Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “But aren’t they just laborers and layabouts?” As a child she would have said, They’re just laborers and layabouts, but Chrysanthemum Lady had impressed upon her that every remark addressed to a man had to be in the form of a question that he could answer, information that he could impart, and it had grown to be a habit with her. And a little to her surprise, her father warmed toward her as men did toward Honeysuckle Lady; even her father, she thought with an inward smile, couldn’t resist being a pedagogue.

  “Not anymore, obviously, if the uppermost lords of the House Akarian have become members. And don’t speak ill of laborers and layabouts, child,” he added. “They have their uses. Particularly as the wells run low, and that imbecile nephew of mine makes new demands for a project that will cripple every house from highest to lowest, and bind every man to his service if it succeeds. Tell me, child. Would you object to a husband from the House Akarian?”

  She blushed again, and turned her face away. I knew it, she thought, I knew it, and felt again Iorradus’s warm, virile touch on her fingertips. Saw his face as she’d conjured it in her dreams, bending over hers . . . .

  The blossoming of the roses of desire.

  She’d seen Iorradus’s face in the few minutes she’d snatched that morning, between her own scrub and that of Opal Girl, when she’d taken a mirror, as wizards were supposed to be able to do, and had gazed into it in the semidark of their attic room.

  He’d been ankle deep in the straw of a stable, feeding an apple to a black mare while his groom stood smiling by. A long-legged colt, black like the mare, wobbled about in the straw, nuzzling the young man’s pockets for treats. The sight had startled her; unexpected, tiny, distant, like a miniature painted in glass. But the fact of the vision itself didn’t surprise her. It was like something she had dreamed about. Something she had always known. Looking back on it now, a few hours later, she wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t been a dream.

  Except that never in her life had she heard a ballad that involved a wizard calling someone’s image in a crystal and seeing him in his stable feeding a horse.

  Iorradus had looked unutterably dear, with the first slant of the early sunlight haloing his head in fire. His linen tunic had been open at the throat, the points of his collarbone visible, his sleeves turned up over tanned forearms.

  Know that Iorradus dreamed all night of you.

  The roses of desire . . .

  She felt her face pinken again.

  Maybe it was only a dream. Maybe the little conjurations she’d started to do were only dreams: the powder she’d prepared, and put into his tea at the supper, that Honeysuckle Lady, the hag, had intercepted; the incense and sigil and ashes she’d burned, to put herself in his dreams. The ants in Honeysuckle Lady’s room. They didn’t let wizards marry. If she spoke of any of this to her father it would put paid to any hope of being Iorradus’s wife, not to mention that if her father was courting Nebekht’s prophet he probably wouldn’t welcome the news that his daughter was trying to see her beloved’s face in mirrors.

  It probably was only a dream. And the ants only an accident. She had used honey in making the marks, after all.

  “No,” she murmured, barely audibly—not as a Pearl Woman should speak, she knew, but she was not able to say more. “No, I wouldn’t object.”

  “Good,” purred her father. “Excellent. Tomorrow night there will be a supper for Lord Akarian—and some of his guests—at House Jothek. I think it would be appropriate if you waited upon us there. Call it a test of your training.” He smiled. “Now drink your tea.”

  NINETEEN

  What’s furniture got to do with anything?” asked Jethan again when Shaldis finally opened her eyes.

  It was evening. The whole world smelled of dust and greasy cooking.

  The children outside were still screaming, but a voice Shaldis recognized as Rosemallow Woman’s was yelling at them to shut up.

  “To make it look like you’re not just staying here for a few days on somebody’s orders.” Shaldis sat up, waited for the room to stop swaying, then fished in her satchel for her spell tablets. There were still twenty-five of them. Her hands shook but she felt better, and ravenously hungry. “What did you tell the landlord?”

  “Preket? I didn’t tell him anything. I told him I wanted to rent the room. The Summer Concubine isn’t back from the aqueduct yet, by the way; I sent one of the children to ask around the market whether the king’s procession had returned.”

  “Curse.” Shaldis looked around her. The room was more barren than any cell in a barracks. There wasn’t even a lamp: just the water jar, the gourd cup, the pillowless blanket and a broom. The broom was typical of Jethan. The dirt floor was spotless, the hearth clean as a bridal chamber. “And the people in the court didn’t ask questions?”

  “What business is it of theirs?” He looked surprised at the thought that they’d even take notice of a new neighbor.

  Shaldis rolled her eyes. “What business is it of theirs that Turquoise Woman bolted her door during the day? What business is it who Rosemallow Woman is sleeping with, or what names Preket’s wife calls him when they fight?” She’d heard both of these topics discussed outside in the yard—even with the door shut voices carried like plague in the summer—during the hours she’d lain between sleep and waking. “In a court like this everybody knows everybody’s business. You might as well just hang a sign on the door saying, I’m Just Staying Here for a Purpose. New bedding, new water jar, no apparent work. Of course everybody here knows you’re working for someone.”

  “So!” Jethan settled himself cross-legged on the floor in the corner farthest from the bed, his back straight as if on parade. Shaldis wondered what he’d done here for the past three days other than sweep the floor.

  “So people talk about anything that seems unusual to them. And it’s not going to take long for our friend, whoever he is, to learn that the Summer Concubine is asking questions, especially if he isn’t a Sun Mage after all. From her to me isn’t a big leap, which means that as a hiding place this is about as secretive as my room in the Citadel.” She finished sorting the tablets into which sigils she could make work and which she couldn’t, and pulled up her spattered and filthy outer robe—which had doubled as a blanket over an immensely proportioned and very dirty cotton nightdress—around her shoulders. “Don’t you have any coffee here?”

  “I don’t drink it.” The young guardsman’s tone implied that neither should women who were proper women.

  “That explains a lot about you. Can you make yourself useful and get me some from the café near the Temple of Phon south of the road? Get me some food, too, if you would.” She found her belt and purse on the heap of her robe beside the mattress and dug in the purse for money, which Sun Mages weren’t supposed to carry. There wasn’t much left of the little hoard of dequins she’d had in her pockets when she’d fled her grandfather’s house. In addition to nightlong nausea on top of a day without anything to eat except a few vanilla wafers, some apricot paste, and a lot of tea—poisoned, at that—she had worked more magic yesterday than she had ever done continuously outside the Summoning of the Rain, and as usual felt that if she couldn’t get sweets she would die. Women weren’t supposed to wear purses, either; a respectable woman was to look to her husband for money, as Sun Mages were to look to the college. It always gave Shaldis a sense of exhilaration to handle money like a man. “On the way back could you stop at that slop-shop on the corner of Hot Pillow Lane and get me a dress and some veils? I can’t keep a cloak over myself the whole time I’m here.”

  “I thought you could do any sort of magic you chose,” retorted Jethan, and took his departure before she could reply, pointedly ignoring the handful of copper and silver she held out to him.

  Beyond the room’s shut door she heard Melon Girl call out, “ ’Morning, Excellency,” in a languid voice, with a dip in it as inviting as if she’d pulled up her dress—which Shaldis reflected she might very well have also done, for all the
good it was likely to do her. His footfalls neither paused nor altered stride as Shaldis’s mage-born hearing traced them across the yard:

  “Xolnax’s boys never heard of him,” she heard the prostitute remark quietly as the young guardsman’s tread lost itself in the yammer of the street.

  “You stupid sow—Xolnax would never give one of his goons money for a new blanket,” retorted Rosemallow Woman. “I think he’s got to be from out of town.”

  “You mean Udon’s gang from Reeds, or one of the boys from over the White Walls?” She lowered her voice still further. “Why send a man here? You think they’d try for a takeover?”

  “Well, if the wells over there are drying quicker than they are here . . .”

  Shaldis grinned to herself, wrapped Jethan’s red cloak around her shoulders and strolled to the door with the hem of it dragging. Rosemallow Woman sat next to her door spinning wool with a simple weight and distaff, while Melon Girl sat next to her painting her fingernails, neither woman veiled and neither of them taking the slightest heed of Zarb and his friend Vorm drinking in Zarb’s doorway and talking about cockfights, as they appeared to have been doing for decades. Melon Girl looked up and called out to her, “Hey,” and Shaldis idled over, doing her best to walk like the girls in the market.

  “Hey,” she replied. “Thanks for the loan of the dress.” She flipped the sleeve of the nightdress, which she’d deduced had to belong to the short, plump Melon Girl. The young harlot’s round and extremely pink painted face broke into a lazy smile.

  “I asked your boyfriend what you wanted a dress for. You all right now? He said you were sick, and cold with it . . . .”

  “Honey, I thought I’d shiver to death.” Shaldis propped a shoulder companionably against the wall. “You probably saved my life. I’d have paid money to see Jethan borrowing it, though,” she added, with a giggle she hoped was flirtatious. “I mean, he’s a sweet boy, but wherever he’s from, they raise ’em strict there.”

  The other women laughed. Shaldis supposed she should have realized that the neighbors would jump to the conclusion not that Jethan was a guardsman, but that Jethan—obviously trained in war, obviously well fed, obviously doing nothing to earn his own living—was a bullyboy for one of the city’s gang leaders staking out the district.

  I’ll have to tell him, she thought. And then, Maybe I’d better not. Whatever unconvincing story he’ll come up with if anyone asks will sound a whole lot more like a genuine lie if he’s not trying to make himself sound like a thug at the same time.

  “You from town, sweetheart?” asked Melon Girl. “We thought you’d be back, seeing you here with old Stone-Face Jethan the other day.”

  Shaldis shrugged. “Over by the Bazaar,” she said. She was tempted to claim origin outside the city—White Lake or the Lake of Reeds—but wasn’t sure she could get the accent right. Besides, she didn’t know enough of the intervillage affairs outside the Yellow City, and to pretend knowledge was simply asking to be tripped up. She ran a self-conscious hand over the straggling lacquered snags of her undone hair, added, “Boy, did I have a night last night . . . . I know it’s asking a lot, but could one of you lend me a mirror? I feel like such a teyn . . . .”

  “Sweetheart, don’t we all have mornings like this?” It was at least five hours past noon, but Shaldis groaned and nodded in agreement, and Melon Girl heaved herself to her feet and trotted to her own room, which was next to that of Rosemallow Woman. Shaldis extemporized a name for herself—Golden Eagle Girl—and a brief and fictitious history of meeting Jethan at the Hospitality of BoSaa Café, and listened to Rosemallow Woman’s account of Preket the landlord’s iniquities and what a nuisance it was to live so close to the Temple of Nebekht, with lunatics coming and going all night and the absolute stink of the animals they were always killing there, and Lohar rampaging through every few days to throw stones at Turquoise Woman’s door.

  “The poor girl never did anybody any harm! Not like that Corn-Tassel Woman, who was always claiming she could do this or that with her magic. She all but killed Normac’s poor dog, putting a spell on it to shut it up from barking just because a friend of hers asked her to. Then Normac’s house was robbed because the poor thing couldn’t make a sound besides just a little hoarse wheeze, and it broke my heart to hear it try to bark. She couldn’t take the spell off it, either, after that.”

  “Cattail Woman is worse.” Melon Girl emerged with a cheap brass mirror, which she held out to Shaldis. “She lives over in the Fishmarket, and she’s always doing things ‘for your own good,’ like making her friends’ husbands impotent after they’ve had a fight—”

  “Like that’s going to make them friendlier,” put in Rosemallow Woman.

  “—or putting ward spells on the whole neighborhood that are supposed to drive away rats but that make everybody’s chickens lay out and their pigs stray as well. Sometimes I think old Lohar has a point about women doing magic bringing nothing but trouble. At least wizards don’t do anything much besides healing and spell warding.”

  Shaldis returned with the mirror to Jethan’s room, and settled herself once again on his blanket. On the two or three occasions that she’d been instructed in scrying, it had been with a crystal specially ensorcelled to show her faraway scenes. She’d never attempted to communicate with another mage through it. But before all else, the Summer Concubine had to be told of yesterday’s events. She was still trying to summon the concubine’s image in the mirror when Jethan returned, bearing a round wicker basket of bread, fruit, and soft goat-milk cheese, a little sack of coffee beans, and a mortar, pestle, pan and coffeepot all wrapped together in a netted string shopping bag. He also had a horrifying green-and-yellow-striped dress.

  “It was the only thing they had,” he said into Shaldis’s appalled silence. He frowned at her expression in the dense gloom of advancing evening. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, if I needed money in a hurry.” She held the thin, tight, low-cut bosom to her shallow breasts, inspected the grimy golden bows on the front, the clinging petticoats and ostentatious, front-fastening girdle.

  “I got you veils.” He held them out. They were pink and almost transparent. “I think it’s pretty,” he added, and under his defensive tone she detected chagrin that she didn’t approve of his choice.

  “You’re supposed to.”

  Shaldis changed clothes while Jethan resolutely looked at the wall. “I’ll have to go out later and buy some paint, I suppose,” she said, settling once more on the floor and picking up the mirror again. She had no idea how such a thing was applied—her veils looked like laundry on a wash line. “By the way. I told the neighbors that I’m your girlfriend. Golden Eagle Girl.”

  “Golden Eagle Girl?” She didn’t know whether he was more disgusted by the name or by the idea.

  “Why can’t a woman be named after something splendid?”

  “Eagles eat carrion,” pointed out Jethan. “And no woman should be able to—”

  “Devil spawn!” roared a piercing voice from the street beyond the court. “Transgressor! It is your stubbornness, your wicked willfulness, that has brought down drought and the wrath of Nebekht on us all!”

  “Not again,” groaned Jethan. “This happened last night too. If I hear Lohar one more time about wizards . . .”

  “Wait a minute—who’s he calling a wizard?” Shaldis yanked the larger of the two pink veils back over her hair, wrapped the smaller around her face as she pulled open the door and strode across the dusty stink of the court. The children were already streaming through the gate to watch the fun, the men who’d been drinking in the doorway ambling after.

  Most of the people gathered in Little Pig Alley were of the same type: loafers, or the lowest type of artisans taking a break from their work. A couple of men from the slaughterhouse were with them, flies circling the blood on their hands and clothing; the women who did the flensing tagged along with their knives still in hand. Lohar marched ahead, managing to keep up his t
irade even while he bent and picked up rocks, dog filth, and broken bottles from the roadway to pelt his target, a stooped, balding man whose tight-screwed little face was gouged with bitter wrinkles of resentment and hate.

  “. . . have not repented, have not seen even yet the sin of your blindness, the sin which draws the righteous punishment of Nebekht upon the whole of the Valley of the Lakes!”

  “You bastards think I asked to give up my power?” screamed back the little man. His voice was old and cracked, his movements stiff, and something about him snagged at Shaldis’s memory, as if she knew him. “You think I like writing Xolnax’s letters for him? You think I like living in a stinking hovel?”

  “Still you seek to regain what was rightfully taken from you, Earth Wizard! Dirt wizard! Dung wizard! This is your blindness! This is your sin!”

  “Damned right it’s my sin and if I still had it in me I’d put a wyrd on your bowels that’d have you praying day and night to Nebekht for relief!” The man called Earth Wizard turned at bay before his house, jabbed a skinny finger at Lohar and his followers, who had swelled, Shaldis was disconcerted to see, into a crowd that blocked the whole of the street. “You’re a crazy man, you know that? I know you, Lohar! Listen to me, all of you! This man started drinking ijnis ten years ago, he was so afraid he’d lose his powers!”

  “Lies! All lies!” Lohar had a voice like storm wind in the Eastern Cliffs. He flung up his arms, face distorted in a popeyed grimace of passion. “In his house he still keeps the devil books, the vile books of spells, seeking to regain that which the great Nebekht rightfully took away.”

  “And how rightfully did your great Iron-Dicked One take it away from you, pal?” The little man ducked, flinched as a rain of rocks and bottles shattered on the wall around him, bloodying his face and upraised arms. He dropped the satchel he carried, record tablets and scrolls tumbling into the dirt of the street, fumbled with a latchkey at the door. The mob, encouraged, began to fling half bricks and chunks of adobe and tiles. “I’m watching you! I’m watching you all!” screamed the former Earth Wizard. “Just wait until one of you wants to borrow money from my master, or buy water—damn it!” He slipped through the door of the little house, and Shaldis, stretching out mage-born senses, heard the scrape of a bar over the door, the scratching of furniture shoved against it.