Circle Of The Moon Part 24

Just forming the words in her mind was like the earth breaking open beneath her feet, dropping her into a void that had no end.

Tears leaking down her face, she whispered, "Papa's only going to use me again and again and again, until there's nothing left of me. He doesn't mean to, but he will. I have to get out."

She fell into Opal's arms as the smaller girl leaped to her feet, rushed to her side, gathered her into a desperate embrace. For a time nothing existed for her but tears and pain and the knowledge that her own a.s.sessment of the situation was correct: that her father loved her dearly, and would use her like a spear until she broke in his hand.

He would never forgive her defection.

Raeshaldis survived this, she thought.

I can, too.

She whispered again, "I have to get out."

"Rider coming," said Rat.

Shaldis, clinging to the saddle bow of her stumbling horse, barely heard. Her eyes were half shut against the hard horizontal glare of the sinking sun and with the light trance of listening, scenting-searching for that elusive flicker of blue in all the wasteland of empty rock and wind-scoured sand.

Except for the shortest possible rest at the worst of the nooning, they had ridden through the day, blazing heat that crushed horses and riders like an invisible hammer. The teyn-and the nomad Crafty-seemed a little closer. They had stopped, too, for a time, or at least the scent and movement of the indigo speck in the distance had seemed unmoving to Shaldis's straining senses. But many miles still separated them. With the coming of night the scent of the indigo would be stronger, but sooner or later they would have to rest.

"Camels," added Rat.

Shaldis drew rein, dared withdraw her mind from the quarry, turned to blink at her companion. "What?"

"Camels. Four of 'em, heading this way." He pointed. The sinking sun, setting behind the near-invisible trace of the distant Dead Hills, drenched the dust cloud with light. Shaldis could make out black, swaying shapes amid the swooning heat shimmer that seemed to hide the horizon in an incandescent curtain. She whispered, "Jethan," half disbelieving. But when she fumbled the scrying crystal from her purse and looked within it, the young guardsman's image was clear: dust covered, veiled against heat and glare, and as stiff in his saddle as the gait of his mount would permit.

Two of the other camels carried waterskins. The third bore an empty saddle. The ta.s.sels and trappings were green and orange, the colors of her grandfather's house.

"The king needs you at the aqueduct," was the first thing Jethan said to her when he came near enough, almost half an hour later. "Two laborers there have gone mad in the past two days. Lord Soth will be going on there from Three Wells, but they'll need a true mage."

"I'm delighted to see you too, Jethan," replied Shaldis in a tone of exaggerated cheer. "And, yes, thank you, I'm in the very pink of good health. How are you?"

Jethan drew himself up in rigid indignation, like a statue wrought of dust. Then he relaxed, tapped the camel down to its knees, and sprang from the saddle to stand before her, where she stood dismounted beside the exhausted horses. "I'm well," he said quietly. "But I'm very tired and very frightened, for the king's sake and that of my lady. Though I am the better for seeing you safe."

Shaldis replied, meaning it, "And I you."

"I have water," said Jethan. "At your grandfather's house they said you took enough for two days, but in this heat . . ."

"Thank you," said Shaldis. "I appreciate that. Rat will, too, when he takes the horses back-they can't go on into the desert this way. Tell the king that I'm pursuing a nomad Raven sister into the desert, the Raven sister he and I spoke of, who can control the teyn. Maybe who can control wind as well. What tracks we've found were nearly erased by wind, but we've barely felt any-only a stream of it, sometimes, flowing near the ground. Not enough to raise dust in the distance. They're almost half a day ahead of us. I hope to overtake them tomorrow."

Without turning his head, Jethan said, "You hear that, Rat, is it? Tell the king that, when you get to the aqueduct. I'm sure your master back in town will understand the delay in your return with his horses." He didn't take his eyes off Shaldis, blue as jewels in the mask of dust. "Please rea.s.sure the king that we'll both be with him when he rides back to the city four nights hence for his jubilee."

Shaldis's head was pounding with the heat and the glare of the sun-blasted emptiness and with the need for sleep. She could have fallen on Jethan's shoulder and cried, as she'd fallen yesterday on the king's. She only said to Rat, "Rest until the sun's down. That dust cloud in the north is the workface of the aqueduct. Once it's dark you'll probably be able to see the lights of the camp."

"You're not going on now, miss?" The driver stepped between her and the saddled camel as she reached up to take its bridle to mount. "Without rest? You've rode since midnight, barring the nooning stop, and if you slept, then by the look of you you didn't get any good of it."

In fact Shaldis ached as if she'd been beaten. But she said, "In my grandfather's house last night I saw green mists, the same green mists Foxfire has said she's seen around her grandmother's house in the hills-and that Jethan and I saw near Ahure's house. I don't know whether these have anything to do with my grandfather's madness or with the gla.s.s this woman is trying to take from him or with what's happened in Three Wells or with the woman who's been crying to me in my dreams. What I do know is that the woman out there ahead of us has some answers. The only answers I've encountered so far. And as far as I know, she and her teyn are still moving. So we need to move, too."

She hooked her toe onto the kneeling camel's leg and sprang into the saddle. The camel groaned in protest, then lurched to her feet, mumbling and grousing as camels do. Jethan unhooked a pair of waterskins from one of the spare camels and laid them in the dust beside Rat and the horses. "Tell the king we will not forsake him," he said softly. "If we do not reach the aqueduct camp before he must leave, we will not fail to be in the city on the day of the new moon."

Shaldis glanced worriedly at him as he swung on his camel again, tapped it to signal it to rise. Behind his shoulder the dwindling crescent moon stood clear in the saffron sky.

She'd watched it from night to night, but its thinness struck her anew, and filled her with despair. Wasting, draining away. Like Summerchild's strength. Like the king's life.

Jethan caught her look, but didn't respond until they had started off again with long swaying strides toward that half-guessed dot of blue in the landscape, that elusive whiff of indigo.

Then Jethan said softly, "But if we come not to the city till the day of the new moon, I fear it will be to find the lady Summerchild dead and all hope at an end."

THIRTY-NINE.

Most curious." Oryn made a move to step closer to the man who sat in the stuffy brown shade of the little goat-hair tent, hands bound before him and leg-shackled to the tent pole. Ykem, foreman of the aqueduct camp, made what might have been a move preliminary to catching his sleeve, but of course a foreman didn't do that to a king.

"Watch it, sir. He's quiet enough now, but this morning he was like to kill the fellow who came in to change the latrine bucket. Lunged at him, screaming and clawing, he did, and we thought he'd snap the tent pole. We had him chained in the quartermaster's store tent, but the men wouldn't have it, sir. Said he'd put a Bad-Luck Shadow on the picks and shovels, and they'd turn in the hands of them as used 'em."

Oryn glanced back at the sunburned little man when he used that nomad term, then looked back at the shackled workman. The man looked like any of the rangeland villagers, wiry and dark, unremarkable save for the expression of mad bliss on his face as he sang.

"Been singin' like that since night before last, sir," added Ykem. " 'Cept when he sleeps, which he does every few hours. Even when he attacked Nam this morning, if you can call it singin'."

"Oh, it's singing, all right." Oryn folded his arms, watched the madman's mouth gaping, flexing, tongue quivering and curling as it gave shape to the sound that poured like a wailing river from his throat. "I've made a study of music-one can only watch dancing girls cavort day in and day out for so long-"

Ykem looked at him in startlement, then saw the joke and laughed.

"And that sounds a bit like what the deep-desert nomads do to bring on trances. Does he have nomad blood? Or nomad family?"

Ykem shook his head. "Hates 'em," he said shortly. "He's from the City of White Walls. Said he'd never been out of sight of the White Lake, till he came here."

Oryn murmured again, "Most curious. And did he know the other man who went mad? Were they friends?"

"Probably knew him. They worked the same gang. n.o.body says they was particular friends. Both of 'em, these three, four days now, the men say they'd been sickenin' for somethin'. They'd eat their food and sneak off to their barrack the minute they could, and their mates'd find 'em sound asleep in minutes." Ykem nodded toward the rough, open-sided shelter of canvas-roofed poles that stood on the edge of the camp. "Deep sleep, dead sleep, they say, but that might be hindsight, the way men do. I asked around among the foremen, and they say five or six other men are startin' to do that. Startin' to claim they're sleepy right after they come off, and sometimes not even stay for the food. But I talked to 'em and they seem all right."

"Or they wanted you to think they are, at any rate." Oryn took another look at the madman, with his lolling head and eyes fixed enraptured on nothingness, wailing words-they had to be words, thought Oryn, there was a regularity in them that went far beyond random sounds-in a language he had never heard before. He wondered what Soth would make of it. Though Earth Wizards were as a rule less scholarly than Sun Mages, Soth had studied ancient tongues, both the languages of dimmest prehistory and the tongues of those alien mages learned through the scrying crystals.

He ducked his head, pushed through the tent flap and out into the slanting heat, the sun-saturated dust of late afternoon.

"And none of the men have reported disturbing a tomb? Finding jewels they shouldn't have or pieces of mummies?"

"Pieces of mummies, my lord?" Ykem stared at him, baffled.

Oryn's head ached. Resting in the heat of yesterday's brief nooning, and riding on through the night, he felt his mind circling again and again to what Raeshaldis had told him about her grandfather and his connection with Noyad the tomb-robbing jeweler, about the howling man in Little Hyacinth Lane, and the burning of the White Djinn Tavern.

The royal cavalcade had followed the line of the aqueduct through the Dead Hills and into the desert. Last year, when the engineers had been constructing the raised waterway across the flat rangelands to the city, he had always felt a lift of hope and purpose in visiting the face camp. Every day had brought the end of the stone trough on its high stone piers closer to their goal, to the rocky, pale shoulders of the Dead Hills. Progress had been visible.

Then he had been able to tell himself, We will reach the Oasis of Koshlar, and the deep waters of its springs will flow cleanly to the city and the fields.

It was hard to remember that now, looking out across the waterless expanses of the desert. A hundred and sixty miles, the surveyors said. It would go faster now, of course, since they were only digging and covering. . . .

If he lived to push it through to completion.

Don't think about that, he ordered himself.

Don't think about Summerchild. About whether she'll be alive when you return, or- Don't think about or.

Weariness settled on him like the big double baskets of earth that were yoked, before and behind, on the teyn who hauled them away from the digging crews. Think about what you're going to say to Soth when he gets here. About what Raeshaldis will make of that poor fellow in the tent. Five or six others, who "look all right."

He wondered how much scrub water Geb had managed to locate, and longed for a proper bath, a proper ma.s.sage, sleep. He couldn't recall when last he'd slept.

He'd even accept dreams about his father being eaten by lions, or about fleeing one himself, as an alternative to sleepless fear for Summerchild's life, for Rainsong's survival.

And the madman in his tent-and the one who'd thrown himself into the teyn gang-had first shown their madness with longing for excessive sleep. Was it the same with Raeshaldis's grandfather?

There were men waiting for him outside his tent. With the sun-drenched dust that hung over the camp like lake fog in the north, he was quite close before he made out the brown and white robes of nomads.

They ran forward to him-surprising behavior for deep-desert dwellers, who mostly had little use for the king-and knelt before him, something no nomad would do save before their own tribal sheikh. Geb emerged briefly in the shadow of the tent doorway, arms folded and an expression of disapproval on his round features that would have done Jethan proud.

One of them, Oryn saw, was the tribal sheikh. So whatever was going on, it was serious. By the tattoos on their foreheads and chins they were an-Dhoki, a tribe that made its money mostly by hunting teyn in the hills and bringing them to the city for sale, though they engaged in small-time banditry when they thought they could get away with it.

"Lord King," said the sheikh, "you who have the great mages at your calling, the great wizards. We, who are your disobedient children, we beg your help. I, Urah of the rai-an-Dhoki, beg it, and we promise our service for ten generations." And though he remained standing, he folded his hands and inclined his head in the closest any nomad ever came to a gesture of supplication.

Oryn knew better than to be transported with joy at this news. They'd be back raiding the herds of the rangeland sheikhs before the moon was full. But he knew also what was expected of him, which was a grave frown and an expression of utterly uncaring haughtiness. "Geb," he called out, "send water and bread to these, my children, and make them comfortable. I will see them when I have eaten and bathed, perhaps slept a little, for I am weary." His father had never failed to impress upon him-and Oryn had found by experience that he was correct-that the longer one made a nomad wait, the greater one's power in his eyes. For the nomads, power was everything. Power, and not showing them that they had a single thing that you wanted.

The waiting game, and afterward the endless ritual of refusing to get to the point of whatever they wanted of one, exasperated Oryn to frenzy, because sometimes things were important. As king he was expected to make everyone wait for days, sometimes months. But the nomads on the whole accepted this with patience and generally did seem to accord more respect to him the more he turned them from his door.

Thus he was astonished when the sheikh caught the sleeve of his robe and cried, "My lord, no! They are dead, my lord, they are all dead!"

Oryn looked down into the brown dusty face within its frame of veils and saw it streaked with tears. "Who is dead?"

The sheikh whispered, "My family-my children-my brothers and their wives. All of them. They all went mad and slew one another in the night." He knelt and rested his cheek in the sand beside Oryn's foot in a gesture, not of humility, but of a despair that lifted the hair on the king's nape. "You are a king who commands wizards. You are a king who has put your life in the hands of the G.o.ds. Take this curse from off us lest these my nephews-all of us few that are left-go mad and die, too."

Hoa.r.s.e with shock, Oryn said, "Show me."

Riding up to the construction camp that morning, Oryn had noticed the vultures, but his mind had been on the mad workman, and he'd accepted Ykem's reply to his query, that it was probably a dead cow, wandered from the hills. The nomad camp lay in a shallow wadi three miles from the vast straggle of tents and teyn pens around the end of the aqueduct ditch. As their horses flung up their heads, snorting uneasily even before the camp came into view, Oryn guessed that Urah and the rai-an-Dhoki had come this close to the Dead Hills for purposes they guessed the king would disapprove. Ordinarily, nomads traveled with their herds of goats and sheep, animals whose straying would have announced their presence (he sincerely hoped) to the construction camp's perimeter scouts.

But as the horses of the king and his squad of guards topped the rim of the stony crack in the earth, Oryn heard only the groaning and mumbling of camels and now and then the whicker of a thirsty horse. "Again, the animals survived," he murmured, drawing rein and leaning to speak to Bax. The commander nodded.

"I thought that myself, sir." The icy eyes scanned the broken ground, the cl.u.s.ters of dusty black birds rising and falling just where wind scour and an outcrop of harder stone offered concealment for the earth-colored goat-hair tents.

Oryn found himself thinking that vultures wouldn't have cl.u.s.tered that way around the hidden campsite had live warriors been lying in wait to take prisoner the king. He thought Bax's heavy shoulders relaxed a little as the commander raised his hand, signaled the guards to ride down into the wadi.

"It was thus we found them when we returned to camp this noon," Urah whispered, urging his skinny, light-built desert pony close beside Oryn's tall mount. "My nephews and I, we followed the wadi from the hills. We saw the vultures gathered, the shar-I-zhaffa, the servants of the G.o.ds of the dead, and we knew then what we would see. We did an evil thing, Lord King, and the curse fell upon these innocent ones."

"What was the evil that you did?" asked Oryn.

The sheikh turned his face aside and drew his veils around him in an att.i.tude of ritual shame. "All throughout the near desert it is said that the curses that once guarded the tombs of the dead hold power no more. It is said that men can enter the sealed houses where the old kings sleep and take back from them at last the gold they stole from the people of the desert and the gold they won from the mines with the blood of slaves."

Most of the slaves who worked the gold mines in the Eanit and around the Lake of the Moon were in fact teyn, not nomads, but Oryn did not interrupt to point this out. No amount of this sort of logic had ever changed the nomads' rationale that robbing the ranchers and farmers of the realm was merely getting back their own. He didn't know if they even really believed it themselves. He said instead, "So you robbed a tomb?"

"We did, my lord." Genuine distress cracked in the older man's voice. "Had we known-had I known-of the doom it would bring . . ." He shook his head. "My lord, it was a few things only, for the tomb had been robbed before us, and most of the gold was already gone. Yet I see no other vultures; we have found no other camps like . . . like that of my family. I know not why the curse was visited on me and mine and not upon the thieves that came before."

As the horses rounded the bare shoulder of sun-blasted rock that sheltered the camp, Oryn's horse flung up its head again, fighting the bit, and at the same moment the stink of decay whiffed in the still, superheated air. Even in the afternoon's heat it was no more than a whiff, and looking down, Oryn saw that what he had first taken to be a twisted black hunk of wood was in fact a mummy: withered, desiccated, and curled so tightly upon itself that it appeared to have been knotted like tarred rope.

Another one lay between where his horse stood and the half-dozen silent tents that cl.u.s.tered in the black shade of the overhanging lip of the wadi. A man-or what had been a man-lay next to that one, covered in vultures.

Oryn swung down from his horse.

"Watch it, sir," cautioned Bax, but he dismounted, too. The other guards followed, leaving their horses with two men and advancing, swords drawn, into the hushed camp.

Beside Oryn, Urah said sadly, "I understand the caution of your men, great lord. There has been much misunderstanding between your people and mine. But I promise you, this is no trap. All here are dead."

"I believe you," said the king. "Zhenus!" he called out to the sergeant of the guards. "Please check the horse line and the camels and make sure that the sheikh here and his nephews are given all their beasts again-all of those which bear proper brands of sale." He glanced sidelong at Sheikh Urah as he said it, and the sheikh bowed again.

"We have erred, Great King, and we have been punished. Please, please, lift the curse from us, from this camp, from our tents, and all that we possess lest it fall upon us tonight as we sleep. We have done great evil and beg only your aid."

Leaving his horse with the others, Oryn waded forward through the deep sand to the tents, Bax and Urah following. Though his father had repeated over and over that one never admitted to a nomad that one was unable to do anything, he said, "You shall have my aid, my son"-the sheikh was at least a dozen years Oryn's senior, ancient by desert standards-"so far as I am able to grant it. And you shall have all the a.s.sistance that my wizard, and the Crafty woman of my people, can grant. But some matters are too great and lie in the hands of the G.o.ds."

Bax shot him a warning look, but Urah only folded his hands again and bowed.

"This I understand."

The body of a woman lay in the doorway of the tent. Her throat had been cut, and the vultures had been at her. Blood clotted in her long black hair. With the sun's descent all the tents lay under the shadow of the wadi's wall, and the interior of the first, as Oryn stepped carefully past the dead woman, was for a moment so dark that all he could see was a stray gleam caught in a vessel of iridescent gla.s.s.

Behind him he heard Urah whisper, "Ah, Nisheddeh, beloved," as he knelt beside the woman. "Forgive me, and do not pa.s.s along the evil to the one who brought it upon you." And he gathered the dead woman's hair into his hands to kiss.

Oryn turned back, blinking, to the dark of the tent. It seemed like any other nomad tent, and more spa.r.s.ely furnished than most: a woman's bow and quiver hanging from one tent pole, ta.s.seled bags holding spare clothing like some sort of exotic fruit upon another, camel saddles to sit on, and blankets unrolled on the faded rugs that kept the inhabitants' feet from the stones and sand. Sacks of dates and rice; a coffee pan of beaten copper and a bigger cooking pot; and two folding tables, one of which held a half-dozen intricately carved ivory spoons of varying sizes-Zali ware, they looked like, tomb loot almost certainly-and something that could have been a flute; as well as the round-bellied little vessel-a vase? a bottle?-of exquisitely tinted green gla.s.s. This vessel seemed to shine with glancing light for which Oryn could identify no source.

"Lord?" The sergeant Zhenus came in behind him, a burly, barrel-bellied man who retained the echoes of striking good looks. "I've had a look at the beasts. Should I . . ." His voice trailed off. Oryn barely heard him as he tried to figure out why that bottle-or vase or lamp or whatever it was-and that object alone should reflect light when the tent doorway lay in the shadow of the wadi's edge. Only when Zhenus tried to step past him, hand reaching out toward the things on the table, did he come to himself.

"Here, don't touch that."

And, when the sergeant did not appear to hear him, Oryn stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on the man's outstretched arm.

Zhenus startled, stepping back, and his eyes widened when he saw the king's hand on him: "Lord, I-I'm sorry, I didn't rightly hear you."

"It's all right," said Oryn, though in fact to "not rightly hear" an order from the king was grounds for whipping at best and possibly hanging, or it would have been if the king had been Taras Greatsword, anyway. Oryn had seen a porter condemned to have all four limbs broken for having his attention elsewhere when Greatsword had given an order. He went on, "It's just that it's best if no one touches anything in the camp, at least until Soth and Raeshaldis have had a look at it."

"But shouldn't we-" The sergeant only just stopped himself from the unheard-of crime of contradicting the king. "That is, lord, might it not be a good idea to take the things back to the camp? His lordship might not arrive till after dark; and for myself, with these teyn turning wild as they've been and escapin', I'd not like to think of anyone, even a mage or a Crafty, wanderin' about outside the camp after dark falls."

"That's a reasonable suggestion, yes," agreed Oryn. "Only there may be a curse, you see. So it's probably best that they be left as they are."

He emerged from the tent to find Bax already a.s.signing four men to remain on guard around the camp: "Most of 'em killed each other, right enough, as you said, sheikh. Same as the village. Strangest thing I've ever seen. You and your nephews best come back with us; we'll see you put up someplace."

"At least until the mage, and the lady Crafty, arrive," added Oryn, seeing Urah's frown at the commander's suggestion. "I shall have the quartermaster set up tents for you, and your beasts will be given their own line separate from those of the camp and water and food. Bax, don't leave a guard here tonight."