Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “What does it want?”

  Very softly, as though fearing that the thing that hunted in darkness would hear, Pomegranate Woman said, “It wants our blood and our hearts, child, devoured within our living bodies. It wants our power, to feed its own. It wants our lives.”

  It was full dark by the time Shaldis reached the Citadel. From the Glassblowers Quarter to the Square of the Mages, she kept to the side streets and alleys, her nape prickling at the shouting of men, the flare of torchlight, the atmosphere of anger that washed through the city like turbulent winds. The mutterings that she’d encountered all through the streets that afternoon looked to be building to some thunderclap of violence, infecting the whole city with fear. Shops and houses were shuttered, an hour before the usual closing-up time, but bands of men roved the streets. Every café was jammed, voices spilling out like the red guts of slaughtered sheep. As she passed, veiled and wrapped for good measure in a gray cloak, the spelling of which gave her a pounding headache, Shaldis heard Nebekht’s name over and over, mingled with fragments of diatribe against wizardry, against taxes, against the nomads, against the aqueduct, against the king. Sometimes she heard Lord Sarn’s name, other times Mohrvine’s. Sometimes Lord Akarian’s, and mostly only the confused outpourings of rage and fear.

  Two weeks’ frustration, fed rather than slaked by that single, disappointing shower of rain, was ready to explode.

  “Three days,” people said. Three days . . .”

  Lunatic, she thought, ridiculous. The garbled account that Pomegranate Woman had given her of Lohar’s attempt to block supplies to the aqueduct couldn’t be true. Could it?

  Lohar and his followers, threaten the king?

  Give him an ultimatum?

  He could have Lohar seized, killed.

  Dear gods, had the Summer Concubine gotten safely away?

  Shouting down an alleyway: a struggling mass of figures. One of them wore the blue leather helmet of the city guards; she saw him tear himself from the mob, flee bleeding into the darkness. Heard triumphant shouting: “Three days!”

  Did she really think the king’s men could get through the narrow mazes of the Slaughterhouse as far as Nebekht’s Temple without being annihilated from every rooftop, every window, every alley mouth?

  “For once the land has surrendered to the rulership of Nebekht,” a crop-haired man was shouting to a crowd that filled the street. “Once all have demonstrated their repentance and acceptance of his will . . .”

  Demonstrated how? As she passed the Grand Bazaar she wondered if her mother lay awake behind the shutters of the harem, listening to those yammering voices and watching torchlight jerk outside. Wondered what her grandfather was doing on this troubled and terrifying night.

  “By the gods, girl, where have you been?” demanded Hathmar when she’d finally convinced Shrem the gatemaster to open for her and she’d climbed the long, lamplit stairs.

  Standing in the old man’s workroom doorway, where his words had stopped her, Raeshaldis opened her mouth to shout, Outside the sacred Citadel of male magic, where you asked me to betake myself lest my dirty presence foul your precious ceremonies. Then she closed it again.

  This is Hathmar, she told herself. Not some dirty-mouthed fellow novice like Soral Brûl

  Sitting behind the table in his workroom, the Archmage looked as though he’d aged ten years in the last three days. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were hollowed by fatigue in a face gaunt with fasting. His unwashed hair had lost what crispness or strength it once had and lay on his skull like watered milk. His bands had a steady, ceaseless tremor of exhaustion whenever he moved them from the tabletop on which they were folded.

  “Someone tried to poison me, sir, when I went down to the city to speak with the Summer Concubine,” she said. “I was ill. After that I was afraid to come back here.”

  “Afraid to come . . . ?” For a moment all that was in his sunken, peering eyes was affront, that she could have for a moment imagined that danger would touch her here. And then, brows drawing together: “Poison you? Poison a mage? Now?”

  “Maybe they thought they could get away with it,” said Shaldis quietly. “Maybe they thought the masters here wouldn’t much care.”

  She met his eyes as she spoke. It was the Archmage who looked away.

  “Child . . .”

  “I understand you thought you needed the other novices—the boys—as much as you needed me,” said Shaldis quietly. “I understand how fond you are of Soral Brûl, how he treats you like a grandfather and brings you tea and cakes and is always asking your help with this and that. How you’d rather not hear anything against him, or know the kind of things he says about me, not only to the other novices, but to masters and adepts. I understand how you’d be afraid to change what has worked for so long and exchange it for something you didn’t know.” In the speckled lamplight Hathmar seemed to shrink behind the scroll-strewn table. “I can even understand how you might have felt envy yourself, as well as fear. But you could have done more than you did, sir And, not having done it, you cannot blame me for seeking to protect myself as well as I could.”

  “No,” he whispered. “No. And I have been—paid—for my hesitation. And for my fear.”

  He rose from the divan, took Shaldis’s arm and drew her to the window of his workroom, flame-headed arches that overlooked the lowest of the Citadel’s courts and the gate that led to the street. From up here, Shaldis could see the black-tiled lodge just within the gates in which she’d sat, a year and a half ago, waiting for Hathmar and the others to come and tell her whether they’d let her in.

  Please tell me you’re joking.

  Gods help us, I think Hathmar’s serious.

  And Xolnax’s amber-eyed daughter, haughty and perfect in her veils, had regarded Shaldis in her boy’s things and dusty sandals with a remote wariness, as if wondering what such a creature was doing in the same room with her lovely self.

  When Shaldis had come to the gate, the street outside had been empty. Now the reflections of torchlight flared over the painted walls of the houses opposite, and Lohar’s voice sawed the warm spring night.

  “. . . degenerate monarch and his filthy sycophants . . . keeping good men down, keeping true men from doing what they know in their hearts to be right . . .”

  “The city guards have come three times to try to take him.” The lamplight blinked across Hathmar’s spectacles as he pushed them up on his forehead to rub the red marks they’d left on his nose. “Each time he’s returned as soon as they leave to quell fighting elsewhere in the streets. He’s stirring up the whole city, like grassfires on the hills at summer’s end. Four of the adepts and all but three of the novices have fled.”

  His voice choked on the words and he turned away. A lamp stood on the table amid a vast confusion of tablets and papers, diagrams and scrolls, signacons and little pots of inks. Oil had dribbled where the lamp had been filled. Of course there were no niches for lamps in any wall in the Citadel. The Archmage’s hand fumbled as he picked up the lamp scissors, trimmed the burned wick, as clumsy as a child. Shaldis, shocked at the merest idea of the defection—even Soral Brûl couldn’t be that contemptible, surely!—barely stopped herself from taking the implement from him, completing the task herself. The last time he’d had to trim a lamp wick this aged man who could have been her grandfather’s father had been a child.

  “. . . demonstrate their repentance and acceptance of his will—yes, the true will of Nebekht! Demonstrate that they’ll follow Lohar, or whoever he chooses to appoint! Cast out every wizard that can go against him . . .”

  “The king can crush them, surely!” She seized on the first thing she could think of to draw his thoughts from that devastating betrayal. Boys he’d taught for years, men he’d known, some of them for decades.

  “If he can bring in the troops to do so, perhaps. But word has come that the Greman levies aren’t coming. There are nomad bands all over the Jothek ranges on the White Lake and moving toward the
City of Reeds. And he can’t defeat the whole city, child. The clan lords have been muttering since the aqueduct began building—wanting to believe there’s an easier way. And each clan lord only watches for the opportunity to put himself and his house on the throne.”

  He sighed again and rubbed his eyes, staring unseeingly at the litter on the low worktable. Shaldis came to kneel beside the divan where he sat and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t send you word, sir. I didn’t realize what was happening, but you must have thought I’d just fled like the others. How were you to know that I wouldn’t do that? Not even,” she added, “if my magic had deserted me, as theirs did. You’re my teacher.”

  He looked up, and she saw the tears in his blue eyes. “For all the good I’ve been at it,” he said, and touched her face with one fragile hand. “Child, we both owe each other apologies, so let us let them swallow each other up and think no more on them. It may be that the adepts, and the boys, left for another reason. I have sent word to the Summer Concubine asking her to bring her ladies here, her Raven sisters. Asking her help, in bringing the rains.”

  Shaldis stared at him, her mouth open in shock.

  He smiled, and put a finger under her chin. “Only now do I realize how stiff-necked I was—the whole of the order was—seeing your astonishment, which is no compliment to me.”

  Shaldis hastily closed her mouth and he laughed.

  “And I have deserved no compliment. But I see now—or I think I see—what must be done. Whatever has caused our powers to wane, it has gone beyond the point of our being able to Summon the rains at all. We cannot allow our pride—I cannot allow my pride—to destroy the realm, maybe to destroy all hope of survival for the people who dwell in the Valley of the Lakes. I know you have become the friend of the Summer Concubine. Do you think she will come?”

  “Of . . . of course. Yes. She would never hesitate.”

  “She is more forbearing than some men I have known.” And he sighed again. His thin fingers brushed the sheets of papyrus and vellum that lay scattered over the worktable, the styli and pots of ocher and iron and ink. “I have invited the mages to take part, all those who still seem to have some power left. Aktis, and Ahure, and Isfan of the City of White Walls, and Nars the Pyromancer from the Lake of Reeds.”

  “I don’t know about Isfan and Nars, sir,” said Shaldis, “but neither Aktis nor Ahure has any power left. Judging by the machinery in Ahure’s house, he’s been faking his effects for years. Aktis certainly doesn’t have the power to undo door bolts or keep Mohrvine’s pages away from his rooms, and he’s been drinking so much ijnis I’d worry about the effects of whatever power he may have left on the rite as a whole.”

  The Archmage’s mouth tightened, and his thin shoulders slumped a little, like a clan lord receiving word, on the eve of battle, of the defection of key landchiefs to his enemy. But he only said, “For the sake of their pride I think I must ask their presence anyway: their pride, and the help their masters can still give to the king. My poor Oryn,” he whispered. “My poor boy, to have to deal with all this. Mohrvine will do what Mohrvine will do, of course.” He shook his head. “Yet if I excluded Ahure, do I not know that Lord Jamornid would take such a pet that he might well forsake the king’s cause? And Lord Sarn—if . . .”

  He hesitated, and his glance touched Shaldis, then fled away, not willing to betray what she’d already guessed: that Benno Sarn, too, was as Empty as the rest.

  From the street below voices rose, a broken shouting, fragments of words: “. . . bitches . . . demons . . . the will of Nebekht. Three days must the false king hold dominion still over the land. Three days . . .”

  Raeshaldis drew forth the silk pouch from around her neck and took out the disk. “What is this, sir?”

  Hathmar took it in his shaky fingers, turned it over, squinted at it in the wavery light. “It’s very old,” he said, passing light fingertips over the incised runes. “I feel . . . There was a time when the spells and power within a thing would have sung to me like the djinni sing in the sandstorms, but these days my ears are all but deaf. Still, the runes are those of absorption, of drawing lightning and fire to them. Perhaps it was a hex eye. How did you come by this, child?”

  “I can’t tell you the circumstances, sir, though I will another time.” Shaldis fought the urge to snatch it out of his fingers, the fear that he would not give it back. “It—it is a secret that isn’t mine to reveal. Those look like Earth Wizard runes.”

  He shook his head and handed the disk back to her. “It’s a very old system, an order that died out at the end of the Hosh Dynasty. After all is over—one way or another—I shall take you to the library and we’ll search the scrolls for record of it together, but until that time, child, I beg you not to carry it, for who knows under what circumstances it will suddenly become active again? Promise me you will take care.”

  Shaldis smiled, and slipped the disk back into its bag. “I’ll take care.” She glanced toward the window. Firelight flared brighter on the other side of the courtyard wall. She heard the sudden rattle of hooves on the pavement of the Court of the Mages, men’s shouting and the percussion of hurled stones.

  She shivered, remembering the ugly currents of hatred that swirled like riptides through the streets.

  The jangling shiver of malice and hate rattling her window in the darkness. Bitch, the voice had whispered. Thief . . .

  “Nebekht and his followers won’t like it that women are being asked to bring the rain. You’ll have trouble from Lohar.”

  “That’s why we’re keeping this as quiet as possible, child. Benno Sarn and I have worked all day, while the others sang, to make a new Rite, a new Song. A Song that will incorporate the Earth Wizards, and the Blood Mages, and the Pyromancers. We have tried, too, to incorporate the powers of the Raven sisters, though we know so little of them—I have hope that the Summer Concubine will come here tomorrow to help us continue the work. Though she has had little formal training, still she knows the most about the powers of women. My child, we cannot fail.”

  He turned toward the window again, where the torchlight was fading and silence whispered in the wake of the ebbing voices.

  “We dare not fail.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Summer Concubine sat still for a long time after she finished weeping, looking sightlessly out at the brittle early sunlight on the garden pavement, her hands pressed to her mouth. She had not uttered a sound. Shaldis wondered if this was something Pearl Women were trained to do. To weep in silence lest they disturb their men.

  Feeling awkward as she always did, Shaldis took refuge in the commonplace, fetched a linen towel from the washstand behind its inlaid door in the corner, wrung it out in the scented water of the basin there. When she came back to the bed, her friend was sitting with hands folded, long tracks of black and green marking where her tears had flowed.

  “Thank you.” The concubine’s voice was barely a whisper as she took the towel. “He will pay for that.”

  “If we catch him,” said Shaldis. “And we will.”

  “I don’t mean the killer.” Her hands trembled as she wiped away the remains of her paint. “I mean Enak.”

  She sat still again, the cloth forgotten in her hands. Shaldis took it from her, looked around and saw the breakfast tray on its spindly-legged stand. Beside it, a brazier warmed the blue-and-golden inner chamber from the morning chill. She folded the damp cloth onto the tray, felt the side of the coffeepot. It was tepid, but she poured a cup anyway, and rang the silver bell on the tray. The stout maid Lotus appeared at once:

  “More coffee, if you would, please.” Shaldis went to hand the woman the tray, and Lotus hastened to intercept it, visibly scandalized that a visitor should even consider doing a servant’s work. She glanced at the motionless figure on the edge of the bed.

  “Is there anything else I can do? Any way I can help?”

  Shaldis shook her head. “Bad news about a friend.” She replied in the same whisper Lotus had used, th
ough she knew quite well that the Summer Concubine could hear the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings in the terrace garden outside.

  “One of her ladies, that disappeared ?”

  Shaldis hesitated, knowing the speed with which any tale, any scrap of information, spread through the servants’ quarters, then only raised her brows. Lotus nodded, both at the mild rebuke—Of course you know I can’t speak of it—and at the reply that lay behind it: Yes.

  “I’ll pray for her,” Lotus whispered. “The god of women—he must be getting stronger these days. And they’re saying that maybe he hasn’t been a god all along, but a . . . a lady god in disguise.”

  When Lotus had gone, Shaldis turned back to the bed. “He was within his rights, you know. Enak. If he had killed her himself, he would still have been within his rights.” She was thinking about her grandfather as she spoke.

  Almost inaudibly, the Summer Concubine said, “Even so.”

  Shaldis wondered how long that state of things would last. The world was changing indeed. No wonder men clung in fury to those like Lohar who promised to keep things as they were.

  The set of the favorite’s mouth, the look of infinite weary anger in her eyes, did not bode well for Enak and Barbonak.

  Then the Summer Concubine sighed and got to her feet, pulling more closely about herself the robe of embroidered white wool that covered her pale green underdress and chemise. “And this woman who called you back out of the darkness, Pomegranate Woman—I hope she slept somewhere safe last night!”

  “I tried to get her to come to the Citadel with me.” Shaldis followed the Summer Concubine to her dressing table, neat with its porcelain pots of ointments and paints. “She refused. She said she’s been a shadow for the past ten years and wants to remain that way. He can’t catch a shadow, she said. He or it, as the case might be.”

  “You’re thinking of the . . . the wight, the thing, whatever it was . . . that Urnate Urla tried to trap among the tombs? But surely it was a living man who attacked you?”