Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  The rest of that money Pomegranate Woman had taken to the markets, traders and receivers of stolen goods throughout the Slaughterhouse, and in spite of the rioting and chaos that had punctuated the day had come up with most of the implements and substances Shaldis had seen Urnate Urla use in his summoning of the wight. Shaldis now tied little sacks of silver, ocher and iron filings ro the belt she’d wound on over the pantaloons, shirt and tunic Pomegranate Woman had unearthed for her—a little ragged and odoriferous, but preferable to going into what might turn into combat with that gaudy green dress tangling her feet. She’d also acquired two six-foot Cottonwood saplings stripped of bark and branches, and to each of these she tied a siver disk: one of them Urnate Urla’s, the other her own makeshift copy, which she hoped would do what it was supposed to do and draw away whatever fire and lightning might be flung at her.

  They’d be on the move, if they got into the temple at all. There was no question of drawing a protective circle and staying put within it. The temple was scry warded from here to next week; if they wanted to see what was inside, they’d have to go look.

  The gods only knew what they’d meet.

  Shaldis held out both staffs. “You pick which you want.”

  Pomegranate Woman shut her eyes, turned around three times, then stopped with her back to Shaldis and groped out with one unseeing hand.

  She touched the copy, closed her hand around the pole.

  “You can still go up to the Citadel,” said Shaldis quietly as they stepped out into the chilly starlight of predawn. Her mind hummed with sleeplessness and with the effort of working ward spells around herself and Pomegranate Woman protecting against every evil she could think of. She had wrought, too, the Sigil of Sisterhood between them; its warmth was comforting, like a heated brick wrapped in cloth on a chilly night. “The Summer Concubine needs every helper, every Raven.” It gashed her heart not to be there for that triumph of the women-who-do-magic, the Raven sisters—the vindication of that cloth dyer all those years ago who’d been lighting bits of kindling in the street.

  But if Lohar and his henchmen were going to try something today to disrupt the Rite, today was the only time she could be sure of finding the temple empty.

  Empty, of course, except for whatever it was whose magic she’d felt through the door.

  And if the new Song did not bring rain, and Lohar’s followers did rise up in open rebellion tomorrow, it would almost certainly be impossible to get into the temple—maybe not even possible to get near it.

  Would her absence from the Ring—and that of Pomegranate Woman—make the difference in the rain coming or not coming?

  She didn’t know.

  Pomegranate Woman’s breath made a thin mist in the starlight. “You can’t go alone into there, honey.” She sounded like a mother trying to talk a bullheaded twelve-year-old out of going into the local tavern to look for Papa. “I’ve dreamed of the Ring all my life—dreamed of the Song of the Sun Mages. Pontifer has too. If we get rid of this thing in the temple—or find out what it is, so that something can be done about it—maybe I’ll have my chance to sing for the rains some other year.”

  Some other year, thought Shaldis, as they slipped from shadow to shadow under the flickering protection of the strongest cloak they could summon. For many days now—since the night she had been attacked, the night of the full moon—she had looked only from one day to the next, trying to outrace or outdodge or outfox her attacker. To Summon this spring’s rains. To survive till tomorrow.

  That there would be another year—whatever happened today—came as a surprise, and somehow the thought of it lessened the blind, frantic hammering of her heart.

  As they halted at the corner of Little Pig Alley with the heavy black reek of old blood from the temple rising to their nostrils, she murmured, “If I don’t get to say so . . . thank you for coming with me.”

  And Pomegranate Woman soundlessly patted her shoulder.

  Pomegranate Woman had been correct in her observation of the temple yesterday; Shaldis had been correct in concluding that Lohar would try something today. Chicken Lane was full of men: laborers, beggars, small-time artisans, out-of-work stockmen and butchers from the yards. All of them sported the cropped hair of the Believers. All of them were silent, disciplined and alert. And all of them were armed.

  From their position in the gateway of Greasy Yard, Shaldis glanced sidelong at her companion, raised her brows. They’d talked last night, in between Shaldis’s completion of the copied protective disk and her painstaking review of Urnate Urla’s diagrams and spells, about sending word of their suspicions to the king, warning him that the True Believers were more than likely going to try to disrupt the Rite. The king’s a smart man, Shaldis had said. He’s going to be ready for something like this, I think, whether we send him a message or not. And if we send him a message that’s intercepted, that may be enough for Lohar to leave someone guarding the temple.

  Watching Lohar move from group to group—watching the glint of swords, of halberds, of serious weapons of warfare in the thin glow of shuttered lanterns—Shaldis prayed she’d made the right decision. More men were moving into the street and under the darkness of the temple porch, and these. she could see, wore not the cropped hair of the True Believers but the topknots of professional swordsmen.

  “They have to be guards from one of the great houses,” she breathed to Pomegranate Woman.

  “Tcha!” the old woman whispered. “That’s not right! Pontifer, do you see that?” And she glanced down at her heel where presumably her imaginary pig had followed them from the Salt-Pan ruins.

  Which? Shaldis wondered. Akarian? Mohrvine? The Summer Concubine had mentioned both as unreliable in the ever-shifting quicksands of alliance that shored up House Jothek’s rule.

  We’ll have to walk past those men, she thought. Maybe past the man who seized me in the darkness. She felt cold, her hands sweating; she wished she had made herself sleep last night. They would certainly have to pass by Seb Dolek, anyway. The young former Sun Mage was right there at Lohar’s elbow, handing out weapons, speaking to this man or that. He seemed, in very short order, to have made himself indispensable to the half-crazed prophet—from somewhere she recalled that Lohar had been a Sun Mage himself. Clever and educated, the young man was almost certainly better at dealing with the real world than was the Mouth of Nebekht.

  Lohar had better watch out in a couple of years, Shaldis thought, watching them together. If he can’t be a Sun Mage, I’m sure Seb Dolek will settle for taking over leadership of a powerful cult.

  The temple door opened, a cubit-wide postern in the huge iron-bound portal. A big man with a scarred chin and a fanatic’s cropped hair started handing out halberds and spears to those who didn’t have them already.

  Now or never. Whatever else could be said about that cold terrible magic, Shaldis knew that it was stronger than any cantrip of hers would be if she tried to move the iron bolts once the door was shut.

  Zin,zin, we are the wind . . . .

  The two women drifted among the crowd like shreds of mist, Shaldis nearly sick with dread as they passed within a few feet of Seb Dolek. Not a shadow flickered in their wake along the wall to the door. Not a dust mote stirred with the light passage of their clothing. They stood for a time at the far end of the porch in the shadows of the pillars, watching the man with the scarred chin and waiting for him to move out of the way. He moved off a few paces to hand someone a bow; Shaldis lengthened her stride, let go of her companion’s hand, darted through just before him as he turned back, her heart in her throat. Pressed to the wall inside, she turned her head just in time to see him shut the postern door and throw the bolt.

  Her heart turned to cold iron with dread. No . . .

  She was trapped in the temple alone.

  “Damn,” muttered the doorkeeper. He bent to pick up a halberd that had fallen to the floor, shot back the bolt again and opened the door.

  Pomegranate Woman was through like a ca
t, pressed to the wall, panting, at Shaldis’s side. “Here, Pontifer!” she whispered—loud enough, Shaldis would have sworn, for the doorkeeper and Lohar and every man in Chicken Lane to hear. She nearly screamed, Damn you and your stupid imaginary pig!

  The doorkeeper lumbered away to one side of the vestibule, where an open door showed a table, a lamp, a bed. Shaldis looked around her quickly, orienting herself: The high-ceilinged, windowless vestibule in which they stood stretched across the front of the temple, which she knew from her previous stay in the Slaughterhouse was a long rectangle whose short side faced south onto Chicken Lane, and whose length stretched back north some three hundred feet into the warren of mud shacks that had grown up around it. The courtyard where they brought in animals for sacrifice lay along the east side, though not for the whole length of the building.

  The great doors before them now, as they stood in the vestibule, would lead into the sanctuary if the place was anything like the temples of Koan and Ean and Neriki the god of merchants that she was familiar with. Mold-stained frescoes loomed around them, flaking from the walls, overscrawled with crude drawings of the sword and the iron girdle that were Nebekht’s symbols. Shaldis wondered if she should put a sleep spell on the scar-chinned porter immediately to keep him out of the way, and remembered the way Lohar had cried out the moment she’d placed the Sigils of Listening on the door.

  The darkness lived. It watched them.

  It also stank. Shaldis’s neck prickled with the stench, which was worse inside than it had been out in the Slaughterhouse all around.

  Somewhere she could hear pigs squealing, shrieks of pain picked up by stone vaulting, echoing fit to split her head.

  Pomegranate Woman’s hand closed hard around hers. “It’s all right, Pontifer,” she whispered reassuringly, bending down so the nonexistent animal could hear. And to Shaldis, “It scares him, even though he isn’t a real pig and they can’t hurt him. It’s just the idea, you know.”

  “Absolutely,” said Shaldis.

  If Lohar’s out there, who’s killing the pigs?

  When the doorkeeper disappeared into his room she led the way across the chipped and filthy marble floor to the sanctuary doors. The statue Lohar had reputedly taken from the tomb should be in there, and she was curious to see it. But when she pushed the doors open, she saw instead a transverse hallway broken by curtained openings at several points on the opposite wall. The wall itself was plastered, and the plaster looked new, cleaner by a dozen decades than that of the wall that separated vestibule from what had been the original sanctuary. Looking down, she saw that the pattern incised in the floor was cut clean across by that new wall.

  “What is it?” breathed Pomegranate Woman. Hesitantly, Shaldis touched the pale roughcast only a foot or so before her.

  “It’s a defense, I think. Maybe a maze. Anyone who enters the sanctuary of Nebekht has to make at least one jog down a short passageway. Maybe more.”

  She pushed on the wall. There was no give to it—Lohar must have drilled the marble to plant studs to hold it in place—but looking at the floor she could tell that this had originally been part of the sanctuary. “Whoever comes into the sanctuary has to pass between certain points.” She looked up. The ceiling was low, planks laid between the walls and painted black. Somewhere she smelled damp leather.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “In the temple of a god, yes.” Shaldis backed out into the vestibule again, closed the doors very quietly. “Gods don’t actually dwell in their temples, of course; they exist where they please. But in a house where some kind of jiggery-pokery is going on, it makes a lot of sense.” She remembered the house of Ahure, the narrow doorways and the careful arrangement of the furniture, to make sure that the petitioner stood in exactly the right place for the cold stream of the hidden ventilators to chill him or her to the marrow.

  Only this, she thought, was deadlier.

  And very odd, for someone who clearly did have genuine magic.

  “There’ll he another way into the sanctuary through the court of the animals,” she whispered, her eyes searching the darkness of the vestibule’s eastern end. There was a door there corresponding to that of the doorkeeper’s little room on the west side; that meant there’d be a little room there, with luck opening in its turn into the court of the animals. The door was locked, with a sliding bolt and internal tumblers. Counter-spells scratched and grated on Shaldis’s thoughts the moment she put forth her mind to feel for them clumsily.

  “They’ll know if a spell is worked here.” Shaldis’s voice was barely louder than a moth wing brushing stone. “Sometimes it’s simple, like a spell that triggers a bell to ring, or a candle to light. I don’t think that’s what this is, though.”

  “Makes sense.” The old woman fished in one of her many pockets and produced a half-dozen bent wires. “I never could make these things work but once in ten tries when my brother taught me. But now I can listen through the wood for the scratch on the tumblers . . . . He’d have turned up his nose, my brother.” She probed into the keyhole, ear pressed to the wood, turning and manipulating delicately. Shaldis realized that the old woman’s hands were as supple as her own, and saw again Hathmar’s arthritic joints and stiff gait, his pale eyes blinking damply behind crystal lenses.

  “Pontifer,” admonished Pomegranate Woman severely, glancing down beside her. “You be a good pig! Sometimes they just forget their manners,” she apologized.

  Shaldis didn’t even want to ask.

  There was, as she’d suspected, a chamber corresponding to that of the doorkeeper from which wide doors opened into the court of the animals. Even through the shut doors and barred shutters the stink of the court penetrated, and when Shaldis and Pomegranate Woman slipped through into the court it was staggering. Morning light was just beginning to stain the sky, but already the roar of the flies above the dung-splotched dirt was like the muttering of an angry mob.

  “I guess Nebekht doesn’t approve of fly wards,” muttered Shaldis. The court, stretching along the temple’s east side, was separated from Little Pig Alley by a twenty-foot wall. Between that wall and the dark basalt side of the temple, the dung lay nearly ankle deep, as if no one had bothered to shovel it in years. The only place it had been scraped away was around the two wells, eight or ten feet from the temple wall and covered with round slabs of stone, chained and barred with iron. Shaldis supposed that if she were dying of thirst she’d bring herself to drink the water seeping from this soil.

  At the far end of the court, in the temple wall, there was a wide door, closed but not visibly barred. A mushy path beaten in the dung amply indicated that this was the route taken by the animals to sacrifice. Dimly she could still hear the pigs screaming.

  As they stole down the length of the court, Shaldis paused to touch the well covers in passing, felt the water deep below.

  Water and magic. An echo of that jangling, uneasy, alien power, like the sound of chains shaken far away.

  Crazier, she thought. Edgier. She tightened her grip on the Cottonwood pole and hoped that if someone or something started flinging fire and lightning at them the silver disk would draw it aside the way it had for Urnate Urla.

  She struck at a fly that swooped at her unveiled eyes, tangled in the strands of hair that had worked loose from the knot at the base of her neck. “That door should lead into some room behind, or next to, the sanctuary,” she said softly. “Someplace where they hold the beasts for sacrifice.” She thrashed her hand at another fly. “You have to use your own judgment here. If something happens to one of us—damn these flies!—the other one has to retreat immediately and get word to the Summer Concubine about what we’ve seen here so far. If we’re attacked by anything, we stick together as long as we can and protect each other, but if I yell for you to run, run. All—”

  “Listen.” The older woman turned her head, her blue eyes narrowing as she struck at the swarming insects. “Wasn’t it lighter a minute ago?”

  Shaldis looke
d around her. Dawn had been in the sky—and with it the sounds of the Citadel horns, an accusation that cut at her heart.

  The horns were gone, as if the two women had slipped over into some place other than the temple court. There was darkness and cold, like the winter fog that rose from Sulfur Lake, and, somewhere distantly, the agonized screaming of the pigs.

  But wherever they were, the flies remained. They swirled around the two women, clung and bit. Shaldis struck at them with her hands, called on the fly wards that were one of the first formal magics she’d learned, but they struck and tangled harder. She pinched her eyes shut, twisted her head as they tried to crawl up her nose and into her ears—Pomegranate Woman pressed one of her many scarves into her hands and she wrapped it around her face, trapping a number of flies against her skin but protecting herself from the growing attack. Somewhere she could hear the pigs still screaming. Why don’t they finish those poor things off? she wondered. How many of them are there? And who’s killing them? She pushed forward, groping through the darkness for the wall.

  But there was no wall. Blindly, she stumbled in black fog. The ground was soft under her feet, sucking at them like mud. I’ll sink, she thought. I’ll sink and be trapped. Panic clutched her and she felt as if she’d somehow wandered into a dream, a dream that clung and stank. Air that first whispered, then roared with the screaming red wildness of alien power. Pain ripped at her calves. There are snakes in the mud, poisonous snakes.

  Her breath came short, and for an instant she saw herself toppling over out of the real world, into nightmare . . . .

  “Follow Pontifer!” she heard Pomegranate Woman shout, muffled in veils and flies. “He knows the way through to the door!”

  She pressed forward, holding hard to Shaldis’s hand. Shaldis stumbled, eyes shut, feeling as if she were suffocating, as if the biting, crawling things would devour her. Feeling as if in another moment she would wrench her hand away from the old woman’s and run screaming to her death in the darkness.