Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

Anything that came near her now would swamp that elusive scent that was more within her mind than any part of the real world around her. Like a single silk thread flying loose in a windstorm she traced it. They have to be headed somewhere, and it has to be somewhere they can get afoot with only the water they can carry.

  I will not be outwalked.

  She stumbled, numb with exhaustion, her body burning with a fever of sleeplessness, weariness, dehydration. After two days and a night, the only thing that existed was the faint scent of indigo and it was weakening, calling her soul from her flesh in order to follow, leaving the flesh to catch up as it could.

  You will not escape me.

  Shaldis!

  I’m sorry, she answered whichever sister it was who cried to her mind. I can’t. This may be our only chance.

  A footfall in the corridor. Foxfire dumped the water from the scrying bowl back into the ewer, thrust the bowl under the mattress, slid like a cat into the high-legged bed, and whipped the sheet over herself and Opal. Both girls dropped their heads onto the pillow and shut their eyes as the latch of the door slid back: Grandmother.

  The whisper of hinges.

  No light.

  Of course. Grandmother can see in the dark as well as I can.

  With moonset the chamber was dark as the inside of an oven. Maybe the reason Shaldis hadn’t responded to her call was because she couldn’t shine light on the water in the bowl—it was something she intended to ask the older girl as soon as she was safe in the king’s palace. Now she could only deepen her breathing and think dreamy thoughts about Belzinan, the gazelle-thin dancer whose performances were all the rage in the Yellow City: conjure up thoughts about what it would be like to be passionately clasped in his arms. Of course, all the gossip said that her father would be far likelier to attract Belzinan’s notice than she would, even could she ever find it in herself to be interested in any man again. But never mind. The dream was pleasant enough.

  She hoped Opal was doing the same. Her grandmother was capable of sensing other people’s dreams, as she herself had sensed those of the guards at Nebekht’s Temple. Maybe her grandmother could even read the dreams of another Raven sister.

  After a long time she heard the door close again.

  Foxfire didn’t know if Red Silk suspected, but she knew she wouldn’t dare try to reach Raeshaldis again tonight.

  Maybe not until she was out of the house completely, on her way back to the city. How close would she have to be to the city’s walls before she called out for riders to meet her? How far from her grandmother to prevent Red Silk from catching her before she was met?

  And how would she be able to tell that?

  She was still working out the mathematics of time and distance of a single hard-riding old lady against that of a troop of the king’s guards searching the broken hill territory between the Valley of the Hawk and the Yellow City when she fell asleep. At least, she reflected, she actually dreamed of Belzinian dancing, rather than of a young teyn lying bound and gagged in slimy green water, staring with frantic eyes as the crocodile swam nearer and nearer. . . .

  A guard coughed. The one at the watch fire over by the closest of the teyn pens, Oryn thought, identifying the direction of the sound. That damned kitchen cat who’d been courting one or another of the camp toms all night started up yowling again. All the half-wild toms who prowled the desert around the kitchen tents took up the serenade, and Oryn briefly considered turning out the entire guard to have the female captured and taken twenty miles out into the desert and dropped. It would take her the rest of the night to return to the camp and resume her love life, and by that time he’d be eating breakfast.

  Chained in the quartermaster’s tent, the mad digger continued to sing in that eerie up-and-down wailing, the same unknown words repeated over and over in an unknown tongue.

  The king turned over on his gilded camp bed—carefully, since the last thing he wanted was Geb scurrying in yet again with inquiries of had he called and did he want a slave to fan him or someone to read to him or play the flute or engage him in a game of fox and geese that he’d be sure to win. No, and no, and NO.

  What I want is for Soth to arrive.

  What I want is for Raeshaldis to come with news that she’s caught that wretched nomad Crafty her groom told me about and her wretched indigo-soaked teyn and has solved this entire tangled puzzle. Or even if she hasn’t solved it, I want her here to tell me if she’s heard from the ladies around Summerchild.

  And while I’m wanting things, I want Summerchild here beside me in this deathly not quite silence, alive and healthy and well.

  Despairingly, Oryn shut his eyes and saw her face again as last he had seen it, wasted, waxen, like a ghost on the threshold of death.

  People always tried to bargain with Death, but Death was notoriously uninterested. I shall be in Death’s house two days from tomorrow, he thought. What if while I’m there, when the priest seals me into that stone grave with the scorpion, I see Her, and She offers to bargain after all. What would I do?

  Give the land to Mohrvine and to civil war in trade for Summerchild’s life?

  In front of the tent, the guard stood up.

  Oryn heard it very clearly: the creak of belt and boot leather, the sweet clink of sword hanger and buckle.

  But no footstep had approached.

  He opened his eyes, curious at the anomaly.

  The outer flap of his tent was open in the vain hope of catching a breeze. Through the gauze inner curtain he saw the man clearly by the glow of the camp torches. It was Sergeant Zhenus. There was definitely no one and nothing in the darkness beyond.

  Yet Zhenus looked around him, then back into the blackness of the tent. And then, to Oryn’s indignant surprise, he simply walked away.

  Now, see here! The king sat up, again cautiously, groped for the shirt he’d left across the foot of the bed. Enough is enough!

  I should have had you whipped back in the nomad camp when you argued with me, my lad. My father always warned me: you let them argue with you over shining bottles with curses on them one day, and by midnight that night they’ll be running off and deserting you.

  Pulling a dark cloak around him to cover the pale shirt, the king stepped to the tent door, soft footed and cautious as a cat. Looking out, he saw Sergeant Zhenus very definitely walking toward the edge of the camp.

  And to the marrow of his bones he knew, the man was heading back to the nomad camp, where the iridescent bottle gleamed darkly in the blackness of the nomad tent. He knew because the image of it had returned to his own mind again and again through the sleepless hours.

  Oryn pulled on boots, gathered up the dagger Bax insisted he carry with him at all times—one of these days I really MUST take the time to learn how to use it!—and followed his guard from the tent. Zhenus had disappeared into the darkness beyond the dim ambience of the fires and torches that dotted the camp, but Oryn had little trouble getting him in sight again. By the stars it was halfway between midnight and morning. Dear GODS, where is Soth all this time? They shed a wan and tricky radiance in which it was nearly impossible to make out anything clearly. But Zhenus was making no effort at concealment. Nor, apparently, did he have any idea he was being followed as he headed east over the broken and uneven ground. He neither quickened his pace nor slowed it, nor made any attempt to seek the occasional cover of rocks or cactus clumps.

  Merely followed the tracks of the horses, where they’d ridden to the nomad camp that afternoon.

  Even Oryn, completely unversed in the lore of tracking, had no trouble following him. Yet to cross three miles of desert mounted, in full daylight, and surrounded by one’s guards is a very different matter from walking those same three miles alone in the darkness. Jethan’s account of teyn lying in wait all around the wizard Ahure’s house returned to him, and his own fearful vision of those hairy hordes rising up out of the sagebrush near Three Wells village. Teyn attacking, moving in formation, directed by a single command.


  The fact that that single command seemed to be far to the south, being trailed by the only academically trained Crafty woman in the known world, was a certain amount of comfort, but what if there was more than one nomad Raven sister? Shaldis had said, hadn’t she, that the marks she’d found about the city had seemed inconsistent, as far as she could judge a magic that felt totally alien to her previous experience. Not to speak of the woman—another nomad, surely?—who called to her in her dreams.

  Objects of accursed glass taken from Zali tombs, objects that seemed to have the effect of driving men mad.

  A village and then a camp, both wiped out, their inhabitants either slaughtering one another or withering up—Dear gods!—into the horrible things he’d seen that afternoon. Maybe, in fact probably, none of the so-called mummies in Three Wells had come out of a tomb at all. All of them could easily have been inhabitants of the village.

  But what had happened to them and to the an-Dhoki nomads of Sheikh Urah’s family?

  And why would nomad Crafties, with or without the services of ensorcelled teyn, want to steal objects so accursed?

  Unless, of course, the nomads knew a way of using some magic that might still linger in those vessels of glass? Could that be true, with the spells of the ancient wizards turning to dust left and right? He’d heard it said that the nomads were descendants of the swarthy-skinned hunters who’d inhabited the forests west of the Great Lake and the Lake of the Sun during the time the Zali kings had reigned: had they preserved some tradition from those days that even the Sun Mages had forgotten? A tradition that let them handle such accursed objects without being sunk into a coma or driven mad?

  Ahure evidently knew something, was seeking the same thing, either in concert with the still-hypothetical nomads or, likelier, in competition.

  Whichever the case, wondered Oryn, how powerful was the magic he or she or they could extract, if it existed at all?

  How much trouble are we in?

  And will my successor—Barún or Mohrvine or whoever decides to risk civil war by breaking with the rituals of sanctification—be able to harness that magic? Or is this going to be the final blow that will shatter the united strength of the realm and condemn everyone to death from starvation and thirst?

  He stubbed his toe on a boulder, the scrunch of his feet in the sand like a drumroll to his own ears. Zhenus did not turn. Oryn debated going back, calling his guards, seeing if by some chance Soth or Raeshaldis had come into the camp. But a glance back over his shoulder at the clustered pinpoints of amber in the unearthly blueness chased the thought from his mind. He knew he didn’t dare. If Zhenus took the bottle—and in his heart Oryn knew it was the bottle—and disappeared, where would they be then? Particularly if Shaldis’s grandfather also vanished?

  Three days. In three days this will all be beyond my ability to help or hurt, and one of those days spent just journeying back to the city—

  STOP IT! You’re not dead yet.

  At least the all-pervasive quality of starlight illuminated the nomad camp evenly, if faintly. The tents were visible, not hidden in pockets of shadow. Oryn slithered down the side of the wadi a hundred feet from where Zhenus descended, and only the sergeant’s almost somnambulistic preoccupation with his own quest kept him from seeing that he was pursued. When Zhenus stopped, Oryn halted, too. The guard unhooked something from his belt, and a moment later a spot of yellow flared into the world of cobalt and black.

  He had brought a lamp with him.

  Therefore, he was planning to come here from before the time he went on duty.

  Was the nomad Raven sister—or a nomad Raven sister—waiting for him in the darkness of the tent?

  Oryn shifted the dagger in his hand and edged forward as the guard ducked into the low black entrance of the tent.

  No sound. No outcry. Through the coarse brown goat hair he could see the lamp moving and Zhenus’s bulky shadow.

  If I’m going to perform feats of physical derring-do like the heroes in all the best ballads, I really must acquire a sword and take some lessons in its use from Bax.

  Oryn lifted the tent flap and looked in.

  No crowd of teyn armed with sharpened bones.

  No nomad Raven sister.

  Only Zhenus, on his knees now and holding the iridescent bottle in both hands. He pressed it to his face, eyes closed, expression rapt. Rolled it against his cheek, his throat, his breast. His head dropped back; he began to sway, and from his throat came thin wailing, soft but growing stronger, exactly the same tune—if it was a tune—that the madman in the supply tent had been singing all day and all night.

  Through half-clenched teeth, the same unknown words.

  Oryn stepped into the tent, said, “Zhenus!”

  The sergeant turned, and his lip lifted clear of his teeth in a snarl like a beast’s.

  “Put it down.”

  Saliva glistened as it tracked down Zhenus’s chin. The singing did not stop, but the eyes that watched Oryn were watchful, ready, and quite mad.

  “Can you hear me? Put it down. I order you—”

  Zhenus lunged. Oryn thought the sergeant would simply try to thrust past him and flee into the darkness with his treasure, but he didn’t. Clutching the bottle in one hand he drew his sword and flung himself on the king as if he were flinging himself into the line of battle, voice raised in a howling cry. Oryn ducked, tripped on the blankets on the floor, and went down. Zhenus stooped to kill him on the ground, and Oryn caught the leg of the table, slammed it into his attacker’s shins. Zhenus fell, letting go of his sword as he clutched the bottle to keep it from breaking.

  Oryn snatched up the weapon, and, when Zhenus sprang up and threw himself at him again, screaming, swung the little table at the man’s head with all the force of his arm. Zhenus fell, dazed, and Oryn smote him again, and this time the sergeant lay still.

  He’s truly unconscious, thought Oryn, kneeling beside him. He’s let go of the bottle.

  He used the sword to nudge the smooth, rounded vessel clear of the sergeant’s hand and into the light of the lamp, which for a wonder hadn’t gone out.

  Why Oryn did this he wasn’t afterward sure.

  Just to see it more clearly.

  Because it was, he saw now, the most beautiful object he had ever laid eyes on. It was perfectly plain, round, and appeared to him to be crystal clear though he could not see through it or into it. Under the surface iridescence lay darkness, as if the bottle were filled with it.

  And under the darkness, a wakeful eye of green light.

  This is the answer, thought Oryn wonderingly, settling himself cross-legged on the tattered nomad carpets, letting the sword slip from his hand.

  This is what will save not only me but Summerchild and the realm as well.

  This power.

  Relief swept him, drowning him; sank him into sweetness he had never imagined before. Like the memory of his dreams he saw himself wading into the lagoon in the House of the Twin Gods, the green water lapping around him, warm with the sunlight. Saw on the lagoon’s rim not two priests but seven, and the answer seemed so clear to him, deceptively simple and beautiful with the perfect beauty of all simple things. The crocodiles merely stayed away from him, did not even turn their wicked yellow eyes in his direction. That was all there was to it.

  Not two priests but seven.

  And trees with lavender flowers, visible over the enclosure wall.

  Relief and gladness as he waded up out of the lagoon, dripping water from his thin white garment, holding up his arms to the cheering crowds, to show himself unhurt. Then he saw her coming down the steps to him, his lady, his wife. It had to be Summerchild, from the love that filled his heart at the sight of her, but she no longer looked the same. She was dark haired and green eyed. . . .

  Why was that?

  The people cheered as he passed before the seven priests, who salaamed in the style that only they used. Crowds followed him along the dusty path back to the city—back to the city? When had th
e House of the Twins moved into the desert? But he recognized the House of Death, built curiously into the city’s southern wall. Death at least had a single servant, as Death always did and always had, but after he’d gone into the stone hollow and come out safely, with the scorpion in his hand, he saw that the House of Wisdom—the house of the serpent king—was also outside the city, only it wasn’t called the House of Wisdom but the House of Madness.

  In either case, the pit of serpents was the same, and the answer was the same, too. To simply walk down the steps and lay his head upon the idol’s altar. To have the snakes ignore him. Easy, easy as a little song, and from the pit’s rim his beloved one smiled down at him from among the nine—nine?—priests.

  But as he approached the altar in the center of the pit, a tiny yellow snake, the length of his hand, struck at him from between the cracks in the altar and bit him on the foot. He kicked it aside, stamped at it, though it eluded him; and he heard the people who lined the pit’s edge gasp. Something went through his mind, some thought, some terrible sense of déjà vu, gone as soon as it touched him.

  He turned back to the altar knowing the pain would start as he turned, and it did. It hit him first in his chest, like the blow of a spear or a knife, searing so that he gasped like a landed fish. Then the next instant knives of pain slashed every joint in his body, so that sweat poured from him, tears flowed from his eyes. His knees gave way and he fell, catching at the altar, crying out. Above him, Shibathnes of the Serpents, the lord of the darkness in the mind, stared down at him with eyes like the darkness behind the stars. Pain, and worse pain, and still worse, and he was screaming, and the nine priests of Wisdom (or Madness) stepped closer to the edge.

  At the same instant men came rushing down the steps into the pit, men with drawn swords. His brother’s men—not Barún’s but some other brother’s, the same way his dark-haired beloved whom he knew so well wasn’t Summerchild but someone he’d never seen before. The pain made it impossible to think. Madness seized him, madness born of the pain that set his brain on fire, and he snatched up the sword that he’d let slip from his hands and flung himself at them, screaming in pain, knowing he was going to die and not caring.