Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  —and the white light that seemed to flow from its mouth veered suddenly away from the lamp, ran like lightning down the black trail of the blood, splitting into finer and finer fingerlets of flame that vanished into the earth and died.

  “No!” Urnate Urla screamed, and ran forward, breaking from his protective square. He snatched up the lamp, shook it, spattering blood. Pressed it, bloody, to his face, then fell upon the corpse, seizing its stained grave cloths and shaking it about.

  “Don’t you dare!” he screamed. “Don’t you dare! You’re nothing, nothing! Dead!”

  The blinding glamour was gone. The thin singing noise that had seemed to go through Shaldis’s head was gone too, leaving behind not even a memory of exactly what it had sounded like. The silence seemed leaden in the wake of its end.

  Urnate Urla clung to the corpse, clung to the lamp, doubled over like a sick man, sobbing, “Come back! You don’t understand!”

  Sickened, Shaldis pulled her thin yellow-striped cloak around her and watched him while he wept. Watched him when he dug handfuls of dirt and threw it about him, when he threw stones, his lamp, the corpse of the pip in all directions into the dark. Ijnis, she thought as the rage grew into madness and he flung his body back and forth, now weeping, now screaming, now tearing chips of marble and brick from the tomb and smashing them into his own forehead and chest.

  But she had to be sure. She stayed where she was, sitting on the ground behind the tall tomb, and watched that wretched man through the night, even after he passed out weeping and shaking the golden lamp. Watched him until the ravens began to caw, harsh voices claiming their territories once more among the lizard-gray hills where the dead lay, and to circle the corpses of the pip and the dead man who had walked. In the predawn iciness Urnate Urla woke and pawed the lamp, then looked at the corpse once more with empty and despairing eyes. The dead pip he did not even regard. Vultures hopped angrily away, opened their mouths and squawked.

  Ants had begun to trail up out of the ground, through the cracks of the blood-smeared tomb.

  Urnate Urla crawled to his feet, gathered up his equipment from where he’d hurled it about: red chalk, iron filings, and candles. The knife with which he’d cut the pip’s throat. He paused twice to throw up. Then he crept back down into the wash, and returned along the graveyard road to town, to take up again his work as clerk for a slick, hardfisted man.

  And behind her tomb, Shaldis held her breath until he was out of sight, her eyes on the spot where the silver disk lay, covered with the dust he’d kicked over it in his frenzy.

  Only when he was out of sight down the wadi did she dare slip from hiding, clutching it up into her hand like the most starving beggar in the Slaughterhouse. It bore the runes he’d written on the sand around it, Akag and Hoeg and the one she didn’t know—Mem, maybe? Even now, after the freezing night, it felt hot in her palm.

  Whatever it was, she thought, it had power in it, spelled to draw the lightning bolts of malice. Out of all his power, all his implements of magic, Urnate Urla had kept only this. What he’d wanted with the corpse, and the iron-circled lamp of gold and crystal, she had no idea. She’d neither read nor heard of any such ceremony as she had seen last night, nor of any being that walked abroad in the corpses of the dead.

  What was that? she wondered, shocked and sick now with what she had seen. What was he trying to do?

  You’re dead, he’d cried, as if that fact had somehow escaped G’s corpse in all the excitement of the funeral.

  Morning was high in the sky and Little Pig Alley jammed once more with beasts being driven to the temple for sacrifice when Shaldis finally reached her room. There was no sign that Jethan had been there, and his absence, rather surprisingly, sent a stab of disappointment and grief through her. She’d hoped . . .

  Well, of course, she told herself, he has Soth’s spells.

  But it wasn’t only that. Gruff and straitlaced and arrogant as he was, she had sensed in him a sturdy comfort, and longed, in her weariness, for at least a few hours in which she wouldn’t be so utterly alone.

  Who can I ask about what I saw last night? she wondered, as she crept shivering into her chilly bed. Was that some piece of hidden knowledge that Hathmar would have! Some secret of the Earth Wizards!

  Her last thought before dropping into nightmare-ridden sleep was Aktis would know.

  But why she was so certain of this slipped from her into the dark.

  “Come on, you lazy little cow, I haven’t got all morning.” Honeysuckle Lady shrugged free of her gauzy outer gown, started pulling the pins from the flaxen oceans of her hair and dropping them behind her, sharp tinkling brightness on the waxed black-cedar floors. “God of Women, I thought that lout would never have his fill.”

  She stretched, rolled her head gently, then snapped, “Come over here and rub my neck.” Opal Girl, bending to gather the dropped hairpins before anyone could step on one, hurried to the gilded leather cushion where the courtesan sat, dumping the three hairpins she’d managed to find onto the corner of the dressing table. Cold dawn filtered through the oiled paper of the windows. Ordinarily, the fledglings who waited on the Blossom Ladies were instructed by them in the mysteries of the inner room at such times. Giggling reminiscences, questions asked and answered as hair was brushed, robes were folded, jewelry was put away. Opal Girl couldn’t imagine asking this tall, lovely, hard-eyed woman anything, certainly not about what a man expected and wanted of a girl. The only time Honeysuckle Lady had spoken of the inner room to her, it had been to tell tales of disgusting requests and callous treatment. “They’re all pigs,” she had said. “They rut like donkeys.”

  Despite all the romances she read—and Foxfire Girl was very good about sharing with her those she bought with her candy money and hid under the floorboards of their room—she couldn’t get those brutal images out of her mind.

  “She only does that to scare you,” Foxfire Girl had said yesterday when Opal Girl had been called on to wait up for the Honeysuckle. “She knows you’re going to be a Blossom Lady, and prettier than her, and she wants you to be afraid.” She’d shrugged, secure in her own prospects for matrimony. Secure too in the spells Opal Girl had watched her weave these past few days, to draw the handsome Iorradus to her. She had given her friend a careless hug. “I’ll fix her for that, too.”

  That had been just before the cushioned litter had arrived to carry Foxfire Girl to the house of her cultured and terrifying father. Since the note Iorradus had sent her, Foxfire Girl had grown more confident of those fragmentary spells she’d learned from this or that astrologer and servant in her childhood. She wove into them fragments of her dreams, omens she’d seen during the day, the appropriate colors and flowers recommended by Starbright Woman’s almanac for that day and symbols the moon seemed to show her. In the gardens she sat patiently, calling the butterflies to dance around her the way, she said, her father’s court mage Aktis did. The night before last, still stinging with rage and ant bites, she’d written Honeysuckle Lady’s name on a piece of paper and inscribed marks of cursing all around it. Had burned it in the kitchen brazier with whispered incantations of ill.

  “You watch while I’m gone,” Foxfire Girl had said as she’d packed up her things to go to her father’s house. “You tell me if anything awful happens to her. Let me know what it is.”

  Nothing had happened yet. Opal Girl wondered if, after the incident with the ants, Honeysuckle Lady had gone to another wizard for a counterspell.

  She hoped something would happen. It would serve her right.

  “Not that way, you imbecile! My gods, what do they teach you little sluts?” Honeysuckle Lady pulled away impatiently. “Go make sure the water’s hot for my bath. And put some charcoal on the fire. It’s freezing in here.”

  That was unjust—the courtesan’s bedroom was considerably warmer than the attics that the fledglings shared—but Opal Girl knelt to tong a big piece of charcoal from the pierced brass can into the brazier beside the bed.
<
br />   Later in the day, Chrysanthemum Lady explained to Opal Girl’s owner that she’d probably slipped on a hairpin that had rolled neglected into the shadow under the brazier. On polished floors, that kind of thing happened all the time. Honeysuckle Lady, whose entire wardrobe—thousands of gold pieces’ worth—perished in the fire, said that the girl had lost her balance getting up, had pitched into the brazier, scattering its flaming contents across the bed. Springing hack, her dress already in flames, the girl had blundered into the flaming bed itself.

  Stumbling, staggering, escaping from the burning room herself, Honeysuckle Lady’s own trailing dress had caught fire and she’d ripped it off, sustaining a painful burn on her buttocks and the back of one thigh.

  It was a curse, she fumed to Chrysanthemum Lady as the healer later spread sheep’s-milk ointment on the burns before going up to look at the drugged, moaning, blistered thing that had been Opal Girl. A damned, filthy, bad-luck curse.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Raeshaldis half expected Jethan to be sitting patiently outside in the noon glare of Greasy Yard when she shot open the door bolts a few hours later, but there was no one there but Rosemallow Woman grinding corn in her doorway as usual, Zarb and Vorm drinking in Zarb’s doorway as usual and a gaggle of the local urchins playing ball. To her question, Rosemallow Woman replied that no one had come asking for her; an attempt, back in the dusty blue shade of her room, to contact the Summer Concubine through the mirror yielded nothing but a headache.

  Her own exhaustion? she wondered. The Summer Concubine’s, after another day of searching the hills?

  She set the mirror aside and sat for a time, staring at the silver disk that she’d taken from beneath her pillow, remembering what she’d seen last night.

  The energy had felt familiar, the burning, jangling of the air. Not exactly the same—was that because Urnate Urla was an Earth Wizard and her attacker was not? But she didn’t know that her attacker was not. The spirit of the dead thing . . . what had that been? Would Hathmar know? Would he tell her if he did?

  What in the name of all the gods had happened to Jethan?

  She waited an hour, then combed her hair, put on her veils, and slung the silver disk in a little bag around her neck.

  “If Jethan comes, tell him to wait for me,” she told Rosemallow Woman, who merely nodded. Then she set out for the green towers of the Eastern Gate.

  RATS KILLED

  MIRE MY MOUSER—BETTER THAN POISON

  RAT SPELLS HERE

  The chalked sign caught her eye as she turned down Goat Street.

  MOSQUITO HERBS

  SMUDGES—NO BUGS

  Under the dirty awnings of Chickenplucker Alley she heard a man say, “Why doesn’t the king do somethin’ about it instead of taxing the hell out of us?”

  “It’s a curse on the whole land, I tell you, a curse been put on the rain.”

  Extending her senses, she picked up the muttering all around her, like bees in swarm: “One bit of a drizzle—what’s that? My son tinkles more against the courtyard wall!”

  “Nomads coming in from the north now, all along the ranges by the White Lake . . . . ”

  “The hell I’ll go if they start drafting men for the damn bucket lines. Work all day in the goddam sun . . . ?”

  “Bucket lines? They’re saying at the café that they’re gonna draft for the aqueduct . . . .”

  “If he doesn’t know what to do about it, I say, let’s get somebody who does . . . .”

  Men crowded outside the guarded barricades around fountains that should have been free. Angry men, shoving each other, eyeing each other, counting the people ahead of them in line. Estimating how much water had been in the well last night, and how many buckets and pitchers and jars would be filled before theirs reached the front. Others trudged, sweaty and weary, up from the lake, the water in their buckets muddied from the cattle and goats and smelling of the whole town’s waste.

  Shaldis quickened her pace. On the temple porch Lohar, arms and legs sticky with sacrificial blood, shouted to passersby: “Those who cling to the old ways are fools, yes, and worse than fools! In holding to the course Nebekht hates, they condemn you and your children to death!”

  A blue sky like arched metal above the city walls. The dark gloom of the tunnel of the Eastern Gate, and above the smell of camels and goats, the smell of rats.

  Meliangobet. Annana dermos ha’ram . . .

  Dead fingers caressing a bloodied little face.

  She shivered, wanting to put last night from her mind and knowing she couldn’t. The energies she’d felt were too similar to those of her attacker.

  Where had Urnate Urla been on the night of the full moon?

  Yet she could swear he had no magic.

  Where had any of them been? Aktis, Ahure, the Red Silk Lady? Benno Sam or Lohar?

  Small odds of finding out the truth about that, anyway. It was clear Ahure could simply close his steam-driven iron gates and claim communion with the majesty of his own power and nobody would ask whether he was actually in his obscure private-quarters or nor. Who among Lohar’s followers wouldn’t swear that they’d seen the Mouth of the Iron-Girdled One wherever he said he was! And who among the Red Silk Lady’s servants would dare whisper a word about her movements even if she weren’t capable of covering her tracks with illusion?

  Meliangobet. She’d read the name in a list, she knew she had—one of those endless lines of memorized names.

  She fingered on her neck, beneath her dress and veils, the silver disk she’d taken from the dust. Crystal and fire-cleansed gold . . . A golden lamp with a cap of crystal, five candles of white wax. Sand and fire.

  Shaldis hastened on under the cold, green-tiled shade of the East Gate. Last night she’d dreamed someone was calling her, someone who was imprisoned in darkness far away and barely audible. Xolnax’s daughter missing. A crazy woman living in ruins who’d healed a cat’s hurt foot.

  We have to find them, she thought. There are so few of us, and the need of the land is so great.

  Had that been the favorite’s voice she’d heard, calling wordlessly in the darkness?

  No, she begged the god of mages, no . . . .

  She turned down the Lane of Blue Walls and the smells of smoke, charcoal and cut wood stung her nose from the Glassblowers Quarter. Wide gates revealed hot bare yards, brick furnaces, piles of sand and harsh-glittering frit. Half-naked men and women moved about in the white heat that roared from the oven doors, while teyn carried charcoal from long sheds roofed in desiccated pine poles. Shaldis asked a ragpicker where Barbonak the master blower had his factory and circled around it to the back. A kitchen court opened onto an alley, as it had at her grandfather’s. Rabbit hutches clustered on one wall. A young unveiled woman in the head clout of a maidservant was bargaining with a woman selling chickens:

  “What, three dequins for Grandma there? Looks like she’s been tanned alive, she has . . . .”

  “Bah, this chicken isn’t but a twelvemonth old . . . .”

  “Oh, you right. And I’m the Queen of the Harvest, too.”

  When the sale was concluded and the bird in question handed over (“You’re robbing a poor woman and starving her children, you’re that heartless, but since it’s the first sale of the day I can’t turn you aside”), Shaldis approached the gate. “Is this the house of Barbonak?”

  The servant shifted the reed cage into her other hand. “You’ll find Barbonak in the yard, out around the corner and first door.”

  “I’m a friend of Corn-Tassel Woman.”

  The girl looked up and down the alley, then back through the kitchen yard to the ramada under its covering of sticks. She lowered her voice. “She all right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shaldis. “I’m trying to find her.”

  The lines around the girl’s eyes twisted with genuine anger and concern. “Damn it,” she whispered. She was a plump girl, probably a few years older than Shaldis, dark hair damp with sweat from the kitchen’s hea
t. “Master Enak, he goes on how u was that concubine of the king’s, that claims to be a Raven, but she’d have sent word. I know she’d have sent.”

  “Threeflower!” The cook emerged from the kitchen door into the striped shadows of the loggia. “Three, you gonna marry Chicken Woman or what?” She stepped out, a small thin woman like a hen sparrow, and Threeflower waved her over.

  “Lady here says she’s a friend of our lady.”

  Cook looked up at Shaldis with both interest and suspicion. “You heard from her? Can you take her a message?” Shaldis unwound her veil from over her face and shook her head again. “What happened? How did she disappear? All I heard from Enak and his father was cursing.”

  “That’s all you’re hound to hear” Cook gave a quick sidelong glance toward the glass yard. “Cursing from him, and whining from Master B. They were on at her—again—to put a word on Ebrem’s furnace, to crack it so it wouldn’t heat evenly. Seemed to think the Good God gave her power just so they could run every other glassblower in the city out of business and then go on to run out the ones in the City of White Walls as well. That’s what they were planning—I heard ’em.”

  She took the wicker cage from Threeflower, frowned at the chicken within it and appeared to be mentally calculating how best to prepare it. Then she looked back at Shaldis. “My lady said she wouldn’t, which was what she started saying after she started talking to whoever it is at the Marvelous Tower. She used to do little cantrips like making other people’s glass crack or furnace cool, just to keep Enak from taking the strap to her. When she made that strap disappear—and he must have looked for it for three hours before he gave up, cursing the lot of us for hiding it—you should have seen his face.”