Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  Then the smell of magic smote her as if she’d thrust her nose into the kitchen spice box and inhaled. Blinding, choking, impossible to distinguish one mage’s thoughts or personality from another’s. Shaldis gasped, literally rocked back on her seat and for a moment clung to the edge of the table fighting not to throw up.

  And thanking every god in the universe that there was nobody in the scrying chamber but herself.

  Well, it works, anyway, she thought when she got her breath again. That was more than could be said of three-quarters of the sigils and spells she’d copied and tried that day.

  She unmade the sigil, and made it again a foot or so to her left. Touched it lightly, light as a feather. It was still like sticking her head into a bushel of spices and trying to distinguish pepper from mace.

  It’s like trying to learn to dance from a book, she thought. Maybe you can walk through the pattern, book in hand, humming to yourself and looking like a fool. Maybe—if you were already a dancer—you could remember to keep your elbows curved and your shoulders down, and to rise and drop and bend your knees at just the proper places. But what you really need is someone to take you through it, at least once.

  And there was no one in the Citadel she trusted to do that.

  A sharp tap of cold, as if someone had touched her shoulder, made her sweep the signacons and her tabled into her satchel and slide it under her cloak, which was folded beside her on the floor. She cast her hearing into the little plaza before the scrying chamber and picked out footsteps—Benno Sarn’s, she thought, though all mages were taught to walk so lightly that it took an extremely high master to distinguish between their footfalls, as wizards routinely identified the footsteps of individual kyne. It had to be Benno Sarn, she knew, because the rector was the only mage in the Citadel not at the Song.

  And how, she wondered, did that make him feel?

  She herself at least had the comfort of knowing she did have magic. That she was being wronged not by some unaccountable alteration in the rules of the universe, but by something simple like prejudice and desperate fear. That her exclusion, if unfair, was understandable.

  Or did he tell himself that it was just part of his duty as rector to patrol the Citadel during the Summoning and let it go at that? Shaldis knew from her own experience how enormous was the temptation to perform unsupervised experiments—and how devastatingly spells, or combinations of spells, whose effects seemed clever and hilarious could backfire.

  Great as was the need for every mage, every voice in the Song of Rain, the masters had learned years ago that at least one of them had better be roving around to make sure no novice was laying badly made curses on seniors who’d hazed him, or setting little summoning spells to call mosquitoes or fleas or roaches to some master’s room. That no servant was prying into matters too dangerous for untrained concern.

  But no footfalls approached. Shaldis got to her feet—carefully, since she didn’t know how much Benno Sarn could still cast his senses into the rooms and passageways about him—and glided to the scrying chambers vestibule, cracking open its outer door enough for her to look out. Sure enough, she saw the square, powerful form of the rector in his blue robe of mastery standing just beside the fountain at the foot of the library stairs. The hot, gold noon sun—the King Sun—beat on his bare head, showing up how much gray there was in his long, straw-colored locks. He was too far off for her to see his expression, but she saw that his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and he looked not toward the scrying chamber, but up the narrow stair to the North Lookout, and from there to the hidden rim of the Ring itself.

  He stood for a long time gazing up like that, listening to the singing of the mages. Looking at the hard, dry blue of the empty sky.

  Then he brought up his hands and clasped one fist in the other meaty palm, a gesture of anger—or despair.

  He turned and was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  There was nothing wrong with the scaffolding, lord.” The man who’d ridden in from the aqueduct’s base camp rubbed a hand over his dusty face. The rough dressing around his forehead was powdered dun like the rest of him. “I’m foreman of the gang working on the forward section, and I checked every inch of it this morning, same as always. Scaffolding, hoists, the lot.”

  Two men dead, thought Oryn, settling back on the divan. Thirty injured, ten of them critically. Fifteen teyn killed outright when the framework of timber and bamboo, tall as an apartment block, suddenly collapsed, without warning and apparently without previous damage.

  “And the witnesses . . . ?

  “There was twenty witnesses, my lord, and they all say the same. None of the beams broke. It was the ropes holding ’em that let go, all in a moment. Sure, the beams broke when they hit the ground, but I’ll swear Ean’s Oath it wasn’t a beam breaking that started the fall. It was too sudden for that, and too silent.”

  The man glanced at Soth, possibly recognizing him as the royal court mage whose recollections of information from the mages of Otherwhere had given birth to the aqueduct in the first place. “The True Believers on the crew say as how it’s that god of theirs showing how he thinks the aqueduct’s a poor idea. Myself, I think it looks more like a wizard’s curse.”

  Oryn hadn’t the smallest experience with construction—he’d always preferred those tales where obliging djinni set up everything from the foundation stones to the selection of dinner wines in a night—but the man’s reasoning made sense. He signed a servant girl—Freesia, if he remembered, she called herself—to refill the messenger’s wine cup. Beside the pavilion’s garden door Iorradus gazed into the garden: The boy was the proverbial deaf-mute one always heard about decadent Durshen kings possessing. The Summer Concubine, behind her screen of lattice, would be listening. Geb, also listening, his ear glued to the keyhole of the vestibule door as usual, would be wringing his hands in mortification that Oryn had taken no more time to dress than he had, slipping out of his crimson bathrobe and into whatever was handiest, an orange-and-yellow tunic, robe, and trousers of silk velvet that didn’t match his earrings and made him look like a colossal tiger lily. Really, if I keep taking these matters of state seriously, my reputation as an arbiter of taste will never recover.

  “Have you had occasion to think there might be a curse before this?”

  By the alteration in the man’s face, he saw he’d touched a nerve. “It’s the first time this much has happened, my lord.” Possibly because Oryn hadn’t said I’ll have someone look into it—or maybe merely the way he leaned forward again to listen to the answer—the way he said “my lord” was different. The foreman’s tone was no longer the awe proper to a king, but the worried respect a workman would use if speaking to a landchief who knew the meaning of what he was hearing.

  “Fact of the matter is, I was having the horse saddled up to ride back here when the scaffold gave way. There’s been . . . odd things.” The clever, dark, worried eyes went from Oryn to Soth to the screen of carved lattice and jade, as if he knew perfectly well who was listening behind it.

  “There was a dozen teyn down sick this morning in that front section gang. Maybe as many in each gang through the whole of the camp. Not just from a single thing, which you’d get if the food had gone bad or something. Some had belly cramps, others had swollen feet or light blindness or toothache . . . different things. The men, too. There was ten, twelve different accidents this morning. All of it stupid things, like harness breaking, or ropes slipping, or some fool dropping a pot and cutting his foot to the bone stepping on the pieces. That kind of thing. But everywhere. Like as if the shadow of the laughing god fell over the whole camp. Now, I’ve heard tell of such things . . . .”

  “Yes,” agreed Oryn, when the little foreman fell uneasily silent again. “Though one hesitates to point fingers, of course.” The librarian met his eyes across the inlaid table, then looked away.

  “Do you have family here in the city—Ykem, I think you said your name was? Or would you accept hospitality he
re in the palace until morning? I think we need to ride out and have a look at this, my court mage and I.”

  “I’d appreciate it, my lord.” The foreman looked hugely relieved. “I left word that none of the broken scaffolding was to be touched.”

  “Did you? Good man!” Oryn got to his feet and, when the foreman did also, clapped him warmly on the back. Even the king’s worst detractors allowed that he had great charm, and a genuine friendliness that made the caricatures of him dissolve from the minds of those who met him. “Can you be ready to ride at the second hour? That should get us to the camp by noon.

  “What do you think?” he asked, as soon as Iorradus had conducted the man out of earshot and the Summer Concubine emerged from behind her screen. “Geb, make yourself useful and fetch more coffee,” he added, raising his voice. “You go help him, if you would, Freesia my dear.”

  “It isn’t what I think,” said Soth, looking into the dregs of his coffee cup as if expecting to see the name of the culprit form up in the grounds—a method, Oryn supposed, that had been tried at times. “But whom I suspect.”

  “I’d say it’s Mohrvine,” added the Summer Concubine, settling herself at the foot of Oryn’s divan again, “except that I sincerely doubt Aktis has that power anymore. He’s taking a great deal of ijnis these days.”

  “I thought ijnis was supposed to give you power.”

  “Up to a point it does.” Soth straightened up and sat tailor fashion on his divan. Behind the ground-crystal lenses his blue eyes had lost their bloodshot look and he ran a self-conscious hand over his unshaven cheeks. “After a point, instead of increasing it, what it mostly does is make it erratic. Spells don’t work the way you think they will. A death spell might have the effect of making the subject fall madly in love with the wizard casting the spell, for instance. Luck spells may simply bring on painful rashes.”

  “I see we have a great deal to look forward to as magic continues to fade,” remarked the Summer Concubine dryly.

  Soth shook his head. “As magic continues to fade, all the ijnis in the world won’t help,” he said. “And each dose unhinges the mind a little more. As for Aktis, he may very well be able to lay quite an effective curse, on a good day—and on another he might not even be capable of getting into the camp unobserved.”

  “Not something I’d want to rely on, were I Mohrvine . . . .”

  “If Mohrvine knows.”

  “Could Benno Sarn do it?”

  Soth and the Summer Concubine traded glances.

  “He could have ridden out there yesterday when the Sun Mages all rested.” Oryn went on. “I assume a major spell like this has to be cast on-site, rather than from a distance?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Soth promptly. “There are few spells that can “be cast out of sight of the victim. And even those are greatly increased in power by having the victim, or the victim’s property, physically marked. And a hex of this scope and scale would absolutely require the mage’s presence.”

  “Which means,” said Oryn, “that we need to ascertain who could have gone out there.”

  “Benno Sarn was at the rain feast in the morning,” said the Summer Concubine. “Afterward I don’t know, but maybe Raeshaldis can find out.”

  “The young lady who spoke to you about being attacked,” said Oryn thoughtfully. “And who is, incidentally, absolved from complicity.”

  “But it leads me to wonder”—Soth cast an apologetic glance at the Summer Concubine—“if you will forgive my saying so, my dear, whether the perpetrator of this hex was a trained mage at all.”

  “No,” said the concubine, “no, if women want credit for having power we must accept with it the suspicion of misusing that power. And the gods know enough women are misusing power in small matters all over the city.”

  Her winged eyebrows drew down under the seed-pearled mists of her veils. “For that matter, Raeshaldis and I parted company shortly after full dark. It’s conceivable she could have gotten a horse and made it out to the aqueduct camp to set a hex in the night, though I can’t imagine why she would have.”

  “That’s the point,” said Oryn. “Because of the rain yesterday morning, almost anyone would have felt justified in trying to put a halt to the aqueduct. I know it’s a terrible burden in terms of taxes. I know there isn’t a lord who likes having his herds and his teyn confiscated for what appears to everyone in the Seven Lakes to be a folly. They can’t see—”

  He broke off, aware that one big, soft hand had bunched into an angry fist on his knee.

  Anger at their obtuseness.

  Anger born of fear.

  He opened his hand, for a moment fixing his eyes on the crimson gems of his rings before raising them to his friends again. “Would you he able to tell who set the hex by looking at the marks in the camp?”

  “Oh, easily.” Soth’s breath expelled in a rueful chuckle. “There are few enough of any line or school who can work magic anymore. If it’s an Earth Wizard sign it will almost certainly be Aktis. I don’t know any other Earth Wizard—including myself—who still has the smallest vestige of power. If it’s a sun sign it will be Sarn—or possibly Lohar.”

  Oryn widened his eyes. “I thought Lohar decided to surrender his magic to Nebekht when he discovered he couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “It’s what Lohar says,” agreed Soth, raising an eyebrow.

  “Ah. Yes. I should know better than to confuse the appearance of imbecility with sincerity.” Oryn shook his head. “And presumably a blood sign would indicate Ahure, in spite of Lord Jamornid’s ostensible support of me in the council. Geb, my darling, thank you.” He took the coffee tray from the eunuch’s indignant hands. A box beside the sugar dish contained rings and earrings of topaz and citrine, a broad hint to repair the incoordination of his ensemble. He must have sent a page to fetch them while Oryn conversed with the foreman Ykem.

  “Would you be a spirit of light and make arrangements for me to ride out to the aqueduct camp tomorrow at the second hour? Horses, tent—we may spend the night there, I think, Soth? Suitable wardrobe . . . what color goes with sand, Geb? I think the pale yellow silk and that gold and violet ensemble . . . .And horses to match, of course.” He poured coffee for Soth, for himself and the Summer Concubine, and passed around a plate of fresh coconut candies, pink and white. “Do you still have a valet, Soth? I don’t know what I’m going to do with you . . . . Geb, darling, before you leave, would you just . . . ?” He held out a hand, and with a long-suffering sigh the chamberlain grasped it, and helped him, groaning, to his feet.

  “And I suppose now I’ll have to send word to Barún, and make arrangements with Bax and the guards . . . .” Oryn shook his head regretfully and put an arm around the Summer Concubine’s thin shoulders the moment Geb and Soth were out of the room. “Will you be seeing your girl Raeshaldis tomorrow, beloved?”

  “We hadn’t spoken of it,” said the Summer Concubine. “I could send for her.”

  “Do. See what she knows about Benno Sarn’s whereabouts yesterday—and about others in the college who might still have the power to accomplish a hex like that. I suppose he—or she—would use a cloak spell to get into the camp . . . . Would someone be able to set up hex marks and keep a cloak about them at the same time.?”

  “They’d have to, wouldn’t they?” said the Summer Concubine thoughtfully. “That would rule out any woman I know, probably even Raeshaldis. I don’t know of any woman with the mental training to make two spells work consistently at the same time.”

  “And what about the women you don’t know?”

  She glanced up at him, blue eyes meeting hazel.

  All she said was “Hmn.”

  “Just a thought.” Oryn tightened his arm around her, comforted by the scent of her, by that light, slim shape, like a gazelle or a miniature greyhound. The thought of spending several hours riding out to the aqueduct camp in the morning made him shudder.

  “If I’m going to be gone tomorrow I suppose I need to send for Sarn today
instead of tomorrow as planned—and I’ll have to put forward the meeting with the lord proctor of the Grand Bazaar, drat it, which means reading his report on the water bosses. . . . And Stagweth . . .” He named the supervisor of the royal silk weavers—a not inconsiderable source of the House Jothek’s revenues—who had also required an audience. “I can’t imagine how the heroes in ballads get on the road five minutes after receiving the bad news. ‘He called for his horse . . .’ which was presumably stabled somewhere and had to be saddled, ‘and leaped to the saddle,’ without lunch—or smoothing down the feathers of those who thought they’d have a council that afternoon, or making sure someone was going to feed his birds in his absence—and where did the hero plan to sleep that night, if he didn’t pack a tent? I can only conclude,” sighed Oryn, “that this is the reason that the heroes of ballads are so seldom actual reigning kings.”

  Honey-colored sunlight stroked Shaldis’s hair like a warming hand as she hurried down the library steps. Even had she not heard the pulse and groan of the horns, the call and echo of the responses, she would have been able to tell at what point the Song stood: For eighteen months she had lived by the slightest alterations of the sunlight, until she knew within her bones how much of the day remained.

  It was the time the masters called the Time of the Sun of Judgment, the harsh, hot burning sun of midafternoon, weighing the desert down like inexorable law. The time under the rule of Ka-Ashkar, god of the afternoon sun, whose images were made of brass and kept heated smoking hot.

  In other words, she thought, she still had plenty of time.

  Through the hours she had been in the scrying chamber, she had seen not the slightest flicker within the mirrors or the crystals or the bowls. Between her studies of the Sigils of Listening, her practice of the High Script and her perusal of her lists (the true name of the long-eared leaping rat of the deep desert was Gurantes; its short-eared golden cousin was called Bronas; the little red burrowing rodents of the water holes at the feet of the Dead Hills were called Corms for the purposes of magic), she had considered those empty devices, and remembered the tales the grieving scryers had told.