Circle Of The Moon Part 4

Foursie! Fourth Daughter-her younger sister's real name-had been a little girl when she'd left.

And she'd be twelve now. And that fairylike child running out of the kitchen with a gourd of water for the three teyn and two old women slaves grinding corn under the other side of the kitchen gallery: That child had to be Fifth Daughter, Twinkle, whom everyone in the household called Our Little Twinkle Star.

"Daughter?"

Shaldis looked back at her father, waiting in the doorway of the shadowed dormitory of the maids.

"I'm sorry." She followed him through the dim room, long and narrow with the girls' wicker chests crowded against the single wall that didn't have a divan, the bedding stowed out of sight in its few wall cupboards for the day. "Was that Twinkle I saw downstairs? She's going to be beautiful!"

"She is, isn't she?" Habnit smiled with a gentleness that told Shaldis that while she'd been watching her mother in the court her father had nipped on through and gotten his cup of wine from his own room, then come back. A second glance showed her that, yes, he had the half-finished cup in his hand, and there was no more talk of getting a tablet and stylus from his room. "Maybe too beautiful-Strath Gamert tells me his son doesn't want to marry Foursie, and wants Twinkle instead. . . ."

Shaldis was shocked. "Twinkle's only . . ." She counted on her fingers. "Twinkle's only eight! You mean Forpen Gamert? Who was supposed to marry me?"

Her father stopped in the doorway that led to the gallery above the garden, his face filled with infinite weariness and infinite shame. "We need Strath Gamert's partnership," he explained-as he'd explained, with that same expression, two years ago when it was Shaldis who had been signed over as bride to the harness maker's foul-tempered son. "Threesie and Twosie were already spoken for-Lily Concubine and Green Parakeet Woman, I should call them." He gave the two sisters their names in the old style, the names their husbands (or more probably their husbands' fathers) had picked for them, with the proper suffixes-Woman and Concubine-that were now falling into general disuse.

"Forpen Gamert doesn't like Foursie, and because the original contract was breached . . ." There was a trace of accusation in his eyes as he regarded the daughter who'd fled the house and her marriage contract and caused him all this inconvenience. ". . . Strath says he should be able to choose. We're still negotiating."

Which meant Grandfather was still negotiating. And if you say a single word in reply to any of this, Shaldis told herself, following her father out onto the next gallery, you'll be dragged back into the affairs of this family, for another sixteen years of rage and helplessness, to absolutely no purpose.

But she still felt sick anger at her father and grandfather for little Twinkle's sake.

One more thing, she thought, to see if I can maneuver.

As she pa.s.sed through the arched doorway of the maids' dormitory she reached out and brushed the wood with her hand, and felt it.

The tiniest whisper of magic, as if the fibers of the wood had been slightly warmed.

"But if you say only women can work magic," fretted her father as they turned along the latticed gallery that led to her grandfather's rooms, "surely you can't mean it's a woman in this household?"

"It's either a woman of the household or a woman who's not in the household," said Shaldis. "If it's a woman who's not in the household, it has to be a woman whom Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; a woman whose family-if she has one-Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered; or a woman who is in the pay of, or being blackmailed by, someone Grandfather has hurt, insulted, or endangered . . . which is a fairly long list of candidates."

"But you're sure it's a woman?" Habnit gestured with his wine cup. By the smell it was sherab-distilled wine, nearly as strong as opium. Two years ago, thought Shaldis sadly, he hadn't started in on the sherab until after dinner. "Father says-"

"Grandfather doesn't know what he's talking about." Shaldis halted on the gallery outside her grandfather's bedchamber door. "Men do not have magic. The same way, ten years ago and for all of time before that, women did not have magic. They just didn't. And now men just don't." Healing no longer flows from their hands, a voice had cried in her dream. "The problem is that everything-laws, family, who we're taught to obey and respect-hasn't changed."

"I should hope not!" exclaimed Habnit, truly distressed at the idea. "But a woman in this household."

"I admit that any woman in her right mind who's conscious enough of her own magic to slip door bolts and elude the camel drivers would use her power to escape the house rather than stick around and try to murder Grandfather." Shaldis pa.s.sed her hands over the door's wrought-iron handle, over the wood just above it, where the latch inside was.

Magic there, strong and sweet now, like a little song. It didn't feel like the spells of the Raven sisters Shaldis knew best, the ones to whose power and souls she had united her own with the Sigil of Sisterhood: Summerchild, Moth, Pebble, and Pomegranate.

Nor did it feel like the magic of Foxfire, Lord Mohrvine's fourteen-year-old daughter, though Shaldis wasn't as sure of that. When the Sisters of the Raven had united their power with the rite of the sigil, Mohrvine had forbidden his daughter to join them, lest they be aware of it should she work some great spell clandestinely. Mohrvine's mother, the formidable nomad princess Red Silk, had likewise held aloof from the rite of the sigil, as had the seventh Crafty woman of Shaldis's acquaintance, a greedy busybody named Cattail who'd formerly been a laundress.

Magic, Shaldis had long ago learned, did not automatically convey either benevolence or wisdom, any more than blue eyes or a sweet voice did. It simply was.

With the magic of these last two, Shaldis had had little acquaintance, but the taste-the vibration-of power she sensed in the wood of the door didn't feel familiar. What Cattail's spells-or Foxfire's or Red Silk's-would feel like if they were sourcing their power differently she wasn't sure. From the earth, for instance, or fire, rather than from the sun. Nor could she tell what difference it might make if they worked magic while drunk or drugged or under any number of other conditions. She simply didn't know.

She followed her father into the room.

Chirak Shaldeth had all four upper chambers along that side of the court, connected by inner doors as well as doors onto the gallery to form a single suite. In the crowded conditions of a city house it was a shocking amount of s.p.a.ce, like his claim to the whole of the inner garden. Her brief mental query about why he'd had the camel drivers sleep out in the gallery rather than in one of the rooms of the suite evaporated the moment it formed. Her grandfather despised the men who worked for him as he despised his family, and kept them away with the same mixture of random physical abuse and arbitrary rules.

Of course he'd keep three rooms empty because they adjoined his own. That was how-and who-he was.

He didn't even use them as Shaldis would have, for a library or a laboratory or to fill with pretty or curious things. She raised the latch on the inner door that led from the bedchamber into the next room along, and saw that second chamber was simply empty: cupboard doors shut, floor swept of the city's eternal dust, divan cushions clean and untouched.

The latch was on the bedroom side. The a.s.sa.s.sin wouldn't have needed magic to dart through and escape the camel drivers, but she would have needed a mage's ability to see in the dark.

Magic had definitely been used in the bedchamber.

It wasn't as localized as the whisper in the wood of the door where the latch had been raised from the other side, but Shaldis felt it everywhere. It clung like perfume to the cedar pillars of the bed, whispered from the folds of the mosquito netting that more and more people were buying now that magic wards against those pests no longer kept them from the windows: every house in the city was beginning to smell of the various smudges people were experimenting with, to drive them away.

None of the Raven sisters had yet been able to place a mosquito ward that worked for more than a few hours.

Yet in her dream the voice had whispered, We command the fire and the serpents and the stinging insects.

WE who?

The woman whose power breathed like the faintest of distant sounds in the air of the dim bedchamber?

Like the sound of . . . what? That rhythmic roar.

Shaldis touched the carved doors of the wall cupboards, the chest beside the bed. All of them locked tight, as were the latches on the window shutters: tight as her grandfather's heart. The magic here felt strange, very unlike the spells of opening that lingered on the door. . . . He had spoken of a knife cutting at him out of the dark-had they kept any slashed bedclothes?-but she wondered if the alien power she sensed like the whiff of smoke around the bed was some kind of death spell.

It was very strange, whatever it was. Something she'd never encountered before.

It seemed to her for a moment that instead of the booming crash, she heard the faintest tickle of evil music- Raeshaldis.

She felt the calling, clear in her mind. The overwhelming urge to look into her crystal or a mirror or a pool of water, anything that would summon an image. "Excuse me, Father," she said, and retreated to the door. Before leaving her cell she'd slipped the white crystal from the Citadel scrying chamber into her satchel, and this was what she angled, so that its central facet caught the light.

And within that facet, like a trick of the light, she saw Summerchild's face.

"Summer, I'm sorry," said Shaldis quickly. "Did everything go all right at the council? Something came up, something that I need to talk to you about-"

"And we need, very badly, to talk to you."

EIGHT.

What was that?" Pomegranate finished lashing the makeshift sunscreen of palm branches and reed mats into place on the ruins of the hut, and Soth-who'd fetched them from the ruined village while the old woman kept watch on the lake-lowered his telescope from his eye.

"Hokiros," he replied. "Who a month and a half ago was as much a legend as the water dragons in the Lake of the Moon."

While in the village, in spite of an arm that slowly stiffened from its injury, he'd also refilled their water bottles from the well and located a couple of gourd cups and a quant.i.ty of almonds and dates. These he proceeded to organize into a makeshift lunch-during her days as a beggar Pomegranate had learned never to pa.s.s up food, and the weaving of the ward spells had left her ravenous for sweets. She put several dates on a plane-tree leaf and set it on the hut's clay floor for Pontifer. "He's had a frightening morning," she explained, and patted her rotund pet's head.

Soth replied in a tone of grave politeness. "So have we all."

The fog was entirely gone. Sunlight glared hot on the surface of the lake, burned Pomegranate's face through the light coating of ointment that everyone wore. With luck, the villagers would be back before too much longer.

"At least the wards worked," she added, looking out past the shredded hut walls at the trailing glyphs of pain, of water, of power, scratched in the earth all around them. In addition to putting up a sunshade for themselves, the two unwilling monster fighters had dragged enough straw mats and bricks from the village to cover Tosu's body, which they'd brought back-in several pieces-from the rice field. Pomegranate had drawn wards around it against foxes and dogs, and hoped they'd work on this occasion. "So at some time in the past, somebody didn't think the lake monsters were legends."

"That was our salvation." Soth glanced up from knotting another of Pomegranate's many scarves into a makeshift sling. "Our only salvation, since those spells were so old they'd fallen out of circulation, even out of memory of the lines of any wizard I've ever spoken with."

He moved slowly, as if the battle had taken from him all the energy he had. "I a.s.sume that fifteen centuries ago lake monsters were a reality in the Lake of the Moon, and wizards of some kind put heavy wards against them all along the lakesh.o.r.e. I'd almost say they were too effective, for the water dragons remained deep in the center of the lake, where the water is bottomless, with the result that everyone forgot their existence. They must have done the same with the creature or creatures up here, renewing them by rote and pa.s.sing the spells along as a religious rite from father to son."

"Until magic changed," said Pomegranate softly. Pontifer came quietly up beside her and lay down, his chin resting on her sandaled foot. She remembered Hokiros's red glare, the wicked, watching intentness of his eyes.

"Until magic changed, and the lake began to dry." Soth folded his long, narrow hands into a double fist, rested them, and his chin, on his drawn-up knees as he gazed out over that glittering blue-and-golden pavement of the open water, beyond the murky pools of the drying lakesh.o.r.e.

Pomegranate said nothing for a time. She guessed that the former Earth Wizard was reliving all the stages of their journey up from the Yellow City in quest of any information-even the slightest rumors-about other women in whom the powers of magic had begun to bloom.

All along the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of the Sun they had asked, in villages and towns where the mages-if they'd had them-had departed or taken on other work. Most people hadn't even heard that women could do magic now. Many, even in the face of Pomegranate's repeated demonstrations of fire lighting, scrying, and ward spells, had simply refused to believe. Again and again, Soth had been approached under the a.s.sumption that he was working through his companion-and that she or her services could be bought from him.

And all along the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of the Sun, the other story had been the same as well: the long flats of drying mud, the acres of shallow reedy pools thick with crocodiles and mosquitoes, that lay between what had once been waterside villages and the current sh.o.r.eline. Everywhere, makeshift ca.n.a.ls stretched across this no-man's-land to bring water to the old fields, the long lines of bucket hoists worked by teyn-the growing effort to keep the teyn enslaved in the face of the failure of the spells that had kept them cowed. Everywhere, maddening infestations of mice, of mosquitoes, of locusts that the mages had once kept at bay.

The Sun Ca.n.a.l, between the Lake of the Sun and the Great Lake that stretched at the foot of the Mountains of the Eanit, had been nearly impa.s.sable, even by barges of the shallowest draft. Teyn work crews labored to deepen it, and foremen labored even harder to keep the crews from vanishing in the night and grumbled about the king. The New Ca.n.a.l, which stretched from the Great Lake north to the City of Reeds, was as bad or worse, and that stilt-legged city that had once stood in the midst of the lake's sparkling waters now balanced mostly above dry land or reeking mud. Nars, a former Pyromancer who'd met them there, told them that the ca.n.a.l which had once connected the Lake of Reeds with the Lake of Gazelles further north was now no more than a ditch choked with brush and young acacia trees.

Nowhere, Nars had said, had he heard of any woman coming to power, and he had journeyed far among the more northerly lakes beyond Gazelles.

It was while they were in the City of Reeds that villagers from Shonghu and Hon had come to them with tales of another peril still.

Pontifer raised his head sharply. Following his wise black gaze, Pomegranate saw the little band of village men making their way along the paths of the rice fields, their simple tunics of stripes and checks like strange colorless flowers among the green. They approached gingerly, poised at each step to spin and race back inland if the waters of the lake so much as rippled.

Having encountered Hokiros, she could not find it in her heart to blame them.

Soth got to his feet, put his spectacles back on-he didn't, Pomegranate noticed, put down his crossbow. The village councilmen seemed to be determined to speak to him rather than to her, possibly because he was a man-though she admitted that with her ragged, brightly colored cast-off garments and the jangling collection of beads, amulets, sashes, and mirrors that hung about her person, they probably came to mistaken conclusions about her. She was used to this. All her life she'd preferred invisibility anyway.

"My lord Silverlord," she heard the headman say, and all the villagers bowed down to the tall, bespectacled mage. "You have gained forever the reverent grat.i.tude of Hon village and all its children, down to the tenth generation. Was Hokiros in fact dying, as he returned to the lake? Will he come again?"

"That I cannot tell," replied Soth. "He was wounded, certainly, and perhaps unto death. But at a guess he wasn't the only one of his kind. You say he has not come forth for nearly fifteen hundred years, and I think it more likely that the thing that destroyed your village today was one of a small group of such things."

The men stared at one another, grasped one another's arms and clothing in terror.

"Until such time as we can deal with the others, if they indeed exist, you'll need to be prepared to sacrifice livestock to Hokiros, to draw him away from the village. Pomegranate will put wards around the village, but you must pen sheep and goats nearby, so that if he comes out he will have something else to eat besides the village."

"But it is so that we would not lose our sheep and goats that we called you!" exclaimed the headman peevishly.

Pomegranate stooped and whispered to Pontifer, "So much for the tenth generation."

"How can you say-"

Pomegranate.

The thought sliced into her mind, clear as crystal.

Look in the mirror.

Summerchild, she guessed, and fumbled one of the several mirrors that hung on ribbons around her neck. She caught the light on the gleaming surface, and a moment later saw her friend's face as if reflected over her shoulder. "Dearie," she sighed, "I was going to scry for you the moment things felt safe around here. I hate to make life harder for the poor king, but-"

"After what happened in council this morning," said Summerchild carefully, "I'm not sure you could do that. I think we need both of you back here, as fast as it's possible for you to come."

NINE.

The wooden gate into the small adobe-walled pen opened; a man in the rough tunic and coa.r.s.e cotton pantaloons of a teyn minder shoved an oldish boar teyn through and into the enclosure. The boar stood still, swinging his ma.s.sive, heavy shoulders as he rocked gently from foot to foot, long arms dangling, heavy head-like a flat blackish-silver rock shorn of its fur-moving a little as his wide nostrils snuffed the air. The minder followed him in and thrust the door shut behind him with his stick. The boar was probably twenty years old, to judge by his whitening fur and wrinkled features: he'd be dead in another five years. Jennies lived perhaps twice that long.

The boar was naked, and his fur had been clipped close. He was sleek and reasonably well fed. There was always a great deal of discussion among the landchiefs about how much to feed teyn, but Lord Mohrvine inclined toward the better-care, less-replacement school of thought.

Watching the teyn over her grandmother's shoulder in the gleaming surface of her grandmother's mirror, Mohrvine's daughter Foxfire felt a surge of grat.i.tude that this was so. Six months ago, at fourteen and a half, she had begun to realize that her father was not the G.o.dlike and charming hero she had always believed him, unquestioningly, to be. She didn't know if that understanding had to do with the budding of her abilities in magic, or whether that was just something that happened when girls' fathers tried to marry them off to dreadful old men like Lord Akarian.

But she still loved her father dearly. Now that Lord Akarian was definitely out of the picture, she was glad that her father was a man she could respect: a man who made sure his horses, his dogs, his teyn, and his slaves were well fed and well treated.

Her love for her father-and the respect he'd taught her for those within her power-made what she was witnessing in her grandmother's mirror all the more difficult to know what to do with. She felt as if she held some alien object in her hand that had to be put away, and she could not find the box or cupboard into which it went. She couldn't even exactly name what it was in her hand . . . anger? pity? shame?

The teyn minder took his charge by the arm, and-though teyn were far stronger than men-shoved him, hard, against the closed door of the pen.

Foxfire saw the teyn strike the rough wooden planks hard enough to rebound into the pen. But the teyn collapsed to its knees, doubled over in pain. It grabbed and clutched at itself, clawing its arm and side where they'd come in contact with the wood. She saw its mouth stretch wide, tusks gleaming in a silent agonized howl. It crawled away from the door, body visibly shuddering, and Foxfire's grandmother shifted her seat on the leather camp cushion before her low dressing table, and said a word respectable ladies weren't supposed to know.

"Looks like the pain is just as bad as the last experiment," she said in her cracked, deep voice, and reached for the tiny gla.s.s-and-silver cup of coffee at her side. The Red Silk Concubine, as she had been called at that time, had been the youngest, loveliest, and most formidable woman in the harem of fat old Oryn I; at seventy-five her bones were beautiful still. Even before she'd begun to develop the ability to see distant places in her mirror or to make marks of ill or inattentiveness on walls or bedding, she'd been widely feared in the household of Mohrvine, her son. Foxfire had grown up in terror of her from her earliest recollection.

Now that Red Silk had taken over elements of her education, Foxfire knew her better, loved her profoundly, and feared her more, and differently. Her grandmother, she knew with a sensation of wondering awe, would not hesitate a moment to destroy her-or her father and brothers or the house or anything in the Yellow City-to protect herself from being interfered with. Foxfire trusted the old lady's wisdom and wiliness implicitly. But she did not trust her.

"Has Summerchild said anything to you about spells of pain?"

In the mirror's gleaming circle, the teyn minder edged tentatively toward the shut door of the pen, reached with the hooked handle of his stick for the slight notch in the planks that was all the purchase available on the doors of the compounds where the shambling unhuman laborers were kept. At night, or at such rare times during the day when the teyn were returned to their compounds, the gates were bolted from the outside. The man flinched and dropped the stick when it came in contact with the door, stumbled back, clutching his hand.

The teyn, who'd sat up in the center of the pen, hugging itself and rocking in pain, remained impa.s.sive, but something in the way it settled its shoulders made Foxfire think it smiled inwardly.

Red Silk swore again.

The minder, a silent tiny image in the mirror, had to yell for his partner outside to open the door.

"I know Summerchild works with pain spells," Foxfire answered her grandmother after a time. "She's taught us the ones that work most often for her, to use in self-defense; to throw pain at another person. She doesn't like them."

"Or says she doesn't," muttered the old lady. "This coffee's cold. Don't you go for fresh, girl-this isn't a Blossom House and I'm not a man. Ring for one of those lazy s.l.u.ts. She's never spoken of ways to modulate pain, to exercise it in varying degrees? Humph. And she calls herself a Pearl Woman. A Pearl Woman must be perfect in every art." Under white brows her turquoise eyes glinted, a shade paler than Foxfire's but clear and deadly as the summer sky in deep desert, when neither water nor help is at hand. "That includes the arts of pain. I suppose that stupid cow Chrysanthemum didn't think to teach you anything about those in that precious Blossom House where your father spent such a fortune having you trained?"