“Foxfire?” The blue eyes slitted. “Mohrvine’s girl? No.”
They might have been pursued. They might have been forced to abandon the camels, to hide.
“Get as many men as you can spare out looking for them where the northern road comes in from the Dead Hills. They may be pursued—they’ll be hiding.”
“As many men as I can spare?” Bax flung out his arm in wild rage. “That’d be the one who’s still back at the barracks with an infected toenail, and I’ve been thinking of sending for him. At sunset tonight the madmen started coming past the ladies’ barricade, and that mist—that green light—started flowing in streets where it hadn’t been before. What’ll happen in this city before daylight—”
“Please!” Shaldis caught his sleeve as he started to turn away. “Commander, please!” And lowering her voice, she whispered, “She can save the king.”
He turned back. His voice was a murmur under the shouting as creatures burst out of the bazaar, blackened things that had once been human, crawling, shambling, even as they died scratching at the guards. “Mohrvine’s daughter?”
Shaldis nodded.
“The witch?”
“The lady of power,” said Shaldis. “Yes.”
“Cosk!” Bax’s voice rose to a bellow. “Get twenty men and get out to the north road!”
“Twenty?”
“Twenty, same as your fingers and toes. If I wanted to argue I’d have stayed with my wife. Camels and horses. You’re looking for Jethan and a girl and you’d better be ready for trouble. Now go!”
Hands seized Shaldis from behind as Bax ran to join his men; it was Pomegranate. “You were right about the glass, child! But it got stronger, as it’s been taking the living. It slipped out again. . . .”
“We found obsidian in the Citadel storerooms,” panted Kylin, filthy and bloodied like everyone else, standing between Pomegranate, Hiero the Citadel cook, and old Yanrid the crystalmaster, the only one of the master mages young and spry enough to go running through the night carrying a couple of sackfuls of black volcanic glass. “It’s expensive! It comes all the way from Tewash Oasis. Most of it’s virgin—there aren’t many spells that use it.”
“I hope you separated out the stuff that had been used?” Though she was virtually certain that the residues of old spells on glass had failed along with everything else, the Dreamshadow might still have some unknown ability to use it. Better not to take chances. And when they nodded—and Pebble and Moth came running up, tattered and exhausted—she went on, “Glass will hold it—glass will absorb it, but not as strongly as obsidian. It can’t escape from obsidian.” She took the hands of Pomegranate and Moth, and Pebble closed the circle of four. The men who had been Sun Mages stood back, looking on, and for one instant in Yanrid’s eyes Shaldis saw the bitter grief of regret.
“These are the spells that will drive the Dreamshadow into obsidian,” she said softly. Closing her eyes, she whispered the words and formed up the rites of focus with her thoughts, recalling what Puahale had told her. “Source your power from the moon, from the moon’s last night. And from this.” She took the obsidian amulet from her neck and hung it around Pomegranate’s.
The old woman’s eyes met hers, startled and shocked. “Who is she?” she asked, and Shaldis knew Pomegranate felt the power that the priestess of the moon and the sea was sending to the enchanted fragment of black glass.
“Puahale is her name. She’s one of us, one of our circle. Start at the perimeter, in a triangle around the infected area, and trap it as you work inward, into those pieces Kylin has. After this is all done we can use the old spells to bring the remains of the Dreamshadow out of the walls, bury all this in the desert surrounded by the old spells, worked with new magic, to seal it up forever.”
“Triangle?” said Pomegranate. “And where are you going?”
Shaldis said, “Home.”
FORTY-NINE
Cosk had been right when he’d said that even guards raised in Sleeping Worms Street were getting lost a yard from its mouth. Two of those who’d tried to get to the house of Shaldeth before her had carried balls of twine that they played out behind them, to guide them back should they become confused in the tangled illusions of dream alleys and dream courts that manifested themselves along the way. Bax gave her twine as well, taken from a looted shop. Shaldis found both previous balls of twine around the first turning of the street, one still clutched in the hands of the guard, hacked to death in a pool of blood.
She took the dead guard’s knife and sword, to add to the short sword and the spear Bax had given her. The silence in Sleeping Worms Street was more frightening than the din in the square behind her. Smoke hung thick between the high stuccoed walls and poured from the latticed windows on the upper floors of the houses on either side. Dust curtained the air, hanging like salt in water, as if the Dreamshadow were able to draw it up from the dunes the storm had left against every wall. It mixed with the smoke and completely negated her ability to see in darkness.
Men and women—children, too—lay sprawled in those waist-high drifts of dust and sand, killed by those whose minds the Dreamshadow had filled with its ancient illusions of terror, violence, pain. She saw one dead man lying facedown, wearing a tunic she recognized as her uncle Tjagan’s. Once a man in the red tunic of the city guard threw himself screaming out of an open house door at Shaldis, hacking at her with his sword. Shaldis held him off on the end of her spear, but he drove himself halfway up its shaft trying to get to her before he finally died. Sickened, trembling, she took several minutes to work the body off the spear shaft, and as she did she could see the flesh and bones blackening and shrinking as the mindless, elemental spirit that had infected it devoured the meat within the skin.
Yet others she’d seen had seemed completely whole, as Puahale had said. Looking down at the mummifying corpse, she wondered what made the difference.
When she looked up she found herself in completely unfamiliar streets, narrow alleyways branching in all directions, choked now not with dust but with vines and lush weeds whose smell came to her thick and green.
Whose dream had that been? she wondered. Whose memory, sucked out of a decaying brain within some ancient tomb? She shut her eyes and closed her hand around the obsidian knife Puahale had given her, pressing the sharp edge into her flesh, and summoned in her heart the beating of the sea.
She opened her eyes to darkness again, to dust and smoke and the familiar twists of Sleeping Worms Street. Green light glimmered in the windows of every house along the way. She paused to bury fragments of glass in the heaped sand along the walls, with the whispered incantation Puahale had taught her. At least, she hoped, she could keep the street behind her clear and safe for a retreat and with luck make sure the Dreamshadow wouldn’t seep after her and take her from behind.
The door of her own house stood open, and stairs ascended to blackness. She could hear her father’s voice singing in the dark.
Shaldis took a deep breath, touched the obsidian knife again, and took a firmer grip on the blood-sticky haft of the spear. The stair curved right as if ascending a tower; she could see nothing of its true course, the one she knew existed in real life. She closed her eyes, summoned up all the power she could call into her heart, to slowly return her perception to reality. The body of a woman in a servant’s dress lay at the top, so withered and deformed that she couldn’t make out who it was—Six Flower, maybe. Again she placed fragments of glass to guard the path behind her, hating to take the time—and even the small outlay of energy they cost—but knowing she must.
She called out, “Mama? Papa? Aunt Apricot?”
She listened. Listened deep into the house she knew so well.
The crackle of fire, the smell of smoke. The kitchen was burning, she thought, but the fire was old and most of the damage already done. Eerie sounds, sounds she knew were as illusory as the extra doors that kept appearing in the walls as she edged along the gallery over the first court; moans and cries an
d the sweet jingling of alien music. Green mist flowed suddenly from beneath one of the doors before her, her father’s room.
Heartsick with dread, she backed a half-dozen paces, knelt, and laid a tiny flake of obsidian on the tiled gallery floor, traced around it the signs Puahale had shown her, signs Shaldis had learned with the quick trained memory from two long years of drilling with the Sun Mages. The mist curled away like a live thing, started to flow along the gallery away from her.
No you don’t, you glowy bastard. I want to know where you are.
She repeated the spell, calling on the strength of the sea and the strength of the moon in the hours of its death. Strength went out of her like blood from a wound, and she put forth her will again. More green smoke flowed along the gallery floor, the luminescence of it bright enough now that she could have read by it.
As it glowed brighter she felt it pull against her, and she repeated the words of the spell: “Lolo ano ti, ti, lolo walana.” Black doors into black, black earth where you come from.
She put her strength into the old formulae that she had written around the glistening little chunk of shiny black glass, the formulae that had been marked on the walls of every tomb, automatically, along with pious wishes for the safe passage of the dead: the Sigil of Earth, the Sigil of Binding, the nearly forgotten Sigil of the Eaters of Dreams.
Weakness filled her, as her power went into the obsidian, as if she were trying to lift a lead chest bolted to the floor. Then in its wake, like a whispered counterspell, despair. The grief of those who had lost everything, the grief of those who understood that all life ended, that all light would fail.
Lolo ano ti, you filthy green nothingness. I don’t care if I’m going to die one day. Lolo walana, and the sea will beat on the shores though none here has ever heard its sound. The power is there.
Slowly, slowly, with a sensation as if coiled wire were being pulled out of the muscle of her heart, she saw the green mist flow into the obsidian, into the annealed essence of the heart of the earth. Flow in and be trapped.
It wasn’t like fighting another wizard, not even like struggling against the power of a djinn. She felt the heaped-up dreams of good and evil people, the confused rages and sorrows of their dying hearts, and the petty malice and greed they might have all their lives suppressed; felt, behind those chaotic shrieks of pain and despair, the raw magic that wizards of the suppressed Black Cult had once distilled from the decaying brains of the dead. Glimmeringly, she felt the knowledge of those Black Cult wizards themselves, trapped and absorbed by the Dreamshadow, the Eater of Dreams, and turned against her. But if the Dreamshadow itself had any thought, any self, any awareness behind the glamour of those dreams, she could not feel it. Only the mindless malice of a carnivorous worm, like water polluted by a thousand poisons. She clung to the wall, feeling as if some enormous river of lightning were being sucked from the distant sea through her body and poured out at the dead green that glowed before her, forcing it into the volcanic glass: as if she were no more than a focus, a window through which flowed the power of the moon and the sea.
When the last of the green mist disappeared Shaldis barely had the strength to stagger forward and make the final signs to close the circle around the obsidian flake. Her hands were shaking and her face and hair soaked with sweat. Ordinary magic, she knew, the magic she had used before, sourced from the sun or the earth, would never have worked against the Dreamshadow’s deep-founded power. So tired was she that she wondered how long this newer strength would last. She felt faint and knew that if she passed out she’d never wake up—and even if she did, Jethan would give her That Look and put on airs about what women weren’t strong enough to do.
The mist within the house was caught within the obsidian, but she felt already that more were nearby. The same creature? An identical one? Did it make a difference? She didn’t know, but knew she’d have to be quick.
She didn’t have the strength to go through that again.
Her voice was a bare croak. “Papa?”
He had ceased singing. She pushed open the door of his room and saw him sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark. His eyes were open, but he gave no sign that he saw her. “Papa?”
When he still made neither move nor sound she drew the obsidian knife from her belt, pulled his shirt open and made slits in his chest and arms, and used her finger to draw the patterns in the blood. He hadn’t begun to deform, to be consumed from within, at least. He gasped as the blood ran down, blinked and tried to focus his eyes on her in the threads of yellow firelight that leaked through the windows. “Old One?”
“Old One!” The cry from the door made her turn. Foursie and Twinkle came running in, stumbling over each other, their long hair hanging over the ragged shirts that were their only garments; faces, filthy and streaked with tears, turned up toward her.
They clutched her, sobbing, clinging. “Oldflower hid us—Mama’s gone crazy—Cook ran away screaming. . . .” And more incoherent stammerings of a day and a night of terror.
Their father turned his head, brows pulling down in dazed pain. “Foursie?” He spoke as if his mouth were numb.
Shaldis took her sister’s hands, wrapped them around the twine that still trailed from her belt. “Foursie, Twinkle, this will lead you out of the house and away to safety. Take Papa with you. Don’t let go of his hands, and whatever you do, don’t let go of the string. Everything around you will try to make you but don’t let go. All right? Can you do that?”
Foursie caught back her sob and wiped her eyes. “Uh-huh. If you can get in here, we can get back.”
“Old One,” whispered Twinkle desperately, “we’re hungry.”
“They’ll give you food and water when they get you out of the square, sweetheart. That green mist, the green light . . .”
“Oldflower said it was the Bad-Luck Shadow. It’s all over the house. She said don’t let it touch us.”
“Don’t,” said Shaldis. “It is the Bad-Luck Shadow. Don’t let it get near you. Where’s Tulik? And Mama? And Oldflower and the others?”
“Up in your attic,” whispered Foursie. “Where you used to hide from Grandpapa.”
Shaldis got their father to his feet, pressed his cold, thin hands into those of his younger daughters. “Go,” she said. “And hurry.” There was no knowing how long the wards she’d put on the glass down in the street would hold, and she could already feel the presence of more Dreamshadow elsewhere in the house.
In her grandfather’s bedroom, she thought.
Flowing out of the iridescent glass dream-trap that had been in an ancient, unprotected tomb. Glass that had been spelled to hold dead men’s dreams.
If she waited and sought the rest of her family in this madhouse, it would grow stronger yet.
She picked up her spear, walked through the dormitory of the maids and down the stairs to cross the kitchen court, for the gallery was burned and the court itself filled with smoldering debris. Beyond lay the silent, sand-filled ruin of her grandfather’s garden.
A woman was singing. Her mother? Aunt Apricot? Shaldis hesitated, almost turning aside to look for her, but from the windows of her grandfather’s room she saw the faint glow of green light beginning to strengthen.
She tried to call up the memory of the sea, the power of the moon. But the moon had long ago set, on the last day of its brief life, and Shaldis had not the training to locate it as she could the sun. Her body felt empty and cold, as if the very marrow of her bones had been scraped out. She leaned on the spear shaft for support. In the heart of her home, it seemed to her that this was as it had always been in her childhood: filled with smoke and sand, with dark and terror, and she stood there alone.
Gathering strength to confront her grandfather and the nameless thing that filled his mind.
Jethan, she thought, you’re right. I can do this alone—but I’d rather you were here at my back. Or by my side.
Feeling a strange and enormous calm at the thought of his friendship, Sha
ldis climbed the stair and walked down the gallery to the old man’s room.
Idiot, she thought as she walked. Selfish, self-satisfied idiot. The teyn knew it was deadly and tried to get it away from you. And you called me in, claiming your life needed protecting, when what you really wanted to protect was this thing that gave you the sweetest dreams, the sweetest illusions, that your mind had ever known.
Other people’s dreams, the dreams of those who’d actually led lives that gave them joy. Who hadn’t spent their precious days wresting money from others and then trying to keep everyone in their proper places so the money wouldn’t wander away. Your life was so joyless you had nothing from which to build sweet dreams of your own.
Were the dreams so all consuming when Grandfather first got the glass ball from Noyad? Probably not. Their strength grew as he let them into his living brain, she thought, night after night. And those dreams called the Dreamshadow from the tombs where it hid, drawing it into the city at last and bringing him dreams a thousand times sweeter still.
She wondered if it was his realization of what he’d done to protect it—of strangling Nettleflower when he caught her conspiring to steal it—that had broken his last link with the pain of the waking world. The men who had such dream-traps were ensnared by the dreams within them, Puahale had said, until they’d rather dream than do anything else. Had that final shock of seeing what he was becoming driven him back to the solitude of his room and the comfort of other people’s dreams?
And Tulik covered the whole thing up rather than have the other merchants take away from him the power that was so close to his hands.
She wanted to take them both and knock their heads together.
But she had to save their lives first.
If she could.
In the darkness there were a hundred doors along the gallery where her grandfather’s room was, all the doors alike. Looking down over the rail into the garden, Shaldis could see, not the sand-drifted trees and the fountain in its covering of boards and straw mats, but a patterned marble floor lit by a thousand lamps, where couples made love on beds of silk and the scattered petals of roses. She could smell the drifts of sweetness and sandalwood and salt, could hear the jingling of the bells the women wore in their oiled hair.
Circle of the Moon Page 41