lake of the Sun was visible over the domes and roof tiles of the city. She couldn’t see the orchards or fields from here, but dawn stillness carried their scent to her, and the rising creak of a thousand bucket hoists, laboriously raising one measure of water at a time to the thirsty fields. Her breath hung in puffs of diamond. She listened, straining her senses, to pick up some whisper of her former attacker. But there was nothing. Only the chitter of rock sparrows waking and calling their territories before first light, the dim hum of bees.

  Market carts, coming into the city below. The smell of fires kindled, where women woke early to make breakfast for men.

  The voices of the Sun Mages as they emerged from the refectory climbed the twisting stairs from the refectory to the lookouts, from the lookouts to the Ring. Rachnis, and Brakt the loremaster, and Yanrid the crystalmaster had spent the freezing hours since midnight laying out anew the power circles, the limitations, the lines and the sigils to draw up the power of the sun.

  They’re only doing what they can, Shaldis thought, her anger rebuked by that patient willingness. They’re trying everything they know.

  In the small, round scrying chamber, crystals and mirrors seemed to wink at her in the darkness. She thought of them, those unimaginable mages she’d never seen but had heard described, or read of in accounts that went back centuries. Black-skinned naked wizards with jewels braided in their thick black hair. Brown-skinned men with huge disks of gold in their ears and plugs of jade in their lips Men whose round faces were entirely covered with red or brown or pale yellow hair, like teyn, so that only their bright, black eyes gleamed through. Men who wore thick furs even within the small rooms of cut stone where they seemed to dwell. Laboriously, the Sun Mages of centuries past had learned the languages of these men, and had spoken to them: of the sky, of the earth, of magic, of the djinni—whom they also knew by other names and who apparently existed in the mountains of the brown men, and in the icy wastes. Of where their cities were and of their empires and their kings.

  No expedition, no matter how well supplied, had ever found these lands or these mages. Most had not come back at all.

  There were men in the Citadel who still mourned the friends to whom they’d spoken for so many years. Teg the windmaster, who up until the Song had begun had spent most of his days here, searching for the dark-skinned Reb-Nak in the mirror that had been silent for years. Rual, who would still sometimes speak of his red-furred friend Nyan-Nyan: “His wife was about to give birth—I gave him advice, but whether she lived . . . the child would be able to run, now. I never said good-bye . . . .”

  Two of the scryers had since died, though the languages they’d so carefully learned continued to be taught in the college, in the hopes that somehow, some way, the communications could be revived.

  From the scrying-chamber door, Shaldis turned and ran up the pink sandstone steps to the library. The door was barred and written over with spells to keep novices out, but it was long since those spells had had power in them. Shaldis had learned how to work even a spelled bar from the other side through the wood of the door. This wasn’t the first time she’d come into the library when Brakt and his assistant were gone.

  They’d both spend the day in the Ring, at the vortex of the summoned power.

  Meaning, Shaldis knew, they’d never miss a book if it were returned by evening.

  She knew exactly what she wanted and went straight to it, choosing among the great shelves of codices that lined the walls of the high stone room. Windows circled the lower edges of the long chamber’s three whitewashed domes, in daylight filling the room with a soft, diffuse light. Lately, as everywhere in the Citadel, lamps had been set up, so that no one wizard would have to admit it if he could no longer see in the dark. During the night hours the light shone forth like necklets of topaz around the dark outlines of the domes.

  Shaldis took three of the signacons—the books of sigils—and a syllabary of the High Script glyphs whose study was part of the education of all upper-class boys. After days of training in meditation, of practice in the weaving of spells and illusion, of lectures and lessons in the properties and preparation of herbs and the anatomy and taxonomy of disease, Shaldis spent several hours each evening in remedial study and memorization, trying to make sense of the runes that formed the sigils.

  Most men only learned a few thousand glyphs of the High Script, enough to carry on commerce day to day, study their horoscopes and read the simpler classics. Scribble, though far less beautiful and connotative of philosophical truth, consisted of only twenty letters and anyone could grasp it in a few months.

  As she slipped through the library doors again, Shaldis tried to picture a recipe for baba cake in High Script, and the effort to keep from giggling aloud restored her good humor completely. She thought, I’ll have to tell the Summer Concubine that, and the memory of the friendship was like touching an amulet, dispelling all Soral Brûl’s dirty remarks.

  She pressed her hands to the door of the scrying chamber, listening within—anyone in the refectory could have heard Benno announcing to all and sundry where she would be found today. As far as she could tell, the room was empty.

  She pushed open the door. Fortunately, the scrying chamber was a solitary building, barely a dozen feet in diameter and topped by a dome as perfect as a blue-and-gold soap bubble; there was no place in the tiled room where anyone could hide. The crystals on their stands of carved mesquite wo
od, the mirrors in their frames of iron or silver, all stood on a single table in the center of the room. The bowls—two alabaster, two onyx, two jade—had been emptied and dried. She took two or three deep breaths to calm her mind and soul. Then she filled the water ewer at the fountain near the library steps and came back to pour three bowls full with water. While she was grinding ink for the other three she felt, through her skin, through her heart, through some part of her that had no physical existence, the rising glitter of magic in the air. Felt it before the first whiff of frankincense spiraled down like a luminous ribbon from the Ring. Felt it before she heard Hathmar’s pure, powerful tenor speak the Praise of the Sun with which all rites of Sun Magic opened:

  Heart of all warmth, Source of all light, Life of all life . . .

  Needing no praise and asking no reciprocation in thought, word, or deed.

  The shining hand held out to us all.

  Tears of anger and betrayal burned her eyes. The magic flowed up through her, rising from the ground and saturating the air, strong as the light itself that was just beginning to dilute the cobalt of the sky.

  The voices of the mages lifted into that first-touched magic sky, calling on the name of the Bird Sun, the Coming Sun, the sun that was promise and relief and hope. She felt the power triangulate, place the hour of the day with the day and month in the earth’s turning, as she knew the lines written on the Ring’s pavement changed a little with each day to align precisely with the changed position of the sun in the sky.

  The horns spoke, eerie and not like music at all.

  They’re trying everything they know.

  She wiped her tears aside and went back to grinding her ink. And I’m trying what I know, she thought. And what I know is to find some spell in the lore of this order that will let me read the name of the mage who attacked me: the mage who may well be behind the disappearances of the Summer Concubine’s friends. The mage whose hate for women-who-do-magic is like lightning and storm.

  His magic has to have lingered in the places he’s touched. And from his magic, I can follow him.

  “Why children?” The wizard Soth handed Oryn his small crystal-glass cup of mint tea in its silver holder; the king groaned piteously as he settled again on the blue silk cushions of the Summer Pavilion’s divan. “Aside from the obvious answer that they’re human beings who are too small to fight effectively, and can be easily carried?”

  The rear downstairs chamber opened into a private garden, redolent, in summer, of wax-white gardenias. A small bath was half hidden among the pepper trees and jasmine vines; Oryn had spent a good part of the morning there slowly regaining his ability to walk. It was nearly noon now. Wrapped in a robe of bloodred velvet, he had decided against a nap and had sent for heavenly morsels, tea and Soth. Blinking with the dazed weariness of what had to be a merciless hangover, Soth sipped strongly brandied coffee.

  “But why carry them away at all?” Oryn asked. The calm faces of the dead children were still visible to him, as if yesterday’s evening sun had etched them onto the backs of his eyelids. Exhausted as he had been for the remaining hour or so of last night, it had been hard to sleep. “Even the wildings never carry captives away when they raid a village. Not to kill or for any other purpose.”

  “No one’s ever heard of a woman working magic, either,” pointed out the librarian simply. “No one’s ever heard of one wizard, let alone dozens, suddenly being unable to perform even the most elementary of spells that they’ve been performing all their lives. No one’s ever heard of a god choosing a man to speak to humankind directly for him, to say nothing of taking the opportunity to announce that contrary to every scripture, he, not Ean, was the creator and is the lord of the universe, and we’d all jolly well better toe the line, do as his sacred Mouth instructs, and donate lots of money, land and sacrificial beasts to his temple.”

  Soth pushed up his spectacles to rub the bridge of his nose, wincing. The Summer Concubine, veiled with the thin silks that wealthy women wore indoors in the seryak portions of their husbands’ houses, added more coffee to the wizard’s shallow alabaster cup and returned to sitting at Oryn’s feet.

  “Could it have something to do with the stories about the djinni taking children?” she asked.

  “Even the djinni don’t butcher them,” protested Soth, and the Summer Concubine replied, “How do we know?”

  “We’ve made slaves of the teyn for a thousand years,” said Oryn thoughtfully, and selected a date ball from the plate before him. “We’ve captured them in battle, bred them, chosen which boar will cover which jenny . . . chosen the docile boars and cut the throats of the intractable ones as casually as we castrate steers. We’ve taught them to speak to us—a few simple words about the work we give them—so we know they can speak. For all that thousand years there have been mages who’ve attempted to learn if they do speak with one another; who have tried to figure out exactly what they’re doing when they cluster, and whether they dream. . . .”

  He shook his head, even that small movement making him flinch. The Summer Concubine was an accomplished bath mistress and had done much to loosen up muscles cramped and stiffened and agonizingly painful after nearly twenty-four hours in the saddle, but he was still earnestly regretting his decision to actually investigate something of what was going on instead of lounging back on his cushions and writing another poem. His nose, insufficiently anointed during yesterday’s ride, had turned an embarrassingly unfashionable shade of red.

  As he’d feared, Geb wasn’t speaking to him as a result.

  “Remember how Hathmar went to live up in that teyn village on the Lake of Reeds? How he’d go out into the fields with them and pick Lord Sarn’s cotton, gods help him? Three years, and all he got were calluses on his fingers and a sunburn he was another three years getting rid of, and he came away not one whit wiser about the teyn.”

  In the garden, Pome the gardener moved carefully from rose tree to rose tree, dippering each its ration of water. The teyn he’d trained for years followed after him with the buckets. Salt and Sugar, he’d named them—the gods knew if they had names among themselves. Like the irruption of bright birds into sunlight, Pome’s two grandchildren bounded out from among the pools of papyrus, the shaded beds of lilies; Oryn started to spring up, with reflexive dread, and sink with a yelp back onto the divan as the stiffened muscles of groin and thighs and back jabbed him with pain as if a dragon had seized him in its mouth.

  The two teyn patted the children, smiling—or were they only baring their tusks?—and touching their fair hair.

  “What do they think?” he asked softly.

  “What does Black Princess think?” Soth nodded toward the graceful little cat, curled asleep in a spot of sunlight on the blue-and-crimson carpets of the pavilion floor. “I’ve shared a house, and a bed, and an infinite number of cups of tea with her, drat her impudence, and I’ve no more idea what goes on in her mind than I have of where the rain clouds have got to. Maybe the teyn have gotten a new religion, a new god of their own. Just because they’ve never worshiped any god before—unless the clusterings are a form of worship—doesn’t mean Nebekht hasn’t revealed himself to a teyn Mouth as well as a human one.”

  “Oh, please!” The Summer Concubine shuddered. “Whatever you do, please don’t mention that where one of the True Believers is likely to hear it.”

  “Lord King!” Young Iorradus appeared among the roses. Oryn wondered idly whether Barún had made the young man an offer and whether he ought to speak to his handsome brother about the inadvisability of taking up with a nephew of Lord Akarian—he had no idea what the young, guard’s tastes were—or if Barún had enough sense to see that for himself.

  Better not count on it.

  In any case, Barún would be at the stronghold of the Brodag-Jothek subclan by this time, in the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon, gathering levies to meet Rai an-Ariban and his tribe.

  Something in the handsome young face, as Iorradus strode up the garden path, ma
de Oryn reflect, I should have taken that nap.

  “Lord King, there’s bad news from the aqueduct.”

  Sigil Deep Awareness. Meditate ten breaths. Sigil of Whispers, linked at the Bird Sun and the Sun at His Prayers. Runes of Shin, Olor, Hobe. Pursue the sounds downward into the fiber of wood and follow the line of the grain inward. Repeat in infinite breath.

  Sigil of Whispers? Shaldis frowned. Was that another name for the glyph whose stem was The Sound of Wind Crossing Deep Sand?

  She flipped open the signacon and scanned the charts of radicals.

  The Hero Sun of midmorning was moving into the King Sun of noon. The smell of incense blessed the air. Shaldis’s anger at the mages came and went, accompanied by shallow evanescent schemes to quit the college entirely or, alternatively, to put forth a massive counterspell to keep the rains away long enough to convince the masters that it hadn’t been her presence that had kept them away before.

  She shook her head, amazed at the selfishness of the fantasy. Come on, Old One, she told herself, if your counterspell could work, so would your help in the Summoning and you wouldn’t be having this problem. She reread the passage on the Spell of Deep Awareness, and noted it down on her tablets with the others that had seemed promising. Then she pushed the signacon aside, touched tongue to fingertip and sketched the Sigil of Deep Awareness on the waxed oak of the tabletop, taking care to orient it along the path of the sun.

  At the two sun-points on the sigil, she linked it with the Sigil of Whispers (Deep Sand or Thin Sand? she wondered—they were different words—Well, I’ll try it both ways), and wove in the three runes of Shin, Olor, and Hobe: Shin the Ear, Olor the Tree, Hobe the Voice of the Living. Closing her eyes, Shaldis laid her hand over it, palm spread—there were some who read best with the backs of their knuckles or their fingertips, but Shaldis had found that the spread palm worked best.

  Beeswax and dents. Dryness and age. Student elbows and the scents of leather and papyrus . . . Teg the windmaster’s voice speaking in a language she didn’t understand.