Circle of the Moon Read online

  When it came, she reflected uneasily, magic or no magic, it would be on top of them before they knew it.

  “We are,” replied Soth softly. “And we do. But the spells that originally defeated water dragons differed from region to region, and the order of Earth Wizards wasn’t centralized until long after the last of them disappeared. The line of teachers of which I’m a part originated in the south. We didn’t learn the more obscure rites of the northern school.”

  “Pardon, Lord Wizard.” Tosu bowed to Soth as he spoke—he was a country boy and still clearly had a lot of trouble with the idea that wizards no longer had power and that women might. “But this is not a ‘water dragon’ that has returned to trouble the lakeshore. This is Hokiros.”

  And he spoke the name with awe.

  Soth’s gingery eyebrows pulled together; he had a thin and rather clerkish face, adorned with square-lensed spectacles, and had wound his waist-length graying hair up into a warrior’s knot, mostly to keep it out of the way in case Hokiros turned out to be more formidable than the two lake monsters that had emerged over the past year from the deep waters of the Lake of the Moon. “The rites that your father repeated to me last night—they were those that defeated Hokiros before?”

  “Hai, lord.” The boy spoke with the thick dialect of the northern lakes. “In our village the rite was handed down from father to son for a thousand years. Every seven years a man’s blood was shed upon the ward stone; every forty-nine years, we brought in a wizard to renew the spells, lest Hokiros wake from his sleep and destroy all the villages of the lakes. In every village along the shore this was done.” His voice shook a little. Shonghu village had been destroyed the night before last; villagers, teyn, livestock torn to pieces. Soth and Pomegranate had viewed the ruin yesterday from a respectful distance, for the crocodiles that infested all the lakes had crept out from the water to devour the carrion. Even through his telescope, Soth hadn’t been able to tell from the tracks whether Hokiros resembled the long-necked, sinuous dragons that had legendarily inhabited the Lake of the Moon. By the accounts of the survivors, it didn’t sound likely.

  As close to the village as she’d dared to get, Pomegranate had put herself into a trance, her hands pressed to the earth, trying to call forth images as she’d once done from objects her daughters used to bring her to tell stories about. But the only thing that had come to her had been a sense of darkness and size and moonlight glittering off its spiny back.

  “The rites he told me of sound very like those that mages in the south used to ward against the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon,” said Soth, who as a trained mage knew thousands of spells, though he was powerless now to work a single one. “Forgive me if I speak from ignorance, Tosu. Back in the days before there were kings, when humankind first dwelled along the shores of the lakes, there were water dragons—”

  “This is not a water dragon,” insisted the boy. “This is Hokiros.”

  The form of the name, Pomegranate sensed, was the old form used for the names of gods. . . .

  And like a god, right on cue, Hokiros appeared at the speaking of his name.

  Just outside the door of the hut—which was rather crowded with the three of them plus Soth’s two crossbows and his satchel of implements—Pomegranate’s pet pig, Pontifer, whipped his head around, sprang to his feet with a squeal of terror. At the same instant Pomegranate heard the sloshing rush of the waters and felt the heavy vibration in the ground. From the lakeshore village of Hon, where Soth (and the apprehensive Hon villagers) had calculated that Hokiros would strike next, arose the wild bleating of goats and sheep, left behind in their pens when the villagers had fled inland. Darkness thickened in the light-drenched fog.

  Darkness and the monster’s hoarse, booming roar.

  The earth shivered.

  Soth’s eyes were huge behind his spectacles. “Bugger all!”

  Tosu was right. As the dark bulk condensed into a moving shape, Hokiros looked a great deal more like a god than a water dragon, but a god of what, Pomegranate couldn’t imagine. He walked on two legs, like some impossibly huge, naked bird, and carried the immense tail high to counterbalance the serpentine arrowhead of his spiny skull. She guessed already that the old rites, and the dragon wards Soth had unearthed from the millennia-old grimoires in the palace library, probably weren’t going to work.

  He went straight for the livestock pens. The villagers had, reluctantly, obeyed Soth’s order to draw lots and leave enough stock to interest the monster so that he and Pomegranate wouldn’t have to hunt him up and down the shores of the lake. Following Soth’s instruction, Pomegranate—who up until last year had been a beggar in the Yellow City’s marketplaces—had circled the pens with the ward spells that had worked against the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon. Hokiros jerked back at the line of them—the line that Pomegranate could see as a smoky rim of light hanging in the air—and thrashed his long neck in pain. Then he stepped through the ward signs like a man thrusting through a thorned hedge and began to kill, striking at the terrified beasts like a shrike killing lizards, tossing each into the air, shaking it about with a murderous whiplash of his long neck, their screams echoing through the unreal world of white vapor and stillness.

  Pomegranate whispered, “Got any ideas?”

  Hokiros swung his head around, as if he’d heard her voice. Maybe he had. He’d stepped on the rails of the pen, the sheep and goats scattering through the village fields in terror. The black, dripping spines of his haunches swayed at least twenty-five feet above his clawed hinder toes—he’d have a stride of nearly forty feet, could catch the fleeing animals easily.

  But Pomegranate saw the red gleam of his eyes trained on the straw of their observation hut.

  She screamed, “Pontifer, run!” but the little white pig had already vanished. No fool, he, she thought.

  Soth caught up one of their crossbows and thrust the other into Pomegranate’s hands. “Have you ever shot one of these things?”

  “And at what point in a lifetime of selling fruit in the streets would I have done that?”

  “Load for me, then. Bolt in the notch, string over that lever. Tosu—”

  But as the ground shuddered with the creature’s lengthening stride, Tosu ripped aside the thin wall of woven reeds that made up the back of the hut, pushed himself through.

  “Tosu, don’t be a fool!” yelled Soth, as the boy began to run along the dry ridge land above the waving tassels of the rice fields that surrounded Hon village. At the best of times this wasn’t a good idea—even so far from the lakeshore the occasional crocodile crept in among the stalks—and the thought that a human would be able to outrun Hokiros would have been laughable were it not hideously tragic.

  The monster came on with horrifying speed, running like the desert lizards. Wizard and Raven sister dashed out of the hut with a single accord, both firing crossbows into Hokiros’s black, gleaming flank as he passed.

  Then Pomegranate shoved her bow at Soth and tore open her satchel, to reweave the ward spells that Tosu had disrupted by dashing across them rather than passing through the thaumaturgic “gate” in the protective square.

  The beast backed from the ward lines before crashing through, thought Pomegranate, struggling for calm. That means they hurt him. She concentrated marks of pain in the ward lines copied from those ancient spells used by the mages around the Lake of the Moon. She was barely conscious of Soth loading both bows, waiting. Her friend Raeshaldis had described the Sun Mages’ exercises, to teach their novices to form their spells with the proper focus and deliberation even while being walloped by the instructors with thorned switches or screamed at or surrounded by bales of burning straw. Pomegranate had thought those tests excessive and barbaric, but had to admit they made a great deal of sense now. Ancient runes, sourced in the magic of the earth, in the strength of its metals and crystals, bringing fear and pain to Hokiros—here she wove his name into the spell, along with the nearly forgotten glyphs the ancient mages ha
d used for the four-legged, fin-footed water dragons.

  Focusing her mind on the earth, on the runes, on the magic that centered somewhere behind her breastbone, just as if that glittering tower of black strength weren’t a hundred yards away . . .

  She heard Tosu scream, the sound jerking, catching as Hokiros shook him; and for those few moments the earth was still. Her long mare’s tails of gray hair hanging in her eyes, she was aware of using the time to strengthen the spell lines, thanking Koan God of Mages that they’d had the wits to ensorcel the crossbow bolts last night with spells of death and malice to water dragons.

  Then the earth shook again.

  Just go on with your spell-weaving, she thought. Don’t look.

  Pounding, trembling . . .

  Glyph of pain, connected at its three points with hands of power formed of salt and ochre. Hook together the lines of the innermost circle with the power curves that continued down into the bones of the earth.

  That booming roar that swallowed up the world.

  She yelled, “Done!” and looked up as Soth leveled the crossbow and fired, the black, spiny triangular head striking down at him.

  Hokiros threw up his head and bellowed as the bolt drove into the flesh just beneath one glaring eye, close—dear gods, how close!—above them. Soth leaped back between the two “hands”—scribbled signs marked on the earth in salt and pigeon blood—that bounded the gate of the protective square: Pomegranate trailed the line of salt between them, to close it. If, she thought, she wasn’t too terrified to concentrate on the final words of the spell.

  The monster reared back, opened his mouth, and spit. From the hillock yesterday Pomegranate had seen scorched and corroded splotches all over Shonghu village’s huts, and she and Soth both knew to leap aside. The yellow slime smoked between them on the ground, and Soth fired the other crossbow at Hokiros’s gaping mouth, though the head moved too fast and the bolt whizzed past. Pomegranate ducked into the hut, snatched at the pile of bolts that lay beside the wooden trapdoor in the floor. Before her husband’s death twenty years ago she’d done all the poor housewife’s tasks of grinding cornmeal and doing laundry, and had the arm muscles to prove it, but her hands were shaking so badly she fumbled twice trying to hook the string on the firing lever. Soth, moving faster than Pomegranate would have thought possible for a man of middle age and no conditioning, whipped into the hut; and the next instant the roof was gone, and in its place grinned that terrible black head, those red eyes that seemed to shine with such wicked, watching light.

  Soth snatched the bow from her hands and fired, missed, shoved Pomegranate down into the little clay hole, and dropped through himself on top of her. He jerked the trapdoor into place and slammed the latch that held it, gasping for breath. The next second claws like chisels knifed through the wood, raining them with splinters. Pomegranate, balled into a corner of the tiny space, worked frantically at the levers and strings, reloading both bows, heard the trapdoor jerk overhead, then rend apart. The clawed hand, like the forepaw of an enormous lizard, jabbed down, and Soth struck at it with his sword, but the snap of the claw drawing back tore the weapon from his grip and, by the look of it, nearly broke his arm.

  Pomegranate pulled her own shorter blade from her belt—though she’d had little more call to use a sword in her life than she’d had to use a crossbow—and when the black gleaming nose slammed down into the square hole above them, struck at it with all the strength of her arm, screaming the words of the ward spell at the top of her lungs. Hokiros withdrew his head and Soth caught up the bow, scrambled up through the trap. Pomegranate saw him kneeling above her as Hokiros struck down again.

  The whap of the bow firing echoed in the little hole; she heard Hokiros scream. Soth dropped the bow and Pomegranate thrust the other, freshly loaded, into his hands, then heard it fire with a noise like the breaking of a tree trunk; the ground shook. Soth dropped back into the hole, and in the next second straw, bamboo, and other debris rained down on them as Hokiros smashed the hut with his tail.

  Thud. Thud-thud. Not the pounding tremor of his terrible charge but aimless staggering, like that of a drunken man.

  Soth fumbled, dropped the next bow Pomegranate handed him, then grabbed it back and scrambled up through the hole. Pomegranate followed in time to see Hokiros reeling away, forehands tearing at his eyes, blood dribbling and splattering. The huge tail struck at the houses of the village, shattering them like toys, crushing fences, splintering sheds. She glanced sidelong at the former Earth Wizard and saw him shaking all over, white as a ghost in the unreal fog light, his hand pressed to his side and his breathing like a leaky bellows.

  Together they stood and watched as Hokiros stumbled away into the thinning white mists.

  Dislimned into a blot of darkness in the slow-lifting fog.

  The water splashed.

  A final howl in the mists, hoarse and furious.

  Then he was gone.

  The fog was clearing. Overhead, the sky was blue and hot. Across the rice fields, the white shape of Pontifer Pig appeared, trotting toward them. He stopped to sniff at something on the path, probably, Pomegranate guessed, Tosu’s body.

  She estimated the entire attack hadn’t lasted a quarter of an hour.

  She turned back to Soth as he sat, very suddenly, against what remained of the hut wall. He looked green, like a man about to faint, his face clammy with sweat. For most of his fifty-eight years, she reflected as she unwound one of her many ragged scarves and soaked it from the water bottle, he’d done little but study spells. He’d occupied himself with perfecting his technique in the drawing of wards, in the healing of the sick, the occasional spells for good fortune or to conceal tombs from robbers or to keep the teyn of some village or other in awe of their minders. Because of his wizardry, he’d probably never done any manual labor in his life.

  Wizardry could be dangerous—seeking out djinni in the desert was never a safe practice—but it was dangerous by its own rules.

  And of course for the past ten years, after his powers had vanished, Soth had remained in an alcoholic fog and hadn’t done much of anything until the previous spring. Since that time he hadn’t touched so much as a glass of wine, but Pomegranate knew that wasn’t the kind of damage you got over in six months.

  He looked like he would very much like a drink now.

  Then he drew a shaky breath, took off his spectacles, and opened his eyes.

  She handed him the soaked rag. “Did we win?”

  Hon village lay in absolute ruin a hundred yards away: huts smashed, ground scorched with acid, livestock scattered or shredded, the date palms that brought in most of what little money came to the village flattened by Hokiros’s monstrous tail. Whatever he was, there was no guarantee that either the poison or the spells of death on the crossbow bolts would work.

  Soth dropped his head back against the shattered wall, slapped the wet rag over his face, and said firmly, “Yes. You and I, madam, have ranked ourselves as subjects of the balladeers for years to come.” He flexed his right arm gingerly, as if to make sure the shoulder still worked. “And I think we’d better get in touch with the Lady Summerchild and let the king know what’s going on here. This is the third unknown creature to—er—surface in a year, and it’s by far the worst. I don’t think His Majesty is going to be pleased.”

  SIX

  Chirak Shaldeth was sitting behind his desk as Habnit led Shaldis between the tiny beds of jasmine, roses, lime, and avocado trees of the innermost court.

  Her grandfather’s study, and his chambers off the second-floor gallery nearby, formed a sanctum of silence from the noise of the camel-drivers’ court at the front of the house and the smokes and stink of the kitchen yard that lay between. Though both his sons—Habnit and Shaldis’s uncle, Tjagan—had chambers off the opposite gallery, Chirak had always forbidden either—or anyone else—to enter the garden when he was in his study. It was the only silence and privacy in the crowded house, and Chirak claimed it as his alon
e.

  The folded lattice wall that would later in the day shut some of the morning cool into the study hadn’t yet been put up, and she saw her grandfather as a pale shape looking out from the shadows of his private cave. When Habnit and Shaldis stopped in the entrance, the old man’s square red face twisted.

  “Veil yourself, girl. Any man would take you for a whore.”

  There was a time when Shaldis would have retorted that she’d been in such a hurry to come here to save his life that she’d left her veils behind—and would have cheerfully taken the beating for such impertinence—but she’d spent many months now observing her friend Summerchild’s impeccable good manners and how the lovely concubine could simply sidestep insults without replying in kind. So now she took a deep breath, salaamed with the exact depth and simplicity that her brother Tulik did when coming into Chirak’s presence, and said, “Father told me an attempt had been made on your life, sir.”

  Rage blazed up in those pale-brown eyes, but so clear were her unspoken words, I can leave if you don’t like the sight of my face, that he said nothing.

  This forbearance left Shaldis speechless with shock. She thought, He’s truly afraid.

  She’d never seen him forgo a burst of rage before, not against a member of his family, only against other businessmen and merchants, whose goodwill he needed.

  “What happened?” A bandage wrapped his neck to hold a dressing to the left side of his jaw, and the left sleeve of his robe bunched over more bandages underneath. “You’re hurt, sir.”