Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  Thank the gods!

  “You have to help me,” she whispered urgently. “A friend of mine is hurt. I need someone to take me to the House of Six Willows.”

  She ran toward him as she spoke, reaching out her hands. But she stopped a step or two from touching him, fighting to pierce the darkness with her eyes, which sometimes saw his shape and sometimes saw . . .

  Something else.

  Was that really him? She couldn’t tell.

  “Iorradus?”

  “I’m here for you, my beloved. I’ve come to take you away.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she whispered impatiently. “I need help. A friend of mine is hurt. It’s my fault, I have to go to her.”

  “I’ll take you wherever you wish, my darling,” murmured that wind-soft voice from the darkness, and somehow she couldn’t make the shape be that of Iorradus; couldn’t fit that voice into his voice. She backed away.

  “Who are you?”

  And when there was no answer, but only deepening silence, she turned suddenly, plunged back toward the lamplight of her chamber, wondering suddenly where the maids were, and the guards, and why this quarter of the house was so silent.

  As she reached the threshold darkness enfolded her, terrible strength, smothering cold.

  Why hasn’t she come back?

  The Summer Concubine walked to the window, listened through the shutters for some sound on the gallery outside.

  Midnight was past. Throughout the hours of the night she had listened: She’d told Hathmar to send Shaldis up to her, at whatever hour the girl came back, and had cast her mind, again and again, to the court below where the great gates of the Citadel of the Sun were shut against the city. She had heard the shifts of guards go past in the gallery above the First Court, where visitors were housed; had listened to Cattail Woman’s too-audible complaints about the bedding in the next chamber, and to the nearly silent tread of the college cats. Two or three hours after full dark, the streets outside the Court of Mages had been quiet. Later—her ears tracked the sounds, and she’d asked the guards for news—there had been rioting, in the Bazaar, and the Dyers Yard, and northward where the metalsmiths plied their trade in long alleys shaded with striped awnings. She smelled the smoke on the wind.

  “Every time the rioting is quelled it flares anew someplace else,” a guard had told her, a sturdy young man in the red of the Marvelous Tower. “Someone keeps starting it up again, Bax thinks; keeps stirring people up. You’d think at this hour they’d all be in their beds.”

  The Summer Concubine knew he was wrong. She knew the Yellow City’s rhythms, knew there were portions of the population—the thieves, the whores, the vendors in the Night Market, the entertainers, the ne’er-do-wells with no work and no stake in the quiet lives of others—that never slept.

  Go to bed, she told herself. You’ll be of no use whatsoever in the Singing if you don’t have some sleep.

  Maybe that was the point?

  She returned to the narrow bed, drew the blanket up around her shoulders. The small guest chamber of the college was nearly bare, its few furnishings sparse and clean, as all things were in the Citadel of the Sun Mages. A low bed that was barely more than a widening in the divan in one corner, a plain cupboard on one wall. A lamp, though she hadn’t lit it, a washstand, a jug with a little water. All old and worn and comfortable. With the red-clothed guards walking the gallery outside it should have felt safe, but it didn’t.

  Did you ever feel that you were being watched?

  Turquoise Woman dead. That sweet oval face, those lovely blue-green eyes framed in the dark hair.

  The way the cats in the Marvelous Tower had flocked to the Summer Concubine’s garden when Turquoise Woman came there, even the skittish Black Princess, the aloof Gray King. Curling around her ankles, sitting on her knees. Playing with the ends of her cheap blue-green veils as if they were permeated with catnip.

  Corn-Tassel Woman, big and bustling and so astonishingly vulnerable and frightened beneath that air of busy meddling.

  The Summer Concubine pressed her hands to her face again, trying not to remember what Raeshaldis had told her of her vision in the house of Barbonak the glassblower.

  Raeshaldis . . .

  As the afternoon had lengthened and news had come in of an armed attack by nomads on the farmers south of the Lake of the Sun, the Summer Concubine had tried to call Shaldis to mirror or crystal or water bowl—anything to hear that she was safe. The effort had resulted in nothing but a headache, and at last she’d desisted, fearing to further drain her powers, which would be desperately needed in the morning.

  Not her too, she prayed to the god of women, that beautiful flowered deity with her braided hair and secret smile. Not her too.

  Bax and Lord Sarn had ridden out with a great company of their men to meet the nomads, who were driving their herds across the tilled fields to the lake waters. They had been attacked on their way through the Slaughterhouse; the rioting that had been triggered had spread, dying down and flaring anew through the night. Had Shaldis been caught in that? The girl could cloak herself against ordinary notice, but if her concentration were broken, if she were struck by a random brick or an arrow? Would she be able to hold the spells?

  What would they do without her? She was the only one among the Ravens to have received the formal training and discipline of the college, the only woman to have both power and thorough teaching. They had twenty-four hours, a full cycle of the sun, to bring the rain. After that Lohar and his followers would rise up.

  And what?

  The Summer Concubine shivered and drew the blanket closer about her, cold as she was always cold.

  Oryn is right, she thought. If we do not hold together now, we will all perish.

  And yet if they succeeded, what then? Would the next request be Help us keep the teyn enslaved? Yet how would they finish the aqueduct in time without the teyn?

  Tiredly her mind slipped back to the aqueduct camp, to the hexed coins and the bloodstained ruin of the scaffolding. The lands are perishing for want of rain and someone with power is using it for that? The sense of power glimpsed—scented like a smoke-whiff—in the Dead Hills near the sealed Hosh tomb came back to her . . . . What of that?

  It wants us, Raeshaldis had reported that the old Raven Pomegranate Woman had said. It wants our power.

  For what? For that?

  But what, or who, would have enough power to seize women who had at least enough magic to defend themselves? If it has such power, what does it want with ours?

  And if it has no power, how could it do what it does?

  On the stairs of the court below she heard the rustle of the day porter’s robe as he descended, lamp in hand, to the gate-house. Was day already so near?

  The creak of the courtyard gates below: hooves clattering and gaudy ribbons of torchlight in the cracks of the shutters. Aktis’s voice, and Mohrvine’s: “You’d best go up. I’ll wait for the king.”

  The voices of guards. Many guards.

  She supposed, if the Citadel itself were attacked, she and the women could call up enough of a cloak of spells to smuggle the Sun Mages out. But where would they flee? And after that, what?

  What would happen if the rains never came?

  The light is fading, Hathmar had said at supper, with twilight waning beyond the refectory’s open doors. Around the tables, those who had remained at the Citadel sat with grave faces, watching their guests, these new holders of magic who had come to start the new Song. The masters and adepts looked exhausted; the three young novices who remained, frankly scared. But if we can accomplish this one task yet, the Archmage had said, we may win for ourselves the chance to light candles to take us through the night. If we fail, we face darkness indeed.

  And of course Cattail Woman had delivered herself of a harangue on the unjust incorrectness of the old man’s metaphor, nearly triggering a quarrel with the two northern wizards Isfan and Nars. Soth had listened in silence, looking as tired as if he�
�d been pulled through a mangle. Pebble Girl and the Moth Concubine had looked as if they would have disappeared had they known a spell to do so.

  The Summer Concubine smiled as she thought of them. Last night after supper, when the women were alone and the last pink glow of evening was fading from the sky, Cattail Woman had overpowered the conversation, demanding of the others details of spells and magics, only to find fault. Despite the fears for Shaldis already growing in her heart, the Summer Concubine had drawn the gruff, dark-faced woman aside and into tête-à-tête conversation—Cattail Woman could be hilariously funny in her acerbic way—to let Pebble Girl and the Moth Concubine get acquainted. Now and then, behind the brassy wall of Cattail Woman’s monologue, she had heard the younger women laugh, the sunny humor of the contractor’s daughter dissolving the shy, young concubine’s fright.

  We are the first, the Summer Concubine had told them after Hathmar had given all the newcomers their instructions for the Song. It was nearly midnight then, and Oryn—who’d come in quietly on the heels of latecomers Aktis and Ahure—was silently making coffee. It has never happened before, that even other mages have been called in to help the Song of Summoning Rain. Now we have been asked to take our place, serving as the mages have all these years so selflessly served.

  Cattail Woman had preened, Pebble Girl had looked grave but calm and, judging from her expression, the Moth Concubine only refrained with difficulty from asking whether her master would still love her if she did such an unwomanly thing.

  But they were the first, the Summer Concubine thought. We are the first.

  As Corn-Tassel Woman, and Turquoise Woman, and even the luckless Amber Girl should have been.

  And afterward Oryn had flirted with all the Raven ladies and even got a smile out of Cattail Woman, though she’d told him that, king or no king, he ought to follow a diet of greenstuff and water.

  Raeshaldis should have been there Raeshaldis and Pomegranate Woman.

  The predawn chill bit the Summer Concubine’s feet as she washed her face. Another knock on the gate—a boy’s voice asked for Mohrvine.

  Where is Raeshaldis? Somewhere near, a man was pacing his room, like an old steer trying to outwalk screwflies in a bad summer; this sound she had heard all night. Elsewhere a boy’s voice asked anxiously, “What if we can’t do it? What if the rains don’t come? They can’t really close down the Citadel, can they? They can’t send us away?” and a young man’s voice replied angrily, “Shut up.”

  “But I showed him,” Cattail Woman declared in her grating voice to Pebble Girl. “Every time he spoke to that hussy, a spell of sickness would come on him that would have him puking the rest of the day. He’ll get the message . . . .”

  Mohrvine’s voice, sudden and harsh in the courtyard below, demanded, “Where is she?”

  The young messenger’s voice panted, “My lord, we could find no trace of her. Her jewels are gone; her mare is gone from the stables. The stablemen say they heard nothing, but they’re saying in the king’s barracks—”

  “What has the king to do with this?”

  Long hesitation, and the Summer Concubine went to the window, pushed back the shutters. Mohrvine had brought a substantial troop to add to the Citadel’s guard—city men, with short hair and close-fitting trousers instead of the deep-desert riders he had of late surrounded himself with. Had she been less frantic with worry about Raeshaldis, the Summer Concubine would have smiled, for the moment the nomads had started causing trouble Mohrvine had quit dressing in their billowing robes and gone to the style of a soldier, close-cropping his hair overnight.

  “Nothing, my lord. Only they’re saying in the guards’ barracks that Iorradus Akarian is gone too.”

  The Summer Concubine turned her attention away, returned to dressing in a loose-fitting gown of white linen—the most comfortable thing she owned, if she were going to be standing all the day in it—and veils and a mantle of pale blue. “You know that linen’s going to be wrinkled like your granny’s backside before the second hour of the morning,” pointed out Cattail Woman, opening her door without knocking. “Have they brought you breakfast yet? I’ve heard they make bargains here with Lord Sarn to get coffee cheap. Is that true?”

  She had the other two with her, and as the college servants arrived just then with barley, curds and honey, all three came in to share the meal, dashing any chance of further listening in the Summer Concubine’s duties as hostess and mother, as it were, of their small new family.

  The Red Silk Lady is a mage, she thought, as she poured tea, spoke gentle encouragement to the Moth Concubine. Mohrvine’s mother . . . in secret, like a snake in a wall. What is she doing in this time? Hiding, watching, waiting?

  “The woman is positively blackmailing the poor fellow into staying with her, Willow Woman says.” Cattail Woman, though her power was real, never shut up. She had received ill the Summer Concubine’s suggestion that she be less ready to “help” everyone around her—all of her friends and relatives, in any case—without more training in how to limit the effects of her spells, not to mention in what was and wasn’t her business. “He really loves her, if only he’d admit it to himself. But he’s positively cowed by Honeybee Woman. So Willow Woman asked me if I’d put a little word on Rynak, to make him realize how much he cares for her, and in the meantime bring that awful Honeybee Woman down sick.”

  Surely, the Summer Concubine thought, the sigil would have let me know last night at least if she is alive.

  But it hadn’t. No more than it had let her know that Turquoise Woman and Corn-Tassel Woman were dead.

  She had no more been able to detect Raeshaldis’s presence anywhere in the city, in the Valley of the Lake, in the rangeland beyond, than she could scry the girl in a half-hour’s ineffective staring into water.

  Raeshaldis, she thought, despairing, speak to me. Reach out to me.

  All the day the Summoning will absorb me, my mind and my magic and my heart. I won’t be able to search for you, even in thought.

  “Don’t go up there just yet,” snapped Mohrvine’s voice from the gallery stair. “I need you. I’m sure you’ll excuse us, Lord Soth.”

  “We were just on our way to see Hathmar,” said Aktis’s voice, presumably the moment Soth was out of hearing. “Lord Soth has come from the Marvelous Tower, with things for the comfort of those mages and women-who-do-magic who are not trained to the exertions of the rites.”

  “Bugger Soth.” Mohrvine’s voice was hard as iron. “Foxfire Girl has run off with that blockhead Iorradus.”

  Just what Oryn needs, thought the Summer Concubine despairingly. A scandal to drive Lord Akarian farther away from the House of Jothek and into the arms of Nebekht. Not that she blamed the girl for being unwilling to wed Lord Akarian, as her informants had told her was being planned, but the repercussions would be fearful. Odd, that even with handfuls of jewels at her disposal the girl had been able to get past her father’s walls.

  “Find her.”

  “My lord, there isn’t time. We must go to the Ring.”

  “If you’re no better calling rain than you were making a love potion to get her to accept Akarian, they’re better off without you. You find her—you scry for her—and when you’ve located her, send me word and send word at once to Mohrhaddin—he came in last night with more of my troops—and have them bring her back. And not a word to anyone, understand? Mohrhaddin’s her brother; he’ll keep his mouth shut. If we catch them now, Akarian need never know.”

  That proves it, she thought. If Mohrvine knew the Red Silk Lady had powers, he’d have asked her, not Aktis.

  And what did it mean, if anything, that the clan lord had called his son down from their lands near the Lake of Gazelles?

  “My ladies?” A discreet fingernail scratched the door.

  They would be in the Ring all day and all the night. She thought about the exhaustion of scrying, the ravenous hunger that followed any magical effort, as if the power were drained out of her flesh. As a Pearl Wom
an she’d been disciplined to concentrate, to put aside hunger and thirst and the need for sleep, and even so she shuddered. What it would be for women who had never had the training she couldn’t imagine.

  She slung her mantle around herself, checked the mirror one more time. Cattail Woman draped her own veils and was redoing those of the Moth Concubine: “Only old ladies drape them that way these days, let me do that—I’ll get yours in a minute. Pebble Girl. I don’t care what those busybodies tell me—I need food if I’m going to use my power . . . .”

  “My lady,” said the servant’s voice. “It’s time to go.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Are you sure you want to do this?” Raeshaldis ducked her face into the bucket of water Pomegranate Woman had brought from some secret cache among the warren of ruined villas where they’d spent the night; icy cold, it took her breath away, but it did wake her up. “You’ve spent this long keeping in the shadows. If there’s something in that temple, it’ll see you if you go in with me.”

  “It knows I exist,” the old woman pointed out. “I’ve heard it whispering through the walls. If it isn’t stopped—if it isn’t found out—it’ll run through all the other ladies that’re up in the Citadel now, and it’ll get to me sooner or later. The two of us might be able to stop it. The one of you sure won’t.”

  “What?” Shaldis grinned at her shakily. “I didn’t impress you with my power?”

  And Pomegranate Woman grinned back.

  Shaldis had spent the night in the crumbling kitchen quarters of one of the old villas of the deserted Salt-Pan Quarter, tracing the precise patterns from the surface of the protective silver disk onto the only silver disk she could find—a big double-royal coin, the last of the money the Summer Concubine had given Jethan for rent on Turquoise Woman’s room—and weaving about it every spell she knew, to call lightning, fire and malice from whatever wight it was she had seen in the Redbone tombs. And if you’ve been debasing your currency, Your Majesty, she thought grimly, and this turns out not to be real silver, shame on you.