Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Marry whom I will? Foxfire fought not to cry; above all things else she couldn’t let her grandmother see her cry. Not if Father has a word to say about it. But she glanced back to the corner of the clammy vaulted cellar, where old Eleven Grasshoppers sat wrapped in her own long arms, quietly watching her, and felt that the old jenny, if she didn’t know exactly what was going on, at least sensed her sickened, desperate pain.

  She held her breath, trembling, until her brother and the failed Sun Mage had pulled the bound teyn, dripping, from Belial’s pool. Then she had to dig her nails into her own wrist to keep from collapsing in tears of relief. Yesterday it had been the same, and the day before, when they’d poured poison down a poor young jenny’s throat and had waited an hour, two hours, three hours in sweating heat before it was clear that Foxfire’s spells had worked. She’d gone to the compound to check on the jenny this morning—Six Thistles, they called her—and had found her nursing her infant as if nothing had happened. The first young boar they’d dumped into the snake pit had been ignored by the cobras until he’d tried to run. Then he’d been bitten four times, and Foxfire had clung to the rim of the pit, working and reworking the spells of the cure of poison from a distance for three hours, before Red Silk would let one of the guards go down and bring him out.

  Foxfire’s spells had protected the guard as well. The boar teyn was still alive, and they’d tied up the next one they’d thrown down, to make sure he stayed still.

  Afterward, when Foxfire had wept hysterically in Opal’s arms in the secrecy of her own room, Eleven Grasshoppers had again tried to comfort them both.

  “She said it today,” whispered Foxfire when after two more teyn had been passed unhurt through the crocodile’s pool Red Silk finally let her return to her room. Opal gathered her into her arms. Eleven Grasshoppers had, in imitation of the maid’s habitual tasks, carefully fetched a bowl of lavender water from the wall bench, making both girls laugh. “She said, ‘You’ll be a royal princess.’ She hasn’t the slightest intention of saving the king’s life.”

  Foxfire wiped her eyes on the bedsheet, where the two girls were now sitting—Eleven Grasshoppers, too, though Red Silk would have whipped them both for letting a teyn, however well washed, sit on a bed. “‘You can marry whom you will,’ she said.”

  “Well, that’s a fairy tale, anyway,” said Opal. She went to the table where a supper of couscous and lamb was being kept warm under a basket. Evening light slanted harsh and golden through the lattices of the window. Beyond, the crests of the Dead Hills, visible above the compound wall, had a weirdly desolate beauty, abstract red shapes against a molten blue sky. “I heard Soral Brûl talking to madam this morning, when I went to get your breakfast. He was telling her that though he can’t do magic himself anymore, it’s in his blood. He said that your daughter by him would be Crafty born for certain.”

  Foxfire was so exhausted that the flash of anger she felt wasn’t enough to warm the sinking in her chest. She felt tears begin to leak from her eyes again, but her voice was steady and sharp as metal in her own ears. “That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that’ll make sense to Father. And I’m sure it’s never even occurred to that stuck-up Brûl that once I have children by him, neither Father nor Grandmother is going to let him live.”

  Opal’s eyes widened. It had clearly never occurred to her, either.

  Foxfire felt a thousand years old.

  She took a deep breath as Opal came over to the bed with a bowl of food. Eleven Grasshoppers sprang neatly down and trotted to her own little bed of folded blankets in the corner; she knew if she did this the girls would give her the scraps. The jenny curled herself up neatly, wrapped in her long arms, for all the world like a little old woman in her simple tunic, watching the girls with her wise pale-blue eyes.

  “How long did it take us to get here?” asked Foxfire. “We left Golden Sky not long after sunset, camped once at noon, then got here late in the afternoon. The city should be a little closer than that.”

  “It takes the supply trains all day and part of a second,” said Opal. “I know because I asked one of the drivers to buy me the latest horoscope from Starbright—I got one for you, too.” She went to the loose floor tile behind the wardrobe, under which Foxfire hid the pilfered pottery food bowl she used to talk to Shaldis, and brought out two small squares of yellow paper. They were rather dark from having been washed and reused a number of times. “They’re from two days after the half moon, and that was the day before yesterday.”

  She sat again on the corner of the bed, watched as Foxfire scooped up couscous with her bread. Her brown eyes filled with concern beneath the scarred mess of lashless lids. “You aren’t thinking—? We can’t.”

  “You’re not,” said Foxfire simply. “Because I’m going to poison you—just enough to make you sleep a lot and then be really sick—so Grandmother won’t think you had anything to do with my getting away.” She got to her feet, carried her empty dish back to the table, and stood looking through the window at the shallow crescent of the waning moon, luminous in the burning sky.

  It was nine days past full. Four days until the dark of its cycle.

  “Foxfire.”

  “The king saved my life,” said Foxfire quietly, still looking out at the moon. “I love Father, Opal, and I—I even love Grandmother, you know. But I can’t go on living like this.” Her throat tightened, and she forced back the tears that burned the backs of her eyes. “I can’t go on waiting for the next awful thing Father or Grandmother is going to make me do. And even when Papa becomes king, you know it’ll be something else. Raeshaldis . . . Raeshaldis left her grandfather. Left her family, because they would have tried to do the same thing to her, tried to make her be just a tool for getting them what they wanted, the way Grandmother and Father are doing to me.”

  She turned back, to look into her friend’s horror-stricken eyes. “If I protect the king, he’ll protect me.”

  “You can’t betray your father!” Opal had lived in the same house as Red Silk long enough to speak the words in a nearly inaudible whisper. “You can’t go against your family!”

  “The king is the head of my family,” replied Foxfire shakily, though she knew Mohrvine would not see it that way at all.

  He’ll never speak to me again.

  Just forming the words in her mind was like the earth breaking open beneath her feet, dropping her into a void that had no end.

  Tears leaking down her face, she whispered, “Papa’s only going to use me again and again and again, until there’s nothing left of me. He doesn’t mean to, but he will. I have to get out.”

  She fell into Opal’s arms as the smaller girl leaped to her feet, rushed to her side, gathered her into a desperate embrace. For a time nothing existed for her but tears and pain and the knowledge that her own assessment of the situation was correct: that her father loved her dearly, and would use her like a spear until she broke in his hand.

  He would never forgive her defection.

  Raeshaldis survived this, she thought.

  I can, too.

  She whispered again, “I have to get out.”

  “Rider coming,” said Rat.

  Shaldis, clinging to the saddle bow of her stumbling horse, barely heard. Her eyes were half shut against the hard horizontal glare of the sinking sun and with the light trance of listening, scenting—searching for that elusive flicker of blue in all the wasteland of empty rock and wind-scoured sand.

  Except for the shortest possible rest at the worst of the nooning, they had ridden through the day, blazing heat that crushed horses and riders like an invisible hammer. The teyn—and the nomad Crafty—seemed a little closer. They had stopped, too, for a time, or at least the scent and movement of the indigo speck in the distance had seemed unmoving to Shaldis’s straining senses. But many miles still separated them. With the coming of night the scent of the indigo would be stronger, but sooner or later they would have to rest.

  “Camels,” added Rat.
<
br />   Shaldis drew rein, dared withdraw her mind from the quarry, turned to blink at her companion. “What?”

  “Camels. Four of ’em, heading this way.” He pointed. The sinking sun, setting behind the near-invisible trace of the distant Dead Hills, drenched the dust cloud with light. Shaldis could make out black, swaying shapes amid the swooning heat shimmer that seemed to hide the horizon in an incandescent curtain. She whispered, “Jethan,” half disbelieving. But when she fumbled the scrying crystal from her purse and looked within it, the young guardsman’s image was clear: dust covered, veiled against heat and glare, and as stiff in his saddle as the gait of his mount would permit.

  Two of the other camels carried waterskins. The third bore an empty saddle. The tassels and trappings were green and orange, the colors of her grandfather’s house.

  “The king needs you at the aqueduct,” was the first thing Jethan said to her when he came near enough, almost half an hour later. “Two laborers there have gone mad in the past two days. Lord Soth will be going on there from Three Wells, but they’ll need a true mage.”

  “I’m delighted to see you too, Jethan,” replied Shaldis in a tone of exaggerated cheer. “And, yes, thank you, I’m in the very pink of good health. How are you?”

  Jethan drew himself up in rigid indignation, like a statue wrought of dust. Then he relaxed, tapped the camel down to its knees, and sprang from the saddle to stand before her, where she stood dismounted beside the exhausted horses. “I’m well,” he said quietly. “But I’m very tired and very frightened, for the king’s sake and that of my lady. Though I am the better for seeing you safe.”

  Shaldis replied, meaning it, “And I you.”

  “I have water,” said Jethan. “At your grandfather’s house they said you took enough for two days, but in this heat . . .”

  “Thank you,” said Shaldis. “I appreciate that. Rat will, too, when he takes the horses back—they can’t go on into the desert this way. Tell the king that I’m pursuing a nomad Raven sister into the desert, the Raven sister he and I spoke of, who can control the teyn. Maybe who can control wind as well. What tracks we’ve found were nearly erased by wind, but we’ve barely felt any—only a stream of it, sometimes, flowing near the ground. Not enough to raise dust in the distance. They’re almost half a day ahead of us. I hope to overtake them tomorrow.”

  Without turning his head, Jethan said, “You hear that, Rat, is it? Tell the king that, when you get to the aqueduct. I’m sure your master back in town will understand the delay in your return with his horses.” He didn’t take his eyes off Shaldis, blue as jewels in the mask of dust. “Please reassure the king that we’ll both be with him when he rides back to the city four nights hence for his jubilee.”

  Shaldis’s head was pounding with the heat and the glare of the sun-blasted emptiness and with the need for sleep. She could have fallen on Jethan’s shoulder and cried, as she’d fallen yesterday on the king’s. She only said to Rat, “Rest until the sun’s down. That dust cloud in the north is the workface of the aqueduct. Once it’s dark you’ll probably be able to see the lights of the camp.”

  “You’re not going on now, miss?” The driver stepped between her and the saddled camel as she reached up to take its bridle to mount. “Without rest? You’ve rode since midnight, barring the nooning stop, and if you slept, then by the look of you you didn’t get any good of it.”

  In fact Shaldis ached as if she’d been beaten. But she said, “In my grandfather’s house last night I saw green mists, the same green mists Foxfire has said she’s seen around her grandmother’s house in the hills—and that Jethan and I saw near Ahure’s house. I don’t know whether these have anything to do with my grandfather’s madness or with the glass this woman is trying to take from him or with what’s happened in Three Wells or with the woman who’s been crying to me in my dreams. What I do know is that the woman out there ahead of us has some answers. The only answers I’ve encountered so far. And as far as I know, she and her teyn are still moving. So we need to move, too.”

  She hooked her toe onto the kneeling camel’s leg and sprang into the saddle. The camel groaned in protest, then lurched to her feet, mumbling and grousing as camels do. Jethan unhooked a pair of waterskins from one of the spare camels and laid them in the dust beside Rat and the horses. “Tell the king we will not forsake him,” he said softly. “If we do not reach the aqueduct camp before he must leave, we will not fail to be in the city on the day of the new moon.”

  Shaldis glanced worriedly at him as he swung on his camel again, tapped it to signal it to rise. Behind his shoulder the dwindling crescent moon stood clear in the saffron sky.

  She’d watched it from night to night, but its thinness struck her anew, and filled her with despair. Wasting, draining away. Like Summerchild’s strength. Like the king’s life.

  Jethan caught her look, but didn’t respond until they had started off again with long swaying strides toward that half-guessed dot of blue in the landscape, that elusive whiff of indigo.

  Then Jethan said softly, “But if we come not to the city till the day of the new moon, I fear it will be to find the lady Summerchild dead and all hope at an end.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Most curious.” Oryn made a move to step closer to the man who sat in the stuffy brown shade of the little goat-hair tent, hands bound before him and leg-shackled to the tent pole. Ykem, foreman of the aqueduct camp, made what might have been a move preliminary to catching his sleeve, but of course a foreman didn’t do that to a king.

  “Watch it, sir. He’s quiet enough now, but this morning he was like to kill the fellow who came in to change the latrine bucket. Lunged at him, screaming and clawing, he did, and we thought he’d snap the tent pole. We had him chained in the quartermaster’s store tent, but the men wouldn’t have it, sir. Said he’d put a Bad-Luck Shadow on the picks and shovels, and they’d turn in the hands of them as used ’em.”

  Oryn glanced back at the sunburned little man when he used that nomad term, then looked back at the shackled workman. The man looked like any of the rangeland villagers, wiry and dark, unremarkable save for the expression of mad bliss on his face as he sang.

  “Been singin’ like that since night before last, sir,” added Ykem. “ ’Cept when he sleeps, which he does every few hours. Even when he attacked Nam this morning, if you can call it singin’.”

  “Oh, it’s singing, all right.” Oryn folded his arms, watched the madman’s mouth gaping, flexing, tongue quivering and curling as it gave shape to the sound that poured like a wailing river from his throat. “I’ve made a study of music—one can only watch dancing girls cavort day in and day out for so long—”

  Ykem looked at him in startlement, then saw the joke and laughed.

  “And that sounds a bit like what the deep-desert nomads do to bring on trances. Does he have nomad blood? Or nomad family?”

  Ykem shook his head. “Hates ’em,” he said shortly. “He’s from the City of White Walls. Said he’d never been out of sight of the White Lake, till he came here.”

  Oryn murmured again, “Most curious. And did he know the other man who went mad? Were they friends?”

  “Probably knew him. They worked the same gang. Nobody says they was particular friends. Both of ’em, these three, four days now, the men say they’d been sickenin’ for somethin’. They’d eat their food and sneak off to their barrack the minute they could, and their mates’d find ’em sound asleep in minutes.” Ykem nodded toward the rough, open-sided shelter of canvas-roofed poles that stood on the edge of the camp. “Deep sleep, dead sleep, they say, but that might be hindsight, the way men do. I asked around among the foremen, and they say five or six other men are startin’ to do that. Startin’ to claim they’re sleepy right after they come off, and sometimes not even stay for the food. But I talked to ’em and they seem all right.”

  “Or they wanted you to think they are, at any rate.” Oryn took another look at the madman, with his lolling head and eyes fixed
enraptured on nothingness, wailing words—they had to be words, thought Oryn, there was a regularity in them that went far beyond random sounds—in a language he had never heard before. He wondered what Soth would make of it. Though Earth Wizards were as a rule less scholarly than Sun Mages, Soth had studied ancient tongues, both the languages of dimmest prehistory and the tongues of those alien mages learned through the scrying crystals.

  He ducked his head, pushed through the tent flap and out into the slanting heat, the sun-saturated dust of late afternoon.

  “And none of the men have reported disturbing a tomb? Finding jewels they shouldn’t have or pieces of mummies?”

  “Pieces of mummies, my lord?” Ykem stared at him, baffled.

  Oryn’s head ached. Resting in the heat of yesterday’s brief nooning, and riding on through the night, he felt his mind circling again and again to what Raeshaldis had told him about her grandfather and his connection with Noyad the tomb-robbing jeweler, about the howling man in Little Hyacinth Lane, and the burning of the White Djinn Tavern.

  The royal cavalcade had followed the line of the aqueduct through the Dead Hills and into the desert. Last year, when the engineers had been constructing the raised waterway across the flat rangelands to the city, he had always felt a lift of hope and purpose in visiting the face camp. Every day had brought the end of the stone trough on its high stone piers closer to their goal, to the rocky, pale shoulders of the Dead Hills. Progress had been visible.

  Then he had been able to tell himself, We will reach the Oasis of Koshlar, and the deep waters of its springs will flow cleanly to the city and the fields.

  It was hard to remember that now, looking out across the waterless expanses of the desert. A hundred and sixty miles, the surveyors said. It would go faster now, of course, since they were only digging and covering. . . .

  If he lived to push it through to completion.

  Don’t think about that, he ordered himself.