Part 13 (1/2)

”If it wasn't a child,” put in Melon, her mouth full of couscous and raisins, ”she'd already be selling pa.s.sion potions down in Hot Pillow Lane and making a fortune,” a piece of logic with which Shaldis could not argue.

”If it's a child, may the G.o.ds help her,” said Rosemallow grimly. ”Because Xolnax-or Cattail, whichever of them finds her first-is going to buy her from her parents and raise her as their own, so that they'll be able to control her magic for their own ends. And then the G.o.ds help us all. Oh, show Shaldis your pendants from Ahure, honey,” she added as a couple of young men-brothers by the look of them and obviously thugs in the pay of some one of the local water bosses-appeared in the archway from the street, leaning slightly on each other and calling out Melon's name.

Melon smiled smugly and preened herself a little. ”Gotta go, kittens. Thanks ever so for the wine-you be here when I get back?” She stood, and unfastened one of the several pendants from around her neck. ”Take good care of that,” she added in a whisper. ”It's brought me I don't know how many good customers.” And she took each bedazzled young thug by an elbow and guided them both into her room.

The pendant was cheaply made, as Yellow Hen had described. Inferior bronze set with a bad-quality topaz and chips of blue faience. A circle of what looked like earth-wizard runes were inscribed around it. There was no more magic in it than in an adobe brick.

TWENTY-THREE.

Shaldis turned them over and over in her mind as she walked back along the path by the city wall to the Fishmarket Gate, and from there along Great Bazaar Street and so home in the darkness as the city settled toward sleep: Cattail.

Ahure the Blood Mage.

A woman calling out in despair in the rhythmically booming darkness.

A skinny gray cat who should have been dead and wasn't.

Echoes of magic that were almost the same but not quite.

A child would use those simple spells to heal a cat.

Would a child use her magic to a.s.sist an a.s.sa.s.sin?

Shaldis had seen too many five-year-old pickpockets and housebreakers in the streets of the Slaughterhouse District to have any illusions about what the innocent could be coaxed, tricked, or blackmailed into doing.

And Cattail was seeking to buy herself that extra power that domination of a Raven child would bring.

Shaldis ghosted among the blankets of the sleeping camel drivers around the embers of the courtyard fire at her grandfather's house, slipped through the silent kitchen court, and up to her own room above it, between her mother's and her aunt's. Bedding had been made up for her, under one of the new mosquito-net tents. As she lay on it she pictured the healing herbs as Yanrid had instructed her, meditated on each one: scent, taste, bark, and leaves.

Fever tree and hand of Darutha, emperor root and chamomile.

After that she stretched out her senses through the house, listening to the sounds in each chamber and gallery. At any other time or place she would have sniffed as well, but at the moment even the senses of the Crafty could not penetrate past the ammonia reek of the dye pots in the kitchen court.

Still, she heard nothing but the night sounds of the house: the snuffle and sigh of her parents' breathing, the thready whisper of Twinkle telling Foursie stories in the dark of the maids' dormitory: ”So the evil queen said, 'You must agree to become my slave, and to do my bidding forever. . . .'”

Then she slipped over into sleep, an hour before first light.

The king and his company reached the village of Three Wells about an hour before first light. ”Best we camp, my lord,” said Captain Numet quietly, when they came within the ring of dusty cornfields that surrounded the town. ”As you said, an hour won't make much difference. The scouts say there's not a sound, either from the village itself or from the teyn compound.”

”Is it safe?” Oryn rose in his stirrups, looked around him at the dark sea of cornstalks, shoulder high to the mounted troopers, in places head high. Beyond them, rough ground rose to the east, a stretch of badlands that the merchant Poru had called the Serpent Maze, separating the village oasis from the true desert beyond.

”We'll keep back of the cornfields, where we can get a clear view, Your Majesty. Anything that comes from the badlands, we'll be able to see before it gets to us.”

Something flickered in the corner of Oryn's vision, something that was gone when he turned his head in the direction of the hills. He nudged his horse over to Summerchild's as the men dismounted and began to set camp. She, too, was gazing at the hills.

”What's there?”

She shook her head. ”Something . . . I don't know.”

”Teyn?”

”No,” she murmured. ”They're everywhere but there.”

Shaldis jerked awake. Voices crying out- The rags of dreams flicked from her mind. What she thought had been strange music on the edge of hearing, scents and sensations of strange sweet poison, dissolved into the peaceful stillness of the time the Sun Mages called the Sun at His Prayers, the hour at which even the rowdiest camel drivers slept.

Yet she was certain she'd heard or smelled or felt something.

What WAS that? Not the Crafty woman crying for help. Something else.

Her mind quested through every chamber, every gallery: kitchen, gardens, the compound of the teyn.

But all she encountered was the night silence of the sleeping house.

With the coming of first light, the king and his party rode through the cornfields to the village.

Vultures were everywhere. The high corn, parching from two days without irrigation, rustled with activity: coyote, kit foxes, and, Oryn saw, the village cats and dogs.

Within the ring of the cornfields lay the vegetable gardens, the charred maze of low walls visible beyond. As they pa.s.sed the gate of the teyn compound he saw that it stood open, and vultures perched on its blackened walls and on the bodies that lay both within it and outside the gate. It seemed to him that only a few lay outside.

After two days, the town was enveloped in a cloud of flies, and the stink was enough to knock a man down.

A woman lay on her back near the edge of town, face-or what the vultures had left of her face-to the sky. It was hard to tell the state of her clothing now, but Oryn didn't see any obvious wounds. A round-bellied kitchen pot lay as if she'd carried it in the crook of her arm; Jethan sprang from his horse and tilted the pot with the handle of his quirt so he could look inside. ”Eggplants, my lord.” He tilted the pot over, spilling the contents on the ground, stirred the smooth white-and-purple globes to see if there was anything of value-or interest-among them.

There wasn't.

”Over here, sir.”

Numet stood over a detached arm, the limb protruding from a bundle of green-and-white cloth that looked like a man's work tunic. ”Looks like there's been grave robbing here.”

Oryn dismounted. The arm was almost black, the desiccated flesh collapsed onto the bone, slick as long-dried leather. He straightened, looked back toward the broken hills of the Serpent Maze, visible now above the burned walls of the village.

”That's a mummy's arm, surely,” said Captain Numet, and turned to Poru as the salt merchant emerged from the charred sh.e.l.l of a house. ”Are there tombs back in the badlands?”

”Absolutely,” Oryn said, and, though he looked a little surprised that the king would know this, the young merchant nodded.

”The hills are rotten with them, Majesty. Some quite big ones. Every now and then the young men of the village will dig through them-especially nowadays-but they've all been looted clean centuries ago.”

”The kings of the Zali Dynasty had tombs out here,” provided Oryn, kneeling gingerly and poking at the arm with a stick. ”Here, and north by the Lake of Roses, hoping, I suppose, that the more trouble they made for tomb robbers the likelier they were to be left in peace-the more fools they. I have one or two pieces of Zali jewelry-which are interesting but not very pretty-and a tremendous collection of burial texts: I suspect most of the Zali jewelry was melted down centuries ago. But why would a tomb robber steal a mummy, much less bring it into the village? They mostly just strip them and dump them on the floors of the tombs.”

”Whyever they did it,” said Jethan grimly, looking into a house nearby, ”it wasn't just one.”

After the fourth time she woke, heart pounding, positive that she'd heard a singing that proved on waking to be illusory, Shaldis gave it up. The house was still shadowy, and the silence now profound. The few hours of relative coolness s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaw of the ravening lion of midsummer.

Birds in full song in the garden.

She slipped from beneath the mosquito net and dressed again in her white novice's robe, made her way unseen down the stairs and through the kitchen court where Cook's dark form could be glimpsed beyond the kitchen archways just making up the fires, then out to the street.