Part 15 (1/2)

She dried her tears.

Is that what it does to you, that knowledge? Makes you like Grandmother?

Foxfire walked back to her room, feeling more alone than ever in her life.

TWENTY-FIVE.

Shaldis slipped back into the house through the camel-drivers' courtyard, keeping the Gray Cloak about her. As she walked she felt the hammering of her heart, the frantic fear that grew in her with every step. What the h.e.l.l had happened?

Summerchild had tried for one instant to use magic, to defend herself with magic . . .

And had been swallowed up.

Dear G.o.ds, let her be all right!

As Pebble had described, Shaldis felt the dim tugging of the Sigil of Sisterhood in her heart. As if another member of the circle were trying to draw upon her magic. She dodged up the stairs from the kitchen court and into her room. The tug of the sigil dissolved into the urgent demand that she look in her crystal again. She shot the bolt, dropped cross-legged onto the bed. It was Pomegranate. ”I think she's still alive,” said the old woman, who by the look of it was in the latticed shade of some lakeside village square, presumably waiting for the next boat. ”I listened for her, listened deep, and heard nothing. But Pontifer Pig says she lives. I think he's right, because I looked for the king and couldn't see him. That means he's still with her.”

Shaldis wasn't certain of that. Summerchild had sought last spring for two of the sisters who'd been killed, and had not even been able to see their dead bodies. As for Pontifer Pig, Shaldis wasn't entirely sure what to think. For ten years, Pontifer had been merely a figment of Pomegranate's deranged imagination: at one time the beggar woman had actually owned a white pig, but the original Pontifer had long ago met his destiny under the wheels of a cart.

At least, thought Shaldis philosophically, it was her pet pig she imagined, and not her equally deceased husband, Deem. And she wondered briefly, with a smile, how her friend Soth had made out, traveling with a four-footed invisible companion that only Pomegranate could see.

When Pomegranate let her mirror fade, Shaldis tried to summon the king's image first in the crystal, then in the hand mirror she sometimes used, with equal lack of success. That might, as Pomegranate had said, mean he was close to Summerchild, and that Summerchild was alive.

She glanced at the room's latticed window. The hour of the Bird Sun was pa.s.sing. Brazen light crept inexorably down the wall on the other side of the courtyard.

She drew a few deep breaths. Three Wells was a day's ride, everyone said. Had they been delayed there or trapped, or had they met something on their way back? But what would they have met? She knelt beside the bed, and with white chalk and red drew on the tiled floor the wide ring, the curving power lines, of the Sigil of Sisterhood, the mark that bound the minds, and the power, of the Sisters of the Raven together. She fas.h.i.+oned the sigil five times, linking the marks with a pentagram. In the midst of this star she lay down and folded her hands on her breast.

Are you there?

What happened?

Where are you?

Deep breaths, and the meditation on the sigils.

Concentration on the faint pull of magic, following its tugging down into darkness.

Singing, very far off. The beat of drums and the mingling of voices. Human? Scents. Of what? The glimmer of green light, blowing like mist across . . . across what?

Don't try to understand. Just listen, and breathe, and see what you see.

She thought she saw Summerchild, or sensed her in the distance. As if she, Shaldis, were swimming down a long well of glowing blue water and saw her at the bottom, sleeping on the floor of the lake. Sleeping in a halo of green light. But the Sigil of Sisterhood was traced around her in the sign of a pentagram, as it was on Shaldis's bedroom floor. The green light hemmed her in but did not touch her.

Then darkness. The sound of rain on leaves. A sweetness in the air that bordered on ecstasy.

That other sound, the slow booming sough that had troubled her dreams. Infinitely distant, like a heartbeat in her blood.

Suddenly, shockingly, she was looking out over a lake of fire. The rock underfoot trembled, and burned her feet through her boots. The air scorched her lungs as she breathed. All things appeared blindingly distinct: dull-red crusts of mud broke to show fiery liquid beneath, liquid that glowed like the molten gold in a smith's crucible, a lake of it, bounded by dim black cliffs whose riven walls caught the ruddiness when the flames shot up. Darkness lay over the cliffs and the burning lake, darkness thick with steams and smoke, but through the darkness moved something that looked like curling snakes of green mist, mist that clung together and did not disperse.

Mist that probed among the rocks as if hunting something.

Shaldis called out, Summerchild? She couldn't imagine what this place was. The dreamworld of a djinn, such as she had entered before?

The world of Summerchild's nightmares?

The green mist glowed as it moved closer to her through the rocks around the lake's black sh.o.r.e. Outcrops of rock glinted, black and s.h.i.+ny, like nodules of inky gla.s.s, and Shaldis thought the music she heard, the voices, were coming out of the mist.

Summerchild?

Fear filled her, and a terrible longing. It knows the answer. The mist will be able to tell me anything. And everything.

Do not let the mist touch you, said a voice in her thought. The words were foreign, but through their musical tones she felt the mind of the woman who had cried out to her, who had begged her for help. Flee it. Flee this place.

Who are you? Shaldis asked. What happened to my friend?

But it felt to her as if hands seized her, or a mind seized her mind. Force flung her into darkness and she grasped for the hand, the mind. She cried out, ”Who are you?” and Pebble's voice replied, ”It's Pebble. Are you all right?”

Shaldis opened her eyes, annoyed. ”Of course I'm all right. Why did you-”

She realized it was dark in the room. Lamps burned in the niches on either side of the bed, and the air had the rank dusty taste of night.

The Sun's Dreams.

The SUN'S DREAMS? The hours after midnight.

She stared up at the other girl in shock. Pebble swallowed, her eyes red with tears and fright. ”We tried and tried to wake you.” Shaldis realized the other smell in the room, even stronger than the indigo in the court below, was burnt feathers. She couldn't imagine how she could have remained asleep with one of those waved under her nose.

”With what Jethan told us about Summerchild-” began Moth, who Shaldis now saw was sitting on the bed at her feet.

”What?” Her mind groped, still trying to deal with the fact that she'd closed her eyes-for a few seconds, it seemed-toward the end of the hour of the Bird Sun and now it was the hour of the Sun's Dreams. A whole day gone. ”Summerchild? I thought Jethan was with the king.”

”He was. He rode in about an hour after sunset, when I was still at the palace, but I'd sent Pebble here and she found you on the floor and couldn't wake you up. You want some coffee?” Moth leaned over to pick up a cup of it that was resting in a lamp niche. ”Jethan said Summerchild couldn't be waked neither, and sent more guards out with a litter, to bring her back from Three Wells. By that time Pebble sent me word you was out like the dead here, and Jethan said one of us had to come back with him.”

”Is Jethan here?”

”Downstairs, and I think if we don't get him out of here soon he's gonna kill that grandfather of yours or that grandfather's gonna kill him, or at least bite him and give him rabies. What an old baboon! He says-”

Shaldis scrambled to her feet, and nearly fell, her stiff muscles cramping from long inaction. It had seemed to her that she'd only skimmed the edges of dreams, had only shut her eyes moments ago. A vision flickered through her mind of the smell of rain, of a lake of fire.

That sound. That distant cras.h.i.+ng.

And a woman's voice warning her. Warning her of what?