Circle Of The Moon Part 13

"If it wasn't a child," put in Melon, her mouth full of couscous and raisins, "she'd already be selling pa.s.sion potions down in Hot Pillow Lane and making a fortune," a piece of logic with which Shaldis could not argue.

"If it's a child, may the G.o.ds help her," said Rosemallow grimly. "Because Xolnax-or Cattail, whichever of them finds her first-is going to buy her from her parents and raise her as their own, so that they'll be able to control her magic for their own ends. And then the G.o.ds help us all. Oh, show Shaldis your pendants from Ahure, honey," she added as a couple of young men-brothers by the look of them and obviously thugs in the pay of some one of the local water bosses-appeared in the archway from the street, leaning slightly on each other and calling out Melon's name.

Melon smiled smugly and preened herself a little. "Gotta go, kittens. Thanks ever so for the wine-you be here when I get back?" She stood, and unfastened one of the several pendants from around her neck. "Take good care of that," she added in a whisper. "It's brought me I don't know how many good customers." And she took each bedazzled young thug by an elbow and guided them both into her room.

The pendant was cheaply made, as Yellow Hen had described. Inferior bronze set with a bad-quality topaz and chips of blue faience. A circle of what looked like earth-wizard runes were inscribed around it. There was no more magic in it than in an adobe brick.

TWENTY-THREE.

Shaldis turned them over and over in her mind as she walked back along the path by the city wall to the Fishmarket Gate, and from there along Great Bazaar Street and so home in the darkness as the city settled toward sleep: Cattail.

Ahure the Blood Mage.

A woman calling out in despair in the rhythmically booming darkness.

A skinny gray cat who should have been dead and wasn't.

Echoes of magic that were almost the same but not quite.

A child would use those simple spells to heal a cat.

Would a child use her magic to a.s.sist an a.s.sa.s.sin?

Shaldis had seen too many five-year-old pickpockets and housebreakers in the streets of the Slaughterhouse District to have any illusions about what the innocent could be coaxed, tricked, or blackmailed into doing.

And Cattail was seeking to buy herself that extra power that domination of a Raven child would bring.

Shaldis ghosted among the blankets of the sleeping camel drivers around the embers of the courtyard fire at her grandfather's house, slipped through the silent kitchen court, and up to her own room above it, between her mother's and her aunt's. Bedding had been made up for her, under one of the new mosquito-net tents. As she lay on it she pictured the healing herbs as Yanrid had instructed her, meditated on each one: scent, taste, bark, and leaves.

Fever tree and hand of Darutha, emperor root and chamomile.

After that she stretched out her senses through the house, listening to the sounds in each chamber and gallery. At any other time or place she would have sniffed as well, but at the moment even the senses of the Crafty could not penetrate past the ammonia reek of the dye pots in the kitchen court.

Still, she heard nothing but the night sounds of the house: the snuffle and sigh of her parents' breathing, the thready whisper of Twinkle telling Foursie stories in the dark of the maids' dormitory: "So the evil queen said, 'You must agree to become my slave, and to do my bidding forever. . . .'"

Then she slipped over into sleep, an hour before first light.

The king and his company reached the village of Three Wells about an hour before first light. "Best we camp, my lord," said Captain Numet quietly, when they came within the ring of dusty cornfields that surrounded the town. "As you said, an hour won't make much difference. The scouts say there's not a sound, either from the village itself or from the teyn compound."

"Is it safe?" Oryn rose in his stirrups, looked around him at the dark sea of cornstalks, shoulder high to the mounted troopers, in places head high. Beyond them, rough ground rose to the east, a stretch of badlands that the merchant Poru had called the Serpent Maze, separating the village oasis from the true desert beyond.

"We'll keep back of the cornfields, where we can get a clear view, Your Majesty. Anything that comes from the badlands, we'll be able to see before it gets to us."

Something flickered in the corner of Oryn's vision, something that was gone when he turned his head in the direction of the hills. He nudged his horse over to Summerchild's as the men dismounted and began to set camp. She, too, was gazing at the hills.

"What's there?"

She shook her head. "Something . . . I don't know."

"Teyn?"

"No," she murmured. "They're everywhere but there."

Shaldis jerked awake. Voices crying out- The rags of dreams flicked from her mind. What she thought had been strange music on the edge of hearing, scents and sensations of strange sweet poison, dissolved into the peaceful stillness of the time the Sun Mages called the Sun at His Prayers, the hour at which even the rowdiest camel drivers slept.

Yet she was certain she'd heard or smelled or felt something.

What WAS that? Not the Crafty woman crying for help. Something else.

Her mind quested through every chamber, every gallery: kitchen, gardens, the compound of the teyn.

But all she encountered was the night silence of the sleeping house.

With the coming of first light, the king and his party rode through the cornfields to the village.

Vultures were everywhere. The high corn, parching from two days without irrigation, rustled with activity: coyote, kit foxes, and, Oryn saw, the village cats and dogs.

Within the ring of the cornfields lay the vegetable gardens, the charred maze of low walls visible beyond. As they pa.s.sed the gate of the teyn compound he saw that it stood open, and vultures perched on its blackened walls and on the bodies that lay both within it and outside the gate. It seemed to him that only a few lay outside.

After two days, the town was enveloped in a cloud of flies, and the stink was enough to knock a man down.

A woman lay on her back near the edge of town, face-or what the vultures had left of her face-to the sky. It was hard to tell the state of her clothing now, but Oryn didn't see any obvious wounds. A round-bellied kitchen pot lay as if she'd carried it in the crook of her arm; Jethan sprang from his horse and tilted the pot with the handle of his quirt so he could look inside. "Eggplants, my lord." He tilted the pot over, spilling the contents on the ground, stirred the smooth white-and-purple globes to see if there was anything of value-or interest-among them.

There wasn't.

"Over here, sir."

Numet stood over a detached arm, the limb protruding from a bundle of green-and-white cloth that looked like a man's work tunic. "Looks like there's been grave robbing here."

Oryn dismounted. The arm was almost black, the desiccated flesh collapsed onto the bone, slick as long-dried leather. He straightened, looked back toward the broken hills of the Serpent Maze, visible now above the burned walls of the village.

"That's a mummy's arm, surely," said Captain Numet, and turned to Poru as the salt merchant emerged from the charred sh.e.l.l of a house. "Are there tombs back in the badlands?"

"Absolutely," Oryn said, and, though he looked a little surprised that the king would know this, the young merchant nodded.

"The hills are rotten with them, Majesty. Some quite big ones. Every now and then the young men of the village will dig through them-especially nowadays-but they've all been looted clean centuries ago."

"The kings of the Zali Dynasty had tombs out here," provided Oryn, kneeling gingerly and poking at the arm with a stick. "Here, and north by the Lake of Roses, hoping, I suppose, that the more trouble they made for tomb robbers the likelier they were to be left in peace-the more fools they. I have one or two pieces of Zali jewelry-which are interesting but not very pretty-and a tremendous collection of burial texts: I suspect most of the Zali jewelry was melted down centuries ago. But why would a tomb robber steal a mummy, much less bring it into the village? They mostly just strip them and dump them on the floors of the tombs."

"Whyever they did it," said Jethan grimly, looking into a house nearby, "it wasn't just one."

After the fourth time she woke, heart pounding, positive that she'd heard a singing that proved on waking to be illusory, Shaldis gave it up. The house was still shadowy, and the silence now profound. The few hours of relative coolness s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaw of the ravening lion of midsummer.

Birds in full song in the garden.

She slipped from beneath the mosquito net and dressed again in her white novice's robe, made her way unseen down the stairs and through the kitchen court where Cook's dark form could be glimpsed beyond the kitchen archways just making up the fires, then out to the street.

Every alley was a canyon of shadow, the vegetable market in front of the Grand Bazaar a world of luminous blue. Pigeons pecked the dirt in quest of grain dropped the day before.

The first of the farmers were setting up their stands there, so Shaldis knew the Fishmarket Gate was open, after being closed barely two hours. This time she followed the path along the wall only halfway, and turned off it onto the smaller but still well-worn track that led toward the Red-bone Hills, where the landchiefs and the great merchant princes had been buried, time out of mind. Around them, closer to town, were interred everyone else who could afford it: each wadi and hillside honeycombed with tombs great and small. In the clear dove-colored light the tablelike marble tombs, the small sharp markers, looked like bits of broken bone, scrawled all over with ancient formulae and curses and protective wards to keep forgotten forms of evil away. Deeper in, Shaldis knew, the rich were buried in crypts dug in the hillsides, painted doors at the backs of caves like the hollowed sockets of skulls.

From the top of the rise where the dry rangelands began, she could see the house Ahure had taken. Like nearly everything else in her world she'd known of it most of her life. It stood alone on the brow of a little knoll half a mile or so from the start of the Redbone Hills proper, just where the old burial road from the city twisted around. There'd been a mortuary temple there whose ruins still stood under the back of the hill. It was too far to easily walk, though Shaldis could have done it had she had nothing else to do that day. It looked frighteningly isolated against the yellow hills, the brown-stained plaster long unpainted and crumbling, the dull-green cacti half shielding it like an ugly forest.

So that was where Ahure had taken refuge, after Lord Jamornid had politely let him know that he had better uses for his money than supporting a mage who could no longer work magic.

Lord Sarn, at least, had taken in his brother Benno, who'd once been rector of the Citadel of the Sun Mages-though, naturally, thought Shaldis, as she watched the first sunlight stream across the Redbone Hills, Lord Sarn hadn't offered Benno back his birthright of elder son, and erstwhile heir, of the great House Sarn.

Gold streamed across the high harsh domes of the Dead Hills, the lower labyrinths of the Redbones, those bitter badlands that divided the rangelands of goats and cattle east of the Yellow City from the true desert, the deadly desert. The realm of Kush the Destroyer. The light struck the isolated little house among its cacti, turned the dirt-colored walls to molten amber.

She turned her steps back toward the city.

As they moved through the narrow streets of Three Wells, Oryn and his party found withered fragments everywhere among the bloated and vulture-torn corpses of the villagers. Sometimes those blackened arms and legs were found separated from bodies, sometimes-gruesomely-they were attached to coal-dark leathery lumps that proved upon inspection to be bodies that had shrunk and contracted to the size of contorted children. "Is that an effect of the kind of mummification they used then?" asked Summerchild, wincing back from a particularly shocking specimen. "What would cause that?"

The face-what there was of it-smiled up at them from the collapsed head in an expression of unnerving bliss.

Oryn drew her away, sickened. In a way it was far worse than the unwounded modern corpses that lay in the doorways around them.

Tracks of teyn were everywhere, though only a single corpse lay, badly hacked, in the street. "Look how they superimpose every human track in the dust," murmured Jethan. The new gold sunlight streaming across the desert threw his shadow over Oryn as king and concubine knelt to examine the single dead subhuman outside the teyn compound gate. "They go from house to house."

"It couldn't have been they who burned the town, though," said Oryn, groaning as he got to his feet. "Teyn are afraid of fire."

"Teyn used to be afraid of the walls of their own compounds, Your Majesty." Jethan reached out significantly and flicked the old fear runes on the compound door with the back of his hand. "And if someone's controlling them . . ."

"They couldn't have got here from where they held us off in time to burn the village," protested Captain Numet, emerging from the burned ruins of the overseer's house. "It was half a day's ride!"

"If someone is controlling them," responded Oryn gently, "he-or she-may be giving instructions to two separate bands."

The captain looked thoroughly nonplussed at this idea. It was not one that Oryn particularly enjoyed either.

"I think," said Jethan, "that the tracks I've seen here are mostly domestics. They're bigger and heavier than the wildings, and they walk more upright, without leaving hand tracks in the dust."

"You mean they escaped," said Numet with an edge of panic in his voice, "and then returned to burn the town after . . . after what? You don't think it could be a curse? A curse that fell on the town because of someone's bringing in a cache of mummies from some tomb in the hills?"

Summerchild shook her head at once. "The curses that lay on the tombs have all failed." Her voice was sad. "Like the spell wards against mosquitoes and mice, and gra.s.shoppers around the fields-"

Like the wards of dread around the teyn compounds, Oryn mentally added.

"-the magic of the wizards that held curses into the stones of the tombs has dissolved. I think that's what our friend Poru meant," she added with a kindly smile, "when he said, 'especially nowadays,' when we spoke of the village men helping themselves to the tombs. Haven't you heard the same thing about the tombs in the Dead Hills?"

Captain Numet seemed a little rea.s.sured. "That's a fact, lady. But seeing this . . . it makes you wonder."

"What I wonder," said Summerchild, returning to Oryn's side, "is whether this plague-this madness or fever that caused everyone to run out into the streets like this to die-can have come from the mummies themselves?"

Oryn winced. "I suppose that means a quarantine. Perhaps we can make it last until after the Moon of Jubilee, to buy ourselves a little more time? Captain," he added, "you might want to tell your men not to touch anything here in the town."

Numet, who'd wandered a few paces to watch the men as they gingerly entered the broken houses, raised his brows. "I'll tell them, sir. But, by the G.o.ds, what on earth in this village would there be for anyone to want to take?"

Walking back toward the city walls through the swift-rising heat of the new day, Shaldis turned over in her mind what she knew of Ahure. A charlatan now, yes, but like many mages a man of intense pride, the birthright pride of one who has known from tiny childhood that he was special. Like the djinni, who were composed entirely of magic, magic was what Ahure was, his sole perception of himself. He couldn't imagine himself no longer being special.

Couldn't imagine existing-as the djinn Naruansich had learned to exist-in any fashion other than the one he had known all his life.

The charlatanry was a way of hanging on to what he had been, she reflected. To what, in his heart and his mind, he still was.

How long would it be, Shaldis wondered, as her boots scuffed the hot dust of the roadway and lizards flicked out of sight before her shadow, before Noyad the jeweler concluded that Ahure's powers were all fake and ceased to send him the protection of his hired bullyboys?

To whom would that sour old man turn then?

Healing no longer flows from their hands. She heard the voice of her unknown sister whisper in her memory, out of the depths of those dreams.

What had the wizards of her acquaintance done when they found that magic no longer flowed from their hands? Did they stew in rancor, in hatred, in envy of those who for reasons unknown now exercised the powers the men had lost?

Or had it been one of them who, like Yanrid, had taught the unknown Raven sister the means of reaching out for help, with spells that he himself could no longer perform?

The morning sun heated her shoulders under the thin white wool of her robe, and before her she could see the dust-clouds already rising, where farmers brought their produce to the city gate.

It was true, reflected Oryn, that, as Captain Numet had said, there was very little in Three Wells worth stealing. "If there was looted tomb gold anywhere in town, cursed or otherwise," he murmured to Summerchild, "whoever burned the place while we were being held at bay by the teyn did a very good job of collecting it."

She slipped behind him through the door of the largest house in town, just off the main square. The overseer's, probably. Jethan had insisted on preceding them around every corner, sword drawn as if expecting to encounter a hostile army. Oryn had the feeling that the young man was slightly disappointed when he didn't.

"Do you think that's what happened?" Summerchild asked. "That someone killed them to retrieve something from the village?"

"No." He paused in the middle of the roofless room, looking around him at the fallen beams, the burned body of a man crumpled in a corner, the broken dishes and cups. The new-risen sun of morning heated his shoulders through the silk of his robe, warmed the air even under the roof beams' broken shadows. "No. Too many of those people in the streets too clearly killed one another."

The guards at least all seemed to be giving the corpses, modern or ancient, wide berth.

Could sickness cling to gold? For that long? Over a thousand years? Oryn cursed himself for not knowing. If some guardsman found, among all this ash, one or another of those big crude-looking gold Zali pendants set with obsidian, or one of those smoky b.a.l.l.s of green-and-silver gla.s.s, would he leave it alone?

Or would he bring it into the Yellow City to sell?

"So what do you think happened?" Summerchild wrapped the end of one of her scarves around the handle of a mirror and picked it up from the ashes on the floor. She turned it over. Both sides were blackened with fire. It had been broken, Oryn saw, by being struck on the corner of the wall bench beside the door. Gla.s.s sparkled, half buried in the ash.

"I can't imagine. Everything we're seeing should be clues, but they don't seem to add up to anything." He held out his hand to pick up a shard, and Summerchild touched his arm stayingly.

"I put spells upon myself, on my flesh and my clothing, against infection," she said. "If something must be touched, I'll do it."

"I do need to be in good shape for my jubilee, don't I?" Oryn dusted his hands, though he had handled nothing. "If that mirror was burned on both sides-and under the gla.s.s bed, too, I see-that means it was broken after the house was first burned, doesn't it? Or at least picked up and moved.

"By the teyn? You say their tracks are everywhere, Jethan, dear boy." He turned toward the tall guardsman. "Have you seen any tracks that look like they shouldn't be here? New boots, or better boots than the villagers would wear? Even horse or camel prints superimposed upon the ash from the second fire?"

"I've been looking, my lord king," replied the young man rather stiffly, as if even long familiarity with the king hadn't inured him to being called dear boy. "And I have seen nothing but the marks of the teyn."