Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  The mob closed around the house, hammering the door and window shutters, cursing and screaming and pelting the walls with garbage. Others gleefully tore up the papers their quarry had dropped, or hurled the tablets into the air. Jethan drew Shaldis aside.

  “He’s all right,” he said.

  Footfalls thudded in the narrow street; someone shouted, “Here, what’s all this, then?” and people began to disperse, fast, in the face of the constables of the watch.

  “Who is he?”

  Jethan shrugged.

  “Xolnax’s clerk.” Melon Girl appeared behind them in the narrow street, what appeared to be an entire garden of silk flowers flourishing tipsily in her garish curls. “Urla, he calls himself, Urnate Urla.”

  Shaldis startled, remembering the face now, remembering the blue eyes. He’d had a beard in those days, and the long pigtail Earth Wizards generally wore. His hair had been black then, too. She recalled him as a soft-voiced man, always ready to lay a mouse ward on a kitchen or mosquito spells on windows. He’d been very well off then, and a good wizard.

  “I remember him when I was a little girl coming into Mama’s kitchen to witch it against rats.” Rosemallow Woman joined them as they walked back around the twisting alley to Greasy Yard, one of her little girls—Five-Fish, a delicate, fair child—on her hip. Her mouth twisted a little at the sound of his name. “He slipped a candy to me when I was fourteen that gave me dreams of him—what dreams!—for weeks, and when I’d see him I couldn’t hardly help myself, wanting him to kiss me . . . ugh!” She flinched, and hugged Five-Fish tight. “Later on I found out I wasn’t the only girl in the neighborhood he’d lay those spells on, either.”

  Shaldis looked over her shoulder at the shut door of the house, the closed shutters. It was true, she thought, that he’d always been giving candies to children. She’d only thought he was kindly at the time.

  Maybe Jethan wasn’t the only naive one.

  “Serves him right.” Melon Girl cast a speculative glance up and down Jethan’s strapping form. “Preket’s like that, you know, our landlord—not a wizard, I don’t mean, but if I had a little boy I’d move. I guess just because a man’s a wizard doesn’t mean he’s a decent man. Now old Pomegranate Woman, she’s crazy as a bedbug, and she can write mouse wards that really work and do a little healing . . . . She fixed my cat’s broken foot, anyway.”

  “Like Murder Girl’s foot wouldn’t have healed up anyway?” demanded Rosemallow Woman with good-natured sarcasm. “Pomegranate Woman claims she can make rocks and bricks and pieces of old glass talk to her too.” She turned to Shaldis. “Pomegranate Woman lives out in the ruins, and she has this imaginary pig—she used to have a real pig, but he got run over by a cart about five years ago, so now she has an imaginary one. Old Urla, he’d always act so meek, but you could tell he thought it gave him rights over everyone, just because he could do healing. Like it was something he’d done, instead of something the gods gave him just for coming out of his mother’s belly like everybody else. And now there he is, working for a couple pennies a week for a crocodile like Xolnax.”

  She glanced back in the direction of the shut door, the mud-spattered house, hidden now by the turn of the walls. Lohar could still be heard shouting alternately at the constables and at Urnate Urla behind his enclosing walls: “Not until the king bows to Nebekht will Nebekht open the skies to the people! Not until Nebekht is acknowledged in all his greatness, his infinite greatness, will the rains return . . . .”

  Melon Girl sniffed. “The gods only know how he’s getting laid these days,” and ducked into her room to get herself ready for business.

  “I wonder,” said Shaldis softly.

  She spent the remainder of the evening alternately sitting before the little brass mirror, staring into her reflection—staring past her reflection—and meditating on the Sigil of Sisterhood, and writing Sigil after Sigil of Deep Listening on the walls. But her concentration kept sliding away, broken by bouts of dizziness. At last she gave up trying to scry the events within the room and concentrated on conjuring the Summer Concubine’s name and image. Trying to summon her, to warn her—trying at the same time to put from her mind all the things that tugged it away: the foul memory of the spells that whispered in the door of her Citadel room, the glowing ward sign on the peeling stucco wall of House Jothek, and the sharp wary eyes of the Red Silk Lady. He’ll use you as he uses everyone . . . as Oryn will use you.

  Tried to put aside the resentment that pulled at her heart with every groan of the Citadel’s horns, with every whisper of chanting that the desert wind brought down from the bluff.

  The red God Sun, as it was called—the sun’s final name—seemed to swell and flatten as it touched the waters of the lake, slipped away out of sight and gave way to cloudless night.

  “The Red Silk Lady is a Raven, like us.”

  “Good heavens!” The Summer Concubine sat, a little numbly, on the leather cushion before her dressing table and stared in surprise into the depths of the mirror where she saw reflected not her own face, but that of Raeshaldis of the Sun Mages. “My dear, are you all right?” she asked seeing in the next moment—the light where the girl sat was not at all good; the tiny glimmer of a tallow-soaked reed, it looked like—how haggard her face was, how hollow her eyes and checks. “Have you been ill?”

  “Not exactly ill. I was poisoned; I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

  “Poisoned?” Having found, at last, the small talismans marked with a jumble of Earth Wizard signs that had been buried beneath the scaffolding, she and Soth had spent the day riding with a small detachment of guards through the Dead Hills searching for the place where the talismans had been ensorcelled. Her body ached now from the hours spent in the saddle, and she thought with longing of the baths in the Summer Pavilion, and of her horoscope for the day: You will yearn for that which is far away.

  The horoscope had added the admonition that rose pink was a lucky color for water-influenced Five-Rabbits—which the Summer Concubine was—to wear.

  “It might have been Ahure,” said Shaldis. “Lord Jamornid may be thinking of hiring me—I don’t know how he knows I’ve been having trouble in the Citadel, but something made him think I might be looking for a new job. And Ahure knows he’s damn well not going to he able to convince anyone of his powers once he’s out of that fake lair of his. And it could have been Aktis, acting under orders from Lord Mohrvine, who’ll do just about anything to undercut the king’s power. And it might have been Red Silk Lady, who apparently hasn’t told Mohrvine about her powers and isn’t going to.”

  “Did she tell you this?”

  “Not in so many words. Someone in her household definitely has magic. There are ward signs at her gate, and in the walkway leading there. She claims to ‘suspect’ one of the servants, as if a woman like her wouldn’t have found out the moment she ‘suspected.’ She said that Mohrvine uses everyone who comes to his hand, and I got the impression she wasn’t about to be used. She may have poisoned me simply because she thought I suspected. She hides in a run-down courtyard at the far end of the compound which I don’t think would be the case if Mohrvine was using her powers. As far as I could tell, the courtyard isn’t guarded. And the ward signs she used to protect it are Pyromancer signs—and badly distorted ones at that—instead of the earth signs Aktis would have taught her.”

  “The Red Silk Lady,” the Summer Concubine murmured, and ran her hands through her dusty hair. All her fears and apprehensions—everything Oryn had said to her about the delicate balance of power with Mohrvine and the other clan lords, based on the enslavement of the teyn—came back to her, turning her cold and ill.

  “I sent Jethan out to the aqueduct camp with a message, in case I couldn’t get through to you at all,” Raeshaldis went on. “I wrote it in blood on a brass circle and then wiped it away—the spellmaster at the college once told me that was the easiest kind of message for a mage to summon back. He should get to you sometime tonight.”


  Just in time to wake me up urgently, thought the Summer Concubine with an inward sigh. Jethan was such a desperately conscientious young man that telling him tactfully that his message could wait until morning might not work.

  “Did you learn anything of Turquoise Woman ?” she asked after a time. “Did you find anything with your scrying?”

  “Not yet. I’ll try again in the morning—I think the poison is still interfering with my ability to work. But it’s got to be the same person who attacked me. I can’t imagine a woman with power being carried away by someone who had none. It isn’t necessarily someone from the college, either. Anyone with power could have gotten past the Citadel’s gates. And another thing: According to Rosemallow Woman, there’s another Raven who lives in the ruins out beyond the Slaughterhouse, someone named Pomegranate Woman. I think I need to find her, warn her . . . and warn Xolnax’s daughter Amber Girl as well, though the gods know how I’m going to get to Amber Girl. Xolnax apparently keeps her pretty close.”

  “Have you heard anything about her working magic?”

  Shaldis shook her head. “I haven’t had much time to ask, but I think if anyone in the district knew about it, they’d have said. It stands to reason he’d keep it a secret, with the True Believers so strong around here. What did you find out about the aqueduct? Did you sense a power that’s . . . kind of cold and jangly feeling? Prickly, like the smell of the air before a storm?”

  The Summer Concubine shook her head. The smell of lamb stew and fresh breads filled the tent, mingling with that of steam and scented oil. Blessed rest, blessed quiet, save for Jasmine and Lupine giggling together as they set out the wash things in the tent’s opulent silk-curtained bath cubicle. Oryn would sup with Bax and Ykem again. All the Summer Concubine wanted to do was sleep, but she knew he’d be in late and would need, like Raeshaldis, to know what she’d found.

  “The marks I found were indistinct, only conduits, Soth said, for power that was raised elsewhere, with a circle of some sort. That way the mage had only to place the talismans—the hex marks were written on copper dequin coins—without having to divert his attention from the cloak that kept him safe from the guards. We searched for such a thing among the tombs of the Dead Hills. There was one, a Hosh Dynasty tomb, the only south-facing tomb on the hills, that looks out over the desert. Every time we passed its entrance we both felt there was some power there, but we couldn’t find a way in. We’ll go back there tomorrow. Where are you now, dearest? Are you somewhere safe’

  “Where’s safe?” returned Shaldis. “Whoever it is who’s after me, he knows to look in the Citadel. I’m in Turquoise Woman’s room.” She gestured behind her. The Summer Concubine saw that the chamber, tiny as it was, had been further divided by muslin sheets hung on a rope, like crude curtains, which when drawn across would officially separate the room into seryak and harem. “I’m with Jethan, except I sent him with the message to you. Who let him in the guards, anyway? He should be a nursemaid!”

  The Summer Concubine smiled in spite of the day’s weariness and anxiety. “Will you be all right there? You could go to the palace if you don’t feel safe in the Citadel.”

  “If you can figure out a way to keep my presence unknown to the servants, that might be a good idea, but offhand, without you there, I’d be afraid to try it. At least down here I’m known as someone else—I’m supposed to be Jethan’s girlfriend Golden Eagle Girl—and nobody knows I’m a Raven instead of a golden eagle.”

  That explained, thought the Summer Concubine with another, inner, smile, the too-pink stains of cochineal on Raeshaldis’s thin cheeks, and the fact that her long brown hair, formerly slicked back into the tight knot demanded by Sun Mage austerity, now lay in loose heavy waves over her shoulders. She’d changed clothes, too, into a startling green-and-gold dress that revealed curves and softness unguessed in her rangy body.

  “I’ll try again tomorrow to see what I can see here, after I’ve had time to sleep and let the last of the poison work out of my system. I told Rosemallow Woman I had a former boyfriend who might be looking for me, and she’s got a couple of her children recruited to keep an eye on the place through the night. I don’t know how safe that’ll make me, but I don’t know how safe anywhere is. I’ve put every ward and wyrd I can think of on the door and window bolts, but all I can do is hope for the best.”

  Looking at the smudges under Shaldis’s eyes, the Summer Concubine would not have bet a worn hairpin on the girl’s being able to stay awake for more than a few minutes after she put aside her scrying mirror. Shaldis was right: Trying to install her anywhere in the House of the Marvelous Tower, now that the gates were shut for the night, would be risky, and there was no way to keep servants from talking. So she only said, “Speak to me through the mirror tomorrow at”—she was about to say dawn, then took another took at the girl’s exhausted face and amended it—“noon. Just so that I know you’re all right. Do you need a message sent to the Citadel?”

  Shaldis sighed and shook her head. “Until I know who’s after me,” she said, “I have to assume that it could be anyone, in the Citadel or outside. Anyone who has power. The gods know what Hathmar’s thinking: I only had a few hours’ leave yesterday to speak to you. I may not even be welcome there when I go back.” She spoke casually, but the Summer Concubine heard the strain in her voice.

  She is isolated, and terrified, she thought, cut off from the Sun Mages for whom she traded her family. Divorced from family and friends.

  She wondered where she got her strength.

  “Whatever happens,” the Summer Concubine said firmly, “I—or the king—will deal with Hathmar. You won’t lose your place in the college over what you’re doing. So sleep well, dearest. We’ll speak in the morning, and all will come out right.”

  Shaldis smiled, like marble melting into life. “Thank you.”

  The mirror went dark.

  TWENTY

  Through the following day—from dawn when, in spite of her exhaustion, she woke as all Sun Mages wake with the coming of the light, until the horns of the Citadel ceased with darkness—Raeshaldis examined every inch of wall and floor in Turquoise Woman’s room. Examined them with not just one spell, not just one set of instructions and sigils and alignments of power, but with all twenty-five, even those that she hadn’t been able to make work at the Citadel.

  And found nothing.

  “It’s maddening,” she said to the Summer Concubine when at noon she settled into the coolest corner of the room with oranges, bread and oil, and the mirror she’d gone out to the Grand Bazaar to buy as soon as the day grew light. “I know he put spells on the latch. But I can’t get a thing. I nearly burned the place down calling fire to make sure the poison was out of my system. Were you able to ask Soth about spells I might use?”

  “I did. He said he’d write them up today—he was barely awake when I spoke to him this morning, poor man, and green with headache—and send them to you by way of Jethan. Jethan orders you to go back to the Citadel at once . . . . ”

  “Of course he does.”

  “And he was horrified that you’d spent the night in Turquoise Woman’s rooms without protection. I take it all was well?”

  Shaldis nodded, though her dreams had been foul. She’d waked again and again, sweating and trembling, the buzzing horror of remembered evil scalding her, only to find the darkness peaceful, or as peaceful as it ever got in the Slaughterhouse.

  “Did you find a way into the Hush tomb yet?” she asked, for she saw that the Summer Concubine sat, dressed and veiled for riding, in the narrow shade of a wadi somewhere. The concubine shook her head.

  “I understand many of these old tombs are connected by grave robbers’ tunnels, but we haven’t made much headway. It is . . . a fearful place. Most of the old magic that was laid on the tombs—the curses, and wards, and those strange old spell glyphs against what seem to be local spirits that the Hosh believed in—most of that’s dead now. But we’re going carefully all the same. Soth told
me last night what he remembered of protective wyrds, but I should hate to find he’s forgotten something important.”

  After the concubine’s image faded from the mirror, Shaldis sat still for a time, gazing around her at the stubbornly uncommunicative walls. Her head ached and she felt exhausted, though it was barely past noon. Her shoulders were stiff from the repeated gestures of passing her hands over every square inch of wall surface, and her palms were rough and black with transferred dirt.

  I need to get out of here for a while, she thought. I need to rest.

  At a guess it would be long after dark before Jethan returned, and then it would be all to do again with whatever sigils Soth sent.

  Voices in the yard. Looking out into the harsh sunlight, Shaldis saw Melon Girl and Rosemallow Woman emerge from the doorway opposite, bundles under their arms made of towels, scrapers and gourds of oil, ointment and soap. Shaldis snatched up her own veils and the bath supplies she’d purchased at the same time as the mirror that morning, and caught up with the two women—without the slightest appearance of hurry—as they were going out the gate.

  “I swear I don’t know what men think women are,” she said, falling into step with them as they stepped into the street. “Or doesn’t ‘come with me and I’ll take care of you’ mean ‘I’ll let you know if I’m going to disappear some night’? Here’s your mirror back—I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the loan. Are you on your way to the baths? Can I go with you? I have no idea where things are in this neighborhood.”