Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  It was very strange, whatever it was. Something she’d never encountered before.

  It seemed to her for a moment that instead of the booming crash, she heard the faintest tickle of evil music—

  Raeshaldis.

  She felt the calling, clear in her mind. The overwhelming urge to look into her crystal or a mirror or a pool of water, anything that would summon an image. “Excuse me, Father,” she said, and retreated to the door. Before leaving her cell she’d slipped the white crystal from the Citadel scrying chamber into her satchel, and this was what she angled, so that its central facet caught the light.

  And within that facet, like a trick of the light, she saw Summerchild’s face.

  “Summer, I’m sorry,” said Shaldis quickly. “Did everything go all right at the council? Something came up, something that I need to talk to you about—”

  “And we need, very badly, to talk to you.”

  EIGHT

  What was that?” Pomegranate finished lashing the makeshift sunscreen of palm branches and reed mats into place on the ruins of the hut, and Soth—who’d fetched them from the ruined village while the old woman kept watch on the lake—lowered his telescope from his eye.

  “Hokiros,” he replied. “Who a month and a half ago was as much a legend as the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon.”

  While in the village, in spite of an arm that slowly stiffened from its injury, he’d also refilled their water bottles from the well and located a couple of gourd cups and a quantity of almonds and dates. These he proceeded to organize into a makeshift lunch—during her days as a beggar Pomegranate had learned never to pass up food, and the weaving of the ward spells had left her ravenous for sweets. She put several dates on a plane-tree leaf and set it on the hut’s clay floor for Pontifer. “He’s had a frightening morning,” she explained, and patted her rotund pet’s head.

  Soth replied in a tone of grave politeness. “So have we all.”

  The fog was entirely gone. Sunlight glared hot on the surface of the lake, burned Pomegranate’s face through the light coating of ointment that everyone wore. With luck, the villagers would be back before too much longer.

  “At least the wards worked,” she added, looking out past the shredded hut walls at the trailing glyphs of pain, of water, of power, scratched in the earth all around them. In addition to putting up a sunshade for themselves, the two unwilling monster fighters had dragged enough straw mats and bricks from the village to cover Tosu’s body, which they’d brought back—in several pieces—from the rice field. Pomegranate had drawn wards around it against foxes and dogs, and hoped they’d work on this occasion. “So at some time in the past, somebody didn’t think the lake monsters were legends.”

  “That was our salvation.” Soth glanced up from knotting another of Pomegranate’s many scarves into a makeshift sling. “Our only salvation, since those spells were so old they’d fallen out of circulation, even out of memory of the lines of any wizard I’ve ever spoken with.”

  He moved slowly, as if the battle had taken from him all the energy he had. “I assume that fifteen centuries ago lake monsters were a reality in the Lake of the Moon, and wizards of some kind put heavy wards against them all along the lakeshore. I’d almost say they were too effective, for the water dragons remained deep in the center of the lake, where the water is bottomless, with the result that everyone forgot their existence. They must have done the same with the creature or creatures up here, renewing them by rote and passing the spells along as a religious rite from father to son.”

  “Until magic changed,” said Pomegranate softly. Pontifer came quietly up beside her and lay down, his chin resting on her sandaled foot. She remembered Hokiros’s red glare, the wicked, watching intentness of his eyes.

  “Until magic changed, and the lake began to dry.” Soth folded his long, narrow hands into a double fist, rested them, and his chin, on his drawn-up knees as he gazed out over that glittering blue-and-golden pavement of the open water, beyond the murky pools of the drying lakeshore.

  Pomegranate said nothing for a time. She guessed that the former Earth Wizard was reliving all the stages of their journey up from the Yellow City in quest of any information—even the slightest rumors—about other women in whom the powers of magic had begun to bloom.

  All along the shores of the Lake of the Sun they had asked, in villages and towns where the mages—if they’d had them—had departed or taken on other work. Most people hadn’t even heard that women could do magic now. Many, even in the face of Pomegranate’s repeated demonstrations of fire lighting, scrying, and ward spells, had simply refused to believe. Again and again, Soth had been approached under the assumption that he was working through his companion—and that she or her services could be bought from him.

  And all along the shores of the Lake of the Sun, the other story had been the same as well: the long flats of drying mud, the acres of shallow reedy pools thick with crocodiles and mosquitoes, that lay between what had once been waterside villages and the current shoreline. Everywhere, makeshift canals stretched across this no-man’s-land to bring water to the old fields, the long lines of bucket hoists worked by teyn—the growing effort to keep the teyn enslaved in the face of the failure of the spells that had kept them cowed. Everywhere, maddening infestations of mice, of mosquitoes, of locusts that the mages had once kept at bay.

  The Sun Canal, between the Lake of the Sun and the Great Lake that stretched at the foot of the Mountains of the Eanit, had been nearly impassable, even by barges of the shallowest draft. Teyn work crews labored to deepen it, and foremen labored even harder to keep the crews from vanishing in the night and grumbled about the king. The New Canal, which stretched from the Great Lake north to the City of Reeds, was as bad or worse, and that stilt-legged city that had once stood in the midst of the lake’s sparkling waters now balanced mostly above dry land or reeking mud. Nars, a former Pyromancer who’d met them there, told them that the canal which had once connected the Lake of Reeds with the Lake of Gazelles further north was now no more than a ditch choked with brush and young acacia trees.

  Nowhere, Nars had said, had he heard of any woman coming to power, and he had journeyed far among the more northerly lakes beyond Gazelles.

  It was while they were in the City of Reeds that villagers from Shonghu and Hon had come to them with tales of another peril still.

  Pontifer raised his head sharply. Following his wise black gaze, Pomegranate saw the little band of village men making their way along the paths of the rice fields, their simple tunics of stripes and checks like strange colorless flowers among the green. They approached gingerly, poised at each step to spin and race back inland if the waters of the lake so much as rippled.

  Having encountered Hokiros, she could not find it in her heart to blame them.

  Soth got to his feet, put his spectacles back on—he didn’t, Pomegranate noticed, put down his crossbow. The village councilmen seemed to be determined to speak to him rather than to her, possibly because he was a man—though she admitted that with her ragged, brightly colored cast-off garments and the jangling collection of beads, amulets, sashes, and mirrors that hung about her person, they probably came to mistaken conclusions about her. She was used to this. All her life she’d preferred invisibility anyway.

  “My lord Silverlord,” she heard the headman say, and all the villagers bowed down to the tall, bespectacled mage. “You have gained forever the reverent gratitude of Hon village and all its children, down to the tenth generation. Was Hokiros in fact dying, as he returned to the lake? Will he come again?”

  “That I cannot tell,” replied Soth. “He was wounded, certainly, and perhaps unto death. But at a guess he wasn’t the only one of his kind. You say he has not come forth for nearly fifteen hundred years, and I think it more likely that the thing that destroyed your village today was one of a small group of such things.”

  The men stared at one another, grasped one another’s arms and clothing in terror.
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  “Until such time as we can deal with the others, if they indeed exist, you’ll need to be prepared to sacrifice livestock to Hokiros, to draw him away from the village. Pomegranate will put wards around the village, but you must pen sheep and goats nearby, so that if he comes out he will have something else to eat besides the village.”

  “But it is so that we would not lose our sheep and goats that we called you!” exclaimed the headman peevishly.

  Pomegranate stooped and whispered to Pontifer, “So much for the tenth generation.”

  “How can you say—”

  Pomegranate.

  The thought sliced into her mind, clear as crystal.

  Look in the mirror.

  Summerchild, she guessed, and fumbled one of the several mirrors that hung on ribbons around her neck. She caught the light on the gleaming surface, and a moment later saw her friend’s face as if reflected over her shoulder. “Dearie,” she sighed, “I was going to scry for you the moment things felt safe around here. I hate to make life harder for the poor king, but—”

  “After what happened in council this morning,” said Summerchild carefully, “I’m not sure you could do that. I think we need both of you back here, as fast as it’s possible for you to come.”

  NINE

  The wooden gate into the small adobe-walled pen opened; a man in the rough tunic and coarse cotton pantaloons of a teyn minder shoved an oldish boar teyn through and into the enclosure. The boar stood still, swinging his massive, heavy shoulders as he rocked gently from foot to foot, long arms dangling, heavy head—like a flat blackish-silver rock shorn of its fur—moving a little as his wide nostrils snuffed the air. The minder followed him in and thrust the door shut behind him with his stick. The boar was probably twenty years old, to judge by his whitening fur and wrinkled features: he’d be dead in another five years. Jennies lived perhaps twice that long.

  The boar was naked, and his fur had been clipped close. He was sleek and reasonably well fed. There was always a great deal of discussion among the landchiefs about how much to feed teyn, but Lord Mohrvine inclined toward the better-care, less-replacement school of thought.

  Watching the teyn over her grandmother’s shoulder in the gleaming surface of her grandmother’s mirror, Mohrvine’s daughter Foxfire felt a surge of gratitude that this was so. Six months ago, at fourteen and a half, she had begun to realize that her father was not the godlike and charming hero she had always believed him, unquestioningly, to be. She didn’t know if that understanding had to do with the budding of her abilities in magic, or whether that was just something that happened when girls’ fathers tried to marry them off to dreadful old men like Lord Akarian.

  But she still loved her father dearly. Now that Lord Akarian was definitely out of the picture, she was glad that her father was a man she could respect: a man who made sure his horses, his dogs, his teyn, and his slaves were well fed and well treated.

  Her love for her father—and the respect he’d taught her for those within her power—made what she was witnessing in her grandmother’s mirror all the more difficult to know what to do with. She felt as if she held some alien object in her hand that had to be put away, and she could not find the box or cupboard into which it went. She couldn’t even exactly name what it was in her hand . . . anger? pity? shame?

  The teyn minder took his charge by the arm, and—though teyn were far stronger than men—shoved him, hard, against the closed door of the pen.

  Foxfire saw the teyn strike the rough wooden planks hard enough to rebound into the pen. But the teyn collapsed to its knees, doubled over in pain. It grabbed and clutched at itself, clawing its arm and side where they’d come in contact with the wood. She saw its mouth stretch wide, tusks gleaming in a silent agonized howl. It crawled away from the door, body visibly shuddering, and Foxfire’s grandmother shifted her seat on the leather camp cushion before her low dressing table, and said a word respectable ladies weren’t supposed to know.

  “Looks like the pain is just as bad as the last experiment,” she said in her cracked, deep voice, and reached for the tiny glass-and-silver cup of coffee at her side. The Red Silk Concubine, as she had been called at that time, had been the youngest, loveliest, and most formidable woman in the harem of fat old Oryn I; at seventy-five her bones were beautiful still. Even before she’d begun to develop the ability to see distant places in her mirror or to make marks of ill or inattentiveness on walls or bedding, she’d been widely feared in the household of Mohrvine, her son. Foxfire had grown up in terror of her from her earliest recollection.

  Now that Red Silk had taken over elements of her education, Foxfire knew her better, loved her profoundly, and feared her more, and differently. Her grandmother, she knew with a sensation of wondering awe, would not hesitate a moment to destroy her—or her father and brothers or the house or anything in the Yellow City—to protect herself from being interfered with. Foxfire trusted the old lady’s wisdom and wiliness implicitly. But she did not trust her.

  “Has Summerchild said anything to you about spells of pain?”

  In the mirror’s gleaming circle, the teyn minder edged tentatively toward the shut door of the pen, reached with the hooked handle of his stick for the slight notch in the planks that was all the purchase available on the doors of the compounds where the shambling unhuman laborers were kept. At night, or at such rare times during the day when the teyn were returned to their compounds, the gates were bolted from the outside. The man flinched and dropped the stick when it came in contact with the door, stumbled back, clutching his hand.

  The teyn, who’d sat up in the center of the pen, hugging itself and rocking in pain, remained impassive, but something in the way it settled its shoulders made Foxfire think it smiled inwardly.

  Red Silk swore again.

  The minder, a silent tiny image in the mirror, had to yell for his partner outside to open the door.

  “I know Summerchild works with pain spells,” Foxfire answered her grandmother after a time. “She’s taught us the ones that work most often for her, to use in self-defense; to throw pain at another person. She doesn’t like them.”

  “Or says she doesn’t,” muttered the old lady. “This coffee’s cold. Don’t you go for fresh, girl—this isn’t a Blossom House and I’m not a man. Ring for one of those lazy sluts. She’s never spoken of ways to modulate pain, to exercise it in varying degrees? Humph. And she calls herself a Pearl Woman. A Pearl Woman must be perfect in every art.” Under white brows her turquoise eyes glinted, a shade paler than Foxfire’s but clear and deadly as the summer sky in deep desert, when neither water nor help is at hand. “That includes the arts of pain. I suppose that stupid cow Chrysanthemum didn’t think to teach you anything about those in that precious Blossom House where your father spent such a fortune having you trained?”

  “No, Grandmother.” Foxfire shivered at the thought, but kept her voice even, as she had been trained to do.

  “And it isn’t pain that we need, in any case.” Red Silk passed one wrinkled white hand across the face of the mirror, releasing the elements of the glass and the silver from the domination of her mind. Ruby rings half hid old scars on her fingers. “It’s fear. We’ll look again in an hour and see if the pain lingers any longer in the wall or the gate than it did in the other pens where we’ve tried it. What sigils went into the makeup of that spell, child?”

  Foxfire turned back to the little scribe desk in the corner of the chamber and the box where she kept the note tablets about her grandmother’s experiments in using magic to master the teyn. Like most women of the deep-desert tribes, Red Silk had never learned to write, not even in the simple alphabet of city women called Scribble, much less the thousands of glyphs that made up High Script. The morning’s heat was growing strong. Even in this tiled pavilion in the gardens of her father’s summer villa of Golden Sky, the sun’s implacable wrath made itself felt. Foxfire guessed the open pens she’d been looking at all morning in the mirror would be insufferable even f
or teyn before long.

  “Damn that brat Soral Brûl for an inattentive lout,” her grandmother went on. “I know there are sigils he never bothered to learn while he was with the Sun Mages.” She named the young former novice, hired a few months ago by Mohrvine and currently occupying—under discreet guard—a comfortable chamber in a secluded corner of the lakeside palace. “Has that girl Shaldis mentioned others that we don’t know about? I know she keeps her mouth shut, but she’s got access to the Citadel library—”

  The old woman broke off and sat up sharply, as if she’d heard a sound, then leaned to her mirror again. “Your father,” she said, brushing its surface with the backs of her jeweled fingers. Foxfire glimpsed in it a cloud of dust along the road to the Yellow City, the flat roofs and crenellated walls rising in the distance. “And in a hurry at that. Something’s happened. Stay where you are, girl,” she added as Foxfire made an impulsive move toward the door. “Riding that way, he’ll come to us before he even knocks the dust off his boots. A man thinks more of a woman—or of another man, for that matter—who doesn’t run to meet him at the gate like a love-struck schoolgirl; the sluts at that precious Blossom House they trained you in must surely have taught you that.”

  Foxfire whispered, “Yes, Grandmother.”

  The cold turquoise eyes held her, as if runes of power were written in the pupils’ tiny pleatings of blue and emerald, so that she could not look away. “But they didn’t teach you why you must make others value you,” said Red Silk softly. “They didn’t teach what happens to women in this world who are not valued. Only life teaches that.”

  Foxfire thought of her friend Opal, whose delicate beauty had been horribly marred by an accidental fire in the Blossom House. The sixth daughter of a poor laborer in the city, she would have been sold for what she’d bring, to grind wheat or haul water, once she was no longer lovely. In a toneless voice Foxfire said, “Yes, Grandmother.” And then, a thought coming to her, “Can you look into the Yellow City and see if there’s signs of trouble there? Papa will value us still more, if we can say, ‘Ah, yes, the riots . . .’ or whatever the trouble is.”