Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  She shook her head, with her tight little gap-toothed smile. “He said if that was what the king’s whore was teaching her—it is one of His Majesty’s concubines, isn’t it?—then he’d see her in hell before he’d let her go there again, and locked her in her room. Tied her to the bed since she’d got out of that room before, and set one of the boys to sit on the ladder outside.”

  “Should have sent her up to the sun singers, that’s what he should have done,” added Threeflower, nodding her head wisely.

  “Think any of them would take help from a woman?” Cook spit into the dust. “Two weeks they been up there tootin’ their horns—two weeks!” She jerked her head in the direction of the bluff, whence the groan of the horns drifted faintly into the untouched sky. “And have we had one single one of ’em come knockin’ on the door askin’, Does a Raven lady live here who could maybe help us? Huh! You right!” She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “Like everybody in the district doesn’t know what she can do. But do they listen?

  “Any rate, Enak comes up next morning to give poor Corn-Tassel Woman another yelling-at, like that’s just what she needs, and finds his boy asleep at the foot of the ladder and Corn-Tassel Woman gone. He runs through the house yelling—he’s a great yeller, Enak—then turns out the room swearing he’ll burn everything of hers he finds in the big kiln. But of course since he done that already the first time she crossed him, he didn’t find a thing. Place has been a holiday with mice ever since. You aren’t the king’s concubine, are you.” She peered at Shaldis with bright black eyes, taking in the cheap finery and sorrily hanging veils.

  “I’m a friend of hers,” said Shaldis. “Did you see the room before Enak sacked it? Were the ropes he’d tied her to the bed with cut or untied!”

  Threeflower looked puzzled, but Cook said, “Cut. You can come up and see the room if you want. Neither Enak nor his dad’ll be back till near sunset. If you can find her, at least let us know if she’s well, if she’s alive.” She squinted at the sun, halfway toward noon, and handed the chicken back to the maid. “Get Leather Legs here killed and plucked, and start the rice. Remember to split it into two pots before you slice the sausage in. Master Barbonak doesn’t hold with overfeeding his men.” she added to Shaldis as she led the way to the ladder that mounted the kitchen’s outer wall. “Two dequins’ worth of rat meat in their rice would make too rich a diet for their tummies. He’s willing to run the risk of it himself, though.”

  “Noble of him.”

  “She was a good lady, the Corn-Tassel, and good to us all, ’cept when she got into one of her bossy moods. But there, who doesn’t get bossy when you’ve the likes of Threeflower to look alter? It’s not knowing, and wondering what’s become of her . . . . There’s another way into the room from where I sleep with the maids.” The old woman climbed nimbly up the heavy rungs and opened the door at the top. “I heard naught and neither did any of the girls, and I think I would have, had anyone come through the room itself. It’s got a real lock on it, not a latch, and Enak locked that up and kept the key to it.”

  Shaldis looked down at the ladder behind her. At a guess, the “boy” who’d mounted guard here had done so at the bottom where he could doze. Even a mediocre mage could have planted the idea in his mind and made it seem reasonable, to keep him from falling and rousing the household.

  The room reminded her almost unbearably of her mother’s. It was the son of cramped cubicle that the principal son of any moderate household and his wife made do with until Grandfather was in his grave. Even in his absence Enak was very much in evidence: shirts and trousers and coats folded on the shelves behind a plain blue curtain, spare hoots and dinner slippers on the floor beneath the single window. Most women, Shaldis had observed, decorated their rooms, even the poorest: a clay statue of Rohar, a bright-colored hanging, a gourd of flowers, something.

  This was a man’s room. She couldn’t imagine how poor Corn-Tassel Woman had endured it, feeling the magic stir and grow within her and not having a place to be alone in.

  Except, as Shaldis had learned to do, within her mind.

  And that, she guessed, was what Enak most resented: a door he could not break down.

  “I’ll fetch the ropes,” said Cook. “I kept them to unravel for kindling.”

  When the other woman went downstairs Shaldis looked around her again. The shutter latched from the inside, but the window looked straight down onto the alley, twenty feet below. Someone had come up the ladder, easily reached from the gate.

  The sleep spell that had put the “boy” out could easily have encompassed the women in the dormitory next door as well, but a kidnapper wouldn’t have wanted to risk carrying a Raven wife through inhabited rooms. A sleep spell might not have worked on her—many times they didn’t on mages.

  She opened that door and put her head through nevertheless. It was only the usual harem dormitory where female servants and sometimes the older daughters of the family slept. Divans of the cheapest sort—little more than peg-footed benches lined with corn-shuck cushions that obviously doubled as beds—stretched along three walls, while cupboards held blankets and sheets. There was a brazier in the middle of the room but the scuttle beside it held barely enough charcoal to keep the room warm an hour. She wondered how much fuel Barbonak rationed to his son.

  “It was real, wasn’t it?” Cook came back in, carrying half a dozen short lengths of rope in her hands. “Men around the neighborhood made jokes for most of a year about some wizard being hid in the next room—that’s when they finally admitted that she could make fire, or draw spells that’d keep the rats out of the kitchen—though with all this talk about magic not being what it was, why would any man hide behind a woman? But there must have been seven or eight people saw her make Little Dog Woman’s ulcer quit bleeding. Barbonak was fit to spit blood. He knew she had power and he’d got her to use it for him, but once she cured Little Dog Woman, he knew it wouldn’t take Ebrem and the other master blowers long to figure out why their glass clouded. He’d been swearing for months she was faking. He’s a sly one, Barbonak.”

  She handed Shaldis the ropes. “Here you go—I picked apart the knots.” Shyly she added, “We were all proud of her, the Corn-Tassel. Sometimes she made a mistake—like with that poor dog of Normac the wood seller—but at least she tried to help folks, which is more than can be said of some. If there’s anything you can tell us, anything you can find . . .”

  “Thank you. Was there a knife in the room?”

  Cook shook her head and tucked callused hands into the waist of her apron. “All Enak wanted was things to be the way they were again. When his father goes, the place’ll be bought out from under him inside a year, and he’ll be lucky if he gets a job shoveling frit. Just you wait and see.”

  Shaldis sat on the bed, the ropes lying loose in her hands. Yesterday’s fruitless efforts in Turquoise Woman’s room had yielded her something after all, she found. She didn’t need to consult her bag of tablets. Each sigil, along with the words and images attendant upon its making, was clear enough now in her mind that she could simply call them into being, tracing them on the ropes, on the blue-and-yellow blanket, on the wall at the head of the bed.

  The Retrieval of Dreams.

  The Summons of Lost Voices.

  The Double Sigil, summons and night.

  Corn-Tassel Woman had lain here, she thought. On this bed—and who knew if the magics she had learned included one for unfastening ropes?—watching the light dim behind the cracks of the window shutter. Listening to the household prepare for bed. The whispered gossip of Threeflower and Cook downstairs. The clank of pots, the smell of ashes. The bray of an ass in the street and the slow boom of the horns from the Citadel.

  Shaldis sank into the images, seeing her mother in her heart, seeing her sister. Knowing the world this woman had lived in. Feeling her thoughts, her patience, her need to help others, to entangle herself in their lives. Her fear that night, her recollection of ominous dreams.

 
; Darkness coming. Silence deepening, though it was still early in the night. There had been a bitter chill, for Enak had not lit the brazier and the shutters fit ill.

  Then the scent, the awareness, of the sleeping spell that had curled like poisoned smoke through the house. The woman on the bed—face hurting where her husband had struck her, hands numb from the cut of the ropes—turned her head toward the outer door. She felt the darkness growing in the yard below, flowing up the ladder, a rolling storm of alien chill and rage. She’s felt it before, Shaldis thought. This isn’t the first time it’s come to her door, sought to get in. She recalled her own desperate struggles to keep the spells of ward on her window shutters while the latch jerked and rattled in its casing.

  She knew—almost—what was trying to get in. Felt the jangling, edgy power, the growing storm of freezing malice and rage. Smelled the blue-flickering lightning of alien magic.

  The woman on the bed struggled, tried to summon some magic, some power, to loosen or break her bonds. But she knew no words for that, could frame no spells. Tried to summon the breath to scream, but that, too, bled away from her with the trickling approach of that icy hatred.

  She heard the latch click on the door.

  And screamed in the moment before darkness swallowed her up.

  Oryn’s first intimation of trouble ahead had been the return of the young guard Jethan in the chill of the previous night. “It was the Believers,” he said, dusty and bruised as he walked back into the aqueduct camp. “They’ve got guards on the road; they took my horse.”

  So Oryn hadn’t been terribly surprised when the stream of cartage from town had thinned to a trickle midmorning, and ceased altogether shortly after the king’s party started out themselves on the road back to the city.

  “There’s a hundred of ’em or more,” reported the foreman of the last train of water-laden asses, which met them halfway along the empty road. “And more coming out from town all day. No fighting yet . . .” He wiped his balding forehead with the back of a sunburned arm. “Just yelling, like they haven’t honest work to do themselves.” He spit in the dirt, shielded his eyes against the hard, bright sun to squint back through the dust cloud that hid the road. “Whoresons.”

  “But they let you through.” Bax settled back in his black mate’s saddle, his soft voice almost conversational.

  The foreman shrugged. “We appealed to their better natures.” He held up his whip, and the dirty men leading the other asses laughed.

  Oryn nudged his own mount over to Bax’s side, leaned from the saddle. “Did they try to stop you?”

  It was curious, he reflected: If one looked sufficiently ridiculous it seemed to have the same disarming effect as looking inconspicuous. The man would never have glanced up at his father that way. But the sheer incongruity of the iris-embroidered gold-and-violet coat—one of Oryn’s best designs, if he did say so himself—in the midst of the dusty guards evidently had its effect. Though the foreman clearly knew who he was, he only gave him one startled, bemused stare—I’ve seen the king and by gosh the stories don’t lie!’—then shrugged.

  “Don’t know as how much they tried, m’lord. There was yellin’ and cussin’, but we was more of ’em than the Believers. More was comin’ out as we got under way again, though.” He scratched at the hair on his chest. “The wells over in the market are dry, see. What with the cattle all along the lakeshore, there’s folks been walkin’ around the city all day yesterday tryin’ to get water that’s halfway clean. There’s a lot of crocs down at water’s edge, too, but you just got to pick your place.”

  Oryn glanced at his commander. Word had come the previous evening that the wells in the city were dangerously low; city guards and palace guards both were working at the lines of bucket hoists that stretched out across the dry mudflats to the receding waters of the lake. Oryn had sent word that more lines of hoists were to be built and unemployed men drafted to construct and man them if necessary. A messenger from Barún had arrived this morning as they were breaking camp, with word that though the nomad An-Ariban’s tribe had been turned back from the Lake of the Moon, two other bands of nomads had invaded the Sarn lands on the far side of the Lake of the Sun.

  “Bunch of Believers gathered in the square outside the Citadel gates about three hours after noon, cussin’ and shoutin’. Didn’t come to much.”

  Oryn rose in his stirrups and peered through the glittering curtains of dust. Geb had brought three parasol bearers among his retinue, with orders to shade him during the ride (“I won’t have you coming back sunburned as you did from the desert, my lord, I simply cannot endure it!”), but Oryn had dismissed them to the servants’ train after the first mile. It is difficult enough to shade a man on a horse at a walk. Among mounted cavalry the whole idea became merely a massively useless annoyance. As a result Geb wasn’t speaking to him—the gods only knew what vengeance the valet would take when Oryn returned to the Marvelous Tower.

  At present he could see the city walls after a fashion, a low line of matte dun through the fog of gold. The road was empty for the hundred yards or so that he could discern, but there was a great deal of dust in the direction of the city, as if from a host of trampling feet. Around him the drovers leaned on their beasts’ rumps and looked back too, trading remarks in low voices: By the Summer Concubine’s curtained litter, and the carts of the baggage train, servants and guards muttered among themselves. All had been given weapons when the king’s camp had packed itself up that morning. Most weren’t happy about it.

  Dim with five miles’ distance, the Citadel horns still sounded, steady as a sick man’s groaning breath.

  “It’s mostly loafers and beggars,” said the foreman reassuringly. “Stirred up by the levies for building water lines, belike. Nobody armed, not with real weapons. Sticks and bricks, some of ’em. But there’s a lot of ’em, so you want to be careful.”

  “We shall do that.” Oryn urged his horse forward and bent from the saddle to give the man a silver piece. “Many thanks,”

  “And you might want to change that outfit.” The foreman pocketed the coin and looked up at him again with a grin. “They throw shit, and you’re a big target.”

  “Dear me. And here I’ve always taken pride in my figure . . . . Well, alas, it would take me at least three hours to get myself properly rigged out in something less conspicuous—if I could convince my valet to unpack anything—and I’m afraid we simply haven’t the time. Thank you all the same.”

  The foreman laughed and saluted; the water caravan moved on eastward toward the aqueduct camp.

  The king’s cavalcade resumed its westward course, and slowly the mob emerged before them from the dust. It stretched across the road just where the rangeland gave way to the market gardens that ringed the city’s walls—thousands, not hundreds. As Oryn and Bax led the guards and the baggage train and rode together toward that wall of restless men, Oryn could hear the unmistakable shouting of the Mouth of Nebekht:“. . . ancient days the kings had the welfare of the people at heart, yes, our welfare and our welfare only! It was the king’s responsibility to sacrifice himself, even his very life, if necessary, to appease the angry gods! How different now, when the king spits, yes, spits upon the very commands of he who wrought the universe. . . . ”

  Bax’s glance slipped sideways to him. Oryn raised his brows.

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “It’s treason, my lord. And incitement to riot.”

  “And absolutely dreadful grammar: ‘the commands of he . . .’? I shall have to speak to Hathmar about the quality of speech lessons at the college.”

  “In those days the rains fell!” Lohar shrieked, waving his arms wildly. “Not by the manipulation and coaxing and lies of mages, but as the free gift of the patient Nebekht . . . . ”

  “Here they come!” shouted someone.

  “It’s the commander! The commander of the king’s guard!”

  “Tell him!” yelled someone else. “Tell him to tell the
king . . . !”

  “Here is your king!” Bax spurred his mare forward, made her caracole; his black cloak spread like a wing from his outflung arm. “Behold him, and tell him yourself what you will!” And he drew his sword, watching the mob with those sharp, pale blue-eyes.

  Counting them. And, Oryn was willing to bet, calculating the ground for an attack.

  Lohar strode forward, without a salaam, without a bow, without even the gesture of courtesy. “How long, O King, will you spit in the face of he who commands the universe?” And from the men behind him—a coarse, dusty brown blanket curving in crescent wings on either side of the road and stretching a hundred yards back toward the city—came a deep-throated and angry roar.

  He’s had all afternoon to work them, thought Oryn. They’re thirsty and hot and looking for someone to blame. To blame not only for the drought, but for all the other disappointments of their lives.

  More dust plumed in a sudden column at the back of the mob. He saw the crimson house flags of the palace guard, and the blue of Sarn’s personal troops. Metal glittered in the sunlight, and as if he’d read the whole tale in a scroll Oryn thought, We’re surrounded on both sides. If they try to cut through to us the mob will close in before they can reach us.

  “Sound the signal for them to hold fast,” he whispered to Bax, and the commander nodded. As the two sharp horn blasts sliced through the shouting of the mob, Oryn thought, And here’s where the hero of the ballad quells the mob with a word.

  He gritted his teeth, spurred forward, and hoped he’d be able to come up with the correct word in the next five seconds.

  “Lohar, my dear man, what on earth is the problem?” Oryn sprang down from Sunchaser’s back, tossed the rein to Bax—who’d ridden up behind him—and walked forward, holding out his hands to the astonished Mouth of Nebekht. “You can’t seriously believe that everyone in the city is going to die of thirst with seven lakes full of water there under our noses, can you?”