Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

“He’s probably been taking care of everyone in sight all his life. Like you.” Jethan got to his feet, held out the waterskin to her. “You want any more of this?”

  When they emerged from their shelter they could see, hanging above the harsh yellow wasteland to the east, the dust column of a moving company. They changed saddles on their tired horses and rode toward it, and reached the slow-plodding line within an hour.

  Shaldis was shocked to see the haggard grayness of the king’s face beneath ointment and cosmetics, the stricken look of his sleepless eyes. “I hope we did well in moving her,” he said as he raised the outer curtains, then the inner gauzes of the ten-bearer litter where Summerchild lay. Around them, though it was only midmorning, the guards and camp servants began to pitch camp, the king’s tent erected around the litter itself. Two of Summerchild’s maids stood by, with water to wash her and clean linen for her to lie on when Shaldis was done.

  “No, you did right. I think,” Shaldis added, looking down at her friend’s still face and trying not to remember that this woman had gotten her into the College of the Mages of the Sun in the first place. Had cared for her and stood by her in days when Shaldis had not known to whom she could turn and had in fact believed that she was not able to turn to anyone.

  She tried to think of Summerchild as only a patient, a subject of healing, and not someone she loved.

  It crossed her mind, as she felt the rustle of apricot-colored silk and smelled the musky languor of extremely expensive perfume at her side, that the king must be struggling, too.

  In a very careful voice, Oryn asked, “Can you do anything?”

  Shaldis knelt, as the tent’s shadows dropped down around them, and felt Summerchild’s wrists and face. “Will she drink? Swallow anything?”

  The shake of his head was barely a movement at all. “We’re keeping her as cool as we can, and moving with the best speed we can manage. We should be back at the palace sometime tonight, and the doctors there can do everything that they usually do, for those in . . . in coma, like this.”

  “Moth’s at the palace already,” said Shaldis. “Pebble will get there as soon as I return to the city. Pebble and I both felt her trying to draw on our magic. I tried to reach her”—her fingers moved slightly toward the still form on the litter—“tried to touch her mind in a trance, to find her and bring her back. I think . . . it looks like I slid into trance myself, for nearly the whole cycle of the sun. As if whatever harmed her, when she opened her mind to seek for it, got or tried to get me as well. They couldn’t wake me, Pebble said.” She looked up into those dark-circled hazel eyes, saw them widen with shock. “I’ll try again, if you want me to, sire. But I don’t think it’s safe.”

  He swallowed. “No, my dear,” he said gently and took her hand. “You must not put yourself in danger. I have my doubts about you riding back to Three Wells as it is. Something very strange is happening out there, as Jethan may have told you. If someone is controlling the teyn, using them as a weapon, they may very well attack you, either on your way there or once you leave the place. It’s a few hours’ further ride and there’s no way you can make it back to the city by nightfall. Jethan can describe the state of the village to you.”

  “He did, on the way here,” said Shaldis. It had occupied several miles, as they’d ridden through the stillness of the rangeland dawn. “But I’ll still need to see it. There’s always something a—a nonmage won’t see.” She barely stopped herself from calling him an Empty, as the novices had referred to men born without the power of magic, when the masters weren’t in hearing. There had been no word, of course, for women born without those powers, because at that time there had been no word for women born with them.

  Though she was tired from the ride, Shaldis elected to press on to Three Wells, a decision with which Jethan concurred. Oryn insisted they take a bodyguard of ten riders, with which Jethan also concurred. “We have no idea what’s happening out here, Shaldis,” he said when she protested that she could deal with any trouble that arose. “We’d be fools to lessen our odds of dealing with it because we feel silly about taking an army on what might turn out to be a simple scouting mission.”

  The killing heat of noonday had well and truly settled on the land by the time their little cavalcade reached the watch camp of guards that had been left posted beside the parched cornfields. A sentry, emerging from shelter, sent word to the corporal in charge, and Jethan and his riders set up their rough military shelters, the one assigned to Shaldis modestly hung with a half-dozen crimson riding veils to mark it as harem. Even that brief exertion of pitching the shelters left Shaldis sweating and dizzy from the heat. She crawled inside and lay down at once.

  But sleep eluded her. The heat was like a goldsmith’s furnace, and every pinhole in the shelter’s weave seemed to admit a searing needle of vertical sunlight. The deep silence, the desert silence, was like the implacable consciousness of Khon, the veiled god of death. She felt no trace, now, of Summerchild’s distant touch on her power.

  Please don’t let her be dead.

  Footfalls in the gravel. Jethan’s voice outside her shelter. “Shaldis?”

  She crawled through the veiling over the entrance. A man never entered a place that was harem, save within his own household.

  He held out a gourd of water to her. She drank, sparingly. It was hot and tasted like sand. “Can we go to your tent?” she asked, groping back through the veiling for her satchel. “I want to try something.”

  In Jethan’s shelter, she had him sketch in the sand what the hills looked like around the village that had been his home. “What was the name of the place?” she asked, and he had to think about it for a moment. It had been, she deduced, so far from any other village that even its own inhabitants had trouble remembering that other places existed.

  “Goat Slough,” he said at last.

  “And your mother’s name?”

  “Gray Rabbit Woman.”

  She cupped the crystal in her hand, angled its central facet to the harsh brazen hell of the noon sky visible through the shelter’s open end. “I’m seeing a house,” she whispered at length. “It’s one story, brown adobe; there’s a dead tree near the front door and wards painted around the windows in white and indigo.”

  “Yes, that’s ours.”

  “There’s a pine-pole ramada at the side. A gray-haired woman is grinding corn there—there’s a younger woman beside her with a baby, working a loom. They’re both tall, I think—it’s hard to tell—but the younger woman has a white streak in her hair.”

  “My sister,” said Jethan softly. “Anyone else? A boy . . . he’d be sixteen now.”

  Shaldis gazed for several more minutes in silence, then shook her head. “No. No one else.” And, when Jethan sighed, she added, “Just because I don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not just indoors or down at the village well or something.”

  “It’s a day’s walk to the village,” said Jethan curtly. For a moment he looked out, into the wavering yellow mirages of the noon heat. Then, “Go back to your shelter, Shaldis. I think we both need to sleep.”

  When the sun had gone over into the hour called the Mercy Sun, and she and Jethan and the other guards in the camp emerged from their shelters to drink a little water and make their afternoon patrols, Jethan did not speak of what she’d seen in her crystal or what it might have meant to him, and she did not bring the matter up.

  “Nobody’s been near the village that we’ve seen,” reported the corporal, a dark young man named Riis. “Coyote and jackals, but no teyn. Certainly no nomads.”

  “So it smells all right to coyote and jackals,” remarked Jethan as he and Shaldis walked the hundred yards or so that separated the guard camp from the first of the burned-out clusters of walls.

  Shaldis swallowed hard as the lukewarm shift of breeze strengthened the stench of rot. “Yum,” she said.

  Jethan looked like he was about to frown, then broke into the first grin she’d ever seen on his face. He sobered
almost at once, as if he were afraid someone would catch him smiling. “If they were staying away,” he said, “I’d worry more about going in.”

  “With what you’ve told me about teyn attacking in groups and maybe burning the place, I’m not sure I can worry more.” Shaldis looked around her at the black, empty walls, the swollen corpses, the green-black clouds of flies, and the glitter everywhere of broken glass. “Where’d they get the fire?”

  “The merchant Poru said several of the houses were burned the first night. There’d be coals still alive under the ashes. Domestic teyn would know that.”

  She stopped, drawing back from a half-dozen vultures and a whirling column of flies that amply indicated another corpse lying among the drooping bean plants. “This is weird,” she added, pushing with the snake stick she’d cut at the tangle of pumpkin vine that grew among the beans, showing where the blackened leg of a mummy protruded. “Why haul a mummy—or part of a mummy—clear out here?”

  “I wondered that myself,” said Jethan. “So did the king.”

  She poked a little among the vines. “I don’t see any wrappings or any dropped trinkets. And in the dark, with all the confusion of the village being massacred and at least a couple of houses burning, it’s odd that scavengers would get everything. I wonder how deep out there the tombs are?”

  She straightened and turned her eyes to the low red-brown masses, the striated shadows, of the Serpent Maze badlands, the edge of the true desert. She briefly considered riding out to look at the tombs themselves, but the sun was westering. It would be well into the night before they reached the Yellow City, and she wasn’t sure that whatever she might learn in several hours spent wandering through the Serpent Maze was worth the danger to Summerchild that her continued absence would cause.

  And somewhere in the Yellow City, someone—a child?—was being forced to use her magic for the petty machinations of gangsters and water bosses, when the realm and its king stood balanced on the brink of death.

  Without touching the walls here—without opening her mind to whatever residue of spells had struck down Summerchild as she opened hers, without fingering the broken glass that glittered, she now saw, everywhere among the bean fields and pumpkin vines around the dead town—she could learn no more. “We’d better go back,” she said.

  As they mounted fresh horses by the little watch camp, Shaldis turned to Corporal Riis.

  “I know it isn’t much,” she said, “but I promise you, I’ll look at your camp—or get one of the other Raven sisters to look at it—through a mirror or a scrying crystal at sunrise, noon, and sunset. If something happens out here, something you can’t cope with, tie one of your red sun veils onto a stick in the middle of the camp. I swear we’ll get someone out here as swiftly as we can.”

  Riis inclined his head. “Thank you, lady.”

  As Shaldis and her bodyguard trotted away from the camp in a huge cloud of amber dust, Jethan remarked quietly, “You know that’s not going to do them any good. By the look of the corpses, death took every one of those people at roughly the same time. It’s a day’s ride from the city. Even if you saw whatever it was, swooping down on the camp—”

  “The village was taken asleep and unprepared.” She glanced sidelong at the guard. Only his eyes were visible above his veils, and there was a trace in them that could have been anger or could have been only concern. “Riis and his men are watching for trouble.”

  “Do you think that will save them?”

  Shaldis was quiet for a few minutes. Then she said, “No. But it might. I have no idea what it is that will come out of the desert, if anything. And if it truly makes no difference one way or the other, there’s no harm in letting them know they’re not simply being abandoned without a thought.”

  “And does it help to know you’re being abandoned with a thought? I’m sorry,” he added almost at once. “You’re right, of course; it is best to know that someone at least hasn’t forgotten you, even if there’s nothing they can do to help. Anything that even sounds like a promise raises the hair on my nape. I shouldn’t have spoken.”

  “You sound like you had a father like mine,” said Shaldis softly, remembering all those assurances of treats, of books, of a tutor who’d teach her. And hard on the heels of memory, the thought, It wasn’t his fault he never came through with them.

  Jethan drew rein a little, his gaze moving unceasingly over the pale wastes of the rangeland, dyed now with the molten colors of the sky. A moment later Shaldis saw a small pack of coyote trotting toward Three Wells.

  “As a child I spent a lot of time with animals,” he said, as he rode on. “Hunting wild goats or looking after my uncle’s sheep. I remember realizing very young that animals don’t understand what you say, only what you do to them. And by the same token, they never tell you one thing and then do something else. If your dog loves you he lets you know it, without worrying about what you’re going to do with that information later. I love that about them.”

  And who told you they loved you, wondered Shaldis, and then turned around and acted only for themselves?

  She didn’t know how to ask. Instead she said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken. Because you’re right, and Riis has to have known there’s nothing anyone can do. But there’s something out here, something deadly.”

  She turned in her saddle. The burned walls and circling vultures were no more than a dark spot in the distance, alone in the empty land.

  “No argument there.” Jethan’s voice was dry. “And if someone has found a way to control the teyn, to make them attack and maneuver as an army, it’s going to be more than deadly. Every village has its compound of workers, every house in the city, practically, its sweepers and water drawers. If someone can command them to kill, it will be disastrous.”

  He was right, of course, thought Shaldis, reining her horse after his down the arroyo, westward toward the Lake of the Sun.

  But that wasn’t what she’d meant.

  She didn’t know what she’d meant. Again and again she paused, turning to look back at the circling vultures that marked the dead village, until even that column was lost in the vast spaces of the oncoming desert night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Don’t be a ninny, girl.” Red Silk’s hand closed around Foxfire’s arm as the girl tried to turn away—she had a grip like an eagle’s claw. Chained to the post in the midst of what had been a small temple at the back of the Valley of the Hawk compound, the half-grown teyn doubled over and began to spasm in the horribly familiar convulsions of wild arum root poisoning. It was the seventh that had died that day. Like the others, even in its agony it didn’t make a sound.

  “If this was my father’s household, we’d be using men and not teyn. I’m not sure that we shouldn’t be using them as it is.” And Red Silk glanced across at Soral Brûl.

  “As I’ve said, my lady,” replied the young former Sun Mage, “a spell that protects a teyn will usually protect a man.”

  “Sun Mage spells.” She waved a dismissive hand and turned back to watch the teyn as it sank to its knees, vomiting and clawing at its belly and mouth.

  Foxfire closed her eyes. I will not faint.

  “According to everything in the Citadel’s library, that held true for all systems of magic. Blood Mages, Earth Wizards, Pyromancers . . .”

  It’s only a teyn. How would I like it if it were Father? It will be if we don’t find a spell that will protect against all poisons. I WILL NOT FAINT.

  How can they talk so calmly while something, anything, is dying in front of them in that kind of pain?

  The jangle of the chains, the sound of retches and gasps, filled Foxfire’s mind and drowned her grandmother’s discussion of male and female magic. The fight not to cry made her almost ill.

  Seven. None of the spells Soral Brûl had guided the two women through since dawn had had the slightest effect. Nor had the earth-wizard magics taught by Urnate Urla, though the bitter little man was seldom sober. Some enchantments would prot
ect against a single poison, but it was guessed—no one knew for certain—that the Servant of Time mixed two and three poisons together in the cups that the kings found within the maze there, and there was never any telling which cup the king might drink from. The Sun Mages had always used a spell of general protection.

  A spell that could not now be made to work by either a woman or a man.

  Foxfire wished with everything that was in her that she knew a spell that would kill at a distance. That would end those desperate, awful noises.

  Not that her grandmother would let her use one.

  And since Red Silk had forced her to bind herself with her into a Sigil of Sisterhood, there was probably no way to do it secretly.

  I WILL NOT FAINT.

  Silence. Her grandmother said, “Grzh,” a foul curse indeed in the language of the deep-desert nomads. Foxfire felt tears track down her face.

  “Well, bring in another one.” Red Silk’s voice slurred. She’d taken tiga root in brandy to work the spells on the previous two teyn, in larger and larger doses. On this last one she’d had Foxfire drink it, too. “To open her mind,” she’d said.

  Foxfire heard Soral Brûl go to the door, call for Garmoth, the captain of the guards. “Grandmother,” said Foxfire carefully, “could we wait and start again tomorrow? I don’t think I have your head for brandy. I think maybe the last one . . . didn’t work”—It died! I put everything of me into protecting it and it died, it died in agony—“because I might have been dizzy from the brandy and couldn’t concentrate.” Not to mention being half-crazy with tiga.

  “Nonsense.” The old woman was already stirring the silver pitcher that contained the decoction of madness. “Don’t get squeamish on me, girl. I expected better of you.”

  “Grandmother, please.”

  Red Silk grabbed her arm again, shook her hard. Soral Brûl caught Foxfire as she staggered.

  “Perhaps she’s right, lady,” he said in his most unctuous voice. “She looks very pale.”

  “Garmoth!” yelled Red Silk as the guardsman came in with two others, leading the old jenny teyn the keepers called Eleven Grasshoppers. “Fetch coffee for my granddaughter and be quick about it.” The hard turquoise eyes were dilated so that only the thinnest rim of green showed about the swollen pupils. “You’ll be more pale watching your father die of what’s in that cup, girl. Or do you want him to die? Is that it?”