Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  What am I doing? she demanded of herself furiously. She’s following a damn imaginary pig.

  But under her feet she felt hard-packed dust and filth, no longer the fearful black mollience of that other world into which she’d been drawn. Eyes shut tight, one hand holding the folds of the scarf over her nostrils, she conjured in the air, in her mind, all the runes of clear seeing, weaving them into sigils of what was real. The bites on her legs, like jabbing needles, were those of big slaughterhouse horseflies, not snakes at least. The memory that could reconstruct spells after one viewing reconstructed the tilt of the courtyard ground, the differences between the temple’s stone wall and the plastered brick of the wall that surrounded the court. If I touch stone, I move right; if I touch brick, left.

  She touched stone. Pomegranate Woman’s big hand clung to her wrist, leading her. I’ll have to ask her what nightmare world she’s seeing . . . .

  “Good boy, Pontifer,” she heard her say through the roaring of the flies. “Good pig!”

  Good pig indeed.

  She felt the doorjamb, the hinges, the latch of the door into the temple. Whatever place it was they had stumbled into, drawn by those alien spells, they had for the moment fought their way clear. A few of the counterspells clinging to the iron of the latch were old, spells placed by what felt like Earth Wizards long ago, not that hot red lightning of the temple’s newer power. The heavy panel moved back. Blind as she was, she felt the cold within. Malice waiting. Watching.

  She slipped in behind Pomegranate Woman. Together they pulled shut and latched the door.

  Flies buzzed away as she unwound and shook out the scarf. A last one bit her on the hand. Pomegranate Woman was slapping them off her arms, out of her hair, her clothing. “Thank you,” Shaldis gasped. And then, looking down in the general direction of the floor, she said, “And thank you, Pontifer. You saved both our lives.”

  Pomegranate Woman smiled.

  They were in a short corridor that led into the bowels of the temple; trails of trampled dung disappeared into darkness that Shaldis’s eyes could not pierce. Fear gripped her again, nauseating in its intensity. The blackness seemed about to explode, with violence, with hatred, with power, with blood. She felt her hands grow almost numb.

  When a spark leaped close beside her she almost jumped out of her skin. It was Pomegranate Woman with a striking kit, lighting a scrap of tow. “First thing I did when I knew I could was put a word on it so it won’t go out,” the old woman confided. “More than just looking at wood and making it light, it always drove me crazy when I thought I’d have a spark going and then it’d up and die. You-got a candle?”

  Shaldis shook her head. It hadn’t occurred to her to carry one for years.

  Pomegranate Woman fished a stub from one of her purses, cupped her hand around the flame. The light made Shaldis feel better and showed her for a moment the dim shapes of double doors at the corridor’s far end. Word or no word, she suspected the moment they moved toward these, the tiny light would puff out. She spoke Words of Light, but the darkness swallowed them; darkness that crept, as if invisible fire were falling through the air.

  She held up the silver disk of protection on its staff, extending it out to the side and as far from her body as she could, and moved forward into the dark.

  She hadn’t thought of the flies, but she had thought of rats. When she heard their rustling, smelled the sweetish pissy stink of them growing stronger and stronger until it drowned even the stench of the pig dung in the wide, short hall, she called to life one of the ward spells she’d worked on last night. It flared like a ring of blue-burning flame moving just above the floor around them, and though the fingerlets of fire threw little light, she saw the rats. They moved like a black blanket, coarse velvet rippled and seethed by the wind. Jeweled velvet, spangled with a thousand thousand wicked ruby eyes.

  She had meditated long, trained long, not to lose her concentration in the face of fear, but it was a near thing. Pomegranate Woman pressed strong wrinkled hands to Shaldis’s shoulders, and she heard the old woman’s whistling singsong, a little homemade spell like the zin-zin song. She had to force her mind shut against it. A rat nearly the size of a cat threw itself at the barrier, squealed and backed away. A line of its flesh smoked as if struck with a red-hot rod.

  The others closed in. The noise of them was horrifying, the stink of burned fur, charred flesh, enough to distract anyone.

  Shaldis shaped the spell, sang it as it had been taught to her in her mind; held it intact. As a child the only space she’d had for her own, the only place where she could be by herself, had been one of the attics at the top of the house; suffocatingly hot, but away from her grandfather, who would look all over the house for her. There had been rats there, skittering along the rafters now and then, or scratching in the walls.

  She stared them down, her hatred pure. Like Buttereyes the kitchen cat, whom she’d found once trapped in a dry well the first time she’d claimed her power, she saw them only as flesh to he destroyed, as blood to be drunk.

  Piercing, probing, shocking, she felt a mind touch hers. Who? Like an echo of rage from far away. Who? Lohar’s voice yesterday afternoon. Who? Human or alien, she couldn’t tell—it didn’t feel like anything she’d ever known before.

  Not Lohar, she thought. Someone else . . .

  There could have been two, she had said to the Summer Concubine. There could have been two.

  She didn’t touch the doors at the corridor’s end, but thrust on them with the tip of her staff. It was fortunate that she did so. Flame blasted out of them, a blinding glare of blue and orange swatting like an angry animal. Shaldis felt the oily heat on her face, then burning her hands as it swirled into the silver disk. Shaldis held out the staff as far as she could, at the full extent of her arm, shielding her face with her other hand. The air seemed to be full of falling fire.

  And cold, burningly cold.

  Pigs filled the lightless room beyond the doors like battle-field dead. Some still lived, savaged hideously—throats torn, bellies torn, hamstrung, crying and kicking weakly as the life bled out of them. Shaldis thought of the three dead children the Summer Concubine had told her of, circled by vultures in the red-and-yellow rock of the Singing World. The room, Shaldis guessed at once, must lie immediately behind the main sanctuary: the ceiling was as high as that of the vestibule, and in one wall, set back in what appeared to be a tall, narrow niche, stood the idol that she knew immediately had to be the one Lohar had found in the desert tomb.

  A hawk-headed man, nearly life-size and armed with sword and shield: a core of crystal, sheathed from throat to feet in gold.

  At the college they had taught her the characteristics of ancient art: Durshen Dynasty, she identified the style with barely a conscious thought, they’d been very fond of the technique. The hands were left bare of the gold, wrapped around a sword of iron, and the dark-gleaming surface of the yellow metal was crossed by bands of iron: girdle, necklace, anklets.

  All this she saw while the rest of her mind was still crying out in horror and disgust at the shambles of the room The floor was awash in blood, and blood spattered the walls above head height, blood years old and black, staining the stone, overlain with blood so fresh it dripped ruby red.

  Something moved, swirled among the carcasses—white lines of light that flowed among the blood like phantom snakes. Lines that poured, shining in the puddles, across the floor and up the flanks of the idol, disappearing into the crystal eyes.

  Driven to her knees, focusing her mind on the rat ward, the runes of protection—trying to keep the cold, howling voice of the thing itself at bay and out of her thoughts—Shaldis watched the ribbons of shining plasma until only the light of them remained. Crystalline, hard and steady, those eyes seemed to watch her. The rats fled away among the dead pigs, but a muttering persisted at the edges of her mind, blurring her ability to think.

  Bands of iron, Shaldis thought. Three bands of iron on gold. Where have I seen th
at? Blue-burning lightning played around the idol’s head, chill and infinitely distant. A crystal heart . . .

  The lamp. Urnate Urla’s lamp.

  And, she thought, something else, something she’d seen . . . where?

  Recollection hovered on the edge of her mind.

  She held the silver disk warily out to one side and called out, “Drinata! Drinata! Meliangobet!” And hoped she got the pronunciation right.

  For one instant, for one second of suspended time, she saw in her heart the image of Meliangobet.

  A thing of fire and dizzying power. A thing of love such as she had not imagined could exist—nothing like human love. Of strange games and delights. A reaching-out and a folding-in. A juggling with water, sand and cloud.

  Songs.

  A smile she would have followed to her death in the wastelands.

  And a taste—just a taste—of the power she had felt among the tombs, when first the dead thing staggered to Urnate Urla’s bloody lure.

  Then silence. She stood alone in darkness before the gold and crystal shape of Nebekht.

  Pigs’ blood and rats, and the thin crackle of the rat ward all around her. But she could no longer see it, or anything but those steady, shining crystal eyes,

  “What is it?” whispered Pomegranate Woman from the darkness behind her. “Pontifer says—”

  “I don’t know what it is.” Shaldis knelt—not daring to look away from those crystal eyes, not daring to spare one thought from her mind, from her spells of protection—and began to mark the floor. “But I’m going to find out.” There was no need, here, of the long, looping net of sourcing lines she’d seen Urnate Urla draw: She stood in the heart of the place of power. She drew the core of his diagram: a pentagram, and a triangle within it. A square and a hexagon. Other figures within them, smaller and smaller, except that they weren’t. They only looked that way because they were farther and farther off, the way Pontifer only looked invisible and imaginary.

  “Tell the Summer Concubine . . .” She didn’t know how to finish, didn’t know what to say. “Tell the Summer Concubine what’s here. Tell her I’ll contact her through the Sigil of Sisterhood, if I can.”

  She heard Pomegranate Woman call out something to her—she didn’t know what. Blue lightning flickered down the golden shoulders, the gleaming thighs, and formed up in the air before her a continuation of the figures that she drew, stretching away into distance that wasn’t distance.

  And at the end of that line of symbols—which only looked like a series of concentric figures—Nebekht waited, watching her with his crystal eyes.

  She walked toward him along the road she had drawn, knowing that he had the answer, or part of the answer.

  Blue fire swallowed her up.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As the shouting of the rioters drew nearer, racketing off the walls of the Avenue of the Sun, Oryn reflected that he really should have ordered that suit of armor before he left for the aqueduct camp. If he was going to go in for the heroism of leading troops into battle, the least he could do was to be properly dressed for it in something kingly that fit instead of some portly cavalryman’s borrowed cuirass with six inches of very undignified peacock silk bulging through the lacing at each side.

  He shifted his sword in his sweating hand and thought, I have never struck a man with a weapon. Not really. Not to kill.

  Dear gods. The thought turned him sick.

  “Traitorous dogs!” Barún strode to Oryn’s side on the walkway above the Citadel gate in an enormous swirl of crimson cloak. “Lohar swore his word!”

  He sounded genuinely indignant—and genuinely surprised. Oryn sometimes wondered if his younger brother lived in the same world as everyone else did.

  The True Believers came into sight at the end of the street, some of them armed with sticks and baskets of rotting meat, sacrificial scraps too putrid for even the very poor in the Slaughterhouse to take. Others bore the weapons of the district: meat axes, ox goads, clubs. Others still carried the businesslike gear of professionals.

  They’d be within bowshot soon. Half a dozen of the palace guards grouped at the top of each pylon that guarded the Citadel gates, and fifty more, mounted, waited behind the shut gates themselves. Lohar dashed at the rioters’ head, waving them on, practically daring Oryn to trigger the fighting by having him shot. He was unarmed, of course, ostentatiously so.

  Would Bax order a volley of arrows? Would Taras Greatsword!

  Taras would have had the man put down a year ago, like a rabid dog, reflected Oryn. Maybe I should have too. There’d been riots yesterday not only in the Slaughterhouse and the Grand Bazaar District, but spreading into the Circus, the Flowermarket District, the Spicemarket District. Dozens of teyn had escaped, and when cornered had fought like beasts.

  No word from Bax or the nomad sorties.

  Sweet and strong, the voices of the singers lifted into the morning air.

  “Nebekht rules!” screamed the voices in the street, and rocks, bricks, hunks of adobe clattered against the shut Citadel gates. “The Will of Nebekht is the only law!” accompanied by the juicy, stinking splat of rotted goat entrails and handfuls of goose guano. “All praise to the goodness and mercy of the Iron-Girdled One!”

  A fight had developed where the Street of Yellow Lanterns debouched into the Avenue of the Sun. A squad of city guards from the Flowermarket had heard the ruckus and come to reinforce the men there—commendable, thought Oryn worriedly, but potentially deadly. Somewhere above the patchwork of tiled roofs and dry garden vines, smoke was pouring up.

  “Any word from Bax?” he asked quietly as young Jethan came out onto the walkway above the gate “Or Lord Sarn?”

  “No, Majesty. But the guards over on the walls near the bluff say they can see men coming up the gorges. Armed, they think.”

  “I’ll get over there,” said Barún. “Half a dozen should be enough to turn them back.” And he strode away, calling to the guards, who followed him with the same delight they’d always shown in following Taras Greatsword wherever he led.

  Oryn shook his head. If he wasn’t such a blockhead I’d have abdicated in his favor years ago.

  “And my uncle?” He turned back to Jethan. The Square of the Mages beneath them was now dark with men, ragged men for the most part, though many of them looked cleaner and better fed than any beggar Oryn had ever seen. “He was supposed to be here.”

  “He left before it grew light. A messenger came. Something about his daughter.”

  Foxfire Girl, remembered Oryn. A pretty minx. Who, according to his sources, was going to marry Lord Akarian, the gods help them all. “Get a man to find him. And see if you can find someone to ride out and get me word of Bax . . . . Not you, dear boy,” he added as the young man showed all signs of dashing down to the courtyard and springing onto the first horse he saw. “Find one of the Citadel servants, if you can. I’m afraid,” he said, “that in a very short time we’re going to need every trained man we’ve got.”

  Raeshaldis saw that she was in the Jasmine Garden, where she had first met the Summer Concubine, seven days ago. Her grandfather was there, shouting at her, striking her with a whip. She was naked, and when she fell to her hands and knees, she saw that the grass was beaded with blood.

  This is a dream, she told herself, though she knew she was wide awake, It is only a dream.

  She got to her feet, staggering—the blows of the four-thonged whip smarted on her flanks with the stinging burn of reality—and made herself face him.

  He was made out of blood. He was made out of fear, the shrinking, suffocating fear of a six-year-old child who knows she cannot escape, who knows that without his man’s love and approval she will be turned out into the streets to die. She thought, I did love him, back then. She remembered loving him without any recollection of what it had felt like.

  She’d forgotten at what point in time her love had turned to hate. She wondered if he were still alive.

  He was shouting at her, but
the words were only a shrill squeal, like a pig in agony. She crossed her arms over her breasts, willing herself not to feel the cut of the whip, facing him, putting aside her fear. Putting aside her memories, her pain, her self. Searching for what lay beyond and outside.

  It was more difficult than she had supposed, to see things not in terms of herself.

  Who are you? she asked. Who are you?

  Her grandfather screamed at her. Hathmar screamed at her. Jethan screamed at her.

  Who are you.?

  I’m in pain, I’m in pain.

  I’m afraid, I’m afraid.

  Echoing confusion, like a hysterical drunk, words and thoughts looping back on themselves. The whip thongs wrapped around the cottonwood pole that she held out to block them.

  Who would you be if you weren’t afraid and in pain?

  The place around them transformed itself into a palace of crystal, wrought of air and light. But the scintillant pillars were all held together with rotting blood, like a kind of black glue. The blood still lived, and the creatures it had been taken out of—pigs, geese, chickens, rats, a lot of rats—were still in it in some fashion. The heat of them made it liquid, and thus able to hold the bits of crystal and light and air together. From the corners of her eyes she could glimpse the animals themselves, or gray, cloudy shapes of what they had been, in their own thoughts and in those of humankind. Tiny flecks of lightning—the sparks of Thousands of animal lives—ran up and down the pillars, up and down her grandfather’s body, holding him together too. Giving shape to the thing inside.

  Who are you?

  Nebekht.

  The voice was still a pig’s hoarse grunt, but the face became the crystal face of the statue. The gold and crystal gleamed, but they were soft as flesh. The staring crystal eyes were streaky with blood, and blood held every atom of the statue together: the heat of blood, the life that had been in the blood.

  Waves of madness came off him like the stench of the blood, like the dark reek of ijnis. Animals, torn apart and dying in agony, wondering at their suffering and only wishing it would stop. The pain and the heat of their lives hammered at Shaldis, skinning her brain, her nerves. She saw that in this place—in the god’s mind—she, like the god, could make whatever place she chose, and people it with whom she would.