Circle Of The Moon Part 26

Because it was, he saw now, the most beautiful object he had ever laid eyes on. It was perfectly plain, round, and appeared to him to be crystal clear though he could not see through it or into it. Under the surface iridescence lay darkness, as if the bottle were filled with it.

And under the darkness, a wakeful eye of green light.

This is the answer, thought Oryn wonderingly, settling himself cross-legged on the tattered nomad carpets, letting the sword slip from his hand.

This is what will save not only me but Summerchild and the realm as well.

This power.

Relief swept him, drowning him; sank him into sweetness he had never imagined before. Like the memory of his dreams he saw himself wading into the lagoon in the House of the Twin G.o.ds, the green water lapping around him, warm with the sunlight. Saw on the lagoon's rim not two priests but seven, and the answer seemed so clear to him, deceptively simple and beautiful with the perfect beauty of all simple things. The crocodiles merely stayed away from him, did not even turn their wicked yellow eyes in his direction. That was all there was to it.

Not two priests but seven.

And trees with lavender flowers, visible over the enclosure wall.

Relief and gladness as he waded up out of the lagoon, dripping water from his thin white garment, holding up his arms to the cheering crowds, to show himself unhurt. Then he saw her coming down the steps to him, his lady, his wife. It had to be Summerchild, from the love that filled his heart at the sight of her, but she no longer looked the same. She was dark haired and green eyed. . . .

Why was that?

The people cheered as he pa.s.sed before the seven priests, who salaamed in the style that only they used. Crowds followed him along the dusty path back to the city-back to the city? When had the House of the Twins moved into the desert? But he recognized the House of Death, built curiously into the city's southern wall. Death at least had a single servant, as Death always did and always had, but after he'd gone into the stone hollow and come out safely, with the scorpion in his hand, he saw that the House of Wisdom-the house of the serpent king-was also outside the city, only it wasn't called the House of Wisdom but the House of Madness.

In either case, the pit of serpents was the same, and the answer was the same, too. To simply walk down the steps and lay his head upon the idol's altar. To have the snakes ignore him. Easy, easy as a little song, and from the pit's rim his beloved one smiled down at him from among the nine-nine?-priests.

But as he approached the altar in the center of the pit, a tiny yellow snake, the length of his hand, struck at him from between the cracks in the altar and bit him on the foot. He kicked it aside, stamped at it, though it eluded him; and he heard the people who lined the pit's edge gasp. Something went through his mind, some thought, some terrible sense of deja vu, gone as soon as it touched him.

He turned back to the altar knowing the pain would start as he turned, and it did. It hit him first in his chest, like the blow of a spear or a knife, searing so that he gasped like a landed fish. Then the next instant knives of pain slashed every joint in his body, so that sweat poured from him, tears flowed from his eyes. His knees gave way and he fell, catching at the altar, crying out. Above him, Shibathnes of the Serpents, the lord of the darkness in the mind, stared down at him with eyes like the darkness behind the stars. Pain, and worse pain, and still worse, and he was screaming, and the nine priests of Wisdom (or Madness) stepped closer to the edge.

At the same instant men came rushing down the steps into the pit, men with drawn swords. His brother's men-not Barun's but some other brother's, the same way his dark-haired beloved whom he knew so well wasn't Summerchild but someone he'd never seen before. The pain made it impossible to think. Madness seized him, madness born of the pain that set his brain on fire, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the sword that he'd let slip from his hands and flung himself at them, screaming in pain, knowing he was going to die and not caring.

Anything, anything to end the pain.

And to take them with him, traitors who had bribed the priests to let him die, when the answer had been in his grasp.

Then his eyes cleared, the dream shifting to waking for one moment, or what would have been waking but for the glowing iridescence of the bottle still burning in his mind. His attackers were but shadows in the darkness around him, but where the starlight touched their eyes he saw they were pale, with slitted pupils like cats.

They seized him, held him down, and the knives all slashed at once. The snake's venom rushed out with the blood as darkness poured in.

FORTY-ONE.

They're out there somewhere.

They can't simply have vanished.

Raeshaldis stopped, letting her slitted eyelids drift that last fraction of an inch into complete closure, sank her mind into the emptiness that now smelled of nothing but air and rock. The desert floor was bare here, even of sand. Only rock stained dark by the slow leaching of the sun. The air was like a diamond, shriveling the tissues of her nose and lips even through her veils.

They have to stop somewhere. She may be a Crafty but she's no more than human. She has to rest.

As her eyes slipped closed that final fraction of an inch, her mind slipped back down into trance, her senses reaching out over the desert like the farthest extension of a single drop of blood spreading in a still pool that taints all the water with its presence. Through weariness like the pounding of a hammer she was aware of Jethan and the camels, some half mile behind her, waiting in the dove-gray twilight of the coming morning. Was aware of her own fatigue and thirst-she couldn't even remember when she'd let her mind be distracted long enough to go back to them for water.

Was aware that this was the hour called the Bird Sun, when back in the lands where there was water all the birds would be waking to cry their territories, to hunt insects, to coo and twitter at one another: in her grandfather's little garden and the king's great ones, under the eaves of every house in the Yellow City and in the palmeries and fields and pastures all along the sh.o.r.es of the lake.

Here there was no sound but the sob of the wind across the bare black rocks and now and then the creak of saddle leather far behind her and the jingle of a camel bell.

It would be full light soon. Full sun.

The night before last she'd followed the teyn's scent far into the bare desert, as she'd followed it through the Dead Hills with Rat on the night preceding that. And the one before that she'd ridden with Jethan to the house of Ahure. She knew she'd dozed and eaten at some point in the past three days but couldn't remember exactly when. Despite her training in long fasts and nights without sleep, she knew she was coming to the end of her physical endurance.

Just what was that other woman made of?

Was she like the teyn, who could go for seven days, it was said, without rest or food?

Was she getting her tame teyn to carry her while she slept?

Were her spells over them that strong?

Shaldis realized she was nodding on her feet, and jerked her mind to wakefulness. Like a wolf she scented the air, turning her head again, sifting and sorting the dry, hard air of dawn.

And finding nothing.

Still she started forward, eyes half shut, trusting that in time she would pick up the trail again.

"Lord King?"

The voice came from a thousand miles away in the darkness.

"Oryn?"

The image of the nine priests on the edge of the crocodile pool dissolved and Oryn opened his eyes. "Where in the G.o.ds' names were you?"

It was Soth kneeling beside him.

Morning sun glared in Oryn's eyes, and the next second a vulture's shadow pa.s.sed across it. The world smelled of the birds and of blood. His skin was on fire with pain.

"And what happened? There were nine priests, though Death still had only one." He brought up his hand to touch a burning line of pain on his forehead and saw that someone had drawn a circle on the back of his wrist in blood to which stuck sand grains and dust. The movement brought back the knives of all his enemies. The henchmen of the brother who wasn't really his brother, or something.

Soth's face looked ghostly white in the pale wrappings of his veils. "Can you sit up?" Behind him a whole squad of guards crowded close, as if they expected their monarch to utter prophecies or give birth.

"Of course I can sit up! I only . . ." He tried it and sank back with a gasp. "On second thought, please have the palace baths transported out here." He managed to get up on one elbow and looked around.

He lay on the ground in mid-desert. Far off a column of dust proclaimed the aqueduct camp, but it had to be a good five miles away. Vultures circled overhead.

At least with such helpful fowl in the neighborhood, once they knew he was missing he couldn't have been difficult to find.

"My lord, what happened? Who did this?" Soth reached back for the dripping waterskin Commander Bax pa.s.sed forward, propped Oryn's shoulders, and helped him drink. Oryn's hands were shaking so badly he found he couldn't support the skin's weight himself. "The relief guard found Sergeant Zhenus missing. He fetched Geb to go in and check on you, and you were gone, too. Bax tells me they were searching for you for the rest of the night. I saw the vultures myself as I rode into camp at dawn. I thought it odd that they didn't land."

Oryn turned his hands over. His shirt was ripped in a hundred places; shallow cuts marked his arms, chest, thighs. Between the cuts, circles and zigzags had been drawn in blood on his reddening, sunburned skin. Stammering a little, he said, "I don't really know. I followed Zhenus to the nomad camp. He was . . ." Oryn turned his head, saw another column of vultures two or three miles off, where the camp must lie in the wadi that was invisible from here, concealed by the rise of the ground. A pale crescent moon hung in the daylight sky.

He looked back at Soth, suddenly frightened. "No one's at the nomad camp, are they?"

The librarian shook his head. "We came searching for you first. Who-?"

"Post guards around it. No one is to go into it, no one, for any reason. There was a bottle. A bottle of iridescent gla.s.s. Zali ware, I think."

Soth held up a fragment of it, a shard about three inches long. It was tipped with dried blood.

Looking past him, Oryn saw that where he had lain on the ground was surrounded by a minute hedge of broken gla.s.s, pieces buried so that their bloodstained points protruded from the earth like uneven teeth, glittering in the hot morning sunlight.

He shook his head, trying to clear away the burning fantasies of dream, to separate them from memories scarcely less unreal.

He'd been a king, he thought. Or someone had.

His enemies had seized him, dragged him to his death; and looking down he saw that between the gashes and the blood circles, his arms were bruised. As Soth and Bax helped him to his feet he lay his own hand gingerly over the darkening finger weals. His hands and feet were small for his height, but at six foot three he was still a big man, and the span of these marks exceeded his own by over an inch.

"What do you remember?" asked Bax gently. "Did you see who attacked you? Or what happened to Zhenus?"

"Zhenus attacked me," said Oryn hesitantly. "Circle the nomad camp, find his tracks if he left it, but whatever you do don't go into it looking for him. It wasn't he who did this," he added, seeing both his friends open their mouths with the same question. "Send a message, at once, now, immediately, to Lady Moth at the palace. A squadron is to go to the house of Chirak Shaldeth in Sleeping Worms Street and arrest every person in it. Slaves, camel drivers, teyn, and every member of the family from lowest to highest, excepting solely the Lady Raeshaldis, if she's there. They're to be taken to the palace prison and given new clothing down to the skin, decently and with respect, mind you. But no single member of the household, and I mean none, is to keep by them so much as a toothpick that was in that house. When the house is empty it's to be cordoned off and no one is to touch anything within it. Lady Moth is to go with the squadron and stay with the guards on the empty house. Lady Pebble is to remain with the household members until they're put in their cells, and then she's to remain in the guardroom until I personally speak to her.

"It wasn't a curse that destroyed the nomad camp, Soth." Oryn turned back to his tutor, tightened his grip on the sinewy, black-robed arm. "It wasn't a plague that killed everyone in Three Wells and then later took those poor guardsmen. No one brought mummies or hex-ridden gold into the village. Maybe not even a piece of gla.s.s such as the one that-that trapped me."

He turned his hands over again, staring at the ragged cuts, the daubed lines and rings that reminded him of the sigils and runes that the mages had drawn for centuries, to focus their power.

"I think it's the Dream Eater we spoke about," he said softly. "It was supposed to haunt tombs, to eat the dreams of the dead. And I think it was a dead man's dreams, a dead king's dreams, that I saw and felt. A Zali king, by the way everyone was dressed. The ancient wizards warded against the Eater of Dreams just as they warded against the lake monsters so long ago and so effectively that everyone forgot that it was real."

Behind him, he heard one of the guards whisper, "Bad-Luck Shadow."

"What?" Oryn swung around.

The guard gulped and looked as if he'd been caught sucking his thumb at a review. "Nothing, sir. Just my granny used to stick broken gla.s.s in the ground just like that, on certain nights of the year, around the house, to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away. My dad complained as how we kids were always cuttin' ourselves on it, and she just said, 'All the better.'"

"Did she, indeed?" murmured Oryn, and turned to look back toward the circling vultures that marked the nomad camp. Rising wind lifted and whirled them like smoke and threw a bitter scatter of sand in his eyes.

"Broken gla.s.s is a very common element in old protective spells," began Soth, and Oryn frowned.

"Exactly what is the Bad-Luck Shadow?" he asked.

The men all looked at one another, baffled to put a description to the bogeyman that all their parents had shaken before their eyes. The first guard shrugged and said, "Something that'll get five-year-old boys if they don't do what their granny says, sir?"

"Someone knows." Oryn's eyes pa.s.sed from the faces of his guards, his tutor, back toward the distant wadi where, he strongly suspected, Zhenus lay among the withered black corpses of the an-Dhoki, perhaps withering and blackening himself by this time, his mind lost in the dreams of ancient kings. "Someone who commands the teyn, who's been using them as cat's-paws to keep us away from the places where the Eater of Dreams has risen from the ground. What are these marks, Soth?" he asked, extending his arms. "Do they look like anything you know of? The dreams that took me-maybe the Eater itself-were lodged in gla.s.s; I think there's another such gla.s.s talisman in the house of Chirak Shaldeth. Does gla.s.s draw the Eater of Dreams or repel it? Was I being protected by this"-he looked back at the ragged ring of glittering points, half obscured now by the blowing sand-"or being sacrificed? Or used as bait?"

Soth only shook his head.

"We have to find out," said Oryn. Wind lashed him again, strong enough this time to make him stagger. All tracks would be gone, he thought; whatever the earth could have told Bax. "We have to find this person, this woman. She holds the key to Summerchild's life, and she seems to be able to command the teyn.

"Bax, we'll start back for the city the moment we're saddled up, but send your messenger now to the house of Chirak Shaldeth. Sooner or later our friend's going to go back there."

"Do you think Pebble can cope with it?" asked the librarian. "Or Moth? Or even Raeshaldis?"

"I don't know. They'll have to, or we're-"

Another gust of wind thrust them all, like a giant hand, and the morning sunlight shifted to a yellow cast. The wind burned Oryn's lungs as he drew breath, wind saturated with- "Dust, my lord!" A guard pointed toward the south, where a deadly line of billowing yellow was beginning to rise above the horizon.

Oryn said, "Dear G.o.ds!" and Bax said something considerably less refined. "Can your man get through?" Oryn added. "It looks like a bad storm."

"I'll get through." Bax transferred Oryn's arm to the nearest guard, strode away toward the horses.

"You? But-"

"With luck I'll reach the hills before it hits," the commander yelled back over his shoulder, then quickened his pace to a run. Before Oryn could call out, the older man sprang up onto the strongest of the horses-Oryn's own, he noticed-and spurred away at a gallop toward the line of the distant hills.

"Come on!" Soth dragged Oryn toward the horses, who were tossing their heads and fighting the guards who held their reins, frightened by the dust-laden wind. "We can make it to the camp and take shelter! Can you ride?"

"I'm jolly well not going to sit here and wait to be buried."

If anyone could make it back to the city through the storm, Oryn reflected, Bax could. He should probably have tried to stop his commander-a man old enough to be his father-from risking a ride through the killer storm, but his half-guessed fear of what was being drawn to Chirak Shaldeth's house was too strong now to put aside. Had no one else been available he knew he would have at least tried to make the ride himself.

Whatever the Eater of Dreams was that seeped from the walls of tombs and trans.m.u.ted the dreams of the dead into madness, the ancients had feared it, and it did not seem to have lost strength in its years of enforced quiescence. He'd seen what it could do in Three Wells. What it could do if it was drawn to a city of a hundred thousand people, he tried not to imagine.

But he did imagine it, and it turned him cold with fright.

The dust storm came out of nowhere.

Shaldis realized she must have fallen asleep on her feet, because it seemed to her one moment that she walked half blindly, numbly, following the hope or illusion that maybe the scent of indigo might lie before her and the next that she was on her knees, with the hot wind ripping at her veils and her clothing, the sunlight yellowing away toward darkness. Dust burned her eyes and filled her nose, and the wind's howl filled her ears. A gust of wind threw her to the ground, and when she fumbled for the spells she'd learned, to part the winds around her and turn aside the dust, she barely had the strength to lessen them.

Jethan, she thought wildly, where's Jethan? She had to get to him, to protect him, too, with whatever she had strength for.

A darker shape blotted the growing darkness of the howling world. She yelled, "Here! Jethan!" and he stumbled out of the dust to her, face wrapped in his veils but still moving like a man blind and deaf.

In one hand he held the end of a rope; he dragged her to her feet without a word, half carried her along. Staggering, Shaldis formed the spell again in her aching mind, splitting the wind behind them so that it rushed by on either side. Gusts whirled onto them nevertheless, and the dust that hung in the air choked and smothered her. The dark around them grew, illuminated by flashes of dry lightning; the wind rose to a scream.

"I got the tent up," Jethan yelled over the din, and the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed his words away. ". . . camels . . ." she heard him say, and ". . . should be safe . . ."

He made a place of shelter, thought Shaldis, as they reeled into the low-pitched triangular tent, before he came for me.

What a blessing to have a friend who thought things out.

Most of the room in the tent was taken up by the camels, grumbling and moaning and stinking as only camels can. Shaldis tried to anchor her spells to the goat hair and the poles, to the small patch of earth that was the only place safe amid the shrieking wildness of the storm. The darkness of the dust blotted out the sickly remainder of the morning light. Mind aching, body aching, she thought she could see the spells themselves, like floating b.a.l.l.s of marsh fire, clinging to the tent.

Then her mind darkened, and she slipped unconscious to the ground.