Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

The world in which he lived now, for longer and longer at a time.

  Her head pounded, as if all the veins in her skull would burst. She couldn’t breathe, as if she were choking in sand.

  Other dreams.

  Long-ago memories, incomprehensible visions: the hot, sweeping winds of the desert, the glittering presence of those magical beings whose loves and feuds and diversions had spanned decades, lifetimes, cycles of stars. A thousand avenues of magic, of knowledge, of ancient secrets forgotten by time, drawing her, tugging her, like the hands of children playing blindman’s bluff—distracting her, she was aware. (I see you must have been a champion, whispered a voice in her thoughts.) Trying to break her concentration, to get her lost, so that he could swallow her, absorb her. Children—she saw the fleeting visions of children who’d wandered from their homes, from their villages, children who’d seen the djinni riding, children who’d never returned.

  They devoured them, she thought, suddenly understanding who and what the escaping teyn of Dry Hill had been trying to conjure in the red-and-yellow wastes of the Singing World. They swallowed up their energy, their lives. Of course the teyn, the dwellers in the wastelands, would try to summon the djinni to their aid using the only bait they knew.

  Her own body, her own self, she conjured against that rending darkness, as if she built her own flesh again out of magic, as the djinni had. Not the luring illusion of her memories, but the simplicity of who and what she was: Raeshaldis. Big Sister. The Old One. Raven’s Daughter. Pain tore at her, trying to drive her forth, and she heard her grandfather screaming at her out of the dark, felt his whip cut her naked flesh.

  The screaming was the shrieking of dying pigs. The pain was their pain, not hers.

  Into the darkness she said, I can free you. I can get you out of this place.

  For she knew she could. Around her feet she made a solid floor. She thought she’d have to conjure chalk and silver into her hand, but instead she drew the diagrams in her mind. Triangle and pentangle, square and hexagram, linked and leading away.

  There were three hallways. Three corridors stretching into darkness.

  Down each, she could see where gate circles had been drawn, the marks to lure and capture the djinni.

  Only the power symbols, the sourcing, differed.

  One gate circle was in the temple’s sacrificial chamber, where amid the dark lumps and rotting offal the signs she had drawn still glimmered. Of Pomegranate Woman she saw nothing, but she glimpsed something that might have been an imaginary pig just trotting out the door.

  One circle glimmered in faint starlight, and she thought she saw the white shape of tombs, the ghostly gray shades of jackals among the gullies. A broken funeral cake lay by the scuffed diagram of runes, marked on the top with a G.

  From there in the Redbone Hills, she thought, she could simply walk to the palace.

  In the third place . . .

  She saw a golden bottle with a crystal stopper, and near it the obsidian image of a god of the Hosh Dynasty, buried in the Hosh tomb.

  The third diagram—the third gate circle—was inside the Hosh tomb in the Dead Hills. The place whose entrance the Summer Concubine had sought.

  There could have been two, she had said to the Summer Concubine not long ago.

  She knelt, and with her finger drew the sigils that matched those of the place where she wanted to go. Then she rose, and spoke to the panting thing trapped in the darkness of the temple, the darkness of the crystal image, the darkness of its past and its unfit survival. She said, “I can help you leave.”

  The Sunflash Prince stood before her again, in the shape of a young boy with diamond hands. The light of him sparkled on the dust around his feet, illuminated all around him the ghastly lattices where stolen life and stolen blood kept him in semblance of what he had once had.

  There is nothing for me out there, Old One. There is nowhere for me to go. I cannot even be, for there is nothing to make up my self. Only in this place—in a trap of crystal sheathed in gold and ringed in iron—can I exist. And then, only if I am fed.

  He was magical before her, a wonder that she would have followed, willingly, across the desert to her death, only because of his glory. She wanted to say I am sorry, but couldn’t. She ached, her mind half blinded, bleeding, as if she had fought him back like a rapist.

  And still she pitied him. There was nothing else for him to be but what he was.

  Or nothing.

  She stepped into the diagram and went away.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  What’s happening.?” The Summer Concubine sank onto the low bed that had been set up on the terrace below the Ring, beneath an awning of canvas white as ancient bone. “I heard shouting just after sunrise.”

  “The True Believers attacked the Citadel.” Soth handed her a towel that had been wrung out in hot herbed water. Mohrvine could say what he liked about Soth being no more than a chamberlain, but she understood what it had cost the librarian to take on the charge of the well-being of those mages not inured to daylong fasts. To no longer pretend to be what he was not, or lose himself in the longing for it, but instead to help where he could. Oryn, ever solicitous of his own comfort, had provided amply for the comfort of others, sending up pavilions, beds, curtains to separate the shelters into cubicles and servants to be on hand with lavender water and citronade.

  “They managed to get into the lower court,” went on the librarian after a moment’s hesitation. “There were . . . some bad moments. They were driven out, but there were injuries. They’re being taken care of.”

  He handed her a cup of chilled lemon water. There’d been a long debate among the mages whether the fasting actually concentrated power, and whether the fasting had to be absolute or not, a debate that would have made the Summer Concubine smile in amused exasperation had the stakes not been so high.

  “Can I do anything?” She started to rise, though her head was throbbing from concentration and she felt giddy—Soth put a gentle hand on her shoulder, pressed her back down to the bed.

  “Yes,” he said. “You can lie down for two hours and then go back to the Summoning.” He stood and drew the curtain around the bed. “Everything will be fine.”

  She heard the lie in his voice as she lay back, closed her eyes. By the smell of the air, there wasn’t a trace of cloud in the sky. It was the eighth hour of the day. The warm, still air was soundless, save for the gentle hoon of the desert wind. The clamor that morning had sounded serious, first the shouting of rioters, coming closer and closer, then the clash of weapons. Cries and curses, unmistakably battle, had sounded as if they were right beneath them in the Citadel. She had smelled smoke. When the wind set right, she had smelled blood.

  None of the Sun Mages had so much as paused. Last night when Oryn had come up to speak to the Summer Concubine’s ladies, he had told them he was expecting Lohar to make trouble: “Well, he’s the sort of man who’d knock over his cup on purpose just as you’re making your cast at darts, isn’t he?” Which had brought a laugh from the shy Moth Concubine. “Of course he’ll make trouble. Someone will come and tell you, if and when something needs to be done on your part. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. Only do that which the gods in their wisdom and generosity have given you the power to do.”

  And not one of them—not even the Moth Concubine, who was so uncertain of herself and was halfway persuaded that Lohar was right about women and magic—had broken the rhythm of their responses during the battle. Whether their concentration had stayed focused, either during the trouble or afterward, the Summer Concubine did not know.

  But it was a good guess, she thought, closing her eyes, that Soth hadn’t told the whole truth. Nor would he, until the Song was done.

  She breathed deep, trying to retain the focus of her mind. Seeking sleep and dreams. But despite herself her mind quested down through the sun-drenched yellow stone of the Citadel, listening to the wind among the courtyards and passageways and endless, narrow, winding stairs.

&nb
sp; She smelled blood soaking into dirt. Bax had not yet returned, and Oryn had had only a small company of the palace guards to divide between the palace and the Citadel. She listened more deeply, seeking the sounds of the infirmary: a confused murmur of men’s voices somewhere—no more. Through the centuries the Citadel must have been dotted like a wedding pastry with spell wards and scry guards.

  Raeshaldis hadn’t come back. What had she learned yesterday about who had known of Amber Girl’s power? Unlike Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman, Shaldis and the Summer Concubine herself, Xolnax’s daughter had never used her powers outside her home. And now the others—Pebble Girl and the Moth Concubine—were revealed to whoever had sources of information in the college. Ahure and Aktis certainly, and thus their respective patrons. Benno Sarn. Whatever spies the Red Silk Lady maintained there.

  She prayed that Oryn’s extra guards, added protection, would be enough.

  Had Shaldis learned something that drew her further on her hunt? Had she found the mysterious beggar Pomegranate Woman? The Summer Concubine guessed it might be so, for last night, half in dreams, she had felt a change in the energies of the Sigil of Sisterhood, as if some other energy had been added to it.

  But she couldn’t be sure. She reached her mind for it again, but her weariness pulled her over the edge into dreams.

  Sweet dreams, of sitting on the edge of the fish pool in the Jasmine Garden watching Rainsong Girl feed bread crumbs to the fish. Her daughter—Oryn’s daughter—was small, like herself, but she had Oryn’s long oval face, and Oryn’s hands, large and deft. Even at eight years she could play quite complicated tunes on the harp. Illyth, alive again and older than he’d been at the time of his death, practiced cuts at the shadows of the vines with a wooden sword: The Summer Concubine’s heart ached at the sight of him. Are you happy, my son?

  She could hear Oryn playing the harp in her dream, though she couldn’t see him: that light, tripping tune he’d woven out of a singing game three of the kitchenmaids played. The notes flitted butterflylike through the garden, and when her dream shifted, returned to the Ring, she saw the notes still, blue and orange butterflies dancing disrespectfully around the heads of the Sun Mages as they called on the distant rains.

  She saw old Hathmar, calling the Summons as he’d called it every year for fifty years—as the Sun Mages had been calling the rain in the third full moon of the year for five hundred years, ever since the yearly rains had ceased to come down from the north of themselves. For five hundred years the Realm of the Seven Lakes had bowed to the Sun Mages in thanks for this, and their Archmage had been hailed as the greatest in the land. Was that over now?

  He looked old, exhausted, worse in her dream than in waking sight. With his spectacles laid aside, his thin face had a sunken appearance, like a corpse already. On his right, Benno Sarn looked as if his mind were on something else—what?

  The fact that he’d lost his birthright, and now was losing the birthright of magic that had taken earthly power away?

  Or just anger that things were changing and he had not given his consent for that change?

  The other masters of the Citadel gathered around close, Rachnis and Brakt, and Yanrid with his face still haunted by grief for his vanished friends. Men she had counseled with over the years, men who had been puzzled by her, offended that a mere concubine—be she never so much a Pearl Woman—had manifested powers that had previously been theirs alone. Men who, like the angry novices, had been looked up to, praised by their families and friends and by everyone who met them. Men who from the age of four or five had known that the sun shone specially upon them. Men who had pursued their duties and their studies conscientiously for the most part, but in the knowledge that they were special.

  Men who were no longer special.

  Who understood, to one degree or another, that they were now no more than curiosities.

  And that women were taking their places.

  An ugly whisper passed like the wind through her dream. The cold scent of lightning, the harsh jangling of the air, like metal clashing far away. A shadow stood at the edge of the Ring in her dream, a shadow that the sun could not dispel.

  She saw Ahure, impassive and impervious. He’d arrived at Hathmar’s instruction last night late, his head bleeding from a dozen gashes, his mutilated hands clotted with blood, and blood leaking from the punctures of his lips and tongue. He had let it be known—rather thickly, since the latest mutilations of his mouth impeded his speech—that he’d been fasting for two days, and looked down his nose at the plump Pebble Girl without a word to say.

  The Summer Concubine thought, For a man who works steam vents with his feel under his robes to impress his patron, you have a lot of room to sniff.

  In her dream she saw Aktis, briefly glimpsed in one of the Citadel guest rooms, stretched on the low bed in exhausted sleep, with the black stains of ijnis around his mouth and an empty bottle at his side.

  Then she was in the Ring again, looking out over the Citadel’s walls. She saw the Lake of the Sun, and in her dream the lake was empty. Flat stretches of baked mud reflected the glare of the sky. The long lines of Oryn’s water lifts stretched across that terrible waste, thin as threads: bucket hoists and troughs all still. Below the voices lifted in the Summons she could hear the empty creak of the ropes in the wind.

  We are ghosts, she thought with shock. We are ghosts haunting this place, after everything has died . . . .

  “Did you look for her?”

  Mohrvine’s voice. Close.

  The Summer Concubine’s eyes snapped open to twilight, luminous within the white canvas of the tent. The dusty scent of desert evening. The dry smell of a cloudless sky.

  “I did, lord.” Aktis. Hoarse, the gasp of a dying man. They must be standing close to the pavilions of rest, near where Soth had placed the big jars of citronade and ginger water. “I can’t . . . I saw nothing.”

  “That I can believe.” The king’s uncle spoke barely above a whisper, but the scorn was as if he shouted. “If this is all you’re going to be able to do . . .”

  “Lord, I’ll be well tomorrow. Truly I will. I will be able to accomplish what you’ve asked, I swear it—”

  “You had better.” Mohrvine’s voice sank, but the Summer Concubine reached down after it with all her wearied concentration, seeking its whispers beneath the singing of the mages in the Ring, the groaning of the horns. “Because that whining fanatic may go back on us—him and his sniveling Believers—unless you can do as you say you can. And if you can’t, believe me . . .”

  “I will, my lord. I swear it.”

  “Like this? Like you were going to turn her love upon old Akarian with that worthless philter? You stink of ijnis, man! If this is the best you’ve been able to do in a day’s scrying . . .”

  “I’m—this passes, as you know. Give me a few hours more to rest and I’ll try again to find your daughter.”

  “Save your strength,” said Mohrvine bitterly. “I’ve got Xolnax and his informers out asking questions. You’ll need your strength for bigger things.”

  Again no mention of the Red Silk Lady. Her own informers had hinted of Mohrvine’s alliance with Xolnax. The concubine wondered if Mohrvine’s mother had heard of her granddaughter’s elopement yet. It was none of her business, of course, but beside her own agony of concern about Raeshaldis, she was conscious of a desire to be a fly on the wall of my lady’s courtyard, to hear how the old woman would break the news of her granddaughter’s whereabouts—if she did scry her—without letting her son know how she’d acquired it.

  Achingly she rose, washed her face and straightened her simple dress. She was starvingly hungry, but one of the tenets of the Song was fasting, which the Sun Mages practiced for concentration. Was that something that worked for men and not for women, or was she only unused to it and weak?

  Climbing the steps to the high place where the day’s last light clung, the Summer Concubine looked up and saw the sky exquisite lupine blue, and cloudles
s to its farthest borders.

  She thought of the True Believers rejoicing in their temple in the Slaughterhouse. Rejoicing and preparing—for what? What had Mohrvine meant by May go back on us? He’d clearly made a bargain with them. For what? And at what price? Save your strength . . . for bigger things.

  “Honestly, it’s ridiculous that they don’t allow us to eat!” she heard Cattail Woman complain as the older woman passed her and went down to the little pavilions on the terrace. “I’ve never found my magic improved by starvation.”

  You’ve probably never matte the experiment, my dear.

  The Summer Concubine took her place again, gathered her thoughts. Watched the rhythm of the chant as she’d have watched a partner in a complex dance, waiting for her moment to step into the movement again.

  Then poured out her heart and her mind and the secret energy of herself that was magic. Nothing further existed for her except drawing up the power through the long curves of conjoined sigils on the paving stones and weaving that power into a great shining net that covered the sky.

  Above and around her the last bronze light faded, stars of the night came forth.

  And so the Song rolled forth like a wheel into the night. Twice more the Summer Concubine went down to the terrace to rest, as she felt her strength and her concentration fail. Lamplight swayed with the desert wind, moving shadows against the white of the tent walls. If she’d suspected Soth had a honeyed fig on his person she would have killed him for it. On neither occasion did she even ask him what was taking place in the city, or what had befallen in the fighting that morning, though she guessed, from the noises she heard in the early night, that there was rioting again. Smoke stained the wind from several quarters. She had the sense, now, of husbanding her energy, like a housewife making a jar of water last through a dry spring, and did not remain awake for more than a second after lying down. Yet there was a kind of strength, a growing exhilaration, that came in the last hours before dawn. The power increasing, it almost seemed, when it should have been ebbing, until the whole earth and sky seemed to glow with it, pulsing with the pulse of the chants.