Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  A corridor opened through the palace, behind Nebekht’s shoulder, clear as in a shadowy dream. Down it she saw the Citadel library, every book open to her, every fragment of knowledge hers for the savoring. In that Citadel—in this place—all her spells would work. She never need leave.

  In the shadows of that library her mother smiled and beckoned. Dearest, I have grapes for you, fresh from the market. . . . Her father waved, big and rosy and happy, joyful to see her. Sit down, Old One, drink coffee with me and let’s talk. I’ve missed you. . . . Exactly as she remembered them.

  Because, she thought, with a curious sad clarity, what I see is only my memories of them.

  The whip had ceased to strike her. She was dressed again in the white robe of a novice. The pain was gone. The crystal pillars, the near incomprehensible chambers of light and floating air, retreated to the periphery of her vision. The library came closer. She could run into it, and from it into the rooms that she knew lay beyond: her own attic at home, her hidden sanctuary, but without the rats. Her mother’s kitchen, always with honeyed apples waiting for her. The market as she remembered it. Or as she had always wished it would be, thought it never was, quite. The market without the camel drivers and the dogs dying in the ditches, where all the beggars were clean and friendly and not really hungry.

  If I turn away from them, will these memories disappear forever out of my mind? Will I ever be able to remember them again, this clearly, this lovingly?

  Smells of apples, smells of ink, smells of water and books and her father’s favorite soap.

  She crushed them out, looked back into the god’s blood-filled crystal eyes.

  Who do you want to be?

  Prince of the Sunflash. Naruansich. Lord of the Thousand Lights.

  She saw him, like a revelation. As the book of the djinni described him, as old Gyrax the windmaster described him, whose friend he had been almost eighty years ago. Saw him in the swirling column of dancing light, that bright, elongate form: “His face is like flame and alabaster,” Gyrax had said to the small group of novices when speaking of his own experiences with the djinni. “Sometimes like a young man’s, sometimes serpentine, as if it is made of jewels. His hands are white, and clear as diamonds. Heat spreads from him, even in the coldest nights, and the sands beneath his feet glitter like living diamonds.”

  She said, “You’re a djinn.” And she remembered where she had heard the word meliangobet.

  It was one of the list of djinni’s names that she’d had to memorize. One of those endless lists that the loremaster gave her: types of rabbits, shapes of cactus flowers, textures and colors of sand. Names to be memorized so that they would hear her when she summoned. So that they would obey.

  Awareness crashed down on her as if she stood in a building whose roof had collapsed without warning: awareness of what had happened to the djinni. Awareness, and horror, and grief without end.

  She saw in her mind Urnate Urla in the graveyard, conjuring the walking dead with a trap of crystal and iron-girdled gold. Saw the ropes of white light stream from the dead mouth, the flame snake along the ground and out of the brick of the tomb. Saw the flame and the light and the smoky plasma dissipate, dissolving into the night, disappearing forever.

  They are dying.

  Tears flowed from her eyes, like weeping in a dream.

  Men lost their magic and remained living men. But magic was not only the art of the djinni. It was the stuff of their bodies, of their world, of their selves. Whatever magic was now, it was not what it had been.

  Around her, the crystal pillars, the halls and chambers and gardens wrought of air and sunlight, floating like bubbles high over the endless sands of the deep desert, all these darkened again as the dirtied life forces of sacrificed beasts reclaimed the Sunflash Prince’s mind. He stood before her, wrought of decaying blood as her grandfather had been, held together by blood, renewed each day by the life energies of the sacrifices, more and more each day.

  They have no flesh, and so must build themselves bodies of magic. That failing, they must take refuge where they can. In corpses, it seems. And in houses of crystal, gold and iron . . . It must be some specific spell, or combination of elements, that can hold them.

  And earning his keep, thought Shaldis, looking into those alien crystal eyes, by bringing water to the temple well, so that Lohar—or more likely the cleverer Seb Dolek—could bind the thirsty and frightened to him.

  Shouting echoed around them, voices growing louder, coming closer. With an abruptness that shocked her. Shaldis was standing in the sanctuary of the temple—naked again, so she knew (or earnestly hoped) that this was a vision within the Sunflash Prince’s dream. He was beside her, a blob of shadow that stank and dripped, a crouching shape like a huge boar pig, stupid malice in his crystal eyes. None of the men pouring into the room paid either of them the least attention, and Shaldis reached into the shape of her own mind to clothe herself in her white novice’s robes. Like her grandfather’s whip, hate and terror and malignant resentment seemed to fly around the torchlit cavern of the sanctuary like broken glass in a sandstorm, tearing at her flesh. Stinging her like the flies.

  Pomegranate Woman, she thought, but could see no sign of her in this dream-union of the actual temple and what existed in Nebekht’s mind and Nebekht’s perceptions. Oddly enough, she could see Pontifer Pig appearing and disappearing among the pillars along one side of the room. Men jostled, shoved, as they poured through the single small door that opened from the defensive maze. Lohar, an outsize sword in one hand and a club in the other, blood on his grimy tunic and clotted in his dirty hair. Seb Dolek, a satisfied smirk on his dustless face, as if all things were working out well for the benefit of Seb Dolek.

  Three men dragged Jethan between them, and Shaldis almost cried out his name. The young guard was struggling, though the men struck him again and again to quiet him; his face was covered with blood and his arms with cuts and mud and dust. He was shouting, “Traitors! Traitors! Let him go or by the gods you will pay!”

  People were starting to shout, “Sacrifice! Sacrifice to Nebekht!” and Lohar’s eyes, wilder and madder, showed that he was being drawn into the whirlwind he had himself whistled into being. Someone came running from the back room with an ax, its handle clotted with years’ worth of animal blood. “Let he who commands the universe have blood!”

  Shaldis guessed what had happened even as she recognized—barely—the other man the mob thrust forward, sprawling in a great crash of armor and blue-green silk at Lohar’s feet, like a peacock snared and half plucked and beaten by malicious boys. Oryn son of Taras rolled to his feet, curiously graceful for a heavy man—Shaldis had noticed that physical grace the day she’d seen him at the Citadel—and struck aside the bullyboys who would have thrown him down again.

  “Jethan, keep still! That’s an order! It’s no good!” He strode to the shoving knot of captive and captors and seized the man with the ax and flung him back, his strength literally lifting him off his feet. Someone struck the king over the back with a bloodied club and someone else yelled a tired jest about the king and pretty boys, but the king paid no heed to it, only commanded, “Don’t!” when another of the three captors pulled out a knife. He turned back to Lohar. “This man has nothing to do with your quarrel with me. Let him go.”

  Shaldis turned to the Sunflash Prince, shocked and frightened. She saw, in the crystalline eyes, some change, some expression—an understanding of what he beheld. The air around him jangled like flaming bells—the quality of djinn magic, thought Shaldis. Like that of Meliangobet among the tombs. She had never heard it described so, but then all descriptions had been written by men. They would perceive it differently because their magic was different.

  In the dark around them she could see that the temple was like the magic palace of the djinn’s memory, a construct held together with the blood and life glimmer of animals dying in pain. But it was a construct aligned with the reality that lay beyond Nebekht’s trapped mind, tru
e events passing in the landscape of his dream. The men who moved through it were real. They shoved each other and muttered; she recognized the scar-chinned caretaker who’d handed weapons out through the door, and old Zarb the drunk from Greasy Yard. Jethan spit at Lohar and was struck down. Shaldis cried, “You idiot!” knowing it was really happening, feeling the thudding echo of his pain in her own skull.

  “You idiot!” The king thrust away the blow of a meat ax, taking a cut on his own hand.

  It was the closest Shaldis had ever seen Oryn son of Taras. That first day in the Citadel, at a distance, she’d found him both impressive and comical in his robes of purple and green with his feather fans and extravagant, velvety voice; she couldn’t imagine what the beautiful Summer Concubine could find in him to bring such delight to her eyes. He wrenched the ax from its wielder and immediately flung it from him; he must have known that holding a weapon of any sort would make him a target and there was no chance of his cutting himself free in this mob. In the blood-stringy frame of his hair she saw even now, in panic and exhaustion, the bright intelligence of his eyes, and his hands, clasped one around the other with blood welling through the fingers, were a musician’s hands.

  Casting away the weapon made the men step back a little from him. He stood alone among them, over Jethan’s body, and silence settled on the sanctuary though the crowd now packed it from wall to wall.

  “Oryn son of Taras.” Lohar flung up his arms impressively “Nebekht calls you to justice for the crime you have committed against your people and against the chief of all the gods! What have you to say?”

  “I say that you are mistaken.” The king, too, had been taught how to make his voice carry, and it was, as Shaldis remembered, deep and musical. He was certainly in pain, from the cut on his hand and the terrible bruising that showed through his torn and bloodied clothes, but the ringing majesty of his tones dominated the sanctuary. “I say that you are the false prophet of a true god, a god whose words you claim to interpret but who is in fact only a mask for your own greed for power. I say that this disgraces Nebekht as surely as it disgraces every man here who seeks to truly serve Nebekht’s will.”

  Beside her, Shaldis was aware of the Sunflash Prince, like a tongue of flame almost unseen over the slumped darkness of the animal that he had now mostly become. She felt the dancing glimmer of his applause, and saw—as if looking down a long dark corridor, much like the one that had led to the library of her mind—a fat, curly-haired child standing in a protective circle in the desert, wide-eyed with wonder at his first sight of the djinni. A child stepping over the boundary, no fear in his hazel-green eyes.

  His mouth working inarticulately, Lohar lunged at the king. Oryn caught his wrists, holding off the clutching hands from his throat but offering no attack. “How dare you!” screamed the Mouth of Nebekht, spittle flying from his lips. “You blaspheme Nebekht! All who believe, hear the words of the Mouth of the god!”

  “All praise to Nebekht!” The response swept the temple like wind going through the date groves at night.

  During the commotion, somebody—probably the scar-chinned caretaker—had opened the veil before the statue. Shaldis guessed the statue had been turned on its plinth. The niche in which it stood was really a tall opening between the sacrificial chamber and the sanctuary. With the curtain parted the stink of the chamber of sacrifices was enough to knock down a man in the sanctuary. On either side of the image, slow fires began to glow—hidden air tubes, thought Shaldis, like the one Ahure had. Looking up, she saw again the sculpted gold over the crystal, the iron girdle around the waist, and the bands of black metal around the ankles and on the feathered throat. Like the bands of iron on Urnate Urla’s golden lamp. An ancient device of the Durshen Dynasty to trap djinni, she thought, and wondered how well it would work if not reinforced with powerful spells.

  In his hands Nebekht bore his iron sword. In the dream that mingled with her consciousness the very walls of the temple, with their leprous frescoes and patched plaster, were held together with gore.

  “When he stepped forth from among the other gods among whom he had concealed himself,” said Lohar, tearing himself from the king and stepping back, “Nebekht made his will clear to us. He is the giver of all good, in his time and in his way. By his will alone do men live. Those men who play with magic have always sinned, tampering with the will of Nebekht. Always Nebekht the Merciful has hoped that men would see their error and put their sin aside”

  Beside her, Shaldis could sense the dark, jangling presence of the djinn; could smell the blood and feel the heat, not the pure fire of which he had once been composed, but the twitchy, flashing bursts of life energy he had taken. She felt, too, the drag of his consciousness on her—she could think of no other way of describing it. Felt his awareness of her, and the slow growth of his shadow engulfing her.

  She looked down now and saw her own hands, her own white novice’s robe, spotted and streaked with oozing blood.

  And, raising her head, she saw his eyes. Animal, and greedy, wanting only to devour her as he devoured the sacrifices.

  Revolted and terrified, she stepped back from him; raised the staff with its protective silver disk.

  “Do you repent?” Lohar demanded.

  The king replied, “I repent only that I didn’t shut you in prison when first I heard the lies you told about Nebekht.” Angry shouting drowned his words. The stone walls, the flat high ceiling, the plastered pillars picked up the noise, but to Shaldis everything was darkening, as if the growing cloud of the djinn’s greedy power clotted the air like a dirty cloud.

  “When Nebekht brings the rain,” Lohar was saying, “it will be a sign to us that your reign is over, Oryn son of Taras.” Seb Dolek handed him the sacrificial ax; he held it up over his head. “It will be a sign to us that the protector of what is abominable to Nebekht is no friend of his. There are others of Greatsword’s blood worthier to rule.”

  Shaldis, backing away from the growing clot of darkness that once had been the Sunflash Prince, turned in shock, watching the men crowd past her to lay hands on the king. Jethan struggled to stand next to his king and was beaten to the floor, and Shaldis felt rage wash over her, at those who would hurt him. Don’t get yourself killed, you imbecile!

  “I accept, Lohar son of Krek.” The king flung up his arms in the filthy tatters of his peacock robe; his voice echoed impressively in the sticky darkness that had now overcome all Shaldis’s vision of the temple. Even through her fear she thought, Well, if he’s their prisoner he couldn’t very well do anything else.

  But his response clearly took the True Believers by surprise.

  “But what about yourself?” he asked, with perfect timing, into that startled silence. “Surely you can’t make one rule for others and keep another for yourself! If the rain does not come when you Summon it, will it be a sign to you that your term is over as the Mouth of Nebekht? Will it be a sign to you that you have deceived yourself and others?”

  And just as Seb Dolek was drawing breath—probably to scream Blasphemer!—Oryn, again with the perfect timing of a thousand after-dinner tales, added, “Or don’t you trust Nebekht’s belief in you?”

  Seb Dolek then managed to yell “Blasphemer!” but his timing was off, and there was no responding roar.

  Instead, the scar-chinned temple porter said thoughtfully, “That’s fair.”

  And other men looked at each other and nodded.

  “If, as you say, the Iron-Girdled One is not the god of war, but the lord of all created men,” Oryn went on, “surely he cannot want his lands destroyed by fighting. You’ve given us three days, for which I do thank you.” He placed a hand on his breast and inclined his head without a trace of sarcasm or irony, a genuine gesture of gratitude. “If, after three days, Nebekht has not sent you the rain either, will you agree that he has some other message for humankind? Then you and I together can seek what his true will is.”

  The vision—the dream of the temple—was falling apart, comi
ng to pieces like rotting meat, and all that remained was vile darkness roaring with flies. Shaldis heard, as from a great distance, Lohar cry something unintelligible as the darkness thickened around her. She saw the thing in the darkness, the thing Naruansich had become: greedy and hungry—hungry for the life-heat in which it renewed itself from day to day.

  Only in that life could it continue to live, she thought, raising the silver disk on its staff. The floor seemed soft beneath her feet, as it had in the magic enclave of his defenses. Flies clung and crawled and stung in her hair again, and the world smelled of rot. The darkness trembled with pain, and with fear.

  The thing in the darkness clung to her, groped for her mind; the cold pressure of alien magic, the flicker of those firefly burns of stolen life. Animals, she thought, thousands of animals. She felt here and there among them the brighter flame of teyn, and felt a stab of anger that someone had sacrificed teyn pips to the greedy god. It sought her now, too, and she forced it back, concentrated all her mind, all her strength, all the magic she had for eighteen months now been trained to wield.

  I will not become part of you, she thought grimly. I will not.

  Down a corridor in darkness she could see the library again, and her mother and father, smiling and alive. Loving her.

  Down another corridor, a room in the Citadel she recognized as Hathmar’s . . . the quarters of the Archmage. Abstruse volumes lay on the desk; petitions from all the lords of the great houses waiting ready to be perused. A statue of Nebekht in a niche, a statue that lived, that smiled with its crystal hawk face, that gave good advice and brought good fortune.

  Lohar’s dream, Shaldis realized. The dream the Sunflash Prince gave him, in trade for all those dying animals.