Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “And when the lakes themselves run dry?” Lohar drew himself up to his full height, which was almost a foot shorter than Oryn’s, and narrowed his bulging, pale eyes. “What then?’

  “Why, I have no idea,” admitted Oryn, praying that nobody here was going to give him the same arguments he’d been giving the clan lords only a week ago. “But with seven of them, and each of them—oh, I think the White Lake is fully a hundred miles long, isn’t it? I’m simply terrible with cubic feet of water, but I don’t think we have anything to be concerned about for quite a while, do we?” Oryn looked around him at the mob as if for further information. Mostly men, though there were a few women, heavily veiled—the wives of the True Believers, despite Lohar’s stated doctrine that Nebkht preferred women to remain in the harem and silent. “There’s plenty of time for the aqueduct to reach the Springs of Koshlar, you know.”

  “The aqueduct is an abomination in the eyes of Nebekht!” boomed Lohar in the trained, carrying voice of a Sun Mage.

  He’d clearly sacrificed that morning: Dust gummed thick to the blood on his arms and calves and he stood in a buzzing column of flies. His mouth worked and his eyes had a frantic glitter—once a man started taking ijnis, Oryn found himself remembering, it was a hard habit to break, even after no trace of magic remained.

  “Those apostates . . . . ” Lohar jabbed a finger in the direction of the city and the golden wall of the Citadel butte. “Those apostates are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord of the Iron Girdle! Thus he has withheld the rain from the lands!”

  “I understand that’s how you feel.” Oryn, too, had been trained by the Sun Mages, and his voice, a beautiful natural baritone, carried as clearly as, and farther than, that of the Mouth of the god. “And I respect your opinions. But you know you’re quite welcome to come to the Marvelous Tower and tell them to me. Any man is. You didn’t need to bring all these good people out here in the hot sun. Have you all been waiting here long?’ He looked around him again. “It can’t have been good for the ladies among you. And truly, it isn’t good for anyone.”

  “I have no fear of your threats!”

  “I’m delighted to hear that, I’m sure, and I’ll remember it if I ever think of making any against you. But I worry more that your own men might hurt one another, as I understand they did in the Slaughterhouse the other day.”

  Someone in the crowd let out a crack of laughter. Lohar’s harsh little walnut of a face turned red with fury.

  “You jest with the Mouth of Nebekht!” he bellowed, raising his hands and turning to the crowd. “You dare to jest?” White gleamed all around the pupils of his staring eyes. “Thus do the madmen mock at the voice of Nebekht! Hear me, O King!” He whirled again, jabbed a stubby red finger at Oryn. “In three days, Nebekht will demand a reckoning of you! For three days more will he tolerate the yappings of your godless wizards! For three days more will your wells be barren, will the cisterns on your roofs swirl with dust—will the realm go thirsty, yes thirsty! because of this man and his stubborn adherence to that which Nebekht abominates!”

  Oryn drew back, unprepared for the violence of this outburst. From the tail of his eye he saw Bax, still mounted, motionless, but he knew the commander was calculating from second to second the movements of the thickening mobs along both sides of the road. It would take very little to trigger a fight, Oryn thought, and even should he make it back to his horse and his guards—always supposing he wasn’t too stiff to mount—the ensuing riot would not only, in all probability, result in the death of everyone in the train, but trigger civil war.

  “The patience of Nebekht is exhausted, King!” screamed Lohar, spittle flying in Oryn’s face. “In three days, if the rains do not come—and they will not!—admit that it is Nebekht who holds the mastery of the rain! Submit yourself to the will of Nebekht—or suffer the consequences!”

  Even had Oryn had a reply to that, it would have been drowned in the bellowing of the True Believers. Thank the gods, he thought, as Lohar turned away, that Barún wasn’t close enough to hear. He’d certainly have screamed “Traitor!” and plowed in with sword swinging.

  The crowd along the road parted, opening a way for Barún and his troops. Already men were leaving the edges of the crowd, streaming back to the city gates. Someone shouted, “The king’s whore!” and men crowded toward the pink-curtained litter. Guards formed up close around the conveyance, swords drawn. Oryn was fairly certain the Summer Concubine had gotten out of it as soon as the trouble started and would meet him back at the palace, which in fact proved to be the case. Falling back from the litter, men rushed upon the baggage wagons instead, tearing at the food stores and the tents.

  “Thieves!” bellowed Barún, and led a sortie against them. They scattered at once before him, while Geb screamed “Vermin! Dung beetles! Bring those back!” and chased after a trio of looters with their arms full of ointment bottles and silver plates. A great quantity of dishes, water vessels, hangings and clothing were left scattered in the dirt.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Oryn quietly as Bax came up cursing to his side. “There aren’t enough of us. Reaching the gates will be cheap at the price.”

  “Rabble . . .” muttered the commander, but signed for the train to form up again.

  “Quite well-armed rabble, as a matter of fact—did you have a good look at them?—and with a lot of friends in the Slaughterhouse for us to ride through before we can make the gate.” Most of the crowd had dispersed, but knots and stringers of men followed on the cavalcade’s flanks like stray dogs as it passed through the reeking city middens, and the narrow streets of the dirty suburb closed them in. From street to street, from square to square, in crumbling courts and teetering tenement doors, Oryn heard the chant taken up:

  “Three days! Three days! Three days!”

  Like a cliff the East Gate loomed. Men jostled Sunchaser, and Oryn was aware that his knees were shaking, aware of just how close he had come to having the situation explode into violence that could end anywhere.

  And however it ended, he thought, even a small rebellion would destroy all chance of the aqueduct being completed in time to do any good, much less others being built. In the event of violence, probably the first thing to be destroyed would be the aqueduct—followed very closely by Oryn himself, the Summer Concubine, their daughter, and large sections of the city.

  Within the gate, the Avenue of the Sun was quiet as the bedraggled train passed along it. Barún and his troops brought up the rear. No one lingered to cheer them. Those who weren’t fetching water from the lakes were presumably standing in line for the muddied dregs of the city wells. The slanting evening sunlight caught the dust in the streets and seemed to fill the city with burning fog. Behind them voices echoed from the district outside, and now and then within the walk as well: “Three days!”

  “Don’t worry, lord.” Bax glanced sharply left and right down the wider streets, at the pale green walls of the Grand Bazaar and into the courtyards and alleys past which they rode. “It won’t take but a day or two for Garon and Brodag to get their levies down here to support you in case of trouble—they’re loyal—and word can be got out to the farther Jothek lords as well. Lohar’s boys are only city rabble when all’s said. They won’t last long.”

  “No,” agreed Oryn quietly. If the Jothek House clans arrived, and weren’t out chasing nomads—or worshiping Nebekht themselves.

  Take the water out of anything, he thought, and even stone will crumble into dust.

  He wondered exactly where Mohrvine had been during the afternoon.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I‘ve been in this place before, thought Shaldis, clouded, shaken, struggling in the darkness of dream. Or is this only the déjà vu of dreams?

  “Help me, Rohar God of Women, help me,” a voice sobbed in the echoing blackness, and Shaldis followed the voice. Rough stone scraped under her fingers. (Why can’t I see?) The walls around her narrowed; she felt them brush her shoulders. Corn-Tassel Woman: She kn
ew the voice belonged to the woman who’d slept in the bed, who’d been bound with those ropes. Whose screams had echoed in her mind as she’d plunged into unconsciousness. The woman who’d felt the confusion and resentment and love imbued in those walls she had touched in waking. The woman who’d tried to meddle with such helpful intent in other people’s lives with her magic, not aware that in doing so she made herself a target.

  She wanted to call out to her. Reassure her.

  But if she called she’d be heard, and not by the woman she sought.

  The thing in the darkness would hear her. The roiling, cold storm of hate.

  I have to get to her. She’s tied up. I have to untie her, free her, get her out of this place . . . .

  Wherever this place was.

  She screamed . . . .

  She felt as if she’d been lost here, wandering, for hours.

  Don’t give up. Don’t give up—I’m coming.

  But the cold around her seemed to deepen. The darkness writhed, alive, as if the air were snakes or fire. As if the air listened for the straining gasp of her breath.

  It was behind her. As she had in the Ring at the Citadel’s crown, Shaldis ducked behind the corner of a wall—for a moment it seemed that it was the same wall—and buried her face in her arms. Soof, soof, I am the darkness, Soof, soof, hide.

  Before her in the darkness the woman screamed again, Help me!

  And in reply, out of that churning stink of dark and terror, she heard a voice that wasn’t a voice scrape on the words. Bitch. Thief. Thieving hag.

  It passed her by. Blue fingerlets of lightning; corpse-glow edging a robe. The glint of edged metal, the queer, lightless glitter like railing fire.

  The woman screamed. No!

  Shaldis knew she should turn and run, run as fast as she could, but she didn’t know the way out of the place. If I scream it will find me. If it finds me I’ll die.

  This is only a dream but if it finds me—if it becomes aware of me—it can follow me back to the waking world. It will know where I am.

  But it already knows. And I can’t leave her.

  She reached out, feeling and probing with her mind as if she thrust her fingers through the barred windows of a prison. Trying to find Corn-Tassel Woman, trying to lend her some of her power, some of her strength.

  The Sigil of Sisterhood, she thought, trying to find the other woman’s thoughts, to lend her strength. We are sisters of the Raven.

  But the sigil had not been with Corn-Tassel Woman then. Raeshaldis understood that she saw what had already happened—there was nothing she could do. Fragments of spells rattled in the dark like blind insects. Spells of escape. Spells of invisibility. Spells of protection. Spells to make whatever it was go away, have a bellyache, forget all about it, trip and fall down . . . anything.

  Dear gods, anything!

  She felt its anger as it brushed them aside.

  You dare do this, dare do this, bitch, dare throw magic at me . . . .

  Knife-glint. A woman bound on what looked like a carved stone table, squat obsidian images staring down at her with mirrored eyes from shadowy niches in the wall. Blood on her wrists and ankles where the ropes cut with her struggles. Something gold glinted in the darkness, a jeweled thing crawling out of the center of that wickering storm of shadow and blue lightning. It crept up the length of the woman’s body, over the torn blue rags of her dress, claws pricking sharp on her plump flesh, digging, drawing tiny spots of blood.

  The woman’s mouth stretched in a soundless scream of horror.

  “No!” Shaldis threw herself forward, reaching to snatch it away, to throw it against the wall. But in her dreaming her fingers passed through the thing like shadow. She was struck aside, swept from her feet, smashed into stone, into darkness. Corn-Tassel Woman shrieked, animal noises spiraling into realms of pain only guessed at. Shaldis ran, and the purple, vibrating darkness followed her, reached for her, sought her. She blundered into walls, cold stone, smelling dust and corpses. Tried to see, and only glimpsed a confusion of images: blood on carved stone, a thing of gems with horns and hooks and pincers outstretched, creeping out of torn flesh covered in blood. She ran, and the darkness ran after her.

  I have to get out. I have to wake up. To get away. If it catches me it will have me, it will give me to that thing . . . .

  Light ahead, a single candle.

  Screams battered her. Her own? Those of the dying woman on the stone table? Horror and pain and despair dragged like clutching hands.

  This way, whispered a voice, very close in her ear. Follow the light. Wake up. You can’t help her.

  The screams were mortal, dying. Darkness like a lightning-seamed storm. It saw her now. No spell, no rhyme, no illusion would blind its vision, and it came fast, like the dust storms that overtake desert travelers, filling eyes and lungs.

  Bitch. Thief. Thieving hag . . .

  The light was a cheap tallow dip stuck in a puddle of its own wax on top of a packing box. Shaldis could even see the maker’s mark on the box, and the carter’s cryptic white chalk X. Behind her, darkness loomed like a cloud, seeking her; and in that darkness, something cold and tiny and vicious, wrought of gems, blood covering its jeweled claws.

  Come back here, bitch. I’ll find you. I’ll have you.

  You won’t run from me . . . .

  Shaldis ran toward the light.

  She fell and woke, clutching at the hands that touched her face. Someone took her wrist and she tried to yank free. The hand was iron strong; she screamed “No!” and struck at the woman who bent over her as the darkness had bent over Corn-Tassel Woman on the carved stone.

  “Wake up,” said the woman again as Shaldis tried to pull loose, tried to flee, striking at the leathery, wrinkled hands that seized her. “Wake up! You’re safe!”

  Shaldis made an inarticulate noise, a cry that echoed the screams she still heard from the dream world in which she had been trapped. The woman said, “She’s dead.”

  She stared up at her through the tangled wrack of her hair.

  The candle whose light she’d followed back to waking burned on an upended packing box beside the cot where she lay.

  “She’s dead,” said the woman again. Her voice was gentle, a hoarse, husky alto like very gritty-brown bread.

  “Who are you?” Shaldis looked around her—the grubby shed behind the kitchen brought back to her the visit to Barbonak the glassblower’s house, the stifling bedroom . . . sitting on the edge of the bed with fragments of rope in her hands.

  They must have moved me. Moved me to the kitchen, away from where the men will be at this hour. Maybe Enak came home. She hoped that really was rat meat they put in his supper.

  A couple of lamps augmented the firelight that trickled back to this little closet from the kitchen hearth, providing more smoke than light. They were pottery, glazed ocher banded with black—she didn’t know why she shuddered at the sight. The sky visible through the shed’s slit window was the color of mountain lupine.

  And clear as azure glass.

  The horns of the Citadel were silent.

  A flea bit her. The scraps of old carpet and fleece that covered the cot were alive with them.

  The woman said, “Pomegranate Woman, they call me. And you’re the Old One, that used to go about the market dressed up as a boy.”

  Shaldis flushed. She’d been careful to keep clear of the wizards in those days. She hadn’t thought anyone else knew.

  Cook appeared in the door between the shed and the kitchen, gray hair bundled in a kerchief and sweat oily on her face “You all right, sweeting?”

  Shaldis nodded.

  Cook handed her a posset, goat’s milk and a little honey with an egg beaten in. “We thought we’d lose you when you fainted like that. Our good lady disappearing the way she did, I didn’t feel right about sending Three up to the Citadel, and neither of us knew which of His Majesty’s ladies it is that our lady was friends with. But Threeflower went looking for Pomegranate Woman out
in the Slaughterhouse.”

  Shaldis looked back at Pomegranate Woman. “Are you sure she’s dead?”

  The older woman nodded. Lamp flame hovered golden and steady in her dark eyes. “Like the other,” she said. “The amber-eyed girl.”

  Shaldis regarded her for a time in the flickering circle of light. She was little and sturdy and wiry, burned brown by sun. Her long white hair hung mostly in a couple of mismatched braids wrapped in bits of leather and cloth, but here and there long locks of it were wound up on sticks, as the nomads wore theirs, or held with jeweled clasps. Her clothing was a shabby mix of men’s and women’s, and none of it fit. Half a dozen necklaces glittered over three tattered shirts and a dress, cheap glass, painted paste and one of them emeralds and gold.

  “Xolnax’s daughter,” she said.

  Pomegranate Woman shook her head. “I don’t know. She was the first I saw. Pontifer here saw her too—didn’t you, Pontifer?” She addressed thin air near the side of the cot. “Pontifer sometimes dreams the same thing I do,” the woman confided. “He’s very clever, for a pig.”

  “I can tell,” said Shaldis doubtfully. Either the woman had a far more powerful cloak on her pet pig than she’d ever encountered, or she was completely crazy.

  Not that insanity had anything to do with magic, of course.

  Pomegranate Woman said softly, “The amber-eyed girl was the first one it took. It wanted me, but I could hide from it. It wanted you, but you hid too. Hid behind the wall in the Ring. I saw you. It seeks those of us whom none will help; seeks us in the places where none will come when we call.”

  A woman tied to her bed in a dark room, waiting in dread for the night to pass.

  A woman alone and shunned in a rented chamber, in a courtyard where a woman’s screams, if she uttered them, were not so unusual as to rouse those sober enough to help.

  A girl sleeping alone in a chamber, whose only neighbors were boys who hated her; boys sunk in the sleep of exhaustion that followed the day of fasting and song.