The brooding darkness of the temple had the taste in her mind of some vile dream. The image of the hawk-headed war god, unthinkably old: crystal wrapped in gold and ringed with three bands of iron.
And within that image, the bloodied labyrinth of the djinn’s mind, created with magic and maintained with the magic that burns on the threshold between life and death.
Maybe, she thought, if she truly wanted to return to that place, if she truly wanted with all her heart to go back into that insane consciousness that existed—that could exist—only in magic . . .
But she didn’t.
And she couldn’t make herself truly want to return.
“He’s there,” she concluded softly. “And he’s aware of me. I know it. But he will not speak. Whether he’ll speak to anyone else, I don’t know.”
“Me, I can think of a couple folks I’d rather he didn’t speak to,” Moth muttered, and selected a vanilla wafer from the plate.
“But what about the gods?” It was the first time Shaldis had heard Pebble question the judgment of anyone, let alone the king. “The real gods, I mean. Ean and Rohar and Oan Echis and Darutha—the ones who made the world and keep it running. Hasn’t anyone asked them what they want?”
“The problem with asking the opinion of the gods, my child,” said the king softly, “is that one cannot always trust the interpretations of those who claim to speak for them. Priests are mortal, when all is said, even priests who speak in holy trances . . . or claim to.”
Pebble stared at him, her eyes slowly filling with tears of disappointed shock, like a child hearing that her father has sold her nurse.
Very gently, the king went on. “I don’t ask the gods much because I don’t trust men. When you’re a king, you can’t afford to. I can only act, to the utmost of my abilities, as I think the gods would have any man act, to keep the realm together at all costs. And for that I need your help. Do you understand?”
The big girl sighed and wiped her eyes. “No,” she said and, reaching across the low table, took his hand and kissed it. “But I trust you, sir. And I trust Summerchild. And I’ll pray every day, to every single one of them. Then if the gods ever tell me what they want, I’ll let you know.”
The king smiled. He had probably the most beautiful smile Shaldis had ever seen. “Thank you.” With his other hand he grasped Moth’s, sticky fingers and all. “Thank you all. Aside from the fact that I really, really don’t want to go into the water with the crocodiles ‘for real,’ as the children say . . . if the realm breaks up, we are all doomed. I just don’t know how quickly. If the rains cannot be brought this spring—if we cannot muster enough labor and supplies to finish the aqueduct—the lakes will dry. It’s ninety days by caravan to the coast, which is rockbound, barren, and without the soil to support a village, as far as anyone has ever traveled. And in all other directions there is nothing. Only sand. If lands lie beyond the desert, no one has succeeded in reaching them. Ever. There is, quite simply, nowhere else to go.”
TWELVE
What should I do?” Shaldis asked when Pebble and Moth took their departure. The sun had reached noon, the heat nearly unbearable even in the palace’s lakeside gardens. All over the Yellow City, farmers were packing up their vegetable stands and cobblers their lasts. In the villages, wives and slaves were putting up curtains of woven straw over windows and doors to close out the heat. In the fields, men drove oxen and teyn under shade, and lay down themselves to sleep through the worst of the day.
All would start up again an hour before sunset. Even the insects slept.
“There’s almost certainly a Crafty woman somewhere in the city that we don’t know about; and there’s one, and maybe more, somewhere, I don’t know where but probably nowhere near the city, or else she’d know about healing with herbs and poultices.”
She adjusted the long boxwood sticks that held her hair in a tight roll at the back of her head—there’d been no time, before dawn that day, to braid it into its usual lacquered knot. “Should I concentrate on finding them, or should I put most of my energy into a library search at the Citadel for anything concerning crocodiles, poisons, and snakes?”
“Hathmar and the Sun Mages were good enough to offer to do that.” His Majesty padded over to the cooler and fished out the remains of the now-tepid jar of lemonade, which he doled out equally between his own cup, Shaldis’s, and Summerchild’s. “Cheers,” he added glumly, lofting a toast. “To the continuation of the senior branch of the House Jothek. It will be many days before Soth and Mistress Pomegranate return, but neither of them has heard of any Crafty women working in either the City of White Walls or the City of Reeds. It’s most discouraging, even without the resurgence of lake monsters that’s been reported, the gods apparently being under the impression that I don’t have enough to occupy my thoughts.”
“Rachnis said that he’d come to the palace and look through the Royal Library,” Summerchild went on. “Soth let it get into a terrible muddle during the years when he was not well—”
Shaldis had for years watched her father’s accounts deteriorate in the morass of depression and sherab, and could only shudder at what the shadowmaster would have to say of the mess the royal librarian’s ten-year bender must have caused. Rachnis had little sensitivity but a very instructive line of invective.
“—and though he’s been working to straighten them out, he’d barely started when he went north with Pomegranate on his search. The problem is that so many spells need the strength of two or three or four Crafty women working in concert, combining their magic through the Sigil of Sisterhood. Soth suspects that the problem may be in sourcing our power, because a single mage could work them. And just because a spell doesn’t work for one woman—or two or three—does not mean it won’t work for four. Which means that we would like your help tonight, when we ride out along the lakeshore to test everything we already know about crocodiles.”
“I’d figured that,” Shaldis said. “I’ll send a note to my grandfather that I won’t be back there till tomorrow morning. Which is fine with me—I don’t think I could take him and my brother again this soon.”
“Otherwise,” continued the favorite, “I think,” and she glanced across at the king, who inclined his head slightly in acquiescence to whatever her opinion might be. “I think the best use of your time would be to concentrate on helping—and if possible finding—the woman in your dream, and most important, tracking down the Raven sister who attacked your grandfather. Even if, for whatever reason, she will not help us—she will not help the king—I think we need to know who and where she is.”
Voices in the garden. The chatter of servants and a child’s treble laugh. Shaldis saw the look of joy that flashed between the king and Summerchild as both got to their feet. The next moment Geb, two palace slaves, a plump and well-dressed nurse, and a slim dark girl filled the archway that looked into the gardens. The king cried, “Princess!” and held out his arms, to sweep up the girl as she ran to him.
Rainsong. Summerchild’s only surviving child by the king.
The king’s only surviving child.
Amid their laughter, the king’s inquiries of his daughter, how she fared at lessons that morning, and Rainsong’s dignified protest that she was much too old to be picked up, Shaldis blew a silent kiss to Summerchild and took her leave. As she made her way through the jasmine arbors, the fountain courts, and the groves of myrtle and bamboo, she thought about that beautiful, dark-haired child, only a little older than her sister Twinkle, and of what would become of her if His Majesty died.
The great houses married among each other, and the upper levels of their landchiefs actually controlled the vast estates that made up their wealth. Like the children of the wealthy merchants, the sons and daughters of the warrior lords were the bricks and mortar of alliances. The king’s brother, Barún, was the first royal heir in nearly a thousand years to actually marry, and in marrying Lord Sarn’s niece he’d sealed one alliance for House Jothek and created
a dozen potential enemies, whose daughters and sisters and nieces had been passed over.
Lord Sarn, Shaldis guessed, would be the power in the land if the king were to die—and Lord Sarn had enemies, and agendas, of his own. He’d try to hold on to Summerchild and the other Raven sisters, by force if not through loyalty.
The gods only knew where that would end. Hostages, threats, lies. Shaldis shivered as she came within sight of the Red Pavilion, a tiny structure tucked away in the gardens behind the library, which the king had given instructions to be always kept ready for her use. If the king were to die, it wasn’t just Rainsong who stood in danger of being used as a hostage for Summerchild’s services. It was whoever and whatever were prized by each of the Raven sisters.
Twinkle.
Or Pebble’s beloved father and siblings.
Or the child that only a few days ago Moth had excitedly whispered to her that she, Moth, carried in her belly, a little girl-child. She already knew it was a girl.
It was fourteen days until the new moon.
Pebble was right, thought Shaldis as she moved into the cool shadows of the pavilion and climbed the stairs to the little bedchamber above. We’re going to need the help of the gods, and we’re going to need every fragment of help that they’re willing to give.
THIRTEEN
Grandmother . . .” Foxfire pleaded in a whisper as she hurried to keep up with the stooped bundle of black rags that hobbled so purposefully on ahead of her. “Raeshaldis already told me, the djinn in that statue doesn’t come out! She’s tried seven or eight times since the spring, and—”
“And you believed what she told you?” Red Silk turned, and above the edge of her dirty and ragged veil her turquoise eyes shone bright and hard as jewels. Her skinny finger stabbed out, ringless now and crooked with arthritis yet so white and well kept as to give the lie to the whole of her beggar’s array—always supposing that there was anyone abroad in the suffocating heat of noonday to see them. “You’re a fool, girl.” She turned on her heel. Foxfire, half smothered under her own set of dirty rags and veils like horse blankets, had to almost run to keep up with her, and the goat she was dragging on the end of a rope didn’t help.
As she trotted, she kept in her mind the haze of spells called the Gray Cloak, that rendered both women—and the goat—absolutely unnoticed by any who might pass them by. This, in Foxfire’s mind, was a totally unnecessary precaution. The beggars, thieves, and whores who populated the Slaughterhouse District—a straggly slum that trailed away outside the city’s eastern gate—were all asleep in the noon heat: she and her grandmother could have paraded naked up and down the squalid alleyways with basketfuls of jewels in their hands and come to no harm.
And in the hammering heat of midday, naked was the way she wished she was. And while she was wishing, she wished she was back at the villa of Golden Sky and not risking death by suffocation through her grandmother’s scheme.
“You don’t believe a thing that woman tells you,” Red Silk threw back over her shoulder. “She’s the king’s minion. They all are, and that skinny-bones concubine of his most of all. What he says, they do. You don’t trust any but your own. And you keep one eye on them.”
That, Foxfire supposed, was the reason she and her grandmother had been brought to the Slaughterhouse District by three of her older brothers: dour Sormaddin, fierce-tempered Úrthet, and dandified Zharvine, sons of her father by his legal wife, Hearthfire Lady (no newfangled dropping of the old name forms for her!). Sormaddin and Úrthet had been left with the camels among the ruined villas that lay along the eastward road. Zharvine, reveling at the prospect of lurking about in disguise, followed them at a distance with drawn sword, clothed as one of the bullyboys whose violence ruled the slum. Foxfire considered his presence as unnecessary as the spells that hid her and her grandmother. The least he could have done was lead the goat.
She knew what her grandmother intended, and though their success might well save her father’s life, she wished desperately that she was home.
The walls narrowed around them, high now though ruinous and sending back waves of heat as if the two dark-clothed women made their way through a bread oven. The reek of rotting meat from the slaughtering yards, of dung and privies, made Foxfire dizzy. Before them the black stone walls of the old Temple of Nebekht rose over the surrounding jumble; six months ago the cult of the Iron-Girdled God had been strong enough to nearly oust the king from his throne, and now, like the Citadel of the Sun Mages, it stood empty.
Empty save for the king’s guards and for the statue of gold-sheathed crystal where Raeshaldis said that the djinn Naruansich still lurked.
Foxfire half closed her eyes, stretched out her mind. Let her consciousness pass into the black stone walls of the temple, as Summerchild had taught her—had taught both the mother and the daughter of her lord’s enemy, because they, like she, were the Sisters of the Raven. Because they, like she, needed the full use of their magic, for all to survive.
The guards in the lobby were dozing. As who wouldn’t in this heat? Her spells probed at their somnolent, undefended minds, halfway toward dreaming already. One man, the older, had brought a book with him, a compilation of the runes of High Script, which he’d been copying onto wax and studying, along with a simplified version of the Classic of Kings. No wonder he’d fallen asleep, reflected Foxfire: part of the training of a Pearl Woman was to learn the thousands of runes of the High Script and how to read the classics of philosophy, scripture, and ancient lore written in them. The younger man was daydreaming about his girlfriend. Foxfire felt the warm tingle of his reminiscent lust, and blushed a little under her veils.
“Two guards, Grandmother,” she breathed.
“Can you put them to sleep?”
She drew a deep breath. “I think so.”
“Do it, then.”
It wasn’t difficult. Shaldis had taught them all the Sun Mage spells for easing people over the edge into dreamland, but Foxfire, like all the women, had used these only as a starting point. She realized she’d been making up little songs in her head for years, to make her nurses and governesses—and later some of the ladies in the Blossom House where she’d had her advanced education in the womanly arts—drift off to sleep. Raeshaldis had told her that she’d done the same thing at her grandfather’s house.
So Foxfire and Red Silk had practiced, all over Mohrvine’s household, without anyone being the wiser. Most times Foxfire could put a guard to sleep, or one of the pages waiting in their little day room. Once she’d whispered a dreaming song that had put the whole dormitory of maids under, but as that had gotten the girls soundly beaten by the housekeeper she hadn’t tried it again. Her grandmother, who experienced no such scruples about who got punished for falling asleep on duty, was much better at it than she was.
But in this case, aided by the day’s heat, the matter was ludicrously easy. Foxfire breathed a sweet nostalgic air into the younger man’s mind, about his beautiful sweetheart, and into the older man’s whispered a soft monotony of runes, lulling as the song of spring wind in willow trees. Beside her she heard Red Silk chuckle. “Very good, little minx,” the old lady whispered. “You’ve put half the neighbors down as well. Now come. Let’s see how you are with opening doors.”
That was another skill Foxfire had practiced under her grandmother’s watchful eye. At least that one didn’t get the servants in trouble. Foxfire wrapped her hands in the end of her veil before pressing them to the sun-hot bronze of the temple doors, probed into the iron-strapped slabs for the mechanism of the locks. Soth, Oryn’s librarian, had taught them that, and mad old Pomegranate, whose brother was a burglar: all the women had studied the construction of locks and latches, to know what to feel for with their minds. Foxfire could see the mechanism in her thoughts, as if she were remembering a dream she’d had, but she couldn’t touch the intricate maze of levers. She felt it when her grandmother reached in, and pushed the tumblers aside.
Her grandmother had poured dumbw
eed down the goat’s throat, to paralyze its voice. Still it struggled, rasping hoarsely as they pulled it over the threshold, as if it knew what would become of it in the vast enclosed dark of the temple.
Foxfire shuddered, hating herself as she drew the great doors closed.
The sanctuary that lay beyond the vestibule breathed with the old reek of sacrificial slaughter, of dirty blood and scraps of meat left rotting in corners—the followers of Nebekht had never enjoyed a reputation for cleanliness.
Above all, the statue of the Iron-Girdled One brooded in the dark.
“High One!” Red Silk’s voice rang in the darkness like the blow of a hammer on steel. Foxfire clutched at the sleep spells on the guards. “Sunflash Prince, Naruansich, lord of the invisible kingdom of the winds!”
Foxfire winced, knowing that her grandmother had learned the djinn’s true name from Shaldis. She wanted her father to survive—she wanted her father to be king, but she knew betrayal when she saw it.
“We call upon you, Lord of the Thousand Lights, we beg of you, show yourself!” The old woman fell to her knees before the idol.
“We seek your council, wisest prince! We seek your aid. Show yourself, we beseech, we pray! Speak with us here!”
Silence, and the reeking weight of the noonday heat, as if the whole of the heavens pressed down upon the black rafters far above their heads. After what felt like hours—but, Foxfire calculated, was probably about as long as it would take to walk a mile—her grandmother cursed, and pulled from beneath her robes a corked gourd bottle of brandy doctored with tiga root, which the nomads of the desert used to simulate madness. Lohar, to whom the djinn had spoken in the name of the god Nebekht, had been mad; Foxfire privately considered that to “free the mind” in this way was crazy in itself, but knew better than to tell her grandmother so.
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