Circle of the Moon Read online

  She knelt in the Circle’s center, closed her eyes.

  I’m here.

  She centered her mind on the sun, the source of the power for the system followed by her order. The Sun at His Prayers, this hour was called, the time of stillness. Magics worked through the power of the sun changed from hour to hour, and at this hour sun magic was said to be strongest. Lately Shaldis had begun to wonder if the spells of the Sun Mages applied to the magic of women. Spells she wove exactly as she had been taught by them were wildly inconsistent in their effects: sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes crumbling away like wet adobe—only words like children’s games. She drew and released her breath, tried to put from her mind her own frustrations with her failure to control her powers. Tried not to think about her fears of what would become of her—what would become of the Realm of the Seven Lakes—if she and the other small handful of Raven Sisters could not learn to use their powers properly by the time next year’s rains were due.

  In the ivory light of the full moon the Lake of the Sun shimmered faintly, sunk low in its bed but still a hundred and fifty miles from end to end. If the rains did not come, those who lived along its shores still had time.

  The woman calling into the dark of her dreams had none.

  Illness . . . fever . . . Our children are dying.

  I’m here. Shaldis opened her eyes, angled the crystal to the moonlight so that its central facet was a tiny slab of pale radiance. Whoever you are, I’m here.

  But she saw no one in that slip of light, and no reply came into her mind. I’m here. . . .

  For nearly a thousand years, the Sun Mages had spoken through the mirrors, the crystals, the water bowls in the scrying chamber with mages in other parts of the world, places that for the most part no one had ever journeyed to. It was ninety days by camel train to the barren, foggy villages on the edge of the sea to the northwest; and what might lie beyond that sea—or beyond the deserts that stretched in all other directions—no one knew. Even the constellations described by those alien mages were unknown. It was part of the Sun Mages’ training to learn the languages spoken by the outlanders, a laborious process: the language Shaldis had heard the woman speak in her dream had sounded like none she’d studied.

  And she had never heard Yanrid or anyone else describe that booming sound she had heard.

  And it wasn’t a dream, she told herself. It was real. A real place, a real woman crying for help.

  Our children are dying. . . .

  And we are dying, too, thought Shaldis, her mind aching with its efforts to focus on something of the dream that would connect her with that despairing cry.

  Unless we learn how to use our powers—among other things, Shaldis had never yet managed to ensorcel either a snake or an insect and neither had any of the women she knew—we shall die.

  We’re on borrowed time as it is, waiting for the time of the rains to come again. Waiting for the next disaster.

  We need your help, as you need ours.

  The sky in the east stained unearthly blue-green above the Citadel bluff. The fat moon turned the lake waters to shimmering silver among shoals black with reeds and crocodiles. Long lines of bucket hoists stretched out from the grainfields, palmeries, and gardens to the now-distant water’s edge. The canal that connected the city’s southern gate with the lakeside Fishmarket and docks burned like a sword blade. In a thousand courtyards in the city, a thousand mud-built nests in the rock crags around her, birds began to sing.

  Shaldis raised her eyes from the crystal, her head throbbing. The mazes of the Yellow City’s streets were still pitch-dark, but the darkness was dotted everywhere now with minute lights as women, or slaves, built up the fires in the outdoor kitchens that nearly everyone used in summertime.

  In an hour the three remaining Sun Mages—powerless now but still traditionally the order most closely allied with the king—would descend to the House of the Marvelous Tower, to meet with the king and with the four great landchiefs of the realm. Shaldis could see the Marvelous Tower itself, a gaudy miracle of red and gold in daylight, now a dark spike against the moon-drenched waters, its thousand mirrors twinkling wanly like the fading stars. The thought of the meeting rankled her a little, for although none of the Sun Mages possessed the slightest magic anymore, they would be given a place of honor on the council pavilion’s divan, while she would probably be asked to sit behind a screen in deference to the sensibilities of the more conservative landchiefs.

  On the other hand, she reflected, that would mean she could sit with Summerchild, the king’s favorite and the center of the Raven sisterhood—a far more entertaining proposition than minding her manners under the disapproving gaze of the men.

  The rising light showed her the stone arches of the king’s aqueduct, stretching away from the city to the south and east. It would, when finished, reach the deep springs of the Oasis of Koshlar and bring water to the Lake of the Sun and to the farms and villages all along its banks: so far it had reached only a few miles beyond the Dead Hills. If it was finished—the desert beyond those parched brown badlands was a deadly place, the haunt of small bands of wild teyn as savage as animals and of nomads barely more civilized who took ill this trespass of their realm.

  Once djinni had haunted the desert, too: deadly, brilliant, seldom entirely visible, creatures entirely of magic.

  And being of magic, when magic had changed, they had melted away, their powers to sustain themselves gone. One of them at least, Shaldis knew, had taken refuge in a crystal statue in a ruined temple in the slum district beyond the city’s eastern gate; after her single interview with it last spring it had not communicated with another human soul. She had theories about what had become of some of the others, but could prove nothing.

  She had a feeling that was one of the things the king would ask her at the council—and that one or more of the landchiefs would try to bribe her for help in getting that djinn on their side.

  In the mazes of the dark streets more spots of light were appearing. The Dead Hills, with their equally impenetrable mazes of dry wadis and forgotten tombs, lay dark still, save where, for an instant, Shaldis thought she saw a flicker of movement, the passing of a glowing greenish light.

  When she blinked and looked again, it was gone.

  It was really time to go down. She’d need a little time to scrub herself and fix her hair and get some breakfast before leaving for the council.

  Yet she turned her eyes back to the white crystal one last time. The whole sky to the east flooded with light, and the crystal seemed to drink it up and throw it back, burning and pale. Shaldis closed her eyes, dipped her mind back toward trance.

  I’m here. I’m Raeshaldis, Habnit’s Daughter. I can help you.

  And, please, you help us in turn. We need all the knowledge of magic, all the workers of magic—all the Crafty ones—on our side, if we are to survive.

  I am here. Please help us.

  For a moment she thought she heard, far off like the echoing memory of her dream, that sighing roar, that heavy hammer blow.

  Then only stillness and from the city below the crowing of a thousand cocks.

  She was definitely late, and nearly ran down the winding stairs from the Circle. Her mind raced ahead of her to what Summerchild would say about her dream, and how they might combine their strengths to scry deeper for its sender. Though she, Shaldis, had the academic training of a Sun Mage, she sensed in the king’s graceful concubine a deeper power. The other Raven sisters of the city—a merchant’s darkly pretty concubine named Moth, and Pebble, a contractor’s big, mousy-haired, good-natured daughter—were newer to their powers and uncertain of them.

  Shaldis wished her friend Pomegranate were still in the city. The half-mad beggar woman was another whose powers, she sensed, were as deep as her own. But Pomegranate had gone with the king’s former tutor, a onetime Earth Wizard named Soth, to seek among the distant cities on the shores of the other lakes for word of other women who might have power. And t
he other three Raven sisters she knew were—

  She came around the corner into the Court of the Novices, and stopped.

  A man stood in the blue shadowy twilight, just outside the door of her room. Not a mage. A tall heavy-shouldered man in a civilian’s loose pantaloons and light summer robe, a man whose movement, as he turned uncertainly from her door, was familiar, even before she saw his face.

  Then he turned at the sound of her step and said, “Raeshaldis? Old One?”

  Recognition hit her like a dagger in her chest. She stood still, unable to move or speak.

  “Daughter?”

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  TWO

  For over two years, Shaldis had wondered what the first words out of her mouth would be should she ever meet her father again.

  Why didn’t you protect me? Silly—nobody protected anybody in her grandfather’s household when her grandfather went after them.

  How could you let him cast me out? Anybody who’d ask that question had never met her grandfather.

  I love you? She didn’t know if that were true anymore, or whether, if it was, what that meant.

  I don’t need you? The agony in her heart gave her the lie, but she probably could have come out with the statement, if given enough time to prepare.

  Yes, it’s me? Too commonplace for words. As if neither love nor agony had ever taken place.

  He looked older than he should have, she thought, as he strode across the court toward her, his arms stretched out. Had there always been that much gray in his straggly beard? Had the pouchy flesh around his eyes been that flaccid? The telltale veins on his nose and cheeks that . . . that telltale?

  Mostly he looked tired. Tired and defeated.

  The way everyone came to look who lived in her grandfather’s house. She noted automatically how stooped he was for a man over six feet high; how long and thin his ink-stained hands were; how despite her grandfather’s wealth, the robe and pantaloons were the same ones he’d habitually worn two years ago. Back in her first year here at the Citadel, when the male novices were brutally hazing her and the masters were demanding why she couldn’t seem to make her spells work, Shaldis had dreamed about encountering her father again and telling him coolly, I have no father. In her dreams she’d managed to figure out how to make her spells work and was an acclaimed master herself, and her grandfather had sent her father to beg her help for one of his money-making schemes. . . . One of the reasons the wizards were organized into orders was to control the hiring of freelance mages by merchants, landchiefs, and anyone who wanted to use magic to further their own businesses at the expense of their neighbors. Of course, by that time her grandfather, the fearsome old merchant Chirak Shaldeth, would be peeling his own skin off from frustration that he’d let a mage in his own household get away. . . .

  I have no father.

  As he took her in his arms Habnit whispered, “Old One, I have missed you so.”

  Shaldis laid her head on his shoulder and began to cry.

  “You’ve grown,” he said, after a time of gently patting her back.

  She wiped her eyes. “Have the others shrunk, sir?” It delighted her, as it had when she was a child, that she made him laugh.

  It was nothing like her dreams.

  “It’s shocking of me to say so”—Habnit drew back and cupped his daughter’s cheek in one hand—“and don’t tell your grandfather I said it, but this new fashion one sees for women going about unveiled . . . it suits you. One sees pretty faces in the markets now sometimes. . . . Just because a rose grows in another man’s garden doesn’t mean passersby can’t be cheered by its beauty. Are you happy, child?”

  “More than I can say.” More than you ever made me.

  But you tried. She sniffled and wiped her eyes again with her sleeve. “Every time I study the books in the library, I thank you in my heart for teaching me the High Script. Even when I got here I read it better than some of the boys.” She’d had nightmares for years about the time her grandfather had caught her practicing the formal runes of the script consecrated to poetry, the classics, magic, and the other affairs of men. She had not forgotten that her father denied teaching her, when his father asked who had done so.

  She had taken a beating rather than give him away. He’d wept later, in the secrecy of his room. On that occasion her own eyes had remained dry.

  The blue shadows in the court were now watery gray, and the upper towers were dyed with the first brazen glare of the sun. Yanrid, old Rachnis the spellmaster, and the even-older Archmage Hathmar would be in the refectory—if they weren’t already done with their spare bowls of corn gruel—and here she was, unwashed and starving. . . .

  “Have you eaten, Papa?” She ducked into her room, gathered up her sandals, sash, and washing things: the little pan of scrub water in her curtained corner of the kitchen court would be almost cold now. “There’ll be bread and honey in the kitchen and coffee, while I—”

  “There isn’t time, child,” said her father, stepping in front of her as she reemerged. “Old One, I know that there was . . . was ill will and anger when you left the house. . . .”

  In the midst of her shocked disappointment—So he only came to seek me because he needs me. Because THEY need me—Shaldis found herself reflecting wryly how like her father it was to describe as “ill will and anger” the rage and grief when she’d returned from one of her surreptitious excursions to the marketplace to discover that her grandfather had found, and burned, her secret cache of books.

  Ill will and anger. Her mother and aunts had had to hold her back from plunging her hands into the kitchen fire to pull the flaming pages out. Had had to keep holding her lest she throw herself at that tall, harsh-faced old autocrat who was cursing her for a disgrace and shouting that he’d had to back down on her dowry in order to get the master harness maker’s son to marry her.

  Her throat had been raw for days afterward, from the words she’d screamed.

  “But we need you. We need your help.”

  Shaldis drew in a deep breath. Beyond her father’s shoulder, the Citadel’s other remaining novice appeared in the gateway, a short, stocky dark-browed boy named Kylin. Like Shaldis he still wore the white robe and sandals of the novices—there were bales of them still in the storerooms—though she was now the only person in the Citadel who actually had power, and he was, essentially, a servant these days.

  She guessed the three old masters had sent him to tell her they were ready to leave for the palace. But when he backed out again, unwilling to interrupt her, she said, “Excuse me, please, Papa,” and called out to the boy. “Tell them to go on without me, Ky. I’ll catch up or meet them at the palace.”

  Kylin glanced at her father, then back at her face, at the red lingering around her swollen eyes. “Are you all right, Shaldis?”

  “I’m fine. I won’t be long.”

  Something in the way her father had spoken made her guess that the second part of that statement was as much a lie as the first, and she felt as if her heart had been dipped in pitch and then set aflame. The council, she had already guessed, would be critical, and even more critical her news to Summerchild that, at long last, after years of searching and silence, word—even the tiniest whisper in a dream—had come to them of the existence of another Raven sister, another Crafty woman, somewhere in the world.

  Word, and a frantic plea for help.

  But when she looked back at her father, she saw he was scared. Scared and desperate.

  And you did not say no to your family.

  Ever.

  For two years the fact that she’d walked away from them had marked her heart like the scar of a burn.

  “What does he want?” she asked, and did not need to say which he she meant. “A curse put on a rival’s caravan so he can get another two dequins a pound on salt?”

  She’d wanted to hurt someone with her words, but when her father looked away in shame she found herself in pain, too. Even a blow struck in self-defense
, she thought, still draws my own blood. . . .

  “Last night someone tried to kill your grandfather.”

  Shaldis opened her mouth to snap something about how wide the field of suspects must be, but closed it. Even two years as a novice in the Citadel—even the unthinkable act of leaving her family’s house—hadn’t erased the manners beaten into her from earliest childhood, about what a girl-child could and could not say about the patriarch of the house.

  Her father, though he might fear and hate Chirak Shaldeth as much as she did, loved his father in equal measure. He was the only one who’d be wounded by such words.

  “I came to you because it looks like whoever it was, they used magic to do it.”

  Oryn II, third lord of the House Jothek to rule as king over the Realm of the Seven Lakes, hated councils. They invariably turned into wrangles about money, a topic that bored him to the screaming point—not that he was so ill-bred as to scream in company no matter how bored he was.

  “The point of being king is that one never has to ask what anything costs,” he argued plaintively as he helped the exquisite Summerchild to the pile of cushions heaped beside the latticed screens that divided the long council room of the Cedar Pavilion into two unequal sections. “People simply bring things to one, and grovel while they do so. Besides, I don’t trust a single one of those landchiefs as far as I can have the guards throw him.”

  He saw the ghost of her smile through the thin celery-green silk of her veil and in the wide topaz-blue eyes. “Perhaps larger guards are in order?” she suggested.

  “Mechanization might suit,” agreed Oryn, kneeling beside her and offering her one of the several plates of fresh fruit laid out on the low table for her delectation. He was a tall man, and he encouraged his court historians to refer to him as the Peacock King because he suspected the alternative title would be Oryn the Fat. His brown curls, touched up with henna, glittered with gold dust, and the hems of his flame-red robe and tunic sparkled with embroidery two handspans deep—sufficient, he hoped, to impress the lesser landchiefs. “A catapult, perhaps . . .”