Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  “Ram and Boaz.” He took the papers unwillingly and looked at his mother, who met his gaze with stony, unflinching eyes,

  “Keep the cloak around the litters,” said the Summer Concubine softly to Pomegranate Woman, who came over as Mohrvine went down to where his guards waited in Pig Alley. “Can you turn people away from coming down this lane? Good.”

  “You need this?” Pomegranate Woman held out to her an enormous skinning knife she’d taken from her boot.

  “Thank you.” The Summer Concubine hefted it. It was a fact little known outside the Blossom Houses that Pearl Women were trained also in a startling variety of weapons. To be a true Pearl Woman was to be able to defend your man in nearly any circumstances, although most men didn’t know this until and unless the situation arose. Most found it tremendously disconcerting. She’d certainly never mentioned the matter to Oryn.

  “D’you want Pontifer to go with you? He’s good in a fight.” Pomegranate Woman looked down to the ground at her side. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  Mohrvine opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

  “Thank you,” the Summer Concubine said again. “But let’s leave him on guard here with you.”

  Turning, she reached out with her mind to the three men coming back from the darkness, glints of armor under concealing cloaks, the soft creak of sword belts and boots. They felt their way along the temple wall; the last blue light had faded from the sky, and against the dim starlight visible over the walls, gathering clouds could be seen. Ram, she whispered the name. Boaz . . .

  And cradled the minds, the names, into a gentle dream.

  Drawing her veils about her, and with them the black cloak, the thickest spells of concealment she knew, she followed Mohrvine through the beast gate and into the temple court.

  The stink of magic here was strong, sawing and plucking at her thoughts with tweezers of fire. Insane magic, bloodied fragments of formless spells. Goats ran crazily around the narrow yard, leaping on and off the well covers, their thin bleating like the wails of frightened children. A flock of geese charged from wall to wall, wings spread—pale, terrified ghosts. Underfoot the pavement was ankle deep in dung and even in the evening dark, flies swarmed. Far off the Summer Concubine could feel other magic, the crazy, jangling magic Pomegranate Woman had described. As Mohrvine led the way through the beasts’ door the air thickened with it, all pervasive.

  There was something here. Something that tasted, felt, a little like the spells she’d felt in the hills while searching for a way into the Hosh tomb, alien and cold.

  But it was far off, brooding. Drawn in on itself. Its madness permeated the walls, the air.

  Rats fled and squealed in the shadows. Somewhere, the Summer Concubine could hear Lohar singing, and the half-ecstatic crooning lifted the hairs on her scalp. Anger and joy mixed. Delight in his martyrdom. Soul-deep satisfaction mingling with bitter rage. The smell of blood and dung was like a battlefield, and the tiny lamps in their niches, far too widely spaced along the corridor wall, burned brownish and sickly in the choking atmosphere. Now and then the flies that swarmed around the lights would ball themselves into tight knots and fall squirming to the muck underfoot, rolling along the ground; once one of these burst into spontaneous flame. A chicken ran squawking along the corridor, then seemed to entangle itself in one of those eddies of stray magic and began to circle helplessly and to fling itself against the walls. Mohrvine flinched at the sight, but Ram and Boaz moved along ahead of him in their private dream, and the Summer Concubine, guiding them with her spells, dared not think too much about the crazed magics that dripped from walls and ceiling like slime.

  It was enough that she kept them in their dream of obedience, and herself in readiness in case of need.

  They met no one. She heard a deep chorus of male voices lifted in singsong response in the sanctuary—their leader had to be Sun-Mage trained, a young voice, beautiful—but none walked here. Mohrvine passed through an archway barely taller than his head and down a flight of steps, extending his arms to the walls on either side and groping with his foot in the darkness. A lamp burned somewhere at the bottom, but the light outlined no more than a riser or two.

  There were two guards outside a room that had probably once housed the temple’s treasure. The brick of the corridor floor was broken with age; the shadows beyond the lamp in its niche smelled as if the guards used the far end of the passageway as a privy. Mohrvine and the Summer Concubine stayed in the blackness of the stairway, shoulder to shoulder in the dark. Ram and Boaz went to the guarded door.

  “They need you up at the sanctuary.” Boaz nodded back toward the stair. “We’ll take over.” If she had to say it herself, the Summer Concubine was pleased at the naturalness of his voice.

  One of the guards grinned. “Get him to tell you the story about Wenthig Sarning and the masseuse.”

  The Summer Concubine laid a corner of the black cloak over Mohrvine as the guards passed them and went on up the stair.

  Ram was already unbolting the door as Mohrvine and the Summer Concubine approached.

  Oryn got to his feet, blinking against even the dim gold of the corridor lamps as Mohrvine opened the door. He was in shirtsleeves, the garment torn and bloody, and he shivered; he had wrapped the unconscious Jethan in his peacock robe against the night’s cold. He recognized Mohrvine, and his eyes went past him to the men with drawn swords. But all he said was, “Would you do one thing for me? Send the boy back to the palace. He’s—”

  “Not a word,” said Mohrvine. “Come with us.”

  Oryn stepped forward; it was only then that he saw the Summer Concubine standing in the shadows at Mohrvine’s back. He stopped, eyes widening with shock and hope, and looked at his uncle. “Hurry,” the Summer Concubine said. “Before the guards come back.”

  Oryn turned back and scooped Jethan up and onto his own wide shoulders—not easy to do given the unconscious guardsman’s size. But Oryn was a good deal stronger than he looked. He halted beside the Summer Concubine, and wordlessly bent, his free hand cupping her face, kissing the flesh of her eyelids and brow, the only unveiled part of her, and whispered like a secret breath in her ear, “Oh, very good, my Summer Child . . .”

  “Leave him,” muttered Mohrvine, as they bolted the cell door behind them, climbed the winding stair. Oryn had to turn sideways and sidle, with Jethan’s bulk on his shoulder. “We can’t rake him to where the body is—”

  “What body?”

  “That blockhead Iorradus. And believe me, nephew, you’re coming with me, and if this—this woman of yours has lied to me about my daughter, or Aktis—”

  “Iorradus? Oh, dear gods, the poor boy! Jethan tells me he has a room near here—something I’d scarcely have expected of him. He can be left there . . . . Your daughter? Foxfire Girl? You’ve found her? Is she all right?”

  “Aktis has taken her,” said the Summer Concubine, her voice barely a breath in the dark of the stinking corridor. “To—to make magic with her blood, with her heart.”

  “Can he do that? Is it possible? I’ve never heard—”

  “Neither have I,” whispered the concubine, “but I believe it is he who’s been killing the Raven sisters. I don’t understand it all, but . . .”

  “Explain on the way. If the girl is in danger . . .”

  “That,” said Mohrvine grimly, “is exactly our problem. To find where he’s taken her. Aktis has always kept rooms in other parts of the city, in the poor districts where he had friends. Or is it part of madam’s training as a Pearl Woman to be a desert tracker as well?” His voice twisted with sarcasm, now his only shield against horror.

  Oryn blinked at him, surprised. “I should think he’d take her to the tomb where he laid out the hex marks lo damage the aqueduct, wouldn’t he?” They had reached the alley—horses stood there, nomad-bred desert steeds that the Summer Concubine knew Mohrvine prided himself on. “The poor districts are too dangerous with the rioters coming and going—not to mention, I s
incerely hope, Bax and his bravos.”

  “The tomb was sealed,” said the Summer Concubine. “Soth and I searched for an entrance but never found one; I think now there must have been spells preventing us from doing so.”

  “If it was that enormous Hosh tomb that looks south out of the Dead Hills I know there are at least two robbers’ tunnels leading into it,” said Oryn. “My jewel dealer Noyad’s been selling Hosh rubies to me for years, not that he’d ever have any dealings with anything so dishonest as a grave robber, you understand. He sold some to you, too, didn’t he, Uncle? Or at least someone did—that cloak clasp you bought last year. The pink tinge in the heart of the jewels and the beveled carving are unmistakable.” He eased Jethan down from his shoulders and looked inquiringly at Mohrvine.

  Mohrvine’s eyebrows snapped together. “Xolnax sold me those,” he said. “He claimed they came from Yarbekt the Strong’s tomb.”

  “That’s only in the next wadi.” Oryn’s studies of Durshen music had given him an almost familial acquaintance with that corrupt dynasty’s rulers and the location of their tombs. The king’s fund of obscure knowledge never failed to amaze the Summer Concubine.

  “He sold my mother a ring that he claimed he ‘found’ near Trosh II’s tomb at the same time; it looks like the same workmanship to me.”

  “Trosh’s tomb is just on the other side of the hill,” mused Oryn. “Astonishing, how Durshen jewels would be so fashionable and Hosh gems considered passé simply because the Hosh were so dull. I really will have to write a treatise on public taste in illegally obtained antiquities.”

  “Iorradus’s body is in a gulch south of the road, not far from the aqueduct,” said the Summer Concubine. “If Aktis took her out there while he was supposed to be scrying for her at the Citadel, it would be a logical place to conceal the body.”

  Mohrvine signed impatiently, and Boaz and Ram stepped forward to receive the Summer Concubine’s instructions to take Jethan to Greasy Yard and leave him in the care of Rosemallow Woman and Melon Girl.

  “You’ll have to pay them for their trouble, I expect,” warned the Summer Concubine, and Mohrvine dug in his purse.

  “Just a moment,” said Oryn as the two guards were moving off again. “May I?”

  And he took Boaz’s sword and thrust it through his own gold-stamped belt. “And if you might lend me a cloak as well? It will be cold out in the Dead Hills.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Lying in the darkness—aching as if she’d fallen down a flight of stairs—Raeshaldis smelled the coming storm and thought, He tricked me. There was no reason, she thought, why the Sunflash Prince couldn’t have sent her back to one of those unknown places she’d heard of in the scrying glasses. Or, since she smelled the familiar wildness of the desert, he might have sent her to some other year in the history of men, when the rains came every winter without being called.

  She rolled over. Her bones felt stiff and her flesh was bruised all over, and she felt sick with the recollection of the tales of mages who had gone with the djinni to their floating palaces of invisible crystal. They had read unknown books, feasted, rode, made love for a night or two, only to return to find their families dead of old age, their houses decayed and abandoned, and the kings they’d served only memories centuries old.

  Time was not the same to the djinni, It did not work the same in their halls of crystal and air.

  A power circle was drawn on the floor beside her, exactly as the Summer Concubine had guessed it would be. From niches in the walls, barely visible through darkness that seemed thick as velvet over her sight, squat obsidian images glared with huge, round, mirrored eyes. The gods of the Hosh Dynasty, such as she had seen in Aktis’s room in the cupboard beside the golden bottle with the crystal stopper, wrapped in three strands of iron.

  He has a djinn.

  Come back tomorrow, Aktis had said. Don’t forget, now.

  She would have, too, she thought. Was that how he’d lured Turquoise Woman to him? Xolnax’s amber-eyed daughter? That pleasant, gentle friendliness, the memory of his reputation for kindness—before his magic started to fail. If she hadn’t feared the Red Silk Lady she would have gone to him, hoping to learn what the Sun Mages had not been able to teach.

  And now she was trapped in the tomb.

  Jangly alien magic filled the cramped space of the tomb’s outer chamber as if she’d been trapped in some monstrous lute’s sounding box. She got to her feet, steadying herself on the stone table of a false sarcophagus. The loremaster’s voice droned for an instant in her mind: Hosh tombs are characterized by their unpainted walls and the obsidian images of their gods—you’ll find the list of their names in the library and I want you to have them memorized by next week—and by the arrangement of an outer or false burial chamber near the main entrance, with an inner chamber cut deeper in the earth.

  They say every tomb in these hills was robbed, she thought. Even if the main entrance was sealed there has to be a passageway out through one of the neighboring crypts. At worst she was in for a four-or five-hour walk to the aqueduct camp. Always supposing the Sunflash Prince had not sent her to some other year, some other era . . .

  She stilled herself, trying to quiet the frightened pounding of her heart, listening. Seeking the soft draw of air against her skin that would speak of a tunnel to the outside.

  Then a moaning from the darkness, from the passageway that led into the cut rock. A girl’s voice sobbed, “Don’t! My father will kill you . . . .”

  And the terrified bleat of an injured teyn.

  Shaldis pressed back against the wall. Above the dry scents of dust and stone she could smell parched greenery from somewhere. A quick search revealed the tunnel, behind one of the tall, darkly gleaming images—too tall to steal, though the gold that had at one time covered its carved kilt and boots had been stripped off. A hole barely wider than her shoulders led away into darkness, but, putting her face close to it, she smelled the desert again, and felt the wind.

  Smelled rain, too. Coming close, clouds filling the sky.

  He’s using the magic to call the rain.

  From the inner tunnel on the other side of the chamber, steeply slanted and choked with debris, she smelled other things. The reek of mingled sulfur and incense, the stink of hot metal. Farther off, the smell of old blood.

  The air was full of magic, the smell of lightning, of jangling malice and hate.

  She glanced again at the power circle, Earth-Wizard signs mingled with runes similar to those on the silver protective disk. The cottonwood staff, with the disk still attached, lay at her side. She felt safer once she had it in her hand again.

  He must have killed them all here. It was a four-hour ride on a good horse—after failing to take her, he could have retreated here, to raise power for that first rain by killing Amber Girl at dawn, the time of Pomegranate Woman’s dream. Rain fell the following morning, the night he kidnapped Corn-Tassel Woman. It must have been her death he used to build up power to hex the aqueduct. She edged closer to the mouth of that downward-leading tunnel, blinking in the darkness. She remembered reading how the old tombs had pit traps in them, sometimes a hundred feet deep, for robbers to stumble into in the dark. He must have a bridge or a plank somewhere, or footholds cut into the wall.

  I should run, she thought. I should get out through that tunnel into the next tomb and flee to the aqueduct camp.

  By which time that girl in the deeper crypt will be dead, whoever she is.

  She couldn’t recognize the voice, but she sounded young. Maybe someone who didn’t even know her own power, someone Aktis had watched through his connections in the Slaughterhouse, as he’d watched her in the Citadel.

  How can he be here? He’s supposed to be in the Citadel today, taking part in the Rite with everyone else.

  If today is the same day I went into the temple.

  Which it obviously isn’t.

  How many days have I lost?

  She crouched at the passageway’s entrance, l
istening ahead of her into the dark of the deeper crypt. Probing with her mind through the vile cold of the alien magic—djinn magic, she recognized it must be now, mixed with and glued together by the stolen life energies of the dead Ravens, as the Sunflash Prince’s existed in the pallid matrix of dead animal lives. She smelled the pong of teyn, and a scent of jasmine perfume.

  “Thieving bitches.” Aktis’s voice was thick with ijnis, drunkenness teetering back and forth across the line of madness. “I’ll teach you. I’ll find out how you’re doing it. How you’re taking it away from us. I’ll make you give it back.”

  “Daddy . . .” The girl’s voice was thinned with tenor. “Daddy, come get me. Daddy, please . . .”

  Djinn-fire and darkness blurred Shaldis’s sight as she crept down the passageway, the plaster of the wall behind her smooth and cold. It was harder and harder to see chunks of rock and rubble that half filled the tunnel guarding the ancient king whose body lay in the crypt somewhere before her, and she didn’t dare make the small glowing finger marks that wizards made to guide them in unfamiliar labyrinths.

  He trapped a djinn, she thought again. He’s using it exactly the way Lohar uses Naruansich. Its name will he in the lists.

  There were three hundred and seventy-five in the lists, including possible duplications and obscure single appearances. And who knew how many more who’d never deigned to establish human friendships at all.

  Don’t think about that, she told herself. If it didn’t have human friends it wouldn’t have been trapped by Aktis. If its name wasn’t in the lists, Aktis couldn’t have lured it the way Urnate Urla tried to lure Meliangobet.

  At least I can eliminate Naruansich and Meliangobet himself. Two out of three hundred and seventy-five—I’m almost there!

  A man and a djinn together. One without magic, the other without the physical body to sustain his life . . . .

  It’s powerful now. It’s got the magic in it of Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman and Amber Girl and who knows how many others the Summer Concubine never even knew about. He’ll have a room here, like the one behind the sanctuary at the temple, a place where he lets it out of that golden bottle I saw in the cupboard.