Desperately, he tried to slam shut the doors of his imaginings. Of coming back to this room to find them waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, looking at each other, asking, Will you tell him or shall I?
Pebble was at the bottom of the stairs with three men. For an instant Oryn only saw the tall girl’s shape against the dawn shadows, and his heart seemed to lock into immobility in his chest. Then one of the men snapped, “And I tell you that after what happened last night we cannot wait! The teyn—”
Oryn’s heart sank. Not here! Those slumped, hairy forms returned to him, erupting from the wadis, driving the men back. Waiting in the hazy heat, clearly at the command of some unseen ruler. Please, not in the city!
“What about the teyn?” he asked quietly. “What’s happened?”
The smallest of the men turned, and despite the dimness and shadows of the pavilion’s lower chamber Oryn recognized Lord Akarian.
“What’s happened?” The old man jabbed a skinny finger up at him. “Fifteen escaped from my compound at Dunwall village last night! Twenty more from my villages at Deepditch and Skipfarm! I demand that you send your Crafty girls out to put marks of fear on the walls of my compounds that will keep the teyn inside at night where they belong! This girl of yours”—he jerked a thumb at Pebble, who still stood at the foot of the steps, looking doubtfully from his lordship to the men with him—Akarian’s sons, Oryn now saw—and back to Oryn—“doesn’t owe allegiance to the royal house anyway! My sons have checked. Her father is of the Url Clan, which is a dependent of House Akarian. I am within my rights to demand that she—and that other girl, whose master also appertains to the House Akarian—be sent now, today, to deal with this problem, before we are all of us impoverished!”
I’m going to be eaten alive by crocodiles in ten days, and you want me to send the women of power out to mark your teyn compounds.
Summerchild could be dying, and you want me to send the only ones who might save her to keep your field labor from escaping.
Oryn drew a deep breath. “I understand that there is an increasing problem with teyn escapes, but so far, no magic has been evolved to prevent them.”
“That’s nonsense! The Sun Mages were able to ward the compounds for a thousand years!”
“Then I suggest you go speak to the Sun Mages on the subject,” replied Oryn in his most reasonable voice. He made a discreet finger sign to Pebble to return upstairs. “They will tell you that the magic of men and the power that women are now able to wield work differently, and many of the spells that worked for mages are simply inert when performed by women who otherwise have power.”
Oryn could see by the way Akarian was looking at him that his lordship didn’t believe a word of it.
“You owe it to us,” the old man insisted stubbornly. “As king, divinely appointed by the gods, you owe it to us to share with us the power of these women you’ve taken under your command.”
It took Oryn the better part of half an hour to disabuse Lord Akarian of the notion that he was going to be able to leave the palace with Moth and Pebble that morning and get them to keep his teyn from escaping. When his lordship and his lordship’s sons finally departed, they left a petition the size of a short novel explaining why the levy of teyn demanded of House Akarian for work on the aqueduct was unfairly large and should be reduced. As their voices died away across the garden—still arguing with Geb and with the guards who’d been called to escort them to the main gate—Oryn turned to the stair that led up to Summerchild’s chamber.
But it was as if his knees had been paralyzed, as if leaden boots had been fixed to his feet. His hand on the corner of the tiled wall, he stood for a moment, absorbing with weary gratitude the silence of the first solitude he’d had in over a day. Then he slowly sank to the steps, leaned his head against the wall behind him, and began to laugh, huge racking sobs of laughter while tears ran down his face.
“My lord, what is it?” Moth came hurrying down the stairs, sat on the step at his side. “You all right?”
“Quite well, my dear,” Oryn whispered, aware that for some time he’d been weeping, not laughing. “Quite well. When this is all over I must ask Soth if there didn’t used to be Eight Veiled Gods, not seven—there seems to be one immutable force besides Death and Time and Change that they’ve forgotten.”
The concubine looked up at him with worried brown eyes, clearly concerned that he was either hysterical or had gone insane from his contact with the priests in the square. “What’s that?”
“Stupidity,” said Oryn. He wiped his eyes, looked out past Moth to the garden archway, where beyond the lattices the sun already burned bright and hot, as if the night’s coolness, the dawn’s birdsong, had never been. “Has Raeshaldis come? She should have been here by this time.”
“No, my lord.” Moth sounded scared. “We been trying to reach her since dawn, Pebble and me. She don’t reply.”
THIRTY
It had been a coyote that delayed them—a spooked horse and a man and horse falling together over the edge of an arroyo, not a serious injury but an annoying delay in the empty rangelands at night. Shaldis had been waiting while Jethan and the others twisted his friend Cosk’s dislocated shoulder back into place and tracked the horse, when Foxfire had called her from somewhere in dark hills in the night.
It was almost dawn before they saw the walls of the Yellow City rising before them.
“Will you stay in the Yellow City?” Shaldis reined in, gazed west through the thinning darkness. “If something should happen to the king?”
The baroque pearl of the moon stood a finger’s breadth above the formless jumble of land in that direction: hills from this side but in actuality the pink-and-yellow bluffs that backed the Yellow City where they drew near the Lake of the Sun. That flat-topped shoulder of rock, she knew, was the high point of the Citadel, the Ring where for six hundred years the Sun Mages had sung for the coming of the rains.
Even at this distance—three or four miles—it seemed to her that she could hear the echoes of the magic that had been raised there year after year, a whispered comfort in her heart.
In the predawn stillness the rangeland hummed with insect life and sang with birds. From here she could smell the lake and the cook fires in the city that lay invisible beyond the hills.
“You mean if he should die?” Jethan was always relentless, but his voice now was quiet and sad. He owed his life to the king, and though as they jogged slowly through the night he’d treated Shaldis to his opinions of His Majesty’s foppish wardrobe, curled hair, painted eyelids, and red-lacquered fingernails, at other times behind his stiff protestations of gratitude and duty she had heard the echoes of his genuine love for Oryn Jothek. “I would remain, of course.”
“To serve Barún?” Shaldis had no great opinion of His Majesty’s brother. She kept her voice low, to exclude the tired band of Jethan’s colleagues who clustered around the injured Cosk—any one of whom, she reminded herself, could have been one of Barún’s short-term paramours. “Do you think he’ll survive the tests, if Oryn doesn’t?”
“I don’t think Barún will even take the tests.” Jethan’s voice, though without inflection, was cold. “Not from cowardice, for His Majesty’s brother is as brave a warrior as any man I’ve encountered. But simply because he does not understand why he can’t be king—accepted by the priests and the nomads and the people of all the countryside—simply because he has the largest army and holds the widest lands.”
Shaldis was silent for a time, reflecting that for all his appearance of blockheaded obstinacy, Jethan understood the king—and the realm—surprisingly well. After a time she remarked, “It’s hard to find grounds on which to argue with him. As long as he has the largest army, and some of his captains or landchiefs—or even merchant lords—don’t decide that they have as much right to rule as he does.”
“Only one man has the right to rule.” Jethan reined away from the rise of ground where they’d halted their horses back toward th
e trace that wound toward the gap in the hill concealing the city wall. “And that is the man who has laid his life in the hands of the gods, for all the people to see. It’s like when I used to ask my grandmother, ‘Can I take my brother’s bow and go hunting?’ Because I was the older and stronger than he. And she’d say, ‘You can, dear, but you may not.’ And I would be ashamed to have acted like a bandit, only because I was strong.”
Shadow of that shame still lingered behind his rueful half smile.
Shaldis had seen no woman old enough to be Jethan’s grandmother in the striped shade of the ramada beside that isolated adobe house. A boy, Jethan had said. He’d be sixteen.
There is nothing we can do, Yanrid had told her.
She sighed. “Do all mothers say that? Mine did.”
“I think it’s a thing that rises into women’s minds with their first milk.” He drew rein a little and pointed to where a doe antelope and two fawns, barely larger than hunting dogs, melted briefly into view from the sagebrush, their vast ears swinging nervously as the dusty little cavalcade rode past.
For all her instruction in the ways of beasts and birds, Shaldis was at heart very much a city girl. During the past day and a half, she had acquired a profound respect for the simple earth craftiness that set Jethan apart even from his fellow guardsmen. He had a primitive sense of kinship with animals, insects, birds, and sky, a quiet harmony that Shaldis—raised in the crowded Bazaar District—had learned only with great labor and thought.
The other riders, warily alert or joshing Cosk about what he’d do for a day in bed and an extra brandy ration, seemed to lack even that.
After a time Jethan went on, “Without the right to rule, it will come down to whoever is the richest: who can buy the loyalty of the most men and who can buy the loyalty of the greatest number of the Raven sisters. I think that’s what the king fears most,” he added, seeing Shaldis open her mouth to protest even the thought. “That Lord Sarn will offer one of you the thing that she most treasures—and that thing may be as simple as her family’s life—and that Lord Jamornid or Lord Mohrvine will offer another something else: money, perhaps. A lot of money. Don’t sneer at it,” he added, seeing the flush of disgust rise beneath the thin skin of Shaldis’s forehead. “Money buys freedom. Ask any dirt farmer. Or any dirt farmer’s wife.”
Shaldis thought of Cattail in her elegant house. Of Yellow Hen and Foursie with nowhere to live but under Cirak Shaldeth’s roof. Of that brown adobe house, a day’s walk to the nearest village.
“Then, too,” Jethan went on, “if one woman stands out against the blandishments of one or another lord, that lord may take it on himself to kill her rather than see her in the employ of his enemy. And that is the road to death indeed.”
Shaldis was silent as they passed around the shoulder of the hills and saw the shadowy bulk of the city’s walls outlined in the glow of dawn and the tasseled green velvet of cornfields and palmeries all tipped with gold. At length she said very softly, “There are times when I hate men.”
Streaming over the Dead Hills to their backs, the long light of morning tipped the palace roofs, the exuberant horns and scrollwork of the Marvelous Tower, with glittering gold. The tower’s chimes rang out to greet the morning, vying with the hum of insects, the far-off crowing of the city’s cocks.
Stooped, hairy teyn jostled in lines along the cornfield pathways closer to the city, slow moving and deliberate, and lifted their heads to watch the dozen riders as they passed. The other guards called out jocular obscenities to the silent creatures, but Shaldis heard at least one of the men mutter to another, “They got to do better than that, keeping them in line.”
News of the attack in the desert would spread, she knew, no matter what orders the king gave to keep it quiet. Garbled and magnified into a threat that every teyn owner would react to. The thought that some Crafty was able to control teyn—to command them to murder their owners—would expose thousands of perfectly innocent, good-natured creatures to massacre at worst and at best ever-harsher methods of incarceration and control.
Yet as the little party rode through the glazed-brick passageway of the Flowermarket Gate, she thought of the empty compound on the outskirts of Three Wells and of the crooked tracks in the dust between those burned walls.
Did the voice that cried to her for help in her dream have anything to do with any of this?
Or the whisper of magic in the walls of her grandfather’s house?
She didn’t know what to think or what it meant, and moreover, now there did not seem to be anyone to ask. Through the night she’d felt the slow draw on her power through the Sigil of Sisterhood, as Pebble and Moth sought by whatever means they could to hold Summerchild with spells of strength and life. Her instincts shrieked at her to search for both the unknown mages, but deep in her bones where her power lived, she sensed Summerchild poised to slip away.
And with her would go, almost certainly, any hope of saving the king.
And maybe the realm as well.
They emerged from the gate shadows into the Square of Rohar, facing the god’s brightly painted temple, and heard men’s voices shouting and a woman’s screams.
Trouble in any of the city’s squares spread very quickly. The donkey trains of market-bound fruits and vegetables, the boys who hawked milk and ointment door to door, and the water sellers with their huge clay jars slung before them and behind panicked first, trying to run without knowing where they fled or from what, stumbling and crashing into barrows of fruit and flowers in the square. Housewives and teyn fetching water dropped their jars and leaped for safety. Shaldis’s horse shied violently and one of the guards’ mounts reared. Dogs barked and voices rose, shouting; and above the sudden din Shaldis heard a man shrieking, shrieking in rage and agony such as she’d never heard before.
From her vantage point in the saddle she saw him as he ran out of Little Hyacinth Lane, naked as if he’d just leaped from his bed. He carried the remains of a chair and in his other hand a gardener’s machete; and he slashed with both all around him—Shaldis barely saw these details, so horrified was she at his face. His mouth hung open, howls pouring out of it like water from a bucket.
His eyes bulged. Windows into hell.
Shaldis flung herself from the saddle, threw the reins to Jethan. The crowd had separated them from the other guards; she ran forward alone, hearing them shout behind her. The howling man plunged through the crowd in the square as if he were running a race, lashing, stabbing, lunging now at one person, now at another; but Shaldis could tell—she didn’t know how—that what he saw had nothing to do with the reality around him.
A woman stumbled, fell in a tangle of horoscopes and almanacs as she tripped over her own blanket; the howling man struck her with the chair, bent to rip with the knife. Shaldis yelled, summoning a spell of pain with all her strength and flashing it at the man’s guts; and though she saw him buckle—saw blood splash out of his mouth—still he fell on one knee beside his victim, cut her throat, and ripped her body open before Shaldis could get there. In rage Shaldis blasted him with a spell of pain again, and when he sprang up, leaped at her in spite of it, she flung a burst of light at him like the sun exploding before his eyes.
He didn’t stop, came at her with eyes wide and staring. Shaldis grabbed the first thing that came to hand, an awning pole off a tipped-over vegetable barrow, and jabbed it straight at him, ramming it in his belly with the force of a thrown spear. It would have knocked any man to the ground breathless and vomiting, but it didn’t. He struck at it, lunged at it, striking now at her, swinging the wooden chair like a vicious club and forcing her back with such violence that she stumbled.
He never ceased to scream, never altered his expression, blood pouring out of his mouth now and trickling from his nose and his ears. Face distorted, eyes staring, he struck at her, and she held him off with the pole like a boar with a spear, frantically hurling every spell she could think of at him—of pain, of blindness. What else?
&nbs
p; It seemed to take hours and it was probably only a handful of moments before men swarmed him from behind. One instant Shaldis was staring into those frightful eyes, separated from her own by two yards of bending, splintering pole . . .
. . . the next instant steel flashed, and she saw Jethan’s face beyond the howling man’s shoulder and blood fountaining up from severed arteries as the madman’s head rolled forward and lolled on a strip of tendon and skin. The body thrust and rammed and swung its weapon at her for several seconds before it collapsed on the ground.
Shaldis stood shocked, gasping, her face and clothing splattered with blood.
Jethan stuck his sword tip down into the dirt of the street to catch her. “Are you all right?”
She managed to nod.
“It’s Gime,” someone said in the crowd. “Gime the tomb robber.”
“He isn’t either a tomb robber.”
“He is. He works for Noyad the jeweler, and if Noyad gets his jewels honestly, I’m a—”
Someone handed Shaldis a cup of water. She found herself sitting on the toppled barrow, Jethan beside her wiping off his sword on the hem of his tunic. The other guards came crowding up. “Good cut, Stone Face,” and “You all right, lady?”
A man’s voice yelled, “What’s going on here, then?” and looking up, Shaldis saw two of the city guards thrusting through the crowd.
Voices layered over each other like the baying of a dozen hounds. “Been acting strange . . . hear him shouting at night . . . come crashing out of his room—his room’s next to mine at the tavern—screaming fit to wake the dead . . . killed Flower the kitchen wench . . . No, didn’t hear no words, just screaming.”
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