Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  She had asked leave of Hathmar that morning to let her visit the Summer Concubine for a few hours instead of watching in the scrying chamber again, but in fact her intent had been to ask for an introduction to Soth, the king’s librarian and a former Earth Wizard. She’d met that tall, quiet-faced man briefly during the nerve-racking process admitting her to the college, but they had never spoken alone.

  But he would know spells beyond those the Earth Wizards taught. Spells of Deep Listening, spells to probe more surely into the walls than those she had already tried. She sensed that Benno Sarn might be right: There was certainly something askew with the way she was learning, though the Summer Concubine had said she had the same problems making spells work. There had to be something that would work for her every time, or at least more frequently than the spells she’d gotten from the Sun Mages’ signacon.

  Now she stood in the hot sunlight of the Golden Court, listening to the fig sellers’ cries, her arms folded around her satchel.

  Whoever it is, she thought, it’s someone with a great deal of power. And it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again.

  And possibly, she thought, very little time.

  She found herself hoping that the king was keeping a close eye on the Summer Concubine. That he was taking proper care of her out there at the aqueduct.

  She could, of course, go back to the Citadel and sit in the scrying chamber all day.

  But Soth, she thought, was not the only mage in the city who might help her.

  She turned and hurried the length of the Golden Court, her white robes billowing about her in the dust. Crossed through the shadows of its many-pillared arcade to the outer gate and plunged into the city.

  FIFTEEN

  The whisper of magic was everywhere.

  It was very faint, a kind of all-pervasive ugliness. The Summer Concubine had hoped to sense something of its origin—earth, sun, blood, fire, wind—and thus have a better chance to guess who had set the curse. But all she could feel, as she clambered over the ruin of broken scaffolding, was malice, like an itching in her skin. The scaffolding itself had been hauled a little distance out into the desert, to leave room for the new framework already under construction. The men at work on this grumbled about having to bring in virgin materials—huge quantities of mature bamboo needed to be shipped in from the lowland forests that fringed the Lake of Reeds, a journey of almost three weeks—but the two foremen, Grobat and Ykem, were cautious about using any materials that might be either still tainted with a curse or damaged from a fall.

  They were right, the Summer Concubine thought, running her fingertips along the woody yellow tubes, the narrow boards still stained with workmen’s blood. Everywhere she touched, the hex seemed to stick to her fingers like slime.

  “It’s here, all right,” she said when Oryn—who’d been conversing animatedly with the scaffold foremen while she searched—picked his way through the jumbled scatter of rubble to where she sat on the broken heap. Amid the constant dust cloud of the construction zone he looked like a giant orchid, unbelievably incongruous in his coat and tunic and trousers of violet and gold, a servant trailing faithfully with a gold-tasseled violet sunshade. “It feels diffuse, like . . . like glue mixed with water. It’s all spreading out from a mark somewhere.” She gestured around her to the tangled riggings, the broken hoist beam, the lashed frameworks that covered nearly the area of a wealthy man’s house.

  “Are you sure.?” Oryn squatted beside her, and the maid Lupine, whose job it was to hold a sunshade over the Summer Concubine’s head, stepped closer to Oryn’s parasol bearer to form a long rectangle of shade to cover them both. “According to our friend foreman Ykem the scaffolding’s been guarded not by one guard, or two, who might have been touched by a sleep spell while the mark was drawn, but by half a dozen.”

  “A mage wouldn’t have to make the mark on the scaffold itself, you know.” The Summer Concubine flexed her aching shoulders. “The mark could have been written some distance away on an amulet, or a talisman. If a mage put the proper limitations on the hex he could come up under a cloak, hang the talisman eye on a beam and slip away again. It would spread out from there, infecting the whole structure.”

  “I’ll have a couple of the men start looking for—how big would it be? No larger than your palm, I suppose, or it would have been seen.”

  “Not necessarily. And it could have been written on paper and pasted on, or on a ribbon and tied.”

  “Well, if it was hung it might have fallen off—or been taken away once the damage was done,” he added grimly. “I’ll have Ykem put men to searching.” He offered her his silver flask of lemon water to drink, the gingery tang stinging on her tongue, and opened the small container of ointment he carried—violet jade set in gold—to tenderly daub the bridge of her nose above the line of her veil. “Can I send for anything for you?” he asked. “A willow tree perhaps to shade you? Musicians? A small shower of rain?”

  Around them, under the bright, brittle glare of the desert afternoon, the camp jostled and clamored. Teyn filed in and out of the three walled enclosures where they were kept, enclosures guarded now, as well as written with runes of obedience and subservience and fear. The silent half-human faces were flat and expressionless under the thin, silky bristle of their shaved hair. Now and then a guard or minder would ask one of them something to be replied to in simple grunting words, but they never spoke to one another. Only now that Oryn had spoken of it to her, the Summer Concubine noticed that they were always reaching out to touch one another, the touch passing down the stoop-backed lines. Comfort? Communication? How could one tell?

  She smiled into Oryn’s worried eyes. “I’m well cared for, thank you.”

  “You let me know.”

  “I will.”

  Other teyn, watched by their minders, dragged cut stone in from the East Road, where the king’s cavalcade had all that morning passed the steady stream of low, wheeled sledges on its way to the camp. The line stretched back through the desert, through the arid rangeland to the fields and orchards by the lakefront. At landing stages just south of the wharves of the fishermen, barges brought in rough-hewn blocks floated down from the quarries in the mountains that bordered the Great Lake’s western shore, via the Sun Canal. By this hour of the afternoon the air was impenetrable with golden dust.

  I’m coming to hate this aqueduct as much as the lords do, the Summer Concubine reflected as Oryn clambered away to speak to the foremen about assigning men to investigate the wreckage. She surveyed the mass of debris before her and reflected that this was something people didn’t generally hear about wizardry: How occasionally wearisome it was to be the one person in hundreds, or even thousands, who was able to effect change in a situation and to be therefore obliged to do so.

  With a sigh she lifted her gaze to the stockpiles of stone blocks, around the advancing end of the aqueduct, the half-raised pillars, the arches that would support the artificial river’s bed once it came down off the desert’s cliffs and had to be carried to the city across the low, flat lands between.

  Madness, the clan lords said—and the priests of many other gods besides Nebekht. But according to Soth such devices worked, to channel water from far away, and the Summer Concubine could see no reason why it should not.

  And beyond the aqueduct, sprawling south between the building site and the road, the shuffling gangs of teyn, the masses of penned sheep, nearly hidden in a fog of wheat-colored dust. Workers’ tents, mess tables, depots of food, butts of water . . . all of this had to come from somewhere. And in all of it, hidden somewhere, was a clue, a trace of magic, that only she could find.

  Before the camp the cliffs loomed, the rough drop-off from the still more barren desert tableland, a jagged zone of badlands called the Dead Hills. Beyond that, the oasis of Koshlar—fifteen days by camel, if all went well.

  If the rains never come, she thought, we will die anyway, long before we reach Koshlar.

  They must come. She clo
sed her eyes in brief prayer to Darutha, lord of rain. This year, and next year, and the year after . . . Just enough to let this be accomplished.

  Two hundred miles. And it was only the first they’d have to build if the cities around the drying lakes were to survive. The aqueduct now stretched just over twelve miles, and in another three would climb through the Dead Hills to the tablelands of the deep desert beyond. There, according to the surveyors Oryn had sent out five years ago, the aqueduct would be cut into the earth, a canal roofed over with stone to prevent evaporation, lined with stone to cheat the dry earth’s baking heat. The springs of Koshlar were bountiful, filling a deep lake in the heart of burning salt-white wastes and overflowing into acres of marsh. Mohrvine was right, she thought. The nomad tribes wouldn’t let that water be tapped without a fight.

  Two hundred miles. And in between, bleak flats of gray rock; bleached miles of pea-sized gravel without so much as a cactus to relieve the endless lifelessness of the landscape. More miles of sand, where white dunes two hundred feet high crept with the slow, wind-driven inexorability of predators. Decayed ridges of saffron rock—black canyons where rivers had flowed so long ago that even the bare stones had forgotten. The Durshen kings had had their tombs carved in the Dead Hills, under the assumption that no robber would find his way through the harsh maze of the badlands; there were rumors of necropoli still farther out in the wastes.

  And beyond all that, more wasteland still. The first three surveying parties sent out had not returned, nor had any sign of their end ever been found. It was not known whether the nomads had taken exception to their trespass—or guessed their ultimate intent—or whether they had simply been led astray and destroyed by the djinni.

  Squads of teyn were already at work cutting the notch of the canal on the far side of the badlands.

  From here the Summer Concubine could see the rising cloud of their dust glimmering in the dry, burning light. Now and then a mirror would flash, a tiny blink of light as one engineer signaled another.

  Two hundred miles. And how many dry years, before the lakes themselves sank away in their beds?

  She turned her attention back to the broken planks, the tangled ropes crusted with the blood of those who’d just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trying to align the dim, prickly ugliness she felt in the wood with a sense, a feeling, of the amulets Soth had brought her, talismans ensorcelled years ago by Ahure, Aktis, Isna Faran, Urnate Urla. But of course talismans lost their strength over the passage of time. And when those talismans had been imbued with spells, had Aktis and Isna Faran already begun to lose their powers?

  Or was this hex the work of some mage she’d never heard of? Some nomad sorcerer trying to keep the aqueduct from the oasis? Or a mage from far away? One of the wizards who’d healed or cast love spells or laid wards of obedience on the teyn in a village in the north somewhere, or in Ith or the City of White Walls or the City of Reeds—maybe even from the faraway coast?

  She couldn’t tell.

  And as she concentrated, the images of Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman kept returning to her, breaking her concentration. No wonder I can’t find anything familiar here.

  Don’t let them be dead, she prayed to Rohar, god of women, the gentle protector whose small chapel and flower-draped image could be found in every harem from the Lake of the Moon up to the scraggle of drying mudflats beyond the Lake of Gazelles. Please guard them, keep them, wherever they are . . . .

  Her fingers brushed another section of planking, another bunch of rope, and the recollection of last night’s horrible dream breathed upon her like the halitus of the grave. She felt again the awful grief in her heart, as if a twin sister had died.

  Grief—and dread. Dread that whatever it was knew her name as well. Dust gritted in her eyes and beneath her veils, and in spite of the protecting gauze, her nostrils and throat felt like a sandpit. Lupine moved over, the parasol’s shade shifting with the sun—Lupine herself wore a double-crowned straw hat more substantial than the roof of a poor man’s house.

  Keep Shaldis, too, she prayed. Hold her in the palm of your hand.

  “I’ll see if he’s receiving company.” Mohrvine’s porter, a fat man with the sloppy accent of a longtime resident of the Circus District, waved Raeshaldis to a bench. She’d gone to the bronze-strapped gates of the old House Jothek in Great Giraffe Street with heavily beating heart, expecting the usual sidelong looks at her novice’s robe and unveiled face, but the man barely gave her a glance. If he’d been raised in the Circus, she reflected, watching him as he whistled through his fingers for a page, this wasn’t a surprise. People in the Circus were used to just about anything.

  Mohrvine’s house—the house the Jothek clan had owned long before they’d become high kings—stood in the Circus District, rowdier and smellier than the more fashionable purlieus of the Flowermarket, where most of the other clan lords had their compounds. Shaldis had been, naturally, forbidden to walk these streets as a child and had, naturally, disobeyed whenever she thought she could get away with it. Even today, the men who played dominoes in the cafés in their short, bright-hued tunics, and the bare-faced women in their jangling jewelry, gaudy dresses and gaudier hair, stared at her less than did passersby in other parts of town.

  Upon reflection, Shaldis supposed it was an improvement that her novice’s robes and unveiled-face classed her with the girl acrobats and female rope dancers rather than marking her as simply a disobedient member of some man’s family.

  “Ain’t you supposed to be up with the rest of ’em bringing the rain?” As a little yellow-clad page scampered away across the high-walled, narrow expanse of the brick-paved court on his errand, the porter turned back and dipped her out a cup of water from the jar in his minuscule kiosk beside the lodge. At the court’s far end, over a wall of plastered brick that could have stood repainting, poplars and sycamores displayed brilliant, healthy leaves in a silent boast of water to spare. Tiled roofs heaped behind them: crimson, yellow, blue, ornamented with sand-scored gilt. A couple of teyn patiently swept the courtyard bricks, backs bent under the glare of the sun.

  “Special message.” Shaldis patted her satchel as if it contained something of importance. In fact it contained all the tablets on which she’d written her Spells of Deep Listening, whether they worked or not; she had meant to ask Soth about them.

  Was there some rule, she wondered, about mages from one discipline helping those of another? She’d never heard of it being done, but then, prior to this it had never had to be done.

  The porter grunted. Both the dripping cup and the jar he dipped it from were painted ware a hundred years old, simple and delicate as anything Shaldis had seen in the Marvelous Tower. She remembered what her grandfather had always said about Mohrvine being a “true gentleman”—true gentlemen being those who held to ancient traditions and didn’t wear pointed-toed shoes. The noise from the street grew louder for a moment as the boar teyn who was sweeping the courtyard bricks opened the gate to brush the dust through and into the thoroughfare. To be tracked back in tomorrow, belike, thought Shaldis, exasperated. The flat, round faces of the teyn under their clipped white beards were inexpressive; sweat trickled down the boar’s back and shoulders, stained dark the jenny’s rough brown dress. Their eyes were blue, and startlingly human. Shaldis wondered if they felt heat the way people did.

  The page came running back and traded a word with the porter, who came to Shaldis with a bow. “He’ll see you, miss.” He used a more respectful pronoun than before.

  Thank you.” Shaldis tipped him—out of a very slender reserve of savings—and followed the page out into the court, to three tall brick steps and a gate that let onto a covered walk. Morning sunlight glared from the pink-washed walls, splashed the grubby white and brown palimpsests of overlaid door and window wards, gilded the scrim of dust in the air. As she passed the teyn the boar glanced sidelong at her, and for a moment she had the disconcerting sense of seeing calculation in those bright b
lue eyes.

  Aktis waited for her in the small courtyard that Mohrvine allotted his court mage, thin and lined and a little stooped, with a nose like a medium-sized yam and eyes dark and wise and twinkling under a gray shelf of brow. A trellis and vine had once circled the walled enclosure, shading the line of chambers and open workrooms that looked into it on three sides. Most of the vine had been pulled down and replaced by an apparatus of pulleys and mirrors. The basin of what had been the courtyard pool stood empty, its tiles smudged with smears of red and white chalk.

  The Earth Wizard listened to her account of being hazed by the other novices—and possibly adepts as well—at the college, of having the ward signs that defended her room violated, of her attempts to locate the perpetrators through the residue of their spells left in the wood. “I copied every spell I could find from the library, but I can’t make most of them work,” she finished. “Even the ones that are straightforward. Ben—One of the masters I spoke to said it may be something simple, that I’m not drawing the sigil precisely enough. But I do practice, and I have successfully made sigils on the air, not once but many times. Sometimes these work perfectly. And other times”—she spread her hands, baffled—“other times they don’t.”

  Thoughtfully, Aktis turned over the spell tablets in his pale, ink-boltered hands. When she’d made up her mind to go to the Sun Mages, Shaldis had resolved that if they wouldn’t take her, she’d seek out Aktis, whom she’d seen many times in the Bazaar. He was reputed to be both a strong mage and a man wilting to help even those who could not pay—something not all Earth Wizards would do. With no overriding authority and no single Archmage—their informal council met only a few times a decade—the Earth Wizards had a reputation for being much more everyday than the Sun Mages, living in houses and shopping in the market. But because they had to buy their own bread instead of being supported by a college that over the years had been given farms, city rentals, cattle herds and the cash to found a substantial moneylending business, they and the Pyromancers were reputed to be more mercenary than the Sun Mages, and far more variable in quality. The Sun Mages trained those who could source power from the sun and tested them rigorously. Earth Wizards drew strength from the ground beneath their feet, from the gold and silver and hidden lodes of water in the soil: They and the Pyromancers, and others of the smaller orders, simply apprenticed likely lads, the way a potter or a carpenter or a goldsmith would.