Circle Of The Moon Part 6

He opened his mouth on an unconsidered retort, then closed it and regarded her with eyes whose light jewellike blueness seemed brighter in the sunburned dark of his face.

She added, "I haven't seen them in two years. I wish I could go another two. Or twelve. Or twenty-four."

He gave the matter grave consideration. Shaldis had seen him smile only on rare occasions, as if his face were unused to the exercise. Then he asked, "All of them?"

She thought of the fragmentary music of her mother's laughter; of Foursie, growing leggy and gawky on the threshold of adolescence; of Twinkle, who'd been so fragile as a child. She was aware that her shoulders relaxed; saw the reflection of the change in Jethan's eyes.

"I haven't seen my family in five years," he said in a quiet voice. "I miss even the horrible ones."

"You're a man." The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them: the accusation and the bitter taste of old despairs.

He had a narrow face that seemed to have been formed by and for disapproval of every innovation to the way things were done in his village. But the look in his blue eyes, for one instant, was simply sad, as if at the recollection of burdens s.h.i.+rked: of a man's part not properly played in some desolate farm village in the far north.

But he only bowed to her and walked away across the sunny green of the rose garden.

"Are you all right, dear?" Summerchild came hurrying down the gravel path among the jasmine to her-she must have heard their voices from the pavilion's terrace. She looked, as usual, breathtaking, though the silk-fine, pale blue linen of her dress was unornamented by anything save the slim straightness of her carriage. When she saw Shaldis was alone she unwound her veils, managing to make them drape in a pleasing pattern over her shoulders. Had her life depended on it Shaldis had never been able to make veils look like anything but was.h.i.+ng hung on a line. "Is all well with your family? You said there was trouble there." She slipped an arm around the tall girl's waist.

"There is," said Shaldis. "How bad I don't know, but . . . Have the others come?" Summerchild had told her, through the crystal, that she'd sent for Pebble and Moth, and for Pomegranate as well from the north.

"Not yet. The king's here, that's all. We'd rather wait till the other two arrive before going into what happened at the council, if you haven't heard the news being shouted in the streets on your way over."

Shaldis shook her head, though now that she thought back on it, there had been more men and women than usual, running from stall to stall in the vegetable market in the Bazaar Square, and thicker crowds than one would normally see this late in the morning, milling in the Golden Court. "Is the king all right?" she asked worriedly as Summerchild led her through a pergola of feathery wisteria to the pavilion's door.

"For the moment, yes, though there is trouble ahead. Tell me what happened to your family."

The lower floor of the Summer Pavilion-and of nearly every one of the dozens of similar structures scattered about the rambling gardens-was divided into a reception chamber, whose latticed shade walls had already been put up against the growing heat of morning, and a dining room, with jewellike private baths tucked away among the pepper trees of the garden and a tiny kitchen built as a sort of annex behind. A stairway, hidden by carved screens, led to the bedchamber above and to the terrace that caught the sweet breezes of the lake. Summerchild led Shaldis to the divan in the reception chamber and sat beside her, pouring out lemonade from a stone cooler.

She listened in silence as Shaldis told her first of her dream of strange sounds and strange scents and of a woman's voice pleading for help, and then of the attempt on her grandfather's life. "So I don't know if I've suddenly crossed the path of one, or two, Crafty women unknown to any of us," she concluded. "The magic I felt in the door of his room didn't feel like Red Silk's, though I can't be sure. Inside the room . . . I can't describe exactly what I felt. A very strange magic, ugly. A sense of something sticky. And deadly. Hidden away, waiting, like a poisonous spider under a divan cus.h.i.+on. Just waiting for you to sit down."

"But recent?"

"Oh, yes. Well, you know that it isn't just the magic of the wizards that's failing. It's the magic that they did, the magic that they put into things, like ward signs and the fear spells on the compounds of the teyn. Which my grandfather thinks I should know how to renew," she added distastefully. "I don't think I've ever been so thankful for not being able to make a spell work. I kept getting the feeling that if he could, he'd hire me out to his friends. Or lend me, in exchange for their goodwill."

"At least Cattail gets to keep the money people pay for her services," mused Summerchild, and Shaldis raised her brows. She hadn't thought of it that way. "And, yes, Pomegranate told me of some rather alarming complications of failed ward signs. This woman who was calling you . . . you weren't able to reach her in the crystal?"

Shaldis shook her head. "I mean to try again from the scrying chamber in the Citadel. According to Yanrid, back in the days before magic changed, there were some of the alien wizards who could be contacted only through crystals, others only through water or only through ink. He said he thought that was because their magic was sourced differently from ours. And, with those wizards, adepts had to learn their languages; they were taught at the Citadel for hundreds of years. I could hear this woman speaking in another tongue, but because it was a dream I understood what she said."

"Did her language sound like one that was taught?"

"Not even remotely. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't understand a word she was saying if I was awake. You know what it's like, hearing people speak in dreams."

"And you're sure it wasn't just a dream?"

"Absolutely. As certain as I'm speaking to you now. Yanrid used to set me to watch the ink bowls-as a punishment, I thought at the time, or to keep me out of the way. But I prayed, just once, to see one of them, to see some mage from another land, another place. He'd tell us about them-Yanrid would-outlander wizards from realms where everything was locked in ice, he said, where even the stars were different. Wizards whose skin was black or brown, or whose faces were covered with hair like the teyn. Wizards who'd learned our language the same way we learned theirs, over lifetimes."

She folded her hands around the alabaster cup, thinking of the mages of the Citadel who'd become friends with those alien wizards over the years. Who'd traded news of their families, their kings, their studies of the skies.

Did their Citadels, too, stand empty now? Did they work as librarians or secretaries or teachers, to feed themselves?

Did they kill themselves, as at least one mage here had?

Did they envy and hate the women whose powers had blossomed in the time of the mages' withering?

Power no longer flows from their hands. . . .

"We have to find her," she said softly. "We have to find them both."

"Sooner than you know," Summerchild replied.

And her soft words were answered by the light chatter of voices from the garden and the glimpse of pink silk and sun-paled sensible blue and brown among the leaves. Moth's laugh came sweet and childlike: once over her initial agonizing shyness, the seventeen-year-old concubine of a silk-merchant's son had proved to be as good-hearted, as undemanding, and as uneducated as any other laborer's daughter sold for her beauty. When Pebble had made her way to Summerchild's pavilion almost a year ago, she'd been twenty-three, old for a girl still living in her father's house, but the placid housekeeper for the widowed contractor and caretaker of her half-dozen younger brothers and sisters. Large boned and a little clumsy looking, she'd begun to use her power healing the strained muscles and occasional colics of her father's oxen, horses, and teyn; alone of the Raven sisters, she seemed to have the gift of consistent and powerful healing, though she could seldom describe how it was worked.

Shaldis and Summerchild rose to greet them, the soft little bundle of concubine and the big, slow, fair girl who smelled of soap and milk. The king came downstairs as well. Shaldis had often had occasion to marvel at the big man's tactful good manners in disappearing when she needed to speak to Summerchild alone-and by some signal Shaldis couldn't detect, sent word to the main palace kitchen. In a very few minutes Geb, the king's fat little chamberlain, appeared with slaves, food, freshly cooled lemonade, and carved boxwood caddies of coffee, sugar, and tea. Shaldis thought that under the extravagancies of his cosmetics His Majesty looked badly shaken up. She saw, too, how Geb watched him under his painted eyelids.

Whatever was wrong, even the servants knew of it.

So did Moth and Pebble. "You really gonna have to swim across a pool of crocodiles, Majesty?" demanded the little concubine, finis.h.i.+ng her Sun in Splendor salaam and falling like a starving woman upon the quail and couscous before the servants were properly out of the room.

"It certainly looks that way."

Shaldis said, "What?" and the moment the servants were well and truly gone-she could hear Geb clucking at them not to linger, all the way down the garden's gravel paths-Summerchild told what Lord Akarian had set into motion in the council pavilion and the horrifying facts that Hathmar and the others had subsequently revealed.

"d.a.m.n it," Shaldis cried when the favorite's narrative was done. "I thought Hathmar was just testing me on ward spells, when they took me through all those wards against crocodiles and snakes. Because they really do have a problem with the crocodiles in the fields along the lakefront, you know, and along the Fishmarket Ca.n.a.l, especially with the night carnival going on there till nearly dawn. I've heard of them crawling all the way inland to the Slaughterhouse District, and nothing Hathmar showed me seemed to work when I did it."

"If I could come up with a snake ward I'd sure be the richest kitten in the street," added Moth. She licked honey from a baba cake off her hennaed fingers and readjusted a jade pin in her sable coils of hair. "I hear Cattail claims she got one, but me, I think it's just red pepper dust, like you do for ants. I ain't never heard it worked."

Summerchild and the king traded a glance. "We should prefer," said His Majesty slowly, "that Mistress Cattail be kept out of this for the time being, unless one or the other of you knows for a fact that she can ward against crocodiles or snakes or can undo the effects of poison at a distance and without knowing what the poison is. Her discretion cannot be relied upon, and discretion is of the utmost importance in this matter."

Shaldis saw Moth's huge brown eyes flick knowingly around the chamber, then slide sidelong in unspoken observation to Pebble: neither Foxfire nor Red Silk were present.

"It is an article of faith," the king went on, gathering his flame-silk robes to sink cross-legged to the divan beside his favorite, "among the people of the city, and particularly among the villages, that the king is selected for his position by the G.o.ds. I'm sure every member of the great houses-every lord who can command the lesser sheikhs and clan lords and village councils to provide him fighting men-guesses that it's probably magic. But they don't know for certain. And the people want it to be the G.o.ds, not simply one more tool of power that any rich man can buy."

He took the coffee cup Summerchild offered him with a bow of thanks, but Shaldis could see he was barely aware of making the gesture. He didn't drink, only turned the delicate nacre and gold cup in his plump, jeweled hands.

"There's no reason, you know, for people to follow the king, except that he is chosen by the G.o.ds. In the days when the Zali ruled around the lakes of the Sun and the Moon, the great lords and landchiefs were in fact kings: the Sarn around the Lake of Roses, the Jamornid in the north. And there was chaos, men rising up in rebellion constantly-not that it mattered a great deal then, except perhaps to the warriors killed in battle. It rained reliably every winter, even far out onto what is now the desert, and the most the mages had to do was keep the teyn in line. The houses that lasted were the ones who got the priests on their sides, not the mages; the houses whose lords were adopted by the G.o.ds. Even at their most powerful, people never really trusted mages. It is to the G.o.ds that people look for comfort and care."

"But it is the G.o.ds who look after us," said Pebble timidly. "Isn't it?"

"It is indeed," replied the king. "And it is the G.o.ds who look after the realm-and the lives of everyone in the Valley of the Seven Lakes-by allowing magic, instead of dying, to pa.s.s to new bearers. Bearers whom I hope will a.s.sist me in holding the realm together until we can either get the aqueduct built or establish a large enough group of Raven sisters who are capable of bringing the rains."

He folded his hands, the topazes of his many rings flas.h.i.+ng even in the pavilion's shady cool. Under eyelids tinted gold and bronze and rimmed with kohl, his hazel eyes were deadly earnest. "Should I die, and should my brother-for whatever reason-not achieve the consecration of the Veiled G.o.ds, the lords of the Sealed Temples who have guarded kings since the days of the Zali, I think that the realm will break apart very quickly. Not only will the armies of each landchief turn against those of other land-chiefs rather than against our common enemies the nomad raiders from the desert, but each landchief will seek to hire and control as many Crafty women as he can. Inevitably, that will mean a division in the force of whatever magic we are trying to muster for the summoning of rain."

The women looked at one another again, again silently counting.

n.o.body needed a second hand for their calculations.

"What about the djinni?" asked Moth, when Pebble, still looking very troubled, did not speak. The young concubine looked across at Shaldis, who had been the last person known to speak to a djinn. "I know they mostly disappeared, but isn't there one still hid out in that temple in the Slaughterhouse District? The one everybody thought was a G.o.d?"

"He's still there." Shaldis spoke hesitantly, and s.h.i.+vered at the recollection of her visions of Naruansich, the Sunflash Prince, the foul thing that clung to the gold-sheathed crystal of an ancient spirit trap, feeding on the energies of slaughtered animals and squeezing forth from those energies a tainted and uncertain magic.

"Can you talk him into helping us?"

She thought about it for a time, wondering how or if it could be done, and at what cost. Then she shook her head. "I don't think so. He was three quarters mad when I encountered him-when I went into the crystal matrices of the statue's heart-and the blood and death he was living on were further twisting what was left of his mind. I've been into that temple at least a dozen times since then, sometimes to draw him out with a blood sacrifice and sometimes just trying to communicate through the circles that worked before. Nothing happens."

The brooding darkness of the temple had the taste in her mind of some vile dream. The image of the hawk-headed war G.o.d, unthinkably old: crystal wrapped in gold and ringed with three bands of iron.

And within that image, the bloodied labyrinth of the djinn's mind, created with magic and maintained with the magic that burns on the threshold between life and death.

Maybe, she thought, if she truly wanted to return to that place, if she truly wanted with all her heart to go back into that insane consciousness that existed-that could exist-only in magic . . .

But she didn't.

And she couldn't make herself truly want to return.

"He's there," she concluded softly. "And he's aware of me. I know it. But he will not speak. Whether he'll speak to anyone else, I don't know."

"Me, I can think of a couple folks I'd rather he didn't speak to," Moth muttered, and selected a vanilla wafer from the plate.

"But what about the G.o.ds?" It was the first time Shaldis had heard Pebble question the judgment of anyone, let alone the king. "The real G.o.ds, I mean. Ean and Rohar and Oan Echis and Darutha-the ones who made the world and keep it running. Hasn't anyone asked them what they want?"

"The problem with asking the opinion of the G.o.ds, my child," said the king softly, "is that one cannot always trust the interpretations of those who claim to speak for them. Priests are mortal, when all is said, even priests who speak in holy trances . . . or claim to."

Pebble stared at him, her eyes slowly filling with tears of disappointed shock, like a child hearing that her father has sold her nurse.

Very gently, the king went on. "I don't ask the G.o.ds much because I don't trust men. When you're a king, you can't afford to. I can only act, to the utmost of my abilities, as I think the G.o.ds would have any man act, to keep the realm together at all costs. And for that I need your help. Do you understand?"

The big girl sighed and wiped her eyes. "No," she said and, reaching across the low table, took his hand and kissed it. "But I trust you, sir. And I trust Summerchild. And I'll pray every day, to every single one of them. Then if the G.o.ds ever tell me what they want, I'll let you know."

The king smiled. He had probably the most beautiful smile Shaldis had ever seen. "Thank you." With his other hand he grasped Moth's, sticky fingers and all. "Thank you all. Aside from the fact that I really, really don't want to go into the water with the crocodiles 'for real,' as the children say . . . if the realm breaks up, we are all doomed. I just don't know how quickly. If the rains cannot be brought this spring-if we cannot muster enough labor and supplies to finish the aqueduct-the lakes will dry. It's ninety days by caravan to the coast, which is rockbound, barren, and without the soil to support a village, as far as anyone has ever traveled. And in all other directions there is nothing. Only sand. If lands lie beyond the desert, no one has succeeded in reaching them. Ever. There is, quite simply, nowhere else to go."

TWELVE.

What should I do?" Shaldis asked when Pebble and Moth took their departure. The sun had reached noon, the heat nearly unbearable even in the palace's lakeside gardens. All over the Yellow City, farmers were packing up their vegetable stands and cobblers their lasts. In the villages, wives and slaves were putting up curtains of woven straw over windows and doors to close out the heat. In the fields, men drove oxen and teyn under shade, and lay down themselves to sleep through the worst of the day.

All would start up again an hour before sunset. Even the insects slept.

"There's almost certainly a Crafty woman somewhere in the city that we don't know about; and there's one, and maybe more, somewhere, I don't know where but probably nowhere near the city, or else she'd know about healing with herbs and poultices."

She adjusted the long boxwood sticks that held her hair in a tight roll at the back of her head-there'd been no time, before dawn that day, to braid it into its usual lacquered knot. "Should I concentrate on finding them, or should I put most of my energy into a library search at the Citadel for anything concerning crocodiles, poisons, and snakes?"

"Hathmar and the Sun Mages were good enough to offer to do that." His Majesty padded over to the cooler and fished out the remains of the now-tepid jar of lemonade, which he doled out equally between his own cup, Shaldis's, and Summerchild's. "Cheers," he added glumly, lofting a toast. "To the continuation of the senior branch of the House Jothek. It will be many days before Soth and Mistress Pomegranate return, but neither of them has heard of any Crafty women working in either the City of White Walls or the City of Reeds. It's most discouraging, even without the resurgence of lake monsters that's been reported, the G.o.ds apparently being under the impression that I don't have enough to occupy my thoughts."

"Rachnis said that he'd come to the palace and look through the Royal Library," Summerchild went on. "Soth let it get into a terrible muddle during the years when he was not well-"

Shaldis had for years watched her father's accounts deteriorate in the mora.s.s of depression and sherab, and could only shudder at what the shadowmaster would have to say of the mess the royal librarian's ten-year bender must have caused. Rachnis had little sensitivity but a very instructive line of invective.

"-and though he's been working to straighten them out, he'd barely started when he went north with Pomegranate on his search. The problem is that so many spells need the strength of two or three or four Crafty women working in concert, combining their magic through the Sigil of Sisterhood. Soth suspects that the problem may be in sourcing our power, because a single mage could work them. And just because a spell doesn't work for one woman-or two or three-does not mean it won't work for four. Which means that we would like your help tonight, when we ride out along the lakesh.o.r.e to test everything we already know about crocodiles."

"I'd figured that," Shaldis said. "I'll send a note to my grandfather that I won't be back there till tomorrow morning. Which is fine with me-I don't think I could take him and my brother again this soon."

"Otherwise," continued the favorite, "I think," and she glanced across at the king, who inclined his head slightly in acquiescence to whatever her opinion might be. "I think the best use of your time would be to concentrate on helping-and if possible finding-the woman in your dream, and most important, tracking down the Raven sister who attacked your grandfather. Even if, for whatever reason, she will not help us-she will not help the king-I think we need to know who and where she is."

Voices in the garden. The chatter of servants and a child's treble laugh. Shaldis saw the look of joy that flashed between the king and Summerchild as both got to their feet. The next moment Geb, two palace slaves, a plump and well-dressed nurse, and a slim dark girl filled the archway that looked into the gardens. The king cried, "Princess!" and held out his arms, to sweep up the girl as she ran to him.

Rainsong. Summerchild's only surviving child by the king.

The king's only surviving child.

Amid their laughter, the king's inquiries of his daughter, how she fared at lessons that morning, and Rainsong's dignified protest that she was much too old to be picked up, Shaldis blew a silent kiss to Summerchild and took her leave. As she made her way through the jasmine arbors, the fountain courts, and the groves of myrtle and bamboo, she thought about that beautiful, dark-haired child, only a little older than her sister Twinkle, and of what would become of her if His Majesty died.

The great houses married among each other, and the upper levels of their landchiefs actually controlled the vast estates that made up their wealth. Like the children of the wealthy merchants, the sons and daughters of the warrior lords were the bricks and mortar of alliances. The king's brother, Barun, was the first royal heir in nearly a thousand years to actually marry, and in marrying Lord Sarn's niece he'd sealed one alliance for House Jothek and created a dozen potential enemies, whose daughters and sisters and nieces had been pa.s.sed over.

Lord Sarn, Shaldis guessed, would be the power in the land if the king were to die-and Lord Sarn had enemies, and agendas, of his own. He'd try to hold on to Summerchild and the other Raven sisters, by force if not through loyalty.

The G.o.ds only knew where that would end. Hostages, threats, lies. Shaldis s.h.i.+vered as she came within sight of the Red Pavilion, a tiny structure tucked away in the gardens behind the library, which the king had given instructions to be always kept ready for her use. If the king were to die, it wasn't just Rainsong who stood in danger of being used as a hostage for Summerchild's services. It was whoever and whatever were prized by each of the Raven sisters.

Twinkle.

Or Pebble's beloved father and siblings.

Or the child that only a few days ago Moth had excitedly whispered to her that she, Moth, carried in her belly, a little girl-child. She already knew it was a girl.

It was fourteen days until the new moon.

Pebble was right, thought Shaldis as she moved into the cool shadows of the pavilion and climbed the stairs to the little bedchamber above. We're going to need the help of the G.o.ds, and we're going to need every fragment of help that they're willing to give.

THIRTEEN.

Grandmother . . ." Foxfire pleaded in a whisper as she hurried to keep up with the stooped bundle of black rags that hobbled so purposefully on ahead of her. "Raeshaldis already told me, the djinn in that statue doesn't come out! She's tried seven or eight times since the spring, and-"

"And you believed what she told you?" Red Silk turned, and above the edge of her dirty and ragged veil her turquoise eyes shone bright and hard as jewels. Her skinny finger stabbed out, ringless now and crooked with arthritis yet so white and well kept as to give the lie to the whole of her beggar's array-always supposing that there was anyone abroad in the suffocating heat of noonday to see them. "You're a fool, girl." She turned on her heel. Foxfire, half smothered under her own set of dirty rags and veils like horse blankets, had to almost run to keep up with her, and the goat she was dragging on the end of a rope didn't help.

As she trotted, she kept in her mind the haze of spells called the Gray Cloak, that rendered both women-and the goat-absolutely unnoticed by any who might pa.s.s them by. This, in Foxfire's mind, was a totally unnecessary precaution. The beggars, thieves, and wh.o.r.es who populated the Slaughterhouse District-a straggly slum that trailed away outside the city's eastern gate-were all asleep in the noon heat: she and her grandmother could have paraded naked up and down the squalid alleyways with basketfuls of jewels in their hands and come to no harm.