Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  The roses have bloomed. His mother’s code phrase sang like music in his mind. The roses have bloomed.

  If he was to be king, he reflected, he would have to win as many of Oryn’s Crafty ones over to his side as he could—after allowing the Summer Concubine to die, of course, which she clearly would soon. And that was not going to be easy, especially when it became obvious to the survivors that he’d hidden for himself the spells that would get a king through the consecration and had let Oryn perish.

  FORTY-SIX

  With heavy screens over the windows to block out wind and dust, the lower chamber of the Summer Pavilion had the appearance of a cave beneath the earth. The flames of a few lamps glimmered back from the designs worked in gold among the cobalt tiles; the gauze curtains billowed with strange restless animation, like ghosts in the darkness. The girl just rising from a Flower in the Wind salaam—the standard for the wives and daughters of shopkeepers when encountering customers—must be the one Foxfire (and Mohrvine’s half-dozen palace spies) called Pebble: a contractor’s daughter, Mohrvine recalled. Big-framed and fair—as far as he could tell from blue eyes and the slip of pale skin visible between her veils—with a sweet matter-of-factness in the way she stepped forward.

  He was interested to observe that Moth, whom his daughter spoke of as being a spitfire, hung shyly in the background, overawed.

  “Lord Prince,” Pebble said. “Please forgive us for asking you to come, and I thank you, more than I can say, for coming so quickly. We’ve heard that there’s danger in the city, an evil thing growing in a house in Sleeping Worms Street, a curse. Our partner Pomegranate is there, and she says she thinks there’ll be trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Barún’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. He clearly, thought Mohrvine, didn’t care to have policy dictated to him by a woman who dressed like a servant and salaamed like a shopkeeper’s daughter.

  “She doesn’t know,” said Pebble. “Nor even if it’s something that can be dealt with materially.”

  “And what house? Who in the city is dealing in curses?”

  “It’s the house of Chirak Shaldeth,” said Pebble. “His granddaughter told us that—”

  “The girl Raeshaldis?” asked Barún sharply. “The one Shaldeth put out of his house? I shouldn’t wonder she put a curse on him, but if she—or you—think I’m going to go against one of the most respectable merchants in the city on the say-so of a rebellious granddaughter—”

  “It ain’t her who put the curse,” snapped Moth, stepping forward, her shyness in the presence of the king’s family forgotten in her impatience. “Pomegranate is out there now—”

  “That frightful old beggar woman?”

  Moth made a clear effort to keep hold of her temper—causing Mohrvine a moment’s amused speculation on the true purpose of veils in the hiding of women’s exasperated expressions when dealing with men. “My lord,” she said, “we don’t know what’s coming down—going on.” She corrected her market slang to the vocabulary and accents she’d clearly been taught in some recent deportment class. “But there’s evil growing, and we think we’re going to need your help in dealing with it.”

  “My dear young lady, before I make any promises about ‘help’ against the head of the largest merchant house in the city, I’m going to need more than speculations about ‘something evil.’ Now, I suggest you and your girlfriends find out what’s actually going on, and then come to me. My time is not to be wasted in this way.”

  “Lady Moth.” Mohrvine bowed to the two Raven sisters as Barún strode out into the windy gloom. Moth glanced sharply at him again, warned by Summerchild for six months past to expect treachery, no doubt. “Lady Pebble. What do you need? How may I help?”

  To her credit—his informant in her master’s household had been right when she’d said Moth was the most intelligent person there—the girl didn’t react with the suspicion she was clearly feeling. She said, “Pomegranate needs help. One of us—maybe both of us, Pebble and me—needs to go out there, to watch over the place. But Summerchild . . .” Her dark eyes moved toward the screen that concealed the stair.

  “No change?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “And no word from Lady Raeshaldis?”

  “No. And we tried, just now we tried. We ain’t heard nothing from her for three days now. I don’t think she’s dead—I think we’d know if she snuffed it. But if we can’t go to Sleeping Worms Street ourselves, we need at least for there to be guards or something with Pomegranate. There’s gonna be trouble, she says, and soon. When it gets dark, she thinks. You know the king would send out men on her say-so.”

  “I know he would,” replied Mohrvine.

  Moth hesitated, as if considering the man who stood before her, and how far he could be trusted. Then she asked, “What about your girl Foxfire? If you could send her here it would help, to at least go with me to Sleeping Worms Street or to stay here with Summerchild.”

  “Unfortunately that isn’t possible,” said Mohrvine smoothly. The roses have bloomed, whispered in triumph through his mind. But the next moment compassion touched him, the wary compassion of a sentimentalist who learned long ago never to give way: a kind of pity for Oryn, who had the love of a remarkable woman, as Mohrvine once had had.

  And not too long ago Oryn and Summerchild had saved Foxfire’s life. That, at least, was a debt he could repay. “What I will do is send for Cattail to come here and pay her for her time, whatever she asks. Will that do? There is nothing that I can do to save my nephew’s life,” he added, not quite truthfully. “But for good or for ill, he can at least go to the consecration without that added grief in his heart.”

  Moth said, “Thank you, yes. That will do. That’s way good of you.”

  “If I pay Cattail enough,” added Mohrvine, with a slight curl to his lip, “she’ll even do exactly as she’s told.”

  The concubine’s eyes glinted. “She damn better.”

  “I’ll make sure of it.”

  Shaldis wasn’t much surprised to see Pontifer lying in the warm sand of the beach, a few feet above the tide line, watching her as she emerged from the healing house. The dawn air was moist and heavy, tepid rather than hot. Puahale gathered a cloak of bright-colored feathers elaborately knotted together about her shoulders; Shaldis was glad for her rough trousers and for the sleeves of her shirt. She hesitated in the doorway, then turned back to her new friend. “Do you see him?”

  “The white pig?” Puahale seemed surprised at the question. “He is yours, is he not? He is beautiful. If I did not think he was precious to you, I would ask that you leave him here awhile, to father piglets that would be a marvel to all.”

  “It is he who brought me here,” said Shaldis. “And I hope, he who shall take me back.” She walked down the beach to where the pig lay and, kneeling in the sand, took from her belt the pouch containing her scrying crystal. How many times, through headache and exhaustion, had she felt the others calling her during her three days’ pursuit of the teyn in the desert and last night as she’d worked healing magic over the herbs that had saved the children. She was asleep and dreaming, she knew, back in Jethan’s arms in her little shelter in the desert, and she was not actually here.

  Nevertheless, she cradled the crystal in her hands. “Pomegranate?” she whispered, calling to her mind her friend’s wrinkled face. “Pomegranate, are you there?”

  “Dear gods, girl, are you all right?” The beggar woman’s image in the central facet was tiny, but beyond her Shaldis could see nothing but a whirling darkness. The dust storm must have enveloped the Yellow City. Pomegranate’s face was veiled, but her voice was hoarse with strain. “Where are you?”

  “I’m all right.” Shaldis didn’t want to go into where she was. “Pontifer’s with me.”

  “Oh, thank the gods! Is he all right? The thing—the thing you said was in your grandfather’s house—it’s stronger. It’s starting to devour people, I think. We can’t get in, that brother of yours won’t let
us. Magic won’t work the same way inside the walls, because it seems like the thing’s making its own world the way the djinni used to. And it’s starting not to work out in a couple of the alleyways behind the house as well. We’re trying to hold it, Moth and Pebble and I—”

  “Who’s with Summerchild?” Panic twisted at Shaldis’s heart. Not this choice, she prayed. Not the choice of whether to let Summerchild die in the hope of having enough strength to defeat the Dreamshadow.

  “Cattail. Mohrvine’s paying her. We’re using all the spells of ward we can, but we can see it. It’s a green mist that’s coming over the walls and under the gates of the court.”

  “It’s a thing called the Dreamshadow,” said Shaldis swiftly. “It comes out of the earth; it lives on the dreams of the dead. If it takes hold of you it can be driven out by bleeding, by cutting the victim with an obsidian knife. There has to have been some kind of ward or spell against it, written on tombs as part of the funeral rite, because we’ve never had trouble with it before, like the lake monsters. Get someone to look it up, fast, but it can be trapped with spells into obsidian or glass if necessary. And listen, Pomegranate! The teyn—”

  “Dear gods!” Pomegranate whirled, as if at some sound in the blackness all around her, and the image in the crystal died.

  “Pomegranate!” She shook the crystal, as if that would somehow bring Pomegranate back. “Damn it! Pontifer, take me back.”

  “What is it?” Puahale came running down the beach as the pig got to his feet.

  “My friends are in danger from the Dreamshadow. It’s big there and it’s strong.”

  “Then take these.” The priestess took from around her neck the biggest of her obsidian amulets, and from her belt an obsidian knife. “Source your power from the moon and the sea. Trap the Dreamshadow with these words: Lolo ano ti, ti, lolo walana.” As she spoke the spells in her own tongue, Shaldis felt their meaning in her heart, in the marrow of her soul, where magic had its birth. Black doors into black, black earth where you come from.

  “The words are from the Old Islands that are no more,” Puahale said. “My sister, come back if you can. . . .”

  Puahale had never heard of scrying, and there was no time to teach her. In the course of the night Shaldis had joined them together in the rite of the Sigil of Sisterhood—that they might call upon each other’s magic, that they might know each other’s hearts—but there was no guarantee it would work across who knew what kind of distance. This might, Shaldis thought frantically, be the last time she might speak to this tall heavy woman with the beautiful hair.

  Would she even be able to carry things from dream to waking? she wondered desperately as she thrust the knife into her belt, strung the amulet around her neck. Would she remember the words?

  From around her own throat she pulled the silver amulet Twinkle had given her, pressed it into Puahale’s hand.

  “I will. I promise.”

  They caught each other in a hard embrace, where the sea beat with a great crashing on the shore. Pontifer Pig was already trotting away down the shoreline toward the trees. Shaldis turned and ran after him, her mind racing ahead of her in despair. She would wake, and she would still be a day and a night from the Yellow City, and who knew what would happen in those hours?

  “Jethan,” she called as she ran. “Jethan, are you there?”

  And awoke, in Jethan’s arms, with her skin and lips cracked dry, her hair full of dust, and a strange amulet and a dagger of obsidian clutched in her left hand.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The dark brought madness to the alleyways around Sleeping Worms Street.

  Crafty ones might see in the dark, but blowing dust reduced visibility to a foot or less, and the wind masked the sounds of screams and cries. Pomegranate, bent over her broken fragment of looking glass in the shelter of the alley behind Chirak Shaldeth’s house, didn’t hear the men coming until they were upon her, shrieking shapes emerging from the storm’s wildness armed with clubs, swords, chains. She rolled, dodged, scrambled behind the mountain of broken baskets at the back of the alley; and they hacked and waded through the matted straw after her, heedless of the cloaking spells she flung around herself. Either the influence of the Dreamshadow reached out this far, she guessed, or they saw something or someone else in her place.

  She slashed and struck with her staff, as she’d learned to on those rare occasions when a beggar more desperate than she had tried to rob or rape her. She jabbed with the pole’s end and saw it do damage she knew a sane man could never have sustained, but these men were not sane.

  Their eyes stared with madness, and the words they screamed were in no language she knew. When Pebble came rushing down the alley with a broken-off length of cartpole and rammed it like a dagger into one man’s back, the man turned and fell, not upon Pebble, but upon his two companions. Pebble grabbed Pomegranate’s wrist and dragged the old woman past the ensuing brawl toward the empty windy street.

  Dreams, Shaldis had said.

  The dreams that lingered in corpses’ brains after their death.

  Dreams of dying, of being killed.

  Two of the men—they’d looked like respectable merchants and householders of the neighborhood—sank down, both eviscerated and still clawing at each other with their nails as Pomegranate looked back. The third man had collapsed into the pile of baskets, his body curling in on itself and darkening as if burning up in some invisible oven. When he opened his mouth, a little green mist flowed out.

  It had started.

  Above the storm’s howling Pomegranate dimly heard shouting coming from somewhere close by and elsewhere, dimly, a snatch of singing, instantly lost in the wind. Even before the tug of Shaldis’s mind on hers, she and the others had begun walking the perimeter of the area that felt wrong—evil and frightful for no reason they could ascertain—marking the walls with chalk. Now they pounded on the door nearest them, and a boy answered, ashen faced with confused terror. He whispered, “My mama . . .” and Pomegranate heard from the steep black stairway behind him a sustained and eerie wail.

  “We’re here to help your mama,” said Pomegranate. “You run now to the Citadel of the Sun”—he looked to be eleven or twelve, old enough to find it with ease even in the tail end of the storm—“and take them a message.” She held out her hand; Pebble slapped a note tablet into it and a hairpin for a stylus.

  Pomegranate scrawled, Dreamshadow eats dreams, burial wards, obsidian, glass, Sleeping Worms Street, spreading, need help NOW, and shoved the tablet into the boy’s hand. “Go. Now. Quickly.” The boy pelted off into the darkness. Green light glowed at the top of the stairs, threads of mist moving downward. Pomegranate listened for other sounds within the house and heard nothing. The wailing had stopped. Dead already? Sleeping unaware? In need of rescue or past it?

  Was anyone really there at all?

  She stepped back into the street, slammed the door.

  “If it takes one of us, cutting will let it out,” she said.

  “Is that with a spell or just cutting?” asked Moth at once, since none of the three knew how much time they might have to share this information. “ ’Cause those guys back there was cutting each other plenty and didn’t look like they was gettin’ no saner.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then it’s probably better none of us gets took.”

  They backed from the door, their hair and veils tangling in the screaming wind. “Was that Shaldis?” whispered Pebble after a few moments, when nothing further happened.

  Pomegranate recapitulated in as few sentences as possible her conversation: “She said Pontifer was with her, which I’m glad of. I worry about him. If anything should happen to me, who would be his friend then? I’m glad he’s making new friends.”

  Pebble and Moth exchanged a look.

  “She said the Dream Eater can be spelled into obsidian or glass,” added Pomegranate, “but she didn’t say how. Could we put a barrier of glass around the bad area, the way my granny use
d to put broken glass under the doorsill to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away?”

  “You think maybe this green stuff is the Bad-Luck Shadow?” Moth speculated doubtfully.

  “If it is, we’re in trouble,” said Pebble, “ ’cause I’ve heard about sixteen thousand spells to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away and not one of them was anything like any of the others. And as far as I could see, none of them worked.”

  Moth patted Pebble’s arm. “We figured out already we’re in trouble.”

  A trickle of green mist began to creep through the lattice of the shut door. Pomegranate edged closer, scribbled with her fingertip on the wall nearby the strongest ward she knew, mingling with it the name of Dream Eater and the signs of earth. It flowed past this without the smallest check, the women backing away before it. “Where can we get glass?” whispered Pebble. “Even if that boy runs it’ll be an hour or more before anyone comes.”

  “Grand Bazaar,” said Moth. “It’s two streets away, way closer than the Glassmakers’ Quarter. I think I can get through the locks. Pebble, you stay here—”

  “No, both of you go,” said Pomegranate. “Two of you can carry more, and one of us not being able to do anything here is just as good as two of us not being able to do anything.”

  The two young women disappeared into the whirling gloom; Pomegranate retreated down another alleyway, her heart pounding. Someone or something rushed down the street at the alley’s far end. When the wind lulled, she heard the incoherent clamor of voices and a woman’s scream.

  And the night, she knew, was only beginning.

  Raeshaldis. Raeshaldis, please . . .

  Pomegranate? Shaldis slipped her crystal into her palm, angled its central facet to the thready light of the stars.

  It was close to midnight. Dusty winds still breathed across the sand in a steady river, but visibility was up to several miles now and overhead the sky was clear. She didn’t dare tell Jethan to stop the camels, wondered if she even possessed the strength to scry without sliding into sleep. Despite the profundity of her sleep, when she’d woken at Jethan’s side, lying in the crook of his arm, she’d felt crushed by exhaustion, as if all her hours on the Island of Rainbows had been hours of waking.