Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  As they massaged and oiled and scraped and scrubbed each other in an exceedingly grubby establishment just inside the Eastern Gate, Shaldis picked up whatever gossip she hadn’t managed to glean just by leaving the door open yesterday—more, in fact, than she’d heard since her days of roving the marketplaces as a child. For eighteen months she had been relatively immured, hearing little except those things that affected the Sun Mages. Even of that she hadn’t heard much, since she ate alone and spent most of her spare hours in the library or reading in her rooms. She had heard the masters say things like The people are grumbling because of the drought: now she felt the hot wind of rebellion breathe on the back of her neck.

  “Of course the rich’ll take it all . . . . ”

  “The king’s a fool—Grearsword would never have let things get this bad . . . . ”

  “I think Lohar’s crazy, but he has a point. Why should we be the ones to suffer when it’s the king’s rich friends who’re causing the problem?”

  Shaldis listened uneasily, contributing only as much as would keep the pot stirring as they basked in the breathless heat of the tiny steam chamber (“They’re only using about half the water they used to, and dirty water, too”). Wondering if the king, or any of the clan lords, truly understood how deep the current of blame was that trickled through the poorer districts of town.

  “Of course the Sun Mages are the king’s pets. That’s why he’s not letting other wizards bring the rain.”

  “They could do it if they wanted. They did, didn’t they, right after the full moon. One pissy little shower, and that not enough to get the streets wet hardly . . . .”

  “I swear I thought all our troubles were over . . . .”

  “Well, what do you expect? If this aquaduck brings in water, they’ll quit calling rain completely. Why give people free rain when you can sell water from an aquaduck?”

  “My husband says Greatsword was in full health and lively as you or me the night before he was struck dead without a mark on him . . . .”

  He died of a stroke, Shaldis wanted to shout at her, what does your idiot husband know about anything?

  “Vorm says they’re going to tax where you live: Pay it or they put you in the street and brick up the door . . .

  “I’d like to see ’em try with Preket . . . . ”

  Hanging around her grandfather’s kitchen in her girlhood, Shaldis had heard grumbling before. But it had been mostly neighborhood gossip, the usual complaints about husbands and in-laws and the high cost of water and fuel. Even during the bad years, the women had still been mostly concerned with the day-to-day annoyances of their lives.

  “I bet old Xolnax will take his bite of whatever money we pay,” she remarked casually as she rebraided Melon Girl’s fanciful Tree of Life coiffure. “You’d never see that stuck-up daughter of his around here, I’ll bet.” She had no idea whether Amber Girl was stuck up or not: The one time they’d been in the same room she’d been so sick with apprehension herself she hadn’t been able to speak a word. But by her companions’ derisive whinnies, she guessed she’d hit the mark.

  “You won’t see her much of anywhere,” jeered Rosemallow Woman, pulling on her much-stained purple linen dress. “Two nights before the full moon she ran off with some man, which should go to show old Xolnax what comes of keeping a girl that age locked up, fancy tutors or no fancy tutors.”

  “Tutors?” So the Summer Concubine’s fears might have been justified, thought Shaldis. Xolnax evidently had had his daughter taught.

  “Wanted her to learn to read the stars,” provided Melon Girl. “Corner the market on horoscopes, I’ll bet. He had Star-bright Woman teach her.”

  “Starbright Woman’s an idiot,” opined Rosemallow Woman. “And her horoscopes are crap.”

  “She is not.” Melon Girl bristled. “She said two nights after the full moon was a night for bringing fortune if Metal Butterflies sought the sweetness of flowers—I’m a Metal Butterfly with a secondary trine—and I wore real flowers in my hair that night, and got a whole silver piece for just a hand job.”

  As they walked back to Greasy Yard, Shaldis was at some trouble to draw the conversation back from the various merits of the several women’s astrologers working in the district—and the comparative costs of hand jobs, stand-ups, “kneeling in prayer” and other chargeable acts—to the subject of Xolnax’s daughter again. “Urnate Urla taught her, I know that,” said Melon Girl, who seemed to be on tolerably close terms with a number of the water bosses’ “boys.” There were others, scholars and even a wizard, but it all turned out for nothing. She ran off with some man she met in the Bazaar, she said in her note, just like any poor man’s daughter. They say after all the money he spent on her Xolnax is spitting blood.”

  As well he might, thought Shaldis. Were she a water boss, if she even suspected a rival had a daughter learning the arts of power, she’d waste not a moment in sending the most personable of her lieutenants to seduce the girl into running away.

  But it was equally possible that Xolnax’s daughter had met some darker fate. The coincidence of her disappearance at the time of the full moon was simply too strong to be ignored.

  The women stopped at the market in BoSaa’s Square for cheese and sausage; competition with the free handouts from Nebekht’s Temple had kept prices down but did nothing for the quality. Walking back to Greasy Yard, Shaldis was conscious of how much anger there was in the voices she heard in the street, how much desperate feat. The streets teemed with men who had nothing to do. They congregated in the crossings, muttering and falling silent when any man better dressed than they walked by. How many men were armed, not just the hullyboys of the water bosses, but common men carrying sticks and knives. How few men rallied when a shopkeeper cried, “Thief!” How most only looked and shrugged.

  After a lunch of sausage, cheese and rather gritty cold couscous, Shaldis returned to work refreshed. But the walls remained impervious to her efforts. She recalled the Summer Concubine telling her that Turquoise Woman had scry warded the whole room from fear of her husband.

  The bar of sunlight that had blinded her that morning, falling like hot brass through the door, disappeared. The wash of burning gold that had soaked the opposite wall of Greasy Yard slowly climbed the dirty stucco, then faded from gold to ocher to pink. The horns of the Citadel, slow as a dying man’s breath, continued to pulse, but Shaldis knew without even consciously listening that they sang to the Wise Sun, the Philosopher Sun, sinking red over the waters of the lakes. Voices rose louder from the Temple of Nebekht, where the True Believers gathered to be handed the smelly, torn-up meat of the morning’s blood sacrifices.

  Damn these spells!

  She returned to her corner and peeled the last of the oranges.

  The day before yesterday Aktis had said, Come back. But even though she was fairly certain that the little man hadn’t the power to shift a door bolt, let alone drown her mind in searing alien magic, she was massively unwilling to present herself at the door of any compound where the Red Silk Lady dwelled. Someone had poisoned her.

  So there was nothing to do, she supposed, but wait for Jethan.

  Yet the thought of spending another wakeful night in this room set her teeth on edge. And as fatigue tightened its grip on her, the thought of sleeping heavily—so heavily that she might not wake at a sound—frightened her still more.

  Xolnax’s daughter, as well as Turquoise Woman and Corn-Tassel Woman. How long before he found someone else? Before he found her?

  Yelling in the street. The yapping of men who have nothing to do all day, who will attack just to vent their own frustration: Seb Dolek’s voice boomed impressively, “Wizard! Scorpion! It is you who bring down this evil on us, you and your foul, grasping lord!” and Shaldis guessed Urnate Urla was coming home again from work. She wondered where Lohar was this evening. Having dinner with the Iron-Girdled One?

  “Lackey! Bloodsucker!”

  The crash of bricks on shutters. The fast pat-pat-pat
of running feet, the slam of a door.

  “Tell your vile master that even so long as he harbors the spawn of iniquity the skies will be as brass, the land will be as stone!”

  Shaldis thought, He has books. At a guess, he was the one who’d sneaked in here and secured whatever volumes and notes Turquoise Woman had collected. Shaldis had asked Melon Girl about them and she recalled there had been some, but not where they’d gone.

  And if he had the smallest trace of power, much less the magic I felt in the Citadel, he’d use it to cloak himself instead of putting up with this.

  She glanced at the color of the fading light in the sky, estimating how long it would be until dark and what she could promise—how much money the Summer Concubine could come up with at her request—to win the former wizard’s help.

  “Well, child.” Mohrvine stretched his hand to pour another cup of wine. “What do you think?”

  The supper tables of the House Jothek’s largest dining chamber had been cleared. The guests, a slightly smaller party but in most respects the same as had dined at the House of Six Willows two nights before, had been seen to the gate with the old-fashioned hospitality that few lords practiced anymore, not that any of his guests deserved it of him, reflected Mohrvine. But they’d all seemed impressed that he hadn’t relegated the task to the usual gentleman usher. Their gratification was worth remembering.

  Lohar in particular had seemed to bask in the honor of being invited to the House Jothek, preening as Mohrvine had opened the gate for him with his own hands while Lord Akarian watched approvingly from beside his litter, and his lordship’s sons and nephew had held their peace.

  Catch them looking that way at my precious nephew, thought Mohrvine. When he returns from his little investigation at the aqueduct he’ll have a surprise indeed, to hear of my daughter’s betrothal. His rule won’t last long in the face of an alternate prince backed by both Akarian and Nebekht.

  Returning to the supper pavilion, Mohrvine had found his daughter there, still in the devastatingly tasteful white gown and robe she’d worn to serve the head table. The white was a subtle boast. Not a stain, not a droplet, not so much as a fleck of oil smirched its gauzy pleats. At the end of the evening it was still as it had been at the beginning, spotless as the pearls and jasmine in her thick-piled raven hair.

  “I think Nebekht’s Mouth could do with a bath.” She came to kneel on the cushion beside Mohrvine’s divan, where she’d knelt to hand him his wine cup and to offer the best cuts to Lord Akarian, who had shared the divan as his most honored guest.

  Mohrvine laughed and tugged at one of her curls. “He lives among the poor, my blossom. Any man who washes too frequently in the Slaughterhouse is looked upon as a whoremaster. You should hear what they say about our friend Xolnax. The Mouth has his uses.”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell who Lord Akarian fawned on the most, him, or you for inviting him to your own house, like a lord.” She filled a cup with the tail end of the wine jar, tepid and strong. “With Lohar’s manners, I could see why he doesn’t get out much.”

  “Don’t mock at him, child.” He dipped his amulet of loadstone into the cup, wondering as always how long Aktis’s powers could be trusted to renew the device’s efficacy against poisons. “At least not where anyone can hear. He’s a man who needs above all to be valued, to be perceived as special, as more important than those around him. Hence his unwillingness to let the topic of conversation stray to anything upon which he is not the most informed person present—that is, anything but the god’s personal revelations to him. I suppose if one spends one’s days hacking up pigs in a stone-walled room one doesn’t learn much of the talk of the markers. But he wields great power, and he has many spies. Hundreds of people will spring to do his bidding—thousands, maybe. More than I’d counted on.” He was silent, turning the wine cup in his fingers. Turning over in his mind all that Lohar had told him that evening—sifting through the preening and the fiery images of madness—and matching it with what Xolnax’s reports said about the temper of the people in the streets.

  “Is Nebekht really the greatest of the gods?”

  “My child, that I do not know.” Mohrvine shrugged. “I don’t pretend to know more about the gods than is discernible with my eyes and ears. Who and how many of them there are and what they want of humankind are mysteries to me. They may think no more of us than we do of the bats that teem in the desert caves. Should you object to pretending that he is?”

  She tilted her head a little, considering the matter with the saucy judiciousness that had been characteristic of her since childhood. “You mean in front of Lord Akarian?”

  “That is precisely what I mean, my per. If you’re going to become a lady of the House Akarian . . .”

  She’d been all cool impudence, peeling a tangerine with delicate fingers; now suddenly she was all child, eyes blazing with passionate delight. So much for my concerns about the toadstone, he thought, amused at the intensity of her yearning. And so much for my concerns about her calf-love for Iorradus. Good thing I thought to have Aktis brew a love philter to slip in her tea yesterday. If this is any indication of his power—getting this kind of reaction to such an unpromising specimen as Lord Akarian—I see I need have no fears. In fact I should ask him to mix the next one more lightly. No sense having her become willing to the extent that she puts her husband’s interests before her father’s.

  “Will I?” she whispered, as if she hardly dared speak.

  “Does it please you?” Aktis had assured him that it would. But then, reflected Mohrvine dryly, he could hardly have said otherwise to his patron.

  “Does it . . . ?” She sipped air, breathed a light little breath, her whole face singing. “Lord Akarian agreed?”

  “That’s why he was here tonight, child.”

  She looked as she did when she was little, when she’d be so excited that she’d leap to her feet and dance. Her mother had been like that, he thought, remembering that fragile and beautiful girl with a terrible stab of regret that never seemed to lessen with the passage of time. “It’s all right with him?”

  “My child,” said Mohrvine, “a child as lovely as yourself, as perfect . . .”

  “I never hoped,” she stammered, her blush visible even in the dim glow of the supper room’s few remaining lamps. “I never dreamed that you’d say it was all right. I dreamed of him last night . . . .”

  I’ll just bet you did. The thought of a fourteen-year-old girl having wildly erotic dreams about the shuffling and querulous old lord made him smile: She’ll have him wrapped around her little finger by the first morning. Him, and with him the whole cult of Nebekht.

  My dear nephew, thought Mohrvine, the smile hardening on his lips, you may have your spell-weaving ladies, but I’ll have the people of your city in the hollow of my hand. We’ll see who wins.

  “You’re sure Lord Akarian says it’s all right?” Her fingers trembled as she arranged the slices of tangerine on a tiny yellow plate. “When you brought them all to the House of Willows, I was so afraid you wanted me to marry one of his sons.”

  “My dearest.” Mohrvine smiled. “What man could see you offered to one of his sons and not want you for himself?”

  Plate and tangerine crashed to the tiled floor. She stared at him for a moment aghast, uncomprehending—or trying to convince herself she didn’t comprehend. “Himself.” All the instruction and precepts at five hundred gold pieces a year whirled away like a gust of chaff in autumn wind. “That smelly old grandpa!” She sprang to her feet, scrambling backward with the old coltish limberness of her childhood. “You don’t mean—Papa, he smells! He’s got hardly any teeth and he picked his nose all through dinner! He thinks Lohar is the most marvelous man alive!”

  “A man’s friends aren’t any of his wife’s concern.”

  “They are if he doesn’t talk about anything else!”

  “And,” added Mohrvine grimly, “that doesn’t matter anyway. Whom did you think you were going to marry! T
hat blockheaded pretty-boy Iorradus!”

  “He isn’t a blockhead!” cried Foxfire Girl with such vehemence that Mohrvine understood at once. She saw the change in his eyes and added hastily, “I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean anyone particularly.”

  “The devil you didn’t, girl—don’t lie to me.” Mohrvine was on his feet too, striding to take her by the arm. “I saw you playing little games at the supper with that Honeysuckle bitch, trying to get him to drink some potion you’d bought from gods know who. I don’t think I need remind you, child, that marriage to Lord Akarian is the greatest service you can render to this house—that, and refraining from deceiving your new husband with members of his own family! It isn’t simply that I would repudiate you—House Jothek cannot be seen to tender faulty goods. Certainly not to—”

  “I’m not a bale of silk!” She pulled her arm free of his grip. “I’m not a—a mare who has to be warranted not to bite or pull! Papa, please . . .” She was crying, tears of anger and revulsion tracking lines through the white and pink of cosmetics. “Papa, don’t! He’s disgusting! He kept trying to touch me.”

  “That’s because he had been assured, by me, that you would be his wife.”

  Seeing the face she made, seeing the shaken anger, the tears rolling down her face, Mohrvine bit back his next words and put his big hands gently on the girl’s shoulders. “Child,” he said, “you’ll feel differently about this when you’ve had a chance to think.”

  “I won’t!” She looked appalled. “What’s wrong with Iorradus! He’s a member of the House Akarian.”

  “Iorradus is the younger son of a second cousin and hasn’t so much as a home of his own,” snapped Mohrvine impatiently. “He’s a palace guardsman who lives in a barracks. If he was a woman he wouldn’t even have the status to rank as a secondary wife to whoever they could find to marry him.”