Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  “All looks well.”

  She heard him sigh. She closed her eyes, her tired head throbbing; Yanrid hadn’t been speaking lightly when he’d urged her to take care of herself. When she looked again at the whitish-lavender shard of stone, it lay clear and empty in her hand.

  “Thank you, my dear,” said the king softly. “You have much relieved my mind. May I fetch you some coffee and a baba cake? Summer—” He stumbled on the name. “Summerchild is always rendered ravenous by scrying, she says.”

  She whispered, “I’ll be all right.”

  He got clumsily to his feet at the sound of voices in the chamber below. Bax, commander of the palace guard; Lotus answering a question, replying, “He’s upstairs.”

  Oryn stood for a long moment looking down at Summerchild’s still face. His long chestnut hair hung lank with sweat around his face in the afternoon heat, and his eyepaint was smeared over lids that had the bruised look of too little sleep. Lotus said, “My lord?” from the doorway, and Oryn closed his eyes like a bone-weary soldier hearing the command once again to form up ranks.

  Shaldis got soundlessly to her feet and gathered the billowing masses of pale-blue over-robe from the divan; held it behind him, as she’d seen Geb do. After a moment the king roused himself enough to glance back at her and smile. “Thank you.” He slipped his arms into the robe and gathered his rings and necklace from the low table where he’d cast them aside: masses of diamonds with an inner fire like the sun. “You’re very good.”

  And pressing her cold hand between his two fat moist ones, he ran with surprising lightness down the stair.

  That night on her way through the market, Shaldis heard the excited talk. There had been a fire the day before in Little Hyacinth Lane and the White Djinn Tavern had burned to the ground. Exhausted as she was she went at once to look at the place, though there was little to see. According to the neighbors the fire had taken place early in the morning. A teyn had been killed but none of the tavern’s residents.

  Standing in the ruins of what had been the common room, Shaldis looked back into the narrow yard, where the kitchen—the only place in the compound where a fire would reasonably be burning in summertime—stood intact. Broken glass glittered in the dust in the light of the waning moon.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The woman may provide useful information from the palace but she can’t scry-ward worth a beggar’s curse.” Red Silk shaded her eyes against the midmorning glare and the thick dust raised by the caravan. “Thank the gods all the king’s girls are still clustered around that concubine’s bed wasting their energies on a lost cause. I hope your father remembered to include ointment.”

  Foxfire said, “Yes, Grandmother,” in what she hoped was a matter-of-fact voice.

  “That doesn’t look like a great deal of water,” the old lady added, running a critical eye over the huge wheeled butts as the ox teams dragged them through the compound gate. “Belial’s pool is so low the stink’s enough to kill those stupid creatures before he even gets to them.”

  “Yes, Grandmother.” Foxfire swallowed hard. The searing white brilliance of the sun made her head pound. All yesterday, and through the morning, they’d been working with various drugs in combination with spells to “open the mind” or increase the strength of their magic. Every death—every pair of terrified, nearly human eyes, every frantic scrabbling to escape—sickened her as badly as the first, though she dared not admit it, dared not let herself faint or be sick.

  Red Silk assured her she’d get used to it.

  Glancing sideways at that implacable profile, swathed in veils of black and crimson, Foxfire wondered if there had ever been any time when her grandmother hadn’t been able to look upon death—and death that she should have been able to prevent—with stony equanimity.

  The last of the water carts—marked with Cattail’s very expensive scry wards—rumbled into the courtyard. Though Foxfire hadn’t had a scrub in days, she didn’t even notice them, could not really care, through the grief and horror she felt as the line of teyn were herded in. Forty of them, dear gods! She closed her eyes, fighting the sobs that strangled her throat beneath the concealment of her veils.

  Big strong shoulders, heavy shaven heads slumped forward, long arms touching the ground with weariness. Some of the jennies carried their infants—pips—in their long arms, pressed to their chests. One big boar had a half-grown pip clinging to his back, thumb in mouth, staring.

  Forty. And each one, she’d have to watch die in the knowledge that there was something she could do to save it, if only she could be strong enough, clever enough.

  If only she didn’t fail, as she’d failed again and again.

  And watched them die one by one.

  She could hear the wildings in the hills, if she reached out her senses to them beyond the stink of dust and oxen and men’s sweat. Smell them, crouched in the wadis all around the compound, silent and motionless as the rocks. Pale slit-pupiled eyes watching under those overhung brows, heavy pale-furred limbs pulled together with animal economy, now and then breaking off a twig of mesquite or camel bush and chewing slowly as they watched. Sometimes Foxfire could scry them. Sometimes, wrung with exhaustion and the various drugs that her grandmother relied on more and more, she couldn’t.

  Did they know what was happening in here to their big domestic cousins? What did they think of the bodies that were hauled out every morning and buried in the wadis, under shoveled layers of lime to keep the vultures from giving the place away to the king’s spies?

  What are they waiting for?

  When Red Silk hobbled off to speak to Foxfire’s half brother Úrthet, who’d been in charge of the caravan, Foxfire slipped away to her room. She closed the door, barred it. She’d seen Soral Brûl on his way across to her with that look of soulful sympathy in his eyes. The room was like a slow oven but she didn’t care. She curled up on the bed and lay shivering, sick and frightened and more wretched than she could ever remember being, even last spring when she’d been in danger for her life.

  How can I feel this bad when I’m in no danger?

  Every time she closed her eyes she saw her grandmother’s face and the faces of the teyn as they died.

  Already she could hear her grandmother’s voice in the courtyard. “Where is that girl? Opal, go get your mistress.”

  And Opal saying something about rest, making some excuse.

  Foxfire wept, quickly and guiltily, trying to do so without letting her eyes and nose swell. A few quick sobs, like stolen kisses. And Eleven Grasshoppers crept from her bed of blankets in the corner, clambered up on the bed—where she wasn’t supposed to be—and gently stroked her hair with her big heavy gray-palmed hands, as if Foxfire were her own pip.

  “Can you see anything more than you did yesterday?” asked Oryn softly, and Raeshaldis shook her head. Within the central facet of her crystal, the small band of guards rode through the gathering twilight, still several miles distant from Three Wells. Before they’d left the palace the previous day, Commander Bax had taken Shaldis down to the barracks and introduced her to those guards who’d be sent out, under the command of Captain Numet. Now she called their images without difficulty.

  They would reach the little town just before full dark. She knew already what they would find there, and in the charred remains of Corporal Riis’s little ring of shelters. She’d scried there several times that day already, and seen the horror of the vulture-torn bodies scattered on the ground.

  Above the hills within the crystal she saw what she knew to be outside the archways of the Summer Pavilion where she sat: the moon shrunk to a half circle in the cobalt sky.

  The following day, just before noon, Soth and Pomegranate returned to the Yellow City. From the upper chamber of the Summer Pavilion, Shaldis could look out through the trees and see the royal barge coming down the lakeshore; a long walkway had been built out from the palace’s original landing stage over the vast stretch of mud and reeds to where the water was now. She watc
hed the king walk out along it, shaded by his bullion-tasseled parasol and trailed by his honor guard in gold and crimson. She picked out Jethan among them by his height and the way he walked.

  Knowing the king would ask, she unpouched her scrying crystal and looked in it for Captain Numet and his men, though she’d scried earlier that morning and had seen them digging a mass grave near the burned shelters outside Three Wells. Now that the day was hot, they were retreating to their own shelters in a clearing hacked out among the dead cornfields a good hundred yards from both the village and the burned camp. A few vultures still perched on the ruins of the town, but the bodies of Riis and his men were gone.

  “Would you be willing to ride out to have a look at the place, Soth?” The king’s velvet-rich voice drifted up to her from the garden path. “I’d have said it was another attack by the teyn, except Raeshaldis was watching the desert as well as the camp and saw no sign of teyn within miles. And then, there was something very odd about the original devastation of the village. According to Poru, there was simply not enough blood on the ground. Many of the dead bore no wounds at all. Raeshaldis says Captain Numet has been burying the guards who were killed, poor fellows, and I really suppose between vultures and jackals it would be pointless to do otherwise, particularly since it will take you a day to get out there.”

  “Either of the other girls scried the guards’ camp?” came Pomegranate’s scratchy voice. “Here, Pontifer, those are the king’s roses!”

  “They’ve tried but haven’t been able to see much, they say. They are both quite tired, of course. All three of them have been heroes, since . . . for the past five days. Jethan here was in Three Wells.”

  The voices became indistinct as they entered the lower floor of the pavilion, saying something about lake monsters and wards. Shaldis slipped the scrying stone back into her satchel, leaned forward to feel Summerchild’s pulse, to brush her fingertips along the energy lines of the face, hands, throat. Nothing had changed. Within its frame of dull-gold hair, her face was like wax.

  “Here!” Pomegranate came bustling up the stairs, long untidy trails of gray hair flying loose over her shoulders and all her beads clanking. “My dear Shaldis, has that boy Oryn been starving you? And him a king!” And she swooped Shaldis up in her arms, the two women clinging to each other, Shaldis finding herself suddenly shaken with sobs of exhaustion and relief.

  “Now, you go downstairs and get some sleep, dearie. I’m here, and Pontifer, too.” She patted the side of her leg, to summon the invisible porker back from wherever she conceived him to be wandering around the room. “We’ll find a way through this, see if we don’t. But you’re no good to Summerchild or anyone else if you wear yourself into a ghost. And that goes for you, too,” she added, swinging around to jab a finger at the king.

  Shaldis did sleep, rather to her own surprise, on the striped linen cushions of the divan downstairs, which Summerchild’s maid Lotus had made up into a bed. Her sleep was deep and free of the sense of profound wrongness that plagued her nights in her grandfather’s house. She dreamed she was in the unburned kitchen of the White Djinn Tavern in Little Hyacinth Lane, trying to make a tisane of the healing herbs on which she still meditated diligently before lying down every night. Only every pot and basket she opened was, annoyingly, filled with mice, weevils, and grasshoppers. They were written all over with wards, of course, and the wards had all ceased to work. There was a lake monster in the water jar that looked up at her with wise golden eyes and seemed about to speak.

  After that, she gave up and walked out to the courtyard—hoping, perhaps, to find a fever tree growing there—and saw before her the burned ruins of the inn. The dead members of poor Corporal Riis’s company lay strewn in the courtyard, covered with vultures. The dust at her feet glittered with broken glass.

  Only it wasn’t glass, she thought, it was jewels: jewels that came from tombs.

  Jewels inscribed with curses. But the curses no longer work, she thought, bending down to pick up a ruby like a drop of blood at her feet. Any more than the mouse wards do. That’s what happened to Riis and his men—mice killed them. A lake monster came up out of the village well.

  She woke with the lake breeze drifting across her face and the sunlight making sharp-edged golden trapezoids all over the wall above her. She went upstairs and found Pomegranate still beside Summerchild’s bed, but obviously Geb had been there in the meantime. A spindly-legged table had been set up beside her bearing coffee things and a dish of heavenly morsels, and the old lady was feeding fingerfuls of whipped cream to three of the palace cats.

  “Any change?”

  Pomegranate shook her head. “Moth came for a time—you were out like you’d had a draught of poppy, dearie. She’ll be back this evening, if you wish to go home and get some real rest.” She broke off, looking sharply over her shoulder as if at some sound.

  “What is it?”

  The old woman listened for a moment, then shook her head. “Nothing, I guess. His Majesty’s down at the wharf, seeing off his daughter. He’s sending her away across the lake to one of the small estates in the Eanit country. As if he doesn’t trust us to get him through his consecration!”

  “I’m sure he’s only concerned for her health in this heat,” said Shaldis. She scooped a fingerful of cream from a pastry. “Would Pontifer care for some? Or doesn’t he eat cream?”

  “Oh, Pontifer’s very particular,” said the old woman, “even about the king’s kitchens. But Pontifer isn’t here.”

  “Where’s he gone?” Shaldis paused, startled, in the midst of offering the cream to the cats. It was the first she’d heard of Pomegranate’s illusionary companion leaving her side.

  “To look for Summerchild, of course. Since he isn’t a real pig”—Pomegranate’s voice dropped to a whisper, as it always did when she didn’t want to hurt Pontifer’s feelings—“he should be able to go where she is. I hope he’ll be all right,” she added worriedly. “It’s a long way for him to travel, and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And there’s something amiss here,” whispered the old woman. “Something amiss in the city, I mean, some evil going forward. I just hope he doesn’t come to harm.”

  The sun was setting. The guard had changed in the kiosk near the ornamental gate that led into the Summer Pavilion’s maze of jasmine and pepper trees; Shaldis quickened her steps to a run, to catch up with the three red-clothed forms of the guardsmen on their way back to the barracks. The Akarian kings had staffed the entire harem area of the palace with eunuch guards, a system that had led to scandalous corruption. As generalissimo, old Oryn the First had sent most of these fairly useless watchers away and had replaced them with men from the regular guard units, rotated frequently and keeping watch in threes. Jethan was with his friend Cosk, his arm already out of a sling despite obvious remnants of pain, and with the boyish-faced Firmin. Through him, Shaldis was finding herself on a first-name basis with half the warriors in the palace, something that would give her grandfather a stroke if he knew.

  “I thought with Pomegranate back, the four of you would be out tonight testing spells for the consecration,” said Jethan when Shaldis told him what she wanted him to do. They’d fallen back a step from the others, to keep their voices low.

  “Well, the first thing the four of us are going to try to do in concert is bring Summerchild out of her coma,” retorted Shaldis. “Pebble’s going to be here tomorrow morning. Then we’ll start throwing chickens at crocodiles again. Tonight’s the first night I’ve been able to leave Summerchild’s side.”

  “So you’re going to spend it riding out into the desert until all hours.” He stopped on the graveled path; the other two halted some distance away, waiting in the dappled shade. They’d removed their helmets and the leather caps beneath them, but Jethan—never one to be less than regulation at all times—still wore his; and his face, framed in gold, had a stripped-down look, as if the structure of its bones had been laid bare.

  “
I’m going to do something I needed to do six days ago,” said Shaldis. “Which is go out to the Redbone Hills and pay a call on Ahure the Blood Mage. Something about our friend on Little Hyacinth Lane the other day is starting to remind me a lot of what we saw out in Three Wells, and both he and Ahure work for Noyad the tomb robber—excuse me, Noyad the respectable jeweler. But if you don’t want to come along to watch my back, I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure you can,” said Jethan, falling into step with her as she started up the path again toward the gate that led to the guards’ court and, beyond it, to the stables, where she meant to beg a cavalry mount from Bax. “Up until the moment that you can’t. Riis could take care of himself, too,” he went on. “I’ve seen him do it in more taverns than I’d care to tell you about. The men of his squad were tough, and now they’re buried in a cornfield. Do we need those two mangy dogs with us as well?” he added, raising his voice to include Cosk and Firmin, who promptly began to howl, yip, and scratch their ears.

  “Good heavens,” said Shaldis, more startled at the question than at the behavior of Jethan’s friends. “I can’t imagine why. I only need someone to keep an eye on things in case a problem comes up. It isn’t as if Ahure can do any magic.”

  “No,” said Jethan, pausing again as they reached the square gray block of the barracks’ gate. “But someone can. Someone was controlling the teyn, who held us away from Three Wells while they burned the village. And someone has, at least once, used magic in your grandfather’s house. You don’t know what we’ll find out there, once we get to Ahure’s house. I agree that we probably don’t need four of us, especially considering the difficulty in concealing four riders, but I’m glad you’re taking help. Get changed into riding clothes,” he added, nodding back in the direction of the Red Pavilion. “I’ll talk to Bax about horses.”