She’d tried to argue with him and had been puzzled by his stubborn refusal to accept her powers, until she’d realized: His father had told him to tell her all this. And he was afraid to go back and say to his father, What’s wrong if she does this?
“I don’t feel sorry for them,” she said when she realized she’d been silent for some minutes. “I think they’d be just as angry if we started being able to do magic and their own powers weren’t disappearing. The boys in the college—they’d still piss on my door.”
And come rattling the window latches in the night?
“Are the others all right?” Shaldis asked hesitantly after a long silence during which the gray cat leaped down from the supper-room table and stretched itself out on the sun-warmed tile of the pool’s brim. “The other Ravens?”
“I don’t know.” The Summer Concubine drew the softness of the shawl closer around her narrow shoulders. “I got word from Pebble Girl—whose father is a contractor in Woolpack Street—and from Cattail Woman, finally. She was one who would not enter the Sigil of Sisterhood with me. Turquoise Woman”—she shook her head—“I haven’t heard from her, but sometimes I don’t for days. She keeps her room down in the Slaughterhouse scry warded, for fear her husband will hire a mage to spy out where she’s hiding.”
“That isn’t possible,” stated Shaldis. “For a mage to scry another mage, I mean.”
“I know. But she’s terrified of him. He would hire her out to the neighbors, to put bug-ward spells on their windows or heal their servants, and pocket the cash. She found out later that he’d heard rumors of her powers, and that’s why he asked for her hand—and paid her father twice the usual bride-price, to make sure he’d have her.”
“Oh, feh!” said Shaldis, disgusted. She didn’t think there was anything that could raise her opinion of her grandfather, but at least he hadn’t peddled her to the neighbors for the most she’d bring.
Or maybe he’d wanted to. Maybe that’s what he and her father had fought about the last day she’d been home.
“What about the other girl they were considering at the college at the same time as me?” she asked after a time. “I never said thank you, by the way, for getting them to let me into the college. I could tell when Hathmar talked to me that the other masters were only going to take one girl . . . . Did the other one come to you?”
Her voice stumbled a little over the words, remembering that beautiful girl with the amber eyes. On the single occasion she’d seen her, in the long visitors’ room of the college, she’d desperately resented her, terrified that they’d take this other and not herself, knowing that she, Shaldis, had nowhere else to go. Now she felt guilty, wondering if that girl had been going back to something as bad as her own grandfather.
Or worse.
At the time, she remembered, she didn’t think things could be worse than daily trying to negotiate the bizarre labyrinth of her grandfather’s arbitrary rules and punishments. Worse than watching her father quietly drink himself into insensibility every night. Worse than falling asleep in her stuffy attic sanctum to the echoes of the old man’s hysterical rage downstairs. The silence of the garden lay around her like a treasure; the ultimate luxury, Shaldis thought. Silence. Like the high silence of the Citadel, where for hours the only sound was the pure whisper of the wind. Prior to her admission to the college, the only silence she’d known had been in the small hours of the morning—and even then there’d be the growing clatter around the Grand Bazaar—and in those rare rides with her father out to the desert.
She remembered that desert silence, like balm on a wound. Others feared it: If your horse breaks a leg, you will die. If you get lost, you will die. If you wander away and the noon sun catches you on these blank pavements of gray stone you will die.
And still she’d loved it.
Her grandfather—one of the five proctors who judged weights and measures and standards of quality and conduct from their red-draped courtyard in the middle of the Grand Bazaar’s sprawling maze—had had a little cubicle set at the far end of the main garden where he’d retire to be alone to read. But he never connected that rare peace with anyone else’s need. What woman likes silence! he’d said dismissively. Get one alone and she’ll talk to the ants on the wall.
“She was one of the ones I’ve never heard of again.” The Summer Concubine’s beautiful eyes darkened with concern. “I’ve tried several times to learn of her, because she had real power. But her father is one of the water bosses down in the Slaughterhouse District, one of the men who hire bullies to surround the public wells and fountains and charge the people there to draw water. The king has tried a dozen times to do something about the situation, but somehow the orders never quite get carried out. The water bosses are rich, and can buy off the constables, and the Slaughterhouse isn’t under the control of any of the clans. Amber Girl was simply too great a risk to be taught the disciplines of real magic. I’ve tried since to find out what became of her, since her father was not one to let talent like that go to waste when he could use her.”
She frowned, troubled, as well she should be, thought Shaldis. The thought of one of the big water bosses—Xolnax or Rumrum or Ebf—with magic in addition to his gang of toughs was not pleasant to contemplate.
She said, “And Turquoise Woman lives in the Slaughterhouse as well?”
The Summer Concubine nodded slowly. “I was going to send a page down there,” she said. “But I think . . . you mentioned, I believe, when you entered the college that you used to go about the city dressed as a boy? Do you know the Slaughterhouse at all? Well enough to draw me a map to a place called Little Pig Alley? Because I’m not sure that I want to let anyone else know where she lives.”
“You can’t go down there yourself!” Shaldis tried to picture that flowerlike loveliness venturing through the tangle of dirt houses and reeking alleys that sprawled beyond the great green-tiled East Gate. Even in her adventurous childhood she hadn’t often gone there, but on two occasions after she’d perfected her zin-zin spells, she’d explored the maze of tiny courts opening into still tinier courts, of cattle pens and hog shambles, of the barricades of the water bosses and the grubby, blood-spattered temples of the True Believers of Nebekht.
And had found there, instead of the exotic wholesale depravity she’d expected, only a lot of very poor people trying to make a living, some of them in very violent ways.
“Oh, I’ll take a guard. And with a gray cloak I should be safe enough.”
“We’ll take a guard,” Shaldis corrected her. “Provided one of your ladies can loan me a dress and some veils.”
Honeysuckle Lady’s screams brought the fledglings out of the kitchen on the run. In contrast to the girls’ frugal breakfast of millet porridge and curds at dawn, the Blossom Ladies had wheat biscuits, honey and cream taken up to them mid-morning by a fledgling—it happened to be Foxfire Girl’s turn today—after which the ladies who’d entertained at supper went down to the bathhouse: The ladies’ chambers overlooked the sandy little kitchen court, so if the girls happened to be eating or snatching a quick scrub between lessons in the striped shade of the porch, they were frequently treated to the less genteel side of Honeysuckle Lady’s vocabulary as she cursed at her maid or at Poppy Lady: The goldenly fair beauty had an impressive repertoire.
Now, however, no words came through the latticed paper of her projecting window, only shriek after shriek of horror, rage and disgust. The fledglings stared at one another in shock: Foxfire Girl had to clap her hands over her mouth to keep from whooping with laughter and triumph, and Opal Girl, next to her on the bench eating a hasty lunch between sessions with the literature master and the music master, stared at her with round dark eyes.
As one, all the other fledglings sprang to their feet and dashed across the yard, Cook and Gecko Woman hard on their heels. Only then could Foxfire Girl throw back her head, clench her fists and laugh out loud. “It worked!” She felt breathless, terrified, wondering. Felt as she’d never fel
t and never even imagined anyone could feel. As if she’d fallen from some great height and had not yet struck ground. As if she weren’t at all sure that she wouldn’t. “It worked!”
Opal Girl made a protective sign with her fingers. “Did you know it would?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know.” Foxfire Girl stared at her across the litter of dishes, aware that she was shaking all over. “Father’s court wizard let me watch him make spells when I was little. He was funny—sweet. He said if you know something’s true name you can call it with this little spell he showed me. He used to call butterflies into the garden and make them land on my hair. I thought it was wonderful. I tried it, over and over—he told me the true name for butterflies. Then I said, what’s the true name for ants? Because my nurse had spanked me for teasing her cat or something and I wanted to call ants to her bed. And he looked at me with this twinkle in his eyes and said, Wizards aren’t supposed to do things like that.”
She shrugged, and got to her feet, and made a quick check of the dishes the other girls had left behind. Wren Girl had left an untouched sugar dumpling, which Foxfire Girl took and divided with her awestruck friend. “I always thought, What’s the point of being a wizard if you can’t get back at people who do bad things to you? Let’s go,” she added, dusting the sugar from her long fingers. “I want to see this.”
Foxfire Girl’s summoning had succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. Every ant in the Flowermarket District, it seemed, had descended on Honeysuckle Lady’s room. Not just the little black grease-ants that invaded the kitchens, but marching lines of red cotton-field ants, big black canal ants that crawled in and out of the makeup jars, and even the knuckle-long brown-and-yellow bull ants, which brooded silently from posts high up the wall. Honeysuckle Lady stood in the corridor in her yellow-and-blue robe, hands over her mouth, screaming in horror—the whole floor was awash in skittering black bodies, and lines of insects trickled purposefully along the corridor out of every crack in the floor.
“Dear gods!” Chrysanthemum Lady, the former courtesan whose nominal husband Gorbas owned the house, came running, her long gray hair hanging down her back and her fingers inky from her morning’s stint with the ledgers. “I’ve never seen field ants and kitchen ants together like that! Cook—”
“I’ve sent Flower out for pepper,” promised the cook grimly. “That’ll keep ’em away. But what we’re to do about this . . .
“Boiling lye. Euh!” she added, jerking her foot back from a new line of scurrying invaders.
“It was Foxfire Girl who did it!” spat Honeysuckle Lady, turning with venom in her eye just as Foxfire Girl and Opal Girl mashed themselves into the rear of the clump of fascinated, horrified fledglings at the top of the winding stair. “Look at her face!”
“I . . .” Foxfire Girl hastily tried to assume an expression of wounded shock. “How could I have done it? You can check in there—there’s no candy or syrup in there—”
“And how,” asked Chrysanthemum Lady thinly, “would you know that, girl?” She stepped in fast, however, as the courtesan lunged at the girl, thrusting her back as she slashed, with real intent, at Foxfire Girl’s eyes with her nails. “None of that!” She grabbed Honeysuckle Lady by the shoulders with hands strong as a man’s, shoved her hard against the wall.
“Bitch!” the blond woman spat at Foxfire Girl. “Sow! Whore, making eyes at Iorradus . . .”
“Jealous?” Foxfire Girl lifted one eyebrow the way her father did.
“You . . .” She lunged again, and Chrysanthemum Lady thrust her against the wall.
“Enough of this! I won’t have any catfights in my house and I won’t have any sneaking around afterward, either! If Foxfire Girl ends up breaking out in a rash from bad cosmetics or puking from bad food I’m going to know who to talk to about it. And I might add,” she went on in a lower voice, pinning the furious Honeysuckle Lady to the wall and bringing her face close to hers, “that the tuition her father pays for her instruction here—and her safety—is considerably more than you bring us in a dozen suppers.”
In the hot shafts of the late-morning light, the ants milled confusedly on the floor; a couple of bull ants fell off the ceiling with audible plops, crept to the door and turned back, to be bitten to death by their swarming, tiny, infuriated cousins. A scorpion, baffled and covered with cream, emerged from one of the cosmetic pots on the dresser, leaving a smeary trail of white as it crawled across the lacquered surface.
“And as for you, miss . . .” Chrysanthemum Lady turned to Foxfire Girl. “You’re to help Flower and Gecko Woman clean up the room.”
“Me!” Foxfire Girl fell back a pace, revolted and alarmed. “How could I have had anything to do with it?”
“I didn’t say you did.” The mother regarded her with narrowed black eyes. “A Pearl Woman is equal to any situation, good or bad, dear. Sometimes one needs training in how to cope with the bad. Go to the kitchen now. Cook will show you what to do with the lye. But I suggest you stop in your room first and change your clothes.”
Firmly taking Honeysuckle Lady’s arm in hers, the mother frog-marched the infuriated courtesan away. The fledglings broke and scattered up the narrow unlit stairs to their own warren of cubicles on the floor above, or down to the kitchen yard to fill in the morning’s duties in Cook’s absence. All except Opal Girl avoided Foxfire Girl’s proximity and eye.
Opal Girl regarded her friend with trepidation. “I’ll ask if I can help you,” she offered. “With two of us, and Flower and Gecko Woman, it won’t be that bad.”
“Oh, shut up!” Foxfire Girl pulled her arm away from the proffered gentle touch and stormed up the stairs to her room to find a short gown and sturdy shoes. In the squares of sunlight on the polished black-cedar floor, the ants crawled in puzzled circles until the humans came back and drowned and scalded them to death.
NINE
Jethan turned out to be a very large young man with the dusky complexion and bright blue eyes of those rangeland villages around Mud Lake who’d married for generations with the deep-desert merchants who came through to trade for sulfur and salt. It was a good thing, Shaldis reflected, that both she and the Summer Concubine cast a cloak about the three of them as they made their way down the broad Avenue of the Sun toward the eastern gate. Even in the knee-length baggy pantaloons and coarse shirt of a laborer, Jethan could not be mistaken for anything other than a soldier.
He kept fingering his hip, where a sword was supposed to be, and studied the crowd, the walls and each doorway or alley mouth they passed as if all the world were enemy territory and he the only soldier in it capable of defending against ambush.
His disapproval deepened profoundly when they passed through the dust-choked cavern of the East Gate and into the Slaughterhouse District itself. Despite the veils that would have rendered the two women completely anonymous had they been noticeable at all, he seemed to want to stand between the Summer Concubine and everything and anyone they met. And this, Shaldis reflected, was only because he could not hustle her bodily back to the palace and lock her in her pavilion, where she belonged.
“It isn’t right that you should be here, lady,” he said, halting to let a woman reel past, unveiled and almost undressed, incapably drunk on the arm of an equally inebriated pimp. “What my lord would say—”
“My lord,” replied the Summer Concubine, gazing around her with enormous interest, “would commend you for your obedience—is that candy that man’s selling!”
“In a manner of speaking,” Raeshaldis forced herself to remember that, first, she was hidden by veils and, second, by spells: Old Grapot wouldn’t recognize in the veiled woman the soft-voiced boy who’d come around exploring a few years ago. Maybe he wouldn’t even have known her had she been in her brother’s clothing again. He looked pretty flown on his own merchandise today. “It’s mixed with hashish. He didn’t used to sell it to children,” she added, feeling she had to apologize for the rheumy-eyed vendor as he handed a bolus of fig paste and nuts to
a boy of about eleven.
The child, to be honest, was probably an accomplished housebreaker already. Most of the urchins hereabouts were—if they survived infancy.
Still, reflected Shaldis, the Slaughterhouse was a lot safer than Jethan seemed to think it was, if you kept your wits about you and didn’t do anything stupid.
The Slaughterhouse District was one of the poorest of the city, a tumbledown brangle of shacks, shambles, tenements and taverns that had grown up between the caravansaries of the city’s Eastern Gate and the villas of the Salt-Pan Quarter, which had been a small oasis owned by various connections of the Sarn at the foot of the Citadel bluff. The wells of those pleasant dwellings had long since run dry. Those nearer the city, Shaldis knew, weren’t bringing up much that was drinkable these days, but the poor who worked in the slaughterhouses, or who cured hides or boiled glue or simply lived out there because it was cheaper than the city rents, were willing to pay what the water bosses charged to draw from them, to avoid the walk into the city. A lot of the residents of the Slaughterhouse were wanted by the city guards anyway, for picking pockets or petty thievery, and had no choice in the matter.
The reek of boiling bones, of rotting hides and untended cesspits, extended for about ten miles into the open rangeland beyond. The lowing of thirsty and terrified cows, the bleat of sheep, the screams of pigs as they were clubbed to death hung thick in the dirty air, along with vendors’ cries for everything from cheap veils to fried locusts.
It was a place where neither the great houses nor any of the temples held jurisdiction, as they did in the city; a place where the big merchant guilds disdained either to sell wares or send proctors. It was the place where the wells ran dry first in bad years, the place where plagues broke out in the stinking streets, where thieves ran to hide in the daytime and from which they sneaked back into the city just before the closing of the gates.
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