Part 12 (1/2)

”If you'd ask that question, you can't know my grandfather Chirak Shaldeth.”

Under the layer of cosmetics there wasn't the smallest change of expression in Cattail's face. Only a small puckering of the brows-carefully executed so as not to wrinkle the paint-as she tried to place the name.

”One of the Grand Bazaar proctors?” Shaldis prompted.

”Oh, of course! Silly of me. I knew the Shaldeth had a proctors.h.i.+p, and I should have realized with the name you'd chosen that you were one of them. Your grandfather is a proctor, dear? The only proctor I know is Merj Glapas.”

Leopard appeared with the coffee, and Shaldis sipped it-it was thickly laced with sugar, vanilla, milk, and cinnamon-and chatted with Cattail as the rose-amber globe of the sun sank itself, burning, into the lake and all the yellow-sailed fis.h.i.+ng craft slipped out over the glowing water, borne on the hot whisper of the desert breeze. The time of Sunrest, the mages had called it, sacred to its own G.o.d Ka-Theruabin. Every spell performed during that hour had a special formula attached to it, to take account of the particular magic of that time.

As far as she could tell, either Cattail had never had the slightest thing to do with her grandfather's house or household, or she was a consummately clever actress-something Shaldis was certain that she was. It wasn't, of course, easy to casually bring up anything in a conversation so overwhelmingly dominated by her hostess's insistence on telling her every detail of everyone else's business in the neighborhood and what she had paid for the coffee service, the embroidered cus.h.i.+ons, Leopard, or her hairdresser, but Shaldis persevered. When she slipped into the conversation the mention that one of her grandfather's maidservants swore she'd seen Cattail herself in the house at night, Cattail's eyes widened with credible-looking startlement and she said only, ”Good heavens, what an extraordinary idea!” instead of, Who says this? or When? ”How on earth would the girl have known what I looked like?”

Shaldis shook her head. ”I have no idea. But I think that's what gave poor Ten Flower-the girl who asked me about the fertility spell-the idea that she wanted one. She says when she heard this, she thought one of the other maids was trying to get herself with child by my uncle Tjagan, to get special privileges, and Ten Flower, who is also sleeping with my uncle, wanted to get in there first.”

”Good lord, these poor silly children.” Cattail shook her head. ”As if any man-though I'm sure your uncle is a very paragon of virtue, my dear-is going to treat any woman better if she bears him a brat. Still, wait here for a few minutes and let me see what I can make up for her. Shall I bring Leopard back and have him sing for you? Or have him read to you? He has a ravis.h.i.+ng voice, among other things,” she added slyly.

”No, thank you, I'll be fine. The silence here is lovely, this close to the lake.”

”I should think that after living up in that ghastly Citadel for two years you'd give your thumbs for the sound of a little music, but to each her own. More coffee? A gazelle horn?” She moved the gaudily cloisonneed plate of cream-stuffed pastries closer. ”My cook is a marvel-I don't think even the king has one as fine. He cost a hundred gold pieces from Lord Nahul-Sarn and worth every dequin of it, I a.s.sure you. Not a woman in the realm can cook as well as a man who is truly an artist. Well, help yourself, my dear.”

For a few minutes after Cattail's departure Shaldis did simply sit where she was in the protective ring of stinking mosquito smudges, drinking in the lakeside quiet. The noises of the wharves were trans.m.u.ted by distance to a musical murmuring, like wind in trees. The evening breeze pa.s.sed with a gentle hrus.h.i.+ng among the forest of dried-out reeds that had grown up between the old wharves just below the wall of Cattail's house and the lake's current sh.o.r.eline a hundred feet away. Swallows veered and darted over the pools, and even the sewery, fishy stink of that intervening stretch of reeds didn't seem so bad, brushed over by the movement of the night air.

The magic light of Sunrest lay upon the world. Soon it would be gone, and dark would come.

When she was sure Cattail had retreated to her workroom elsewhere in the house, Shaldis got to her feet and went to the door that led back into the rooftop kiosk that contained the stair down into the rest of the house. It stood open, veiled in gauze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and through the pinkish layers she could see the pierced lamps of the tiled stairwell. The elaborate tile work-brilliantly colored like everything else in the house-went around the opening of the door, breaking only for the heavy iron hinges of the folded-back leaves of the door itself.

Shaldis spread out her hands, brushed them lightly across the doors, the tile, then knelt to touch the threshold, and stippled her fingers over the curtain of gauze.

The sigils of protection, of warning, of ward leaped out at her as if they'd been shrieked. Beneath them lay other sigils still, glyphs tinkered together from both High Script runes and from the hasty letters of Scribble into signs of cursing, scrubbed into the wood and iron, written in salt and blood. Shaldis sensed those evil signs were inactive, but they'd been activated, then put to sleep again, recently and often-probably every night, she thought. To whoever forced or opened those doors at night, terrible things would happen . . .

There were no limiting spells on those curses, which shocked her deeply. It meant that the evil would take any form, disproportionate to the act of burglary and striking those for whom the cursed one cared, as well as the offender himself. They would also, eventually, have an effect on the inhabitants of the house, not only Cattail but the handsome Leopard and the talented cook.

One of the first lessons Shaldis had been taught as a Sun Mage-and in fact one of the first principles taught by any of the organized systems of male wizardry-was that all spells must be specifically limited in their duration, in their strength, and in their effect. The carelessness of Cattail's defenses both horrified and disgusted her. The former laundress didn't care, evidently, that the generalized curse placed on a burglar might take the form of a contagious disease spread to half the neighborhood, or the maiming of his innocent wife or child by a crocodile's bite.

You touch my house, something AWFUL will happen to you, was all she cared about.

Had she been taught by a responsible mage, who'd been taught responsibly by his master, would she have done differently? Shaldis knew that the house had been built-and therefore these curses laid on the doors-after Summerchild had pointed out to Cattail that spells must be limited, even though there were many spells that did not work nearly so well that way.

Almost certainly, no one burgled Cattail's house. Not anymore, anyway.

Shaldis couldn't be sure, but she felt that the magic that had made those signs was different from that used to put sleep spells on the guards in the gallery outside her grandfather's room. The faint residue she'd sensed in the wall of the gallery had a different color to it, a fundamentally different quality, as if she were differentiating Summerchild's sweet tones from Cattail's throaty purr.

Which was just as well, she thought, returning to her chair as she heard her hostess's rather heavy tread on the stairs. Confident as Shaldis was in the strength of her own counterspells, she wouldn't have wanted to risk one of Cattail's curses sticking to her by breaking in and having a look at the woman's account books some night.

”It's odd,” she said as Cattail handed her a little pottery bottle (Pottery, good G.o.ds! And after Summerchild told her that ensorcelled substances must be contained in gla.s.s, which has its own special properties with regard to magic!). ”I'm remembering what Nettleflower said”-she watched Cattail's eyes again but saw no reaction-”about thinking she saw you in Grandfather's house. She said it was a Raven sister, so I think she a.s.sumed it was you. But is there someone else working in the city that we don't know about?”

Cattail sniffed. ”Other than that poor frump Pebble? Good lord, I swear the child puts sheep fat on her face for ointment. And her clothes! And if I have to hear one more time about that dreary 'papa' of hers or her tedious batch of sisters.”

Shaldis wondered what Cattail said about her, behind her back. ”I thought so, but it was on a night when I know Pebble and Moth both were at the palace with Summerchild. In fact I'd thought that you were there, too,” she added hastily, seeing Cattail's eyes narrow with slighted anger. ”But I know sometimes you're busy and don't go.”

”Well, some of us have to earn our living and don't have our bread handed to us by men-”

Shaldis broke hastily into what she guessed was a coming tirade with ”Do you think there's someone else working in the city? Another Raven sister?”

And saw Cattail's mouth harden to a slit. ”Nonsense.”

There is.

”I know you hear everything.” Shaldis hoped her widened eyes and the slightly wors.h.i.+pful note in her voice-copied from Nettleflower's best efforts with Uncle Tjagan-would eradicate the memory of her earlier expressions of distaste for Cattail, her clientele, and her methods. ”I thought you might have picked up a rumor-”

”Rumor?” The older woman spit. ”It wouldn't be a matter of rumor, my girl, with the king and that concubine of his holding out as much gold as you care to think about to any woman with the smallest wink of power to come over to their side. A woman has only to be able to call birds to her hand or charm the fleas off her papa's donkeys for Summerchild to take her in and start telling her how to conduct her life. Why would you think I'd know?”

”Because you're independent,” said Shaldis, taking the pottery phial, very carefully, from Cattail's hands. ”Summerchild is the one who has access to the royal library, after all. Just because some of us seek to learn what Summerchild has to teach doesn't mean we think her way is the only way.”

She waited, but Cattail only regarded her with hard suspicion in her dark eyes. ”You owe me half a royal,” she said after a moment. ”Let me know when your grandfather's girl conceives.”

Shaldis nodded and produced the coin with a friendly smile. ”I will. And thank you.”

She followed the handsome Leopard down the stairs, holding the phial wrapped in a corner of her mosquito veils and reflecting that she'd be lucky if she wasn't pregnant by the time she got home. There were seven clients in the waiting room by that time, drinking coffee and chatting as if they were at a bathhouse. Shaldis didn't recognize any of the veiled women, but one of the men-corpulent, pockmarked, overdressed in pink and purple satin, and studying the room with the sharp attention of one who could price the embroidered cus.h.i.+ons to within a dequin of their value-she recognized as Xolnax, the thug who was water boss of the Slaughterhouse District. And, according to her aunt Yellow Hen, a frequent visitor to her grandfather's study.

She boarded a water taxi and returned to the torchlit walls of the Yellow City in a thoughtful mood.

TWENTY-TWO.

A column of a hundred riders reached the king's camp just before sunset, with the first whispers of the cooling evening breeze stirring their banners and the captain's plumes. These, like Numet's company, were levies of the House Jothek, loyal to the king and his family and paid, now, from the royal treasury. Watching them approach, Oryn reflected not for the first time that there ought to be some other way of policing and defending the boundaries of the realm. All the great landchiefs had their private armies, whose loyalty to the king was less real to them than their duty to their clan chief.

A dozen of his minor chiefs-and all the sheikhs they ruled-were in fact originally va.s.sals of House Akarian, who had gone to the banner of Taras Greatsword in protest against the decadence of their former lord. What they would do in the face of the jubilee, thought Oryn, watching the tired horses, the sweating and heat-sick men ride up to the little camp, was anyone's guess.

The tents were packed up, the horses watered, the saddles of the newcomers changed to fresh mounts. In spite of Geb's near-tearful declarations of humiliation, Oryn, with only minimal repairs to his coiffure and eye paint, looked as kingly as he ever did, though he suspected he more resembled a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bouquet than a king. Where is Barun to look n.o.ble when I need him? The captain of the column saluted and agreed that his men press on, at least until they were well past the point where the teyn had attacked before. Having pa.s.sed that point with no sign of further trouble, at Oryn's suggestion they halted for an hour's rest. ”We're not going to reach Three Wells much before dawn in any case, and if we encounter teyn closer to the village I'd so much rather have rested men around me than tired ones.”

Numet looked a little surprised at this consideration. It wasn't, Oryn reflected, very like the warrior heroes in ballads, wherein everyone simply leaped on their seemingly inexhaustible horses and pounded away at full gallop for fifty miles whether it was midsummer or not. But having lost half a day, there didn't seem much point in das.h.i.+ng madly to what he was almost certain would be a smoking ruin.

His father would have, of course.

They rode through the night, ringed by scouts and p.r.i.c.kling with wariness, but no attack came. ”They're near,” Summerchild whispered, riding beside him, her eyes half closed in a listening trance. ”There are dozens of them, moving along beside us through the sagebrush, far more than any band I've ever heard of.”

”Only the teyn?” whispered Oryn. ”No one else?” And, when she shook her head, ”That's unheard-of.”

”Who knows what the teyn are truly like,” Summerchild replied, ”when they're free to act without wizards to keep them afraid. To keep them enslaved.”

Oryn glanced down at her, this beautiful woman, this Pearl Woman, the mother of his daughter and the delight of his life. Now all those things and something more. It had seemed completely natural to him, when he'd learned that Summerchild's perfections included the abilities of a worker of magic. As a Pearl Woman, she had been trained from babyhood to be a perfect weapon, a perfect tool, in the hand of the man who owned her.

But he knew that she felt responsibilities to magic itself, which outdistanced her love for-and duty to-him.

And in her voice he heard, as he had heard before, that she did not feel that the G.o.ds had given her magic to enslave or terrify anyone.

Not even those whose unwilling service meant the difference, now, between life for the people of the Seven Lakes or slow death.