Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  “Or as if someone had decided for them.” Oryn heaved himself to his knees with a gasp. Jethan helped him to his feet and supported him to the tent door. As they both straightened up outside, Oryn untoggled his spyglass from his belt again and scanned the eastern desert, the thinning column of smoke that was now almost extinguished in the pallid sky.

  “I don’t like this,” he said softly. “I don’t like it at all. They’re behaving like soldiers—soldiers under some central command. Why murder the nomads who’d been through Three Wells? Why block the way to the town from us until it could be burned?”

  “You make it sound as if there’s someone controlling them,” said Jethan. “Using them as tools. How?”

  “I think at this point,” murmured Oryn, “how doesn’t matter as much as why.”

  “My lord!” Captain Numet appeared between the low shelters as men began emerging, pouring out slim field rations from waterskins, preparing their horses for another ride. “Reinforcements are approaching; we should be able to deal with the teyn now.” He saluted sharply. “My advice is to press on as soon as you can be ready, my lord, so that we can be through them before dark.”

  “Or we could, if they behaved like men and stayed put,” remarked Oryn. “Thank you, Captain. Yes, I shall be ready in a few minutes. Geb, darling— Yes, there you are. No, I don’t think I shall have time for you to shave me . . . No, what I’m wearing is quite all right. Thank you,” he added, with a smile to dispel his chamberlain’s disapproving pout. “Just have them make a horse ready for me and for my lady. I’m rather curious,” he added as captain and chamberlain went striding away in opposite directions, “as to whether the teyn have actually dispersed, or whether this is simply a trap of some kind. And I’m even more curious as to what we shall find in Three Wells that someone would rather we didn’t see.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  With the evening’s first cool, Raeshaldis made her way through the southern gate of the city and took one of the brightly decorated water taxis down the canal that led to the Fishmarket District on the lake’s edge. This was still a pleasant trip of a mile or so through the relative coolness of palmeries and gardens, although the ward spells that had once kept the mosquitoes from the canal had—like all other wards—failed.

  Mostly, the Fishmarket District was concerned with the fleet of big reed canoes that sailed each sunset out into the deeper waters and brought in netfuls of silvery trout, flopping bass, and millions upon millions of tiny, oily sardines—the staple food of the city’s poor—and with the barge traffic from across the Lake of the Sun. Corn and dates and rice from the Jothek and Jamornid clan lands around the White Lake and the Lake of Roses came in here, and pigs, goats, cattle from the richer Sarn farmlands along the shores of the Great Lake to the north. As they approached the lake, Shaldis was interested to see how the canal had been deepened, to allow for the gradual retreat of the shoreline over the past decade. On either side of the canal, land that up until a decade ago had been lake bottom was now a dispirited-looking tangle of reeds, ponds, and brush, alive with birds and crocodiles in the last red glow of the retreating sun.

  This was the first year that the shoreline hadn’t retreated still further. Without the Sun Mages to sing the rains across the desert from the barren coasts of the distant ocean this spring, Shaldis wondered, watching the back of her veiled but otherwise nearly naked boatman dip and bend with the stroke, how soon would it be before the waters retreated too far for the distance to be traversed with canals and bucket lines?

  Eight women.

  The gods help us.

  And one of them, the gods help us, Cattail.

  Cattail had had a new house built this year, on the site of the modest dwelling she’d shared with the long-suffering little nonentity who’d been her husband. The big, dark-haired woman liked to proclaim in her deep voice how nothing could induce her to abandon her friends and neighbors in the Fishmarket; the uncharitable (Shaldis among them) suspected that Cattail so loved the worship of the coterie of neighbors whom she had dominated for years with advice and favors that she simply couldn’t stand the thought of living elsewhere.

  In either case, thought Shaldis, the house looked like exactly the sort of thing a laundress would have built if she should suddenly happen to have several hundred thousand gold pieces thrust upon her by merchants, land-chiefs, and wealthy gentlemen desirous of love potions or curses with no questions asked.

  Cattail was sitting on her little roof-garden terrace, enjoying the cool breezes and the sight of the wharves below. As Shaldis was shown up by an extremely comely young serving man, Shaldis noted that reeking smudges of lemongrass and pitch burned everywhere: Cattail hadn’t figured out a mosquito ward, either. And the doors and windows of the little kiosk through which the stair from the house below opened into the garden were defended with massive shutters and bars, so Cattail hadn’t had any more luck with the problem of thieves, despite her reputation. The Fishmarket was a poor district.

  “Raeshaldis, my dear child!” Cattail rose from her short-legged couch and crossed the garden to meet Shaldis, her jeweled hands held out. “So good of you to call.” In the heat of noon, just before the dead hours of siesta, Shaldis had gazed into her crystal and spoken Cattail’s name. When the swarthy, heavy-featured countenance of her sister Raven had appeared, she had asked if Cattail would do her the favor of receiving her that evening.

  There’d been four other people in Cattail’s downstairs waiting room when Shaldis had come in. They’d all glared daggers at her when the handsome young steward had heard her name and taken her up before them.

  “Leopard, go fetch us coffee,” Cattail commanded with a wave, and the steward bowed deeply and departed. Shaldis had to admit she felt a little shock, since even slave men were never given the descriptive pet names that women—and, she reflected, teyn—went by. Even the lowest male slave was named by his father with one of the names that appertained to their clan, and that was that. Men kept their names, even slaves or entertainers like the graceful Belzinian who danced in the Circus District before scandalized crowds. Everyone Shaldis met was shocked, in one degree or another, that she’d taken a male clan name when she’d left her grandfather’s house; it had never occurred to her that a woman would arbitrarily rename a male slave she’d bought, the way men routinely renamed women.

  For that matter, she’d never heard of a woman owning slaves in her own name, and guessed that Cattail had a mud husband tucked away somewhere, the way the madams of the Blossom Houses and brothels did: a legal spouse contracted with and supported by a small stipend, who legally owned the woman’s house and slaves and who knew better than to ever put forward his claim. Most of the Blossom Mothers and madams worked through gangsters contracted to murder the mud husband out of hand in the event of funny business.

  Shaldis didn’t envy Cattail’s spouse.

  Then she was embraced in a great wave of expensively perfumed flesh and guided to a chair. “Dearest child, is it true about the King’s Jubilee? Is he really going to go through with it? It will make it excessively awkward for poor Summerchild if he fails, and her without a son. Awkward for us all. I wonder she hasn’t done more about getting herself to conceive by the king. It’s really a fairly simple matter.”

  She regarded Shaldis with those heavy-lidded dark eyes, and Shaldis’s mind went back over the two or three attempts that had been made, over the past year, by various landchiefs to introduce new, youthful concubines into the king’s harem. It was generally supposed that Summerchild used spells of her own on the king—which Shaldis didn’t think was the case, though she’d never asked—and that she had placed some sort of spell ward on him to keep him proof against other women’s love potions, something else Shaldis had no information about but which she considered only logical.

  Maybe their love was simply beyond all that.

  Three of the clients in Cattail’s opulently decorated chamber downstairs were women, anonymously veiled in extremely costl
y silks. Spells of fertility, thought Shaldis, or spells of love, despite the fact that even when the men had been working magic, spells of fertility were dangerous things and as often as not killed the mother or produced a dead or deformed baby. Summerchild was keeping a record of such things, now that women were either trying to work men’s spells or inventing their own. Despite Cattail’s claims, there was little reason to believe they’d gotten any safer.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Shaldis, watching her hostess’s face carefully. “The Lady Summerchild keeps her own counsel, the way she always does, but I was asked recently by one of my grandfather’s household about a spell to make her conceive, and since that’s not in my line, she asked me to come to you.”

  The plucked brows arched up. “Asked you to come to me? Dear child, and you agreed to run errands for a concubine? With that kind of attitude I can see why the Sun Mages ran into trouble. No one respects even a Crafty who’ll run their errands for them. Be advised by me, dearest, don’t let yourself be imposed upon again in that way. Why didn’t the poor thing come to me herself?”

  “If you’d ask that question, you can’t know my grandfather Chirak Shaldeth.”

  Under the layer of cosmetics there wasn’t the smallest change of expression in Cattail’s face. Only a small puckering of the brows—carefully executed so as not to wrinkle the paint—as she tried to place the name.

  “One of the Grand Bazaar proctors?” Shaldis prompted.

  “Oh, of course! Silly of me. I knew the Shaldeth had a proctorship, and I should have realized with the name you’d chosen that you were one of them. Your grandfather is a proctor, dear? The only proctor I know is Merj Glapas.”

  Leopard appeared with the coffee, and Shaldis sipped it—it was thickly laced with sugar, vanilla, milk, and cinnamon—and chatted with Cattail as the rose-amber globe of the sun sank itself, burning, into the lake and all the yellow-sailed fishing craft slipped out over the glowing water, borne on the hot whisper of the desert breeze. The time of Sunrest, the mages had called it, sacred to its own god Ka-Theruabin. Every spell performed during that hour had a special formula attached to it, to take account of the particular magic of that time.

  As far as she could tell, either Cattail had never had the slightest thing to do with her grandfather’s house or household, or she was a consummately clever actress—something Shaldis was certain that she was. It wasn’t, of course, easy to casually bring up anything in a conversation so overwhelmingly dominated by her hostess’s insistence on telling her every detail of everyone else’s business in the neighborhood and what she had paid for the coffee service, the embroidered cushions, Leopard, or her hairdresser, but Shaldis persevered. When she slipped into the conversation the mention that one of her grandfather’s maidservants swore she’d seen Cattail herself in the house at night, Cattail’s eyes widened with credible-looking startlement and she said only, “Good heavens, what an extraordinary idea!” instead of, Who says this? or When? “How on earth would the girl have known what I looked like?”

  Shaldis shook her head. “I have no idea. But I think that’s what gave poor Ten Flower—the girl who asked me about the fertility spell—the idea that she wanted one. She says when she heard this, she thought one of the other maids was trying to get herself with child by my uncle Tjagan, to get special privileges, and Ten Flower, who is also sleeping with my uncle, wanted to get in there first.”

  “Good lord, these poor silly children.” Cattail shook her head. “As if any man—though I’m sure your uncle is a very paragon of virtue, my dear—is going to treat any woman better if she bears him a brat. Still, wait here for a few minutes and let me see what I can make up for her. Shall I bring Leopard back and have him sing for you? Or have him read to you? He has a ravishing voice, among other things,” she added slyly.

  “No, thank you, I’ll be fine. The silence here is lovely, this close to the lake.”

  “I should think that after living up in that ghastly Citadel for two years you’d give your thumbs for the sound of a little music, but to each her own. More coffee? A gazelle horn?” She moved the gaudily cloisonnéed plate of cream-stuffed pastries closer. “My cook is a marvel—I don’t think even the king has one as fine. He cost a hundred gold pieces from Lord Nahul-Sarn and worth every dequin of it, I assure you. Not a woman in the realm can cook as well as a man who is truly an artist. Well, help yourself, my dear.”

  For a few minutes after Cattail’s departure Shaldis did simply sit where she was in the protective ring of stinking mosquito smudges, drinking in the lakeside quiet. The noises of the wharves were transmuted by distance to a musical murmuring, like wind in trees. The evening breeze passed with a gentle hrushing among the forest of dried-out reeds that had grown up between the old wharves just below the wall of Cattail’s house and the lake’s current shoreline a hundred feet away. Swallows veered and darted over the pools, and even the sewery, fishy stink of that intervening stretch of reeds didn’t seem so bad, brushed over by the movement of the night air.

  The magic light of Sunrest lay upon the world. Soon it would be gone, and dark would come.

  When she was sure Cattail had retreated to her workroom elsewhere in the house, Shaldis got to her feet and went to the door that led back into the rooftop kiosk that contained the stair down into the rest of the house. It stood open, veiled in gauze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and through the pinkish layers she could see the pierced lamps of the tiled stairwell. The elaborate tile work—brilliantly colored like everything else in the house—went around the opening of the door, breaking only for the heavy iron hinges of the folded-back leaves of the door itself.

  Shaldis spread out her hands, brushed them lightly across the doors, the tile, then knelt to touch the threshold, and stippled her fingers over the curtain of gauze.

  The sigils of protection, of warning, of ward leaped out at her as if they’d been shrieked. Beneath them lay other sigils still, glyphs tinkered together from both High Script runes and from the hasty letters of Scribble into signs of cursing, scrubbed into the wood and iron, written in salt and blood. Shaldis sensed those evil signs were inactive, but they’d been activated, then put to sleep again, recently and often—probably every night, she thought. To whoever forced or opened those doors at night, terrible things would happen . . .

  There were no limiting spells on those curses, which shocked her deeply. It meant that the evil would take any form, disproportionate to the act of burglary and striking those for whom the cursed one cared, as well as the offender himself. They would also, eventually, have an effect on the inhabitants of the house, not only Cattail but the handsome Leopard and the talented cook.

  One of the first lessons Shaldis had been taught as a Sun Mage—and in fact one of the first principles taught by any of the organized systems of male wizardry—was that all spells must be specifically limited in their duration, in their strength, and in their effect. The carelessness of Cattail’s defenses both horrified and disgusted her. The former laundress didn’t care, evidently, that the generalized curse placed on a burglar might take the form of a contagious disease spread to half the neighborhood, or the maiming of his innocent wife or child by a crocodile’s bite.

  You touch my house, something AWFUL will happen to you, was all she cared about.

  Had she been taught by a responsible mage, who’d been taught responsibly by his master, would she have done differently? Shaldis knew that the house had been built—and therefore these curses laid on the doors—after Summerchild had pointed out to Cattail that spells must be limited, even though there were many spells that did not work nearly so well that way.

  Almost certainly, no one burgled Cattail’s house. Not anymore, anyway.

  Shaldis couldn’t be sure, but she felt that the magic that had made those signs was different from that used to put sleep spells on the guards in the gallery outside her grandfather’s room. The faint residue she’d sensed in the wall of the gallery had a different color to
it, a fundamentally different quality, as if she were differentiating Summerchild’s sweet tones from Cattail’s throaty purr.

  Which was just as well, she thought, returning to her chair as she heard her hostess’s rather heavy tread on the stairs. Confident as Shaldis was in the strength of her own counterspells, she wouldn’t have wanted to risk one of Cattail’s curses sticking to her by breaking in and having a look at the woman’s account books some night.

  “It’s odd,” she said as Cattail handed her a little pottery bottle (Pottery, good gods! And after Summerchild told her that ensorcelled substances must be contained in glass, which has its own special properties with regard to magic!). “I’m remembering what Nettleflower said”—she watched Cattail’s eyes again but saw no reaction—“about thinking she saw you in Grandfather’s house. She said it was a Raven sister, so I think she assumed it was you. But is there someone else working in the city that we don’t know about?”

  Cattail sniffed. “Other than that poor frump Pebble? Good lord, I swear the child puts sheep fat on her face for ointment. And her clothes! And if I have to hear one more time about that dreary ‘papa’ of hers or her tedious batch of sisters.”

  Shaldis wondered what Cattail said about her, behind her back. “I thought so, but it was on a night when I know Pebble and Moth both were at the palace with Summerchild. In fact I’d thought that you were there, too,” she added hastily, seeing Cattail’s eyes narrow with slighted anger. “But I know sometimes you’re busy and don’t go.”

  “Well, some of us have to earn our living and don’t have our bread handed to us by men—”

  Shaldis broke hastily into what she guessed was a coming tirade with “Do you think there’s someone else working in the city? Another Raven sister?”