Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Anything, anything to end the pain.

  And to take them with him, traitors who had bribed the priests to let him die, when the answer had been in his grasp.

  Then his eyes cleared, the dream shifting to waking for one moment, or what would have been waking but for the glowing iridescence of the bottle still burning in his mind. His attackers were but shadows in the darkness around him, but where the starlight touched their eyes he saw they were pale, with slitted pupils like cats.

  They seized him, held him down, and the knives all slashed at once. The snake’s venom rushed out with the blood as darkness poured in.

  FORTY-ONE

  They’re out there somewhere.

  They can’t simply have vanished.

  Raeshaldis stopped, letting her slitted eyelids drift that last fraction of an inch into complete closure, sank her mind into the emptiness that now smelled of nothing but air and rock. The desert floor was bare here, even of sand. Only rock stained dark by the slow leaching of the sun. The air was like a diamond, shriveling the tissues of her nose and lips even through her veils.

  They have to stop somewhere. She may be a Crafty but she’s no more than human. She has to rest.

  As her eyes slipped closed that final fraction of an inch, her mind slipped back down into trance, her senses reaching out over the desert like the farthest extension of a single drop of blood spreading in a still pool that taints all the water with its presence. Through weariness like the pounding of a hammer she was aware of Jethan and the camels, some half mile behind her, waiting in the dove-gray twilight of the coming morning. Was aware of her own fatigue and thirst—she couldn’t even remember when she’d let her mind be distracted long enough to go back to them for water.

  Was aware that this was the hour called the Bird Sun, when back in the lands where there was water all the birds would be waking to cry their territories, to hunt insects, to coo and twitter at one another: in her grandfather’s little garden and the king’s great ones, under the eaves of every house in the Yellow City and in the palmeries and fields and pastures all along the shores of the lake.

  Here there was no sound but the sob of the wind across the bare black rocks and now and then the creak of saddle leather far behind her and the jingle of a camel bell.

  It would be full light soon. Full sun.

  The night before last she’d followed the teyn’s scent far into the bare desert, as she’d followed it through the Dead Hills with Rat on the night preceding that. And the one before that she’d ridden with Jethan to the house of Ahure. She knew she’d dozed and eaten at some point in the past three days but couldn’t remember exactly when. Despite her training in long fasts and nights without sleep, she knew she was coming to the end of her physical endurance.

  Just what was that other woman made of?

  Was she like the teyn, who could go for seven days, it was said, without rest or food?

  Was she getting her tame teyn to carry her while she slept?

  Were her spells over them that strong?

  Shaldis realized she was nodding on her feet, and jerked her mind to wakefulness. Like a wolf she scented the air, turning her head again, sifting and sorting the dry, hard air of dawn.

  And finding nothing.

  Still she started forward, eyes half shut, trusting that in time she would pick up the trail again.

  “Lord King?”

  The voice came from a thousand miles away in the darkness.

  “Oryn?”

  The image of the nine priests on the edge of the crocodile pool dissolved and Oryn opened his eyes. “Where in the gods’ names were you?”

  It was Soth kneeling beside him.

  Morning sun glared in Oryn’s eyes, and the next second a vulture’s shadow passed across it. The world smelled of the birds and of blood. His skin was on fire with pain.

  “And what happened? There were nine priests, though Death still had only one.” He brought up his hand to touch a burning line of pain on his forehead and saw that someone had drawn a circle on the back of his wrist in blood to which stuck sand grains and dust. The movement brought back the knives of all his enemies. The henchmen of the brother who wasn’t really his brother, or something.

  Soth’s face looked ghostly white in the pale wrappings of his veils. “Can you sit up?” Behind him a whole squad of guards crowded close, as if they expected their monarch to utter prophecies or give birth.

  “Of course I can sit up! I only . . .” He tried it and sank back with a gasp. “On second thought, please have the palace baths transported out here.” He managed to get up on one elbow and looked around.

  He lay on the ground in mid-desert. Far off a column of dust proclaimed the aqueduct camp, but it had to be a good five miles away. Vultures circled overhead.

  At least with such helpful fowl in the neighborhood, once they knew he was missing he couldn’t have been difficult to find.

  “My lord, what happened? Who did this?” Soth reached back for the dripping waterskin Commander Bax passed forward, propped Oryn’s shoulders, and helped him drink. Oryn’s hands were shaking so badly he found he couldn’t support the skin’s weight himself. “The relief guard found Sergeant Zhenus missing. He fetched Geb to go in and check on you, and you were gone, too. Bax tells me they were searching for you for the rest of the night. I saw the vultures myself as I rode into camp at dawn. I thought it odd that they didn’t land.”

  Oryn turned his hands over. His shirt was ripped in a hundred places; shallow cuts marked his arms, chest, thighs. Between the cuts, circles and zigzags had been drawn in blood on his reddening, sunburned skin. Stammering a little, he said, “I don’t really know. I followed Zhenus to the nomad camp. He was . . .” Oryn turned his head, saw another column of vultures two or three miles off, where the camp must lie in the wadi that was invisible from here, concealed by the rise of the ground. A pale crescent moon hung in the daylight sky.

  He looked back at Soth, suddenly frightened. “No one’s at the nomad camp, are they?”

  The librarian shook his head. “We came searching for you first. Who—?”

  “Post guards around it. No one is to go into it, no one, for any reason. There was a bottle. A bottle of iridescent glass. Zali ware, I think.”

  Soth held up a fragment of it, a shard about three inches long. It was tipped with dried blood.

  Looking past him, Oryn saw that where he had lain on the ground was surrounded by a minute hedge of broken glass, pieces buried so that their bloodstained points protruded from the earth like uneven teeth, glittering in the hot morning sunlight.

  He shook his head, trying to clear away the burning fantasies of dream, to separate them from memories scarcely less unreal.

  He’d been a king, he thought. Or someone had.

  His enemies had seized him, dragged him to his death; and looking down he saw that between the gashes and the blood circles, his arms were bruised. As Soth and Bax helped him to his feet he lay his own hand gingerly over the darkening finger weals. His hands and feet were small for his height, but at six foot three he was still a big man, and the span of these marks exceeded his own by over an inch.

  “What do you remember?” asked Bax gently. “Did you see who attacked you? Or what happened to Zhenus?”

  “Zhenus attacked me,” said Oryn hesitantly. “Circle the nomad camp, find his tracks if he left it, but whatever you do don’t go into it looking for him. It wasn’t he who did this,” he added, seeing both his friends open their mouths with the same question. “Send a message, at once, now, immediately, to Lady Moth at the palace. A squadron is to go to the house of Chirak Shaldeth in Sleeping Worms Street and arrest every person in it. Slaves, camel drivers, teyn, and every member of the family from lowest to highest, excepting solely the Lady Raeshaldis, if she’s there. They’re to be taken to the palace prison and given new clothing down to the skin, decently and with respect, mind you. But no single member of the household, and I mean none, is to keep by them so much as
a toothpick that was in that house. When the house is empty it’s to be cordoned off and no one is to touch anything within it. Lady Moth is to go with the squadron and stay with the guards on the empty house. Lady Pebble is to remain with the household members until they’re put in their cells, and then she’s to remain in the guardroom until I personally speak to her.

  “It wasn’t a curse that destroyed the nomad camp, Soth.” Oryn turned back to his tutor, tightened his grip on the sinewy, black-robed arm. “It wasn’t a plague that killed everyone in Three Wells and then later took those poor guardsmen. No one brought mummies or hex-ridden gold into the village. Maybe not even a piece of glass such as the one that—that trapped me.”

  He turned his hands over again, staring at the ragged cuts, the daubed lines and rings that reminded him of the sigils and runes that the mages had drawn for centuries, to focus their power.

  “I think it’s the Dream Eater we spoke about,” he said softly. “It was supposed to haunt tombs, to eat the dreams of the dead. And I think it was a dead man’s dreams, a dead king’s dreams, that I saw and felt. A Zali king, by the way everyone was dressed. The ancient wizards warded against the Eater of Dreams just as they warded against the lake monsters so long ago and so effectively that everyone forgot that it was real.”

  Behind him, he heard one of the guards whisper, “Bad-Luck Shadow.”

  “What?” Oryn swung around.

  The guard gulped and looked as if he’d been caught sucking his thumb at a review. “Nothing, sir. Just my granny used to stick broken glass in the ground just like that, on certain nights of the year, around the house, to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away. My dad complained as how we kids were always cuttin’ ourselves on it, and she just said, ‘All the better.’”

  “Did she, indeed?” murmured Oryn, and turned to look back toward the circling vultures that marked the nomad camp. Rising wind lifted and whirled them like smoke and threw a bitter scatter of sand in his eyes.

  “Broken glass is a very common element in old protective spells,” began Soth, and Oryn frowned.

  “Exactly what is the Bad-Luck Shadow?” he asked.

  The men all looked at one another, baffled to put a description to the bogeyman that all their parents had shaken before their eyes. The first guard shrugged and said, “Something that’ll get five-year-old boys if they don’t do what their granny says, sir?”

  “Someone knows.” Oryn’s eyes passed from the faces of his guards, his tutor, back toward the distant wadi where, he strongly suspected, Zhenus lay among the withered black corpses of the an-Dhoki, perhaps withering and blackening himself by this time, his mind lost in the dreams of ancient kings. “Someone who commands the teyn, who’s been using them as cat’s-paws to keep us away from the places where the Eater of Dreams has risen from the ground. What are these marks, Soth?” he asked, extending his arms. “Do they look like anything you know of? The dreams that took me—maybe the Eater itself—were lodged in glass; I think there’s another such glass talisman in the house of Chirak Shaldeth. Does glass draw the Eater of Dreams or repel it? Was I being protected by this”—he looked back at the ragged ring of glittering points, half obscured now by the blowing sand—“or being sacrificed? Or used as bait?”

  Soth only shook his head.

  “We have to find out,” said Oryn. Wind lashed him again, strong enough this time to make him stagger. All tracks would be gone, he thought; whatever the earth could have told Bax. “We have to find this person, this woman. She holds the key to Summerchild’s life, and she seems to be able to command the teyn.

  “Bax, we’ll start back for the city the moment we’re saddled up, but send your messenger now to the house of Chirak Shaldeth. Sooner or later our friend’s going to go back there.”

  “Do you think Pebble can cope with it?” asked the librarian. “Or Moth? Or even Raeshaldis?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll have to, or we’re—”

  Another gust of wind thrust them all, like a giant hand, and the morning sunlight shifted to a yellow cast. The wind burned Oryn’s lungs as he drew breath, wind saturated with—

  “Dust, my lord!” A guard pointed toward the south, where a deadly line of billowing yellow was beginning to rise above the horizon.

  Oryn said, “Dear gods!” and Bax said something considerably less refined. “Can your man get through?” Oryn added. “It looks like a bad storm.”

  “I’ll get through.” Bax transferred Oryn’s arm to the nearest guard, strode away toward the horses.

  “You? But—”

  “With luck I’ll reach the hills before it hits,” the commander yelled back over his shoulder, then quickened his pace to a run. Before Oryn could call out, the older man sprang up onto the strongest of the horses—Oryn’s own, he noticed—and spurred away at a gallop toward the line of the distant hills.

  “Come on!” Soth dragged Oryn toward the horses, who were tossing their heads and fighting the guards who held their reins, frightened by the dust-laden wind. “We can make it to the camp and take shelter! Can you ride?”

  “I’m jolly well not going to sit here and wait to be buried.”

  If anyone could make it back to the city through the storm, Oryn reflected, Bax could. He should probably have tried to stop his commander—a man old enough to be his father—from risking a ride through the killer storm, but his half-guessed fear of what was being drawn to Chirak Shaldeth’s house was too strong now to put aside. Had no one else been available he knew he would have at least tried to make the ride himself.

  Whatever the Eater of Dreams was that seeped from the walls of tombs and transmuted the dreams of the dead into madness, the ancients had feared it, and it did not seem to have lost strength in its years of enforced quiescence. He’d seen what it could do in Three Wells. What it could do if it was drawn to a city of a hundred thousand people, he tried not to imagine.

  But he did imagine it, and it turned him cold with fright.

  The dust storm came out of nowhere.

  Shaldis realized she must have fallen asleep on her feet, because it seemed to her one moment that she walked half blindly, numbly, following the hope or illusion that maybe the scent of indigo might lie before her and the next that she was on her knees, with the hot wind ripping at her veils and her clothing, the sunlight yellowing away toward darkness. Dust burned her eyes and filled her nose, and the wind’s howl filled her ears. A gust of wind threw her to the ground, and when she fumbled for the spells she’d learned, to part the winds around her and turn aside the dust, she barely had the strength to lessen them.

  Jethan, she thought wildly, where’s Jethan? She had to get to him, to protect him, too, with whatever she had strength for.

  A darker shape blotted the growing darkness of the howling world. She yelled, “Here! Jethan!” and he stumbled out of the dust to her, face wrapped in his veils but still moving like a man blind and deaf.

  In one hand he held the end of a rope; he dragged her to her feet without a word, half carried her along. Staggering, Shaldis formed the spell again in her aching mind, splitting the wind behind them so that it rushed by on either side. Gusts whirled onto them nevertheless, and the dust that hung in the air choked and smothered her. The dark around them grew, illuminated by flashes of dry lightning; the wind rose to a scream.

  “I got the tent up,” Jethan yelled over the din, and the wind snatched his words away. “. . . camels . . .” she heard him say, and “. . . should be safe . . .”

  He made a place of shelter, thought Shaldis, as they reeled into the low-pitched triangular tent, before he came for me.

  What a blessing to have a friend who thought things out.

  Most of the room in the tent was taken up by the camels, grumbling and moaning and stinking as only camels can. Shaldis tried to anchor her spells to the goat hair and the poles, to the small patch of earth that was the only place safe amid the shrieking wildness of the storm. The darkness of the dust blotted out the sickly remainder of the
morning light. Mind aching, body aching, she thought she could see the spells themselves, like floating balls of marsh fire, clinging to the tent.

  Then her mind darkened, and she slipped unconscious to the ground.

  FORTY-TWO

  Through the stillness of concentration, the deep weariness of power raised and power expended, Pomegranate heard the voices in the lower chamber of the Summer Pavilion and shivered.

  Lotus was saying, “I’m sorry, they’re working great magic. It’s a matter of life and death.”

  And a voice that Pomegranate recognized as belonging to Shaldis’s aunt Yellow Hen—who’d always given her food and sometimes clothing in her begging days—retorted, “You think I’d have walked all the way here from the Bazaar District and put up with that snippy porter at the gate if this wasn’t life and death? Tell her I need to see her, and I need to see her at once.”

  Since she’d come back to the Yellow City four days ago, Pomegranate had been plagued by the nagging sense there was something wrong somewhere. She had spoken of it only once, to Shaldis, but the uneasiness, the feeling of listening, had never left her.

  Pontifer sensed it, too. All day yesterday the white pig had trotted back and forth from where Pomegranate sat at Summerchild’s side out into the terrace garden, then back again, restless, the way he’d done back when he’d been a real pig when a storm was brewing. When, during their watches at Summerchild’s side, Shaldis had spoken to her in passing of her grandfather’s obsession with an object that came out of a tomb, Pomegranate had wondered if that was the reason for the prickling sensation in her palms and scalp, for her sense of something always lurking around the next corner, watching.

  Since last night she had felt as she frequently felt when her dreams were bad, when she’d wake in the middle of the night and gather up blankets and clothing and quietly flit through the silent alleys to another of her hidey-holes in the Slaughterhouse District. Moving on, so that it wouldn’t get her.