Part 31 (1/2)
Through the whole of the night and the morning, she had felt the draw of their energies on her, calling her magic through the Sigil of Sisterhood, to a.s.sist their own waning strength.
She did not think she would be able to sleep, but to her surprise she did, and dreamed of Foxfire, asleep in a shallow cave in some rocks, with a white-furred old jenny teyn sitting beside her, rocking in silence.
Riding through the Dead Hills in the stifling late afternoon, she saw smoke rising in the west, where the Yellow City lay. Coming out of the hills' shadow into the final fading of evening light she saw the red-gold flames licking up above the city wall. Shaldis cursed and whacked her camel with a quirt-encouragement that got her only a grumbling moan and an infinitesimal quickening of its stride.
Her hand closed around the obsidian amulet. Puahale. Puahale, my sister, if you can raise even as much power as would fill an orchid's heart like dew, send it to me, send it to us. Send it to this amulet.
Above the city walls, above the shrunken azure waters of the Lake of the Sun, the moon's thin crescent hung. As she rode toward the city Shaldis fixed her eyes on that great shape in the sky, conscious of its wasting as she'd been conscious of it for three days in the desert.
Power was more difficult to call from the waning moon, Puahale had said. But Puahale had taught her the words, the meditation to do so, and she called upon them now, as the Sun Mages had once called upon the sun's. She had no idea if she was doing it right, but a sense of comfort and strength filled her heart. She drank from the depleted waterskin, settled into the swaying of the camel, and remembered the pounding, steady pulse of the sea.
From that eternal pulse, too, she called power, as she'd once called power from the sun below the horizon, and felt strength flow into her veins.
Her scrying that afternoon had told her to avoid the Slaughterhouse District, so she swung lakeward and came to the city's southern gate beside the basin of the Fish-market ca.n.a.l. Only a short length of street separated the gate square from the greater square before the Grand Bazaar, and through the open gate she could see the flames, the running shapes of the red-clothed city guards. The shouting carried to her with the reek of smoke, of burning wood and flesh. She left the camels tied among the dusty poplars on the bank of the ca.n.a.l-Tulik would skin her if they got stolen but she was past caring-and ran through the gate, stumbling with weariness and cramp.
The Grand Bazaar was in flames. Its doors, usually locked at sunset, stood open; men and women-children, too-in the grubby rags of the Slaughterhouse District's disreputable denizens ran in and out, carrying away bolts of silk and handfuls of gold and silver chains. At least a dozen lay sprawled on the flagstones of the square, the arrows of the city guards in their backs and not a fragment of loot still in their lifeless hands. Their friends and neighbors had relieved them of it the minute the coast was clear, probably before they'd stopped twitching. Others ran in and out, too, screaming, wild-eyed-Shaldis's heart twisted in her chest as she recognized her own friends and neighbors, people she'd known in her childhood on Sleeping Worms Street or in the alleyways around it. Once she thought she saw Cook from her grandfather's house, but her face was so distorted-as if the bones were beginning to fall in-and so covered with soot, filth, and blood that it was hard to tell.
”Oh, no, you don't, boy!” A guard caught her arm as she tried to run into the smoke-clogged canyon of Sleeping Worms Street. ”You get the h.e.l.l- Miss?” It was Cosk, Jethan's friend from the palace barrack.
Shaldis realized she was still in boy's garb, filthy and sand covered from the desert. He'd probably taken her for a looter.
”I have to get in there. My family's in there.”
”n.o.body can get in there. They get lost, two feet in, even the ones who're from this district. They're looking for you, miss. Bax!” he yelled over his shoulder. ”Commander!”
A guard came toward them, red clothing torn and face and hair black with filth. Only when he got close did Shaldis recognize the pale-blue eyes, the glints of white beneath the soot and grime of his hair, as belonging to the commander of the guards.
Knowing Bax, she expected his first words to be Where the h.e.l.l have you been? But the commander only gripped her shoulder hard enough to break it. ”Thank the G.o.ds. It's coming from your grandfather's house-n.o.body can get near there. This morning it seemed the other ladies had it in check-they had a perimeter up, spells and broken gla.s.s.”
”I know.” She looked around her for Pomegranate and the others. Since Bax's command post seemed to still be in the Bazaar Square, they had to be close by.
”d.a.m.ndest thing I ever saw.” Bax wiped some of the grime from his face, the soot reduced to mud by blood and sweat. ”I thought the rioting would spread to the rest of the city, but it's only the thieves from the Slaughterhouse District and those who're mad from this-this thing. Half the city's already flocking to the Sealed Temples. Just standing there, waiting. As if they expect the G.o.ds to come down and deal with this situation when they've finished with the king.”
”Has Jethan come in?” demanded Shaldis, hoping against hope though she knew they couldn't reasonably reach the city before her. ”Jethan and Foxfire?” The last time she'd scried for them had been hours ago and in her weariness it was taking her longer and longer to get an image. Even that little energy, she was increasingly aware, would be taken away from what she knew was a battle ahead.
”Foxfire?” The blue eyes slitted. ”Mohrvine's girl? No.”
They might have been pursued. They might have been forced to abandon the camels, to hide.
”Get as many men as you can spare out looking for them where the northern road comes in from the Dead Hills. They may be pursued-they'll be hiding.”
”As many men as I can spare?” Bax flung out his arm in wild rage. ”That'd be the one who's still back at the barracks with an infected toenail, and I've been thinking of sending for him. At sunset tonight the madmen started coming past the ladies' barricade, and that mist-that green light-started flowing in streets where it hadn't been before. What'll happen in this city before daylight-”
”Please!” Shaldis caught his sleeve as he started to turn away. ”Commander, please!” And lowering her voice, she whispered, ”She can save the king.”
He turned back. His voice was a murmur under the shouting as creatures burst out of the bazaar, blackened things that had once been human, crawling, shambling, even as they died scratching at the guards. ”Mohrvine's daughter?”
Shaldis nodded.
”The witch?”
”The lady of power,” said Shaldis. ”Yes.”
”Cosk!” Bax's voice rose to a bellow. ”Get twenty men and get out to the north road!”
”Twenty?”
”Twenty, same as your fingers and toes. If I wanted to argue I'd have stayed with my wife. Camels and horses. You're looking for Jethan and a girl and you'd better be ready for trouble. Now go!”
Hands seized Shaldis from behind as Bax ran to join his men; it was Pomegranate. ”You were right about the gla.s.s, child! But it got stronger, as it's been taking the living. It slipped out again. . . .”
”We found obsidian in the Citadel storerooms,” panted Kylin, filthy and bloodied like everyone else, standing between Pomegranate, Hiero the Citadel cook, and old Yanrid the crystalmaster, the only one of the master mages young and spry enough to go running through the night carrying a couple of sackfuls of black volcanic gla.s.s. ”It's expensive! It comes all the way from Tewash Oasis. Most of it's virgin-there aren't many spells that use it.”
”I hope you separated out the stuff that had been used?” Though she was virtually certain that the residues of old spells on gla.s.s had failed along with everything else, the Dreamshadow might still have some unknown ability to use it. Better not to take chances. And when they nodded-and Pebble and Moth came running up, tattered and exhausted-she went on, ”Gla.s.s will hold it-gla.s.s will absorb it, but not as strongly as obsidian. It can't escape from obsidian.” She took the hands of Pomegranate and Moth, and Pebble closed the circle of four. The men who had been Sun Mages stood back, looking on, and for one instant in Yanrid's eyes Shaldis saw the bitter grief of regret.
”These are the spells that will drive the Dreamshadow into obsidian,” she said softly. Closing her eyes, she whispered the words and formed up the rites of focus with her thoughts, recalling what Puahale had told her. ”Source your power from the moon, from the moon's last night. And from this.” She took the obsidian amulet from her neck and hung it around Pomegranate's.
The old woman's eyes met hers, startled and shocked. ”Who is she?” she asked, and Shaldis knew Pomegranate felt the power that the priestess of the moon and the sea was sending to the enchanted fragment of black gla.s.s.
”Puahale is her name. She's one of us, one of our circle. Start at the perimeter, in a triangle around the infected area, and trap it as you work inward, into those pieces Kylin has. After this is all done we can use the old spells to bring the remains of the Dreamshadow out of the walls, bury all this in the desert surrounded by the old spells, worked with new magic, to seal it up forever.”
”Triangle?” said Pomegranate. ”And where are you going?”
Shaldis said, ”Home.”
FORTY-NINE.
Cosk had been right when he'd said that even guards raised in Sleeping Worms Street were getting lost a yard from its mouth. Two of those who'd tried to get to the house of Shaldeth before her had carried b.a.l.l.s of twine that they played out behind them, to guide them back should they become confused in the tangled illusions of dream alleys and dream courts that manifested themselves along the way. Bax gave her twine as well, taken from a looted shop. Shaldis found both previous b.a.l.l.s of twine around the first turning of the street, one still clutched in the hands of the guard, hacked to death in a pool of blood.
She took the dead guard's knife and sword, to add to the short sword and the spear Bax had given her. The silence in Sleeping Worms Street was more frightening than the din in the square behind her. Smoke hung thick between the high stuccoed walls and poured from the latticed windows on the upper floors of the houses on either side. Dust curtained the air, hanging like salt in water, as if the Dreamshadow were able to draw it up from the dunes the storm had left against every wall. It mixed with the smoke and completely negated her ability to see in darkness.
Men and women-children, too-lay sprawled in those waist-high drifts of dust and sand, killed by those whose minds the Dreamshadow had filled with its ancient illusions of terror, violence, pain. She saw one dead man lying facedown, wearing a tunic she recognized as her uncle Tjagan's. Once a man in the red tunic of the city guard threw himself screaming out of an open house door at Shaldis, hacking at her with his sword. Shaldis held him off on the end of her spear, but he drove himself halfway up its shaft trying to get to her before he finally died. Sickened, trembling, she took several minutes to work the body off the spear shaft, and as she did she could see the flesh and bones blackening and shrinking as the mindless, elemental spirit that had infected it devoured the meat within the skin.
Yet others she'd seen had seemed completely whole, as Puahale had said. Looking down at the mummifying corpse, she wondered what made the difference.
When she looked up she found herself in completely unfamiliar streets, narrow alleyways branching in all directions, choked now not with dust but with vines and lush weeds whose smell came to her thick and green.
Whose dream had that been? she wondered. Whose memory, sucked out of a decaying brain within some ancient tomb? She shut her eyes and closed her hand around the obsidian knife Puahale had given her, pressing the sharp edge into her flesh, and summoned in her heart the beating of the sea.
She opened her eyes to darkness again, to dust and smoke and the familiar twists of Sleeping Worms Street. Green light glimmered in the windows of every house along the way. She paused to bury fragments of gla.s.s in the heaped sand along the walls, with the whispered incantation Puahale had taught her. At least, she hoped, she could keep the street behind her clear and safe for a retreat and with luck make sure the Dreamshadow wouldn't seep after her and take her from behind.
The door of her own house stood open, and stairs ascended to blackness. She could hear her father's voice singing in the dark.
Shaldis took a deep breath, touched the obsidian knife again, and took a firmer grip on the blood-sticky haft of the spear. The stair curved right as if ascending a tower; she could see nothing of its true course, the one she knew existed in real life. She closed her eyes, summoned up all the power she could call into her heart, to slowly return her perception to reality. The body of a woman in a servant's dress lay at the top, so withered and deformed that she couldn't make out who it was-Six Flower, maybe. Again she placed fragments of gla.s.s to guard the path behind her, hating to take the time-and even the small outlay of energy they cost-but knowing she must.
She called out, ”Mama? Papa? Aunt Apricot?”