Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  Yet even after Aktis was pledged to Mohrvine and had no more need to earn his living, Shaldis had seen him heal a beggar child’s foot of a camel bite in the marketplace. Had seen him go into the shabby huts in the Slaughterhouse District to spell their pitiful cupboards against mice, their windows against the incursions of the mosquitoes that came whining in clouds from the borders of the lake. Urnate Urla and Khitan Redbeard had muttered about people taking away their business, but one didn’t mutter too loudly against Lord Mohrvine Jothek’s court mage. The beggars called out blessings on him when he passed, and on Lord Mohrvine as well.

  “Trace out this sigil on the table.” Aktis selected one of the tablets, “just as if you were going to scry the wood.”

  He watched as she obeyed, eyes following the track of her finger on the coarse peasant bench. He hadn’t said to put the focus of her power on it, so Shaldis didn’t, and as a result she couldn’t see the glowing line that sometimes appeared under her finger as she made a sigil in a spell. Still, when she’d completed the sign he nodded, said, “Stand up and close your eyes and spin around three times . . . . I can see you must have been a champion at blindman’s bluff. Now trace it again, exactly over the first. That looks good,” he finished when she repeated the invisible sign. The simple bench was in keeping with the plain furnishings of the rooms that she could see through the wide-open windows that faced onto it: a few cupboards, an adobe divan scattered with cushions of pink-and-blue country-work. The teapot and cups he brought out were plain green-glazed work from the papyrus forests and fishing villages around the far north end of the Lake of Reeds. A black glass idol, of the kind found in very old Hosh tombs, stared bleakly from its niche in the wall. “That’s very good. You have a good inner eye. I don’t think practice is what is lacking.

  “Everyone needs practice,” he added, his fleet grin suddenly lightening a face gouged with the marks of weariness. “If you plan to follow the path of power, child, you’d better learn to love practice and memorization, because you’re going to be doing a lot of them. But it doesn’t look as if that’s the problem. And your orientation to the sun is certainly accurate.”

  “Then what’s wrong?” asked Shaldis, frustrated. “Why can I make spells work sometimes and other times they just . . . they just turn into lines and words?”

  Aktis sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was, Shaldis reckoned, a good twenty years younger than Hathmar, yet something about the way he tried to straighten his back, the way he shifted his shoulders, reminded her of the old Archmage. His hair, which had been coal black and thick only a few years ago, was thin now, limp and the color of cave mud.

  “I do have power,” Shaldis went on, more softly. She stared down into her teacup, the strong burnt-honey smell of the steam rising around her face. “Some things—spells of concealment, and illusion—I can do . . . oh, as if I were born knowing how to do them. Just shaping the illusions with my mind. The power is there.”

  Aktis opened his mouth as if he would speak what was in his thoughts. Then he seemed to change his mind and only shook his head. “Where does it come from, child?” he asked. “This power.”

  Shaldis hesitated, casting into her mind, into her dreams. “It’s—It’s inside me. In my chest, I think.”

  “But when you focus it, channel it,” went on Aktis, “where does it flow from? I know you’ve been taught to source from the sun, and every spell and sigil you know has reference to it.” His expressive fingers played above the tablets, scattered on the bench between them. “Have you studied the sigils the Earth Wizards use? Seen them at all?”

  “I’ve seen them.” They were very different, odd-looking and shaped to a completely different geometry, as different from the signs of the Sun Mages as formal High Script was from Scribble, or as the classic sun glyphs of men’s horoscopes were from the complicated, ever-altering lunar women’s signs.

  “Are you so sure,” said Aktis, “that you are a Sun Mage at all?”

  Benno Sarn had said the same thing. Raeshaldis shook her head, uncertain and feeling a kind of despair.

  “Have you ever been tested?”

  “By the Sun Mages, yes.”

  “Hmm.” Aktis’s mouth twisted and he tugged at his pigtail, winding its thin gray strands around thin fingers. “Hathmar hasn’t had a new novice at the college for three years. I expect he’d have taken anyone with any sign of power and not asked about source.” His dark-circled eyes returned to her, searching her face.

  “Would you teach me?” asked Shaldis. “Write out for me the runes and sigils I’d need to—to feel, to see, who this was? What this was?”

  The thick brows quirked upward, but Aktis only looked down at the table, at the spot where Shaldis had traced the sigils, invisible on the wood. He said nothing for a time, and sipped his tea in deepening silence while the noises of the house, and of the streets outside, clashed on the high pink walls. Looms thudded in the workshops somewhere near; a groom cursed a teyn. A woman in the street outside called, “Hot bright gingerbread—a dequin for a cake!” “Anybody anybody, chairs to mend?” wailed a male voice, and a camel groaned. Irritating contrast, Shaldis realized, with the absolute restful silence of the Summer Concubine’s terrace gardens.

  “You mean,” said Aktis at length, “that you want me to go against the Sun Mages with an Earth Wizard’s spells?”

  His dark eyes flicked inquiringly to her, and Shaldis understood what he implied.

  “It’s just one spell.”

  “And no one would know?” The brows went up again. Then he sighed. “Child, you don’t remember what happens when the orders of wizardry fight one another. I barely remember the last time it happened—I couldn’t have been seven years old—and that was a small spat, a stupid squabble between a Wind Singer who worked for the House Sarn and some of old Lord Akarian’s court mages—Earth Wizards, I’m ashamed to say.

  “People are always saying how wizards are useless—how they’ll never do the things you most want them to. And this is why: Because we have learned, over the years, to watch how we use our power. Five or six days ago a man came to me complaining of vomiting, of paralyzing pain in his hands. It turned out his wife had paid one of these new—these new women-who-do-magic to make him stop spending his money on drink, and this was the best way this woman could think of to make him do what made her most comfortable. Not knowing, of course, that no spell has ever been found to cure a man of drugs, or drink, or gambling.”

  He shook his head in genuine distress. “If you’re being taught by the Sun Mages you must have learned about the limitations that must be on any spell, the boundaries to keep ill luck from spreading everywhere in the world, to keep a simple spell of bellyache or migraine from spreading and duplicating itself until half a village is puking itself to death.

  “In that last quarrel the Order of the Wind Singers came to an end, except for a few hermits in the desert west of the Eanit. What you’re asking is forbidden. And for good reason. For the best of reasons.”

  Shaldis looked down for a time at the tablets, at the grain of the table. At her own hands, long and white and skinny, lying in the knotted shade of the naked vine.

  “The Sun Mages won’t help me,” she said at last, glad that she’d decided not to mention the disappearance of a couple of freelance spell weavers like Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman. Not that she would have done so in any case, given Aktis’s position in Lord Mohrvine’s household.

  “Then you should leave them.”

  She looked up, startled.

  “I can’t do what you ask—simply hand you spells like a street-corner peddler passing out two-penny mouse wards. For one thing, I doubt you’d be able to use them.” He pushed over a couple of tablets that lay beyond her reach, and she saw his fingers trembled a little with a kind of constant, unsteady vibration. “You certainly wouldn’t be able to use them safely. But I can teach you. In fact I’d rather do that, and make sure you learned your limitations properly. I promise you—”


  “My lord.” The page reappeared in the gateway of the court, a chubby boy whose long old-fashioned curls reminded Shaldis of the streetwalkers outside. “My lord Mohrvine would see you. Now, sir, he says—please, right away.” The boy glanced at Shaldis with a combination of apology and fascination, the kind of stare she got often in the streets from young boys unused to seeing a woman’s face uncovered in public.

  Aktis glanced at the angle of the sun on the table and his mouth tightened. Shaldis got to her feet and gathered up her tablets, counting to make sure she had them all.

  “I won’t keep you, sir,” she said. “Thank you for your time, for your help and advice.”

  He stood also, reached a hand as hesitant as a cat’s paw to touch her sleeve. “Child,” he said, “don’t do anything foolish. If the spells of the Sun Mages won’t work—spells that you’ve been taught to bound and limit properly—don’t endanger yourself or anyone else by tampering with other types of spells. You don’t—”

  The page glanced over his shoulder through the gate, as if he expected to see the greatest and most dangerous of the clan lords storming down the walkway at his heels, and cleared his throat. “My lord wizard, my lord said as how it was . . . That is, he told me to tell you—”

  “That he wants me right away.” Aktis’s voice was very quiet, touched with pain. With anger, too, thought Shaldis, and no wonder: that even the lord of one of the great houses would command a mage to come, like a servant. “Of course he does. Come back to me tomorrow, child. Promise me that you will. We need to talk more of this. And between now and then, be careful. Don’t tamper with what you don’t understand. I assure you, only dreadful grief will come of it.”

  “No sir.” Shaldis stepped back under the trellis, waiting to be taken back to the gate, as Aktis went into one of the several small rooms that surrounded the court. The page followed him to the door, having doubtless received instructions to make sure he didn’t delay. She heard the man say, “Just give me a moment, boy,” his voice muffled by the curtain that covered the door. Turning her head, she saw him through the window of what had to be the next room taking something from a locked cupboard in the corner opposite the window.

  He opened the cupboard with a key, and she thought, He doesn’t use a ward sign.

  What he took out was a black clay bottle, which he stood looking at for a moment. The late sunlight coming through the window stood clear on the sweat on his face.

  He wet his lips, made as if to put the bottle back—then brought it to his mouth and took a small, a very small, sip.

  And shuddered, with a look of such desperation on his face that Shaldis’s heart seemed to twist in her breast.

  He put the bottle back, closed the cupboard.

  Then opened it again fast, and rook one more desperate gulp, as if fearing that he would be observed. Past his shoulder Shaldis could see into the cupboard—saw a big gourd, stained dark and surrounded by dead roaches; saw a bundle of dried ijnis leaves and a porcelain mortar likewise stained; a small retort for distilling and a golden bottle, wrapped in three strands of iron and sealed with a crystal stopper. She knew he was going to look around and turned away, moved behind the post of the trellis and gazed across the garden, feeling shaken and sick.

  Aktis reemerged from his door with a brisk stride and pulled it closed behind him. The page stepped respectfully aside as the Earth Wizard traced signs on the door with one finger: “One can’t be too careful, my child,” he said with forced heartiness. “Topeck will show you out, won’t you, Topeck? Good lad. Tomorrow?” he said, laying a hand on Shaldis’s shoulder.

  She nodded. When he turned to go through the gate of the courtyard ahead of her, she reached out casually and brushed the door with her fingers, seeking the ward mark he had left.

  She felt nothing. She could have gone in and helped herself to his supper—or his ijnis—for all the mark would do to keep her out.

  The curly-haired page was waiting, with no very good grace. She slung her satchel up on her shoulder again and followed him through the gate and into the slatted shade of the covered walk, heading back toward the main court. For a few minutes Aktis’s stooped, black-clothed shoulders bobbed ahead of them under the flicking bars of shade. Then he turned down another walkway, ascended a flight of tiled steps to pass through a door.

  Just because he’s taking ijnis, thought Shaldis, doesn’t mean he can’t teach me.

  Or does it?

  How soon did the drug begin to affect the mind? Immediately, everyone said, and far quicker for some than for others. He’d seemed perfectly in control except for the trembling of his hands. But if his spells weren’t to be trusted anymore—as they obviously weren’t, if he’d used a key rather than a ward spell on his cupboard—did that mean . . . ?

  And as clear as a bell, sweet and strong as if she’d walked past a rosebush in full scent, she felt magic.

  And turning, saw the fugitive glimmer of a freshly drawn rune, of ward on the corner of a wall.

  SIXTEEN

  There were spells Shaldis had used when she was a child—like the zin-zin spells of I’m not here—to make the servants in the kitchen yard think everything was going along as it usually did, while she slipped through and out the gate in her brother’s clothes. They weren’t exactly cloak spells because if someone was really looking for her they could see her easily, but she thought of them as blinkers: It was a blinker that rose most easily to her mind now and she whispered it into the already preoccupied thoughts of the curly-haired page.

  She’s right behind you all the way to the gate, Topeck.

  As the boy strolled jauntily down the narrow passageway between courtyard walls. Shaldis slipped into the turning where the ward was written and ran her hand exploringly over the pink-washed wall.

  It was definitely a ward sign and definitely not one of Aktis’s. She’d sensed Aktis’s ward sign, blurred with the passage of time, on the wall at the far end of this walkway. His was an earth sign and nothing like this one. When the page turned the corner, Shaldis hurried along the uneven brick pavement to the place to run her hand over the invisible mark to be sure.

  Then she went back to the turning.

  There was definitely another wizard in House Jothek.

  It was a Pyromancer sign, she thought, but made by an amateur. Something someone learned somewhere and had enough strength to make work. The walkway beyond it was narrow and unused looking, the worn old bricks pitted, unswept and in places covered with sand. The stucco behind the torch sconces was deeply stained with soot. Still a narrow trace through the sand showed that people did go this way, and through the open gate at the end Shaldis could see greenery.

  There was another ward sign on the arch of that red-tiled gate, the same kind.

  The garden there—more an agglomeration of vines, orange trees and plants whose pots and tubs had been crammed into the tiny paved space at random rather than an organized garden—was watered but not well trimmed. An old woman stood on a wooden stool to feed finches in one of the dozen cages that hung from every limb big enough to support them. Shaldis took in almost unconsciously the brilliance and newness of her black-and-red silk robes, the complex rolls and jewels in her white hair, and the soft, well-cared-for hands.

  A member of the Jothek household, and an important one.

  The old woman turned around and gave a start at the sight of her “Who are you?” And then, taking a closer look: “Ah. You must be the Raven girl my bath woman was telling me about. Come to see my son?”

  “I . . .” Shaldis put two and two together in her mind and made a deep salaam. “No, my lady. That is, I didn’t come to see Lord Mohrvine, but Lord Aktis.”

  “Lord.” The woman sniffed. “Lord for a fisherman’s son? For a boy born in a hut on a marsh? Who I’m told can’t so much as ward mosquitoes away these days . . . can he?” Her eyes were sharp under beautifully shaped white brows, a clear, light hue like very green turquoises.

  “I don’t
know, lady.”

  The old woman studied her a moment more at the distance of a few feet—the courtyard itself, even without the tubbed orange trees and statues half hidden in cloaks of vine, was barely the size of a medium-sized bedroom. Then she hobbled closer and took Shaldis’s arm. She’d lost many of her teeth, but those that remained looked white and strong, and her flesh smelled of the mild aromatics of very fine ointment. “Help me inside, child,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

  As they passed through the open door of a beautifully appointed wine room, a servant woman hurried to relieve Shaldis of the slight burden of the old woman’s weight; the old woman waved her impatiently aside. “Fetch us tea, if you’d be of any use,” she commanded. And, when the servant bowed herself back through the curtain of embroidered black wool, the old woman said, “I don’t trust a one of them.” She lowered her voice. “It’s true, then, that women can do magic now? Some women? It’s not market prattle?”

  “It’s true.” Shaldis felt uneasy under the scrutiny of those wise, calculating eyes. She helped the old woman to sit on a divan of plain black cushions, and was herself gestured to a stool covered in a sheepskin dyed red after the fashion of the nomad sheikhs. But before she could draw away, the old woman’s hand tightened on her arm.