Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “I think one of them’s that way.” The old lady’s voice sank to a whisper, and her huge green eyes darted toward the door. “One of the servants, I mean.”

  “You mean mage-born?” It was a word that had application only to a male birth; there was no similar term that applied to a female child. Shaldis sank down onto the sheepskin stool.

  “I’m called the Red Silk Lady,” said her hostess, and Shaldis’s eyes widened: She’d heard the name. Now that she thought about it, she did remember that Mohrvine was the son of the Red Silk Lady by Oryn Jothek I, the old generalissimo’s final passion after he’d defeated the last of the Akarian kings and taken the throne for himself. The daughter of a deep-desert hunter—though sometimes she claimed a sheikh for a father—the woman had been notorious in her own right for her extravagance, her intrigues and the stubbornness her lover had shown in keeping her by him in the face of all his advisers’ exasperated urging. The old grandmother of her grandfather’s cook had been full of such tales, and Shaldis, fascinated, had been the only one in the household to listen to her.

  “Yes, I see you stare. It’s good to know one’s name has survived—though I’m not what I was, I can tell you that, girl. But I’ve seen a thing or two, and I swear one of the girls here—and I don’t know which—is working magic.” She shook her head, the rubies in her lacquered hair twinkling. “And I won’t speak of it, either, to my son. Nor must you, nor to any.”

  “Why not?” The darkness of her room at the Citadel came back to her, the whisper of her name at the window.

  The servant “girl” came back bearing a wicker tray with tea things. In contrast to Aktis’s strong, black honey-flavored smoke tea, this was the finest green leaf tip from the hills to the northwest of the Lake of Reeds, light as rosewater to the taste. One did not, Shaldis knew, pollute such delicacy with honey, and none was offered. On her knees the servant, who was probably old enough to be Shaldis’s mother, offered first Shaldis, then her mistress, a plate of flat crisp vanilla cakes, then a bowl of figs and nuts.

  Only when the woman was gone did the Red Silk Lady say, “And put her into my son’s hands? It’s not a fate I’d wish on even the silly sluts he sends to wait on me. Tell me if those cakes aren’t to your liking.” Her tone held a world of grief for the cook if Shaldis so much as grimaced, and in fact they were excellent. “He uses everyone, my son. Everyone who comes to his hand. As that fat custard Oryn is using that skinny concubine what’s-her-name, the one Greatsword paid too much for . . . and as he means to use you, if you’ll let him.”

  “I owe the king . . .” Shaldis hesitated, remembering the afternoon heat as she’d stumbled through the streets with the tears of grief and rage still on her face, wondering what she’d do if the mages at the college didn’t take her. Wondering where she could go that wasn’t back to her grandfather’s house. She remembered looking at the prostitutes as she passed them, bored, young, unveiled faces in the open windows, lolling limbs in tight-fitting dresses of yellow and red. Remembered wondering how one became a prostitute and whether it would be worse than going back.

  Even the echo of that despair was like the breath of the abyss blowing over her face.

  “I owe the king everything.”

  “You think Hathmar wouldn’t have jumped to take you on without Oryn’s say-so?”

  Aktis had said much the same. But they hadn’t taken Xolnax’s amber-eyed daughter, and the Summer Concubine had said she was good.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  Finches fluttered in from the garden, black and white and red. The Red Silk Lady chased them away from the crumbs with a wave.

  “Don’t let yourself be used, child,” said the lady. “That’s all I’m saying. Don’t let Oryn—or the Summer Concubine, who can charm the birds off the trees—make you think that you owe either of them one solitary thing for sending you to be trained in arts that will make you into a more effective weapon for them. Watch out for yourself, think for yourself. The favorite—is it true what I’ve heard, that she has power too?”

  Shaldis nodded.

  “Is she any good?”

  “I don’t know, lady. Are you any good?”

  “What? At what?”

  “At staying alive in the desert. At climbing a tree. At keeping out of sight of . . . of someone who wants to kill you.” (A black shadow in darkness—a burning in the air like the jangling of chains.) “I don’t think she knows how good she is, any more than any of us do, until we have to find it out.”

  The Red Silk Lady sank back onto her cushions again and sipped her tea. “You’re saying you won’t tell me.”

  “I’m saying I don’t know.” Shaldis set her tea aside, with the feeling that Mohrvine wasn’t the only person in the House Jothek who used everyone who came to hand. She hesitated a moment, wondering whether she should speak of matters that might be the Summer Concubine’s secrets in the House of Mohrvine, but she knew instinctively that the concubine would be horrified if she did not. “Thank you very much for the tea, lady. Tell your servants—tell all of them—to watch out. There’s someone—and we don’t know who—who seems to be attacking women-who-do-magic, carrying them off.”

  The old lady startled, then leaned back almost at once. “Are you sure?”

  And Shaldis thought. It’s her.

  She’s the one who made the ward sign.

  She’s the one who has power.

  She knew it. Yet she hadn’t told her son . . . and Aktis’s power must be shrunken to nothing if he didn’t know to tell Mohrvine, either. Her heart beating hard, she said, “Two women so far that we know about have been taken, and there have been two attempts on me.”

  The green eyes narrowed, and the Red Silk Lady folded her big hands, with their rings of ruby and gold. Calculation fleeted behind her veiled glance. For a time she sat so still that the jewels in her snowy hair held the light in steady reflection and did not gleam. “And you have no idea of who this is?”

  Raeshaldis shook her head and stood. “No. Nor why. But it’s filled with hatred and rage, and I fear the women who’ve disappeared were . . . were killed. I tell you this in confidence, lady, so that you may guard yourself—”

  “I’ll tell my girls to guard themselves, yes.” In the dimness of the curtained wine room the old woman’s face was still as ivory. “Whichever of them is indeed the Raven’s wife. Flower!” She clapped her hands and the servant woman appeared again. “Show Habnit’s Eldest Daughter to the gate.”

  It wasn’t until she was nearly to the forecourt of the house that Shaldis realized what it meant, that the Red Silk Lady knew her original name.

  She’s had me watched, she thought. Probably from the moment I arrived at the college saying I could do magic.

  She looked back over her shoulder at the passageway among the high red walls, the cramped courtyards, of Mohrvine’s house. But they’d already turned a corner, and when she checked her stride even a half pace the servant woman glanced over her shoulder, as if to make sure she didn’t wander off again.

  Neither hex mark nor amulet could be found on the scaffolding. The sun burned orange and hot above the dust cloud that hid the road. The Summer Concubine’s fingers ached from passing across broken bits of framework and rope and she was coming earnestly to hate the sight of bamboo.

  It has to be in the camp somewhere, she thought. Spreading by touch from a center nearby.

  She looked across at where Soth knelt among the debris, patiently touching, probing, turning over fragments of rope and wood and bamboo in his hands. He moved slowly and she guessed the former wizard was able to ascertain nothing—certainly nothing through the channels of the magic he had once had. But like a good scholar he was reexamining everything anyway, hoping to see something that in the light of his theoretical knowledge might tell them something, anything, of who had set this hex.

  The same man who had attacked Shaldis?

  Could there be two wizards who had somehow retained their powers in force whe
n all around them was fading?

  The Summer Concubine didn’t know.

  Quietly she said, “Lupine, go see if my lord Soth needs anything, would you, please.” And when the young woman propped her parasol amid the wreckage and picked her way through the debris in the wizard’s direction, the Summer Concubine got to her feet, wrapped herself in the thickest cloak she could summon and moved off through the camp.

  Listening as Soth had taught her to listen. Focusing her mind in the search for whatever trace of magic she might find. Breathing in the scents of the dust and the mortar, the outhouses and the cooking smoke, unraveling those great tangled knots of sensation with the patience of womankind.

  Camels and teyn and engineers. Guy ropes creaking. Jackals rustling in the arroyos, waiting for darkness and the garbage of supper. Shrill voices: A young man in the rough tunic and ragged haircut of the True Believers was haranguing a work gang, whose members had downed tools to listen. “. . . will of Iron-Girdled Nebekht . . . Trust in the care of the commander of the universe . . . . The king has transgressed against his will, taken the part of the devil-hags, the wives of the Raven! Nebekht says to you, Such a man can lead you only to ill!”

  Nebekht says that, does he? Her eyes narrowed. It was one thing to preach the god’s hatred for certain groups, or certain policies of the king. It was quite another to preach against the king himself.

  The wives of the Raven. Devil-hags. The Summer Concubine remembered the words scribbled on the wall of Turquoise Woman’s room.

  Was that what this attacker, this stalker, called them?

  She closed her eyes, seeing the little room again, looted and stripped. Seeing, too, Turquoise Woman, swarthy and neat-featured like the countrywomen but with lovely blue-green eyes. So young—only a few years older than the girl Raeshaldis—and so uncertain of herself, feeling her strength and afraid of it, as she had been taught to be afraid.

  Don’t let her be dead, whispered the Summer Concubine to Rohar, god of women. Bring her back. We can’t spare her, any of us.

  But she had been missing for a week now, and in her heart the Summer Concubine knew that her friend was dead.

  A few yards away a teyn slipped on the uneven ground, dropped the load of bricks he carried. With a curse the guard stepped in, struck the stooped, silvery creature a sharp blow across the shoulders with his staff. “Get that picked up, you! Pick up!” And he pointed to the bricks.

  The teyn picked up one brick: adobe, a foot square, and weighing several pounds. He stood unmoving, short and pale furred and bandy legged, naked as a pony, the way all the teyn on the work site worked. Silent, with a silence that seemed to spread. The Summer Concubine saw the other teyn in the moving line stop, turn, look with those flat, slit-pupiled inscrutable eyes.

  They know, she thought. They know that the magic of humankind no longer has power over them.

  If they rose up now—if they attacked the guards, or tried to flee—she, the Summer Concubine, would have to use the spells, twist their minds to subservience again. The way women had been twisted to subservience all those thousands of years.

  She stood unseen, a shadow in the blowing dust, waiting for the attack and wondering what she would do.

  Cast fire at them? Fling spells of fear into their hearts, or spells of pain into their bodies: belly cramps, headaches, weakness in their muscles? Soth was beginning to teach her these spells, to cripple and to shock, to bring down an opponent and leave him incapacitated on the ground. Was teaching her, too, the counterspells, so that she could not be brought down—if her magic was stronger than that of her attacker.

  The thought of using them against beings that had no magic, that had no defense, made her sick.

  Slowly, glowering, the teyn dropped the brick onto its pallet, began to load on the others. The others of its kind stirred again and moved on, resuming their labors on the aqueduct; the Summer Concubine had the sensation of seeing birds or fishes that had moved in the unity of a flock or school break apart, each going its own way again.

  Wondering what she would do when someone—Bax, or Oryn, or one of the clan lords—came to her saying, I need a spell to keep the teyn in line.

  And without the slightest idea of what she would do or say.

  SEVENTEEN

  Be so good as to let Lord Ahure know that it would please me if he would see this young lady.” Lord Jamornid waited until the overdressed page had scampered away for a second time down the long, rather gloomy passageway that led to the Blood Mage’s private court, then inclined his head apologetically to Raeshaldis. “Lord Ahure’s meditations—the exercises he does to keep his spirit fit for the terrible burden of power they must bear—fill a great deal of his day and are of the first importance to him. And to us all, of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Raeshaldis. When Ahure had sent back the page who had announced her at the gate with word that he would see no one, Shaldis had given considerable thought to the wording of the note she’d then sent to Lord Jamornid. A week ago she would probably simply have retreated, too proud and too angry to try to work her way around a snub. Having watched the Summer Concubine in action, however, she had begun to realize that the use of levers to make work easier is not a principle limited to engineering; nor is the use of oil on recalcitrant machines.

  Her note to Lord Jamornid had simply begged him to use his influence with the great mage whose opinion she sought, those of her own preceptors having proven unequal to the complexity of her problem with magic.

  The implication that he, and only he, could be of help to her because he was so important and so gracious had worked better than any charm she’d learned in the College of the Sun Mages. The lord of the wide acres that circled the White Lake—the owner of most of the silver mines in the Mountains of the Moon—had hastened to the porter’s lodge fairly glowing with graciousness. Raeshaldis had been careful to execute her deepest and most womanly salaam.

  “It’s his meditations, and his exercises, you know,” Lord Jamornid went on now, signing one of the troop of pages who had followed his cushioned litter to bring him a crystal candy bowl. “They keep his own powers strong while so many others have flagged in this difficult time.” Two more pages plied enormous fans of ostrich feathers, though the afternoon’s heat, so oppressive a few hours earlier among the high-walled passageways of House Jothek, was already fading. With Lord Jamornid’s arrival Shaldis had been immediately conducted from the porter’s lodge by the gate to a separate, inner chamber obviously furnished for more important visitors. Shaldis shook her head inwardly over the tufted silk rugs, the bright-colored hangings, the gilt-and-porphyry statuary and the elaborate tile work of the walls. Even the House of the Marvelous Tower lacked appointments like these.

  Yet at the same time she wondered what he wanted. She was, when all was said and done, a merchant’s daughter and the newest novice in the College of the Sun Mages. Why the attempt to impress her? Which he was clearly trying to do.

  “That’s what he says, at any rate.” His lordship’s weak brown eyes took on a glow of shallow sincerity. “But I think it has to be something more, don’t you? Some inner might, some depth of soul, like a . . . like a well deeper than others, going straight down into the rock. Have they found anything at the Citadel—among the researchers in their library, I mean—concerning why this is happening? Please, dear girl, have some apricot paste. My own workshops make it from trees that grow only in my gardens. It’s a variety unknown in the rest of the Realm of the Seven Lakes. My great-grandfather discovered it.”

  “It’s delicious.”

  He beamed as if he’d actually had something to do with the production of the confection himself, and straightened the sleeves of a robe sewn with bullion like an idol’s altar cloth. “Everyone tells me how excellent it is—it’s all due to the fruit, you understand, and of course to my chefs. Now, I’ve had scholars searching my library here—which has fully as many volumes as that in the Citadel, five hundred more than even the palace
library—for references concerning the relative strength of magic over time. Did you know I operate a school for youths from my lands? There are two or three who have come up through it who are true geniuses, and they’ve been seeking anything that will help others—those not so fortunate as Ahure, whose powers remain intact.”

  “My lady—miss . . .” The page seemed a little at a loss as to how to speak to an unveiled woman clothed in the robes of a scholar. “My lord wizard says please come.”

  Raeshaldis knew enough to take time for effusive thanks to Lord Jamornid before she followed the boy up the narrow sloping way to Ahure’s gate.

  When she’d returned to the Marvelous Tower after leaving House Jothek, she’d been told that Soth, too had gone. She knew of Ahure by reputation, having only seen him at a distance. As a rule she, like most Sun Mages, found the Blood Mages rather disgusting. Moreover, she had heard that Ahure was as proud as his patron, and difficult to approach.

  But her encounter with the Red Silk Lady had sharpened her sense of urgency about learning as much as she could—as quickly as she could—about the man or creature that had assaulted her. If there was one Raven sister in the city whom even the Summer Concubine had never suspected, there would be others, and their danger would be all the greater.

  In stark contrast to the opulence of the House Jamornid—the intricate mosaics that covered the walls of the porter’s lodge, the gilded marble of the fountain there, the embroidered carpets—the passageway that led from the outer court to Ahure’s quarters was starkly plain, and led between high unbroken walls of dark stone. The corridor was so narrow as to be in perpetual gloom, but the narrowness collected heat, even in wintertime. By this late in the afternoon it was stifling. Shaldis wondered that Ahure would have chosen the place. That he had chosen it was clear to her from even a few minutes’ conversation with Lord Jamornid—the lord would quite clearly have provided any sort of residence the Blood Mage demanded, if for no other reason than to display to the world his own consequence at possessing the best.