Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

  Twilight lay again on dust-dry gardens of the city; twilight and silence. Pomegranate Woman, sitting on a cushion near the door that led to the Summer Pavilion’s hanging gardens, was brushing the dust from her ash-white hair after a day’s work on the relays of water hoists that bore lake water, bucketful by patient bucketful, up to the thirsty fields. Even the lords of the great houses. Mohrvine and Akarian and Sarn, had gone down to work on them, though privately Shaldis didn’t think this would last long. But it was important that they be seen to work on them, especially as Oryn himself did such work daily. It was nobody’s business how much he groaned about it in the baths afterward.

  Shaldis hoped Mohrvine’s blisters would suppurate and he would die of them.

  Small chance, with his mother and his daughter studying magic. But she could hope.

  “That’s a very old technique,” pointed out Soth, who had walked over from the library with more notes about water wheels gleaned from the transcripts of scrying-stone conversations generations ago. “There were half a dozen Durshen Dynasty combinations of crystal, metals and spells that were supposed to contain or imprison djinni, but I don’t think I’ve ever read of a case where such traps worked for very long.”

  The court mage had met the king’s party halfway back from the Dead Hills, three nights ago now, with spare horses, two litters and a squad of House Jothek cavalry, newly arrived from the wide royal holdings along the north shores of the Lake of the Sun. The nomads had been turned back there after a sharp battle, and Lords Jamornid and Sarn, seeing the strength of loyal troops, had suddenly realized that they could spare men from their own lands to help the king after all.

  “The djinni have a way of . . . of absorbing any construct,” Soth went on, “be it material or imaginative, to draw magic out of it. Generally dreadful things happened to the wizards who wrought the traps. They could literally make the magic of escape from the material of their prison.”

  “If they wanted to,” said Shaldis. “And if they had the power that they used to have.”

  “The poor things,” said Oryn softly.

  The Red Silk Lady sniffed. “One of those ‘poor things’ nearly tore the heart out of your breast, boy, and went far toward destroying the realm.”

  Once the darkness was too far advanced for work on the water hoists to proceed, the Summer Concubine invited the members of the newly established Sisterhood of Ravens to dine with her in the pavilion. Cattail Woman and Pebble Girl were both on the night work shift—checking ropes, repairing sluice gates, resetting the water wheels that Soth claimed would make the work easier—and the Moth Concubine had chosen to spend the evening with her master, a middle-aged merchant who traveled in silk. But Soth had come, looking better than anyone had seen him in years, and full of engineering schemes. And, rather to Shaldis’s surprise, Foxfire Girl and her grandmother put in an appearance as well.

  Very little wind stirred the white gauze curtains of the pavilion’s upper room. Instead of rain, it appeared that the summer heat would come early this year. The work on the aqueduct was already being carried on only in evening and morning. Shaldis couldn’t imagine how it would be finished in time to do anyone any good.

  Oryn continued quietly, “We are creatures of the flesh as well as of magic.” He poured out coffee for the Summer Concubine’s guests. The supper had been a simple one—an uneasy reminder, perhaps, of hard days to come. “If our salvation is not to be from magic, at least we can seek it through the flesh of the physical world.”

  His grandfather’s concubine prodded him irritably with her walking stick, and said, “Some with more flesh than others.”

  He smiled graciously as he held out to her a gold-rimmed glass cup. “Some of us are gifted with flesh, and others, like yourself, with magic, madam. And beauty as well, which I consider a bit unfair . . .” She jabbed him again with her stick, but looked pleased. “We must each honor our own gifts. We—men—humankind, I mean—we at least have the option—if certain imbeciles in charge of the major houses of the land would only see it, present company of course excepted—to bring in our means for survival from elsewhere. Or, if worse comes to very worst, to move on somewhere else, or to alter the way we live . . . to do something. Being creatures utterly of power, and apparently only of a certain kind of power, the djinni have fewer roads to try.”

  In billowing garments of rose-colored silk, earrings twinkling in the speckled light of a dozen lamp niches ranged in the wall behind him, the king looked every inch the dandy again, a perfumed and fan-waving disgrace to his father’s name. But Jethan was alive, Shaldis knew, only because of Oryn’s stubborn refusal to abandon him. Why this should concern her she couldn’t imagine. The young man was straitlaced, provincial, had no imagination, was wholly given to the pursuit of arms and disapproved of half the things she’d said on the two occasions she had gone to the infirmary to have coffee with him—though of course she would be sorry had the king lost so loyal a retainer. She’d gone with Bax the day before yesterday to Greasy Yard to fetch him back as soon as the king had returned from the desert, and had heard then that it was Oryn who’d carried him out of the temple.

  “He is—a true king,” the young man had said, when Shaldis had visited him yesterday. He was obviously uncomfortable about the idea of a true king who spent more time having his hair curled than he did leading his troops, but at least, Shaldis had replied, having your hair curled didn’t result in dead men’s bodies scattered to the horizon. This had led to a lively argument. She hoped he’d be more tractable when she called on him tomorrow.

  “Did you learn anything at the temple today?” asked the king, dividing his glance between Soth and Shaldis. It was Shaldis who shook her head.

  “The place was empty,” she said. “Locked up. It took us a while to get in, but there were no traps, no magical summoning’s of rats or flies.”

  “Though the gods know,” added Soth, “there were plenty of both on hand. And stink enough to knock you down.”

  “I asked—and Soth asked—about what was happening, to magic, to the rains, to the world. About why all of this was going on. And Naruansich said nothing.”

  The Summer Concubine asked softly, “Was he there?”

  “Oh, yes.” Shaldis wasn’t sure how she knew this. A whisper of magic, the faintest rustle of air. “He was there.”

  She sipped her tea, steadying the cup with her bandaged hand. “I suspect somebody in the past must have tried exactly the same thing Lohar actually did—tried to trap a djinn in the cult statue of a god, for the purpose of extorting ‘miracles’ to impress the ‘faithful.’ It wouldn’t have worked—and certainly didn’t work—when the djinn had any power, or could have existed outside the statue. The maker of the statue must have had it buried with him.”

  “Damn those tomb robbers,” sighed Oryn, settling back into the cushions of the divan. “Something really will have to be done about them. Particularly now that the spells of protection put all throughout the necropoli are fading away.”

  “I think it likelier,” said Shaldis, “that it was the Sunflash Prince who found the statue and took refuge in it, and called Lohar to him to be his servant. The same thing may have happened with Ba and Aktis. I have no idea how old that golden bottle was that I saw in his rooms with the things he used to make ijnis. Did you find a silver protective sigil, madam”—she turned to the Red Silk Lady—“in Aktis’s rooms?”

  Foxfire Girl starred to reply, bin her grandmother cut her off with “Certainly not.”

  Yeah, thought Shaldis, you right.

  “But I did find these.” The Red Silk Lady held them out: hairpins with heads of elaborately worked glass such as the wife of a glassblower would wear. A few strands of blond hair still tangled in them. And a cheap blue-green veil such as vendors sold in the Slaughterhouse of a color that would look good on a woman with turquoise eyes.

  The Summer Concubine whispered, “Thank you,” and gathered them into her hands.

  “And noth
ing,” said Oryn, “to show why he was sacrificing a jenny teyn, before—er—dealing with my cousin?” He glanced in the direction of Foxfire Girl, who sat quietly on the divan near the garden doors. She had come in from her curtained chair leaning on a crutch, and when she’d removed her veils had revealed the bandages that covered the wounds she’d taken from Aktis’s djinn on her cheekbones and neck. Shaldis guessed her grandmother would use her magic to make the scars disappear—she’d already asked the Moth Concubine about healing—but for a girl that beautiful, she had an abashed air, a silence as if laboring under some shame or pain.

  “Nothing,” said Shaldis. “I thought it odd, myself. But lucky, since I never would have gotten you out of there otherwise.”

  For a long time no one spoke. Then Soth asked, “If you saw the bottle in Aktis’s room—when? Only the day after you learned that other women had disappeared—”

  “I glimpsed it before I knew it had anything to do with who we were looking for,” she replied. “I was thinking then in terms of who had power—and Aktis clearly didn’t.”

  “Does anyone anymore?” asked Foxfire Girl softly.

  And just as softly, with a proud secret smile through the steam of her coffee, her grandmother replied, “We do.”

  Foxfire Girl sighed. When Shaldis had gone the previous day to the House Jothek to see her, she’d found the girl in the servants’ quarters with another girl—a young maidservant, it looked like—who appeared to have been quite badly burned, just sitting and holding her hand. She had asked then about learning the spells of healing: There has to be something I can do, she had said.

  “And that was enough to lead you to Aktis?” the Summer Concubine asked, settling her gossamer shawl around her shoulders.

  “I didn’t think I’d find Aktis in person,” said Shaldis. “I only wanted to see what was in the crypt of the Hosh tomb, to see whether my suspicion of him was correct. I lost about a day in the idol—when the djinn tried to . . . to take over my mind. I stepped through that gate a full day later than I thought I would. I thought Aktis would still be at the Citadel and that it would be pretty safe to look around.”

  “What will become of Nebekht now?” asked Foxfire Girl. “You say he—it—is still trapped?”

  With the dispersal of the rain clouds, Lohar had hanged himself in the sanctuary of the Temple of Nebekht. Since Seb Dolek had managed to offend so many of the god’s other followers by his swift rise to power, a schism among Lohar’s successors had resulted within a day. There had been no resistance when Bax had taken palace troops into the Slaughterhouse.

  In fact, of all the ragged, furious men who’d manned the barricades, none were found who would even claim to have been there. They had all been home, minding their own business, and knew nothing of the affair. No one knew who had burned down all those buildings, looted those shops, stolen the expensive green-embroidered shirt Rosemallow Woman had been wearing when Shaldis had gone to get Jethan or the quite excellent ham she’d been feeding the young guardsman on.

  And Shaldis only said, “I don’t know.”

  “But at least,” said Oryn, “we know he’s there. Perhaps only the mad or the mage-born can hear him.”

  “I suppose the question should be,” said Soth, stroking Gray King’s wide, rounded head, “are there any more of them trapped or hiding somewhere that we ought to know about?”

  Oryn sighed. “I’m sure we’re eventually going to find that out.”

  “Oh, good,” said the Summer Concubine. “Something to look forward to.”

  And the look that passed between the blue eyes and the hazel was like a kiss.

  How much of the djinn Ba—whose name and attributes Shaldis had looked up last night in the college library—had been left, she wondered, in the thing she’d struggled against in the painted labyrinth of the old kings’ tombs? It had fed on the stained and alien magics of the women, trading what magic it had still been able to work for the life Aktis was willing to let it continue in the crystal bottle. How conscious had Ba still been, there at the end? She had been able to speak to the Sunflash Prince in his poisoned dreamworld within the idol. Had Aktis ever actually spoken to Ba?

  When she’d reached with her mind into the numinous blue lightnings that hung, in that last instant, around Aktis’s head, she’d sensed only Aktis’s malice, Aktis’s rage. Aktis’s grief.

  Had there been any crystal world of borrowed dreams in that bottle, for Aktis to live in for a time?

  As people got good and tired of working sweeps and buckets, there was less and less talk in the marketplaces against the construction of the aqueduct. Even Mohrvine had quit writing scurrilous little ballads about it to circulate through the poorer quarters, though the Summer Concubine had probably had something to do with that.

  As human beings, we do have options, thought Shaldis. At least some of them still appear viable. She hoped so, anyway.

  Or are we, like the djinni, doomed as well?

  She gazed out into the darkness of the garden, the trellis still almost bare against the star-powdered, velvet sky. From here she could see the lights of the Citadel, citrine flecks as tiny as those of the intricately pierced lamps behind the king.

  An admission of defeat.

  An acceptance of how the world now was.

  With most of the novices gone—and Benno Sarn as well—Shaldis had found the quiet of the Citadel both restful and sad. The three novices who had elected to remain had been asked to sit with her at the masters’ table, and there was no more whispering or jokes.

  Something moved in the darkness. Shaldis thought it was a late-fluttering bird, but for a moment it seemed to her she glimpsed a small white pig lying on the edge of the empty pool, looking across the tiled basin at her with crystalline eyes that glowed with light unlike the gold of the pavilion lamps.

  Then it was gone.

  No one else in the pavilion appeared to have seen it. But Gray King, sitting on the low table dipping a paw into the king’s coffee, turned his head and met her eyes with a reflection of that pale, steady, alien fire.

  Meliangobet, she thought, had taken refuge in a corpse. Ba, and the Sunflash Prince, had sought crystals and gold to house the structure of their personalities, their minds, when the ambient magic of the air had changed so much that it would no longer suffice. But she wondered, suddenly, if that was the only sort of house that the refugee spirits could seek.

  We could exist in their dreams. Can they perhaps exist in ours?

  Or in the minds of our cats?

  “We don’t know anything about anything, when it comes to it.” Shaldis turned on the divan, looked back into the lamplit blue and golden room. Seeing their faces in the warm faceted glow, like the family she had never had: the king holding his Summer Lady’s hand; the white-haired dowager disparaging the fig balls to Soth; the cheerful old crone offering to teach some spell—Rohar only knew what—to the dark-haired girl.

  It’s up to us, she thought, and knew that wasn’t entirely true.

  The gods who ruled the universe had put them together for a reason. She simply couldn’t imagine what.

  “We only know that the world is changing, and that we were given this gift, for this time, for reasons that we don’t understand. All we can do is make the best use of it we can, in the time we have.”

  “And that,” said the Summer Concubine, “can be said of anything, and of everyone.”

  Three days later, while all the remaining Sun Mages—and nearly everyone else in the Yellow City—were working on the water relays, clouds gathered in the north and poured down rain on the lands.

  A WORD ABOUT

  WOMEN’S NAMES

  While the names of men are largely based on archaic clan surnames, those of women are traditionally given to them by their husbands when they marry (usually between the ages of fifteen and eighteen), or by the masters to whom their fathers sell them outright if they don’t. In the wealthier households female children are given individual names, but th
e general custom is simply to number the girls, giving them a standard name (usually Rower or Fish or Rabbit, or sometimes simply Daughter). Theoretically a husband can change the name of even a nobly born wife, like Foxfire Girl, but this would be regarded as a tremendous insult to the girl’s father.

  Though the translations used in this book sound clumsy, what I have translated as Woman, Girl, Concubine, Lady, etc., are actually very brief suffixes indicative of the woman’s status. To have only one name—Flower or Fish—is an indication of no status at all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Barbara Hambly was born in San Diego on August 28, 1951, and grew up in Southern California amid daydreams, Beatle-mania, and Flower Power. She attended the University of California, Riverside, where she obtained a masters degree in medieval history and a black belt in Shotokan karate. She later taught a year of high school, waited tables, taught karate, shelved books in the local library and was “downsized” out of the aerospace industry two days after signing her first book contract in 1981. For many years she was best known for writing sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with occasional excursions into vampire tales, Star Trek and Star Wars novels, but has recently branched out into a series of well-reviewed historical who-dunits as well. A world traveler, she has served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and at one point in her life wrote scripts for cartoon shows. She currently lives in Los Angeles.