Part 16 (1/2)

”I'm guessing it was Ahure she went downstairs to let in, two nights ago,” she said while they rested their horses in the shade of a withered mesquite. ”I think Grandfather followed her down and killed her in a rage.”

”Over what?”

”I don't know. I need to find that out. Someone definitely attacked him in his room the night before Nettle-flower's murder, though, and if it was Ahure he had someone else working with him, someone who can do magic. And my brother's trying to cover it all up,” she added with an effort to keep her bitterness, her sinking sense of being used by her family, out of her voice.

”What does your father say?”

Shaldis had to turn her face aside in anger and shame. ”Mostly, Isn't it time for another cup of sherab?”

”Ah,” said Jethan. And then, ”Your brother must be scared to death.”

Shaldis glanced back at him. It hadn't occurred to her that Tulik was feeling anything but anxiety that the proctors.h.i.+p would slip out of his grip.

”If it's an attack on the House Shaldeth in general, he'd be in danger as well, wouldn't he?” He pulled his own veils back up over his face-crimson, the royal color. Shaldis didn't even want to think what it had cost to dye that much gauze. Above them, his blue eyes seemed brilliant as the desert sky.

Shaldis nodded. She hadn't thought of that. ”He is only a kid,” she said at last.

”He's probably been taking care of everyone in sight all his life. Like you.” Jethan got to his feet, held out the waterskin to her. ”You want any more of this?”

When they emerged from their shelter they could see, hanging above the harsh yellow wasteland to the east, the dust column of a moving company. They changed saddles on their tired horses and rode toward it, and reached the slow-plodding line within an hour.

Shaldis was shocked to see the haggard grayness of the king's face beneath ointment and cosmetics, the stricken look of his sleepless eyes. ”I hope we did well in moving her,” he said as he raised the outer curtains, then the inner gauzes of the ten-bearer litter where Summerchild lay. Around them, though it was only midmorning, the guards and camp servants began to pitch camp, the king's tent erected around the litter itself. Two of Summerchild's maids stood by, with water to wash her and clean linen for her to lie on when Shaldis was done.

”No, you did right. I think,” Shaldis added, looking down at her friend's still face and trying not to remember that this woman had gotten her into the College of the Mages of the Sun in the first place. Had cared for her and stood by her in days when Shaldis had not known to whom she could turn and had in fact believed that she was not able to turn to anyone.

She tried to think of Summerchild as only a patient, a subject of healing, and not someone she loved.

It crossed her mind, as she felt the rustle of apricot-colored silk and smelled the musky languor of extremely expensive perfume at her side, that the king must be struggling, too.

In a very careful voice, Oryn asked, ”Can you do anything?”

Shaldis knelt, as the tent's shadows dropped down around them, and felt Summerchild's wrists and face. ”Will she drink? Swallow anything?”

The shake of his head was barely a movement at all. ”We're keeping her as cool as we can, and moving with the best speed we can manage. We should be back at the palace sometime tonight, and the doctors there can do everything that they usually do, for those in . . . in coma, like this.”

”Moth's at the palace already,” said Shaldis. ”Pebble will get there as soon as I return to the city. Pebble and I both felt her trying to draw on our magic. I tried to reach her”-her fingers moved slightly toward the still form on the litter-”tried to touch her mind in a trance, to find her and bring her back. I think . . . it looks like I slid into trance myself, for nearly the whole cycle of the sun. As if whatever harmed her, when she opened her mind to seek for it, got or tried to get me as well. They couldn't wake me, Pebble said.” She looked up into those dark-circled hazel eyes, saw them widen with shock. ”I'll try again, if you want me to, sire. But I don't think it's safe.”

He swallowed. ”No, my dear,” he said gently and took her hand. ”You must not put yourself in danger. I have my doubts about you riding back to Three Wells as it is. Something very strange is happening out there, as Jethan may have told you. If someone is controlling the teyn, using them as a weapon, they may very well attack you, either on your way there or once you leave the place. It's a few hours' further ride and there's no way you can make it back to the city by nightfall. Jethan can describe the state of the village to you.”

”He did, on the way here,” said Shaldis. It had occupied several miles, as they'd ridden through the stillness of the rangeland dawn. ”But I'll still need to see it. There's always something a-a nonmage won't see.” She barely stopped herself from calling him an Empty, as the novices had referred to men born without the power of magic, when the masters weren't in hearing. There had been no word, of course, for women born without those powers, because at that time there had been no word for women born with them.

Though she was tired from the ride, Shaldis elected to press on to Three Wells, a decision with which Jethan concurred. Oryn insisted they take a bodyguard of ten riders, with which Jethan also concurred. ”We have no idea what's happening out here, Shaldis,” he said when she protested that she could deal with any trouble that arose. ”We'd be fools to lessen our odds of dealing with it because we feel silly about taking an army on what might turn out to be a simple scouting mission.”

The killing heat of noonday had well and truly settled on the land by the time their little cavalcade reached the watch camp of guards that had been left posted beside the parched cornfields. A sentry, emerging from shelter, sent word to the corporal in charge, and Jethan and his riders set up their rough military shelters, the one a.s.signed to Shaldis modestly hung with a half-dozen crimson riding veils to mark it as harem. Even that brief exertion of pitching the shelters left Shaldis sweating and dizzy from the heat. She crawled inside and lay down at once.

But sleep eluded her. The heat was like a goldsmith's furnace, and every pinhole in the shelter's weave seemed to admit a searing needle of vertical sunlight. The deep silence, the desert silence, was like the implacable consciousness of Khon, the veiled G.o.d of death. She felt no trace, now, of Summerchild's distant touch on her power.

Please don't let her be dead.

Footfalls in the gravel. Jethan's voice outside her shelter. ”Shaldis?”

She crawled through the veiling over the entrance. A man never entered a place that was harem, save within his own household.

He held out a gourd of water to her. She drank, sparingly. It was hot and tasted like sand. ”Can we go to your tent?” she asked, groping back through the veiling for her satchel. ”I want to try something.”

In Jethan's shelter, she had him sketch in the sand what the hills looked like around the village that had been his home. ”What was the name of the place?” she asked, and he had to think about it for a moment. It had been, she deduced, so far from any other village that even its own inhabitants had trouble remembering that other places existed.

”Goat Slough,” he said at last.

”And your mother's name?”

”Gray Rabbit Woman.”

She cupped the crystal in her hand, angled its central facet to the harsh brazen h.e.l.l of the noon sky visible through the shelter's open end. ”I'm seeing a house,” she whispered at length. ”It's one story, brown adobe; there's a dead tree near the front door and wards painted around the windows in white and indigo.”

”Yes, that's ours.”

”There's a pine-pole ramada at the side. A gray-haired woman is grinding corn there-there's a younger woman beside her with a baby, working a loom. They're both tall, I think-it's hard to tell-but the younger woman has a white streak in her hair.”

”My sister,” said Jethan softly. ”Anyone else? A boy . . . he'd be sixteen now.”

Shaldis gazed for several more minutes in silence, then shook her head. ”No. No one else.” And, when Jethan sighed, she added, ”Just because I don't see them doesn't mean they're not just indoors or down at the village well or something.”

”It's a day's walk to the village,” said Jethan curtly. For a moment he looked out, into the wavering yellow mirages of the noon heat. Then, ”Go back to your shelter, Shaldis. I think we both need to sleep.”

When the sun had gone over into the hour called the Mercy Sun, and she and Jethan and the other guards in the camp emerged from their shelters to drink a little water and make their afternoon patrols, Jethan did not speak of what she'd seen in her crystal or what it might have meant to him, and she did not bring the matter up.

”n.o.body's been near the village that we've seen,” reported the corporal, a dark young man named Riis. ”Coyote and jackals, but no teyn. Certainly no nomads.”

”So it smells all right to coyote and jackals,” remarked Jethan as he and Shaldis walked the hundred yards or so that separated the guard camp from the first of the burned-out cl.u.s.ters of walls.

Shaldis swallowed hard as the lukewarm s.h.i.+ft of breeze strengthened the stench of rot. ”Yum,” she said.

Jethan looked like he was about to frown, then broke into the first grin she'd ever seen on his face. He sobered almost at once, as if he were afraid someone would catch him smiling. ”If they were staying away,” he said, ”I'd worry more about going in.”

”With what you've told me about teyn attacking in groups and maybe burning the place, I'm not sure I can worry more.” Shaldis looked around her at the black, empty walls, the swollen corpses, the green-black clouds of flies, and the glitter everywhere of broken gla.s.s. ”Where'd they get the fire?”

”The merchant Poru said several of the houses were burned the first night. There'd be coals still alive under the ashes. Domestic teyn would know that.”

She stopped, drawing back from a half-dozen vultures and a whirling column of flies that amply indicated another corpse lying among the drooping bean plants. ”This is weird,” she added, pus.h.i.+ng with the snake stick she'd cut at the tangle of pumpkin vine that grew among the beans, showing where the blackened leg of a mummy protruded. ”Why haul a mummy-or part of a mummy-clear out here?”

”I wondered that myself,” said Jethan. ”So did the king.”

She poked a little among the vines. ”I don't see any wrappings or any dropped trinkets. And in the dark, with all the confusion of the village being ma.s.sacred and at least a couple of houses burning, it's odd that scavengers would get everything. I wonder how deep out there the tombs are?”

She straightened and turned her eyes to the low red-brown ma.s.ses, the striated shadows, of the Serpent Maze badlands, the edge of the true desert. She briefly considered riding out to look at the tombs themselves, but the sun was westering. It would be well into the night before they reached the Yellow City, and she wasn't sure that whatever she might learn in several hours spent wandering through the Serpent Maze was worth the danger to Summerchild that her continued absence would cause.