“So far.” The king’s librarian turned his face from her, rested his arm along the light deck rail, his chin on his wrist.
Pomegranate settled herself against the willow work of the backrests provided for the vessel’s passengers, let her mirror fall back among the tangle of her beads, and for a time watched the dark shapes of the banks in silence. Their little cabin was in the barge’s stern, barely more than a sunshade of woven straw. The beat of the coxswain’s drum was soft, more a heart tap than demanding thunder. The rowers were men, not teyn, and took it turn and turn about to time the strokes.
After a time she asked, “What’s that?” and pointed. Soth adjusted his spectacles, the lenses rectangles of reflected silver on either side of the long curve of his nose. After a frustrating evening of negotiating broken shallows and long stretches where the narrow vessel had to be carried, they’d come to one of the canal’s newer reaches just after midnight, where Pomegranate could scry for whatever news she could of Hokiros’s movements. By midmorning they should see the wide waters of the Great Lake open before them.
Even to the old woman’s magical sight there was little around them here to see. The banks stood high above the sunken channel, walls of velvet black on one side, of etiolated pewter on the other. But along the southern rim a greenish light glowed, less bright even than the starlight. Even as she pointed it faded away.
“Did you see it?”
The beaky profile dipped in assent.
“What is it? I used to see something like it from time to time last winter, when I’d sleep in the ruined villas out past the Slaughterhouse District. Sometimes it looked like spots of greenish fire in the Dead Hills, sometimes like a little greenish mist moving along the wadis. I thought it might have something to do with the djinni.”
“It could,” said Soth slowly. “The king says he saw it, too, far out on the desert when he was trying to contact the djinni. . . . But, no, I don’t know what it is.” He hooked one elbow over the rail, turned his head to watch the place on the high banks as it retreated behind them with the boat’s silent speed. “Any more than I know what those things are in the Lake of the Moon or what Hokiros was or is. I looked through over a hundred volumes in the palace library, and quite a few of the Citadel’s as well, for anything about those lights, and there was nothing. That fact alone troubles me.”
“That you can’t find any record of such a thing?”
“That it’s . . . unprecedented. Like our friend Hokiros.” He faced her again and drew the thin white mosquito veiling over his face and ears as the boat followed the new-cut channel closer to the shore. His bony hands were perfectly steady; whatever new hope and purpose he had found in his inclusion in the circle of the Raven sisters, it seemed to be proof against the murky memories of his years of drink.
“At one time I thought that my losing the power to do magic was the worst thing that could happen,” he said. “I was one of the first whose powers failed. I didn’t understand then that it was going to happen to everyone, to every single mage I knew. Or that the rains would fail. Or that the djinni would disappear. Or we wouldn’t be able to heal with our hands or ward against mice and locusts . . . or lake monsters. Or that the realm would be endangered. Or what else? What comes after that?”
He looked down at the moonlight glittering on the arrow of the bow wave that lapped the hull, on the slick, glassy crests where the oars cut the water and the wet black blades as they lifted free. A tiny craft like a folded leaf, skimming the ebony surface of an unknown universe below.
“That’s what worries me,” he said. “The fact that we think we’ve seen the worst of it, and maybe we haven’t.”
The night was far spent; the air like warmed syrup, scented already with the coming day. Oryn knew better than to sleep again so soon. He groped for the robe of yellow silk that lay over the foot of his bed, slipped from beneath the mosquito bar, and padded to the stand where his harp gleamed gently in the night-light’s glow. Moonlight made checkered patterns on the floor, glittered on the waters of the lake.
There was an old love song his nurse had taught him on her wooden flute. He picked it out, sweet fantasies of embellishment, then simple phrases of that ancient tune: longing and love, hope and delight. This is for my Summerchild, he thought, dreaming her dreams. May they not concern crocodiles.
This is for my Rainsong Girl.
He started through it a second time when lamplight joggled among the jasmine. A moment later the stout little form of Geb emerged from the garden. Oryn put the harp aside.
Someone was with Geb. A young man, dark and bearded and wearing the striped coat of a small-time merchant, a traveler in goods from one settlement to the next.
Oryn thought, quite calmly, Damn.
Nobody ever came into the gardens of the king in the middle of the night bearing good news.
“My lord,” said Geb, “this is Poru, of the merchant clan of Brûl. He’s come from the village of Three Wells, in the rangeland out by the Dead Hills, a day’s ride east. They’re dead there, my lord.” The chamberlain’s sweet alto voice shook a little; in the light of the lamp he held, his round, ageless face was like collapsed suet under its layer of cochineal and kohl, and his eyebrows stood out like two strokes of black paint. “They’re all dead.”
SEVENTEEN
When Shaldis woke, very late in the morning, Jethan was gone. Despite the fact that he was managing, disapproving, and old-fashioned enough to believe that even a woman who had the powers of magic needed protection from the rough world, she was conscious of disappointment.
Either Kylin or Hiero the cook had left a kettle of scrub water simmering over the coals of the outdoor oven in the kitchen yard for her. When she entered the refectory, shaking her wet hair through her fingers to dry it, she expected to find the immense stone chamber empty and hoped to find at least that Hiero the cook had left her some bread and the dregs of the teapot. Instead she found, a little to her surprise, both Yanrid and Rachnis still at the single small table in the corner. The rest of the chamber, where close to a hundred and fifty Sun Mages and novices had once been served, echoed softly with the murmur of their voices in the rich yellow sunlight from the windows.
“A messenger came for the Lady Summerchild before daybreak,” said the crystalmaster, beckoning Shaldis to join them. “Your boy Jethan escorted her to the palace. I gather they would be riding out of the city at once.”
“There was a plague in a village called Three Wells.” Her fellow novice, Kylin, draped in a kitchen apron over his robe, dropped onto the bench at her side and poured a cup of tea for himself, before Shaldis could comment on the fact that Jethan was not “her” boy. “They say everyone died.” He sounded both excited and scared; all thought of Jethan vanished in a stab of sickened shock.
“Of plague?”
Our children are dying. . . .
I can’t be too late! Not having come so close!
“If they died of plague it was from unclean dishes.” Hiero the cook appeared in the pantry door, tall and slightly stooped, his wise, kindly face luxuriantly bearded and radiating serenity. He looked exactly like every wizard in every story Shaldis had ever heard, far more so than the two rather sleepy old ruffians across the table from her. “Or from a lethargy caused by laziness.”
Kylin gulped down his tea and got to his feet, darted back into the kitchen.
Yanrid, of whom Shaldis had spent her first eighteen months at the Citadel absolutely terrified, grunted. “Disaster struck Three Wells the night before last,” he said. “Had the woman in your dream been there she would not have said Our children die, but We all perish.” He smeared a little goat cheese on his bread, studied the result in a shaft of sunlight that was already growing hot. “And in any case there is little you can do. And nothing that you could have done.”
Shaldis knew he was right—knew it down to her bones. Why then, she wondered, did bitterness and anger sicken her so? She pushed her own bread away, her hand shaking, and s
at for a time gazing into the shafts of sunlight, the shadows beyond. Did I leave the scrying chamber too early? If I hadn’t let Jethan talk me into abandoning it then, would I have heard from her?
Did I really destroy our only hope through my weakness, my carelessness?
She looked across at the craggy-faced man opposite her, saw the dark eyes that had always seemed so unfeeling still on her, filled with an understanding concern.
“How did you do it?” she asked softly. “How can you do it still? Knowing the outlander mages, knowing they have to be going through something just as terrible as we’re going through here, if their magic has faded. Friends, people you’ve known for years. You know what’s happening and you can’t do anything! She could be dying—she could be dead already.”
“If she is dead, there was nothing you could have done.” Yanrid’s voice was like granite, unmoving. But not, she realized, because he didn’t feel. “If she is alive, there is nothing that you can do to keep her from dying tomorrow . . . or not dying. I think no one who has our powers—your powers,” he corrected himself gently, “ever loses the feeling that we owe it to everyone to help them. And until we find a way to step past that, there is no end to the harm we do ourselves and others. We do what we can. And we come to understand the things that we cannot do. You don’t know whether this woman is alive or dead. It isn’t necessary to hurt yourself thinking she’s dead when, in fact, you simply don’t know.”
“It comes with age, child,” sighed Rachnis, giving his white hair a single deft twist onto the back of his head and skewering it into place with a stylus. Then amusement glinted in his black eyes and he added, “Or anyway I hope it will to me,” and they all laughed.
“As for what you can do,” said Yanrid, “since this woman seems able to communicate through dreams rather than regular scrying—a method which has been written about but for which no spell of control exists—I suggest that each night before you sleep, you meditate on the healing herbs that will bring down fever and the spells to be written over them that add to their strength. With luck these things will enter your own dreams, and she may read them there.”
“But what if she lives in the deep desert?” asked Shaldis. “Or the mountains—she has to be somewhere far away, not to have heard of healing with herbs to begin with.”
“That only means you must meditate on as many different varieties as you can. I’m sure”—here he glanced beside him at Rachnis—“that we can come up with enough herbals in the library to keep you and your unknown sister busy.”
Shaldis drew a deep breath, as if the old men had lifted some great weight from her shoulders. It hadn’t even occurred to her that others had communicated in this fashion before. “Thank you. I’ll do that. And if there’s anything else you think of that I can do . . .”
“Yes,” said Yanrid firmly. “Take care of yourself, so that when you do sleep, your own dreams will be clearer. As I said, no one has ever come up with a method of opening this dream communication at will, but if it happens again, any notes you can take on the subject will—”
Kylin swept back into the refectory, a towel slung over one shoulder and sand all over his apron, with which they scoured the pots. “This came for you.” He fished in his belt satchel and brought forth a tablet of the sort that merchants’ accounts were tallied on. The two wooden leaves were tied together with green string and sealed with the seal of the Clan Shaldeth.
Another attempt last night. Grandfather well, though shaken. A maid killed.
How like Tulik—Shaldis recognized her brother’s textbook-neat hand—not to bother to say which of the maids had died.
She closed the diptych, slid it into the purse at her belt, and snagged an orange to eat as she walked. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“That can’t possibly be Three Wells, can it?” Oryn shaded his eyes with his hand against the horrific glare of the forenoon sun. The morning’s warm cerulean had burned out of the sky: the Hero Sun, the mages called this strengthening, nearly vertical heat. The province of Ka-Issiya, the god of the golden noon.
The rangeland beneath it was a gilded anvil, still as death.
The wheeling vultures were too distant to be more than minute specks swimming in blue emptiness, but Oryn thought there were a lot of them.
“You said the village lay due east and a full day’s ride, did you not?” Oryn turned in the saddle as the young salt merchant Poru reined his horse up beside the king’s.
“I did, my lord. There are vultures there right enough, or at least there were when I passed through it yesterday. But we’d not be seeing them yet.” Like the rest of the cavalcade the young man’s face was wrapped in gauze veils against the sun, and the skin around his dark eyes glistened with sweat and ointment.
Numet—captain of the first company of the king’s guard—joined the little group at the forefront of the line of guards, remounts, and provision mules, and squinted against the blazing light in the direction of Oryn’s worried gaze. “That’ll just be a dead steer, is all, sir.” Since they’d ridden out of the city in the darkness before dawn, they’d seen more than one picked-over skeleton. He urged his horse forward, then turned back when the king made no move to follow.
“That’s a lot of vultures for a single steer, isn’t it?”
The captain looked again. He was a broad-shouldered young man from one of the cadet branches of the House Jothek, chosen like many officers of the guards for his good looks. “It could be two or three steers,” he offered. “Maybe there was a stampede, and several fell down a wadi all together.”
“Hmn.” Oryn untoggled the spyglass from his saddle horn, rose in the stirrups to get a better look. Behind him, Elpiduyek—master of the king’s parasol—unfurled the white-and-gold rooflet, and the first company closed ranks around the little knot of captain, merchant, royal mount, royal concubine, and parasol bearers. Geb and Elpiduyek had both pleaded with Oryn to travel by litter as befit the king—and to bring along a second litter for Summerchild rather than have her ride horseback like some trooper’s moll—to little avail. Oryn had spent the first dozen years of his reign lolling in a litter on those few occasions when he went out of the Yellow City at all, and he knew exactly how long that sort of elegant transport took to even get out the palace gate.
Much as he loathed jolting over the rangelands on horseback—not to mention the weeks it would take to repair the sun’s ravages on his complexion, ointment, veils, and parasol notwithstanding—he understood in the marrow of his aching bones that there was no time to lose.
Maybe no time at all.
In the sharp circle of the spyglass the vultures made a wheeling black column, like a dust devil. He thought, but he wasn’t sure, that its base was far too wide for even two or three dead cattle.
He turned in his saddle, scanned the horizon toward the east, though Three Wells would be far too distant yet for any trace even of a vulture column to be seen.
“Poru, my dear boy, is there a wadi there where the vultures are circling? Were they there when you rode past this place yesterday afternoon?” He passed his spyglass to the salt merchant.
The young man studied the column for a time, then said, “That looks about where Black Cow wadi should lie. It’s true cattle or goats sometimes fall over the edge and kill themselves, but it’s also true that bandits, or rogue nomads, will sometimes ambush caravans there. The edge of the wadi overhangs and makes good cover. Everyone who makes the rounds of the villages knows about it.”
“Do they indeed?” Oryn took the spyglass back and passed it to Summerchild. She looked through it for a time, then folded it up, handed it back, and drew from the reticule at her belt a silver hand mirror. This she gazed into for so long that Numet began to fidget and look pointedly at the angle of their shadows and off in the direction of Three Wells village. Oryn paid him no attention—he knew perfectly well that if he said they were going to camp for a week exactly where they were, the captain would be required to acquiesce
no matter what his opinion was—but kept a close watch on Summerchild’s topaz-blue eyes.
He saw her brows draw together in puzzled distress. “There’s at least a dozen men dead there,” she said at last. “They look like nomads, the an-Ariban tribe, I think. They’re not one of the warlike groups—mostly sheep stealers and tomb robbers.”
“If they met a bad end, serve ’em right.” Numet laughed. “Thieving beggars. Why we should make ourselves late to the nooning site over it—”
“Heaven forfend that we should,” agreed Oryn affably. “Still, I am the king. And I’d like to have a look.”
He could feel the glares of his chamberlain and parasol bearer like knives sticking in his back as he reined in the direction of the vultures.
On her way to the Bazaar District along the broad Avenue of Gold—with its handsome houses, beautiful temples, and even-more-beautiful public baths—Shaldis ran through in her mind the women of her grandfather’s household. Her father had mentioned the addition of one maid, whose name would inevitably be Eight Flower and who would almost certainly be a child, knowing her grandfather’s habits of domestic economy.
But in spite of Pebble’s surmise yesterday evening in the baths, Shaldis would have been surprised to have little Eight Flower turn out to be the Crafty behind the murder attempts. A child old enough to do the heavy housework required even of very young maids would have been old enough to recognize the potential of her own power and, depending on her nature, either offer it for sale to the head of the house or use it to flee.
A child young enough to be utterly dependent on adults, her grandfather would not have bought.
Her sisters? Magic had generally appeared in boys at age four or five, then vanished again until puberty. Shaldis wasn’t sure whether this pattern held true for girls as well. Foxfire, the youngest in the circle of the Raven sisters, had been fourteen when she had consciously begun to use her full powers, but that had been at a time when all over the Yellow City, such powers had begun to stir in the hearts of those who later became crafty.
Circle of the Moon Page 13
