SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

“Why children?” King Oryn asked. The calm faces of the dead children were still visible to him, as if yesterday’s evening sun had etched them onto the backs of his eyelids. “Why carry them away? Even the wildings never carry captives away.”

“No one’s ever heard of a woman working magic, either,” pointed out the wizard Soth. “No one’s ever heard of one wizard, let alone dozens, suddenly being unable to perform even the most elementary of spells.”

The Summer Concubine, veiled with the thin silks that wealthy women wore indoors, sat at Oryn’s feet. “Could it have something to do with the stories about the djinni taking children?” she asked.

“Even the djinni don’t butcher them,” protested Soth.

The Summer Concubine replied, “How do you know?”

PRAISE FOR BARBARA HAMBLY

“Hambly is a born storyteller, a smoothly natural spinner of tales . . . a master fabulist.”

—Realms of Fantasy

“First-rate high fantasy, elegant, intelligent, and entertaining.”

—Publishers Weekly on Dragonshadow

“Beautifully concise, adroitly plotted, inventive, and insightful.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on Dragonshadow

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Barbara Hambly

All rights reserved.

Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc

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First eBook Edition: August 2002

ISBN: 978-0-446-55528-9

E2-20200525-PDJ-PC-AMZ

For Marc and Elaine

ONE

If the other novice wizards on the row hadn’t broken into Raeshaldis’s rooms the previous day, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon.

It was the seventh night of the Summoning of Rain, and magic filled her like a cup brimming with holy light. Her soul rang with it, nearly effacing the memory of her eighteen months in the College of the Mages of the Sun: the petty tricks, the dirty scrawls, the male novices’ unrelenting hate. If that was the price she had to pay for the joy of feeling magic flow in her, she thought as she made her way across the moon-drenched North Terrace, she was more than willing to pay it. Nothing was too much for this ecstasy, this knowledge that the dreams of all her life had been true.

But yesterday’s memory made her wary. The filthy bed and violated walls, the derisive look the Master of Novices had given her when she’d complained to him . . . Shouldn’t a student of your great abilities be able to guard herself against the jests of boys?

And behind his resentful anger, the unspoken wish that she’d leave the college, as if her departure could make all things as they had once been.

So she approached the stair that led down into the darkness of the novices’ row with caution, half expecting further mischief.

Between walls of stucco and dressed stone at the bottom of the stair, darkness clotted thick, like blindness cut into slabs. Shaldis’s ability to see in darkness was new—it had opened like a flower only a few years ago, almost unremarked in the greater birth of her other powers. After a day in the open ring that crowned the Citadel, pouring her concentration and her power into the Summoning of the vital rains, Shaldis wasn’t surprised that her eyes couldn’t pierce those shadows.

Still she slowed her steps, braced herself, listened into that silent blackness for the sound of breathing. Moonlight flooded the indigo infinities of sky. From the stony heights to the east and south of the high Citadel bluff, the endless wasteland to the north, the wind carried only the scents of sand and dust. After seven days of Summoning the sky was still clear, but Shaldis understood that the rains took time. They would come. How can they not? she thought, reliving in her flesh the music of the Summoning Song. Magic is here. Magic is alive.

How can people say it is gone?

She smelled her attacker the moment before he struck. As she came down the dark unrailed stair from the terrace into the black seam between the northern wall and the novices’ quarters, she felt—she didn’t know why—as if someone called to her in a language she didn’t understand. Then, in the second before hands grabbed her out of the dark, she thought, The boys are here after all. . . .

Her stomach curdled with dread.

But it was no boy who seized her. Hands crushed her arm, twisted the lacquered knot of her hair. Only the merciless hazing she’d endured for a year and a half had her curling her back, tucking her chin, so that she took the impact with the wall on her shoulders and not her skull. In that same instant spells of defeat and confusion smashed at her mind like a blow. Magic that took her breath away: malice, poison, sick despair.

She called a thunderclap of fire in the air between them and of course none came. Tried to remember how to make white light explode to blind this man and couldn’t. Her only awareness was breathless terror: She lashed with her feet, ripped with her nails, kicked into swirling masses of heavy wool and screamed.

Will anyone come?

Or are they all in on it?

She got a foot behind her and thrust off the wall, drove her head hard into her attacker’s middle. When an iron grip tried to haul her back, she skinned out of her over-robe, plunged up the stairs again in the pitchy dark. Magic reached after her, smoke in her eyes, panic that screamed at her to circle back into that waiting dark. Its strength was terrifying—Not a novice. She stumbled, scraped her palms, rose and fled.

And whoever it was, she knew instinctively she must not let herself be caught.

It wasn’t late—a few hours before midnight—and freezing cold. Adepts and masters, numb with exhaustion after the Summoning’s daylong fast, had all fallen into their beds; she alone out of all who’d sung today had had enough energy to sneak out to the pantry in quest of honey and bread. Now she fled across the terrace, not daring to look back. Praying someone, anyone, would be abroad, would save her . . .

Who, in this place, would care if they heard her scream?

Three years ago, when at fourteen she was too old to be sneaking out to the marketplace in her brother’s clothes but was still doing so anyway, she’d been recognized as a girl by a bunch of half-drunk camel drivers. They’d chased her through the tangled alleyways around the Grand Bazaar, herding her with the brutal efficiency of wolves. The terror she’d felt then was as nothing to what she felt now, for even then, she suspected, she’d felt the first stir of power in her, and had known she could get away . . . .

This man was a mage. And he was stronger than she.

She fled up the stairs beyond the terrace. Night cold gashed through the pale wool of her robe. Her pursuer’s steps weren’t the thudding tread of the camel drivers but the light wind-touch of one trained to cross sand without leaving a track. Shadow wouldn’t hide her. Magic wouldn’t hide her. The Summoning had drained her, taken everything she had. She couldn’t make a cloak spell work. The air like broken glass in her lungs, she threw herself up the narrow stairway to the rock tip of the Citadel, the summit, the Ring, her mind reaching to the magic that still clung around the place.

Break his vision, even for an instant, she thought, dodging behind the waist-high wall that set it off from the drop on all sides. Mage-born eyes could see right through the cloaks—the spells of unseeing—and her panic-sickened thoughts couldn’t summon the words. She wadded her long legs and skinny body into a ball in the few hand spans of rock between the wall and space: a drop of sixty feet to the pavement of the library court. She hid her face, the lingering magics left from five hundred Spring Summonings flowing away like water from her groping mind. Only the old nonsense spells remained, words she’d made up for herself when she’d hide from her brothers in the kitchen yard of her grandfather’s house.

But that childish spell—if it really was a spell—had sent the camel drivers roaring and cursing down another alley and had convinced her—almost convinced her—that the powers she’d begun to dream about might actually be real.

A child’s chant, silly and simple: Zin, zin, I am the wind. Zin, zin, blow. Ping, ping, I am the starlight. Ping, ping, shine. Words to focus her mind, to make her body melt into the icy drift of the desert wind that sidewindered across the Ring’s bare flagstones. Different words every time. Words to make her shadow melt into the blue moon shadows without appearing to do so. To dislimn her form into the black lines between the blocks of the wall. Whiss, whiss, I am the dust. Whiss, whiss, sneeze.

Don’t let him see me, she prayed desperately to Rohar, the braided-haired god of women. Please don’t let him see me . . . .

The drop, an inch beyond her feet, turned her sick. The Citadel clung like a succession of swallows’ nests to the golden sandstone of the bluff. Below it the Yellow City spread. An intricate jumble of walls and domes, roof tiles and vines, pigeon coops and cisterns and marketplaces no bigger than the Citadel’s dining hall, baths and Blossom Houses and dyers’ yards and stables. Like a moth pressed to the wall, Raeshaldis saw the topaz speckle of the few lamps still burning far below, the knot of torchlight that would be the Circus district against the flank of the bluffs and the hot clump of jewels that marked the Night Market. Plowed fields lapped the city like dark velvet, north and south along the lake’s still darker shores. The lake itself—the Lake of the Sun—burned with the fierce platinum moonlight, stretching out of sight into the west.

I’m going to die.

And yet the lake and the city and the sky are so beautiful . . . .

She smelled, and felt, her pursuer. The smoke in his robes, the revolting halitus of decayed blood filled her nostrils, and beneath those stinks the tingly whiff of ozone. She dared not look up, dared not even think, lest he hear her thought. Then like a shadow the smell winked away, and she found herself thinking, Silly me, I slipped and fell and thought it was someone attacking me. I’d better go back to my room . . . .

Her belly went soft with dread. Not even an adept could call spells of concealment like that. A master wizard.

He hears me, she thought. Hears me breathe. No matter how still I sit, I can’t stop breathing.

Zin, zin, I am the wind . . . .

Please go away. Go away and let me alone.

The other novices were boys. Angry like boys, but like boys, even cruel boys, limited in what they could and would do. That one of the masters who should know better should have this much anger terrified her.

Zin, zin, blow.

She pressed her hands over her mouth and waited. She didn’t even dare to reach out with a counterspell to put aside the illusions of safety that came like vagrant wind into her mind.

Shadow gathered at the head of the stair to her left. She tucked her face into her arms so as not to catch the moonlight. Her long brown hair, torn free from its pins, trailed out over the abyss. She felt him seek her, a thin alien jangling in the air, as if her flesh were scourged with a thousand icy chains. Utterly different from the magic of the Summoning, different from any magic she had felt before. She felt him scan the moon-frosted flagstones of the Ring, from which even the tiniest particles of the gypsum, iron dust, and ocher that had made the great power curves of the Song had been meticulously cleaned away. The core of his anger was a column of freezing shadow, the heart of an unimaginable storm.

She felt him cross the Ring, listen for her breath, for the beating of her heart. He stopped near where the Archmage had stood all day in his ceremonial robes of blue silk and gold. His listening touched her, like cold fingers groping. Then he moved on. Soundless as darkness down the marble stair to the outer courts of the college. Shadow passing over the painted dining hall, the tiled scrying chamber, the library where the wisdom of a thousand years dreamed in its cases of pickled oak.

The reek of his rage settled like filthy smoke into the dust.

They heard me scream. Trembling so badly she feared she would lose her balance, pitch over the edge, Raeshaldis crept along the wall to the stair that would lead back down to the terrace, then to the walkway to her room. When he seized me, every boy in the novices’ three dormitories heard me scream.

And none came.

She had to support herself on the balustrade. Eastward, level with the Ring and the Citadel’s uppermost roofs, desert stretched back from the flat-topped bluffs that bounded the Realm of the Seven Lakes. Below her, around her, the rangeland that lay beyond the tilled arable of the lakeshore showed dark patches, herds of cattle and sheep. Their thirsty lowing carried up to her through the stillness. Rangeland thinned to scrub—bounded by the cliffs or merging gradually up the slope between them, range gave way to desert. Stringers of rock marked the low hills surrounding the valley north of the cliffs, where jackals cried among the tombs.

At the bottom of the steps she found her over-robe, novice white and thick against the freezing desert nights. Though the blindness that had covered her eyes had vanished and she could again see clearly in the darkness, she almost feared to stoop and pick it up, expecting someone to jump out of one of the deep-set doorways along the seam between wall and wall.

Secure in the knowledge that she wasn’t going to tell.

You could run crying to the masters only so many times: The boys hit me. The boys aren’t being nice.

Shouldn’t a student of your great abilities . . . ?

Fingers fumbling, she touched the secret spots on the door of her own tiny cell. It had once housed the prefect of this corridor, and sometimes she could detect, deep in the wood, the spells some long-ago adept had put on it to warn him if the boys under his charge had broken in. Her own spells to ward away intruders were usually stronger, but on this occasion they hadn’t worked. They often didn’t. She didn’t know why, and the masters weren’t able to tell her.

It didn’t require a spell to tell her the room had been entered when she’d sneaked out to slake her craving for sweets. The stink that hit her as she opened the door informed her of that. Tears collected in her eyes as she pulled the blankets from the bed, dumped a dead pigeon to the floor and carried it by one wing to the window. Maggots crept confusedly around in the sheets and pillows. Shaldis stripped the bed and found another blanket in the cupboard. It wasn’t thick enough to stave off the spring night’s bitter cold, but she didn’t care.

She bolted the door and the window shutters, laid every spell of ward she could think of on them, rolled up in the blanket on the bare cotton tick and cried herself to sleep.

Corn-Tassel Woman had long ago become adept at gauging the depth of her husband’s slumber by his snores. Even before she’d felt the first strange stirrings of power in herself—those terrifying awarenesses that she was unlike any of her friends, unlike any woman she’d ever heard of—she’d taught herself to listen, to walk through her father-in-law’s house with mind and ears, identifying the breath of each servant girl in the harem, each child in the nursery, each teyn in the sheds—latterly each mouse in the loft. The house was silent.

Corn-Tassel Woman slipped from the quilts, wrapped her thickest shawl around herself. It had taken her a long time to realize she could see in the dark, for she knew every inch of the house so well she could walk it end to end blindfolded. The night outside was rich with moonlight, but her husband Enak was a deep sleeper. When she cracked the modest bedroom’s outside door she didn’t even need that little mental hush-a-bye that she’d learned recently was enough to deepen his dreams. The air was piercing as she descended the pine-pole ladder to the kitchen below. It would have been warmer to go downstairs through the house, but she thought Number Four Flower—the youngest maid in the harem—carried tales to her father-in-law. Her life was difficult enough without that.

All the scents of the Glassblowers Quarter rose up to meet her, scents that blended in daylight into one great smoky reek. Each was sharp and distinct now as the note of a flute: the rabbit hutches along the back of the courtyard, the heaped charcoal beside the furnaces, the privies, the wet, sour aroma of the laundry next door. A ghostly whiff of frankincense blessed the air from the high Citadel where the Sun Mages had spent the day calling the rain.

Sheep Woman had said she’d wait for her in the alley, outside the kitchen-yard gate. Sheep Woman was the wife of one of her father-in-law’s workmen. A small woman of the brown-skinned desert breed, her round face disfigured now by a black eye, a blot between the indigo swaths of her veils. Corn-Tassel Woman guided her silently across the yard and into the warm kitchen, where Cook had banked the fire but left a pot of water steaming on the back of the hearth for tea.

“He’s not a bad man,” Sheep Woman said, putting back her veils and accepting the teacup. “Please don’t think that of him. But when he drinks it’s like he turns into someone else. And he spends more and more of each day in the cafés, and it seems he’s always drinking now. I went to a wizard”—her voice hushed with respect—“but he said it wasn’t something he could do, to put a spell on a man’s heart so he wouldn’t drink so much. Then I heard about you.”

“Isn’t that just like wizards.” Corn-Tassel Woman shook her head, exasperated, and grated a little more sugar from the heel of the loaf. She was a tall, stout woman, the blond hair for which Enak had named her at their marriage returning, slowly, to its original brightness under the influence of little cantrips and spells. Of course Enak would never hear of her bleaching it, though he had plenty to say about graying old mares who couldn’t give a man a decent ride anymore. Her movements were brisk, but her big hands were gentle as they patted the other woman’s bowed shoulder. “They can’t do this and they can’t do that, and nowadays they can’t even make a mouse ward that works, or keep the mosquitoes out of the house.” Old ward signs, the ocher faded with years and overlaid with generations of kitchen soot, ringed the windows and stretched across the thresholds of the kitchen’s three doorways: one into the yard, another into the tiny storeroom, and a third into the seryak—the public area of the house. Only the outside one had a wooden door. The others were curtained with weaving of Corn-Tassel Woman’s own bright, lively work.

“Don’t you worry, doll baby,” she added kindly, giving the smaller woman a hug. “I’ve been thinking about Vorm’s drinking, and what I think is this: I’ll put a spell on him”—she held up a little tube of copper into which a rolled-up paper could be tucked in the manner of Earth Wizards’ spells that she’d observed—“so that when he drinks he’ll get sick: headache, throwing up, joints hurting, itching—everything I can think of. Ordinarily I wouldn’t put those kinds of bad spells on anyone, of course, but in this case I think it’s justified. That would be enough to stop anyone from drinking, don’t you think?”

Sheep Woman nodded eagerly, eyes swimming with relief. The majority of the folk of these poorer quarters were of the neat-boned desert breed, like the farmers whose villages thickly dotted the shores of the Seven Lakes. Corn-Tassel Woman, like her husband’s family, was of the taller and fairer stock of the High Houses and the old merchant clans. “The wizards all say—I’ve been to them before—that it’s a man’s own decision whether he wants to drink or not,” Sheep Woman said. “But that isn’t right. There has to be some way to stop him.”

“Well, if this doesn’t,” Corn-Tassel Woman said with a grin, taking her special bag of powders—ocher and silver and lamp-black and ash—from its hiding place beneath the hearth, “he can’t be stopped. And if he knew, he’d thank us.”

Sheep Woman’s smile of gratitude was all the reward Corn-Tassel Woman needed. She felt a bright glee in herself as she spread out a slip of papyrus paper on the hearth. She was always happy to help, as she wished she could have helped her mother in the face of her father’s drunken violence—both had died long before Corn-Tassel Woman had realized she could make crying children sleep with a word and could take the sickness off the kitchen cats.

Briefly she consulted the almanac for her own moon aspects and those of her friend, then whispered spell words as she ground a little ink onto the stone and mixed in water and spit. Sheep Woman huddled beside her in her thick, bright-colored shawl as Corn-Tassel Woman took up her quill, watching in fascination by the glow of the tiny fire.

Corn-Tassel Woman thought for a time, pulling the magic out of the secret part of herself—the magic women weren’t Supposed to have, had never had . . . .

Never until now.

At last, she thought, marking the paper with those few High Script glyphs she’d been taught, at last I can help people. Can make people what they ought to be, for their own good.

Maybe that’s why the gods are taking magic away from the wizards and giving it to us.

Raeshaldis remembered very clearly when first she heard the rumor that magic was dying. She’d been nine then, old enough and big enough to climb over the stable-yard gate and walk about the market in her brother’s clothes. She’d been tall and thin even as a girl, and in the baggy trousers and embroidered shirt, tunic and short coat, with her delicate, rectangular jaw and her hair braided up under a rough hat, she’d looked enough like a boy to be taken for one. That was when she’d taken a boy’s name, calling herself Raeshaldis if anyone asked.

The news that magic was dying had made her want to weep.

Isna Faran, the gruff, elderly Earth Wizard who healed the sick in the Grand Bazaar and laid wards to keep mice from the granaries, had bristled his black whiskers and sworn it wasn’t true. Others agreed. How could it be true? That was like saying dogs would cease to be dogs—what else would they be, if not dogs? Like saying all the musicians in the world would simultaneously forget what tunes were. That birds would lose the ability to fly.

A hundred contrary anecdotes were produced. Only last week Khitan Redbeard, the old Blood Mage over in the Tannery District, had written wards for the new king on the city granary, and everything over there was well. And Urnate Urla, another Earth Wizard who was court mage for Lord Sarn, had cured two of Lord Sarn’s teyn children of scorpion sting just by laying his hands on them. Of course magic lived.

Well, there were charlatans—more every day, it seemed. Their spells wouldn’t work, that went without saying. But that didn’t mean magic itself was dying.

Then Isna Faran hanged himself in his house. And Urnate Urla was called to lay words of healing on the Quail Concubine, Lord Sarn’s favorite, just to take a little summer fever off her. After tossing in delirium for three days the girl died, as had the next person the healer had tried to cure, and the next.

People began to look more closely at their neighbors.

If spells were less efficacious—nobody dared to say more than that at first—how would the landchiefs keep control of the teyn who tilled the grainfields and worked in the silver mines, who picked and milled the cotton? Teyn had no magic—there was even debate about how much of anything the slumped, white-furred humanoids understood—but they did have cunning. In addition to the thousands domesticated around the Seven Lakes, there were wild bands that roved the desert. How would they be kept at bay?

How would the sick be healed if the hands of the wise men lost their power to cure?

How would mice be kept from the great clay storehouses of the city’s grain? What would happen the next time black clouds of locusts billowed down from the desert wastes?

And, most critically, how would rain be brought each spring, to fill the Seven Lakes and quicken the growing crops along their shores?

The new king, fat and lazy and bejeweled, roused himself from among his concubines and called a meeting of his land-chiefs, of the other great clan lords and of the lesser rangeland sheikhs, and of the mages from all the cities around the Seven Lakes that comprised the realm. But nothing much was done.

It simply wasn’t true. And it couldn’t be true.

Walking about near the Southern Gate, where the camel trains came in from far-off Ith and the Towns of the Coast with their loads of fine porcelains, of amber and pig iron, or from the deep-desert nomad sheikhs with longer-lived and hardier wild teyn, Raeshaldis one day heard shouting and cursing and ran to see. She was eleven by that time, and knew all the wizards around the Bazaar District where her grandfather’s house was—Urnate Urla, and Aktis, and old Ghroon the Pyromancer—and those from other districts of the Yellow City as well. She was careful around them, well aware that if she called attention to herself they could probably see through her boy’s disguise. They had always fascinated her, and when she heard the rumors about magic failing she’d felt horrible, as if something were being taken away from her. Of course that was absurd, since women had no magic and never had.

She ran down the little crooked street near the southern wall where the crowd was gathered, and so was in front and saw everything clearly. It was the street of the dyers, and everything stank of dye and soap and the piss that the dyers used to set the color: a tangle of little houses, white or brown or pink-washed stucco piled up on top of each other, all marked with mouse runes in ocher and indigo, with ladders and little windows and sometimes vegetable gardens growing on the roofs. The gutters flowed bright with streams of blue and red and green from the round dye-yard vats.

A woman was sitting on the threshold of a dye yard making fire without touching the wood.

The sight went through Raeshaldis like the blade of a knife. Like the noon blare of sun unshuttered suddenly into a darkened room.

The woman looked to be about thirty, chubby and ordinary. Like most women of the working people, she didn’t veil her face, and the veil that covered her hair didn’t hide its coarse, black straggles. Her sleeves were rolled back, her brown arms and legs bare, her breasts saggy under a couple of layers of rough linen and goat hair. The bunch of friends gathered around her were of much the same type. She’d made a little pile of sticks and cotton fluff before her on the yard’s wide stone threshold, and she pressed her hands together and looked at the wood, and the wood caught fire.

Then she scooped up a handful of dust and smothered the flame and scattered the wood. And rebuilt the pile and looked at it again. First smoke curled forth, then pale bright tongues of light, almost invisible in the day.

A boy named Seb Dolek, Urnate Urla’s apprentice, who was fifteen then and had been the god of his father’s house since his powers first became evident when he was five, jeered, “Yeah, you right—” marketplace slang to express his mocking disbelief. “Show me another, Mama.” Someone else went into the nearby house to find the wizard there who was really starting the fires, but he came out shaking his head and said, “Place is empty.” Other men—fair-skinned merchants from the cotton market, some of the dyers and a silversmith from the next street—looked in every house on the street.

But even then Raeshaldis knew.

And the whole core of her quivered with wonderment, and she thought, It’s true.

Young Seb Dolek kicked the burning twigs into the street, scuffed them out with booted feet. The woman looked up at him with her dark wondering eyes, then looked at the charred twigs lying around in the widened circle of the spectators . . . . And all the twigs burst into flame again.

“You see?” The woman’s smile was gap-toothed with child-bearing, brilliant with relief. “Magic isn’t dead! It isn’t dying!”

Shaldis felt that she would throw up, or weep, or laugh.

It was the first time she had seen a woman work magic.

The first time anyone present had.

There was a word for men who weren’t wizards—kyne, they were called, though she’d learned later at the college that wizards called them Empties among themselves. There wasn’t a word for women who weren’t wizards, because magic was a thing that had never appeared in women before. It was like asking for a word for a woman who wasn’t a man. And there definitely wasn’t a word for a woman who did magic. Looking around her in the crowd, Shaldis—aged eleven, in her brother’s clothes—saw in the faces of the men all the expressions she’d later see when men looked at her. Disbelief, mostly, and annoyance that she’d say it was so.

And anger.

The anger of the other novices in the college, cheated of the birthright they’d come to take for granted.

The anger of the Master of Novices, who hadn’t been able to work a spell in seven years. Shouldn’t a student of your great abilities . . . ?

A man came out of the crowd, parted the front of his pantaloons and pissed on the fire, putting it out. The woman looked up in shock, and Shaldis saw her face change from joy to terror, and knew this was the husband. He grabbed the woman by the arm and slapped her, said, “I told you not to go running around the town playing these tricks! Making me a laughingstock!” And men began to call out jovially, offering to buy her—“Bet she had to learn magic just to get your sword in battle order!”

There was laughter all around them as he shoved her away down the street.

Shaldis didn’t know what ever became of her.

But she had thought of her today, whoever she had been. Had thought of her the day before, and for the four days prior to that, in the chill brittle glory of the Citadel Ring, from sunrise to the final fading of the light.

Thought of her as she’d focused all her energy, all her magic, on calling the rain, in a ceremony that according to college records had not taken more than two hours, sixty years ago. Not more than half a day as recently as thirty.

Shaldis had come back from the market that day six years ago not knowing whether to laugh or to weep, and had told her father that magic wasn’t dying. It was only turning into something that women could work, instead of men. Her father had slapped her for lying and sent her back to the women’s side of the house with instructions for her mother to beat her.

But what you know, you cannot unknow.

TWO

Pomegranate Woman dreamed about the Citadel of the Sun Mages, and a girl with amber eyes.

She’d never been to the Citadel, of course. Up until a few years ago no women were even admitted past its outer gates. But she’d dreamed about it for as far back as she could recall.

Back in the days when she’d been married—when she’d been the mother of girls, and had lived in a regular house, albeit a tiny one, near the great Eastern Gate, and had gone about the streets selling pomegranates from her husband’s orchard—she’d had a game with her daughters at bedtime. They’d bring her an object, an old earring found near the local baths, or some neighbor’s slipper, or a piece of broken pottery, and she’d make up a story about it. About the woman who wore the earring, and how she’d wanted to marry a handsome young neighbor but her father had given her instead to a fat middle-aged merchant who came to love her dearly; about the cobbler who made the slipper, and how he’d worked long and hard to buy a beautiful dog in the market from the caravans that came across the desert, two months’ journey, from the towns of the barren coast. After the girls went to sleep, Pomegranate Woman would sometimes dream about these people, seeing their lives go beyond the borders of her tale. Occasionally, she’d see people in the market who could be them.

On the days of the Rain Song, when the antiphony of the Sun Mages’ chants flickered on the wind, when the slow, atonal crying of the horns whispered in every corner of the city and the air smelled of ozone and frankincense, she would dream of the Citadel Ring. See the novices in their white robes and the adepts in gold-figured blue, the masters burning like flame in panoplies of sapphire and crystal. See every gesture and sign, every sigil written on the peach-colored sandstone flooring, each cloud as they gathered in the infinite sky.

So she felt she knew the Ring, and wasn’t surprised to find herself walking there again.

It was empty at this hour. The full moon balanced a hand-breadth above the quicksilver waters of the Lake of the Sun, the stars just beginning to lose their intensity above the cliffs in the east. She was a little surprised in fact that the mages weren’t there already, laying out anew the sigils and runes, the glyphs and lines and triangles on the stone to focus the power of the air and the light. Though in all her other dreams the Ring was an open circle of space, tonight she saw a shoulder-high stone block there, like the altar of some unknown god.

“That isn’t right,” said Pomegranate Woman to Pontifer Pig, who trotted at her side as he had trotted for years. He cocked his big, white, silky ears at her, regarded her with bright black eyes. “That shouldn’t be there.”

She walked over to investigate, even though she knew this was only a dream.

A girl lay on the stone block, her thin silk shift torn half off her and her flesh gleaming like the petals of a lily. Soft straight hair, dark gold like sage honey, rippled down off the edge of the block, hanging nearly to the ground.

Bright scarves or rags bound her hands above her head and roped her ankles to the corners of the block. She must have heard the rustle of Pomegranate Woman’s shabby garments, the click of Pontifer’s little cloven hooves on the stone, for she turned her head and her eyes were honey colored like her hair, and wide with terror and pain.

“Don’t be afraid, dearest,” said Pomegranate Woman, though she herself was profoundly uneasy. “This is only a dream.”

But she looked around her at the cold stillness of the dawn and thought, This isn’t right. It isn’t the right dream. The Ring looked all right, but now there was no Citadel around it. The cliffs of wind-carved golden sandstone had vanished, replaced by strange rock-strewn hills half seen in darkness. Pomegranate Woman often argued with her dreams: It had driven poor Deem to distraction, the Good God bless his faithful heart.

Wondering if, when she woke, Deem would be there alive again, Pomegranate Woman searched through her mismatched assortment of dresses and shirts for the scissors she usually carried, to cut this poor girl free. But she couldn’t find them, and she couldn’t wake up, and someone was coming.

If it was the Archmage she’d be in trouble. They wouldn’t want to see any woman here, much less a raggedy old beggar-crone whose unruly cloak of ash-gray hair hung about her shoulders unveiled. But if it was the Archmage she’d have to go over and tell him that the poor young girl had no business in this dream that was frightening her so, and then they’d cast a spell on her, Pomegranate Woman, that would prevent her from dreaming about this place ever again. And that would be worse than anything.

This was the reason she hurried to one of the three stairways that led down from this high place and crouched behind a baluster at the edge of the down-plunging cliff. She snapped her fingers for Pontifer, who’d stood on his hind legs with his forehooves against the stone block, sniffing worriedly at the girl with his pink snout; the white pig dropped down and ran to join her, crouching at Pomegranate Woman’s side.

It wasn’t the Archmage who came.

Pomegranate Woman tried to see his face and couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t have one. It was like trying to see into the heart of a moving storm. Cold wind flowed out of that blackness, and she saw blue light flicker, flashing as if far off and creeping over the stones.

Pale hands held a thing that glittered as it moved.

What the girl on the table saw Pomegranate Woman didn’t know. But she began to fight, trying to thrust herself away; dark blood bloomed on her bare heels where they scraped and shoved at the granite. Hips and back arched, head thrashing from side to side, and that dark shape within the darkness watched her, silhouetted against the searing stars, lambent with invisible fire and holding the moving thing of gold and crystal close at its breast.

Pomegranate Woman thought, No. No, leave her alone . . . .

And then Wake up. I have to wake up.

Because she knew that what she was going to see was hideous, was something she wouldn’t want to remember, ever, dream or no dream.

The white hands set the glittering thing on the stone between the girl’s knees, reached back within the darkness of itself to emerge with a knife. The girl’s body bucked and twisted as she screamed, but her voice rebounded from those scraggy bare hills, the dead obsidian sky.

And the glittering thing moved, tiny, like a jeweled scorpion, flashing its barbed pincers, its four-jawed glittering tail.

Its jointed iron legs moved like a spider’s, as it climbed up on the girl’s bare thigh. Its claws left beads of blood.

Wake up! Wake up, girl—you don’t want to see this.

Was there a way to wake the poor girl on the table?

But Pomegranate Woman knew—more clearly than many things she knew in waking life—that to cry out, to call attention to herself, would bring that horror upon herself as well.

It’s only a dream, she thought desperately—and understood that this was not true.

Somewhere this is actually happening. Why don’t the Sun Mages hear? Why don’t they come and stop this?

A second white hand took the girl by the hair, twisted her head to one side. The knife pierced the flesh just beneath her shuddering breasts, the blood spilling out blackly as the blade drew down. Pomegranate Woman saw the thing crawling up the girl’s slim white leg, over her bucking hip and belly. Saw it only distantly and in the confusion of starlight, heaving shadow, wrenching terror. It crept to the bleeding wound and crawled in. Blood fountained out, as if the thing had found the heart, and the girl’s scream ripped the night, her last breath shrieking to the stars that heard, but did not care.

Pomegranate Woman jerked awake with a sensation like falling, to find Pontifer Pig shoving at her feet with his flat round snout. Gasping, she sat up, and the pig planted his hooves on the bed and regarded her worriedly with those bright, too-intelligent black eyes. Hand trembling, Pomegranate Woman pulled the blankets tight to her sagging breasts and tried to rid her brain of images that would not disappear.

When she opened her eyes again the room seemed dark. For a moment she wondered if she was forty again, and Deem still alive. Would she have to grind his breakfast corn for him in an hour or so, and then go out herself into the lively early-morning streets to sell pomegranates? When she opened the door would she see the Salt-Pan Quarter as she remembered it, the streets brisk with vendors’ cries and the jingle of donkey bells?

Would she have to face Deem again, knowing he was going to miss his footing while repairing Lord Nahul-Sarn’s rain tank and drown?

Knowing that she’d have to go through all those weeks and months of madness again, of sorrow that no healer could lift from her, of lying quietly in the dark talking to Pontifer?

No. She touched her long gray hair, the badge and reminder of her years.

He saw me hiding behind the wall. He’s looking for me.

Pomegranate Woman scrambled out of bed, pulled from the top of her blankets all the rest of her clothes—dresses of wool and camel hair and quilted cotton and a heavy old robe of silk given to her by a merchant’s wife—put them all on, one on top of another, and thrust her feet into her old boots. Without bothering to latch them she shot open the door bolt, hurried out into the etiolated dimness of the street, Pontifer trotting soundless at her heels. Drifts of sand and tumbleweed heaped the north-facing walls, and the dead, bare, gray tangles of vines hanging from roof garden and terrace scratched and fumbled in the predawn wind. Pomegranate Woman stopped long enough to latch up her boots, then hurried again not toward the city, whose wall rose blank and lightless at the end of the avenue, but outward to the open desert.

She glanced toward where the Citadel was hidden by the towering bluff, black on the ashen sky. The moon’s nearly down—first light will be in an hour. Against the somber bulk of the city wall, specks and sprinkles of gold gemmed the Slaughterhouse District, which lay outside the Eastern Gate and between these ruined villas and the city. Wives lit breakfast fires, ground corn in the flickering light. Sheep bleated plaintively as they were driven to the markets. Pigs squealed in the shambles, a sound she hoped Pontifer didn’t understand. A cock crowed.

At one time the whole Salt-Pan Quarter had been a comfortable and stylish suburb where villas stood among groves of date palm and tamarisk and even willows, fed by their own rain tanks, or by wells along the foot of the cliffs. The Slaughterhouse District had lain farther off, south of the road. But now even the beggars had abandoned these streets. The wind blew cold across the open desert, and it was a nuisance to walk all the way back to the Bronze Leopard Fountain for water—not to mention paying Xolnax and his thugs their fee.

There was a law, of course, against enclosing public fountains, but the kings had never bothered much with the Slaughterhouse. She wondered, as she passed among the square brick pillars of this new construction they were building—this aqueduct—whether the water bosses would find a way to take it over as well.

Beyond the suburbs, when first she’d lived here with Deem, there had been a strip of market gardens salvaged from the desert. When the rains were summoned the whole vast Valley of the Seven Lakes drank the blessing, out onto the ranges and scrubland of the desert’s edge. Wildflowers grew almost to the feet of the cliffs, and those who served the House Sarn and its subsidiary clans—which owned all this land to the northeast of the city around the bluffs—would farm a little, though personally Pomegranate Woman had always thought the wild pomegranates that grew in the canyons to be sweeter. Now, like the suburb, those market gardens were gone. Only little ridges marked where the fences between them had stood.

Still, she found where Deem’s orchard had been. She could still feel under her fingers the prickly echo of the melon leaves that had grown there; still taste the sweetness of the new-picked corn at summer’s end. Still hear the women singing thanks to Darutha, god of rain, as they decked themselves with flowers. Sand filled the ridges of the ground as she walked over them, slid beneath her boots. Sand skated in over the lift of the desert and hissed across the ground.

There wasn’t even a god who ruled the desert; the desert was a place where the gods didn’t go.

Far out on the sand beneath the dimming stars, Pomegranate Woman gazed into the darkness. The darkness was clear, like something viewed through a polished sapphire, and she could see what looked like little fingerlets and flickers of greenish fire flashing among the sagebrush and ocotillo. She’d heard all her life about djinni, the Beautiful Ones, creatures of starlight and wind. The ones who did rule the desert. Mages could speak to them, and sometimes they went for a time to live in their crystal palaces, in their realms built all of magic, invisible to all but mage-born eyes.

But this she had never heard of, these green whispers of light.

She sat down and put her arm around Pontifer’s neck, trying not to think about the knife, and the girl, and the blood bursting out after that foul insect of crystal and gold had wriggled into the curled-back lips of the wound. Tried not to think about the way the girl had screamed.

There was nothing, she thought, in all she had ever heard, in all the stories she had absorbed from walls and stones and people, about this.

Pomegranate Woman hugged her little friend in the bitter cold, taking comfort from his round, solid warmth, and wondered if she were the only one who knew.

She stayed sitting on the desert’s edge with her pig until full dawn came and the clamor of the market carts could be heard entering the city’s gates.