Foursie was twelve, Twinkle eight.
Shaldis was almost positive that had there been another Raven sister in the household in the months preceding her departure—if her mother (difficult as it was to even think about picturing that!) or Aunt Apricot or old Yellow Hen had begun to develop power—she would have known. She would have felt it in the walls of the house.
And she was almost—though not quite—certain that they would never have left her to suffer and be cast out alone.
If they had developed such power after her departure, they almost certainly would have gotten word to her at the Citadel.
That left the maids.
She considered them, one by one; considered the world in which they lived. The world that, but for her propensity for sneaking over the courtyard wall in Tulik’s clothes, would have been the whole of her own world until her marriage to sulky Forpen Gamert.
A world of gossip and hard work, of hair pullings and whispered secrets after the lamps were out. Early on, she’d fled from the chattering hive of the maids’ dormitory to sleep and study in one of the attics above the kitchen—the heat was ghastly in midsummer and the rats worse—but she’d still grown up in their world of horoscopes and astrological almanacs, of petty thefts and pettier rivalries, of shirked tasks, love notes from camel drivers, and the vital importance of who knew what about whom.
A world of soul-killing smallness, thought Shaldis with a qualm of bitter memory. And yet, not nearly as bad as that desolate northland village Jethan had fled. Most were illiterate. Cook, Four Flower, and Aunt Apricot spent their evenings drinking cheap sherab and smoking hemp, and who could blame them? When One Flower—Old Flower, everyone called her (out of Grandfather’s hearing)—had grown too old even to grind corn with the teyn, Chirak had tried to sell her: Shaldis’s father had paid the small asking price through an intermediary, and the old woman shared the cook’s tiny chamber behind the kitchen, a secret the whole household kept from its head. Two Flower—Cook’s older sister—was nearly that feeble as well when Shaldis had last lived in the house, and was going blind.
None of them—with the possible exception of her uncle Tjagan’s concubine the sharp-witted Nettleflower—had ever impressed Shaldis as imaginative or outward looking, qualities she associated with magic. And yet, she reflected, as she crossed the Avenue of the Sun and plunged into the lively string of open-air marketplaces that led toward the Grand Bazaar, Pebble was of nearly the same mental makeup as the maids: simple hearted, even a little simpleminded, shy in the presence of adults and loving the animals and birds with which she surrounded herself.
Nettleflower—a slim woman whose beauty always reminded Shaldis of first-quality honey—had the sly intelligence that probes for secrets. Shaldis remembered her as the troublemaker in the stifling little world of the maids: always prying out information and carrying tales to Chirak Shaldeth, whom she seduced within twenty-four hours of coming into the household, to the deep distress of Shaldis’s grandmother.
Chirak had grown bored with the girl within a year and had, according to Habnit, passed her along to Uncle Tjagan shortly after Shaldis’s grandmother died. The other maids hated her. Nettleflower might not want to murder Chirak, reflected Shaldis, as she peeled her breakfast orange with her fingernails and edged her way through the narrow Lane of the Blue Walls. But her services might easily be bought by someone who did.
Rohar God of Women, she prayed, don’t let her be the Crafty in the household! She caught the prayer back guiltily, knowing how badly the Raven sisterhood needed every woman of power. But the thought of working with Nettleflower, the thought of the havoc she’d cause, turned her stomach.
In any case, Rohar of the Braided Hair must have been feeling in a benign mood that day, because her wish was granted. When she stepped through the gate into the kitchen court and dropped from her the Gray Cloak of illusion that she’d assumed, almost automatically, to pass through the dusty chaos of the outer court of the camel drivers, the first thing she asked old Yellow Hen was “What happened? Who was killed?”
“Nettleflower.” The old lady spat without missing a beat at her grinding quern. “Good riddance to the little slut. Tulik wants to see you.”
EIGHTEEN
She was killed in the passageway that leads past Grandfather’s study, out to the alley.” Tulik lifted back the sheet that covered Nettleflower’s body, where it lay on a worktable in the kitchen storeroom. Shaldis winced at the sight of the contorted, blue-lipped face, the blood-dabbled disorder of the honey-blond hair. “Grandfather was awakened by the sounds of someone moving in his room. Before he could cry out for help, someone rushed at him in the dark, slashing and clawing at him. He thrust his attacker off and heard him—or her,” he added with the air of one making a concession, “flee. So bruised and shaken was he that it was several minutes before he could follow, and when he did, he found poor Nettleflower lying dead on the floor of the passageway and the alley door standing open. He then came back upstairs and awakened me, and we both tried to revive her, but, alas, were too late.”
He drew the sheet back over the girl’s face. Through the open archway into the kitchen court, the grumbling scrape of the grinding querns made a soft background of sound, and with them came the stinks of dust, of woodsmoke, of indigo boiling in the dye cauldron. The house had always been a place of violence, thought Shaldis, looking down at the threadbare linen that outlined the dead girl’s sharp nose and curving breasts. Never a day had gone by here, in her recollection, that had not been rendered hideous by her grandfather’s screaming rages and hissing rod.
Though it came from the outside, this murder seemed to be of a piece with all those recollections, all those days of sickened fear.
“What was Nettleflower doing down in Grandfather’s garden in the middle of the night?” she asked. “Had she been with my uncle Tjagan?”
Tulik hesitated, and from the doorway, Foursie—who was leaning in the arch with Twinkle—replied at once, “No, ’cause Uncle’s gone out to Kamath to look at camels.”
“Foursie, take your sister upstairs and get to work on your sewing,” ordered their brother. “She shouldn’t see something like this—nor you, either.” He turned back to Shaldis. “I can only assume that she’d left or . . . or had forgotten something in Uncle’s room and went back to get it.” More confidently, he went on, “In fact I think I heard her in the gallery—I have the room up there between Uncle’s and Father’s now, you know. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I did hear her walk past.”
“But you didn’t hear her being killed?” Shaldis pulled the sheet aside again, revealing the whole of the body in its torn and rumpled red dress. The dress she recognized as one of Aunt Apricot’s. Nettleflower had probably talked Tjagan into giving it to her, the way she’d gotten most of her grandmother’s jewelry. “Looking at the state of her clothing and the blood in her hair, she fought. She wasn’t just strangled, she was battered to death against the walls of the passage. You didn’t hear this?”
Tulik’s eyes shifted. “If a wizard did it, he could have kept anyone from hearing.”
Shaldis’s skin prickled, as if tiny lightning bolts had run up her spine.
Before she could speak, a shadow darkened the archway and her grandfather snapped, “Of course a wizard did it, imbecile! How else could he have undone the bolts in the passageway door by the study? And I know what wizard it was, too! It was that poisonous charlatan Ahure—”
Shaldis said, “What?”
At the same time Tulik corrected, in the voice of a man correcting a child, “Of course that’s only a guess, Grandfather, since your room was pitch-dark and you didn’t see your attacker—”
“Nonsense!” Chirak Shaldeth thrust his grandson aside as Tulik attempted to ease him back into the courtyard. He pushed his way into the storeroom and caught Shaldis roughly by the arm, as he had when she was a child living in this house. “I always thought it was that scoundrel Ahure and now I’m sure of it! A stinking leech and
a liar! He’s sought to cheat me and steal from me for years!”
Shaldis said nothing, only stared at the old man in shock. He had clearly been battered by someone, his cheeks and forehead marked by the parallel scores of claw marks or nail scratches, and bits of dried blood still stained his unkempt white mustache. He wore only his bed robe, though it was late in the morning. Shaldis looked down and saw his wrists and hands, too, marked as if someone had tried to tear something from his powerful grip.
“Grandfather . . .” Tulik stepped between them, closed his hand over the old man’s wrist, and stared hard into his eyes. “You’re not feeling well, remember. You’re still quite shaken up.”
“Balderdash! I’m well enough to know—”
“You’re not, Grandfather.” With their faces close together—and within a few handsbreadths of Shaldis’s own—she saw again how similar they were, not in shape or coloring but in expression. It was hard to recall her brother was only sixteen, his cheeks innocent of any trace of down. “Trust me, Grandfather,” he went on, emphasizing the words. “You need to rest, probably for the remainder of the day. You’ve had a terrible shock.”
For a moment Shaldis saw the old fire glint in Chirak’s eye, as if he were going to lunge forward and bite his grandson’s face off.
Then the fire died. It was like watching a lion go down under a hunter’s spear. Shaldis felt shock and dismay at her own flash of pity.
“You’re right, my boy,” muttered Chirak. “I . . . You’re right.” His shoulders slumped, as if all strength had gone out of him, and he made no protest as the youth led him away across the hot sunlight of the court. Shaldis heard him say, “It was Ahure,” but his tone was that of a petulant child. “He’s a thief. He wants to rob me of what’s mine.”
“Yes, Grandfather, I know he is. But you mustn’t say so to just anyone.”
Why not?
Shaldis turned back to look again at Nettleflower’s body. The nails of both hands were broken, as if she’d torn and clawed at her attacker’s face and wrists. When Shaldis looked more closely, she saw blood and skin clotted up under them, and lodged in that blood, a stiff white hair from a beard.
The sun was high and blisteringly hot when Oryn and his cavalcade reached Black Cow wadi. The horses were beginning to labor in the heat; the men bowed down under it. They would soon have to break their journey and set up even the minimal shelter of army shades, to hide through the worst of the burning noon. With this detour—as Captain Numet and Geb both pointed out on several occasions during the ride—they wouldn’t reach Three Wells until almost twilight.
Yet his instincts told him that whatever had destroyed Three Wells, it would be best to know if it was capable of reaching out this far beyond that doomed village and killing again.
He glanced sidelong at Poru as they rode, remembering the young salt merchant’s description of what he had found when he and his men had ridden into the village the morning before. They all died at once, my lord, for ’twas clear none had tried to bury any other or even drag them into the houses from the streets. The birds were just beginning to come down as we made the town, the sky just growing light. Wolves must have been there in the night, I think, for I saw pieces of bodies in the streets as well as bodies still whole. It was as if a battle had passed over the place, yet there was no blood. We stood only at the edge of the town and looked. If it was sickness that had done it, we wanted to carry none away. It was clear none moved about alive.
Oryn wondered whether Poru and his camel drivers had thought about the possibility that some survivor had lingered, incapacitated, in one of the houses. If that had been the case, he reflected, that survivor was undoubtedly dead now. And another quick look at the thin dark face of the merchant, the exhausted mouth and haunted eyes, told him that yes, Poru had thought about it, probably many times on his ride to the Yellow City to deliver the news.
Did you look into the teyn compound? he’d asked as Geb had fetched them coffee and the palace pages had darted away with orders to fetch Summerchild from the Citadel of the Mages and to ready a cavalcade and guards.
Poru had shaken his head. It was true, Oryn knew, that teyn suffered the same diseases as humankind. A teyn could take a disease like smallpox from a man, or pass it to him, much as a man could take a cold from a dog.
Still, if the teyn had been closed into their compound before the disease struck, he didn’t like to think of them shut there, without food and probably without water, for the day that it had taken for Poru and his men to reach the Yellow City and for this second day that it would take for help to return. We heard the cattle lowing in the byres, Poru had said, the asses complaining and the camels in their stables. Yet we dared not enter the town.
At least they all had that much sense, Oryn reflected, his glance going beyond the merchant to Summerchild, and to the baggage ass led by her most faithful maid Lotus, bulging with packets of herbs and books of healing. He edged his horse to Summerchild’s side, asked her softly, “This woman Raeshaldis sought for in the scrying crystals, the Raven sister who called out for help. You say she spoke of sickness?”
“She did, yes. And of healing ‘no longer flowing’ from wizards’ hands. Yet if she was from Three Wells, she’d be close enough to the Yellow City to have heard of healing with herbs, which indeed nomads and midwives have been using for centuries without benefit of wizardry.”
“That may be so,” murmured Oryn. “But it’s also true that I’ve never heard of an herb or a nomad or a midwife who could cure madness. Or indeed, of any sickness that produces it to the degree that it would wipe out a town.”
Vultures stretched out their naked heads at the intruders as the king and his guards came up on the dry deep crevasse of Black Cow wadi; opened bloody beaks to squawk curses and spread their soot-dark wings. The nomads lay, not in the wadi itself, but about a dozen yards from its edge, crumpled among the summer-yellowed bunchgrass. Their dark hair was wet with blood, their eye sockets stared sightlessly at the hard colorless sky. All men, Oryn observed. A cattle-stealing or tomb-robbing party almost certainly. All were small and lithe, their swarthy cheeks, chins, foreheads marked with the black tattoos of the an-Ichor tribe. Summerchild’s guess at an-Ariban hadn’t been far wrong—both tribes wove a cloth dyed red and indigo, only the pattern of the stripes differing.
“They at least didn’t die of sickness,” murmured Jethan, stepping from the saddle and turning one of the bodies over with his foot. The man’s throat had been slit with some rough weapon, a blunt-edged tool or a chipped stone. “Yet their tracks lead back toward Three Wells.”
“Teyn did this.” Captain Numet raised his head from an examination of the scuff marks around one of the bodies. Oryn himself had already seen the flat, crooked, splay-toed tracks lacing everywhere, interspersed with the marks of dragged knuckles. He dismounted cautiously, gathering the fluttering golden silk of his robes to keep it from snagging in the ubiquitous camel thorn, and picked his way among the corpses. Small hoof gouges, torn-off bridles and saddlecloths, huge gouts of splashed blood clearly announced that the an-Ichor had had at least a couple of their tough little desert ponies with them. Wilding teyn—the untamed bands that roved the near-desert preying on insects and lizards—would kill a straying goat or sheep if they thought they could get away with it, but it was unheard of for them to attack men.
Or at least it had been, up until that spring.
“I don’t like this,” Oryn murmured as Summerchild returned to his side. He patted under his veils at the sweat rolling down his plump cheeks. “I don’t like this at all. Before last spring you never heard of teyn attacking men at all, not even the deep-desert nomads who hunt them for the market. I didn’t know they could organize themselves for an attack, for one thing, much less cut throats with edged weapons. How can they coordinate an attack, if they don’t speak among themselves?”
“Nor do wolves,” pointed out Summerchild. “They seem to do all right.” She followed the scratched and blo
ody marks where a horse had been dragged toward the wadi’s edge. Dry wind lifted the ends of her veils like a silken flag. She shaded her eyes as she looked up at Oryn. “But the teyn who turned on their masters at Dry Hill last spring were mingled with wildings, when you caught up with them, you and Bax and his guards.”
The brush was thicker closer to the wadi’s edge. Oryn held up the hem of his robe, knowing Geb would kill him—or kill himself—if the green-embroidered saffron silk ended up snagged. “You don’t suppose the teyn in the Three Wells compound—”
The teyn that erupted out of the brush around and in front of him emerged so fast, and so close, that Oryn could only gape in shock in the split second between their appearance and being thrown to the ground, seeing the rocks in their hands, the broken-off spikes of sharp bone. With an inarticulate yowl of fright he rolled in time to avoid having his skull smashed; felt huge hands—hands with the startling strength of animals’—clutch at him; smelled the musty, sweetish stench of their flesh. Then the air above him exploded in a searing burst of white fire and the teyn jerked back in shock, and the next second Summerchild strode forward, hand uplifted to cast a second spell. At the same instant Jethan waded into the midst of them, sword flashing bloody in the sun.
Oryn tried to scramble to his feet and got kicked over again as more teyn came pouring out of the wadi, silent—silent as horrors in a dream. Numet and his men charged, either afoot or on horseback, swords glinting in the hot noon light; and teyn rose up out of every thicket of mesquite and camel thorn in the landscape, brush that Oryn would have taken oath couldn’t have sheltered rabbits. Jethan waded in among them, striking at the hairy faces, the massive hands, and tusked, gaping mouths. Oryn rolled out of the way of a cavalry mount’s hooves, the teyn who held him breaking and fleeing only to reassemble and charge. They hurled rocks, sprang in fives and sixes at the charging horses, dragged and clutched at the riders. More white light exploded in the air, and a horse screamed as it was brought down. Oryn gasped, “Dear gods!” and it seemed to him that teyn were everywhere, rising from the wadi and the brush and converging on the little knot of horsemen from all points of the compass.
Circle of the Moon Page 14
