Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  For a moment Oryn met those ice-bright, disdainful eyes and saw himself in them, with his immense cloak of sables and the barber’s careful curls unraveling from his hair. “I should like to come with you, if I may,” he heard himself saying. “Under your command, of course.”

  Bax’s eyes couldn’t have widened more if Oryn had asked him to come to bed with him. Never in his life had Oryn seen the commander bereft of speech. It was an interesting sight.

  “I think that if a decision has to be made—er—about anything, it might be best if I was on hand rather than waiting for a messenger.” And, when Bax still said nothing, he added, a little shyly, “I can ride, you know.”

  And to his absolute astonishment, Bax smiled. It changed his whole square, harsh face. “Yes, I know. I’ve watched you. D’you have armor?”

  Are you joking? But even as he thought it, Oryn knew he should have had some made before this. His mind flirted momentarily with what his robe maker would say, and if he’d be able to get colors that matched his cloaks. “Can you fit me with some? Surely there’s someone in the guards of my—er—kingly frame.”

  “Kiner, get His Majesty some plates,” called the commander over his shoulder to a speechless aide. Barún, equally non-plussed, was looking from his brother to the commander like a dog watching a game of shuttlecocks, with the expression of one who knows he ought to contribute something but can’t immediately think what. It was a common activity for Barún. “We can lace you up the sides. We need to go fast, though. The runner said they’d taken three children.”

  “Taken?” That didn’t sound like wilding teyn, who simply laid hands on whatever foodstuffs they could carry. The wildings didn’t even seem to understand the concept of water vessels, or at least never bore away water in them, a circumstance Oryn had always found curious. Lord Akarian, he supposed, would commend the completeness of their trust in Iron-Girdled Nebekht. In any case he couldn’t imagine they’d be intelligent enough to reason out the need for hostages.

  “Killed three men. Is Lord Soth . . . ?”

  “I believe he’s . . . unwell . . . this evening.” His eyes met Bax’s and he saw that the commander understood. Had probably understood for a long time.

  “Let him sleep, then.”

  “Should I come with you?” Barún asked as if the idea had only just occurred to him, which it probably had. “I can be armed in minutes.”

  He could, too. It was one of Barún’s great skills, one that Oryn—being laced between two plates of hammered steel over his blue velvet tunic by Bax and the breathless Kiner—had never fully appreciated before. Oryn looked around for the Summer Concubine, but she’d disappeared, something else Pearl Women were good at. Damn these conventions that would prevent him from kissing her good-bye.

  “I should feel better knowing you were in charge of things here.” He reached around Kiner’s bent head to clasp Barún’s hand. It was an absolute lie, of course—Barún wasn’t capable of deciding whether to piss in a bucket or a hole—but since in his absence his brother would be in charge of the House of the Marvelous Tower anyway, he might as well make him feel better.

  Gratitude warmed Barún’s tawny eyes. “I’ll try to be worthy.”

  Jethan, Iorradus, and Oryn’s valet Geb appeared, Jethan still armored though he went off duty at sunset, Iorradus rumpled and buckling his belt. Geb was trailed by a servant who bore two duffels of things Geb knew Oryn considered indispensable to his own comfort—everything from mother-of-pearl tableware to a selection of favorite nightshirts—and a small satchel of his own. “My lord,” said Jethan, “you can’t—”

  “My dear boy, I’m the king,” protested Oryn plaintively. “I can do whatever I want.” Geb elbowed the aide Kiner out of the way and took over the task of lacing the too-small armor plates around Oryn’s rotund form, muttering all the while about what the metal would do to the velvet.

  Oryn turned to Bax. “Could you wait perhaps a half an hour for me?” he asked, and moved tentatively in the armor plate. It was made for a shorter man and incredibly uncomfortable. He felt like a tortoise and probably didn’t look nearly so trim and graceful as one. “I think I may be able to cut some hours off our tracking time.”

  The commander’s sharp glance rested on him, reevaluating. “As you say, my lord, you’re the king,” he said. “You can do whatever you want. We’ll be ready. Kiner, get four of the biggest mounts you can for His Majesty . . . . Not the royal steeds but cavalry horses. No sense having them drop dead on us. Get rid of that stupid baggage, Geb—you think His Majesty’s going to review troops out there?”

  Oryn was already striding along the arcade that led to the Inner Court, his sables billowing about him.

  The gardens that surrounded the Summer Pavilion were sweetly silent but for the occasional note of wind chimes and the rustle of a hunting cat. The beds were laid out by scent as well as by texture and color: On moonless summer nights Oryn could pick out where he was in their shady labyrinth by the Jasmine, the sweet olive, the roses. Now in winter the only scent was that of turned earth and the sweetness of frankincense that lingered over the city from the Summoning.

  And the scent of approaching rain itself, faint and ecstatic In a cloud-banded ebony sky.

  Darutha, god of the rain, Koan, god of mages, thank you . . . .

  Lamps of pierced bronze burned in the wall niches of the Summer Pavilion’s lower floor. The flecked light showed him the big blackwood dining table, the musicians’ dais, the Summer Concubine’s lute and harp. In the room above, which opened onto an exquisite roof terrace, only a single lamp burned, and by its swimming glow he saw the Summer Concubine sitting cross-legged on the divan.

  A shallow alabaster bowl rested on the table before her. As he came near, Oryn saw the glint of lamplight in water and in her gazing eyes. He took a seat on the divan where it cornered with the shape of the room, watched her heart-shaped face.

  They called the gods pitiless. He supposed they were, or some of them were, and he couldn’t imagine how one of them—he burned incense to them all, just in case—had decided to give him the woman he had believed would be denied him forever by his father’s power. Every morning waking up at her side was a song.

  And it was in this woman—this woman of all beloved women—that magic had bloomed.

  A woman-who-does-magic. He shook his head: We really must find a word for what is happening, whatever it is. And how many mages—and others—still refused to believe that anything was happening at all?

  Cycles of time, as Mohrvine had said?

  Some vast cosmic testing, by Nebekht of the Iron Girdle or someone else?

  A comprehensive and terrible counterspell, evolved by some great wizard somewhere for purposes that would later become distressingly clear?

  He didn’t like that one. Nine years ago Soth and Hathmar had investigated that possibility and had found nothing; only the intelligence that among the nomads, and in the towns beside the far-off ocean, it was the same. For centuries, mages in the Realm of the Seven Lakes had spoken by scrying crystals to black- or brown-skinned wizards in other lands, in realms no one had ever visited or heard of, who had never heard of them. Soth had had a friend thus, whose language he had laboriously learned as others had before him—who had told him of cities and magic and realms unimaginable. Soth’s crystal, and those of all other scryers, had begun to fail ten years ago. One could only guess that elsewhere the fading was the same.

  And for Oryn, it came back to that. To the Summer Concubine framed in the lapis-lazuli tiles of the Summer Pavilion, amber lamplight shining on her uncovered hair as she gazed into water to see things far away.

  And succeeded at it.

  Of course she’d succeed, he thought, as he’d thought when first she’d spoken to him of her dreams of power, and of how she had begun to call birds to her hand by thought alone. She’s a Pearl Woman. She was raised to be perfect. He had almost not been surprised, having never seen her as other than marvelous.

&
nbsp; “Did you see them?” he asked when she closed her eyes.

  She pressed her palms to her forehead in exhaustion, nodded. “There are two rock chimneys, and a third farther off.” She sketched the shape of what she had seen with her hands. “They’re in a dry watercourse—the teyn are—near a red rock shaped like a kneeling camel. There’s an old tomb there, closed with rubble, it has an eagle carved over its door.”

  “I’m sure Bax will know the place. The eagle was the badge of the Durshen Dynasty, and they were mostly buried south of the Lake of the Moon.”

  “They’ll be gone when you get there. They have food from the village. The rain will cover their tracks.”

  “It may have been what they were waiting for. I should be composing hymns of thanks for it, I suppose . . . . Are the children all right?”

  “I think so.” Her eyes opened, filled with tears. “They’re asleep. Their arms are bruised, their feet bleeding from running.” Their son would have been four, had he lived. Oryn had always wondered whether the scorpion whose sting had ended the boy’s life had come into his rooms via some malign wizard’s machinations. That had been before they’d realized that the ward spells Soth taught the Summer Concubine didn’t always work. “They’ll move on the moment the rain starts.”

  “We’ll get them.” He got to his feet, awkward and puffing in his steel back-and-breast, and came to her side. Knelt to kiss her, tasting the dust of the night’s ride still on her lips. “Are they village teyn or wildings?”

  “Village,” she said at once. “They’re big and plump, and the hair’s been shaved from their arms.”

  Dear gods. Oryn wondered if the village mage at Dry Hill—Hobet, his name had been, or Hobekt, something like that—had survived the attack. He remembered making a mental note two years ago that the man should be replaced, but there had been no one to replace him. “And the djinni?”

  The Summer Concubine shook her head. She was still in her riding dress, her gold-dust hair unfurled down her back in a shining coil. Oryn laid his cloak of sables around her shoulders, knowing how easily she chilled. More easily after she’d exerted her powers, as she had this weary and fruitless night.

  Her fingers brushed his as she gathered the heavy fur around her. “Soth told me that one hears them, or feels them—like scented wind blowing, he said—before one sees them. There wasn’t even that.”

  Her voice was dreamy with weariness, as if she already half slept. “He said the first time he didn’t know what it was: He was seven or eight, and coming back from carrying lunch out to his uncle, who was painting a tomb in the Redbone Hills. It was about twilight, he said. He heard a kind of humming music, and felt the wind over his face from a direction the wind had not blown before. The air and earth opened up like a painted curtain, he said, and he saw a shining hall without a building around it, and a shining woman there who called his name. He ran away, he said.”

  “Good for him.” Oryn shivered. Though no djinn would ever admit that he or she (or it) had ever had anything to do with such a thing, there were rumors and tales down through the centuries of children who had disappeared: children who had come back, some of them, a few days, or a week, or a month, later, with no memory of what had happened to them. Such children frequently dreamed dreams that rendered them in some curious way unfit ever after for life in the world of humankind. Other children simply did not come back at all.

  But if this wasn’t the first time teyn kidnapped children . . . ?

  He shook his head, tucking away the information in the immense, ill-organized toy box of his mind. Pressing her hands, then her feet, between his palms, he found them icy: “I’ll see Geb brings you some food.” After the working of magic, the Summer Concubine was always ravenous for sweets, and this evening in particular she looked exhausted, as if haunted by some secret grief. He went downstairs and found Geb there already, bearing a wicker tray of dates and honey, hot barley tea and a syrup-saturated baba cake. The tubby eunuch glared up at him in motherly reproach as Oryn took the tray.

  “What possesses you to abscond with a band of insolent soldiers I’ll never know.”

  “Nor shall I, Geb, my little summer squash.” Oryn carried the tray upstairs, followed by instructions about the ointment pots and how those barbarians in Bax’s cavalry could not be trusted to care for Oryn’s spare slippers properly.

  Spare slippers? What else had Geb considered appropriate gear for a military campaign?

  Coming into the darkened upper room, Oryn saw only a huddle of black fur on the divan and the long silken rope of her hair gleaming in the lamp’s solitary light.

  He set the tray down beside her, but she didn’t wake. How comforting it would be to sit in the window embrasure and play songs while she slept, until the rain came. He could smell the water in the air, though ivory moonlight still glimmered on the bare-branched rose beds of the terrace garden. He was glad she’d wake to the rain, and hoped whatever had troubled her this afternoon had passed.

  He shivered again, his mind returning to the present. When they overtook the teyn, he understood that he’d have to order them killed. He’d spent his boyhood deliberately misconstruing his father’s demands—what had the man expected after he’d smashed Oryn’s harp and burned his books?—but he knew that this was something that could not go unpunished. The news that the spells that had once held such power no longer operated could not be permitted to spread.

  If the teyn who tilled the fields of every village, hauled the water at every well, swept the floors and ground the corn in nearly every house in the Realm of the Seven Lakes hadn’t figured that out already.

  It was to make whatever decisions needed to be made that he had asked to be taken along.

  He stood for a time, gazing past the ornamental vines, the shrubs and trellises of the terrace, toward the eroded buttes and the dry ghosts of riverbeds. The thought of what he had to do sickened him, but he knew that the danger in which humankind stood from its erstwhile slaves was worse.

  As he was turning away, movement caught his eye far out in the darkness. A flicker of light, like a greenish mist, near the mouth of what had to be an arroyo in the badlands that lay beyond the bluffs. He fetched a telescope from its cupboard and trained it on the place, but he saw nothing.

  He folded the instrument and toggled it to his belt, and descended the stair to meet with Bax and do his duty as king.

  Oryn, the Summer Concubine thought, where is Oryn?

  Why was it so dark and so cold?

  Sleep crushed her like stone blocks, as if she’d been buried in the foundation of a temple. The headache she’d taken from the calling of the djinni spread now to her bones, her muscles, her lungs and heart and brain.

  Evil, there was something terribly evil happening, something she could prevent, if only she could wake up.

  Someone was calling on her, crying her name desperately— someone she knew, someone who trusted her—and she was too weary to respond.

  Oryn . . .

  The word wouldn’t even pass her lips.

  Maybe Geb? He was downstairs in the salon; she could see him silhouetted against the pierced bronze lamps in their niches, making a list of all her dresses grouped by color in an orgy of self-indulgent pleasure. He had to help her, wake her up so she could . . .

  . . . so she could . . .

  Someone was screaming her name.

  And someone listened to those screams with a terrible thoughtful intentness, fingering a thing that moved and glittered in the darkness.

  The Summer Concubine slid helplessly deeper into sleep.

  Corn-Tassel Woman was asking her, “How did you know? When did you know?” They were sitting on the terrace in the thick heat of the summer night, the stars like smoky jeweled veils in a sky of profoundest indigo. “The first I can remember thinking I’ll use magic to do so-and-so was when my son took sick of fever. We paid that Earth Wizard from the Grand Bazaar, Urnate Urla that used to work for Lord Sarn, to heal him, and he couldn’t—
he said the fever was too virulent. But looking at my boy I knew that wasn’t so. I could feel it wasn’t so. After the healer left I did all the things he’d done, putting my heart into them and my mind . . . . But it seemed like I’d known I could do it for a long time before that.”

  “Yes,” the Summer Concubine said, recalling how she’d stuck little wards made of feathers, over which she’d sung certain songs, into the boughs around a dove’s nest on the terrace, to send the cats away. “Yes.” The mother dove had driven the young ones out of the nest and one had been killed by old Gray King anyway—even in the days of Taras Greatsword the big tom had been lord of the palace felines—but at least the baby birds had had their chance.

  Someone was calling her, frantic, desperate, and in her dream she turned her head to look, frightened by some sound. When she looked back, Corn-Tassel Woman was gone, and the marble bench beside her was splattered with blood. The blood dripped down onto the terrace with a soft, deadly pattering, the smell of it mingling with that of the summer dust.

  She woke, crying out, and for a moment heard the blood still dripping, dripping on the terrace stones. Shadow seemed to lean over her, listening . . . .

  . . . then it dissolved away into the darkness of familiar things. She realized that the dripping she heard was the first patter of the rain.

  Trembling, she gathered the robe of sables from the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her, went to the shutters to scent the wild, heartbreaking magic of desert rain. Though it was a smell she had all her life loved, as she stood there she could not rid her mind of the fear that what fell on her face was blood and not water.

  The fear that someone—who?—would see her as she stood in the doorway against the glow of the lamps.

  Oryn too, on the road to Dry Hill, would look up and curse the rain.

  Like music over the palace’s quiet, the Summer Concubine heard the horns and whistles in the city streets as men and women ran out of their houses to welcome the spring. “Darutha’s blessing on you,” they would say, naming the god of the rains.