Circle of the Moon

by Barbara Hambly

  She had moved away from him, as silently as she could, so that when he woke they would be at opposite sides of the crowded little tent. She told herself that it was out of kindliness, since she knew Jethan would be disturbed enough that he’d gone to sleep under the same undivided roof as a woman not of his family. He would be so horrified that he’d fallen asleep with her in his arms, he wouldn’t know what to do or say.

  But the truth was that she feared he would turn away from her, if he remembered that in his exhaustion he had held her so.

  And that, she realized, she could not bear.

  Her mind aching, she reached into the half trance of scrying, and the scratched, dirty face that appeared in the crystal was that of Foxfire.

  “Oh, thank the gods,” the girl gasped, and her words poured out like a spring mountain torrent after the rains. “I was afraid. . . . I tried to reach you last night. I didn’t think I could ask for help any sooner because Grandmother has her spies in the king’s palace. Shaldis, I’ve left, I’ve run away. I’m on my way into the city, but I need someone to come and meet me. They’re after me, I know they’re after me even though I can’t see them. Grandmother’s with them—she can track like a hunter and I can’t use spells to hide from her.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Dead Hills. Father has a house in the Valley of the Hawk. That’s where we’ve been, Grandmother and I. Shaldis, I can do it! I can work the spells to send the crocodiles away and the serpents, and to undo poison, any kind of poison, at a distance. We did it with teyn and yesterday morning we did it with some of the guards.” Foxfire’s voice caught on a sob, even as Shaldis’s heart jolted, as if she’d swilled raw wine.

  The king would be safe.

  “Shaldis, I can’t let her catch me! I don’t know what she’d do if she caught me. The king’s got to protect me.”

  “He’ll protect you,” promised Shaldis, almost light-headed with shock, relief, wild fear that even yet something could go wrong. “Are you alone?”

  “I have a teyn with me, to carry water and food. She’s really smart; she helped cover our tracks when she saw me trying to do it.”

  In other words, she was alone. Shaldis wondered if she’d left that poor maid of hers back at her father’s house and what awful thing Red Silk would do to the girl in retaliation, but it meant that Foxfire would be that much more difficult for her grandmother to find.

  They needed to get word to the king.

  Fear flashed through her, and an instant later, despair. Pomegranate had cried, Dear gods, and her image had vanished. We’re trying to hold it, she’d said, Moth and Pebble and I. Shaldis had waited an hour, then tried to reach each of the three in quick succession.

  None had been able to reply.

  And she had only to think about what Cattail would do with the information about Foxfire’s defection to discard the idea with a shudder.

  Which left who?

  During the preceding weeks of weaving over and over again the spells of healing—and the preceding months of contemplating the upcoming Summoning of Rain—she had frequently been in despair at how few they were. Now their fewness became, not an inconvenience or a worrisome peril, but a crisis, like an injury in the deep desert, not fatal in itself but guaranteeing inevitable death.

  Shaldis took a deep breath. For all she knew the other three Raven sisters might be lost in the kind of coma that had engulfed Summerchild, and the deadly madness of the Dreamshadow might be spreading out from her grandfather’s house to turn the whole district—the whole city—into the horror she’d seen at Three Wells. Even if they were still conscious, they would be fighting for their lives.

  And whipping, twisting at those fears was the wild triumphal chorus: Foxfire had stumbled on the spells—or found within herself the necessary power to fuel her spells—to get the king through the ordeals of the jubilee. And she was willing to give her allegiance to the king.

  No mention of Red Silk being able to do them. Presumably that grim old lady couldn’t, if she was hunting her granddaughter like a gazelle through the hills. Unless she was simply so infuriated at the girl’s defection from the family that she’d rather have a rebellious prisoner than an ally not completely under her control.

  And Shaldis shivered, remembering the formidable old lady’s anger. Foxfire better run, and run fast.

  “Foxfire, listen,” she said, trying to think through the buzzing exhaustion of days without sleep. “There’s no one—none of us—at the palace. I don’t think I can reach the other three—I’ve been trying for hours. I’m going to send Jethan to meet you; he’s the only one with me.” She glanced ahead of her at the strong square shoulders, the turbaned head bowed before the wind, outlined in the faint glimmer of starlight.

  Did he know where the Valley of the Hawk was?

  She certainly didn’t.

  “Can you get yourself close to where the road runs out of the hills onto the rangeland? Don’t show yourself on the road but hole up where you can watch it. Jethan will show himself there—”

  “I’ll what?” He drew rein, let his camel fall back to keep pace beside hers. “Who are you talking to? What are you saying I’ll do?”

  He must know that for Shaldis to reply—especially as exhausted as she was—would cause her to lose the image in the crystal, possibly past recovery; or at least he should have known. Even her flash of anger at him was dangerous, like taking her eyes off a single goose in a flock if she hoped to find it again.

  “Can you come?” Foxfire sounded desperately forlorn. Terrified, too, thought Shaldis, and well she should be.

  We’re trying to hold it, Pomegranate had said.

  And the images of the bird-chewed bodies in the lanes of Three Wells, the tiny picture of far-off carnage in her crystal when she’d looked at the camp of the guards who’d been left there. Dear gods, had anyone gotten Foursie and Twinkle out of her grandfather’s house? Had anyone gotten her mother away or Tjagan’s children?

  Her voice shook with the effort to keep it steady and cheerful. “I’ll come if I can,” she said. “I’ll send others if I can, the moment I can—I probably won’t reach the city till sunset tomorrow, and at sunrise after that, the king goes to his consecration.”

  If the city is still standing, she thought. If anyone remains there alive to care.

  “And if the king fails,” whispered Foxfire, “my father will be king. And then there will be no escape for me. Ever.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Don’t be stupid,” said Jethan when Shaldis told him what she wanted him to do.

  “Don’t you be stupid,” retorted Shaldis, wondering why she’d ever cared enough about this stubborn man’s feelings to take such pains about where he thought she’d slept. “The king’s life depends on you getting Foxfire safe to the city.”

  “The king’s life also depends on you getting safe to the city—”

  “And you think I won’t, without you standing guard over me?” If they’d both been standing on the ground she’d have turned and stalked away in a huff, but since they rode side by side on swaying camels her movements were limited.

  He made no reply to that, but his upper lip seemed to lengthen as his mouth pressed into a line of disapproval. He saw his duty, she thought furiously, and he was going to do it come death and destruction.

  “She’s better than I am,” said Shaldis softly, the admission like a fishhook in her flesh. Not that Foxfire was better, but that a girl younger than she had had that greater power given her.

  Jethan said, “I don’t believe that.”

  “Whether she has as much power as I do or not,” said Shaldis, “she’s the one who knows the spells that will save the king. I don’t. You have to go to her, to keep her from falling into her grandmother’s hands again. To keep her from falling into Mohrvine’s hands. You have to.”

  He looked aside for a few moments, his face like stone in the ragged frame of his veils.

  He knows I’m right, she thought, a
nd won’t admit it. Doesn’t think I can look after myself. How dare he, after I turned aside the winds, after I tracked the Crafty woman and her teyn for three days out into the desert? How dare he think I can’t take care of myself?

  “Take care of yourself, then,” he said, as if he’d heard her thoughts, and turned back to meet her indignant eyes. “I don’t mean fight off wolves and bandits and lake monsters and tribes of ravening teyn. I know you can do all that, or could, if you weren’t so tired you’re falling out of the saddle. I mean rest when you need it. Sleep if you can. You push yourself too hard. Why do you think I—?”

  He stopped himself mid-sentence, lips closing on whatever he was going to say. His face in dust and starlight had a remote harshness to it, as if, in weariness, he had passed somewhere beyond human emotion.

  “If things are as bad as they seem to be in the city, you’ll need your strength when you get there. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

  Without waiting for a reply he tapped his camel’s shoulder with the stick and moved away from her, the beast and the remount lengthening their strides, like long-legged wading birds through the streaming dust along the ground.

  Shaldis watched those dark, swaying shapes for a long while as they retreated through the starlight toward the distant hills.

  She pushed on through the night, and on into the deathly silent stillness of the following day alone. Toward morning, with the last of the storm dying to whispers, she dropped into uncontrollable sleep, and only the camel saddle kept her from falling long enough for the jerk of sliding sideways to wake her. She stopped after that and slept for nearly two hours in a little camp ringed with whatever ward spells she still had energy to write. Waking, she summoned the image of her grandfather’s house in Sleeping Worms Street and saw only a confusion of images: one of a house burning—but not her grandfather’s house—and another of her grandfather’s house with blood running from the windows and the door transformed into a mouth that grinned and spoke unknown words.

  Attempts to view the familiar streets of the Bazaar District yielded tangled images of alleyways she had never seen in all her years, fading into the sight of familiar streets with men and women racing about in the duned dust of yesterday’s storm or fighting one another bloodily in the doorways. The king’s red-clothed soldiers were there, and the constables of the city guards: she thought she glimpsed Commander Bax striding among them in the square before the Grand Bazaar, shouting orders.

  Neither Moth nor Pebble nor Pomegranate responded to her pleas to look into their scrying tools, not much to her surprise.

  Though she knew it was idiotic to suppose that Jethan was more than a quarter of the way to the northern road leading into the Dead Hills, she summoned his image anyway and saw him riding fast and steadily through the broken brown emptiness under the glare of morning sun. Why this sight comforted her she didn’t know, but it did. Over the six months she’d known him, she’d come to value that big, quiet man whom nothing could disconcert.

  Maybe it was because, as he had said about animals, he acted rather than spoke.

  She ate a little, drank some water, and rode on. When she stopped at noon, unwillingly recalling Jethan’s instructions—only they’d sounded more like orders—the images she was able to summon were no less frightening and no less ambiguous. If what she saw in her crystal was true—and she reminded herself desperately that it might not be—fires and riot were spreading through the Bazaar District, with the brain-infected mad roving the streets, attacking whomever they met, and looters from the Slaughterhouse slums moving in to steal what they could. She saw the city guards fighting with men who, like the howling man who’d attacked her in Little Hyacinth Lane, seemed unaware of their hurts. Saw, too, city guards emerging from houses as mad as those who’d slept there in the previous haunted night.

  I have to get back, she thought desperately. I have to get back.

  She was only once able to look inside her own house, and the carnage she saw there she hoped was only the Dream Eater’s illusion. Where her three Raven sisters were she did not know, but sometimes she saw ward signs new marked on house walls, signs that incorporated formulae that she recognized from her studies of ancient tombs (they must have contacted Rachnis!)—and in many places she saw where broken fragments of mirrors and glass had been wedged into window frames or doorsills.

  Through the whole of the night and the morning, she had felt the draw of their energies on her, calling her magic through the Sigil of Sisterhood, to assist their own waning strength.

  She did not think she would be able to sleep, but to her surprise she did, and dreamed of Foxfire, asleep in a shallow cave in some rocks, with a white-furred old jenny teyn sitting beside her, rocking in silence.

  Riding through the Dead Hills in the stifling late afternoon, she saw smoke rising in the west, where the Yellow City lay. Coming out of the hills’ shadow into the final fading of evening light she saw the red-gold flames licking up above the city wall. Shaldis cursed and whacked her camel with a quirt—encouragement that got her only a grumbling moan and an infinitesimal quickening of its stride.

  Her hand closed around the obsidian amulet. Puahale. Puahale, my sister, if you can raise even as much power as would fill an orchid’s heart like dew, send it to me, send it to us. Send it to this amulet.

  Above the city walls, above the shrunken azure waters of the Lake of the Sun, the moon’s thin crescent hung. As she rode toward the city Shaldis fixed her eyes on that great shape in the sky, conscious of its wasting as she’d been conscious of it for three days in the desert.

  Power was more difficult to call from the waning moon, Puahale had said. But Puahale had taught her the words, the meditation to do so, and she called upon them now, as the Sun Mages had once called upon the sun’s. She had no idea if she was doing it right, but a sense of comfort and strength filled her heart. She drank from the depleted waterskin, settled into the swaying of the camel, and remembered the pounding, steady pulse of the sea.

  From that eternal pulse, too, she called power, as she’d once called power from the sun below the horizon, and felt strength flow into her veins.

  Her scrying that afternoon had told her to avoid the Slaughterhouse District, so she swung lakeward and came to the city’s southern gate beside the basin of the Fish-market canal. Only a short length of street separated the gate square from the greater square before the Grand Bazaar, and through the open gate she could see the flames, the running shapes of the red-clothed city guards. The shouting carried to her with the reek of smoke, of burning wood and flesh. She left the camels tied among the dusty poplars on the bank of the canal—Tulik would skin her if they got stolen but she was past caring—and ran through the gate, stumbling with weariness and cramp.

  The Grand Bazaar was in flames. Its doors, usually locked at sunset, stood open; men and women—children, too—in the grubby rags of the Slaughterhouse District’s disreputable denizens ran in and out, carrying away bolts of silk and handfuls of gold and silver chains. At least a dozen lay sprawled on the flagstones of the square, the arrows of the city guards in their backs and not a fragment of loot still in their lifeless hands. Their friends and neighbors had relieved them of it the minute the coast was clear, probably before they’d stopped twitching. Others ran in and out, too, screaming, wild-eyed—Shaldis’s heart twisted in her chest as she recognized her own friends and neighbors, people she’d known in her childhood on Sleeping Worms Street or in the alleyways around it. Once she thought she saw Cook from her grandfather’s house, but her face was so distorted—as if the bones were beginning to fall in—and so covered with soot, filth, and blood that it was hard to tell.

  “Oh, no, you don’t, boy!” A guard caught her arm as she tried to run into the smoke-clogged canyon of Sleeping Worms Street. “You get the hell— Miss?” It was Cosk, Jethan’s friend from the palace barrack.

  Shaldis realized she was still in boy’s garb, filthy and sand covered from the desert. He’d probably
taken her for a looter.

  “I have to get in there. My family’s in there.”

  “Nobody can get in there. They get lost, two feet in, even the ones who’re from this district. They’re looking for you, miss. Bax!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Commander!”

  A guard came toward them, red clothing torn and face and hair black with filth. Only when he got close did Shaldis recognize the pale-blue eyes, the glints of white beneath the soot and grime of his hair, as belonging to the commander of the guards.

  Knowing Bax, she expected his first words to be Where the hell have you been? But the commander only gripped her shoulder hard enough to break it. “Thank the gods. It’s coming from your grandfather’s house—nobody can get near there. This morning it seemed the other ladies had it in check—they had a perimeter up, spells and broken glass.”

  “I know.” She looked around her for Pomegranate and the others. Since Bax’s command post seemed to still be in the Bazaar Square, they had to be close by.

  “Damndest thing I ever saw.” Bax wiped some of the grime from his face, the soot reduced to mud by blood and sweat. “I thought the rioting would spread to the rest of the city, but it’s only the thieves from the Slaughterhouse District and those who’re mad from this—this thing. Half the city’s already flocking to the Sealed Temples. Just standing there, waiting. As if they expect the gods to come down and deal with this situation when they’ve finished with the king.”

  “Has Jethan come in?” demanded Shaldis, hoping against hope though she knew they couldn’t reasonably reach the city before her. “Jethan and Foxfire?” The last time she’d scried for them had been hours ago and in her weariness it was taking her longer and longer to get an image. Even that little energy, she was increasingly aware, would be taken away from what she knew was a battle ahead.