Circle of the Moon Page 11

  Trembling, she led the goat forward, and the two women wrestled it to the dirty floor. It flung its horns up and down, and the broken noises that came from its mouth seemed louder than shouts in the horrible shadowed silence of the windowless temple; Foxfire was hard put to keep her thoughts concentrated on the two men sleeping in the vestibule, on the other spells Shaldis and Summerchild and old Pomegranate had taught her, to turn the attention of passersby aside. She couldn’t believe no one would hear.

  The goat’s hoof slashed her wrist and drew blood. A stone knife glinted dully in Red Silk’s hand, a sacrificial implement from the desert tribes among whom she’d grown up. Foxfire draped her weight over the goat’s thrashing legs and grabbed at the horns, and Red Silk struck. The flint blade tore through hair and soft flesh; blood fountained out. Pressed to the goat’s body, Foxfire felt its lungs and heart work wildly as its life gushed away.

  In her heart she cried, I’m sorry, and fought not to weep for the animal’s soul.

  Fought to keep her little songs of sleep upon the guards.

  She stumbled back, nauseated by the stink of the fresh blood, her own garments dribbled and blotted. Reeling with the onset of the drugs, Red Silk knelt over the dying goat, slit the body open, and plunged her hands inside. Foxfire looked away, and when she looked back she saw her grandmother standing before the plinth on which the idol rested, her body pressed to the stone. The temple was windowless and the darkness complete, but Foxfire could see in the dark, as all Crafty ones could. She saw the trail of blood that led from the goat’s body in her grandmother’s wake, saw the thin streams of it crawling down, from where Red Silk’s ensanguined hands stroked the idol’s golden feet.

  “Come to us and help us.” The old woman’s voice was thick now and strange, stammering with the drugs that disjointed her mind. “Speak, and we will speak for you. Help, and we will grant you whatever it is you ask for, whatever it is you need.” She pressed herself to the stone. Flies, that were to be found everywhere in the Slaughterhouse District, began to roar dully in the stillness and to settle on the dead goat and the blood trail.

  Foxfire felt sick.

  For almost two hours Red Silk whispered, screamed, pleaded, and threatened: offered blood, more goats, teyn, slave children. “Tell me what it is you wish! What price you demand! You must speak to me! You must give us your help!”

  Sleepy-by, sleepy-by, you’re safe in Mama’s arms, Foxfire sang mechanically into the minds of the two men slumped by their lamp in the oven heat of the vestibule. Sweat crawled down her face and body and the drone of the flies filled her mind like the howling of desert winds. As long as she’s with you, you’ll come to no harm.

  She forced her thoughts to see only that plump little brown-eyed girl that the younger guard loved, a little like Opal before the fire, singing the sleepy-by song as she brushed her hair (Who is she? Do you treat her well?); to shape the one-thousand-two-hundred-and-fourth, the one-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifth of the twelve thousand specialized sigils of the High Script. What will you do with this knowledge? Write poems about the stars, read the tales of the ancient kings?

  It seemed to Foxfire in her half-dreaming state that they were not alone in the temple after all, that someone or something stood quite close to her grandmother beside the blood-smeared plinth. Something that shined as if all the stars of the Milky Way had collapsed upon one another into a single column of unbearable light.

  Something that looked upon the old woman and the dead goat with disgust and contempt in its golden eyes. Around her the air seemed for an instant to buzz and jangle, as if with the sound of a hundred thousand chains shaken at the far side of the universe.

  Then it was gone.

  At last her grandmother staggered back to her, tripped on the dead goat, fell to her knees, and vomited. Foxfire hastened to her side to steady her, but was shoved away. “Damn it, girl, you think I can’t look after myself? In the tribes a woman who can’t get to her feet again is left behind. Give me my stick.”

  Trembling, Foxfire obeyed.

  “There’s nothing here,” muttered Red Silk. “Nothing. Curse them all. Curse them for liars. Let’s get out of here.”

  She reeled toward the door, leaving the goat’s carcass in a puddle of filth, blood, and flies for someone else to clean up.

  “We’ll find a way, though. You mark my words, girl—my son will be king.”

  In the doorway she slewed around, dilated eyes staring into the darkness. Then her drugged gaze swung onto Foxfire, contempt bitter in her voice. “Just like that hussy Raeshaldis to lie about him being here. There’s no one here. You can’t trust her. Can’t trust any but your own.”

  But who, Foxfire wondered, are my own?

  FOURTEEN

  A little before sunset Raeshaldis woke. The afternoon heat broke in the palace sooner than anywhere else in the city; breezes ruffled gently in from the lake, bringing the dry rustle of the date-palm groves along its shores, the creak of the long lines of bucket hoists that these days transferred water across the stretches of what once had been submerged.

  She had slept with her crystal beneath her pillow, hoping for another dream. Now she cradled it in her hands, tried to call back anything, any image, that might lead her to sight of the unknown Raven sister who had cried for help in the night.

  But nothing came.

  In time she set the crystal aside, collected a light robe from one of the wall cupboards, and went downstairs and along the garden path to the palace baths.

  There were several of these, dating from the times when kings had maintained dozens of concubines and scores of dancing girls, some of whom had to be kept from encountering one another at all costs. Although in his youth King Oryn had pursued an extravagant course of debauchery, it had been, Shaldis suspected, more to annoy his father than out of any true inclination for multiple liaisons; he’d generously dowried and married off most of those young ladies the moment his father’s death had opened for him the way to the woman he truly loved.

  To her knowledge, four of those former concubines had asked to remain: one of them worked with Soth in the palace library, two had become lovers and lived contentedly as pensioners in a small pavilion in a corner of the gardens, and the fourth had taken over administration of the palace household funds, invested part of the income from royal lands and lent the rest out at interest, and was making a small fortune for herself and the king. All of them got on extremely well with Summerchild.

  At the baths this evening, however, Shaldis encountered only Summerchild herself, who gave her further details of the search Soth and Pomegranate had been engaged upon since late in the spring and the problem of lake monsters which would eventually have to be dealt with. “The odd thing is, Pomegranate says that she encountered marks that felt like ward signs in the City of Reeds and in one of the villages along the shores of the White Lake—both in places where everyone has said there are no Crafties of either sex and have not been since the magic of men faded. She says she isn’t certain, but she thinks they’re newer than that, and she thinks they were made by women.”

  “I don’t understand.” Shaldis moved her shoulders into the powerful massage of the bath woman’s hands. She and Summerchild had passed through the soaping and rinsing, the bubbling hot pools and the steam, in small talk and silence; now they lay on towels and warmed marble in the delicious afterglow stage that made actual baths—as opposed to the pan-and-pitcher scrubs with which most people started their mornings—such addictive pleasure. The royal bath women were the best in the realm and had hands like blacksmiths’. “That’s what I don’t understand about what happened to my grandfather, either. Why would a woman who has magic, who can do magic, hide her skills? I mean, Cattail down in the Fish-market is practically coining money!”

  “Maybe they’re afraid of Cattail,” surmised Summerchild quietly. “Although to tell the truth I’ve never heard of her threatening another Raven sister. Her attitude seems to be there’s plenty of customer
s out there for everyone.”

  “Including the ones she’s sold good-luck spells to, to counteract the bad-luck spells their enemies have paid her to put on them.” Shaldis took a sip of the mint tea whose delicate cups stood between their respective massage slabs. “That wouldn’t hold in any case for those in the north, when there isn’t a jealous and powerful Raven sister trying to corner the market.”

  “Unless someone was lying to Pomegranate.”

  “It could be children.” Pebble and Moth came in, sweating and pink from the hot tubs and swathed in enormous cotton towels. Before returning to their respective homes at noon—borne in the palace sedan chairs in which they’d been fetched—both junior sisters had promised to return that evening, to ride along the lakeshore and test spells on crocodiles. Pebble went on, “When I was little, my friends and I played games with signs: You can’t walk past this line, that sort of thing. Could Pomegranate tell what the signs had been made for?”

  “No. She said they weren’t real sigils or ward runes, just simple little squiggles imbued with magic.” Summerchild and Shaldis exchanged a look as they yielded their places on the massage slabs to the others and retreated to the couches. A junior bath girl brought their tea; two others fetched sandalwood combs and began to comb their hair. Pebble just wound her limp, mousy strands into a knot, but Moth had brought her own maid to execute one of the elaborate braided coiffures that were in such fashion in the city, when the massage was done. “That sounds like children, at that. But surely their parents would know. Would tell someone.”

  “Maybe they don’t know themselves yet,” mused Shaldis. “And maybe they come from families like mine, where even five-year-olds know they’d better keep everything to themselves if they want to have any kind of lives of their own.”

  “Pomegranate say anything else?” asked Moth, wriggling like a contented cat into the massaging hands of the bath woman. “Other than monsters coming out of the lakes and stomping on villages just like in the stories? I always thought monsters in the lakes were just fairy tales, you know, like phoenixes and rocs that fly away with camels in their claws and devils that can put the Bad-Luck Shadow on you when you’re asleep.” Her dark eyes sparkled with childlike delight that such marvels might come true.

  “My father told me he heard a rumor yesterday about a plague among the northern lakes,” said Pebble quietly. “One of the men on the lumber boats from the Mountains of Eanit said whole villages were killed off in a night.”

  “Maybe they got a lake monster up there, too?” Moth didn’t sound terribly upset about the prospect.

  Summerchild’s face was grave, and suddenly tired. “I’ll have the king send word to the marketplaces to ask,” she said, and sat up on her couch. “Thank you, dear,” she added, to the girl who was coiling her hair into its deceptively simple knots. “And it may only be rumor. Sometimes I wonder if the realm won’t fall apart simply because we don’t have Sun Mages in Ith or the City of White Walls to speak with Yanrid every morning in the Citadel’s scrying chamber and let him—and us—know what’s happening three hundred miles away. The City of Ith could be destroyed by lake monsters—or by plague or an infestation of locusts or Bad-Luck Shadow—and we wouldn’t know it for weeks.”

  Our children are dying.

  “Pomegranate didn’t happen to mention anything that might have been the sound I heard in my dream, did she?” Shaldis sat forward on the couch and drew her bath sheet closer around her thin shoulders. “A long soft roaring followed by a crash? Like an avalanche, but repeated, spaced out at about a count of five.”

  Summerchild shook her head and looked at the others. They both returned blank stares.

  Shaldis sighed. “Just a thought.”

  The king joined the ladies for a light supper at the Summer Pavilion just after the sun went down. When full dark came, they all set off from the northern gate of the palace that opened to the kitchen courts, riding secretly in twos and threes under the cloak of spells. Summer nights saw a thousand daytime occupations, and a carnival atmosphere prevailed in the rural suburb that clustered outside the Yellow City’s northern gate. From the road through the palmeries and farms of the lakeshore, Shaldis could see the torchlight of the gate and its surrounding taverns and bawdy houses. Not many people, it was true, walked along the wall to the lakeshore itself—if you didn’t get eaten by crocodiles, the saying went, you would be by mosquitoes—but everyone who hadn’t gone back to work by torchlight was out walking in the evening cool.

  They kept the cloaks—of magic or of dark anonymous wool—well wrapped around them until they were clear of all these evening strollers. It wouldn’t do for anyone to report that the king had ridden out with his coterie of Raven sisters, to see if by spells they could circumvent the will of the gods. Looking ahead of her at Jethan’s broad shoulders and stiff back, Shaldis wondered if that young man had been one of those who’d believed implicitly in the will of the gods.

  She wouldn’t put it past him.

  “The guards on the Temple of Nebekht report that they awoke from deep sleep this afternoon to find the mutilated carcass of a goat in the sanctuary,” murmured the king, reining back his tall horse to ride between Shaldis and Summerchild. “There was blood on the statue—were I a betting man I’d wager six pots of first-class ointment and four camel loads of white rose petals that the celebrants of that particular little rite were my uncle Mohrvine’s ladies.”

  “You really think you could find a taker, my lord?” Summerchild raised her brows, exquisite beneath the pearl border of her head veil.

  “I’m sure I could order someone to accept my bets. I understand kings have in the past.” He glanced away across the fields and pastureland east of the road to where the low black wall of the Place of Kush, the only one of the Sealed Temples to lie outside the city, stretched almost invisible beneath the chilly glow of the stars. “Completely aside from the uncleanliness of it—they could at least have tidied up after themselves—I shouldn’t care to think Lord Mohrvine now has a djinn on his side.”

  “It tells us one thing,” remarked Shaldis. “It tells us Red Silk doesn’t have the power to make those spells work, any more than we do. Not if she’s bargaining with a djinn for goats. We know Naruansich’s name,” she added, “and we know spells that will hold off a djinn. Or at least they did last time. And personally, I don’t think he came out. He was a slave before, doing the bidding of a madman. I think he’ll be careful about putting himself in that position again.” In a lower voice, she added, “I would be.”

  In addition to the king, the Raven sisters were accompanied by Bax, the white-haired commander of the palace guard; by Yanrid, Rachnis, and the novice Kylin; and by a handful of trusted guards, who formed a cordon in the darkness among the cornstalks and the tomato vines. By everyone, in fact, Shaldis guessed, who could be trusted with the secret that Crafties, not gods, were to be behind the king’s success in his ordeals of consecration. Leaving the king and Kylin to mind the horses, they picked their way through the dark field rows to the spongy stretches of mud where the water had dried away to mazes of pools, papyrus, and desiccating reeds.

  Mosquitoes swarmed here, and Shaldis, who eschewed veils with the pride of a young woman who can protect herself, was extremely glad for the gauzy folds Summerchild had lent her: pride was one thing but there was no need to be stupid. Crocodiles swarmed here, too, not only in the streamlets and irrigation canals but crawling among the islets of dry land and up in among the rows of corn and vegetables onshore. Shaldis and her fellow Raven sisters carried wicker hampers filled with newly killed chickens, to leave Bax and Jethan free to use, if necessary, their crossbows and pikes.

  They needed them. The four women tried every spell and combination of spells that the two former wizards could think of—including a dozen variations of Pomegranate’s lake-monster spells—individually and with their powers fused by the Sigil of Sisterhood, to drive the twelve- and sixteen-foot reptiles back from the chickens they tosse
d out among them. Twice Bax and Jethan had to fire flaming crossbow bolts at hungry reptiles for whom a few chickens weren’t enough.

  In the end, exhausted and frustrated, the little party beat a hasty retreat up the path through the cornstalks, Shaldis and the others stretching out their awareness to listen for the rustle of huge scaly bodies in the dark away from the trail. They found the king and Kylin both mounted again, torches in hand and looking nervously down at the road around their horses’ feet.

  “No, no, I haven’t had any company,” the king explained, dismounting gingerly as the party of magic workers emerged from the cornstalks onto the road. “Just a great deal of rustling, which of course could have been rats or foxes as easily as crocodiles. Indeed, it occurred to me that you might have driven the crocodiles away with spells so potent that they rushed ashore and all this distance inland in a panic. . . . No? Well, a man can hope.”

  FIFTEEN

  We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects. . . .

  Shaldis watched the main party of king and guards turn along the dark path toward the palace’s northern gate. The late moon was rising, full and smiling as a young wife carrying a longed-for child.

  It would wither away to nothing in fourteen days, leaving the king to face his ordeal in its darkness.

  She rubbed her eyes, her head throbbing. That afternoon’s siesta and bath seemed years in the past.

  Fourteen days.

  Ahead of her, Rachnis, Yanrid, and Kylin talked softly about negotiations with the grocer and whether the Citadel should liquidate some of its hard-won investments in order to purchase a collection of grimoires being offered by the widow of a former Pyromancer in Ith who had hanged himself last spring. Behind, she was aware of Jethan riding with a single lantern, in silence.