Part 30 (1/2)
FORTY-SEVEN.
The dark brought madness to the alleyways around Sleeping Worms Street.
Crafty ones might see in the dark, but blowing dust reduced visibility to a foot or less, and the wind masked the sounds of screams and cries. Pomegranate, bent over her broken fragment of looking gla.s.s in the shelter of the alley behind Chirak Shaldeth's house, didn't hear the men coming until they were upon her, shrieking shapes emerging from the storm's wildness armed with clubs, swords, chains. She rolled, dodged, scrambled behind the mountain of broken baskets at the back of the alley; and they hacked and waded through the matted straw after her, heedless of the cloaking spells she flung around herself. Either the influence of the Dreamshadow reached out this far, she guessed, or they saw something or someone else in her place.
She slashed and struck with her staff, as she'd learned to on those rare occasions when a beggar more desperate than she had tried to rob or rape her. She jabbed with the pole's end and saw it do damage she knew a sane man could never have sustained, but these men were not sane.
Their eyes stared with madness, and the words they screamed were in no language she knew. When Pebble came rus.h.i.+ng down the alley with a broken-off length of cartpole and rammed it like a dagger into one man's back, the man turned and fell, not upon Pebble, but upon his two companions. Pebble grabbed Pomegranate's wrist and dragged the old woman past the ensuing brawl toward the empty windy street.
Dreams, Shaldis had said.
The dreams that lingered in corpses' brains after their death.
Dreams of dying, of being killed.
Two of the men-they'd looked like respectable merchants and householders of the neighborhood-sank down, both eviscerated and still clawing at each other with their nails as Pomegranate looked back. The third man had collapsed into the pile of baskets, his body curling in on itself and darkening as if burning up in some invisible oven. When he opened his mouth, a little green mist flowed out.
It had started.
Above the storm's howling Pomegranate dimly heard shouting coming from somewhere close by and elsewhere, dimly, a s.n.a.t.c.h of singing, instantly lost in the wind. Even before the tug of Shaldis's mind on hers, she and the others had begun walking the perimeter of the area that felt wrong-evil and frightful for no reason they could ascertain-marking the walls with chalk. Now they pounded on the door nearest them, and a boy answered, ashen faced with confused terror. He whispered, ”My mama . . .” and Pomegranate heard from the steep black stairway behind him a sustained and eerie wail.
”We're here to help your mama,” said Pomegranate. ”You run now to the Citadel of the Sun”-he looked to be eleven or twelve, old enough to find it with ease even in the tail end of the storm-”and take them a message.” She held out her hand; Pebble slapped a note tablet into it and a hairpin for a stylus.
Pomegranate scrawled, Dreamshadow eats dreams, burial wards, obsidian, gla.s.s, Sleeping Worms Street, spreading, need help NOW, and shoved the tablet into the boy's hand. ”Go. Now. Quickly.” The boy pelted off into the darkness. Green light glowed at the top of the stairs, threads of mist moving downward. Pomegranate listened for other sounds within the house and heard nothing. The wailing had stopped. Dead already? Sleeping unaware? In need of rescue or past it?
Was anyone really there at all?
She stepped back into the street, slammed the door.
”If it takes one of us, cutting will let it out,” she said.
”Is that with a spell or just cutting?” asked Moth at once, since none of the three knew how much time they might have to share this information. ” 'Cause those guys back there was cutting each other plenty and didn't look like they was gettin' no saner.”
”I don't know.”
”Then it's probably better none of us gets took.”
They backed from the door, their hair and veils tangling in the screaming wind. ”Was that Shaldis?” whispered Pebble after a few moments, when nothing further happened.
Pomegranate recapitulated in as few sentences as possible her conversation: ”She said Pontifer was with her, which I'm glad of. I worry about him. If anything should happen to me, who would be his friend then? I'm glad he's making new friends.”
Pebble and Moth exchanged a look.
”She said the Dream Eater can be spelled into obsidian or gla.s.s,” added Pomegranate, ”but she didn't say how. Could we put a barrier of gla.s.s around the bad area, the way my granny used to put broken gla.s.s under the doorsill to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away?”
”You think maybe this green stuff is the Bad-Luck Shadow?” Moth speculated doubtfully.
”If it is, we're in trouble,” said Pebble, ” 'cause I've heard about sixteen thousand spells to keep the Bad-Luck Shadow away and not one of them was anything like any of the others. And as far as I could see, none of them worked.”
Moth patted Pebble's arm. ”We figured out already we're in trouble.”
A trickle of green mist began to creep through the lattice of the shut door. Pomegranate edged closer, scribbled with her fingertip on the wall nearby the strongest ward she knew, mingling with it the name of Dream Eater and the signs of earth. It flowed past this without the smallest check, the women backing away before it. ”Where can we get gla.s.s?” whispered Pebble. ”Even if that boy runs it'll be an hour or more before anyone comes.”
”Grand Bazaar,” said Moth. ”It's two streets away, way closer than the Gla.s.smakers' Quarter. I think I can get through the locks. Pebble, you stay here-”
”No, both of you go,” said Pomegranate. ”Two of you can carry more, and one of us not being able to do anything here is just as good as two of us not being able to do anything.”
The two young women disappeared into the whirling gloom; Pomegranate retreated down another alleyway, her heart pounding. Someone or something rushed down the street at the alley's far end. When the wind lulled, she heard the incoherent clamor of voices and a woman's scream.
And the night, she knew, was only beginning.
Raeshaldis. Raeshaldis, please . . .
Pomegranate? Shaldis slipped her crystal into her palm, angled its central facet to the thready light of the stars.
It was close to midnight. Dusty winds still breathed across the sand in a steady river, but visibility was up to several miles now and overhead the sky was clear. She didn't dare tell Jethan to stop the camels, wondered if she even possessed the strength to scry without sliding into sleep. Despite the profundity of her sleep, when she'd woken at Jethan's side, lying in the crook of his arm, she'd felt crushed by exhaustion, as if all her hours on the Island of Rainbows had been hours of waking.
She had moved away from him, as silently as she could, so that when he woke they would be at opposite sides of the crowded little tent. She told herself that it was out of kindliness, since she knew Jethan would be disturbed enough that he'd gone to sleep under the same undivided roof as a woman not of his family. He would be so horrified that he'd fallen asleep with her in his arms, he wouldn't know what to do or say.
But the truth was that she feared he would turn away from her, if he remembered that in his exhaustion he had held her so.
And that, she realized, she could not bear.
Her mind aching, she reached into the half trance of scrying, and the scratched, dirty face that appeared in the crystal was that of Foxfire.
”Oh, thank the G.o.ds,” the girl gasped, and her words poured out like a spring mountain torrent after the rains. ”I was afraid. . . . I tried to reach you last night. I didn't think I could ask for help any sooner because Grandmother has her spies in the king's palace. Shaldis, I've left, I've run away. I'm on my way into the city, but I need someone to come and meet me. They're after me, I know they're after me even though I can't see them. Grandmother's with them-she can track like a hunter and I can't use spells to hide from her.”
”Where are you?”
”The Dead Hills. Father has a house in the Valley of the Hawk. That's where we've been, Grandmother and I. Shaldis, I can do it! I can work the spells to send the crocodiles away and the serpents, and to undo poison, any kind of poison, at a distance. We did it with teyn and yesterday morning we did it with some of the guards.” Foxfire's voice caught on a sob, even as Shaldis's heart jolted, as if she'd swilled raw wine.
The king would be safe.
”Shaldis, I can't let her catch me! I don't know what she'd do if she caught me. The king's got to protect me.”
”He'll protect you,” promised Shaldis, almost light-headed with shock, relief, wild fear that even yet something could go wrong. ”Are you alone?”
”I have a teyn with me, to carry water and food. She's really smart; she helped cover our tracks when she saw me trying to do it.”
In other words, she was alone. Shaldis wondered if she'd left that poor maid of hers back at her father's house and what awful thing Red Silk would do to the girl in retaliation, but it meant that Foxfire would be that much more difficult for her grandmother to find.
They needed to get word to the king.