Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  She held her breath, then, as the teyn slipped through the gate, eased herself to her feet, slithered past the baskets and into the alley. As she’d ascertained, no one waited there. Though if this woman was strong enough to work a door bolt from a distance, would she be able to cloak herself even against another Raven sister’s sight? Shaldis didn’t know. She was used to thinking of women’s magic being weaker and less reliable than men’s had once been. How strong could women’s magic be?

  Soft-footed as she could manage, she crept down the passageway to her grandfather’s garden, the passageway that still held, for her, dim ragged echoes of Nettle-flower’s murder. She could see the dark trees, the white-starred shrubs ahead of her through the narrow archway; glimpsed movement. Glimpsed something else and quickened her stride—the glimmer of greenish light, of what looked like green mist, rising from the grass. Do not get near it. The Crafty woman’s voice had spoken in her mind, on the shores of the lake of fire. Do not touch it.

  Though the garden was enclosed and the night windless, it seemed to be moving, spreading up the stairs.

  What in the name of the GODS is it doing HERE?

  Shaldis ran, and skidded to a stop at the end of the passageway as the smell of teyn suddenly filled her nostrils. She was starting to leap back even as one teyn came around the corner and sprang at her, so that it was unable to seize her. She called a spell of bursting light between them, but that didn’t stop it. It knocked her down, then fled across the garden like a silent, misshapen shadow, to where a second teyn, a jenny, waited in the kitchen passageway’s dark.

  Shaldis cried, “Stop them!” and scrambled to her feet, dashed in pursuit. One of them slammed the grilled gateway to the kitchen court. Shaldis saw them flee across the court as she scraped and fumbled at the latch—which stuck and jammed under her fingers. “Stop them!” she yelled again, and heard the camel driver wake on the gallery outside her grandfather’s room and begin to clatter downstairs toward her. By that time the teyn were nearly to the gate of the main court and from there would vanish in the dark streets.

  Wildly, Shaldis lashed forth with her mind. She meant to slam the gate that led to the main court, and when she saw that didn’t work, thrashed forth another spell that knocked the vat of indigo from its tripod, dashing the contents over the second of the fleeing teyn.

  The next instant the grille’s latch gave under her hand, but before she could dash in pursuit, the camel driver who’d been on guard by her grandfather’s door caught up with her, grabbed her, yelled, “Got you, you sneaking bitch!” and slammed her against the tiled wall of the passageway.

  Shaldis ducked his blow and her shout of “It’s me, the Old One, you idiot!” was drowned in his cursing as his hand connected with the tiles. She had to shout it two or three times, dodging another slap and being shaken so her teeth rattled. Only when Tulik came panting into the passageway with a lamp did the driver seem to realize his mistake.

  “What’s going on?”

  “An attack—I don’t think they got up the stair.” Shaldis looked past her brother and the bodyguard into the garden court. There was no sign of the green mist, but after an instant’s hesitation she ran back to the stairway, raced up it to pound on her grandfather’s door. “Grandfather?” From above, looking down, there was no sign either of the mist. Her mother and her aunt Apricot appeared on the other side of the gallery, clinging together with sheets wrapped around them, not willing to come into range of the head of the household’s wrath.

  “Grandfather?”

  Shuffling. “Who is it, damn you?”

  “It’s Raeshaldis— It’s the Eldest Daughter,” she corrected herself. “Are you all right?”

  A bolt scraped, then another. The door opened a crack. “What the hell do you mean, pounding on my door and waking me?” He looked absolutely ghastly, unshaven, filthy and naked, as if it was past his thought even to look for a sheet. He didn’t seem to have shaved since she’d seen him last—six days ago now, that was—and the room behind him reeked of bedding unwashed and unaired.

  “You asked me to come to this house to protect you, so I’m protecting you,” retorted Shaldis. “Two teyn broke in, tried to get up the stairs. . . .”

  “You’re crazy, girl. Teyn—”

  “No one came in? Let me in.”

  “Go to hell.” He slammed the door in her face.

  She heard the bolts scrape.

  She could have slammed back the bolts and confronted him—and while she was at it demanded to have a look at the glass ball that was the focus of the trouble—but she knew that every second, the teyn and their mistress would be heading for whatever bolt-hole had let them through the city wall. Tulik and the camel driver came dashing along the gallery, and Tulik called out, “Grandfather!”

  “Let him be,” said Shaldis. “If that’s the way he wants it, I have other things to do. Get me a horse, a remount, a groom, and two days’ food and water and get them fast. I’m going after them.” She’d already pushed past her brother and was striding back along the gallery toward her room to change clothes. “And tell Grandfather that when I get back, I’m going to want to see whatever it is that he’s got hidden in his room.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Two laborers insane in two days, rumors of others. Please send someone to advise. Ykem.

  Ykem was the foreman in charge of the aqueduct camp.

  Oryn turned the curled scrap of parchment over in his hands. “Get some horses saddled, if you would, please, Geb.” Geb started to protest—probably that it was already midmorning and no cavalcade was going to get far by noon, and besides it did not suit the dignity of the king to ride horseback and look what had happened last time.

  Oryn simply lifted his hand and shook his head. Moth—who was on duty at Summerchild’s side that morning, stylish as ever in pink gauze and topazes—did not even look up from her meditations. “Is the messenger who brought this still in the palace? Please find out, and, if he is, have him meet me in the Golden Court to ride out with us. Jethan!”

  The young guardsman, who had brought the message from the front gate to the Summer Pavilion, came swiftly to the bottom of the stair as Oryn raised his voice. Palace custom dictated that whatever commands Oryn had for a guard would be taken by Geb, or preferably by a page, but Oryn simply descended the stair, to the chamberlain’s scandalized twitters.

  “Would you be so kind as to go back to Chirak Shaldeth’s house and ask Raeshaldis to join us on the road to the aqueduct? This is all becoming . . . very disquieting.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Jethan salaamed.

  “And send another guardsman here at once!” added Geb as the young man strode away up the garden paths. “My lord, you can’t simply—”

  “I’m the king, my squash blossom,” said Oryn with a faint smile. “As I keep telling you, I can do whatever I want.”

  Except save the life of the woman I love.

  He looked for a time down at Summerchild’s face. In the hot morning sunlight she seemed terribly pinched and wasted. Yesterday evening, after the four sisters had made their sigil and their circle, he’d thought she looked better and had dared to let himself hope.

  Silly, he thought. His father would have had a few words to say to him about that. Not to speak of what he’d have said of a king letting a silk merchant’s granddaughter cry on his shoulder and pick through leftovers with him.

  He wondered what, if anything, had been the result of the tall girl’s ambuscade last night. Nothing useful, he thought. If she’d actually found this nomad Raven sister, she’d have brought her here to the palace early that morning. Or brought word of her own defeat.

  Dear gods, don’t let the battle between them have harmed her.

  If Shaldis had been injured or killed . . .

  He looked down at Summerchild’s face again, and thought once more, I can do whatever I want, except save the life of the woman I love.

  Or the lives of my people.

  Or my own.
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  The messenger was indeed awaiting Oryn when the king’s guards, packhorses, and Elpiduyek the parasol bearer—honestly, Geb!—assembled in the Golden Court. He reported that both men were simple laborers on the aqueduct, part of the small gang in charge of roofing over the finished section behind the main diggers. One man had come running out of his hut with a knife in hand just after sunset and had thrown himself into the midst of a band of teyn just being brought back to quarters from the ditch. They’d killed him before the minders could whip them away.

  The other man was still alive, tied hand and foot, alternately screaming and singing in a language no one could recognize.

  Had the villagers sung, Oryn wondered, as they’d run among the burning huts of Three Wells?

  Though the cavalcade assembled with a swiftness unheard-of among kings, still crowds were gathered along the Avenue of the Sun to watch them ride away. There was something speculative in their silence, though when Oryn raised his hand to them they cheered, like a sun patch breaking through winter clouds.

  “They don’t imagine I’m running away, do they, Bax?” he inquired, leaning a little in the saddle to speak to the commander, who rode at his side.

  “Course they do.” The stocky soldier spoke without turning his head, his pale-blue gaze scanning each side street and temple; Oryn wished he didn’t suspect the white-haired commander of marking out possible sites for fortification should street fighting break out in the wake of a bid for power by Sarn or Mohrvine or Akarian. “I expect before noon there’ll be odds offered at every café in town as to whether you’re coming back.”

  “So nice to know my people take an interest in my welfare.”

  “Don’t you think they don’t, sir.” Bax nudged his mount to a hand gallop, deftly avoiding Elpiduyek, who determinedly cantered close by, silken canopy flapping up and down with the jogging stride. “There’s hundreds in the city doing just that—betting the gods will carry you through. Will carry us all.”

  Betting Raeshaldis and the others will come up with the appropriate spells, perhaps. Oryn wondered again what that tall, shy girl had encountered last night that had prevented her from either coming herself that morning or sending word. The events at her grandfather’s house and those at Three Wells—not to speak of the madman in Little Hyacinth Lane—had a suspiciously similar ring. And whether the advent of the lake monsters—thankfully uncomplicated so far by a reappearance, according to Pomegranate—was part of the puzzle or merely the gods’ attempt to prod him into nervous prostration before his consecration, only the gods knew.

  He’d sent another messenger posthaste to the ruined village, with a message to Soth to make all speed for the aqueduct camp.

  But as the cavalcade passed through the east gate square, with the harsh sun bright now on the gate’s green tiles and the dust like a golden fog, Oryn happened to turn his head. And though he knew that the Veiled Priests never left their temples, he could have sworn he saw them, seven black figures almost invisible in the shadows of the alleyways nearby.

  Watching him as he rode out the gate.

  “She movin’ over rock, miss.” The camel driver Tulik had fetched for Shaldis as a groom was an elderly man named Dhrosas, whom everyone in the caravanserai called Rat—Shaldis had known him from her childhood. He now pointed with his quirt at the streambed, decades dry but paved with smooth stone and gravel and dotted with the gray desiccated mounds of camel bush. The noon sun sent up waves of heat from that impermeable pavement already, flung harsh glare into the pursuers’ eyes. “We not find her tracks before, we sure not find her here.”

  “I thought nomads could pick up the tracks of birds an hour after they’d flown past.”

  The little man grinned and leaned forward to pat the neck of the lean bay mustang he rode. “I’m only half nomad, miss, so I only track that one halfway to where she goin’.” He did look like a rat, too, reflected Shaldis, with the tip of his long nose—pink with sunburn—sticking out through the dark gauze veils that protected his face and eyes, and below it his bristling white mustache. His skinny hands on the reins had the look of a rat’s forepaws in their tattered gloves. Most camel drivers didn’t live to be old—their lives were too harsh, and most of them that weren’t killed by bandits and nomads died in bar fights. But she remembered Rat telling her stories of the djinni, when she was a child.

  She sat back in her saddle and closed her eyes. As she’d suspected, she wasn’t able to scry the fleeing teyn in her crystal, which meant she was with the Crafty who controlled her. But half in a trance of seeking, Shaldis could still catch the acrid pungence of indigo, clinging to the rock of this parched Dead Hills streambed, hanging in the air. Scanning the dun slopes above the banks of the wadi, eyes narrowed against the blazing sun, it seemed to her that far off, she saw the moving dot of blue.

  She had followed that scent through the night, among the tangled wadis and steep-walled canyons of the Dead Hills, moving south from the Yellow City, then bending east. In the darkness her ears had sifted through the scuffle of hunting jackals, the yips of foxes, and the scrambling whisper of rabbits, searching for the steady tread of fleeing bipeds. But those sounds, like her scrying, had been masked by cloaking spells. Now and then she’d stopped to look up and to gauge by the stars burning white and steadily above the matte-black cliff faces where they were.

  And sometimes, in those cliffs, she’d seen the faint glow of greenish light, outlining the mouths of the ancient tombs that dotted those withered valleys.

  Keep away from the mist, the voice had whispered in her thoughts. Flee it. . . .

  She wondered if, in some nomad legend forgotten by Rat’s father, there was mention of a lake of fire.

  Or of something that crashed and boomed, again and again, with the regularity of breath?

  They’d ridden through night and morning. Now with the sun straight overhead they had come to the end of the hills, and before them the desert stretched, north, east, and south. Far away to the north Shaldis was aware of the tiny glittering cloud that marked the construction face of the aqueduct, but beyond that there was no sign of habitation, of human passage at all. Even the salt caravans that crossed the distances to the oases and the migratory camps of the deep-desert nomads, who navigated by the stars and by the far-off shapes of the land, knew well that to go beyond the farthest oasis was suicide.

  She opened her eyes and saw Rat kneeling on the descending bank of the failed wadi, making a cairn of stones to guide them back. He’d done this half a dozen times already, through night and morning. In the desert, one did not take chances.

  Even behind the protection of the veiling he shaded his eyes to look up at her. “Nothing out there,” he said. “That direction—one oasis, ten days journey, and the Rai an-Tzuu camp there this time of year. They hunt teyn, for the market.”

  “Our teyn is fleeing with a Crafty woman,” said Shaldis. “If she wasn’t, I’d be able to see her. They may be meeting someone between here and there.” She unhooked the water bottle from her saddle, took a sparing drink. Following Rat’s example, she was being stingy even though there were waterskins on both spare horses. “Will the horses be all right?”

  Rat checked both remounts, then swung to his own saddle again. “Camels be better,” he reported. “We give them rest in the heat of the day, they good for a day, two days. After that . . .”

  “With luck we’ll catch our friend within a day.” Shaldis wrapped the dark gauze once again over her eyes. “Now she knows she’s being pursued, this may be the last clear chance we’ll have to face her down and bargain with her. This way.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Breast deep in the stinking green of the scummy pool, the young boar teyn made no sound. The guards had gagged it with a wad of leather and rags, bound it hand and foot before lowering it into the water. From where she stood behind the railing opposite it, Foxfire could see it trembling, see the terror in those huge, pale, dilated eyes.

  Belial the crocodile slid thro
ugh the filthy water. The bow wave of his passing sent up a reek to her, like the cesspools under hell. She closed her eyes, but she could see the pool, the reptile, the terrified, helpless victim all engraved on her mind like some inescapable dream. Through her exhaustion and her terror she repeated the patterns of the spell, formed up the lines of power in her mind.

  He will go away. He will turn aside. There’s nothing there.

  Belial’s eye was like yellow glass as he turned in the water.

  And slipped past the teyn, so close that his scales scraped the huge, furry shoulder.

  Foxfire’s mind locked around her spells, her body sick with unbreathing terror.

  He will turn aside.

  Belial turned aside.

  Hold the spells. Don’t think about anything else.

  “You’ve done it, girl!” Her grandmother’s hand tightened like a thumbscrew around her arm. “You’ve done it!”

  She wanted to twist her arm away and couldn’t, couldn’t move for fear of relaxing her concentration the tiniest bit.

  “Get him out of there,” she managed to whisper. “Please.”

  Red Silk shook her with bruising triumph. “You’ve done it!” Her laughter was almost a shriek. She didn’t even look at the teyn.

  “Úrthet,” Foxfire gasped, and her brother and Soral Brûl began to gently haul on the rope that bound the teyn, drawing it to the edge of the pool.

  At the same moment Red Silk snatched one of the wicker cages from Urnate Urla, the chicken within it squawking with protest, and hurled it into the water a few feet from Belial’s enormous head.

  With deadly speed the huge reptile whirled in the water, snapped up cage, chicken, all.

  Red Silk shrugged. “He was hungry, all right.” Then she cackled again, almost hugging herself with delight. “You’ve done it! Your father will dance! You’ll be a royal princess, my girl, the daughter of a king! You’ll marry whom you will, do as you please.”