Sisters of the Raven

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Sisters of the Raven Page 34

by Barbara Hambly


  “It was a human being, anyway,” said Shaldis. “I’m pretty sure it was bigger and heavier than the Red Silk Lady, at least as tall as I am—and I’m ready to take oath it was a man. But I was taken by surprise, and of course I couldn’t see anything. Now that I think about it, I can’t even swear that he was alone. There could easily have been two of them . . . .” She-paused, her mind snagging on a thought that would not quite form. “You don’t happen to know where Lohar was on the first night of the full moon, do you?”

  “But Lohar has no power. I know he’s supposed to spend every night in the temple, in communion with Nebekht.”

  “Which tells us exactly nothing.” Shaldis sighed. “Having followers everywhere, he’d have known about Corn-Tassel Woman, and Turquoise Woman . . . and me, of course.” She watched for a moment while the Summer Concubine smoothed ointment on her face and rubbed a trace of cochineal powder on her cheekbones and lips. Her eyes she painted again with kohl and malachite, fine lines with a squirrel-hair brush: Shaldis wondered, even with her thoughts of power and murder and blood black in the moonlight, how it was that this looked so beautiful on the Summer Concubine and made her, Raeshaldis, look like a girl acrobat in the circus whenever she tried it.

  “Pomegranate Woman said that the attacker was looking for her, that she’d dreamed about it,” she said after a time. “Did you? Or did you ever feel that you were being watched?”

  Only a Pearl Woman’s training, thought Raeshaldis, kept the Summer Concubine’s hand from jerking at the question; she saw how she froze, and how the delicate muscles of her back and shoulders tightened at memories of things half forgotten. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Sometimes. There have been times—in dreams, or in the shadows of night—that I felt that I wasn’t alone.”

  “But whoever it is,” said Shaldis, “knows better than to come after you, because if anything happened to you, the king wouldn’t rest in hunting him down. What about the other Ravens, Cattail Woman and Pebble Girl? Did they ever speak of . . . of this sense of being watched in their dreams!”

  “No.” The Summer Concubine turned from her mirror, set the fragile brush back in its holder, a frown pulling at her brows. “Cattail Woman I don’t know: She’ll never admit that there’s anything she can’t cope with. But I asked Pebble Girl and she said she’s never had this . . . this experience of someone trying to take her. Unlike the others, she’s kept her powers a secret, even from her family.” She smiled with gentle indulgence at the young woman’s simplicity of heart.

  “She used her powers mostly to make flowers grow in the harem courtyard of her father’s house, and to make pictures appear in the flames when she told her younger brothers and sisters tales around the nursery fire at night. Her father’s a contractor, as I think I’ve said, a kindly, simple man who depends on her. Sometimes she’ll heal his mules when they get ill, but she doesn’t tell him because she’s afraid he’ll be shocked. She’s a solitary girl, and shy—a little slow, I think, judged by the ways of the world. But such a treasure inside.”

  She folded her hands, gazing out through the doorway to the terrace, where the big cat Gray King stalked a lizard along the tiled edge of the pool. Uneasy stillness lay on the city, like the pall of smoke from the scattered fires that had been started and quenched in last night’s sporadic rioting. Shaldis’s nape prickled, and she went to the dress stand to fetch the gown the Summer Concubine would wear to consult with Hathmar that day, gray-blues and greens, changeable silk like lake water.

  The Summer Concubine went on, “Last night when I reached here after the attack by Lohar’s mob on the road, a girl was waiting for me, the Moth Concubine—she belongs to one of the silk merchants allied with House Jamornid. She’s had dreams of power for nearly a year, she told me, and never dared to put it to the test. But when I asked her to, she could make fire by looking at a candle and find things that I hid. I don’t know the extent of her power, nor what she’s capable of. Like Pebble Girl, she’s never felt any sense of threat.”

  “So it’s only women who were known to have power,” concluded Shaldis. She helped her friend into gown and jacket, sashes and veils and scarves, all the intricate embroidered costume of perfection. “Maybe we’ve been looking too much at what the attacker is, and why he still has power, and haven’t asked the simpler questions: Who knew about the victims and where to find them? You can’t scry someone who has power, not against their will. And the answer to that”—Shaldis gathered up her own veils and wrapped them over her tawdry dress—“lies back in Greasy Yard.”

  “Spare nothing in finding that answer.” The Summer Concubine finished tying her three sashes in pleasing knots and came over to lay her hands on Shaldis’s shoulders, looked up into her eyes. “For you can besure that whoever he is, he is watching. And once we go up to the Citadel tonight—once we start with the new Song at tomorrow’s dawn—even those who are hidden, like Pebble Girl and the Moth Concubine, will be known to him too.”

  Shaldis made her way toward the Golden Court and the outer gates of the palace compound, but a thought crossed her mind and she turned her steps aside to the smaller Court of the Guards. It lay like an enclave off the larger, semipublic space, bare walled and unbroken by the usual arcade, forbidding and stark. If nothing else, Jethan deserved thanks for his willingness to act as a messenger. The Summer Concubine had told her that he had gone straight to Greasy Yard upon his arrival in the city with the king’s party, only returning to the palace that morning. He would be annoyed, Shaldis feared—of course by the time she’d thought to send a message from the Citadel telling him not to wait, the city gates had been closed. He was entirely too arrogant and he’d go on and on about how she shouldn’t be gallivanting around the city by herself.

  But she didn’t want him to be angry with her. And he had had a difficult couple of days on her account.

  So she went to the Court of the Guards, and one of the men there said Jethan was in the baths, they’d send for him.

  “No, please don’t trouble him.” That was all Jethan needed, thought Shaldis, to clinch his contempt for her, that she call him out of the baths.

  “Sweetheart”—the guard grinned—”if you knew how many of the boys here have been waiting to see our Jethan take up with some pretty little fox from the city . . . Don’t deprive us of the sight, I beg of you.”

  So Shaldis, blushing under her pink veils, which the Summer Concubine had redraped for her, settled on a marble bench to wait. She felt more flustered than she had thought she would, to be described as a pretty little fox. It was certainly something no one had ever said of her before. She was still waiting a few minutes later when Lord Mohrvine and his guards rode into the court.

  The court was long and narrow, running back from its gate to a fountain at the far end. The clash of the hooves echoed against the bare cobbles and walls. The guards dismounted, bringing their horses to drink at the troughs around the fountain; Mohrvine on his black mare was still speaking to Aktis, who rode beside him, and such was the tone of his voice, and the swift, angry gestures of his hand, that none dared come near.

  “Soth used to be a wizard and is now nothing but a chamberlain,” the king’s uncle was saying, his beautiful voice hard. “And by the gods that’s what you’ll be if there are more humiliations like that one! Love potion forsooth! After all your vows that there was power in it.”

  “There was power in it,” returned Aktis doggedly. “I swear to you.”

  “If that’s the best power you can come up with these days, you’d best learn to keep household accounts, then, because that’s what you’ll be doing for your bread. Do you have any concept of what’s at stake! The king has two days, and then we must prove our strength.”

  “I won’t fail you.” The Earth Wizard looked half dead, cheeks hollowed and eyes sunken with fatigue. Sweat stood glittering on his balding forehead and his hands shook as they gripped the pommel of his saddle. Did he see, Shaldis wondered, the fate of Urnate Urla waiting for him? To b
e cast out by his patron, to finish as a clerk to some water boss hiding in his dung-spattered house for fear of the True Believers?

  “Best you don’t.” Mohrvine swung from his saddle and strode through the doorway that led to the Green Court and the inner realms of the palace beyond, trailed by a small army of his black-clothed guards. Aktis stayed mounted for some moments, clinging to the pommel and swaying slightly, his face waxen with weariness and despair.

  Shaldis went over to him, took the reins in one hand and held out the other to him. Aktis’s hand groped for it gratefully, and he dismounted with the slow care of one who has not the strength to get down alone.

  “Thank you, child,” he whispered. “I shall be better presently. It passes.” His hand was as cold as dead mutton in hers.

  She left the horse ground-reined and led Aktis to the bench. When he sank down on it, she went back, wrapped the horse’s rein around one of the wall rings by the fountain and held one of the public cups beneath the trickle of cold, rust-tasting water. Looking back, she saw the Earth Wizard slumped on the bench, hands folded on his knees to stop their trembling, narrow shoulders bowed. With the amount of ijnis she knew he was taking, it was no wonder some important spell went awry—it was only a matter of time before one did, she thought. Like Ahure, he had probably been fighting for years to maintain the illusion of the power that was his only way of making a living. Five years ago, he would have gone with Lord Mohrvine to see the king, and not be left here in the harsh open sun of the guards’ court with the horses.

  Five years ago there would have been half a dozen of the palace guards who’d have come out and offered him the hospitality of the barracks watch room, a drink of wine, jockeying to sit by him and talk.

  What would he be, she thought, when it was shown that that power was no more?

  And it would be shown. Sooner or later, he would be able to hide his weakness no longer. He would stand stripped before their eyes, revealed not only as a failure, but as a fraud for many years. And then what?

  She had the feeling Mohrvine wouldn’t even keep him to do the accounts, as he’d threatened, but would turn him out, as her grandfather had turned out his hunting dog when it grew too old to run.

  He looked up at her as she handed him the water, squinting a little at her eyes between the diaphanous pink folds of the veils. “Do I know you, child?”

  She raised and lightened her voice, and thickened her Market District accent, lest he realize that she was someone who had known him in better times—that she was someone who now had what he did not. “I don’t think so, sir, though I seen you in the markets. Are you all right, sir? Can I get you aught?”

  Aktis sighed and forced a smile of politeness, though it was clear he only wanted to lie down somewhere and rest. “Thank you, no.” By his tone it was clear he thought her only one of the barracks whores, veiled or not. “What I most need these days no one can bring. But I truly appreciate your kind thought.”

  Jethan appeared in the main doorway of the barracks looking impatiently around the yard; Shaldis was aware of half a dozen other palace guards suddenly loitering around the several lesser barracks doors in the sun. Afraid that Jethan would call out to her, she dipped a quick salaam to the wizard, hurried to the door: “Where are you bound for?” he demanded, running a disapproving eye over her gaudy—and now much tattered—dress. “You can’t be going down to the Slaughterhouse again, surely? Don’t you know the whole city’s on the edge of riot? They were burning cafés and astrologers’ houses last night—and any place else where they thought there was money to be looted—and it looks like there’ll be worse trouble tonight.”

  “Then I’ll watch out for myself tonight,” retorted Shaldis, keeping her voice low and glancing back at the little brown-clothed form of the wizard slumped on the bench in the sun. “Anyway, tonight I should he back where it’s safe. Keep your voice down.”

  “Why! So those louts I share quarters with will conclude that I’m whispering words of love to you?”

  “If you don’t,” said Shaldis, “I’ll throw my arms around you and kiss you.”

  “What’s so important that you need to go back to Greasy Yard?” whispered Jethan. His dark hair, slicked back into a warrior’s knot, was still wet from the baths; standing close to him, she smelled the soap scent that lingered on his flesh and the faint muskiness of ointment. Somewhere in his journeys to and from the aqueduct camp he’d taken a small cut above one eye. “I understood from her ladyship’s message that you’d learned what you needed to learn, elsewhere than—”

  She put a hand over his lips. “I need to speak to Melon Girl,” she said. “That’s all. We can’t talk now. I only wanted to thank you for doing what you did.”

  “I did no more than her ladyship commanded.” Jethan’s voice was stiff, but she saw worry and puzzlement, as well as disapproval, in his blue eyes.

  “That doesn’t make it less appreciated—or less difficult for you.” She reached toward the cut on his forehead but did not after all touch his skin. For a moment they stood awkwardly facing one another, unsaid things flickering in the air between. She noticed how his nose had once been broken, long ago, and that he had a small curved scar near the corner of one eye. That his eyes were bluer than the lobelia that blossomed across the highlands on the other side of the Lake of the Moon. “Thank you.”

  And turning, she hurried away across the long courtyard, to disappear into the wide arcades of the Golden Court beyond its gate.

  Without the voices of the mages, without the groaning of the horns, the silence in the Yellow City was shocking. Such merchants and market women as remained on BoSaa’s Square were barely pretending to do business, and crowds lingered on every street corner talking angrily among themselves. Now and then Shaldis would see men lugging buckets of lake water on yokes, but there were still long lines around the city wells, where the water was cleaner and there wasn’t the risk of crocodiles or competition with the herds. The murk that slopped out of the lake-water buckets didn’t look remotely drinkable. Near the East Gate men were selling charcoal to boil it into some semblance of potability. When she passed through the square a brawl erupted around one man who everyone shouted was charging too much. His cart was overturned—boys and young men snatched up the fuel in their clothing and ran away into the Slaughterhouse’s impenetrable maze.

  In the Slaughterhouse itself, streets were barricaded, carts and furniture piled into walls where the water bosses’ bully-boys lounged with arrows and bows. The crop-haired Believers were much in evidence, on the barricades as well as in the streets. The cafés were empty, but men clustered uneasily in the squares and intersections; half the streets were choked with herds of skinny cattle and sheep being driven down to the lakeshore and back, trampling the dry dung underfoot into a haze of stinking dust.

  Rosemallow Woman sat as usual in her doorway, spinning goat-hair yarn, which she sold to one of the big jobbers; she was teaching her little Five-Fish to handle a spindle and distaff as well. “You’ll always be able to make your own living, girl,” she was saying as Shaldis came into Greasy Yard. “You won’t have to depend on a man for your bread.”

  Arrayed in last night’s tawdry finery, Melon Girl straddled an old saddle buck beside the door, her usual stool, and pestled up coffee beans. They both greeted Shaldis with pleasure and Rosemallow Woman sent Five-Fish into the house for some of yesterday’s grounds to eke out the fragrant grit in the mortar. Both complimented Shaldis on the drape of her veils (“A friend did it for me,” Shaldis said, knowing she’d never get them right again, and slung them back over her shoulder).

  Both women seemed perfectly willing to provide any information Shaldis wanted about Amber Girl, Xolnax, Urnate Urla or anyone else.

  “He always did keep her close,” said Rosemallow Woman. “Sounds funny, that a bullyboy’s daughter should be raised right here in the Slaughterhouse—in that big old palace he’s taken over for his own on Sheepbladder Court—but it’s true.”
/>   “I think he was always afraid she’d fall in love with one of his thugs, or with somebody else’s,” added Melon Girl, dumping the ground coffee into the top portion of the brass pot. “So he raised her to be stuck-up and la-di-da—when she’d go out in her litter you’d just catch a glimpse of her eyes, cold as topaz above her veils. Even as a little thing she thought she was someone special and didn’t have a good word to say to servants or Xolnax’s boys or anyone. She had servants following her with parasols by the time she was six. And after all that, to run off with some thug after all! Serves old Xolnax right.”

  Shaldis, who knew what had become of the girl, only shivered. No one deserved what Pomegranate Woman said had befallen her. “You said before that he had her educated to be an astrologer. Do you remember who her teachers were?”

  The women looked at each other. “Urnate Urla would know about her, if anyone would,” said Rosemallow Woman.

  “If you can sit through how Urnate Urla used to be the best mage in the city, and could heal the sick by looking at them and raise rainstorms all by himself.” Melon Girl’s painted mouth twisted with the memory of the former wizard’s private pleasures. “Nasty old bugger.”

  “Now, whatever he did with his powers, it’s got to be a comedown for him to he just a clerk,” said the softer-hearted Rosemallow Woman. “Damn those rats!” she added as a huge one streaked out through the doorway behind her, hotly pursued by Murder Girl. “I swear I should have got Turquoise Woman to do a rat guard while she was here. Did you ever find her, honey? Or hear what happened to her?”

  “Urnate Urla says she was a fake.” Melon Girl got to her feet, stretched her spine, and went into her friend’s room to fetch the coffeepot and the water bubbling on the little stove.

  “Urla hated her because she could do spells and he couldn’t anymore.” Rosemallow Woman wrapped her skirt around her hand to take the water pot. “He never had much good to say about Amber Girl, that’s for sure. He taught her High Script, and the gods know what-all else, but he felt it was a comedown, as I said. I gather she wasn’t a very nice pupil.”

 

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