Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  One guard bent over the dead horoscope seller, the other moved off down Little Hyacinth Lane in the midst of the knot of gawkers. Both then turned and converged on Jethan, shouting questions at him as if he’d seen the whole thing and knew who the dead man was. The royal guards pushed back, defending their own. The crowd was already jostling away up Little Hyacinth Lane. Using her awning pole for support Shaldis stumbled after them. The track of Gime the maybe tomb robber from the Square of Rohar to the tavern where he lodged was horrifyingly clear, like the trail of a sacking army: blood splashed on the whitewashed walls, broken fragments of the chair, doors and window shutters gouged and splintered, a dead dog with its head twisted nearly off its body. Gime’s neighbors—other single men who roomed at the White Djinn Tavern—clustered around her, along with the tavern owner himself.

  Yes, Gime worked for Noyad the jeweler. No, there’d been no trouble with him before, a very quiet sort he was, went early to his room and to sleep.

  “Dear gods!” The tavern keeper, a stout graying man with a scar on his cheek, stopped in the doorway of his tavern, staring about the room. As Jethan and the two constables pushed through the crowd, the rest of Jethan’s guards in tow, the tavern keeper whirled on them. “Look at this place! Look at it! Gime never did all this! Just raced on through.”

  “My glasses!” wailed his wife, shoving into the room from behind him. “All my glasses! And my mirror, too!”

  Shaldis looked through the door at the ransacked common room. Gime’s whirlwind progress from the stairway to the outer door was marked by overset tables and shattered chairs, and in one place by the body of a kitchen maid lying with a broken neck against the wall. But someone had clearly entered the room after everyone had rushed out in the madman’s wake, opening cupboards, smashing every glass bowl and vessel in the place.

  “Did they get the cashbox?” the innkeeper was yelling, and his wife rushed to one of the wrenched-open wall cupboards. “If whoever did this got the cashbox, I’ll hold the city proctors responsible!” he yelled at the city guards. “You should have been here protecting my place!”

  “Deemas be thanked,” gasped his wife, clutching the little locked box to her bosom. In addition to being the god of thieves Deemas was the god of innkeepers. “But who would do a thing like this?”

  Who indeed? Shaldis stepped back as the city guards and what seemed like several hundred other random citizens all crowded into the common room. Hesitantly she put her hand to the doorpost, fearing that if she touched it—if she listened into the wood and adobe as Summerchild had done—she herself might disappear into a coma, her mind vanishing down into sleep that spiraled to death.

  Very quick, like an eyeblink, she touched it.

  Magic.

  It was only a breath, and she didn’t dare sink deeper to look for more. There’d been a simple little spell worked here recently—but she didn’t think as recently as that morning.

  She couldn’t be entirely sure, but it felt like the same magic she’d felt on Murder the cat and on the wall at her grandfather’s house.

  THIRTY-ONE

  For four days after that, Shaldis remained almost constantly at Summerchild’s side in the blue-and-gold pavilion, weaving and renewing, over and over again, the spells and sigils of life that covered the floor around the bed. When she wasn’t doing this she was poring over the books Yanrid brought her from the Citadel library, searching for further magics that might be turned to use by the power of women, to bring Summerchild back from wherever it was she had gone.

  Or, failing that, to simply keep her from dying.

  Pebble very practically rigged an arrangement of a hollow reed lacquered for strength and a bulb of pig intestine—of the sort she’d used to give drenches to her father’s horses—by which they were able to force water down the unconscious woman’s throat. Sometimes Shaldis suspected that this, rather than any magic, was the principal reason her friend didn’t die of dehydration in the grilling summer heat.

  She felt utterly helpless and exhausted beyond anything in memory.

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?” whispered Foxfire again, late on the first night of watching at Summerchild’s bedside. Shaldis had had a quick scrub after returning to the palace and a hasty meal, after reassuring Moth and Pebble, who’d been trying to reach her. Most of the remainder of the day she had spent patiently feeding spells of life and energy drawn from her own strength into the Circle of Sisterhood, and as a result was so exhausted she could barely sit up. But when she’d felt the mental tug of summons to her crystal, she’d woken Moth to take over the spell-weaving and had gone out into the garden—exquisitely cool with the lake breezes—and had let the images come.

  Foxfire looked as bad as she herself felt, her eyes red with weeping.

  “Just keep me informed of whatever you can without getting yourself into trouble.” Shaldis rubbed her aching forehead. She could see little of the girl’s surroundings—it looked like she was bending over a water bowl in a corner of a bare adobe room, but there was a glimpse of a window behind her, looking into a waterless courtyard full of bull thorns and scrub. When she’d spoken to her last night—it felt like years ago—she’d seen behind her the jagged shoulders of desert hills.

  “I wish I’d joined the circle—gone through the rite of the Sigil of Sisterhood,” said the girl. “Can Pomegranate send her energy to help you from far away?”

  “Yes, and it’s saving all our lives. But I don’t know whether what your grandmother’s doing would be more of a drain on us than a help, if you were part of the circle now, so maybe it’s just as well.” Shaldis glanced briefly aside at Moth, sitting on the edge of Summerchild’s bed. Moonlight flooded in from the gardens, where Gray King, the biggest of the palace cats, sat on the edge of the fountain, gazing in with enigmatic eyes. “We’ll be all right, baby. We’re splitting watches now to work the spells to keep her alive, and when Pomegranate gets back—maybe as soon as the day after tomorrow—we’ll be able to go back to throwing chickens at crocodiles and teasing snakes.”

  Foxfire put her hand over her mouth at that and shuddered at some terrible memory. Shaldis felt the flare of burning anger, guessing how the more brutally practical Red Silk must be testing her spells.

  “Shaldis, it’s awful here,” Foxfire whispered. “Grandmother . . .” She stopped herself, swallowed hard, no more able to betray her grandmother’s doings than Shaldis, exhausted as she was, would contemplate remaining here rather than returning to her grandfather’s house later that night.

  “Listen, there’s something terrible happening here, something I don’t understand. There’s a—a mist, something that rises out of the desert sand. I saw it last night, like a green glow in the hills. Tonight when I walked on the walls I saw it again, before the moon came up. The guards say it’s Bad-Luck Shadow and hang all kinds of charms on the walls and on their doors, but it’s more than that. The teyn have figured out some way of getting out of their pen, but they won’t go past the walls to escape. So it has to be something frightful. Do you know? It’s nothing Soth or Hathmar ever told me about.”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve seen it, too. Usually far off in the desert or around the wadis in the Dead Hills. Pomegranate’s seen it near the City of Reeds.” And moving along the shores of a lake of fire in my dream.

  “It couldn’t be the djinni, could it? Magic has turned into something else. Could the djinni have . . . have transformed? Shaldis . . .” Her voice sank. “It sings to me. I hear it in my dreams. Music, like a buzzing insect, or sometimes bells or voices.”

  “Voices?” Shaldis sat up. “What do they say?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand them, but they sound far off and sweet.”

  “No other sound? Not like a crashing or a rushing?”

  Foxfire shook her head.

  Do not let the mist touch you, the woman’s voice had whispered to her in her dream. Flee it. Flee this place.

  “It isn’t the djinni,�
� said Shaldis slowly. She had her own theories about what had happened to the djinni and where they were hiding, but could prove nothing. She knew she’d almost certainly be regarded as a madwoman if she spoke about it. “I don’t know what it is. But keep away from it. And let me know if you hear things in your dreams again.”

  The girl murmured, “All right.” She glanced aside, as if at some noise, then back. “I have to go.”

  Her image faded at once.

  Shaldis closed her eyes. It was midnight, the hour of the Sun’s Dreams. She had left her grandfather’s house the night before last at this time, leaving poor Pebble, whose release the king had negotiated on his return to the city, by the simple payment of an enormous bribe.

  For a man who seemed to think of nothing but playing the harp and collecting antique jewels, he displayed a keen ability to size up her grandfather’s priorities.

  But a promise was a promise, and if for no other reason, Shaldis knew she had to go back to the house on Sleeping Worms Street. Moreover, she was virtually certain that the unknown Raven sister would return there on her own or in the service of whomever she worked for. So she sent for one of the palace litters and rode through the lively night markets, past torchlit taverns that remained open until almost dawn. By the time her grandfather had dressed her down about leaving him alone to his enemies for so long—“That fat cow you left here was worse than useless!” he stormed, and didn’t mention the king’s bribe at all—it was only a few hours till first light. Shaldis fell asleep in the middle of her meditation on healing herbs and slept like a dead woman. Fifty unknown Raven sisters could have danced in a ring around her without her being aware of it or anything else.

  Three more days passed, in which Shaldis felt as imprisoned, and as worn, as the teyn who ground corn all day in her grandfather’s kitchen courtyard. With Moth and Pebble she patiently renewed the spells of life around Summerchild’s bed, while Summerchild’s maid Lotus and as often as not King Oryn himself kept her body clean and as cool as they could with constant application of damp cloths, to slow the deadly process of dehydration that was the true killer in wasting sicknesses. The energy Shaldis put into the spells left her drained and shaky, but her anxiety prevented her from eating the meals and sweets Geb sent up: she slept instead, when she could.

  Between times, while she was supposed to be resting, she read the scrolls Yanrid sent over, of ward-magic theory or the staggering variety of plants that could be used for healing and the spells that would strengthen their effects. Or she went downstairs to the lower chamber of the pavilion and worked with Rachnis on formulating protective spells and cantrips to be used when Pomegranate returned or when it became clear that the spells of life had at least stabilized Summerchild as she was. As the only one of the three trained in the formal manipulation of magical power, Shaldis could not put this aside. The moon was on the wane. She saw it from the galleries of her grandfather’s house as she walked them in the darkness, her senses stretched for the whisper of magic, the creak of some anomalous sound.

  And she heard again Jethan’s quiet voice against the birdsong of the desert morning: Only one man has the right to rule . . . that is the road to death indeed.

  In those days Jethan was almost her only comfort, though the strict rules of the guardsmen on duty in the harem gardens meant that she could speak to him only if she walked down the path to his little kiosk by the ornamental gate. And being Jethan, he would not converse on duty. Still, it was profoundly comforting to know he was there.

  On her second night of sleeping in the chamber above her grandfather’s kitchen court, she was wakened by someone passing the ward sigil she’d put on the alley door. By the time she ran downstairs there was no one there, and the latch was still in place. Opening the door—it was nearly the hour of the Sun at His Prayers—she looked into the black silence of the alley and thought she saw a dark-robed figure slip around the corner. Though it was difficult to tell, in the warm night this close to the garbage middens, she thought the smell of old blood and dirty, lacerated flesh lingered in the air.

  Back at the palace on the following afternoon, Geb the chamberlain, nearly spitting with indignation, stormed into the lower floor of the Summer Pavilion where Shaldis was reading with the news that Cattail—“Only she’s calling herself the Lady Cattail now!” sputtered the little eunuch—had come to the palace offering her services to the king.

  “She asked him—she dared to ask him—how much he was willing to pay for spells that would guard him from any poison whatsoever!” Geb’s round face was pink with rage as he set down the tray of sweet dates and plums and savory chicken and lamb with rice on the low table among the piled books and scrolls. “After coming up to the gate in a litter that I’ll swear was the one Lord Jamornid had made for his wife the year before last, and I wonder what she had to say when he took it and passed it along, with its matched team of bearers, to that . . . that fishmonger’s widow!”

  “I hope he didn’t pay?” Shaldis was torn between concern—the gods only knew what the spells would actually do—and a desire to laugh.

  “Great gods, no! She then said she was quite willing to lay aside her other concerns—for a consideration—and take over the efforts to arrive at the other spells needed. ‘It is quite clear no magics invented by men are going to be the slightest use to women of Craft,’ she said. ‘Those who try to force their own power to flow through channels not designed for it are only wasting their time. From the beginning I have made my own spells, wrought and honed my unique methods.’ As if what you’re doing here is just nursery rhymes to amuse children!”

  Shaldis shook her head in agreement and let Geb bully her into eating, but she was uneasily aware that while Cattail’s made-up spells frequently did not work, they often did.

  It might be, she thought, as she mounted the stairs to the upper chamber again through the breathless heat, that they would come to needing even Cattail’s power added to their own, to save Summerchild and the king. She hoped not. Summerchild’s prestige as the favorite of the king had kept in check Cattail’s fondness for running things. Without her, Shaldis suspected that the woman’s inclusion would harm more than help.

  If indeed her only motives were money and power, and not something more sinister. Shaldis wondered if the dark-faced Raven sister still roved the alleys of the Slaughterhouse District, seeking the Raven child.

  That same afternoon, when she summoned as usual the image of the guards’ camp outside Three Wells village in her crystal, the first thing she saw was vultures and jackals fighting over the corpse of a man. Tiny and distant as the scene was—as all things were, scried from afar—it hit her like a blow beneath her heart. She sank back onto the divan and whispered, “Damn it!” and Oryn, kneeling beside Summerchild’s bed, looked up sharply from the reports he was reading from the aqueduct camp.

  “Something’s happened at Three Wells.” Shaldis angled the crystal: sometimes, scrying a scene far away, she could look on many angles at once as if she stood in several places in her mind. Her hands shook and she fought to keep her concentration. This time, no amount of angling the crystal showed her any but that single view. “I see a body, fresh—and at this hour of the day if there were any alive in the camp they’d have dealt with it.” She looked up, striving to step past, as Yanrid had said, the sense of obligation to help everyone—the nagging guilt that if catastrophe happened, it was due to her failure. But all she could remember was how Corporal Riis’s shoulders had relaxed with relief when she’d said she would check on the camp daily.

  A lot of good that had done them.

  Jethan had been right.

  “They were well, when I checked on them yesterday evening. The last of the bodies from the village was buried the day before without any sign of ill effect. I can’t imagine there was a man of the company that would have gone into the ruins after that.”

  “Then something may have come out of the desert and fallen upon them.” The king’s voice remained reas
onable and steady, but in his face Shaldis could see her own thought reflected, and her own guilt. The side of his face still bore the fading bruises left by the teyn attack near Three Wells. He picked up the silver bell that stood in a lamp niche by the bed, shook it sharply. As Lotus’s footsteps vibrated on the stair he went on, “Raeshaldis, my dear, would you be so good as to look in your crystal at the aqueduct camp? It’s only a half-day’s ride from Three Wells. Ah, Lotus, my pearl of light, could I possibly prevail on you to fetch Bax here? It looks as if we’re going to need another expedition out to Three Wells. I kiss your hands and feet, my dear.”

  Shaldis heard the girl go, heard the silky rustle as the king turned back her way. But he did not speak, and her own thoughts were tangled deep in the half-tranced state that scrying sometimes demanded. It had been months since she’d ridden out to the face camp at the end of the stone-lined canal that now stretched beyond the Dead Hills, and the image within the crystal was slow in forming, as it was for all places where Shaldis herself had not been. Indeed, her reasons for riding out to the camp had been so that she would know at least some elements of it—to focus on the shape and color of the tents, the faces of the foreman and chief teyn minder, the way the aqueduct looked now that its channel was no longer a line of tall stone columns but a deep, straight slot in the earth.

  Even so, it took all her concentration, all her power, to summon the image of the camp. Weary as she was, it was as if she stood some distance off in the desert, looking toward the gaggle of tents and pens, the towering haze of dust; and she could not seem to bring herself closer.

  Her voice sounded thick in her ears as she spoke. “I see movement—gangs of teyn going to the ditch—lines of camels and asses coming into camp. Kites at the camp dump. Dogs.”

  “But all looks well?” The king’s words seemed to come to her from some great distance away.