Shaldis stared at him, first blankly, then feeling the heat of rage climb from her belly to her face, so that she was glad of the shadowy dimness of the chamber. Even her grandfather’s earlier fury, down in his study, hadn’t been as bad as this.
“You’ll have to excuse us if we’re not up on how witches would prefer to be treated,” Tulik went on with a practiced, conspiratorial grin. “But it’s really something nobody’s had to deal with before this. You’ll let us know—Father or Grandfather or myself—if there’s anything else you’d like. Whatever it is, we’ll get it for you; we’re that glad to have you back. Aren’t we, Grandfather?”
“Absolutely,” assented the old man with a decisive nod and a glitter in his eye as if he were already planning which caravans to have Shaldis put a good-luck word on—and which rivals to grace with a bad one. “With the Citadel closing down, I hear, it’s high time you returned to us. But you could have come before, you know.” He ratcheted his smile wider.
Shaldis fought the desire to throw up. In a shaking voice, she said, “I’m sure I could have, sir. But as you said downstairs, I was afraid I’d be taken for a whore.”
And brushing past them, she left the chamber and the gallery, descending the stairs with her father’s voice calling her name after her, and walked as swiftly as she could out of the house.
The guardsman Jethan met her where Sleeping Worms Street turned before it opened into the square before the Grand Bazaar. As Summerchild had promised, he led a horse, one of the cavalry’s stringy little mounts; he sat his own with the straight-backed seat of a warrior.
“There you are.” His voice was accusing. “The Summer Concubine—”
Shaldis caught the pommel and swung herself into the saddle: “Don’t you say one word to me.” After the unholy trio of her father, her brother, and her grandfather, she was in no mood for the big guardsman’s defensive loyalty to Summerchild or his disapproval of females who studied the arts of magic and went running around the streets of the city unveiled and alone. The morning was already hot, and the square with its vegetable stands and its clutter of thatch-roofed booths and barrows seemed to float in a haze of golden dust.
She jerked the reins out of his hand, aware that it wasn’t at Jethan that her anger had flowered, but too angry to care. What she really wanted to do was cry—for her father, for her childhood, for the knowledge that she’d have to revisit that house.
So she settled for jabbing her heels hard into her mount’s washboard sides and plunging off at a trot through the red-and-blue kiosks, the makeshift stands selling eggplants and tomatoes and little yellow horoscopes, with Jethan—tall and frowning and, as requested, silent—riding in the cloud of her dust.
ELEVEN
As always, the gardens that were the great luxury of the House of the Marvelous Tower quieted Shaldis’s heart. They constituted almost a dwelling in themselves, some great rooms with long vistas, like the Green Court with its lawns and fountains and lines of rose trees, and some small and intimate, like the jungles of jasmine and gardenia that sheltered the Summer Pavilion in a magic enclave of quiet fragrance. When Jethan bowed stiffly at the entrance of the pavilion’s garden and would have gone, Shaldis touched his arm.
“I’m sorry. My family . . . does that to me.”
He opened his mouth on an unconsidered retort, then closed it and regarded her with eyes whose light jewellike blueness seemed brighter in the sunburned dark of his face.
She added, “I haven’t seen them in two years. I wish I could go another two. Or twelve. Or twenty-four.”
He gave the matter grave consideration. Shaldis had seen him smile only on rare occasions, as if his face were unused to the exercise. Then he asked, “All of them?”
She thought of the fragmentary music of her mother’s laughter; of Foursie, growing leggy and gawky on the threshold of adolescence; of Twinkle, who’d been so fragile as a child. She was aware that her shoulders relaxed; saw the reflection of the change in Jethan’s eyes.
“I haven’t seen my family in five years,” he said in a quiet voice. “I miss even the horrible ones.”
“You’re a man.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them: the accusation and the bitter taste of old despairs.
He had a narrow face that seemed to have been formed by and for disapproval of every innovation to the way things were done in his village. But the look in his blue eyes, for one instant, was simply sad, as if at the recollection of burdens shirked: of a man’s part not properly played in some desolate farm village in the far north.
But he only bowed to her and walked away across the sunny green of the rose garden.
“Are you all right, dear?” Summerchild came hurrying down the gravel path among the jasmine to her—she must have heard their voices from the pavilion’s terrace. She looked, as usual, breathtaking, though the silk-fine, pale blue linen of her dress was unornamented by anything save the slim straightness of her carriage. When she saw Shaldis was alone she unwound her veils, managing to make them drape in a pleasing pattern over her shoulders. Had her life depended on it Shaldis had never been able to make veils look like anything but washing hung on a line. “Is all well with your family? You said there was trouble there.” She slipped an arm around the tall girl’s waist.
“There is,” said Shaldis. “How bad I don’t know, but . . . Have the others come?” Summerchild had told her, through the crystal, that she’d sent for Pebble and Moth, and for Pomegranate as well from the north.
“Not yet. The king’s here, that’s all. We’d rather wait till the other two arrive before going into what happened at the council, if you haven’t heard the news being shouted in the streets on your way over.”
Shaldis shook her head, though now that she thought back on it, there had been more men and women than usual, running from stall to stall in the vegetable market in the Bazaar Square, and thicker crowds than one would normally see this late in the morning, milling in the Golden Court. “Is the king all right?” she asked worriedly as Summerchild led her through a pergola of feathery wisteria to the pavilion’s door.
“For the moment, yes, though there is trouble ahead. Tell me what happened to your family.”
The lower floor of the Summer Pavilion—and of nearly every one of the dozens of similar structures scattered about the rambling gardens—was divided into a reception chamber, whose latticed shade walls had already been put up against the growing heat of morning, and a dining room, with jewellike private baths tucked away among the pepper trees of the garden and a tiny kitchen built as a sort of annex behind. A stairway, hidden by carved screens, led to the bedchamber above and to the terrace that caught the sweet breezes of the lake. Summerchild led Shaldis to the divan in the reception chamber and sat beside her, pouring out lemonade from a stone cooler.
She listened in silence as Shaldis told her first of her dream of strange sounds and strange scents and of a woman’s voice pleading for help, and then of the attempt on her grandfather’s life. “So I don’t know if I’ve suddenly crossed the path of one, or two, Crafty women unknown to any of us,” she concluded. “The magic I felt in the door of his room didn’t feel like Red Silk’s, though I can’t be sure. Inside the room . . . I can’t describe exactly what I felt. A very strange magic, ugly. A sense of something sticky. And deadly. Hidden away, waiting, like a poisonous spider under a divan cushion. Just waiting for you to sit down.”
“But recent?”
“Oh, yes. Well, you know that it isn’t just the magic of the wizards that’s failing. It’s the magic that they did, the magic that they put into things, like ward signs and the fear spells on the compounds of the teyn. Which my grandfather thinks I should know how to renew,” she added distastefully. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so thankful for not being able to make a spell work. I kept getting the feeling that if he could, he’d hire me out to his friends. Or lend me, in exchange for their goodwill.”
“At least Cattail gets to keep the mo
ney people pay for her services,” mused Summerchild, and Shaldis raised her brows. She hadn’t thought of it that way. “And, yes, Pomegranate told me of some rather alarming complications of failed ward signs. This woman who was calling you . . . you weren’t able to reach her in the crystal?”
Shaldis shook her head. “I mean to try again from the scrying chamber in the Citadel. According to Yanrid, back in the days before magic changed, there were some of the alien wizards who could be contacted only through crystals, others only through water or only through ink. He said he thought that was because their magic was sourced differently from ours. And, with those wizards, adepts had to learn their languages; they were taught at the Citadel for hundreds of years. I could hear this woman speaking in another tongue, but because it was a dream I understood what she said.”
“Did her language sound like one that was taught?”
“Not even remotely. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t understand a word she was saying if I was awake. You know what it’s like, hearing people speak in dreams.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t just a dream?”
“Absolutely. As certain as I’m speaking to you now. Yanrid used to set me to watch the ink bowls—as a punishment, I thought at the time, or to keep me out of the way. But I prayed, just once, to see one of them, to see some mage from another land, another place. He’d tell us about them—Yanrid would—outlander wizards from realms where everything was locked in ice, he said, where even the stars were different. Wizards whose skin was black or brown, or whose faces were covered with hair like the teyn. Wizards who’d learned our language the same way we learned theirs, over lifetimes.”
She folded her hands around the alabaster cup, thinking of the mages of the Citadel who’d become friends with those alien wizards over the years. Who’d traded news of their families, their kings, their studies of the skies.
Did their Citadels, too, stand empty now? Did they work as librarians or secretaries or teachers, to feed themselves?
Did they kill themselves, as at least one mage here had?
Did they envy and hate the women whose powers had blossomed in the time of the mages’ withering?
Power no longer flows from their hands. . . .
“We have to find her,” she said softly. “We have to find them both.”
“Sooner than you know,” Summerchild replied.
And her soft words were answered by the light chatter of voices from the garden and the glimpse of pink silk and sun-paled sensible blue and brown among the leaves. Moth’s laugh came sweet and childlike: once over her initial agonizing shyness, the seventeen-year-old concubine of a silk-merchant’s son had proved to be as good-hearted, as undemanding, and as uneducated as any other laborer’s daughter sold for her beauty. When Pebble had made her way to Summerchild’s pavilion almost a year ago, she’d been twenty-three, old for a girl still living in her father’s house, but the placid housekeeper for the widowed contractor and caretaker of her half-dozen younger brothers and sisters. Large boned and a little clumsy looking, she’d begun to use her power healing the strained muscles and occasional colics of her father’s oxen, horses, and teyn; alone of the Raven sisters, she seemed to have the gift of consistent and powerful healing, though she could seldom describe how it was worked.
Shaldis and Summerchild rose to greet them, the soft little bundle of concubine and the big, slow, fair girl who smelled of soap and milk. The king came downstairs as well. Shaldis had often had occasion to marvel at the big man’s tactful good manners in disappearing when she needed to speak to Summerchild alone—and by some signal Shaldis couldn’t detect, sent word to the main palace kitchen. In a very few minutes Geb, the king’s fat little chamberlain, appeared with slaves, food, freshly cooled lemonade, and carved boxwood caddies of coffee, sugar, and tea. Shaldis thought that under the extravagancies of his cosmetics His Majesty looked badly shaken up. She saw, too, how Geb watched him under his painted eyelids.
Whatever was wrong, even the servants knew of it.
So did Moth and Pebble. “You really gonna have to swim across a pool of crocodiles, Majesty?” demanded the little concubine, finishing her Sun in Splendor salaam and falling like a starving woman upon the quail and couscous before the servants were properly out of the room.
“It certainly looks that way.”
Shaldis said, “What?” and the moment the servants were well and truly gone—she could hear Geb clucking at them not to linger, all the way down the garden’s gravel paths—Summerchild told what Lord Akarian had set into motion in the council pavilion and the horrifying facts that Hathmar and the others had subsequently revealed.
“Damn it,” Shaldis cried when the favorite’s narrative was done. “I thought Hathmar was just testing me on ward spells, when they took me through all those wards against crocodiles and snakes. Because they really do have a problem with the crocodiles in the fields along the lakefront, you know, and along the Fishmarket Canal, especially with the night carnival going on there till nearly dawn. I’ve heard of them crawling all the way inland to the Slaughterhouse District, and nothing Hathmar showed me seemed to work when I did it.”
“If I could come up with a snake ward I’d sure be the richest kitten in the street,” added Moth. She licked honey from a baba cake off her hennaed fingers and readjusted a jade pin in her sable coils of hair. “I hear Cattail claims she got one, but me, I think it’s just red pepper dust, like you do for ants. I ain’t never heard it worked.”
Summerchild and the king traded a glance. “We should prefer,” said His Majesty slowly, “that Mistress Cattail be kept out of this for the time being, unless one or the other of you knows for a fact that she can ward against crocodiles or snakes or can undo the effects of poison at a distance and without knowing what the poison is. Her discretion cannot be relied upon, and discretion is of the utmost importance in this matter.”
Shaldis saw Moth’s huge brown eyes flick knowingly around the chamber, then slide sidelong in unspoken observation to Pebble: neither Foxfire nor Red Silk were present.
“It is an article of faith,” the king went on, gathering his flame-silk robes to sink cross-legged to the divan beside his favorite, “among the people of the city, and particularly among the villages, that the king is selected for his position by the gods. I’m sure every member of the great houses—every lord who can command the lesser sheikhs and clan lords and village councils to provide him fighting men—guesses that it’s probably magic. But they don’t know for certain. And the people want it to be the gods, not simply one more tool of power that any rich man can buy.”
He took the coffee cup Summerchild offered him with a bow of thanks, but Shaldis could see he was barely aware of making the gesture. He didn’t drink, only turned the delicate nacre and gold cup in his plump, jeweled hands.
“There’s no reason, you know, for people to follow the king, except that he is chosen by the gods. In the days when the Zali ruled around the lakes of the Sun and the Moon, the great lords and landchiefs were in fact kings: the Sarn around the Lake of Roses, the Jamornid in the north. And there was chaos, men rising up in rebellion constantly—not that it mattered a great deal then, except perhaps to the warriors killed in battle. It rained reliably every winter, even far out onto what is now the desert, and the most the mages had to do was keep the teyn in line. The houses that lasted were the ones who got the priests on their sides, not the mages; the houses whose lords were adopted by the gods. Even at their most powerful, people never really trusted mages. It is to the gods that people look for comfort and care.”
“But it is the gods who look after us,” said Pebble timidly. “Isn’t it?”
“It is indeed,” replied the king. “And it is the gods who look after the realm—and the lives of everyone in the Valley of the Seven Lakes—by allowing magic, instead of dying, to pass to new bearers. Bearers whom I hope will assist me in holding the realm together until we can either get the aqueduct built or establish a large enough
group of Raven sisters who are capable of bringing the rains.”
He folded his hands, the topazes of his many rings flashing even in the pavilion’s shady cool. Under eyelids tinted gold and bronze and rimmed with kohl, his hazel eyes were deadly earnest. “Should I die, and should my brother—for whatever reason—not achieve the consecration of the Veiled Gods, the lords of the Sealed Temples who have guarded kings since the days of the Zali, I think that the realm will break apart very quickly. Not only will the armies of each landchief turn against those of other land-chiefs rather than against our common enemies the nomad raiders from the desert, but each landchief will seek to hire and control as many Crafty women as he can. Inevitably, that will mean a division in the force of whatever magic we are trying to muster for the summoning of rain.”
The women looked at one another again, again silently counting.
Nobody needed a second hand for their calculations.
“What about the djinni?” asked Moth, when Pebble, still looking very troubled, did not speak. The young concubine looked across at Shaldis, who had been the last person known to speak to a djinn. “I know they mostly disappeared, but isn’t there one still hid out in that temple in the Slaughterhouse District? The one everybody thought was a god?”
“He’s still there.” Shaldis spoke hesitantly, and shivered at the recollection of her visions of Naruansich, the Sunflash Prince, the foul thing that clung to the gold-sheathed crystal of an ancient spirit trap, feeding on the energies of slaughtered animals and squeezing forth from those energies a tainted and uncertain magic.
“Can you talk him into helping us?”
She thought about it for a time, wondering how or if it could be done, and at what cost. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think so. He was three quarters mad when I encountered him—when I went into the crystal matrices of the statue’s heart—and the blood and death he was living on were further twisting what was left of his mind. I’ve been into that temple at least a dozen times since then, sometimes to draw him out with a blood sacrifice and sometimes just trying to communicate through the circles that worked before. Nothing happens.”
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