Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  Would a nomad Raven sister linger in the town long enough to heal a dying cat?

  She reached down and felt the face of the little boy nearest her. He seemed to be sleeping easier, and his skin was cooler. While they’d been working, she’d heard rain begin outside, from those floating masses of cloud. Heard it sweep through the jungle, then rush over the healing house’s thick grass walls in effortless waves, filling all the universe with its sweetness before it trailed away over the ocean again.

  Now birds were beginning to sing, a thousand voices waking and lifting to the coming dawn.

  “I have to go,” said Shaldis again, and looked back into the darkness of the healing house, where she thought she could glimpse the white shape of Pontifer Pig. “Puahale, listen. I thank you—I cannot thank you enough—for the help you’ve given me, the spells you’ve taught me. In my own land, it’s not just the Dreamshadow that’s a danger. The king—the man who can keep my people together long enough to ride out this change that the world has gone through—is in peril.”

  And in Puahale’s mind she saw the image of a canoe captain who keeps his crew together with his own courage and wit and laughter, and keeps the vessel’s nose turned into the oncoming deep-ocean waves. “Men seek to put him to a test, men who blame him for all the evil that has befallen since magic began to change.”

  “People fear change,” agreed Puahale. “We had some trouble here, too, a few years ago, when some of the men wanted to kill the Little People after they realized they too had magic. What a king is I know not.”

  “He is my friend,” said Shaldis, and Puahale nodded, as if there were no more to be explained. “The tests he faces are against poisonous insects and serpents, against poison that he must drink—we know not what kind it will be—and against”—did they have crocodiles here?—“giant water lizards. We have no spells to defend against these.”

  “I’ll tell you the words that will turn aside stinging insects. You have to change your spells, depending on where you yourself are in relation to the course of the moon. The spells work at a distance, as do the ones for snakes. There are snakes in the jungles of all the islands, and some very bad ones on the Big Island. The elders say they were there before the first of us came. Water lizards I know not.”

  She frowned, trying to picture them—maybe trying to pluck the image of them from Shaldis’s mind, but by her expression, not succeeding.

  “The Little People may know,” she said at last. “Do you know the Little People? They live in the jungles and on the slopes of the mountains. We have often wondered how they came here, for they do not live in houses or build canoes or use tools of any sort, yet they were here before us. They don’t even speak. Where they call their power from we don’t know either, though they did not used to have power at all, before ten years ago. They have it now, though, and make ward marks and other magic signs on the trees and rocks. So it is as well that we always let them alone, even when they sneak down to steal our pigs and poi pots. Even before they had power, their skill was very great.”

  Shaldis stared at her, openmouthed at the image that came to her from the other woman’s mind.

  “You do not have Little People?” asked Puahale again. “They are covered with hair and have long arms that they use like legs sometimes and pale eyes with pupils like slits.”

  “We do,” said Shaldis softly. Dawn light was trickling into the sky, dyeing the ocean heliotrope and pink. The steady heartbeat of the surf boomed into the silence, and Shaldis felt almost dizzy as cascades of inferences dropped into place.

  The teyn have magic.

  The teyn knew about the Dream Eater. It was they who were trying to destroy it, to get it away from Grandfather. They tried to stop Ahure from his tomb robbing. Not a child Crafty, not a nomad—a teyn.

  And very clearly and distantly, she recalled the mad wizard Aktis, who had murdered Raven sisters in an effort to absorb their power. When he’d kidnapped Foxfire and hidden her in the tombs of the Dead Hills, he’d also kidnapped and killed a jenny teyn. She, too, must have had power.

  Then suddenly, like a desperate, far-off clamoring, she felt the tug and drain of magic, magic drawn from her through the Sigil of Sisterhood that bound her to Pomegranate, Moth, Pebble. They were calling on all the power they could muster, calling in frantic need, in danger of their lives.

  Calling for help.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Pomegranate halted in her tracks, repelled and terrified, whispered, “Dear gods!”

  “You feel it, too?”

  And the next second, peering through the slashing dust at the high red wall, the shut gate, the old woman could not for the life of her lay a finger on what was so different, so frightening, about the house of Chirak Shaldeth. Windows shuttered behind their lattices, ward signs against mice and insects and Bad-Luck Shadow—just to be on the safe side—painted neatly around all doors. A house like other houses in the street.

  Was it the emptiness of the street that gave her the impression of having wandered into a nightmare? The sickly brown darkness and the gusts that whirled her veils and her straggly hair into tangles around her?

  She didn’t think so, and glanced over at her companion. “What is it?” she asked. “Why does it feel like this?”

  Yellow Hen shook her head, her dark eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. But it’s worse now than it was when I left for the palace.”

  It wasn’t surprising, of course, that the house was closed up tight, and neither woman had ever entered the front door of a dwelling in their lives. The main gates were only closed, not latched; the wind was less in the main courtyard owing to the height of the walls. Nevertheless the stables and storerooms were closed up as well—with the drivers undoubtedly inside—and the court empty.

  The gate through to the kitchen court was latched, but it had been years since latches had troubled Pomegranate. As the two women advanced down the narrow tiled passageway, the deadly stillness seemed to press more purposefully around them, the shrieking of the wind only emphasizing the silence that lay between its moans. It would help, she thought, if Pontifer were with her—she couldn’t imagine where her pet had gone.

  They stepped into the kitchen court.

  Into clear sunlight and the sound of splashing water in a central fountain. Pomegranate froze, her hand shutting hard around Yellow Hen’s wrist. The court seemed oddly angled, and there were gateways leading into courtyards beyond where she knew only the surrounding streets and houses lay. Three children she’d never seen before knelt on the fountain’s tiled rim, dabbling their hands in the water.

  In the next instant a woman burst from the shuttered doorway of the kitchen, fled across the court, her clothing in flames and her hair streaming. Something followed her, something that could have been a cloud of dense smoke or a billowing swarm of stinging insects, something that reached tendrils for her as she plunged past the pool, through the tiled archway that led into the front part of the house. Pomegranate and Yellow Hen raced after her, Pomegranate grimly trying to collect whatever spells of protection she knew, wondering if they’d work in this place.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Tulik stepped out of the archway, blocking them. Grabbed Yellow Hen’s arm. “And who’s that and what’s she doing in this house?” The chilly brown gaze that Pomegranate had found so unpleasant in the child had not improved in the young man.

  “What’s she doing?” repeated Yellow Hen incredulously. “What are you doing? Didn’t you see Six Flower just now? And can’t you see—”

  She turned wildly back toward the kitchen court, but Pomegranate, looking back as well, knew what she’d see: the yellow mists of dust, the basinless stone wellhead boxed with makeshift boards, the kitchen archways closed with lattices hastily erected against the dust.

  And no sign of the burning woman or her pursuer in the tiled passageway beyond Tulik.

  But something moved in the shadows—maybe only an eddy of dust.

  And Pomegranate w
asn’t sure, but she still thought there was one extra archway leading out of the kitchen court, one that hadn’t been there the last time she was here—admittedly several years ago—and, if she remembered the layout of the neighborhood aright, couldn’t be there.

  Above the howling of the wind she could hear someone singing somewhere in the house.

  “Are you part of the plot, too?” Tulik shook his aunt roughly by the arm. “That old faker Ahure was here this morning already. He’s the one we have to thank for the teyn all running off, him or whoever’s paying him to ruin us! He bribed Nettleflower—oh, yes, I know all about that! I should have known he wouldn’t stop at just one!”

  He bared his teeth, just the way his grandfather did, Pomegranate thought. He really was turning into the old man.

  He looked like an old man, too, in the ghastly twilight of the storm. Hair dirty, face haggard. Had he been old enough to have it, his cheeks would have been stubbled: they were certainly days unwashed. He wore only a sheet wrapped around his waist and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has not slept in so long that sleep and waking merge.

  “But I will not be pushed from command of this house,” Tulik whispered. “Grandfather is well—he is only tired. I do exactly as he bids me and no one—no one—is taking over our affairs. Hamar! Dzek!” He raised his voice to a shout, and two of the camel drivers came running down the passageway behind him. Pomegranate saw their faces, slightly dazed or slightly drunk, beyond clear thought in any case. “Take Yellow Hen to the cellar and see that she stays there out of trouble. This one you can throw into the street.”

  The men moved to grab Yellow Hen’s arms, but Pomegranate caught the skinny woman’s elbow, wrenched her from Tulik’s grip at the same moment Yellow Hen herself whipped and slashed her arm around to break her nephew’s hold. The drivers lunged at them, but Pomegranate struck at them with her stick, called a spell of explosive light to burst in the air between them, but absolutely nothing happened.

  Hand in hand, she and Yellow Hen turned and ran.

  Tulik yelled, “Stop them! Make sure they’re in no condition to make trouble for me again!”

  They darted across the kitchen court and through the gate, but it wasn’t until they reached the street that Pomegranate was able to call a howling blast of the dust-laden wind to surround their pursuers, to cloak her and Yellow Hen in curtains of dust so thick as to hide them from sight. They flattened, panting, into an alley some distance away, still holding hands to keep from losing each other in the dust and the wind.

  “What do we do?” gasped Yellow Hen. “Where’s that fat fool of a king when you need him? I have nieces and nephews in that house that I care about. Even that fool prig Tulik, for that matter. Where’s Raeshaldis? She went off two nights ago after a teyn that Father claimed was trying to murder him, and hasn’t been seen since—that blockheaded sweetheart of hers came the next day and took four camels and went after her.”

  “We’ve heard nothing,” replied Pomegranate grimly, for she had tried twice in the past two days to contact Raeshaldis, but she had not looked into mirror or crystal to answer her call. “As for us, I think the first thing we’d better do is walk the alleys around the house and see if it’s the only place that’s affected, or if this—this evil, this sickness—goes beyond its walls.”

  She tucked her face veil in more firmly into the random knots of her head veil and hair. After many hours of working spells of healing, spells of life, to try to keep Summerchild from slipping away from the precarious borderlands where she now wandered, Pomegranate was deeply weary. Maybe only that lay behind her inability to make spells work within the walls of Chirak Shaldeth’s house, she reflected. Neither Moth nor Pebble would be in better shape, she knew. And her instincts told her that whatever was in the house—whatever had drawn parts of it into the halfway world of dream, where the waking world’s magic was altered—was strong.

  She took a deep breath. “But whatever we find, I think someone needs to stand watch over the place until we can figure out what to do. And I think I’m going to need help.”

  “Of course my brother will be back.” Barún’s soldierly spine stiffened in indignation at the merest notion that his uncle might think otherwise. “He has great faith in the gods—as have I. There has been a great deal of foolish talk lately, but the simple fact is that they will not desert him.”

  For a time Mohrvine regarded his nephew across the rim of his wine cup, marveling for the thousandth time that his older brother’s two sons should so absolutely divide the qualities of their father. Barún was nearly the double of Taras Greatsword, as Mohrvine recalled him in his fiery prime: arrogant, handsome, able to spear a gazelle at a distance of a dozen yards with a single throw and to fight all day, untiring. But he was stupid as a wooden peg. Greatsword’s canny intelligence had all gone to his older child, that plump, curly-haired, self-indulgent painted harp strummer.

  Oryn had inherited Greatsword’s stubbornness, too, reflected Mohrvine irritably. Stubbornness that saw only a single answer to the perplexing questions facing the realm.

  Not entirely of his conscious volition, Mohrvine’s hand stole to the velvet purse at his belt, where his mother’s folded message lay. All things continue well here. The roses have bloomed, as I know you hoped they would.

  The roses have bloomed. He shut his eyes with a shiver of anticipation, relief, ecstasy.

  They had found spells that would take him through the tests that ringed the kingship in a hedge of peril.

  The tests that would slice Oryn to pieces.

  “And if the gods choose otherwise?” asked Mohrvine softly. “Do you think that they will desert him and stand by you?”

  Barún’s eyes shifted toward the latticework wall that divided this lower chamber of his private pavilion into two. The lattice, as was common for such divisions, was curtained on the other side; Mohrvine could smell the drift of incense and perfume, and guessed that the Emerald Concubine—the woman he had given Barún a few months ago—was there.

  Listening.

  And silently, by her delicate scent, reminding the king’s heir of her presence. Reminding him of the privileges of being king, if he lived to enjoy them.

  Barún said, “That is a matter that I leave in the hands of the gods.” He almost sounded as if he believed it.

  “And if your brother dies the day after tomorrow,” Mohrvine pressed, for he did not seriously believe Oryn would renege on the jubilee, “will you put yourself in the hands of the gods?”

  Barún’s big, sword-callused hand toyed with the delicate coconut candy on the inlaid platter between them. Beyond the tight-fitting screens of lattice and gauze, the late afternoon sky was dark with blowing dust, and lamps had been kindled in all the niches of the chamber. Intermittent flashes of lightning illuminated the gloom, and between them, the air prickled as if perpetually charged for the next explosion. Before leaving his house Mohrvine had ordered all the teyn put under guard. They often tried to run away during storms or wind.

  “Surely,” said Barún, “these ceremonies . . . these superstitions . . . surely the gods would not demand adherence to them in all circumstances. And I’m not certain that a precedent exists for two rites to be held so close together. . . .”

  “You’re right!” exclaimed Mohrvine, raising his eyebrows like a man suddenly enlightened. “I shall have my secretary inquire into it—Soral Brûl, who used to be a Sun Mage, is well acquainted with ancient lore. But surely a precedent can be found for a crowned king to delay the tests of consecration, if the need of the realm is desperate . . . as all must agree that it surely is. Even Lord Akarian cannot argue that.”

  Barún nodded, visibly relieved. He clearly hadn’t the smallest suspicion, Mohrvine reflected contemptuously, that Lord Akarian most certainly would argue that, and would probably step in demanding to take the tests of kingship himself, when Barún backed out. Or would step in did not Mohrvine step neatly before him.

  And if Akarian really wanted
to make himself a meal for crocodiles, he was perfectly welcome to do so. It would be neater than having him assassinated, which Mohrvine knew he would be obliged to do at the earliest possible moment, despite the fact that he would then have to deal with an uprising in the Akarian heartlands around the Lake of the Moon.

  With luck it wouldn’t be a bad one.

  Watching his nephew’s face, Mohrvine could see that none of these contingencies troubled him. Barún had been presented with what looked like a solution. Faced with the spectacle of Oryn’s death and his own ensuing peril, Barún, Mohrvine guessed, would accept any position—commander of the guards, for instance—that permitted him to go on fighting nomads upon occasion and bulling lovely women and willing youths.

  What neither son of Greatsword seemed to have inherited was their father’s ambition. And the gods be thanked for that. If only Oryn . . .

  “My lord Barún?” A red-clothed guardsman bowed from the doorway. “A page has arrived from the Summer Pavilion. They beg that you come there as soon as may be.” It was unheard-of, of course, even in these unveiled times, for women to directly initiate a visit with a man, though Mohrvine supposed that would be next.

  Barún looked discontented. Mohrvine didn’t doubt he’d planned to go straight into the Emerald Concubine’s chamber next door. “Thank you, Cosk,” Barún said. “Send the boy with my message that I will come presently.”

  Which meant, Mohrvine knew, he’d go tomorrow if he didn’t forget.

  “Might I accompany you there, nephew?” he inquired, rising and gesturing toward the door. “I long to know how the lady fares.”

  Barún frowned, put out, but didn’t object to being maneuvered.

  Probably didn’t notice he was being maneuvered, reflected Mohrvine, following the guardsman out to the anteroom of the green-tiled chamber and plucking the colorless military scarves from the arm of a waiting servant.