Circle of the Moon Read online

  INTO THE MADNESS

  Murdered men and women—children, too—lay sprawled in waist-high drifts of dust and sand. A man in the red tunic of the City Guard threw himself screaming out of an open house-door, hacking with his sword. Shaldis held him back on the end of her spear, and he drove himself halfway up its shaft trying to get to her before he finally died. Sickened, trembling, it took her minutes to work the body off the spear, and as she did she could see his flesh and bones blacken and shrink.

  PRAISE FOR BARBARA HAMBLY’S NOVELS

  CIRCLE OF THE MOON

  “Perfect . . . a believable, fantastic, and colorful world with appealing characters . . . Shaldis and Summerchild are everything a reader could want in the way of heroines.”

  —Trashotron.com

  “Hambly’s books are powerful celebrations of women realizing their own power and self-worth . . . Her best fantasies in years.”

  —FreshFiction.com

  “An enthralling fantasy series.”

  —BookLoons.com

  “The culture that the author has created is so realistic and complicated; it’s hard to believe it doesn’t exist somewhere.”

  —TheRomanceReadersConnection.com

  SISTERS OF THE RAVEN

  “Demonstrates [Hambly’s] graceful storytelling style and flair for world-building . . . Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “The world-building is fulfilling and polished . . . [The Yellow City] is nowhere you have ever lived or visited but is somewhere you can practically taste.”

  —SFR Newsletter

  “An excellent fantasy . . . lends itself to some deeper and unsettling thoughts.”

  —MostlyFiction.com

  “An exciting fantasy tale that contains a strong morality subplot . . . The story line engages the audience from the beginning.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Smart, thoughtful . . . keenly imagined . . . vividly convincing.”

  —SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS, author of The Slave and the Free

  “This is Barbara Hambly at the very top of her form . . . Read this one!”

  —HARRY TURTLEDOVE, author of the American Empire series

  ALSO BY BARBARA HAMBLY

  Sisters of the Raven

  Available from Warner Aspect

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Hambly

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a reivew.

  Warner Books and the Warner Books logo are trademarks of Time Warner Inc. or an affiliated company. Used under license by Hachette Book Group, which is not affiliated with Time Warner Inc.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50993-0

  For Allan

  Contents

  Into the Madness

  Also by Barbara Hambly

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Someone was calling for help.

  Raeshaldis, Habnit’s Daughter, stirred in her sleep.

  The call came spiraling up from deep within her dreams, but she knew this was no dream vision, no mental sifting of waking events or past griefs.

  Our children are dying. Help us. . . .

  A woman; almost certainly a woman of magical power. Even sunk in sleep, Shaldis could sense the shape and color, the taste of the woman’s spells. The cry was in no language she had ever heard before—musical and rippling—but the meaning shaped itself in her mind, as words are understood in dreams.

  Illness—fever— The wizards cannot help. Healing no longer flows from their hands. We the Craft women—

  Here Shaldis’s mind groped for the word. In the tongue spoken in the Realm of the Seven Lakes there was no word for women-who-do-magic, as there was for men. Until two years ago there had never been a need for one, for no woman had ever been born with such power in her flesh.

  We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects, but we cannot wield the power that sends fever away.

  And behind that cry, that desperation, Shaldis heard another sound that moved her as if her heart knew what it was or must be. A thick, soft booming, as regular as the beat of the Earth’s heart. A rushing like the wind through the groves of date palms, building to a crash like the sound of an avalanche of sand in the dry wadis where the ancients had buried their dead.

  But unlike either, and as unknown to her as the language in which the Craft woman called. Yet her dreaming mind felt its power, as it understood the meaning of the words.

  Help us. Please help us. Our children are dying.

  In the village of Three Wells, Bennit the king’s overseer also dreamed.

  He’d gone to sleep early, not that anyone in Three Wells had any reason to sit up late. The farming village lay far out on the edge of the yellow rangelands, close to the badlands where ancient kings had buried their dead. Sometimes a wandering storyteller passed through or a traveling merchant. Then everyone gathered in Bennit’s big adobe house to listen to news from the other villages, or even from the Yellow City on the lake’s green shores. For a night they’d marvel over the doings of the king, like a gorgeous peacock in his palace, the House of the Marvelous Tower, or of the great landchiefs of the realm or of the wizards. Poru the salt merchant had brought the astonishing news last year that wizards had indeed been gradually losing their powers all over, as had been rumored for years, and that, of all things, certain women had begun to show skill in magic. Bennit had laughed at this and declared he’d believe it when he saw it and not before.

  But such festive evenings were few. Mesquite for convivial fires had to be fetched out of the badlands; sheep fat was more profitably used for cooking than for burning in a lamp. More often, Bennit made his final rounds of the village fields at
sunset, checking for evidence of prowling nomads and finding mostly only the marks of jackals and coyotes. He’d count the hairy subhumans—the teyn who did the heavy work of tilling and digging—in their compound, and lock the compound gates. Then he’d return to his wife’s corn cakes and beans, a few drinks of corn liquor or strong date wine, and sleep.

  If last night, and the three nights before, Bennit had done his final inspections while the sun burned in the sky, well, what of that? And if, contrary to forty-three years of his custom, he found himself looking forward to sleep with the excited eagerness of a child awaiting a treat, it wasn’t to be wondered at.

  Was it?

  He was glad his wife, Acacia Woman, for once made no comment at his change of habits. Such forbearance wasn’t like her, but he barely noticed this; in fact, she seemed just as eager to seek her own side of the corn-shuck mattress as soon as supper’s dishes were scoured and put away. It annoyed him that she slipped so easily into sleep, when he lay awake, watching the dove-colored twilight fade from the sky. When he trembled with eagerness, waiting . . .

  Waiting for the music that heralded the coming of those exquisite dreams.

  Dreams of things he’d never experienced in waking life. The songs of instruments he’d never heard, of voices in a tongue unfamiliar but teasingly like something he’d once understood. The taste on his tongue of sweets or savories that he knew in no real existence. Kisses—by the names of all the gods, what kisses!—from the mouths of women whose faces were clear and as individual as those of the daughters of his friends, women whose names he could almost have said . . .

  And other things still. Deeper exhilarations: of having power, of wearing silk. Of joy so wild that he wanted to weep. He had almost struck old Acacia Woman for waking him this morning, for robbing him of the last smoky whispers of his dream.

  He frowned at that memory as he began to slide over into dream. His wife had woken him because when the boys had driven the sheep out to pasture they’d found the body of Klu the teyn minder lying among the cornstalks of the village fields, hacked to death, a look of staring agony on his face. The brother who shared Klu’s house was missing—a curious thing, for the brothers had been devoted to each other.

  It was his duty to investigate, but curiosity about the matter was pulling Bennit back toward waking. He thrust the matter from his mind, fearful that thoughts of the waking world would somehow interfere with the coming of the dreams. As the sky outside the window darkened and the moon appeared, full and brilliant, fear touched him, as it had last night and the night before—an agony of terror that the dreams wouldn’t come.

  But they did. First sweet and far-off singing, unfurling like glowing ribbons in the dark. Then beauty that filled him like a bejeweled memory of unutterable sweetness. Stolen lovemaking with the woman he adored—he could see her face like a flower! A single moment encapsulating a hundred meetings, a night of frenzied passion compacted into seconds. Bennit heard himself groan in ecstasy that was half in memory, half in truth. In the next second it seemed to him that he was holding up his baby son, not any of the worthless brats Acacia Woman had given him, but one whom he knew to be the dear child of his soul, and it seemed to him that his heart must break with gladness.

  Denser, stronger than ever before, joy followed joy until his heart pounded in his ears, as if someone were pouring the sweetest of liquors down his throat, drowning him.

  Then he heard screaming.

  Someone screaming in the real world, the waking world, the world that no longer mattered.

  The sweet liquor’s savor changed to the metallic gush of blood.

  Bennit gasped, gagged as pain ripped his belly. A spear impaled him, hurling him to the ground. Men were running toward him, naked swords in hands. Panic darkness swooped upon him, death in agony.

  He cried out and tried to jerk himself awake, but only succeeded in sitting upright. Every nerve and joint shrieked in anguish and he looked at his hands, saw them fingerless with leprosy, red-black with running sores. Like a ghost in a dream, he was aware of Acacia Woman leaping to her feet, thrashing her hands at something he couldn’t see, as if she, too, were trapped in some fearful dream. She staggered around the room, screaming, fell into the hearth and crawled, her long hair burning, out through the door.

  But the dreamworld shifted back into his mind. There were men in the room, soldiers. Though their arms and mail were strange to him, he knew them, knew they were there to kill him, and he leaped to his feet. He was too late. A knife tore into his chest; he felt it cleave his lungs, slice the big muscle of his heart. He was drowning in blood, falling.

  Fire was all around him. Shadowy shapes whirled among the soldiers, striking at them—or at something else Bennit could not see—with a burning stick from the banked kitchen fire. The worlds of dream and waking merged, fused, as in the worst of nightmares. Fire roared up the straw mats of the house walls, devoured the woven rush rugs of the floor. Bennit ran out the door, bleeding, dying, consumed with pain and knowing that though he was aware of pieces of reality he was still asleep, unable now to wake.

  Dimly he could see the streets of the village as he knew them in daytime, in the waking world that now swam in and out of existence. Men and women he knew with sudden despairing clarity ran among the burning houses, shrieking like the damned, their eyes the wide, unblinking eyes of sleepers who see only their own private shadow shows. Bennit saw his sister run past with her infant in her arms and fling herself into a burning house. Saw one of his cousins crumple, rolling, to the dusty ground, clawing and clutching at his arms, his belly, his throat as if trying to dislodge some horrible thing. Among the houses—Bennit didn’t know if it was real or part of the horrors of the dream—he saw something that seemed to be a green mist floating or dimly shining clouds of greenish light.

  Only it seemed to him that the clouds had eyes, had mouths—mouths that spoke his name.

  The mouths converged on him, singing those beautiful songs. So great was his terror at what they would do—at what they might tell him—that he flung himself back into his own burning house.

  ONE

  Shaldis woke, the sound of that heavy, crashing boom whispering away from her ears.

  She sat up on her narrow cot. The full moon’s silver light flooded her cell, glimmered on the drifts of sand that were beginning to accumulate in the corners of the Court of the Novices outside. The dozen or more novice Sun Mages whose daily duty had been to keep the sand at bay were gone. Last spring, when the rains had not come for weeks despite all the efforts of the Sun Mages to bring them, the populace of the Yellow City had rioted and attacked their Citadel. Most of the mages, from master down to novice, had departed after that, facing the fact, at last, that no wizard was able to work magic anymore.

  Healing, as the woman in the dream had cried, no longer flowed from their hands. Nor did the power to bring the rains, to ward against rats and mosquitoes, to control the hairy silent army of teyn upon whose labor the great grainfields depended.

  Eventually, after everyone gave up trying, the rains had come.

  Shaldis didn’t know what she and the three remaining Sun Mages were going to do about the rest of it: mosquitoes, rats, teyn.

  She rose from her bed, a tall skinny girl whose fair complexion and thick brown hair proclaimed her descent from one of the half-hundred upper-class clans who had settled in the Valley of the Seven Lakes centuries before. The women of these clans went veiled about their womanly duties. Until two years ago, it was as unheard-of for a girl of one of the great merchant families to go unmarried out of her father’s house, as it would have been for her to discover in herself the power to work magic like a man.

  Her grandfather had cast her out when she had claimed her own power. At the age of sixteen she had been the first female the Sun Mages had taken in to teach.

  Now, almost thirty months later, she was still the only female. She and the three remaining masters—plus the Citadel cook and one male novice—continue
d to dwell in the nearly empty sandstone fortress on its bluff above the Yellow City, subsisting on donations sent them by the king. Back when the mages had been able to sing the rains out of the skies every spring and cast wards to keep rats from the granaries and grasshoppers from the fields, the great landchiefs of the realm had given them the revenues from land and mines, and thousands of teyn laborers. These had largely disappeared.

  Shaldis wrapped the sheet around herself and went to fetch her white novice’s robe from its peg on the wall. The predawn air held a taste of the desert’s nighttime chill. Even the hundred feet or so that the Citadel was raised over the rest of the city made a difference. Down in the twisting canyons of the city’s narrow streets, the air, even at this hour, would be like tepid glue. She pulled on her robe and scooped from a painted pottery bowl on the table a hunk of white crystal as long as two of her knuckles and twice as thick. Yanrid the crystalmaster had let her take it from the Citadel’s scrying chamber the day before. It was old and powerful, and worked far more reliably than her own.

  A Craft woman, the voice in her dreams had called itself—her mind recalled the shape of the meaning, tried to fit it into words she knew. In the Yellow City they called the women in whom the powers of magic had bloomed Ravens, or Raven sisters, from the fact that, alone among the beasts and birds of the earth, the same word was used for both the male and the female of that species and from the legend that ravens could work magic. The nomads of the deep desert called such women witches, a word that originally meant “poisoners of wells.” But some in the city were beginning to call the women-who-did-magic Crafty Ones or Crafty Women, the way northern peasants had called wizards Crafty Men sometimes: “those who have a special skill.” The term was beginning to be used interchangeably with “Raven.” There were still men in the city who claimed to be Crafty Men.

  Fewer and fewer believed them.

  Carrying the white crystal in her hand, Raeshaldis crossed the Court of the Novices through luminous blue darkness, climbed the rock-cut stairs still higher up the bluff. Well above the rest of the Citadel, she came into the Circle, the open space in which the rites of the Summoning of Rain were worked each spring. It stood empty most of the year, two hundred feet above the dark maze of the city, but the magics that had been raised there every year for six hundred years seemed to rise from its stones and whisper to the overarching stars.