Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  If I ask him, will he lie?

  Of course he will.

  She wondered how she could possibly feel that much pain and not bleed. She had been trained in the arts of a Pearl Woman—the perfect courtesan, the perfect concubine, the perfect tool and helper of whichever man she was given to—and had delighted in her skills, for they had won her father’s praise. Pearl Women did not cry. Not for themselves, anyway.

  She dried her tears.

  Is that what it does to you, that knowledge? Makes you like Grandmother?

  Foxfire walked back to her room, feeling more alone than ever in her life.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Shaldis slipped back into the house through the camel-drivers’ courtyard, keeping the Gray Cloak about her. As she walked she felt the hammering of her heart, the frantic fear that grew in her with every step. What the hell had happened?

  Summerchild had tried for one instant to use magic, to defend herself with magic . . .

  And had been swallowed up.

  Dear gods, let her be all right!

  As Pebble had described, Shaldis felt the dim tugging of the Sigil of Sisterhood in her heart. As if another member of the circle were trying to draw upon her magic. She dodged up the stairs from the kitchen court and into her room. The tug of the sigil dissolved into the urgent demand that she look in her crystal again. She shot the bolt, dropped cross-legged onto the bed. It was Pomegranate. “I think she’s still alive,” said the old woman, who by the look of it was in the latticed shade of some lakeside village square, presumably waiting for the next boat. “I listened for her, listened deep, and heard nothing. But Pontifer Pig says she lives. I think he’s right, because I looked for the king and couldn’t see him. That means he’s still with her.”

  Shaldis wasn’t certain of that. Summerchild had sought last spring for two of the sisters who’d been killed, and had not even been able to see their dead bodies. As for Pontifer Pig, Shaldis wasn’t entirely sure what to think. For ten years, Pontifer had been merely a figment of Pomegranate’s deranged imagination: at one time the beggar woman had actually owned a white pig, but the original Pontifer had long ago met his destiny under the wheels of a cart.

  At least, thought Shaldis philosophically, it was her pet pig she imagined, and not her equally deceased husband, Deem. And she wondered briefly, with a smile, how her friend Soth had made out, traveling with a four-footed invisible companion that only Pomegranate could see.

  When Pomegranate let her mirror fade, Shaldis tried to summon the king’s image first in the crystal, then in the hand mirror she sometimes used, with equal lack of success. That might, as Pomegranate had said, mean he was close to Summerchild, and that Summerchild was alive.

  She glanced at the room’s latticed window. The hour of the Bird Sun was passing. Brazen light crept inexorably down the wall on the other side of the courtyard.

  She drew a few deep breaths. Three Wells was a day’s ride, everyone said. Had they been delayed there or trapped, or had they met something on their way back? But what would they have met? She knelt beside the bed, and with white chalk and red drew on the tiled floor the wide ring, the curving power lines, of the Sigil of Sisterhood, the mark that bound the minds, and the power, of the Sisters of the Raven together. She fashioned the sigil five times, linking the marks with a pentagram. In the midst of this star she lay down and folded her hands on her breast.

  Are you there?

  What happened?

  Where are you?

  Deep breaths, and the meditation on the sigils.

  Concentration on the faint pull of magic, following its tugging down into darkness.

  Singing, very far off. The beat of drums and the mingling of voices. Human? Scents. Of what? The glimmer of green light, blowing like mist across . . . across what?

  Don’t try to understand. Just listen, and breathe, and see what you see.

  She thought she saw Summerchild, or sensed her in the distance. As if she, Shaldis, were swimming down a long well of glowing blue water and saw her at the bottom, sleeping on the floor of the lake. Sleeping in a halo of green light. But the Sigil of Sisterhood was traced around her in the sign of a pentagram, as it was on Shaldis’s bedroom floor. The green light hemmed her in but did not touch her.

  Then darkness. The sound of rain on leaves. A sweetness in the air that bordered on ecstasy.

  That other sound, the slow booming sough that had troubled her dreams. Infinitely distant, like a heartbeat in her blood.

  Suddenly, shockingly, she was looking out over a lake of fire. The rock underfoot trembled, and burned her feet through her boots. The air scorched her lungs as she breathed. All things appeared blindingly distinct: dull-red crusts of mud broke to show fiery liquid beneath, liquid that glowed like the molten gold in a smith’s crucible, a lake of it, bounded by dim black cliffs whose riven walls caught the ruddiness when the flames shot up. Darkness lay over the cliffs and the burning lake, darkness thick with steams and smoke, but through the darkness moved something that looked like curling snakes of green mist, mist that clung together and did not disperse.

  Mist that probed among the rocks as if hunting something.

  Shaldis called out, Summerchild? She couldn’t imagine what this place was. The dreamworld of a djinn, such as she had entered before?

  The world of Summerchild’s nightmares?

  The green mist glowed as it moved closer to her through the rocks around the lake’s black shore. Outcrops of rock glinted, black and shiny, like nodules of inky glass, and Shaldis thought the music she heard, the voices, were coming out of the mist.

  Summerchild?

  Fear filled her, and a terrible longing. It knows the answer. The mist will be able to tell me anything. And everything.

  Do not let the mist touch you, said a voice in her thought. The words were foreign, but through their musical tones she felt the mind of the woman who had cried out to her, who had begged her for help. Flee it. Flee this place.

  Who are you? Shaldis asked. What happened to my friend?

  But it felt to her as if hands seized her, or a mind seized her mind. Force flung her into darkness and she grasped for the hand, the mind. She cried out, “Who are you?” and Pebble’s voice replied,

  “It’s Pebble. Are you all right?”

  Shaldis opened her eyes, annoyed. “Of course I’m all right. Why did you—”

  She realized it was dark in the room. Lamps burned in the niches on either side of the bed, and the air had the rank dusty taste of night.

  The Sun’s Dreams.

  The SUN’S DREAMS? The hours after midnight.

  She stared up at the other girl in shock. Pebble swallowed, her eyes red with tears and fright. “We tried and tried to wake you.” Shaldis realized the other smell in the room, even stronger than the indigo in the court below, was burnt feathers. She couldn’t imagine how she could have remained asleep with one of those waved under her nose.

  “With what Jethan told us about Summerchild—” began Moth, who Shaldis now saw was sitting on the bed at her feet.

  “What?” Her mind groped, still trying to deal with the fact that she’d closed her eyes—for a few seconds, it seemed—toward the end of the hour of the Bird Sun and now it was the hour of the Sun’s Dreams. A whole day gone. “Summerchild? I thought Jethan was with the king.”

  “He was. He rode in about an hour after sunset, when I was still at the palace, but I’d sent Pebble here and she found you on the floor and couldn’t wake you up. You want some coffee?” Moth leaned over to pick up a cup of it that was resting in a lamp niche. “Jethan said Summerchild couldn’t be waked neither, and sent more guards out with a litter, to bring her back from Three Wells. By that time Pebble sent me word you was out like the dead here, and Jethan said one of us had to come back with him.”

  “Is Jethan here?”

  “Downstairs, and I think if we don’t get him out of here soon he’s gonna kill that grandfather of yours or that grandfather’s gonna kill
him, or at least bite him and give him rabies. What an old baboon! He says—”

  Shaldis scrambled to her feet, and nearly fell, her stiff muscles cramping from long inaction. It had seemed to her that she’d only skimmed the edges of dreams, had only shut her eyes moments ago. A vision flickered through her mind of the smell of rain, of a lake of fire.

  That sound. That distant crashing.

  And a woman’s voice warning her. Warning her of what?

  She was halfway to the door when Pebble caught her sleeve. “Did you find her? Did you . . . did you touch her?”

  Shaldis stood for a moment, trying to remember. She thought she’d glimpsed Summerchild ringed by the sigil, but had lost sight of her. And though the successive vision was curiously vivid, nothing in it fit with anything she knew.

  She said softly, “I don’t know.”

  “Should we look? Moth and I? One of us can find her.”

  “No!” Shaldis looked back at the dark-haired concubine, who was tucking her veils back around her face and hair preparatory to going downstairs where strangers could see her. Moth drew back, startled, from the frightened vehemence of her voice.

  “Don’t either of you try this,” said Shaldis. “I never get lost in trance; never get so deep that I don’t know where I am or how long I’m under. I don’t know what happened, or whether it has anything to do with Summerchild or not, but until we know more about what happened to her, none of us is trying this again. All right?”

  The other two nodded, and—silently acquiescing to the takeover of command by a girl their own age—followed her down the stairs.

  “Don’t be absurd,” snapped Tulik when Shaldis announced she was going with Jethan to meet the royal party on its return to the Yellow City. “I forbid it.”

  “There’s been murder and mayhem in this house,” added her grandfather, who’d been—as Moth had related—in the midst of a furious argument with Jethan in the long seryak parlor when the three Raven sisters entered. “Damn it, girl, someone is trying to—to murder me, to use magic to bring this whole house down about our ears, and you rush off with some good-looking soldier because he beckons you?”

  If Jethan’s back could have gotten stiffer than it already was, it would have—and, Shaldis reckoned through a burning flush of anger and embarrassment, he probably would have snapped in two.

  “I am ‘beckoning’ your granddaughter, sir”—Jethan could barely get the words out—“because her skills in the craft of magic render her assistance to the king imperative.” In the golden lamp glow of the seryak his own dusky skin had flushed darker.

  “Nonsense! You have other Crafty girls.” Chirak’s thumb jerked rudely at Moth and Pebble. “Take one of them, if the king wants a wench so badly.”

  “Don’t you call me a wench, you moneygrubbing old counter jumper!” Moth whirled like an enraged lapdog.

  “Hold your tongue, girl, if you don’t want to be sent back to your master with every thread of his stock in the bazaar, so he can sell it and you in the streets!”

  “Grandfather—my lady. . . .” Tulik and Jethan nearly bumped into each other getting between Chirak and Moth.

  After a moment’s silent mutual regard, Tulik said, “Of course we are most gratified that His Majesty values my sister’s skills as we do here—she being the only formally trained woman of magic in the realm. But as my grandfather says, there have been two attempts on his life here, attempts made by magic, and he must be protected at all costs.”

  “I’ll stay,” volunteered Pebble.

  “Which of ’em’s stronger?” demanded Chirak, his glare going from the big fair girl in peasant blue to the pink-and-gold spitfire beside her.

  “It don’t matter which of us is stronger because, me, I wouldn’t stay to keep you from being chewed up by magic mice and spit back out three times a day for a week! And if somebody wasn’t already trying to kill you with magic, I’d do it!”

  “My lady.” Tulik raised placating hands, then turned to Pebble with a deep salaam. “Thank you, my lady. Guardsman, how long will His Majesty require my sister’s services? If it’s no more than a day or so, yes, thank you, we will accept this young lady under our roof, providing her husband is agreeable.”

  “Father,” corrected Pebble.

  “Father. And he shall of course receive ample compensation for her services, as well as every assurance that his daughter shall be accompanied and looked after by my mother and aunts at all times that she is beneath the Shaldeth roof.”

  These formalities dispensed with, Raeshaldis ran upstairs, changed as fast as she could from the white robe of her novitiate into the boy’s garb of pantaloons and tunic she’d brought here yesterday, and ran down the stairs again, to meet Jethan in the courtyard. By the light of torches borne by the stablemen—the teyn had long since been locked up for the night and in any case weren’t to be trusted with fire—Jethan’s face had a wooden look as he held Shaldis’s horse for her. He said nothing as he led the way through the gate and back along the Avenue of the Sun, where every temple and town palace now slumbered in shuttered silence.

  Only after Jethan showed his written pass signed by Bax, the commander of the guard, to the guards on the Eastern Gate and they were clattering along through the mostly somnolent squalor of the Slaughterhouse District did Shaldis say, “I’m sorry that I . . . that I kept you waiting so long. I couldn’t help it. I’d meant to just see if I could reach Summerchild’s mind, touch her thoughts, just to see if she still lived.”

  Jethan’s broad, stiff shoulders relaxed and he said, “I’m only glad you did come out of it. That you’re all right.” Embarrassed awkwardness lingered in his voice.

  Her grandfather was right, Shaldis reflected, considering Jethan’s profile by the light of the gibbous moon. He was good-looking.

  But she couldn’t imagine him “beckoning” her to run away with him, nor that she’d do so without a whopping good reason.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I wish there was some way we could have let you know what had happened, so you wouldn’t try to follow her into trance.”

  “I’d have tried anyway. I had no idea I’d be trapped, too, if that’s what happened.”

  “Does she still live?”

  Shaldis was silent, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. And failing. The moon drenched the range with liquid silver, turned the flatlands to ivory velvet, the jumbled hills to monsters sleeping in shadow.

  At length she said, “I think so. Pomegranate thinks so, too, or at least she informs me her imaginary pig told her so.”

  Jethan rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t dismiss what Pontifer says, Jethan. For a figment of an old woman’s imagination he’s right a good deal of the time. You say she’s on her way back to the palace?”

  “She should be. His Majesty left guards around the ruins of Three Wells. Some of the houses in the village were burned three nights ago, when the people were all killed, and then someone—it may have been teyn—came in and burned the whole village.”

  “Teyn? But—”

  He held up his hand against her shocked protest. “Burned it while a band of several hundred teyn kept us away.”

  “Several hundred? Acting in concert?”

  “Burned it,” he concluded grimly, “and broke every mirror, everything made of glass, in the place.”

  For a few moments she only stared at him, baffled. Then she began, “What on earth?”

  “That,” he said, “is what His Majesty says the Summer Concubine was trying to find out.”

  After a moment she asked doubtfully, “Will the guards be all right out there?” For some reason Ahure’s lonely little house came to mind.

  “They have instructions to touch nothing. Not walls, not debris, not the water in the wells. The caravan taking the litter out to bring the Summer Concubine home includes a hundred waterskins. His Majesty hoped, after you had seen the lady, that you would ride back to look at the village yourself and see if anything there ca
n give a clue as to what happened there. Not,” he added, his voice turning a shade more dry, “that I would suggest a course of action so likely to produce an apoplexy in the head of your clan.”

  Shaldis shot him a glance that he either didn’t see or pretended not to, but she felt herself relax. As they followed the worn pale trace of hoofprints across the range to Three Wells, through the remaining hours of night and on into the heartbreaking beauty of the rangeland dawn, she outlined to him the events of the past three days: the accounts of the first attack on her grandfather and her certainty that she was being lied to about Nettleflower’s death.

  “I’m guessing it was Ahure she went downstairs to let in, two nights ago,” she said while they rested their horses in the shade of a withered mesquite. “I think Grandfather followed her down and killed her in a rage.”

  “Over what?”

  “I don’t know. I need to find that out. Someone definitely attacked him in his room the night before Nettle-flower’s murder, though, and if it was Ahure he had someone else working with him, someone who can do magic. And my brother’s trying to cover it all up,” she added with an effort to keep her bitterness, her sinking sense of being used by her family, out of her voice.

  “What does your father say?”

  Shaldis had to turn her face aside in anger and shame. “Mostly, Isn’t it time for another cup of sherab?”

  “Ah,” said Jethan. And then, “Your brother must be scared to death.”

  Shaldis glanced back at him. It hadn’t occurred to her that Tulik was feeling anything but anxiety that the proctorship would slip out of his grip.

  “If it’s an attack on the House Shaldeth in general, he’d be in danger as well, wouldn’t he?” He pulled his own veils back up over his face—crimson, the royal color. Shaldis didn’t even want to think what it had cost to dye that much gauze. Above them, his blue eyes seemed brilliant as the desert sky.

  Shaldis nodded. She hadn’t thought of that. “He is only a kid,” she said at last.