“No,” said Shaldis.
Her mother interpolated, “I should say not! I’ve always said, it’s the most unsanitary—”
“Are you sure it was Nettleflower?”
Both girls nodded. “She was wearing the silk veil she’d got Uncle to give her just before he went to Kamath village,” provided Foursie. “Green with pink flowers, and bells at the corners. She was always getting permission to go out and go shopping. When she couldn’t, she’d tell old Two Shoes that she had it anyway and he’d let her out. Once he wouldn’t, and she told Uncle he’d stolen from her and he beat him. After that Two Shoes let her out whenever she wanted to go.”
“Ahure gave her something,” added Twinkle, “in the market. We saw him.”
Foursie nodded. “And anyway Ahure and Grandfather hate each other,” she said, her eyes sparkling at the recollection of the dramatic scene. “Last time he was here in the house Ahure said he’d put a curse on Grandfather.”
“What?” said Shaldis, startled. “Why? What was he doing here? I didn’t even know Grandfather knew Ahure.”
And at the same time she thought, Why didn’t Tulik tell me that? Why keep Grandfather from bringing up his name?
“He knows him, all right.” Yellow Hen sat back from the hearth, where the kettle of water was just beginning to boil for the first of the yellow dye baths. “Noyad the jeweler—”
“You girls get on out of here, now,” broke in Shaldis’s mother with a sharp look at Foursie and Twinkle. “Go on, now. This is grown-up talk.”
“It wasn’t grown-up before,” protested Foursie. Her mother gave her the Look that Shaldis so well remembered. Foursie resignedly took Twinkle’s hand. Twinkle pulled loose and carefully lifted the largest and most elaborate of her amulets off over her coiffure. She held it out to Shaldis—cheap beggar silver with a garish pink-glass bead.
“This will protect you,” she promised breathlessly, “from Ahure’s evil spells.”
Shaldis knew the only way it would protect her from Ahure’s evil spells was if she hit the old Blood Mage over the head with it and knocked him out. But she put it on at once and said gratefully, “Why, thank you, Twinkle Star.” Since Ahure hadn’t been able to cast a spell, evil or otherwise, for probably a decade, the fact that the amulet was worthless scarcely mattered.
“What about Noyad the jeweler?” she asked as her younger sisters scampered away.
“Your grandfather has a number of—of associates, whose names are best not bandied around the town,” her mother said. “Not that he has a thing to be ashamed of, except his disgraceful language. You aren’t eating your bread and butter, dear.”
“One of ’em’s Noyad the jeweler.” Yellow Hen stood up from the hearth, dusting ashes from her hands. “Your grandfather got him a pitch in the best part of the Grand Bazaar—a place other jewelers have waited years for—in exchange for a cut of his profits. And Ahure works for Noyad these days.”
“Doing what?” Shaldis had seen the haughty old Blood Mage’s elaborate peep shows of illusion and machinery, designed to keep Lord Jamornid believing in his ability to do magic. She couldn’t imagine Ahure coming down to do anything so mundane as keeping a jeweler’s books.
“He won’t say,” replied Yellow Hen. “And if anyone asks him he merely looks haughty and denies it. But word’s spread around the town that Ahure’s found a way to imbue gems with good luck or ill.”
“That’s silly.” Shaldis obediently tore her bread into pieces and consumed it, the butter dripping down her fingers. “Ahure couldn’t imbue a sponge with water. No mage can.”
“You sound awfully sure of that, dearest.”
“I am awfully sure of it, Mother. And I’m certainly awfully sure of Ahure.”
“Be that as it may,” said her aunt with her crooked, toothy grin, “by looking wise and tapping the side of his nose and raising his eyebrows when anyone asks him questions, Noyad—who swears Ahure only ‘does him favors’ and won’t say what—is charging three crowns for turquoise pendants that no one in their right senses would pay three dequins for . . . and is getting it, and getting it so fast he can barely keep up. What he asks for real jewels that have ‘passed through Ahure’s hands,’ I’d hate to tell you.”
“Oh, please. And Ahure and my grandfather fought?”
“Ahure came to the house three or four days ago,” temporized her mother. “Of course no one heard what they said, but Nettleflower—who was up in your uncle’s room on the gallery over the garden—said that she saw Ahure storm out of your grandfather’s study, shouting back at him that he would put such a curse upon the house that it would crumble to the ground. Of course,” she added with a glance sidelong toward the storeroom where Nettleflower’s body lay, “though she was quite a . . . a good-hearted girl underneath, I’m sure, sometimes Nettleflower wasn’t entirely truthful.”
That, reflected Shaldis, as she licked the butter from her fingers, was putting the matter mildly.
Whatever had actually happened between her grandfather and the former wizard, Nettleflower was the only possible witness.
And a few days after that, the girl had met the old man in the marketplace.
Money? With a promise of more, if she’d let him into the house by the alley door?
And before the next day’s sun had risen, Nettleflower was dead.
“What is it?” Oryn rolled over on the loose bed of cushions laid out for him on the ground, propped himself on one elbow, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The bruises that had seemed minor a few hours ago had stiffened and he felt as if he’d been racked. Dear gods, I never properly appreciated what the guards go through. I really must raise their pay, give them a special liquor allotment, have a special baths built for them in the palace, or something.
Summerchild was sitting up beside him already. Even within the shelter, the heat was like being slowly roasted to death. No wonder he’d dreamed about being bricked up in a furnace. . . .
“What’s burning?”
She pinned her veils over her face and hair again and crouched her way to the tent flap, Oryn hobbling behind. He noticed that Summerchild, who had taken just as many blows in the battle as he had, still moved with the lithe unconcern of a dancer.
Jethan and two other troopers were also out of their shelters, talking to the pickets around the camp. A column of smoke stood in the eastern sky.
Summerchild asked, “Is that Three Wells?”
“It’s the only habitation in that direction, lady.”
“Can you call up the image of the place in your mirror?” asked Oryn, looking down at his ladylove, and Summerchild’s brow puckered.
“I’m not sure. I’ve never been in Three Wells, but I could try focusing on the smoke. I’m not sure how much I would see.”
“Try it,” said Oryn softly. “If the town is deserted, and all there are dead, I am most curious as to who set the fires. And why.”
TWENTY
At no time of the day or night did the Dead Hills appear welcoming. There were those who said that the broken badlands east and south of the Lake of the Sun had earned their name from the tombs that honeycombed them—those of the kings more isolated, those of nobles or the wealthy merchants dotting the dry wadis that could be reached from the Yellow City in a few hours. But those who looked on the hills, or rode through them, quickly came to the conclusion that the name had come first, the tombs, after.
Summer or winter, they had the appearance of a land the gods hated, or at least those gods who had the good of humankind at heart. The bleak waste of pale-brown stone was like a dream landscape of half-buried skulls, riven with twisting canyons; a world whose parched shade offered no coolness. Dusty precipices and blank stretches of broken talus flung back the day’s heat even in the deep of night. Even where the King’s Aqueduct pierced them, a gray finger pointing toward the distant Oasis of Koshlar across two hundred miles of desert, the hills seemed dead, waiting silently for some night when they might silently swallow up t
he work camps of men and teyn and camels.
In the Valley of the Hawk, twelve miles from the aqueduct and fifteen from the walls of the Yellow City, the silence and the waiting seemed more perilous.
Foxfire climbed stiffly down from the litter in which she’d swayed, suffocating with heat, since the previous night and asked, “Who in their right mind would build a house in this place?”
The villa lay before them, the same dusty brown as the surrounding rock. At one time the pylons on either side of its gate had been painted with scenes of lion hunts and crocodile spearings. At one time there’d been sycamore trees in front of the pylons. Their desiccated trunks remained, behind which the flaked eyes of hunters and prey stared hopelessly across the desolation of dust.
“What did they teach you in that school of yours, girl?” demanded her grandmother, swinging down from the horse which she’d insisted on riding, knee to knee with her son. “A hundred and fifty years ago there were springs in a dozen places in the foothills, and the lords of House Jothek hunted lions in the desert from here. If she’s to remain under your roof,” she added, regarding Mohrvine as he dismounted, “that daughter of yours had best put in her spare time here studying the lore of her own House.”
“I shall mark it down as a future course of study for her,” replied Mohrvine smoothly, crossing to Foxfire’s litter and putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Let us use the time here to the better purpose of making sure our House remains the House of Kings. Then she shall take her place in its lore”—he smiled down into her eyes—“rather than merely reading of the deeds of others.”
Foxfire looked around her, hating the place. Hating the sense of being watched by something just out of sight in the shadows of those sun-blasted arroyos. She was deeply grateful for Opal’s little veiled shadow in the second litter she’d insisted her father provide for her maid.
“Must I stay here?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Won’t you need someone in your household in the city who can communicate with Granny at a moment’s notice? I’m much better at it than I was.”
The hopeful eagerness as she brought out this fib warmed her father’s eyes, turned his coldly handsome face gentle and human. In that moment she would have done anything for him. Anything except remain here, if given a choice.
But her father did not believe in choices. Not when the advancement of the cadet branch of House Jothek was the prize. “My child, your grandmother has more need of your powers than I do. Pigeons can carry a message from the city in a matter of hours. They will have to do.”
Behind them a baggage camel groaned. The caravan that had accompanied the litters moved forward as the villa’s gates opened between the pylons. Foxfire looked through them into a courtyard as dust-choked and brown as the hills.
Beside the camels a line of teyn walked, chained neck to neck. The lead boar balked at the sight of the hills; and Foxfire’s brother Zharvine, who was in charge of the baggage train, tapped him with the end of his six-foot rod. “Don’t start giving us trouble now, Dogface; you’ll have worse than the sight of those hills to think about, believe me.” The teyn only looked around them in silent anxiety, not understanding a word.
Her least-favorite brother, Úrthet, emerged from the gate, squat and stocky. He walked up the little rise to where Foxfire and their father still stood beside the litter. Even the litter bearers—teyn matched and trained to respond to the commands of the human team captain—clustered together, swaying fearfully from foot to foot as they gazed at the parched wadis, the sharp columns of grayish-buff rock.
“Well’s dry as a crust, sir.” Úrthet practically spit the words out. Twelve hours traveling in the blistering heat, with only the shortest of noon halts, had done nothing for his temper. “We’ve put the waterskins in the cellar. We’ll have to ration.”
“We’ll send out for more tomorrow,” promised Mohrvine with the casual ease of one who has at least three of the city’s gangster water bosses in his pay. “Is there enough for Belial?” He glanced with a kind of affection at the tall-sided wagon that had been nursed and lifted over nearly fifteen miles of rutted path, the wagon whose black felt canopies and tarred sides glistened with damp and smelled of murky wetness and filth.
“Should be, sir. Though he’ll need more soon.”
“He’ll have it.” Mohrvine’s smile widened as his green gaze followed the wagon down through the courtyard gate. Still affectionate, but all gentleness had disappeared. Then he turned back to Foxfire and laid his gloved hands on her shoulders again. “Be a good girl, and do exactly as your grandmother says,” he admonished and leaned down to kiss her forehead. “Don’t leave the compound for any reason. These hills shelter nomad raiding parties in the summers and bandits—they pass through the wadis to have shelter in attacking the rangelands around the city.”
Foxfire looked out past him at the hills, reflecting that the warning was hardly necessary. He could have given her a million gold pieces and a written promise from Deemas, the patron god of thieves, attesting their nomad-less state and she still wouldn’t have gone anywhere near them. There was something within them, among them, that watched her and waited. She knew it.
“Learn all you can from Soral Brûl,” her father went on, naming the young adept, formerly of the Sun Mages, who was even now walking back to the gateway with Úrthet. “And from Urnate Urla.” He nodded at the crabbed and skinny little man who, after his powers of earth wizardry failed, had gone to work as secretary for one of the Slaughterhouse water bosses. “But don’t tell them anything, don’t trust them, and don’t let yourself be alone with them. Understand?”
“I understand.” Her grandmother’s horse appeared from around the corner of the compound wall, and Red Silk leaned down from the saddle to address the two former mages, young and middle-aged. She made a sweep with one arm, as if describing a barrier, and Foxfire heard Soral Brûl hoot with laughter.
“Why don’t you hang straw dollies on the walls while you’re at it?” He named one of the old peasant cantrips against the Bad-Luck Shadow. “Or plant marigolds around the walls to chase ghosts away? Poqs, I mean.” He spoke the nomad word for the thing the wandering people claimed was responsible for every ill from dead sheep to cross-eyed babies.
“Don’t laugh at the Bad-Luck Shadow when you stand so near his abiding place,” responded Red Silk drily. “You need not believe in the warding spells that guard you from him for them to work.” She reined her horse away.
Foxfire shivered. As a child she’d half believed in the Bad-Luck Shadow, as something that “got” bad little girls, though she’d never heard or read of anyone who’d ever actually been “gotten.” Unlike the djinni, who had been attested to by sightings and periodic contacts for centuries, there was nothing real called a poq. Yet out here in this utterly silent land—this exile where she and her grandmother were to come up with spells to deal with crocodiles, cobras, and whatever poison it was that the Priest of Time concocted for the test of the king—she felt the presence of Something.
Anything seemed possible here. She stretched out her hand to the other litter; Opal emerged through the curtains, gave her a protective hug.
Her father’s voice called back her thoughts. “You won’t be here for long, my little vixen,” he promised. “Indeed, the quicker you find an answer to our problem, the quicker you can return home. But for good or ill you will be back in the Yellow City in forty-three days.”
Foxfire started to say, but it’s only thirteen to the Moon of Jubilee, and realized that her father wasn’t thinking of Oryn’s tests.
He was thinking of his own, to be held under the new moon that succeeded Oryn’s death.
Late in the afternoon, with the gold sun lying two hands-breadths over the scraggy sagebrush to the west, Jethan’s voice said, “My lord king?” outside and Oryn pushed up the light inner curtain.
“I suppose Geb will have a stroke when he learns I’ve acted as my own porter,” sighed the king, beckoning the guardsman in
side. Even on its downswing the sun was a power to be reckoned with, and the evening wind had not yet begun. “But goodness knows where we’d put a porter inside here with us, and bringing along a lodge for one to sit outside would have meant another baggage ass, and that sort of thing can get out of hand very quickly. Any sign of the reinforcements?”
“The pickets have just sighted a dust cloud in the west,” reported Jethan, kneeling upright under the tent’s low roof. He had, Oryn observed, washed his face before presenting himself; water still glistened in his hair. “That isn’t why I’ve come, Lord King. The teyn appear to be gone.”
“As of when?”
“Not long ago, I don’t think, my lord. I’ve been watching with a spyglass all afternoon. I could see half a dozen of them most of that time, just sitting.”
“That’s odd in itself, isn’t it?” remarked Oryn. “I mean, they can usually hide under pebbles, it seems. Why sit in the open?”
“To let us know they were there, perhaps?”
Oryn raised his brows. “That isn’t behavior one usually hears of with teyn—that kind of planning ahead, I mean. But, then, up until last winter one never heard of them attacking men, either. If they’re no longer in evidence I suppose Numet should send out scouts.”
“I already went, sir,” said Jethan. “When I didn’t see any teyn I took a horse and rode two or three miles in the direction of Three Wells. I was unmolested.”
“Good heavens, my dear boy, you didn’t need to do that!” cried Oryn, really distressed. “You could have been killed.” He could see, beyond the edges of the bandages on the young man’s arms, the blackening bruises of rock hits. “The gods bear witness that just getting on a horse at this point would kill me.”
Jethan didn’t smile. Oryn suspected he considered grimness part of his job. “I was mounted, sir, and could probably have outrun them. When I wasn’t attacked I checked for tracks. There were hundreds, dispersing in all directions. As if they’d all decided that they no longer needed to hold us here.”
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