FORTY-TWO.
Through the stillness of concentration, the deep weariness of power raised and power expended, Pomegranate heard the voices in the lower chamber of the Summer Pavilion and shivered.
Lotus was saying, "I"m sorry, they"re working great magic. It"s a matter of life and death."
And a voice that Pomegranate recognized as belonging to Shaldis"s aunt Yellow Hen-who"d always given her food and sometimes clothing in her begging days-retorted, "You think I"d have walked all the way here from the Bazaar District and put up with that snippy porter at the gate if this wasn"t life and death? Tell her I need to see her, and I need to see her at once."
Since she"d come back to the Yellow City four days ago, Pomegranate had been plagued by the nagging sense there was something wrong somewhere. She had spoken of it only once, to Shaldis, but the uneasiness, the feeling of listening, had never left her.
Pontifer sensed it, too. All day yesterday the white pig had trotted back and forth from where Pomegranate sat at Summerchild"s side out into the terrace garden, then back again, restless, the way he"d done back when he"d been a real pig when a storm was brewing. When, during their watches at Summerchild"s side, Shaldis had spoken to her in pa.s.sing of her grandfather"s obsession with an object that came out of a tomb, Pomegranate had wondered if that was the reason for the p.r.i.c.kling sensation in her palms and scalp, for her sense of something always lurking around the next corner, watching.
Since last night she had felt as she frequently felt when her dreams were bad, when she"d wake in the middle of the night and gather up blankets and clothing and quietly flit through the silent alleys to another of her hidey-holes in the Slaughterhouse District. Moving on, so that it wouldn"t get her.
Whatever It was, in her dreams.
This was the first time she"d felt like this in waking life and she couldn"t explain it, but she knew it wasn"t good.
"I"ll see if she"s even able to hear me," whispered Lotus"s voice downstairs. "But they"re working to save my lady"s life now, and she"s been unconscious so long."
Silently, Pomegranate withdrew her mind from the Circle of Sisterhood that held together the magic of the others. Pebble looked haggard with weariness, her plump cheeks marked with lines of concentration grimly at odds with her usual placidity. The paint on Moth"s face had a doll-like appearance against the pallor underneath. Neither opened her eyes. Pomegranate padded from the chamber on bare feet and met Lotus as the maid was coming up the stair.
"My lady . . ." the girl began, and Pomegranate lifted her hand in acknowledgment and nodded.
"How is the lady?" asked Yellow Hen when Pomegranate emerged from around the stairway screen. "My niece has been in a fair stew over her, with my father and that brother of hers both tearing at her like a couple of dogs."
"What"s happening?" Pomegranate met the other woman"s eyes: like herself, no longer young, and like herself unwanted in the world that had too many husbandless women already. For as long as she could remember, Pomegranate had seen Yellow Hen come and go from the house on Sleeping Worms Street. Knowing, as she did, everyone in the city, she"d heard all about Chirak Shaldeth"s attempts to sell his crooked-backed, stubborn daughter to whomever would take her long before she heard that Shaldeth"s granddaughter had power in her veins and hands.
More than the old skinflint deserved, for a fact.
"One of the maids disappeared last night," said Yellow Hen briefly. "And my brother Tjagan the night before that. I"ve been up and down the house searching. I found Six Flower"s hairpins on the attic stairs but no sign of the girl herself. My sister-in-law won"t come out of her chamber and neither will my father, but they"re both singing-singing music such as I"ve never heard, the one of them answering the other from court to court. Some of the camel drivers are gone, too, and their mates swear they went into the kitchen court, not out into the street."
"And you found nothing in the attic where you say you saw this one girl"s hairpins?"
"I found nothing." Yellow Hen hesitated, regarding Pomegranate as if wondering how much of what she"d seen or thought she"d seen she could speak of without sounding demented.
And evidently remembering the woman she was talking to was widely regarded as mad herself. "The attic was . . . was changed. Or there was something there that made it appear different. I can"t explain, but it seemed when I went in there, there were more rooms than there had been, more doors where doors hadn"t been before. And something moved up there, something green that glowed."
"Yes," whispered Pomegranate, "yes. I"ve smelled it, felt it . . . heard it singing far-off in my sleep. What about Shaldis"s father? Your brother?"
"He won"t come from his study. He isn"t singing yet, but I didn"t like his voice, when he told me to go away. His wife tells me he won"t let anyone in."
"And his son? That snotty-nosed brat who Shaldis tells me is now running the house?"
Yellow Hen"s face twisted. "He keeps swearing there"s not a thing wrong. I left him cursing Shaldis for not doing something to keep the teyn from running off, and cursing Strath Gamert or Noyad or whoever he thinks is doing all this just to ruin the family."
"Sounds like him." Pomegranate remembered Tulik as young as the age of eight, ordering the servants to drive her away from the kitchen court. She glanced through the doorway into the gardens, where the light was sickening to yellowish brown and gardeners were scurrying to put cages of wicker and gauze over the rosebushes. Up until a few years ago, when dust storms howled in from the desert, the Sun Mages in their Citadel could be counted on to send them elsewhere. She could hear the old gardener cursing, as if his inconvenience were the worst calamity to be faced as a result of the change in the structure of the universe.
It was an att.i.tude Pomegranate had met with all up and down the sh.o.r.es of the seven lakes.
There probably were men, she reflected, who thought that poor Oryn"s death and replacement would solve that problem, too.
"Wait here for me," she said, and sprang up the stairs again with the lightness of a far younger woman.
Pebble and Moth had emerged from their healing trance and were consuming tea and honeyed fig b.a.l.l.s with the ravenousness of athletes after a race. Lotus and another maid were going around the room, fastening up the gauze-backed lattices that would allegedly keep most of the dust out of the beautiful blue-and-gold chamber, though Pomegranate knew that, like every other dwelling in the city, the palace was in for a ma.s.sive sweeping out by tomorrow.
The two young women listened to Pomegranate"s tale with expressions of deep uneasiness; she saw their glances meet. "I have to go," she finished, prodding more hairpins into the random coils of her hair. "I know Yellow Hen and I know she wouldn"t come here for help unless there"s something really scary going on in that house-and I think there is. But this isn"t a rangeland village. It"s a city-and we have no idea how far or how fast it will spread."
She started to wrap one of her many ragged scarves around her hair and face, to protect against the rising winds and dust. Even broken by the Dead Hills, the storm"s violence was a force to be reckoned with; lightning was beginning to flash in the darkening sky. Wordlessly, Lotus went to one of the wall cupboards and brought out airy lengths of pink and white gauze. "I know it would be all right with her," the maid whispered, glancing at the still face of the woman on the bed.
Pomegranate smiled. "Thank you, dear." She turned for the door.
Pebble asked, "Isn"t Pontifer going with you?"
Pomegranate stopped, looked gravely back at the younger woman"s shy smile. She knew perfectly well that none of her colleagues could see her pet and that most of them-Pebble included-didn"t believe him to be any more than a madwoman"s delusion. It touched her that the girl would ask after him anyway. "Pontifer"s gone," she said. "He left an hour, maybe two hours ago, I don"t know where. If he comes back, tell him I need him. Maybe we all need him."
Raeshaldis opened her eyes, knowing that she dreamed. She lay in Jethan"s arms, in sleep far deeper than she ever recalled in her life, her body depleted, her mind drained. Jethan, holding her, looked just as bad, she thought. Under the film of dust his face was like a dead man"s, save for the sweat that tracked through the gray-brown crust. The hour was that of the Sun of Justice, the Hammer Sun, the crushing nadir of afternoon, the heat brutal, the darkness almost complete. The howl of the winds all around them drowned every other sound, as if they were lost, adrift in some alien world of ashen midnight, unable to return to their own.
She was glad that Jethan was beside her. That she wasn"t alone.
In his dream, she wondered, was he scandalized that the tiny confines of their tent had broken all possibility of a woman"s s.p.a.ce being separated from a man"s?
Probably.
And she smiled.
Dust hung thick in the air. As she had before she"d fainted, she could see her protective spells like fluttering rags of light, clinging to the tent poles. The goat-hair cloth above them sagged with the weight of dust. She rose to her knees, leaving her body behind her, still in the crook of Jethan"s arm-shocked a little at how gaunt she was, sunburned and haggard-and crawled to the entry flap. Untying it, she looked out, saw how the winds rose up on either side of the little tent in walls of blowing dust. These met overhead as if the tent were enclosed in a fragment of gla.s.s. Even in her dream, she was simply too weary to reach out her mind to feel for the storm"s edge, to judge how long it would last.
The howling of the storm"s voice filled the earth.
She had lost the marked teyn and the woman who controlled it.
After all this long pursuit, to the very edge of the world it seemed, she had after all failed. And in failing, had almost certainly condemned Summerchild and the king to death.
Nothing remained except to go back, to take up the threads of things as she found them, and help the situation as best she could.
Through the whirling brownness beyond the limits of her wind ward, she saw something moving, something white and low. It was quite close to her before she realized it was a pig, and for an instant her cracked lips smiled. "Hey, Pontifer," she said. Then fear flashed through her, fear that Pomegranate was somewhere in the storm, lost. Pomegranate wouldn"t have come looking for her, would she? Not all the way out here.
Tentatively she reached out her mind for the animal"s-for though she"d never made mental touch with Pontifer she guessed he was perfectly capable of it-but received nothing. The pig only turned and trotted off into the storm again. He stopped, looked back at her over his shoulder. Shaldis pulled her veils around her face, then turned her head to look back into the tent.
She saw herself sleeping, curled into a ball at Jethan"s side. Did he dream, she wondered, of the granny who wouldn"t let him pick on his brother? Of that low brown hut and parched fields, where he should have stayed to look after his family?
Did he dream of his friends, of Riis and his men who now lay beneath the rangeland"s hard yellow earth?
Far off, Shaldis heard-or thought she heard-the rhythmic crashing from her earlier dreams, nearly inaudible beneath the screaming of the wind.
She stepped from the tent and followed Pontifer into the darkness.
In time the crashing grew louder, the wind less. Through the darkness she heard what could only be drumming and saw light-fire?-and the thin gleam of the waning moon. She felt-and she could never afterward explain it-as if the sun turned over, and instead of its being the grilling Hammer Sun of afternoon it was the hour of the Sun"s Dreams, the deepest hour of the night.
And still. The air on her face was moist and sweet, as if she had walked into the time of the winter rains along the jungled sh.o.r.es of the Great Lake. The scents of vegetation and flowers nearly intoxicated her.
Woven reeds crunched under her foot. She put out her hand and touched a wall of bunched gra.s.s tied to a framework of poles. A fire built just outside the low door opening showed her the sharp slant of an enormously high roof and, along the gra.s.sy walls, children sleeping.
They dozed fitfully on woven mats. Brown skinned, dark haired, thin with sickness. Around them, bunches and bundles of plants had been laid, and the whole surrounded with the familiar runes of healing that she"d been meditating on for so many nights, crudely but carefully scratched in the earth.
Drumming outside, and the soft rhythmic crashing that had led her here. Shaldis put off her veils, dust sliding from their creases in pale streams, knelt at the nearest child"s side. It was a girl the same age as Twinkle, her skin dry and her lips cracked. A gourd beside the child"s mats held water and by it a wet handful of pulpy felted cloth. Looking more closely at the bunches of plants, Shaldis recognized the bark and leaves of the fever tree, the dried flowers of the hand of Darutha.
She heard, thought Shaldis, knowing where she had to be. She gathered the plants, but didn"t know what to do with them.
Like us, with our spells against crocodiles and snakes.
She pa.s.sed her hand gently over the girl"s face, drew signs of courage and life with her finger in the dark. Then she took the gourd of water and the branch of the fever tree and went to the door, to see if there was a way to heat the water for the necessary tisane.
Outside, the waning crescent of the moon was almost bright enough to cast a shadow. The gra.s.s house stood on a little rise of ground among dense trees, but before it the ground fell away to sand.
And beyond the sand . . .
Shaldis thought, It"s the sea.
Tears flooded her eyes, of shock, of delight, of emotions for which she had no name.
The water-infinite water, endless water-rose up in a wall, curled, and fell foaming, roaring, onto itself a dozen yards from the white sand. It was a little like the waves of the lakes when the wind was high. So a child, she thought, might mistake a bowl of leaves for a forest.
What I heard was the noise of the sea-which neither I, nor anyone I know, has ever seen.
On the edge of the sea women danced in a ring by moonlight, young women and old, an outer circle of fifty or more and an inner group of five. Men played the drums for them, a heavy haunting rhythm. The dance was like nothing Shaldis had ever seen, yet it drew her, as if she could have walked down the sand to them and joined in.
They"re raising magic with the dance. The power hung palpable in the flower-drenched air, the way the power of the Sun Mages haloed the Circle at the top of the Citadel, when the adepts and the singers and the masters had all a.s.sembled, to sing the Summoning the Rain.
This was the first time, she realized, that she"d been sleeping at the time they raised power: sleeping deeply enough in the daytime, her mind exhausted past the point of all its defenses.
Their day is our night. She didn"t know what this meant or why it was true, but in her bones she knew it was. Long training homed her mind to the distant sun.
But these people have never needed to summon rain. Clouds sailed free as elephantine birds above the sea. They live with the sound of that crashing water every day of their lives.
The tallest of the women stopped dancing, stood still in the center of the circle gazing up the hill at Shaldis in the door of the gra.s.s house, transfixed. Then she stepped out of the ring, walking slowly first, signaling the others to stay back, then running. Shaldis stood waiting for her, a pale shape in the firelight, the water gourd and the healing branch in her hands.
"You came." Because it was a dream-or maybe because Pontifer Pig lurked in the dark of the house behind her-Shaldis again heard in her mind the thought behind that musical language.
She said, "Puahale?" knowing it-the way things are known in dreams-for the other woman"s name.
Puahale smiled, white teeth in a round face like dusky honey. "Rae-shaldis?" She p.r.o.nounced the name hesitantly. "Old One?"
"Father calls me that."
The other woman laughed, still uncertain, as if not believing that they stood face-to-face. "My father calls me Little One."
Shaldis looked up at her-she stood considerably more than six feet, several inches taller than Shaldis, who was as tall as many men. "I hope that"s a joke."
Puahale laughed again, then put out one big hand to touch Shaldis"s face wonderingly, as if expecting her fingers to pa.s.s through the flesh. Shaldis half expected them to as well. But they didn"t. Puahale"s hand was warm, and sweat glittered on her face from dancing. Her hair was black, straight, and hung almost to her knees. Her body and limbs were patterned with tattoos. She was, Shaldis thought, a few years younger than Summerchild, and, like Summerchild"s, her smile radiated both power and peace.
"You came," she said again, and Shaldis took her hand.
"I came to show you how to get healing from plants and leaves," she said. "And I came to beg your help."
FORTY-THREE.
Was that you I spoke to by the lake of fire?" Shaldis asked as the two women sorted through the bunches of leaves and roots. In the fire before the house door, chunks of rough-textured black rock heated, to be dropped when red-hot into the huge water gourd, an ancient method that Shaldis had heard Rachnis the shadow-master speak of. Some of the deep-desert tribes still used it, the ones who seldom came in touch with the traders from the Realm of the Seven Lakes and might not see a metal pot from one year"s end to the next.
"That"s the Dreamshadow." Puahale"s round face grew somber. "It lives under the ground, in the ground. It"s a thing, a spirit, but not like the djinni that used to dwell in the sea and the air." The word she used was different, but because they spoke in the language of dreams, Raeshaldis knew at once that it was indeed those glittering ent.i.ties of magic of whom she spoke.
"We don"t even know if the Dreamshadow is one creature, or many, or just a kind of poison that the earth exudes in some places. The voices it speaks with seem to be just the voices of those whose dreams it scavenged. Its music is the music that lingered in the hearts of the dead after their souls had been taken back into G.o.d. Back before we came here, Wika tells me-Wika is my teacher, the teacher of all us priestesses-our people used to put the dead in holes in the ground or in tombs cut into the rocks. But the Dreamshadow lived in those rocks, and in the earth of the Old Islands, and it grew so strong eating the dreams of the dead that it started oozing out of the tombs and out of the ground near the tombs, to attack the living. It would burrow into their minds until they thought they were in the dreams of all those long dead. Sometimes-not always-it would eat their bodies as well, making them wither up and turn black. Other times they would just go mad and die singing or be killed by those they attacked."
Gime. Shaldis saw again the flash of Jethan"s sword, the crimson fountain of blood in the morning sun.
Saw the blackened mummies in the streets of Three Wells.
Saw the drift of green mist in the garden courtyard below her grandfather"s rooms and Summerchild, in a vision like a dream, surrounded by the glowing mists, protected by the power of the sigils drawn around her but unable to break free.
"How do you get rid of it?" she whispered, panic closing over her throat like a strangling hand. "How do you save someone who"s been taken by it?"
And for an instant she felt sick with terror that Puahale would shake her head and say sadly, There is no way.
But the woman said at once, as matter-of-factly as Shaldis would have prescribed willow bark for fever, "You cut them, where the lines of the body"s energy run near the surface. It breaks the Dreamshadow"s hold. There are spells to say-"
"Tell me," said Shaldis. "Teach me. A friend of mine was taken. And my grandfather has a-a gla.s.s ball, an ancient thing that came out of a tomb, that I think is drawing the Dreamshadow to it."
Puahale"s eyes widened. "Wika told me about that! On the Old Islands the wizards would trap it in something called gla.s.s. Do you know gla.s.s? Wika says it was made out of melted sand-"
"My people have it, yes." And a little wryly, despite her fear, she added, "Sand is something we have plenty of." She held up the amulet Twinkle had given her, with its huge central bead of pink gla.s.s.
Puahale touched it wonderingly, brushed its smoothness against her lower lip. "Our people who came here didn"t know how to make it," she said. "And our wizards found that obsidian works better, the black gla.s.s from within the volcano"s crater." The last words she used, Shaldis could form no mental image for. But Puahale went on, "That"s where the Dreamshadow dwelled, here, where the molten heart of the island seeps forth. What you called the lake of fire. It was weaker here, because it hadn"t been devouring the dreams of the dead for all those lifetimes as it had on the Old Islands; from the first the wizards put boundaries against it, of obsidian rocks, and gave the dead to the birds of the air. But it"s still deadly dangerous."
Puahale stopped her grinding to touch one of the several disks of highly polished obsidian that she wore, strung on braided strands of fish sinew around her neck. "It will go into obsidian before it goes into a living person." She held up one, not a disk, but a small, flaked blade. "In the Old Islands, some of the wizards used to make gla.s.s traps for it that men would put under their pillows, so they could dream the dreams of the dead. When I went up to the crater and saw you there, I was seeking the learning of the dead, hoping there might be a way to hear it without being trapped. But Wika my teacher stopped me, as I stopped you. Wika said the men who used such dream-traps were ensnared by the dreams within them, until they"d rather dream than do anything else and so went mad. And because of the dreams concentrated in the gla.s.s, the Dream-shadow was drawn to them also, drawn out of the ground, out of the tombs, and took those men and whoever else was nearby."