Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  “It’s a little hard to tell.” Shaldis looked around the room, a rock-cut cellar from which a further stair mounted the far wall to a door hidden in shadows some fifteen feet above the floor. “Have teyn attacked the house before this?”

  “I told him,” said the taller man in a disgusted voice. “Like I was sayin’ to my brother, Dupy, here, only today.” He jerked his thumb at his chubby brother. “Teyn won’t attack a house. Not even wildings’ll attack a house, ’less they see there’s only kids there or something.”

  “He says they have.” Ghru scratched his scarred nose. He was also missing the tips of both ears—a frequent penalty for theft—and had been branded on the hand for manslaughter. “He says they come after him ten feet from the front door one night, and another night tried to break into the place, hammerin’ at the doors and the shutters with rocks. And you can see where the wood’s fresh splintered, that’s for sure. We’ve had ’em snoop three or four times, since the boys and me came out, and we managed to kill one or two with lucky shots. But attack? Nah. You really Chirak Shaldeth’s granddaughter that’s the Crafty, like he says?” And he looked past her at Jethan, sizing up the crimson tunic and trousers.

  “I am,” agreed Shaldis. “Though I’m here to ask advice—” She’d made sure she had some genuine questions to ask, though in fact she had no expectation of getting a word of truth or help out of the Blood Mage. All she really wanted was a look around the house. “What is the quarrel between him and my grandfather, anyway?” she added in the voice of one puzzled and exasperated about a matter of ultimately little moment. She looked from Ghru to the brothers, whom she guessed to be simple and good-natured souls at heart, a bit like Jethan’s friends in the guards but not so wellborn. “One of my aunts told me there’d been a shouting match of some kind ten nights ago, but it’s a long way from a shouting match to ordering you to kill me.”

  “By BoSaa’s boots, more than a shouting match, missy—lady,” Ghru corrected himself. Then he shrugged. “What do you expect, bringin’ in outsiders to the tomb-riflin’ game? Two men take a fancy to the same bit of glitter and think that gives them claim over the rules of division.”

  “Rules of division?”

  “Of course, rules of division!” Ghru drew himself up proudly. “What you think we are, street brawlers? Smash-and-grab thieves? Tomb riflin’s a game that’s been goin’ forward as long as kings been plantin’ their daddies. If there wasn’t rules, hard rules, about who gets what, and what happens to them that doesn’t like it, we’d all have killed ourselves off inside the first year. They’d all have killed theirselves off,” he added. “I only knows this from hearsay, of course.”

  Yeah, right, thought Shaldis. And I bet you got your ears clipped in a terrible accident at the barber’s, too.

  “Drupe, Dupy, let’s get these folk upstairs and see if his lordship’s still awake. Come along, now.”

  He shifted his lamp to his other hand, and led them wide around the lines of baskets that occupied most of the center of the room, a precaution that would have served well in the cellar’s darkness had Shaldis not been able to see perfectly clearly in the dark.

  Some baskets, she saw, contained jars of alabaster and onyx of the sort that royalty and nobility had buried with them filled with the highest-quality ointment and wine. Other baskets held jewelry, sorted by size: pendants, earrings, bracelets. The amulets that had been wrapped in the bindings of mummies, to call down curses on those who robbed them.

  Only of course, those curses had no power now, any more than the curses written around the doors of the tombs. At one end of the cellar a couple of hampers brimmed over with coils of stiff and friable linen, glinting with the sullen gleam of gold.

  “Now, I hope you understand me to say Noyad doesn’t buy a single jewel or ounce of gold if he thinks it’s from a tomb,” Ghru went on with a self-righteous glance at Jethan. “Mind the steps here—we had to fill ’em in with adobe, they was so worn, and it don’t hold up so well to traffic. And I’m sure it’s just a misunderstandin’ that some has accused Noyad of dealin’ with robbers, for he’d never do such a thing in his life. But the fact remains that with the city guards pickin’ and pryin’ into his affairs, and Ahure not bein’ able to vouch for every single piece that he trades for, they had to bring your grandpa into it, missy, him bein’ proctor of the market and all.”

  The long stone stairway debouched into a storeroom cut into the living rock of the hill and raftered in pine poles and brush. One wall was built up of adobe: a low door let them through into a tiny chamber, furnished with two solid plank doors, remarkable in so humble a house. In most poor dwellings, especially away from the wood port on the lake, a pantry or a closet like this one would have been equipped with a curtain or a lattice screen.

  “As I understand it,” Ghru went on in a hushed voice as he guided them through one of the doors to the house’s rather bare front hall, “Noyad made your grandpa a gift of a choice piece, to thank him for all his help, one that Ahure wanted to keep for his own. Now me, I could care less about that old stuff.” He held the lamp higher and tapped one of the several figures that its light revealed, standing in plastered niches of the adobe wall. “Crude, it is, and who cares if it’s two thousand years old? The Durshen had a way with jewels and gold that nobody’s had since, if you ask me, though I like a lot of the Interregnum pieces. But these? Pish.”

  Pish indeed, thought Shaldis, politely putting her hands behind her and studying the image. It was crude, with its distorted face and lumpish body, yet the glass it was molded of was exquisitely colored, pale greens and browns like water, with a chain of trapped bubbles twisting through it. She glanced back at the scar-faced bodyguard, who displayed such a surprising streak of connoisseurship, and said, “This is Zali Dynasty work, isn’t it?”

  “Supposed to be.” Ghru shrugged. “We’re gettin’ a lot of Zali plunder now. Trash, I call it, and half of it glass. You, Drupe! See if his lordship’s awake. The piece his lordship got into such a lather about with your grandpa was just glass. One of those glass balls they find in the Zali tombs—pretty, I suppose, but nuthin’ to make yourself sick angry over, walkin’ the floors at night and carryin’ on.”

  “You’d think if Lord Ahure was a mage,” said Shaldis, knowing she was rushing things but keeping a wary eye on the taller brother as he disappeared back out the door through which they’d come, “and he wanted something that badly, he’d take steps to get it, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’d think.” Ghru ran a hand over his pink scalp. “I thought he would, myself. And after all his pesterin’ and cursin’ to Noyad, I was ready for there to be no end of trouble, if he tried anything. You know.” And he made twiddling gestures with his fingers, in a layman’s imitation of a mage casting a spell. Then he frowned, puzzled and a little pitying. “It’s like it took everything out of him, that fight with your grandpa, miss . . . m’lady. I thought we’d have trouble after that. But since that time—and it was just a night or two before that that the boys and I started coming out here—seems like he just crumples up, come nightfall, and falls asleep like a child. Like havin’ it took away from him is burnin’ him up inside. Noyad’s right peeved about it, I can tell you.”

  “He must be,” remarked Jethan sarcastically, turning back from his examination of a beautiful Durshen statue of Darutha God of Rain that stood in another niche. “Considering it’s the custom to—er—meet with the traders from whom he gets all these pieces by night, isn’t it?”

  “That it is.” Ghru winked. “I tell you, other than one night when he went into town on business, it’s quiet as tombs out here. But he insists he’s in danger from the teyn, so who am I to contradict?

  “Who are you, Ghru,” whispered a harsh, sibilant voice from the shadows at the far end of the room, “to speak of me and my affairs to anyone, much less to a demon brat in the pay of my enemy?”

  Except where niches broke the wall, most of the front chamber of Ahure’s house was curt
ained floor to ceiling in black, which Shaldis had guessed already concealed one or more doorways as well as any number of the scorpions and spiders inseparable from desert living. Thus Ahure’s seeming materialization didn’t surprise her. As she’d spoken to Ghru she’d walked about two thirds around the perimeter of the room brushing these curtains with her hand—albeit gingerly—and had found no trace of magic, not even Ahure’s.

  Which didn’t mean that he wasn’t holding the unknown Raven sister in some kind of thrall. Or wasn’t simply paying her, as he’d clearly paid Cattail to come and mark his house with ward signs—and, for that matter, had clearly paid poor Nettleflower, either to steal back his coveted trinket or to let him into the house to steal it himself.

  She’d already ascertained what she’d come to the house to learn: namely, whether the unknown Raven sister had worked magic inside his house as well as just outside the connecting tunnel, and if so, how much. But she stood for a moment, shocked at Ahure’s appearance. Burning up inside, his bodyguard had said, and Shaldis saw by the lines around the deep-set pale eyes that this was true. He was wasted and haggard, his long hands uncontrollably trembling. Behind her she heard Jethan’s swift intaken breath; the Blood Mage had clearly been trying to raise power in the old way, and his shaven scalp, mutilated hands, and scarred cheekbones were crisscrossed with lines of fresh scabs.

  Beneath those wounds—and by the smell of old blood and poultices he was cut all over his body under the filthy black robe he wore—lay a horrible palimpsest of older injuries, some self-inflicted, others crude and jagged in a yellow-green mottling of three-week-old bruises.

  Shaldis gasped. “Did the teyn attack you, sir?” Somebody certainly had.

  “Did the teyn attack you?” mimicked the Blood Mage through his nose. “You know that well enough, witch, for it was you who set them on. Have you come to gloat? To take word back to your grandfather, may the maggots devour his bones.”

  “It was not me who set them on,” said Shaldis, thinking fast, and she executed the deepest and most elaborate salaam she could think of. “Rather, I came to you in the hopes of ending this quarrel, for your curses have brought sickness and ill fortune to my grandfather’s house.”

  “And they will bring worse!” declared Ahure, clearly under the impression that he still did have the power to curse. “He will find—”

  “Sir, we are finding it so!” Shaldis had to shout to be heard against the Blood Mage’s impassioned shriek. “I want to end this! Tell me what it is you’re looking for and I will see what I can do.”

  “Don’t—you—touch it!” Ahure strode toward her like a monstrous bat, black robes billowing, white face inhuman with rage. He seized Shaldis by the shoulders, shook her like a child shaking a doll. She heard Jethan swear and the clatter and shuffle of a struggle behind her with Drupe and Dupy, even as Ghru darted forward.

  “Now, my lord, now, my lord, no call to lay a hand on the young lady!”

  “Slut!” Ahure screamed as Ghru pulled his grip away from Shaldis’s arms. Ahure’s hands had the strength of a madman’s, but like most Blood Mages he’d cut off a number of his own fingers in the raising of his particular style of magic, and his clutch was easy to break. “Witch! Demon! Keep away from it! It is not for the likes of you!”

  He twisted in Ghru’s grasp, and both Drupe and Dupy released Jethan and hastened to their chief’s aid. Jethan caught Shaldis against him, drew her away as the Blood Mage began to spit as well as howl and claw at her with his few remaining hooked and grimy nails.

  “You tell that senile cheat that it’s mine! Tell him that the evil that has befallen him is nothing to what will happen unless it is returned to me! Tell him—”

  The door shut behind the struggling group of guards and Blood Mage. Shaldis stood, shaking a little with shock, in the circle of Jethan’s arm. She realized she could have, and probably should have, used a spell of some kind to hurl Ahure back from her but wondered if one would have worked on him, any more than it had worked on poor Gime, who had died howling in Little Hyacinth Lane.

  Ahure’s screams could be heard through the adobe walls, gradually subsiding into silence. A moment later Ghru slipped out through the door of the little room from which the stair led down to the tunnel.

  “Damn me, miss, I’m sorry.” The bodyguard had a bruise on one cheek and claw rakes from Ahure’s nails on the other side of his face. Shaldis hoped he’d douse them with the strongest brandy he could find, fast. “He’s been bad since that quarrel with your grandpa, but never this bad. I hope you understand—you seem an understandin’ kind of girl—lady—that he’s not in his right head when he gets so. My boys and me”—he jerked his thumb toward the back room where Drupe and Dupy were no doubt putting the wizard to bed—“we do the best we can, and if you was to put a bad mark on the house, or even on him personal, we’d be the ones would suffer. I doubt he’d notice.”

  “No, I think you’re right.” Shaldis stepped forward and laid her hands on Ghru’s muscular arm. “In truth, I came out here to see if Ahure had the power to do the harm that’s been done to my grandfather, and having seen him, I don’t think he has. You say he’s been here every night but one since his quarrel with my grandfather. Which was what? Two nights ago?”

  Ghru counted back on his fingers. “Night before last it was, miss. Now, I tell a lie, he was in town twice since his little set-to with your grandpa: first time was the last night of the full moon. He came back late that night, and cursing.”

  The night of Nettleflower’s death, thought Shaldis. Presumably, because he’d gone to the alleyway door at the back of the house to meet her, only to find the household in a hubbub over her death.

  “Then, yes, he did go in night before last, to meet the boss, Lord Noyad, I should say, and he come home in a foul mood. He’ll be fine during the day,” the bodyguard went on, “or as fine as ever he is, at any rate—seein’ those who come out from the city to have spells or curses, or sometimes goin’ out into the hills with . . . er . . . to meet them as trades in old gold.” And he gave her a wink at the euphemism. “But he’ll get restless with the coming of night, and then as soon as it’s dark, it’s like he’s had a draft of somethin’, and he’s off to bed, sometimes before the light’s out of the sky. Me and the boys stand watch here, to guard him from the teyn he says are after him, but it’s a lone and dismal stand, let me tell you.”

  “These visitors who come,” said Shaldis, determined to take advantage of Ghru’s eagerness to placate her out of cursing the house. “Who are they?”

  “Folk from the city.” Ghru shrugged. “Some rich, some not so rich. Noyad don’t like it—he says it takes away from the sales of them ‘enchanted amulets’ he sells—but Lord Ahure just agrees with ’im and sees ’em on the quiet. Myself, I hear tell wizards don’t got no power no more—that only Crafty ladies such as yourself can work spells—but there’s many and many that don’t believe it and will come to them as claim the power still. And I must say, his lordship puts on a good show, with his colored lamps, and them levers he’s got behind the curtains. Whether his spells really work, well, the feller who used to watch here with us—Gime was his name, one of Noyad’s boys—he said those were poisons Ahure brewed up out of the herbs in his garden. Poisons and healing drafts both. Who’s to say the words he lays on ’em don’t make ’em stronger to their tasks?”

  “Are any of those who come to see him Crafty women themselves?” asked Shaldis.

  Ghru considered. “That Cattail from down the Fishmarket’s been here once or twice. She’s supposed to be a Crafty. The gods know she talked enough about how she was.”

  “Any others?”

  The sparse eyebrows pulled together for a moment; then he shook his head. “If they was, they didn’t say so. It might be as some of the nomads was Crafty. They don’t come inside, just meets him by the gate or halfway up the path.”

  “Nomads,” said Shaldis thoughtfully.

  “Rangeland tribes,” agreed Ghr
u as he showed them to the outer door. “Though now and then there’ll be a couple from the deep desert. You see more deep-desert tribes coming in these days than you used to when the rains were more regular. It’s the deep-desert tribes that know the ways to the truly old tombs, the Zali tombs far out in the desert itself that ain’t been opened till now. Not, like I said, that I’d give a snap of my fingers for Zali ware, myself, but it all melts down the same. Will you be all right, gettin’ home? It’s a long ways. We have horses here, but they’d need to be returned, and if word got to Noyad we’d lent ’em . . .”

  “It’s all right.” Shaldis pressed her palms together and whispered again the spells of ward and retrieve, which summoned the animals she and Jethan had turned loose far enough from the house that no wizard, listening within, could have detected their approach.

  “This glass ball that he’s so angry about,” said Shaldis, “did he get that from the nomads?”

  “I don’t know where he got it from, m’lady, and that’s a fact. It came out of a tomb for sure.” He shrugged again as he opened the door to the blue-and-ivory stillness of the desert. “There’s no mistaking that old work. They do say the curses that were writ on the old tombs have no more strength nowadays, but this piece seems to be doin’ not so bad, if it’s turned his brain this way. Not that it had far to turn, if you ask me. And maybe it would have happened, glass ball or no glass ball. You watch out as you ride to the city, now, miss. It may not have been teyn, but something attacked him out there, and it’s a fact we’ve had wildings close around the house.”

  Like faithful ghosts materializing from moonlight and shadow, the dun gelding and the paint trotted up the path, snuffling and evidently pleased about their little holiday of rambling the hills at night. Shaldis listened for a moment before she swung to the saddle, probing the night for the sound and scent of intruders.

  Ghru was right. There were wildings within a few hundred yards, invisible in the still landscape of sagebrush and mesquite. Jethan started to speak as they rode away, but she signed him quiet, listening behind her. The teyn made no attempt to follow as they trotted their mounts back toward the road, then broke into a gentle hand gallop back toward the city under the silver light of the waning moon.