Part 27 (1/2)

FORTY-TWO.

Through the stillness of concentration, the deep weariness of power raised and power expended, Pomegranate heard the voices in the lower chamber of the Summer Pavilion and s.h.i.+vered.

Lotus was saying, ”I'm sorry, they're working great magic. It's a matter of life and death.”

And a voice that Pomegranate recognized as belonging to Shaldis's aunt Yellow Hen-who'd always given her food and sometimes clothing in her begging days-retorted, ”You think I'd have walked all the way here from the Bazaar District and put up with that snippy porter at the gate if this wasn't life and death? Tell her I need to see her, and I need to see her at once.”

Since she'd come back to the Yellow City four days ago, Pomegranate had been plagued by the nagging sense there was something wrong somewhere. She had spoken of it only once, to Shaldis, but the uneasiness, the feeling of listening, had never left her.

Pontifer sensed it, too. All day yesterday the white pig had trotted back and forth from where Pomegranate sat at Summerchild's side out into the terrace garden, then back again, restless, the way he'd done back when he'd been a real pig when a storm was brewing. When, during their watches at Summerchild's side, Shaldis had spoken to her in pa.s.sing of her grandfather's obsession with an object that came out of a tomb, Pomegranate had wondered if that was the reason for the p.r.i.c.kling sensation in her palms and scalp, for her sense of something always lurking around the next corner, watching.

Since last night she had felt as she frequently felt when her dreams were bad, when she'd wake in the middle of the night and gather up blankets and clothing and quietly flit through the silent alleys to another of her hidey-holes in the Slaughterhouse District. Moving on, so that it wouldn't get her.

Whatever It was, in her dreams.

This was the first time she'd felt like this in waking life and she couldn't explain it, but she knew it wasn't good.

”I'll see if she's even able to hear me,” whispered Lotus's voice downstairs. ”But they're working to save my lady's life now, and she's been unconscious so long.”

Silently, Pomegranate withdrew her mind from the Circle of Sisterhood that held together the magic of the others. Pebble looked haggard with weariness, her plump cheeks marked with lines of concentration grimly at odds with her usual placidity. The paint on Moth's face had a doll-like appearance against the pallor underneath. Neither opened her eyes. Pomegranate padded from the chamber on bare feet and met Lotus as the maid was coming up the stair.

”My lady . . .” the girl began, and Pomegranate lifted her hand in acknowledgment and nodded.

”How is the lady?” asked Yellow Hen when Pomegranate emerged from around the stairway screen. ”My niece has been in a fair stew over her, with my father and that brother of hers both tearing at her like a couple of dogs.”

”What's happening?” Pomegranate met the other woman's eyes: like herself, no longer young, and like herself unwanted in the world that had too many husbandless women already. For as long as she could remember, Pomegranate had seen Yellow Hen come and go from the house on Sleeping Worms Street. Knowing, as she did, everyone in the city, she'd heard all about Chirak Shaldeth's attempts to sell his crooked-backed, stubborn daughter to whomever would take her long before she heard that Shaldeth's granddaughter had power in her veins and hands.

More than the old skinflint deserved, for a fact.

”One of the maids disappeared last night,” said Yellow Hen briefly. ”And my brother Tjagan the night before that. I've been up and down the house searching. I found Six Flower's hairpins on the attic stairs but no sign of the girl herself. My sister-in-law won't come out of her chamber and neither will my father, but they're both singing-singing music such as I've never heard, the one of them answering the other from court to court. Some of the camel drivers are gone, too, and their mates swear they went into the kitchen court, not out into the street.”

”And you found nothing in the attic where you say you saw this one girl's hairpins?”

”I found nothing.” Yellow Hen hesitated, regarding Pomegranate as if wondering how much of what she'd seen or thought she'd seen she could speak of without sounding demented.

And evidently remembering the woman she was talking to was widely regarded as mad herself. ”The attic was . . . was changed. Or there was something there that made it appear different. I can't explain, but it seemed when I went in there, there were more rooms than there had been, more doors where doors hadn't been before. And something moved up there, something green that glowed.”

”Yes,” whispered Pomegranate, ”yes. I've smelled it, felt it . . . heard it singing far-off in my sleep. What about Shaldis's father? Your brother?”

”He won't come from his study. He isn't singing yet, but I didn't like his voice, when he told me to go away. His wife tells me he won't let anyone in.”

”And his son? That snotty-nosed brat who Shaldis tells me is now running the house?”

Yellow Hen's face twisted. ”He keeps swearing there's not a thing wrong. I left him cursing Shaldis for not doing something to keep the teyn from running off, and cursing Strath Gamert or Noyad or whoever he thinks is doing all this just to ruin the family.”

”Sounds like him.” Pomegranate remembered Tulik as young as the age of eight, ordering the servants to drive her away from the kitchen court. She glanced through the doorway into the gardens, where the light was sickening to yellowish brown and gardeners were scurrying to put cages of wicker and gauze over the rosebushes. Up until a few years ago, when dust storms howled in from the desert, the Sun Mages in their Citadel could be counted on to send them elsewhere. She could hear the old gardener cursing, as if his inconvenience were the worst calamity to be faced as a result of the change in the structure of the universe.

It was an att.i.tude Pomegranate had met with all up and down the sh.o.r.es of the seven lakes.

There probably were men, she reflected, who thought that poor Oryn's death and replacement would solve that problem, too.

”Wait here for me,” she said, and sprang up the stairs again with the lightness of a far younger woman.

Pebble and Moth had emerged from their healing trance and were consuming tea and honeyed fig b.a.l.l.s with the ravenousness of athletes after a race. Lotus and another maid were going around the room, fastening up the gauze-backed lattices that would allegedly keep most of the dust out of the beautiful blue-and-gold chamber, though Pomegranate knew that, like every other dwelling in the city, the palace was in for a ma.s.sive sweeping out by tomorrow.

The two young women listened to Pomegranate's tale with expressions of deep uneasiness; she saw their glances meet. ”I have to go,” she finished, prodding more hairpins into the random coils of her hair. ”I know Yellow Hen and I know she wouldn't come here for help unless there's something really scary going on in that house-and I think there is. But this isn't a rangeland village. It's a city-and we have no idea how far or how fast it will spread.”

She started to wrap one of her many ragged scarves around her hair and face, to protect against the rising winds and dust. Even broken by the Dead Hills, the storm's violence was a force to be reckoned with; lightning was beginning to flash in the darkening sky. Wordlessly, Lotus went to one of the wall cupboards and brought out airy lengths of pink and white gauze. ”I know it would be all right with her,” the maid whispered, glancing at the still face of the woman on the bed.

Pomegranate smiled. ”Thank you, dear.” She turned for the door.

Pebble asked, ”Isn't Pontifer going with you?”

Pomegranate stopped, looked gravely back at the younger woman's shy smile. She knew perfectly well that none of her colleagues could see her pet and that most of them-Pebble included-didn't believe him to be any more than a madwoman's delusion. It touched her that the girl would ask after him anyway. ”Pontifer's gone,” she said. ”He left an hour, maybe two hours ago, I don't know where. If he comes back, tell him I need him. Maybe we all need him.”

Raeshaldis opened her eyes, knowing that she dreamed. She lay in Jethan's arms, in sleep far deeper than she ever recalled in her life, her body depleted, her mind drained. Jethan, holding her, looked just as bad, she thought. Under the film of dust his face was like a dead man's, save for the sweat that tracked through the gray-brown crust. The hour was that of the Sun of Justice, the Hammer Sun, the crus.h.i.+ng nadir of afternoon, the heat brutal, the darkness almost complete. The howl of the winds all around them drowned every other sound, as if they were lost, adrift in some alien world of ashen midnight, unable to return to their own.

She was glad that Jethan was beside her. That she wasn't alone.

In his dream, she wondered, was he scandalized that the tiny confines of their tent had broken all possibility of a woman's s.p.a.ce being separated from a man's?

Probably.

And she smiled.

Dust hung thick in the air. As she had before she'd fainted, she could see her protective spells like fluttering rags of light, clinging to the tent poles. The goat-hair cloth above them sagged with the weight of dust. She rose to her knees, leaving her body behind her, still in the crook of Jethan's arm-shocked a little at how gaunt she was, sunburned and haggard-and crawled to the entry flap. Untying it, she looked out, saw how the winds rose up on either side of the little tent in walls of blowing dust. These met overhead as if the tent were enclosed in a fragment of gla.s.s. Even in her dream, she was simply too weary to reach out her mind to feel for the storm's edge, to judge how long it would last.

The howling of the storm's voice filled the earth.

She had lost the marked teyn and the woman who controlled it.

After all this long pursuit, to the very edge of the world it seemed, she had after all failed. And in failing, had almost certainly condemned Summerchild and the king to death.

Nothing remained except to go back, to take up the threads of things as she found them, and help the situation as best she could.

Through the whirling brownness beyond the limits of her wind ward, she saw something moving, something white and low. It was quite close to her before she realized it was a pig, and for an instant her cracked lips smiled. ”Hey, Pontifer,” she said. Then fear flashed through her, fear that Pomegranate was somewhere in the storm, lost. Pomegranate wouldn't have come looking for her, would she? Not all the way out here.

Tentatively she reached out her mind for the animal's-for though she'd never made mental touch with Pontifer she guessed he was perfectly capable of it-but received nothing. The pig only turned and trotted off into the storm again. He stopped, looked back at her over his shoulder. Shaldis pulled her veils around her face, then turned her head to look back into the tent.

She saw herself sleeping, curled into a ball at Jethan's side. Did he dream, she wondered, of the granny who wouldn't let him pick on his brother? Of that low brown hut and parched fields, where he should have stayed to look after his family?

Did he dream of his friends, of Riis and his men who now lay beneath the rangeland's hard yellow earth?