"Nor do wolves," pointed out Summerchild. "They seem to do all right." She followed the scratched and b.l.o.o.d.y marks where a horse had been dragged toward the wadi"s edge. Dry wind lifted the ends of her veils like a silken flag. She shaded her eyes as she looked up at Oryn. "But the teyn who turned on their masters at Dry Hill last spring were mingled with wildings, when you caught up with them, you and Bax and his guards."
The brush was thicker closer to the wadi"s edge. Oryn held up the hem of his robe, knowing Geb would kill him-or kill himself-if the green-embroidered saffron silk ended up snagged. "You don"t suppose the teyn in the Three Wells compound-"
The teyn that erupted out of the brush around and in front of him emerged so fast, and so close, that Oryn could only gape in shock in the split second between their appearance and being thrown to the ground, seeing the rocks in their hands, the broken-off spikes of sharp bone. With an inarticulate yowl of fright he rolled in time to avoid having his skull smashed; felt huge hands-hands with the startling strength of animals"-clutch at him; smelled the musty, sweetish stench of their flesh. Then the air above him exploded in a searing burst of white fire and the teyn jerked back in shock, and the next second Summerchild strode forward, hand uplifted to cast a second spell. At the same instant Jethan waded into the midst of them, sword flashing b.l.o.o.d.y in the sun.
Oryn tried to scramble to his feet and got kicked over again as more teyn came pouring out of the wadi, silent-silent as horrors in a dream. Numet and his men charged, either afoot or on horseback, swords glinting in the hot noon light; and teyn rose up out of every thicket of mesquite and camel thorn in the landscape, brush that Oryn would have taken oath couldn"t have sheltered rabbits. Jethan waded in among them, striking at the hairy faces, the ma.s.sive hands, and tusked, gaping mouths. Oryn rolled out of the way of a cavalry mount"s hooves, the teyn who held him breaking and fleeing only to rea.s.semble and charge. They hurled rocks, sprang in fives and sixes at the charging horses, dragged and clutched at the riders. More white light exploded in the air, and a horse screamed as it was brought down. Oryn gasped, "Dear G.o.ds!" and it seemed to him that teyn were everywhere, rising from the wadi and the brush and converging on the little knot of hors.e.m.e.n from all points of the compa.s.s.
"Back!" he heard Numet"s voice shouting above the din. "This way back!" At the same instant Jethan dragged his horse to a foaming halt almost on top of Oryn, two remounts on lead.
"Summerchild!" yelled Oryn as Jethan heaved him onto one of the remounts. Three teyn tried to swarm them from the other side, grabbing bridle and stirrups, slashing with their splinters of bone; and the young guardsman laid about him with his sword, cutting off hands and heads as the horses reared and thrashed.
"Back that way!"
"Summerchild!" It wasn"t at all like battles in songs and Oryn hadn"t the slightest idea where Summerchild was or if she was alive or dead; and with the dust kicked up thicker and thicker around them like a fog and horses and guards and teyn pouring in all directions around them, he couldn"t imagine how he"d find out if she was all right until after it was over and it was too late.
"Ride!" yelled Jethan, slapping the flank of Oryn"s horse hard.
The horse leaped, Oryn looking wildly around him. A thrown rock hit him in the back with an impact like a club and another half-dozen teyn were around him. More rocks rained; a bone dagger ripped into his boot and his leg, then Jethan came charging out of the choking yellow curtain of the dust to grab the horse"s bridle.
A trumpet blasted shrilly, signaling in which direction everyone was to go. Overheated and tired as they were, the horses galloped full tilt for nearly half a mile before Numet shouted, "Pull up!" and the whole stampede slowed to a milling circle.
Only then did Oryn see Summerchild, safely mounted nearby.
The next thing he saw was the line of settling dust they"d just fled, jagged and dotted with the silent, crouching teyn.
Numet-transformed from a slightly foppish princeling to a battlefield commander by a liberal coating of dust and blood-was already counting his men. Oryn picked out Jethan"s sable mane, Lotus clinging gamely to young Poru"s horse"s crupper, and Geb and the servants cl.u.s.tering together with the spare horses and the baggage a.s.ses. Elpiduyek was sobbing in frustrated rage at the loss of the royal parasol, which lay like the broken corpse of a gilded bird, halfway between the royal party and the crouching line of teyn.
The king rode back to Numet"s side. "What in the name of the G.o.ds was that all about? Has there ever been an attack by teyn on mounted troops?"
"You know there hasn"t." Jethan and Summerchild joined them. "You would have been told."
"Never, my lord," affirmed Numet with the crossed-hands gesture that called Ean to witness his oath. "And, by the G.o.ds, they"ll be taught a lesson. Firmin."
A boyish trooper near them urged his mount closer, dipped a quick salaam to the king.
"Ride back to the city at once. Notify Commander Bax that we were attacked by a major force of wilding teyn and that we need reinforcements, a hundred riders at least. Are you all right, my lord?" the captain added as Firmin trotted to the knot of remounts to switch horses before riding away. His own mount, Oryn saw, was stumbling with heat and weariness. It would be a terrible ride back, through the desolate country in the hammering heat of the noon.
"I"m well." Oryn wiped his face and winced, then looked with surprise at the blood on his hand.
"I told you you should have remained in the city." Geb urged his horse nervously into the group. "What on earth will it serve for you to put yourself into danger like this?"
"They"re not advancing on us." Jethan"s quiet voice rode effortlessly over the chamberlain"s shrill despair. The young guardsman circled back to the little group around captain and king, and gestured with one arm toward the teyn. As the dust was settling they could still be seen, squatting in a ragged line perhaps three-quarters of a mile long, stretched across the direction in which Three Wells lay. The ground behind them was dotted with the slain and with dark splashes where blood soaked into the ground. The vultures were beginning to come down again. "They seem to be waiting."
"Insolent beasts," Numet fumed. "They"ll be taught a lesson for them to carry to their kinsfolk . . ."
"But what lesson will they be taught?" wondered Oryn softly. The cavalcade grouped again and moved back in the direction from which they"d come through the brutal shimmer of noon heat. The teyn did not follow, but neither did they disperse. They only waited.
For what?
"Captain-Jethan-Was it my imagination or were there both wilding teyn and escaped domestics in the band that attacked us?"
Numet looked nonplussed by the question, but Jethan said, "Both, Lord King. I"m guessing the domestics escaped from the compound at Three Wells. The wildings probably moved in the moment they could see the villagers dead."
"Good heavens," gasped Numet, "you don"t think the wildings killed the villagers?"
"Poru said specifically that the majority of the corpses were unharmed," said Summerchild quickly. "Only a few, he said, seemed to be dismembered. The teyn would have butchered the cattle in the stalls as well, and he said he heard them alive." Even in the chaos of battle she"d kept herself demurely veiled-Oryn supposed that was something Pearl Women were taught to do-and her delicate brows stood out dark against her face. "I understand that the people in other villages-and in the cities as well-need to be warned that the teyn must be more closely guarded. But I think we need to take care how we warn, lest teyn who hadn"t the slightest thing to do with this suffer the consequences of their masters" fears."
"But there"s no way of telling which teyn have nothing to do with rebellion," pointed out Numet. "You can"t know what"s going on in those thick skulls of theirs! G.o.d of war, I"ve never seen so great a band of them! Never heard of more than a dozen together in the wilds!"
The riders had drawn up in a sand flat where not even clumps of rabbitbrush would offer shelter to a creeping a.s.sault; the men were beginning to set up shades for the nooning and to string out into a perimeter guard. With his spygla.s.s Oryn could still see a teyn or two, only dark specks now, but sitting precisely where they"d left them, across the line of march toward Three Wells.
"We cannot allow this to continue," Numet went on as Oryn was helped from his horse by Geb and the other camp servants and guided toward the single small tent that had been set up. The captain leaped down from his horse and followed, gesturing as he walked. "Surely Your Majesty can see that that must be your first consideration, the first consideration"-he didn"t so much as move his eyes in Summerchild"s direction-"of the . . . the persons of power under Your Majesty"s command."
Oryn stopped and stood, shading his eyes, looking quietly at the captain. Around them, the little band of guards was unpacking waterskins and field rations of curds, dates, and boiled rice. Though the teyn were no more than distant dots now among the rocks and scrub, no man"s hand was more than a few inches from his sword; and as the cavalry mounts were unsaddled, the tack was put at once onto the fresh horses, picketed under guard in their lines.
"I agree that the matter must be my first consideration," said Oryn. "Oh, stop fussing, Geb, do, and look after the men who were genuinely wounded; I"m not going to die of a bruise. And I do hope we"ll be able to find a way to keep this sort of thing from occurring again . . . once we figure out exactly what this sort of thing actually is and what it means."
NINETEEN.
It didn"t take Shaldis more than a few moments to ascertain that whoever had opened the door that led from the pa.s.sageway-where Nettleflower"s body had been found-it hadn"t been the former Blood Mage Ahure.
Shaldis knew Ahure. In addition to having worked magic at his side in the spring, when both had partic.i.p.ated in the great rite that had attempted to bring the month-late rains, she had at one time suspected him of murdering three of her fellow Raven sisters and had visited his quarters when he"d still been Lord Jamornid"s court mage. She was familiar not only with the characteristic feel of his spells imbued in the walls there but with the calculated charlatanism by which he"d maintained his position for months-perhaps years-after his powers were utterly gone.
Someone had used magic to move the latch on the pa.s.sageway door. Shaldis could feel it when she put her hand on the iron-strapped mountain oak, the wrought-iron bar. But she didn"t think it had been last night. Two nights ago, or three. The same magic she"d felt in her grandfather"s room, she thought, her long fingers tracing the Sigil of Deep Awareness, her eyelids half closing in a listening trance.
But it hadn"t been Ahure. It didn"t feel like the magic of a Blood Mage at all. The magic practiced by that order had always filled her with disgust and unease, its obsessive intensity repelling her as much as the Blood Mages did themselves. Those she had met had been, for the most part, a dirty and frightening group, their tongues, lips, and earlobes pierced with ragged scars and holes where they drew thorned strings through, to concentrate their own power through blood and pain. Many had cut off fingers when they needed to source great power or had gashed open their shaved scalps.
Shaldis wondered what her own reaction might be, if she were to learn that such mutilation was the only sure way to raise power these days.
Let"s not think about that right now.
She stepped a few paces back along the plastered walls of the pa.s.sageway, traced again the Sigil of Deep Awareness, and breathed her mind into the mud brick underneath.
The queasy reek of rage and violence rose through her, the stink of blood and perfume. The shouting horror of rage so blinding, so unreasoning, that it amounted to madness. Shaldis jerked her mind back from it: Was the killing like THAT?
Insane fury like the screaming of trumpets?
And no magic at all. Not last night. Not in connection with Nettleflower"s death.
She stood for a time in the narrow pa.s.sageway, looking along its shadowy arch to the hot greens and flower spangles of the garden. As she watched, Tulik came down the stair, hastened through the archway at the far end of the garden into the kitchen court-looking for her, she supposed.
Her brother was sixteen. It was hard to remember that, seeing how he spoke to the servants, to the teyn, to their father, even. He had spoken casually about having a room off the gallery above the inner court, a privilege accorded only to the men of the family, her father and Uncle Tjagan.
A room, she guessed, that had been taken away from her father"s modest suite.
For at least two years before Shaldis had left the household, the boy had been checking their father"s bookkeeping-which grew less reliable as each day drew on-and a.s.sisting their grandfather in the trading end of the business, while Chirak filled his post as proctor of the Grand Bazaar. As proctor, she knew, Chirak had a great deal of power, and they had already begun to discuss Tulik"s taking over their grandfather"s position as soon as the other proctors would permit it-or, alternatively, marrying into one of the other big merchant houses and taking over their proctorial seat. Then the Shaldeth clan would have two votes, not one.
But Tulik was, when all was said and done, still only sixteen.
And if their grandfather died-or was found to be mad and removed from his post-that would leave the Shaldeth without any voice in that inner council. The seat in the red-draped inner court of the Grand Bazaar would be given to some other family who would never turn it loose.
With a quick glance in both directions, Shaldis emerged from the pa.s.sageway and crossed the garden, climbed the steps to the gallery outside her grandfather"s room. She moved with the soundlessness in which the wizards had for centuries been trained and cast her thoughts before her, probing toward her grandfather"s room. Listening for the sound of his breathing, for the quick angry stride that would tell her that he heard her coming.
But there was nothing. Only the snuffle of an old man sliding into sleep.
Breathless with fear-the fear she"d felt as a child of this all-powerful, terrible man; the fear of that mad, screaming rage she"d sensed in the pa.s.sageway where Nettleflower had died-Shaldis crept to his door and laid her hands gently on the handle.
No magic had worked its latch last night.
Her grandfather"s story of an attack in his room last night-the story Tulik had corroborated-had been a lie.
Had he suspected Nettleflower was going to the pa.s.sageway beside the study, to open the alley door? For whom? A lover? Or a business rival to whom she was selling information?
Ahure, perhaps?
Snaldis shivered as she descended the stair. She"d always known her grandfather was an arbitrary man, one addicted to his own rage; a man who loved to get angry, to exercise the power that law and custom gave him over his family and slaves.
But that hysterical paroxysm, that shrieking fury she"d felt like a dark stain in the walls of the pa.s.sageway . . . that was the stuff of madness.
On her way through to the heat and noise and indigo stink of the kitchen court, she pa.s.sed the door of the storeroom and, glancing within, saw Tulik there, washing the blood from Nettleflower"s stiffening hands.
In the kitchen, Foursie, Twinkle, and Yellow Hen were chopping bloodroot for a dye bath while Cook and Shaldis"s mother plucked chickens for dinner. Shaldis asked, "What"s really going on?" and her mother turned from the worktable and laughed.
"My darling, for two years now I"ve wondered-I"ve worried-if the wizards would have changed you, made you into someone else that I maybe wouldn"t like so much." Her brown eyes twinkled as she crossed the sweltering little room, embraced Shaldis with chicken blood and feathers all over her plump hands. "And now I see how foolish that worry was. Have you had breakfast, dear? Not enough, I"ll wager-I understand those poor old men up there are starving to death and getting jobs sweeping floors to feed themselves."
"Hogwash," said Shaldis cheerfully, and pulled up a tall stool to perch on while her mother went back to work. Her mother and Cook, she noticed, still wore half a dozen amulets apiece-copper, malachite, gla.s.s-although the wizards who"d made them undoubtedly had no power to ward off anything anymore. Foursie and Twinkle were the same. Only Yellow Hen seemed to have accepted the fact that talismans were a waste of money. But then, Shaldis recalled, her aunt had never had much use for purchased luck.
She went on. "The king sends us whatever we need. The masters are all his old friends, for one thing, and even if they weren"t, they"re still teachers who know all the old spells, even if they can"t do them."
"Exactly what I was saying," declared her mother triumphantly.
"Nonsense, Barley Sugar," retorted Yellow Hen, "you were telling me only yesterday that the king had deserted the mages."
"That isn"t what I meant," explained Shaldis"s mother with a slight scolding note in her voice, as if her elderly sister-in-law had willfully twisted her words. She turned back to Shaldis. "As for what happened last night-Foursie, darling, get Old One some bread and b.u.t.ter, because whatever she says, they really are starving her to death. The first thing any of us heard last night was shouting and thumping down in the garden. The girls heard it, that is, since the dormitory looks onto the garden and your aunt and I sleep farther away."
"We all saw Grandfather rush out of the pa.s.sageway and up the stairs to Tulik"s room," breathed Foursie, her thin cheeks flushed with excitement where a few moments before they had been deathly pale. "At least, later on we knew it was Grandfather-it just looked like a white blur because he was wrapped up in a sheet. Tulik came out of his room and ran downstairs with him and into the pa.s.sageway, and then after a little while he came back up and told us Nettleflower had been killed."
"He looked sick," put in Twinkle, carefully placing a handful of dripping red shreds into the smallest of the dye pots. "Sick and scared." Like Foursie, the youngest of Habnit and Barley Sugar"s daughters was dark and delicate boned. She"d braided up her hair-or more likely gotten one of the maids to braid it for her-in a killingly fashionable tree-of-life style, and in addition to fifteen amulets wore a whole collection of cheap bright-colored beads of marketplace gla.s.s around her neck that clinked and clattered when she moved. Clearly, she was already on her way to becoming as style-conscious as Moth. She swallowed hard, asked timidly, "Did it- Do you think it hurt her to die?"
Shaldis thought about the broken nails, the bloodied hands. Her grandfather"s scored face.
"Oh, I don"t think so, darling," said their mother.
But Shaldis said, "Yes, I think it did. That"s why I"m going to catch the person who did it and see that he"s punished."
The words flaked over her tongue like ashes.
No, you"re not.
Tulik will lie himself black in the face, to keep anyone from suspecting that Grandfather killed someone in his own household in a fit of madness.
At least until he"s eighteen. She"d never heard of anyone being permitted to take his seat as a proctor so young, but wouldn"t put it past Tulik to manage it.
At eighteen.
Sixteen, never.
She took a deep breath. "So why does Grandfather think it was Ahure the Blood Mage?"
Foursie looked nonplussed at the question. "Wasn"t it?"
And Twinkle said decisively, "It was." She looked up at Shaldis again. "We saw them-Foursie and I-when we went with Mama and Aunt Apricot to the milk market yesterday morning. We went to get a horoscope, and we both saw Nettleflower standing talking to this horrible man with a bandage on his hand and cuts on his head and dried blood and flies, and Foursie said, That was Ahure the Blood Mage. You don"t have to cut your fingers off to make magic, do you?"
"No," said Shaldis.
Her mother interpolated, "I should say not! I"ve always said, it"s the most unsanitary-"
"Are you sure it was Nettleflower?"
Both girls nodded. "She was wearing the silk veil she"d got Uncle to give her just before he went to Kamath village," provided Foursie. "Green with pink flowers, and bells at the corners. She was always getting permission to go out and go shopping. When she couldn"t, she"d tell old Two Shoes that she had it anyway and he"d let her out. Once he wouldn"t, and she told Uncle he"d stolen from her and he beat him. After that Two Shoes let her out whenever she wanted to go."
"Ahure gave her something," added Twinkle, "in the market. We saw him."
Foursie nodded. "And anyway Ahure and Grandfather hate each other," she said, her eyes sparkling at the recollection of the dramatic scene. "Last time he was here in the house Ahure said he"d put a curse on Grandfather."
"What?" said Shaldis, startled. "Why? What was he doing here? I didn"t even know Grandfather knew Ahure."
And at the same time she thought, Why didn"t Tulik tell me that? Why keep Grandfather from bringing up his name?
"He knows him, all right." Yellow Hen sat back from the hearth, where the kettle of water was just beginning to boil for the first of the yellow dye baths. "Noyad the jeweler-"
"You girls get on out of here, now," broke in Shaldis"s mother with a sharp look at Foursie and Twinkle. "Go on, now. This is grown-up talk."
"It wasn"t grown-up before," protested Foursie. Her mother gave her the Look that Shaldis so well remembered. Foursie resignedly took Twinkle"s hand. Twinkle pulled loose and carefully lifted the largest and most elaborate of her amulets off over her coiffure. She held it out to Shaldis-cheap beggar silver with a garish pink-gla.s.s bead.
"This will protect you," she promised breathlessly, "from Ahure"s evil spells."
Shaldis knew the only way it would protect her from Ahure"s evil spells was if she hit the old Blood Mage over the head with it and knocked him out. But she put it on at once and said gratefully, "Why, thank you, Twinkle Star." Since Ahure hadn"t been able to cast a spell, evil or otherwise, for probably a decade, the fact that the amulet was worthless scarcely mattered.
"What about Noyad the jeweler?" she asked as her younger sisters scampered away.