Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “That’s all you can think of.”

  “As head of this branch of the House Jothek,” said Mohrvine, “yes, as a matter of fact, that is all I can think of. And you must think of it too. Or do we need to go to your grandmother with this?”

  “No!” Foxfire Girl pulled free of his grip, stumbled a few paces backward, her white robe making her seem to shine like a lily in the candlelight. “No, please . . . I won’t marry him! If I can’t marry Iorradus I don’t want to marry anyone.”

  And, turning, she fled from the room, scattering tangerine peels like the torn-off petals of a brilliant rose on the black tile floor.

  So much, thought Mohrvine grimly, for the spell of passion that Aktis swore would have her dreaming of him as of a young prince. He looked around him and struck the gong that would summon the servants, then followed his daughter down the cedar-smelling stair to the tiny garden in which the dining pavilion stood. But instead of pursuing her to her own courtyard—to the rooms that she’d had as a child before the House of Willows—he turned in the other direction. Torch flame sent his shadow veering over the stucco walls as he made his way toward Aktis’s courtyard to have a word with his court mage on the subject of love spells and Nebekht’s will.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Seb Dolek, once he had his audience, continued to expound his own version of the will of Nebekht until darkness had well and truly settled on the lane. He spoke with startling authority for one so young—as a Sun Mage he had already been one of the most prized singers of the rain, and his voice had been trained to be both carrying and pleasing. He spoke, moreover, pleasantly and reasonably, not shouting but conversing, man to man. Those who’d gathered to receive the Iron-Girdled One’s bounty of hacked gobbets of meat and clean, sparkling water from the temple well choked Little Pig Alley almost from end to end, forcing Raeshaldis to stay where she was in the doorway of Greasy Yard.

  “You ask why a god who commands all the universe, who could send the rains at any moment, withholds water from mankind? You ask how he could do this? But haven’t each and every one of you done the same, when your child grew to an age to be willful and would not surrender a plaything that was bright, that was shiny, that held his fancy but that you knew would hurt him? Wouldn’t each man of you threaten Unless you put that knife down you’ll have no sweets?”

  He’s good, thought Shaldis unwillingly. And he had, in some fashion, slightly altered the tonsure of the True Believers so that it didn’t make him look ridiculous. She wondered how quickly he would rise in the temple ranks. Long after it had become obvious to everyone at the college that he had no power whatsoever, all the masters had continued to treat him almost as a son.

  “Nebekht wants—Nebekht demands—that you acknowledge him now for what he is, the true commander of the universe’s truth.”

  And your master as his prophet. Shaldis wondered if the crowd would ever clear.

  Or you, maybe, if you can manage to edge Lohar out of the way.

  Little Pig Alley was barely an armspan wide. She dared not emerge from the gate until the young man finished and went back into the temple and the crowd of listeners dispersed. When she and the Summer Concubine had first looked into the long yard that ran along the side of Nebekht’s Temple, Lohar had claimed to see them. Whether this was true or not she didn’t know, but it wasn’t a risk she wanted to run. Seb Dolek was, as far as she knew, empty of power. But if her cloak should happen to fail as other spells sometimes failed, she feared what would happen. She hadn’t forgotten the glare of hate in his eyes, the twisted, tight voice whispering, Get her out of here . . . .

  Even draped in her silly pink veils she did not feel safe.

  So she waited in the growing darkness, wondering just how she was going to get the former mage to unbolt his door. The sheer quantity of smears, scrawled curses and dents in the barred shutters bore eloquent testimony to Urnate Urla’s understandable unwillingness to respond once he was closed in his fortress for the night. She wondered, too, what she’d do if he asked a reward that she didn’t think the Summer Concubine or the king would pay.

  Her apprehension turned out to be completely for naught, like most apprehensions. Hardly had the last True Believer vanished into the darkness than the wizard’s door opened and a shuttered beam of lantern light floated in the dark like a hooded eye.

  His head poked out. His eyes gleamed as he looked cautiously up and down the street.

  Shaldis heard a tiny, whimpering groan.

  The door opened wider. Urnate Urla emerged, a rawhide satchel over one shoulder and in the other hand the end of a braided rawhide rope by which he led a three-year-old teyn child.

  Shaldis recalled distastefully what Rosemallow Woman had said of the former wizard’s proclivities, and almost turned back to her own room in disgust. I’ll wait for Jethan, thanks very much.

  But a moment later she thought, If he wanted to abuse the poor thing he’d do it in his own house. She could see from the shadows where she hid that the pip was gagged, its hands bound behind it. It wouldn’t have made outcry.

  So what was he doing with it? In the narrow alley’s absolute blackness the little creature’s downy white fur seemed to shine. Almost nobody bought teyn that age. Like the human five-year-olds they resembled, they were too small and weak to do heavy labor and were not old enough to be trained in anything skilled. Most people would let the mother’s owner keep and feed the pip until it could be taught to do some actual work.

  And what would Xolnax’s clerk want with a teyn anyway?

  Instead of speaking, Shaldis simply stood back and let him pass. When he was about twenty feet ahead of her she ghosted from the shadows, flitting in his wake through the tangled passages of the Slaughterhouse, far from the lights that burned on the city’s walls. In the icy night, the smells of blood and dung grew stronger as they passed among the holding pens. Then rot, and garbage, and the scuffle of jackals as they crossed through the tone of middens that straggled away south of the tenements and corrals. The parched smell of the ranges took the place of the scent of the lake and the farms. Distantly a hippopotamus lifted its curious whuffling grunt, but no other sound came from the direction of the muddy shallows.

  Only the rattle of wind in the sagebrush, and the scrunch of Urnate Urla’s boots as he led his little prisoner along. A funeral had passed along this track before them in the afternoon, hound for the tombs in the Redbone Hills south of the city. As she wove a robe of starlight and dust to conceal herself, Shaldis felt in the air the echoes of the funeral songs, saw by the roadside the dropped flowers and boughs that mourners had carried, and fragments of funeral cakes.

  Among the hills that rose before them, jackals lifted a thin howling. Shaldis shivered in her thin cloak, remembering all the tales she’d heard as a child of the djinni that haunted the wastelands. At the college she’d read tales of other spirits, older still, that had supposedly haunted the Redbone Hills in the days of the first kings when all the dry lakes and marsh flats to the north had been a single great sheet of water. Things whose names the Sun Mages didn’t even know. Now and then one would still see, in very ancient tombs, glyphs of protection against them.

  She half expected Urnate Urla to turn aside before he reached the hills, but he didn’t. Against the dark jumble of shadows, tombs gleamed white, weathered like the bones they contained. The great houses had never favored the Redbones as a place of burial: They lay too close to the city and its robbers. Artisans of her father’s order, however, raised sepulchers there by the thousands. Faceless and crumbling, the stone statues of the warrior guardians flanked the road where it turned aside into the hills: She felt, as she passed them, the whisper of their eroded wards against things no longer recalled.

  A scraggy path led up either side of a rock-strewn gorge. Like little huts of whitewashed buck, tombs ranged along the lip of the ground above. Farther along, the eroding sandstone had collapsed, dumping bricks, bones, memories down into the brush. Urnate Urla followed the ri
ght-hand track, the rough climb still marked by fresh footmarks, broken flowers, here and there a mourning cake dropped into the sand by some child. Shaldis bent and picked up one of these bird-pecked confections, superstitiously fearing that it would be marked with the High Rune H, for her father’s name.

  G. Who had G been, she wondered, turning over the palm-sized fragment of bean paste and cornmeal in her hand, and what had he done with the yean the Good God gave him?

  Urnate Urla picked up the teyn pip and set it on the plastered brick of a tomb. Standing behind a three-level brick tomb some forty feet away, Shaldis could see now it was a jenny. On this, the southern side of the wash, the dead were mostly covered with stone slabs to keep the jackals from digging them up, or rectangles of brick inscribed with the names of the men whose bones they covered. Occasionally newer patches showed in the stucco, where wives or unmarried daughters had been buried later. Slips of thick paper, or sometimes ivory, stuck out between cracks where requests to the souls of the dead had been thrust, giving some of the tombs the look of enormous pinfish with their bristling fins.

  But it was a risky business, this petitioning of the dead. In ancient times, when the great houses themselves had been little more than sheikhs and nomads, there had been orders of mages who sourced power from death itself, from blood and bones, horror and grief, and from the life force that flowed out of the soul in death. That magic still whispered in places in the ground. Shaldis couldn’t imagine anyone coming up here alone for any reason, particularly not once the sun had set.

  Jackals cried again, nearer. Urnate Urla was taking things out of his satchel: red chalk, a small bag of something heavy that settled like sand. A golden lamp whose lid caught the moonlight on crystalline facets when he ran his fingers around the black wires that wrapped it tight. A disk that flashed silver in the starlight, which he set on the sand before the tomb where the teyn child sat. Around this disk, and around the tomb, he drew a power circle, its lines radiating away into the dust after the fashion of earth magic. He fumbled at the hag, his hands unsteady; Shaldis, behind the tomb, watched closely the circles he drew, unable to guess his purpose from the unfamiliar patterns but making note of them anyway.

  The power circle was standard. The second circle he drew had the shape of the gate circles wizards sometimes used to conjure simple elemental spirits. She didn’t understand that one completely, but she imprinted it in her mind. A pentagram within a circle; a triangle within that. A square, a hexagon, an octagon, smaller and smaller within the sourcing circle of power, beside the crumbling tomb.

  She had no idea what the silver disk was, but it was clearly important to him. He ringed it with runes: Hoeg, Akag, and a third Earth-Wizard sign she didn’t recognize. Hoeg, the Sand; Akag, Fire Falling through the Air—simpler than Sun-Mage glyphs. She felt no magic in the night, but he went through the motions as one long trained. He sighted on the peaks of the hills to orient himself to the energy flows of the earth, and in relation to them drew a defensive square, still within the power circle, with the silver disk between the square and the gate circle. He left a door in the square—an opening in the lines.

  He’s going to summon something, thought Shaldis. A ghost? She’d heard of it being done, but it was a horribly dangerous procedure that often had totally unexpected results. Not something she’d have wanted to try with all magic in its currently unstable state.

  The teyn child watched, too, from within the circle, soundless, eyes glinting like stars beneath the moon-white snarl of hair.

  The circle was finished at moonrise. Urnate Urla took a bottle from his satchel, unstoppered it and drank. Shaldis saw him flinch and shudder, and heard the involuntary gasp; she guessed it contained ijnis. The former wizard looked around him, scanning the toothy black semicircle of the hills where wealthier men than those buried nearby had had their tombs dug. In the thin bluish light all the world was colorless save for the warm spot of lantern glow at the foot of the tomb, the dim luminescence of the small candles.

  Urnate Urla swallowed another gulp of ijnis, pulled a knife from his satchel and with one abrupt movement grabbed the teyn child and cut her throat.

  Shaldis, forty feet away, saw the blade-flash and smelled the blood in the same instant, and clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out in horror, protest, rage Pig, she thought, pig, wanting to scream at him, but the pip was already dead, slumping back onto the tomb, whose lid trickled with a thin black line of blood.

  Urnate Urla laid down the still jerking body and set the golden lamp within the gate circle. He opened the lamp’s crystal lid, catching a handful of the steaming blood, poured it in as if it were lamp oil. The whole night smelled of it. Jackals scrabbled, restless and hungry, in the ravine.

  Then the former mage stepped back into his defensive square and closed the “gate” with a long, looped sigil drawn in the blood.

  And waited.

  The thornbush rustled among the tombs. Extending her senses, Shaldis smelled the feral musk of jackals on the other side of the gorge, scratching around the cairn of bricks erected over the unknown G’s new-made grave. Now she heard the pad and scuffle of feet, the soft whine of breath, coming close . . . .

  Stopping.

  She reached out her perceptions, found each animal with her ears and her nose and her mind. Heard what no Empty would have been able to detect, the low chorus of growls in the darkness.

  Then the growls turned to whines of fear. The thornbush told of their going, leaving silence behind.

  Silence terrible, filled with the stinging whisper of magic.

  Alien magic. Not human at all, terrifying in its familiarity, tingling and prickling on her skin.

  A rolling blast of graveyard stink. A slow scuff of stumbling feet.

  A kind of glitter in the air, like falling fire.

  Is it him? Is it the same? Is he—it—in league with Urnate Urla? The magic didn’t feel identical; was it only the darkness and open air that made it seem different? That made it seem so similar? Shaldis didn’t know. She hadn’t smelled rot when she’d been attacked . . . . For a few moments, before the dead man appeared, her mind groped in panic, trying to tell.

  The man who staggered out of the darkness had been dead, Shaldis judged through a haze of shock, for probably less than two days. That was the usual time it took to organize a funeral at this season of the year. His square, rather handsome face had the purplish lividity of death; his unseeing eyes, sunken and flattened, still seemed firm in their sockets. His mouth hung open, the loose jaw swinging back and forth as he walked.

  She pressed her hands to her own mouth, her breath jammed in her throat. The air horned around her not with a sense of storm, but with one of decay.

  Brightness shimmered about the dead man, a foul corpse glow magnified, coming off him like mist. It was hard to look at him, hard to see details.

  He groped toward the tomb, pawing the air with hands shredded from tearing apart the tomb bricks that had held him in. Urnate Urla crept forward within his defensive square, lips parted, staring as the dead thing passed its hands fumblingly over the dead teyn child’s bloodied face.

  “Meliangobet.” Urnate Urla’s voice was hoarse, desperate with something close to unholy passion. He lifted his hands and the corpse stumbled, staggered back with the pip’s fresh blood on his hands. “Meliangobet, annana dermos ha’ram, dermos ha’ram.” Shaldis recognized the spell words, the True Names studied by all the mage-born: dermos—crystal. Ha’ram, the secret name for fire-cleansed gold. The former mage’s lined face twisted with strain, his thin voice trembled. It seemed to Shaldis that light flickered around the open top of the blood-smeared golden lamp.

  Urnate Urla reached out his hands as if it was all he could do not to leap over the protective lines, to seize the thing that stood swaying with tomb mold and blood and filth all dripping from its hands. The corpse backed away, stumbled and fell. Still it attempted to crawl, but it could not seem to leave the power circle. It
crept around the tomb, crawling helplessly among the trampled thorns. Urnate Urla rose to his feet, swaying with his hands raised before him. Annana dermos ha’ram. Drinata, he said, and this Shaldis knew was the name of a sigil—she could see it in her mind, the glyphs of bondage and sanctuary linked, an unpleasant concept Hathmar had once urged her to meditate on: the image of a servant cleaning out stables, sheltered while lightning leaps from cloud to earth outside What mellian-gobet was she did not know.

  The corpse reared to its knees, and around it the air burned more fiercely, though it gave neither heat nor light. Out of its open mouth fire spattered, orange and blue in the inky darkness, piercing brightness that illuminated nothing, and blue lightning leaped from its wildly thrashing hands. But the lightning grounded, burning, into the silver sigil on the earth before Urnate Urla. It draws the spells to it, Shaldis thought, sickened, fascinated, shocked. Pulls the power into it, renders it harmless.

  Within the gate circle, the facets of the golden lamp’s crystal lid caught the snap and brilliance of the light. The corpse heaved to its feet, staggered toward the tomb again, weaving, flailing, like a drunkard fighting to escape a net. Its mouth worked, shouting words Shaldis could nor hear. And Urnate Urla went on singing, his face rigid, almost expressionless, but his dark eyes stretched and blazing. The thin voice soared up and down the scale as he repeated the name of the sigil, the words for crystal and for gold, and the gold and crystal of the iron-bound lamp glowed like flame. Sweat glittered on his face and ran down his cheeks, and he swayed as if he were going to fall: Meliangobet, he sang, drinata . . . drinata . . . drinata.

  The corpse began to scream. Something came out of its mouth: long, wriggling threads of white light. They writhed and whipped like tent ropes in a sandstorm, pulled toward the lamp. Urnate Urla’s mouth gaped, laboring to form words. He fell to his knees, eyes locked to the corpse, as if he dared not look away, and indeed Shaldis couldn’t imagine anyone in that situation daring to take his eyes from whatever it was that burned and flared and glowed around the corpse’s head. The corpse fell forward, almost across the body of the teyn pip on its bier. Urnate Urla’s hands stretched out, clawing at the air. The corpse pulled back, fell again, shrieked—