FIFTEEN

The whisper of magic was everywhere.

It was very faint, a kind of all-pervasive ugliness. The Summer Concubine had hoped to sense something of its origin—earth, sun, blood, fire, wind—and thus have a better chance to guess who had set the curse. But all she could feel, as she clambered over the ruin of broken scaffolding, was malice, like an itching in her skin. The scaffolding itself had been hauled a little distance out into the desert, to leave room for the new framework already under construction. The men at work on this grumbled about having to bring in virgin materials—huge quantities of mature bamboo needed to be shipped in from the lowland forests that fringed the Lake of Reeds, a journey of almost three weeks—but the two foremen, Grobat and Ykem, were cautious about using any materials that might be either still tainted with a curse or damaged from a fall.

They were right, the Summer Concubine thought, running her fingertips along the woody yellow tubes, the narrow boards still stained with workmen’s blood. Everywhere she touched, the hex seemed to stick to her fingers like slime.

“It’s here, all right,” she said when Oryn—who’d been conversing animatedly with the scaffold foremen while she searched—picked his way through the jumbled scatter of rubble to where she sat on the broken heap. Amid the constant dust cloud of the construction zone he looked like a giant orchid, unbelievably incongruous in his coat and tunic and trousers of violet and gold, a servant trailing faithfully with a gold-tasseled violet sunshade. “It feels diffuse, like . . . like glue mixed with water. It’s all spreading out from a mark somewhere.” She gestured around her to the tangled riggings, the broken hoist beam, the lashed frameworks that covered nearly the area of a wealthy man’s house.

“Are you sure.?” Oryn squatted beside her, and the maid Lupine, whose job it was to hold a sunshade over the Summer Concubine’s head, stepped closer to Oryn’s parasol bearer to form a long rectangle of shade to cover them both. “According to our friend foreman Ykem the scaffolding’s been guarded not by one guard, or two, who might have been touched by a sleep spell while the mark was drawn, but by half a dozen.”

“A mage wouldn’t have to make the mark on the scaffold itself, you know.” The Summer Concubine flexed her aching shoulders. “The mark could have been written some distance away on an amulet, or a talisman. If a mage put the proper limitations on the hex he could come up under a cloak, hang the talisman eye on a beam and slip away again. It would spread out from there, infecting the whole structure.”

“I’ll have a couple of the men start looking for—how big would it be? No larger than your palm, I suppose, or it would have been seen.”

“Not necessarily. And it could have been written on paper and pasted on, or on a ribbon and tied.”

“Well, if it was hung it might have fallen off—or been taken away once the damage was done,” he added grimly. “I’ll have Ykem put men to searching.” He offered her his silver flask of lemon water to drink, the gingery tang stinging on her tongue, and opened the small container of ointment he carried—violet jade set in gold—to tenderly daub the bridge of her nose above the line of her veil. “Can I send for anything for you?” he asked. “A willow tree perhaps to shade you? Musicians? A small shower of rain?”

Around them, under the bright, brittle glare of the desert afternoon, the camp jostled and clamored. Teyn filed in and out of the three walled enclosures where they were kept, enclosures guarded now, as well as written with runes of obedience and subservience and fear. The silent half-human faces were flat and expressionless under the thin, silky bristle of their shaved hair. Now and then a guard or minder would ask one of them something to be replied to in simple grunting words, but they never spoke to one another. Only now that Oryn had spoken of it to her, the Summer Concubine noticed that they were always reaching out to touch one another, the touch passing down the stoop-backed lines. Comfort? Communication? How could one tell?

She smiled into Oryn’s worried eyes. “I’m well cared for, thank you.”

“You let me know.”

“I will.”

Other teyn, watched by their minders, dragged cut stone in from the East Road, where the king’s cavalcade had all that morning passed the steady stream of low, wheeled sledges on its way to the camp. The line stretched back through the desert, through the arid rangeland to the fields and orchards by the lakefront. At landing stages just south of the wharves of the fishermen, barges brought in rough-hewn blocks floated down from the quarries in the mountains that bordered the Great Lake’s western shore, via the Sun Canal. By this hour of the afternoon the air was impenetrable with golden dust.

I’m coming to hate this aqueduct as much as the lords do, the Summer Concubine reflected as Oryn clambered away to speak to the foremen about assigning men to investigate the wreckage. She surveyed the mass of debris before her and reflected that this was something people didn’t generally hear about wizardry: How occasionally wearisome it was to be the one person in hundreds, or even thousands, who was able to effect change in a situation and to be therefore obliged to do so.

With a sigh she lifted her gaze to the stockpiles of stone blocks, around the advancing end of the aqueduct, the half-raised pillars, the arches that would support the artificial river’s bed once it came down off the desert’s cliffs and had to be carried to the city across the low, flat lands between.

Madness, the clan lords said—and the priests of many other gods besides Nebekht. But according to Soth such devices worked, to channel water from far away, and the Summer Concubine could see no reason why it should not.

And beyond the aqueduct, sprawling south between the building site and the road, the shuffling gangs of teyn, the masses of penned sheep, nearly hidden in a fog of wheat-colored dust. Workers’ tents, mess tables, depots of food, butts of water . . . all of this had to come from somewhere. And in all of it, hidden somewhere, was a clue, a trace of magic, that only she could find.

Before the camp the cliffs loomed, the rough drop-off from the still more barren desert tableland, a jagged zone of badlands called the Dead Hills. Beyond that, the oasis of Koshlar—fifteen days by camel, if all went well.

If the rains never come, she thought, we will die anyway, long before we reach Koshlar.

They must come. She closed her eyes in brief prayer to Darutha, lord of rain. This year, and next year, and the year after . . . Just enough to let this be accomplished.

Two hundred miles. And it was only the first they’d have to build if the cities around the drying lakes were to survive. The aqueduct now stretched just over twelve miles, and in another three would climb through the Dead Hills to the tablelands of the deep desert beyond. There, according to the surveyors Oryn had sent out five years ago, the aqueduct would be cut into the earth, a canal roofed over with stone to prevent evaporation, lined with stone to cheat the dry earth’s baking heat. The springs of Koshlar were bountiful, filling a deep lake in the heart of burning salt-white wastes and overflowing into acres of marsh. Mohrvine was right, she thought. The nomad tribes wouldn’t let that water be tapped without a fight.

Two hundred miles. And in between, bleak flats of gray rock; bleached miles of pea-sized gravel without so much as a cactus to relieve the endless lifelessness of the landscape. More miles of sand, where white dunes two hundred feet high crept with the slow, wind-driven inexorability of predators. Decayed ridges of saffron rock—black canyons where rivers had flowed so long ago that even the bare stones had forgotten. The Durshen kings had had their tombs carved in the Dead Hills, under the assumption that no robber would find his way through the harsh maze of the badlands; there were rumors of necropoli still farther out in the wastes.

And beyond all that, more wasteland still. The first three surveying parties sent out had not returned, nor had any sign of their end ever been found. It was not known whether the nomads had taken exception to their trespass—or guessed their ultimate intent—or whether they had simply been led astray and destroyed by the djinni.

Squads of teyn were already at work cutting the notch of the canal on the far side of the badlands.

From here the Summer Concubine could see the rising cloud of their dust glimmering in the dry, burning light. Now and then a mirror would flash, a tiny blink of light as one engineer signaled another.

Two hundred miles. And how many dry years, before the lakes themselves sank away in their beds?

She turned her attention back to the broken planks, the tangled ropes crusted with the blood of those who’d just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trying to align the dim, prickly ugliness she felt in the wood with a sense, a feeling, of the amulets Soth had brought her, talismans ensorcelled years ago by Ahure, Aktis, Isna Faran, Urnate Urla. But of course talismans lost their strength over the passage of time. And when those talismans had been imbued with spells, had Aktis and Isna Faran already begun to lose their powers?

Or was this hex the work of some mage she’d never heard of? Some nomad sorcerer trying to keep the aqueduct from the oasis? Or a mage from far away? One of the wizards who’d healed or cast love spells or laid wards of obedience on the teyn in a village in the north somewhere, or in Ith or the City of White Walls or the City of Reeds—maybe even from the faraway coast?

She couldn’t tell.

And as she concentrated, the images of Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman kept returning to her, breaking her concentration. No wonder I can’t find anything familiar here.

Don’t let them be dead, she prayed to Rohar, god of women, the gentle protector whose small chapel and flower-draped image could be found in every harem from the Lake of the Moon up to the scraggle of drying mudflats beyond the Lake of Gazelles. Please guard them, keep them, wherever they are . . . .

Her fingers brushed another section of planking, another bunch of rope, and the recollection of last night’s horrible dream breathed upon her like the halitus of the grave. She felt again the awful grief in her heart, as if a twin sister had died.

Grief—and dread. Dread that whatever it was knew her name as well. Dust gritted in her eyes and beneath her veils, and in spite of the protecting gauze, her nostrils and throat felt like a sandpit. Lupine moved over, the parasol’s shade shifting with the sun—Lupine herself wore a double-crowned straw hat more substantial than the roof of a poor man’s house.

Keep Shaldis, too, she prayed. Hold her in the palm of your hand.

“I’ll see if he’s receiving company.” Mohrvine’s porter, a fat man with the sloppy accent of a longtime resident of the Circus District, waved Raeshaldis to a bench. She’d gone to the bronze-strapped gates of the old House Jothek in Great Giraffe Street with heavily beating heart, expecting the usual sidelong looks at her novice’s robe and unveiled face, but the man barely gave her a glance. If he’d been raised in the Circus, she reflected, watching him as he whistled through his fingers for a page, this wasn’t a surprise. People in the Circus were used to just about anything.

Mohrvine’s house—the house the Jothek clan had owned long before they’d become high kings—stood in the Circus District, rowdier and smellier than the more fashionable purlieus of the Flowermarket, where most of the other clan lords had their compounds. Shaldis had been, naturally, forbidden to walk these streets as a child and had, naturally, disobeyed whenever she thought she could get away with it. Even today, the men who played dominoes in the cafés in their short, bright-hued tunics, and the bare-faced women in their jangling jewelry, gaudy dresses and gaudier hair, stared at her less than did passersby in other parts of town.

Upon reflection, Shaldis supposed it was an improvement that her novice’s robes and unveiled-face classed her with the girl acrobats and female rope dancers rather than marking her as simply a disobedient member of some man’s family.

“Ain’t you supposed to be up with the rest of ’em bringing the rain?” As a little yellow-clad page scampered away across the high-walled, narrow expanse of the brick-paved court on his errand, the porter turned back and dipped her out a cup of water from the jar in his minuscule kiosk beside the lodge. At the court’s far end, over a wall of plastered brick that could have stood repainting, poplars and sycamores displayed brilliant, healthy leaves in a silent boast of water to spare. Tiled roofs heaped behind them: crimson, yellow, blue, ornamented with sand-scored gilt. A couple of teyn patiently swept the courtyard bricks, backs bent under the glare of the sun.

“Special message.” Shaldis patted her satchel as if it contained something of importance. In fact it contained all the tablets on which she’d written her Spells of Deep Listening, whether they worked or not; she had meant to ask Soth about them.

Was there some rule, she wondered, about mages from one discipline helping those of another? She’d never heard of it being done, but then, prior to this it had never had to be done.

The porter grunted. Both the dripping cup and the jar he dipped it from were painted ware a hundred years old, simple and delicate as anything Shaldis had seen in the Marvelous Tower. She remembered what her grandfather had always said about Mohrvine being a “true gentleman”—true gentlemen being those who held to ancient traditions and didn’t wear pointed-toed shoes. The noise from the street grew louder for a moment as the boar teyn who was sweeping the courtyard bricks opened the gate to brush the dust through and into the thoroughfare. To be tracked back in tomorrow, belike, thought Shaldis, exasperated. The flat, round faces of the teyn under their clipped white beards were inexpressive; sweat trickled down the boar’s back and shoulders, stained dark the jenny’s rough brown dress. Their eyes were blue, and startlingly human. Shaldis wondered if they felt heat the way people did.

The page came running back and traded a word with the porter, who came to Shaldis with a bow. “He’ll see you, miss.” He used a more respectful pronoun than before.

Thank you.” Shaldis tipped him—out of a very slender reserve of savings—and followed the page out into the court, to three tall brick steps and a gate that let onto a covered walk. Morning sunlight glared from the pink-washed walls, splashed the grubby white and brown palimpsests of overlaid door and window wards, gilded the scrim of dust in the air. As she passed the teyn the boar glanced sidelong at her, and for a moment she had the disconcerting sense of seeing calculation in those bright blue eyes.

Aktis waited for her in the small courtyard that Mohrvine allotted his court mage, thin and lined and a little stooped, with a nose like a medium-sized yam and eyes dark and wise and twinkling under a gray shelf of brow. A trellis and vine had once circled the walled enclosure, shading the line of chambers and open workrooms that looked into it on three sides. Most of the vine had been pulled down and replaced by an apparatus of pulleys and mirrors. The basin of what had been the courtyard pool stood empty, its tiles smudged with smears of red and white chalk.

The Earth Wizard listened to her account of being hazed by the other novices—and possibly adepts as well—at the college, of having the ward signs that defended her room violated, of her attempts to locate the perpetrators through the residue of their spells left in the wood. “I copied every spell I could find from the library, but I can’t make most of them work,” she finished. “Even the ones that are straightforward. Ben—One of the masters I spoke to said it may be something simple, that I’m not drawing the sigil precisely enough. But I do practice, and I have successfully made sigils on the air, not once but many times. Sometimes these work perfectly. And other times”—she spread her hands, baffled—“other times they don’t.”

Thoughtfully, Aktis turned over the spell tablets in his pale, ink-boltered hands. When she’d made up her mind to go to the Sun Mages, Shaldis had resolved that if they wouldn’t take her, she’d seek out Aktis, whom she’d seen many times in the Bazaar. He was reputed to be both a strong mage and a man wilting to help even those who could not pay—something not all Earth Wizards would do. With no overriding authority and no single Archmage—their informal council met only a few times a decade—the Earth Wizards had a reputation for being much more everyday than the Sun Mages, living in houses and shopping in the market. But because they had to buy their own bread instead of being supported by a college that over the years had been given farms, city rentals, cattle herds and the cash to found a substantial moneylending business, they and the Pyromancers were reputed to be more mercenary than the Sun Mages, and far more variable in quality. The Sun Mages trained those who could source power from the sun and tested them rigorously. Earth Wizards drew strength from the ground beneath their feet, from the gold and silver and hidden lodes of water in the soil: They and the Pyromancers, and others of the smaller orders, simply apprenticed likely lads, the way a potter or a carpenter or a goldsmith would.

Yet even after Aktis was pledged to Mohrvine and had no more need to earn his living, Shaldis had seen him heal a beggar child’s foot of a camel bite in the marketplace. Had seen him go into the shabby huts in the Slaughterhouse District to spell their pitiful cupboards against mice, their windows against the incursions of the mosquitoes that came whining in clouds from the borders of the lake. Urnate Urla and Khitan Redbeard had muttered about people taking away their business, but one didn’t mutter too loudly against Lord Mohrvine Jothek’s court mage. The beggars called out blessings on him when he passed, and on Lord Mohrvine as well.

“Trace out this sigil on the table.” Aktis selected one of the tablets, “just as if you were going to scry the wood.”

He watched as she obeyed, eyes following the track of her finger on the coarse peasant bench. He hadn’t said to put the focus of her power on it, so Shaldis didn’t, and as a result she couldn’t see the glowing line that sometimes appeared under her finger as she made a sigil in a spell. Still, when she’d completed the sign he nodded, said, “Stand up and close your eyes and spin around three times . . . . I can see you must have been a champion at blindman’s bluff. Now trace it again, exactly over the first. That looks good,” he finished when she repeated the invisible sign. The simple bench was in keeping with the plain furnishings of the rooms that she could see through the wide-open windows that faced onto it: a few cupboards, an adobe divan scattered with cushions of pink-and-blue country-work. The teapot and cups he brought out were plain green-glazed work from the papyrus forests and fishing villages around the far north end of the Lake of Reeds. A black glass idol, of the kind found in very old Hosh tombs, stared bleakly from its niche in the wall. “That’s very good. You have a good inner eye. I don’t think practice is what is lacking.

“Everyone needs practice,” he added, his fleet grin suddenly lightening a face gouged with the marks of weariness. “If you plan to follow the path of power, child, you’d better learn to love practice and memorization, because you’re going to be doing a lot of them. But it doesn’t look as if that’s the problem. And your orientation to the sun is certainly accurate.”

“Then what’s wrong?” asked Shaldis, frustrated. “Why can I make spells work sometimes and other times they just . . . they just turn into lines and words?”

Aktis sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was, Shaldis reckoned, a good twenty years younger than Hathmar, yet something about the way he tried to straighten his back, the way he shifted his shoulders, reminded her of the old Archmage. His hair, which had been coal black and thick only a few years ago, was thin now, limp and the color of cave mud.

“I do have power,” Shaldis went on, more softly. She stared down into her teacup, the strong burnt-honey smell of the steam rising around her face. “Some things—spells of concealment, and illusion—I can do . . . oh, as if I were born knowing how to do them. Just shaping the illusions with my mind. The power is there.”

Aktis opened his mouth as if he would speak what was in his thoughts. Then he seemed to change his mind and only shook his head. “Where does it come from, child?” he asked. “This power.”

Shaldis hesitated, casting into her mind, into her dreams. “It’s—It’s inside me. In my chest, I think.”

“But when you focus it, channel it,” went on Aktis, “where does it flow from? I know you’ve been taught to source from the sun, and every spell and sigil you know has reference to it.” His expressive fingers played above the tablets, scattered on the bench between them. “Have you studied the sigils the Earth Wizards use? Seen them at all?”

“I’ve seen them.” They were very different, odd-looking and shaped to a completely different geometry, as different from the signs of the Sun Mages as formal High Script was from Scribble, or as the classic sun glyphs of men’s horoscopes were from the complicated, ever-altering lunar women’s signs.

“Are you so sure,” said Aktis, “that you are a Sun Mage at all?”

Benno Sarn had said the same thing. Raeshaldis shook her head, uncertain and feeling a kind of despair.

“Have you ever been tested?”

“By the Sun Mages, yes.”

“Hmm.” Aktis’s mouth twisted and he tugged at his pigtail, winding its thin gray strands around thin fingers. “Hathmar hasn’t had a new novice at the college for three years. I expect he’d have taken anyone with any sign of power and not asked about source.” His dark-circled eyes returned to her, searching her face.

“Would you teach me?” asked Shaldis. “Write out for me the runes and sigils I’d need to—to feel, to see, who this was? What this was?”

The thick brows quirked upward, but Aktis only looked down at the table, at the spot where Shaldis had traced the sigils, invisible on the wood. He said nothing for a time, and sipped his tea in deepening silence while the noises of the house, and of the streets outside, clashed on the high pink walls. Looms thudded in the workshops somewhere near; a groom cursed a teyn. A woman in the street outside called, “Hot bright gingerbread—a dequin for a cake!” “Anybody anybody, chairs to mend?” wailed a male voice, and a camel groaned. Irritating contrast, Shaldis realized, with the absolute restful silence of the Summer Concubine’s terrace gardens.

“You mean,” said Aktis at length, “that you want me to go against the Sun Mages with an Earth Wizard’s spells?”

His dark eyes flicked inquiringly to her, and Shaldis understood what he implied.

“It’s just one spell.”

“And no one would know?” The brows went up again. Then he sighed. “Child, you don’t remember what happens when the orders of wizardry fight one another. I barely remember the last time it happened—I couldn’t have been seven years old—and that was a small spat, a stupid squabble between a Wind Singer who worked for the House Sarn and some of old Lord Akarian’s court mages—Earth Wizards, I’m ashamed to say.

“People are always saying how wizards are useless—how they’ll never do the things you most want them to. And this is why: Because we have learned, over the years, to watch how we use our power. Five or six days ago a man came to me complaining of vomiting, of paralyzing pain in his hands. It turned out his wife had paid one of these new—these new women-who-do-magic to make him stop spending his money on drink, and this was the best way this woman could think of to make him do what made her most comfortable. Not knowing, of course, that no spell has ever been found to cure a man of drugs, or drink, or gambling.”

He shook his head in genuine distress. “If you’re being taught by the Sun Mages you must have learned about the limitations that must be on any spell, the boundaries to keep ill luck from spreading everywhere in the world, to keep a simple spell of bellyache or migraine from spreading and duplicating itself until half a village is puking itself to death.

“In that last quarrel the Order of the Wind Singers came to an end, except for a few hermits in the desert west of the Eanit. What you’re asking is forbidden. And for good reason. For the best of reasons.”

Shaldis looked down for a time at the tablets, at the grain of the table. At her own hands, long and white and skinny, lying in the knotted shade of the naked vine.

“The Sun Mages won’t help me,” she said at last, glad that she’d decided not to mention the disappearance of a couple of freelance spell weavers like Corn-Tassel Woman and Turquoise Woman. Not that she would have done so in any case, given Aktis’s position in Lord Mohrvine’s household.

“Then you should leave them.”

She looked up, startled.

“I can’t do what you ask—simply hand you spells like a street-corner peddler passing out two-penny mouse wards. For one thing, I doubt you’d be able to use them.” He pushed over a couple of tablets that lay beyond her reach, and she saw his fingers trembled a little with a kind of constant, unsteady vibration. “You certainly wouldn’t be able to use them safely. But I can teach you. In fact I’d rather do that, and make sure you learned your limitations properly. I promise you—”

“My lord.” The page reappeared in the gateway of the court, a chubby boy whose long old-fashioned curls reminded Shaldis of the streetwalkers outside. “My lord Mohrvine would see you. Now, sir, he says—please, right away.” The boy glanced at Shaldis with a combination of apology and fascination, the kind of stare she got often in the streets from young boys unused to seeing a woman’s face uncovered in public.

Aktis glanced at the angle of the sun on the table and his mouth tightened. Shaldis got to her feet and gathered up her tablets, counting to make sure she had them all.

“I won’t keep you, sir,” she said. “Thank you for your time, for your help and advice.”

He stood also, reached a hand as hesitant as a cat’s paw to touch her sleeve. “Child,” he said, “don’t do anything foolish. If the spells of the Sun Mages won’t work—spells that you’ve been taught to bound and limit properly—don’t endanger yourself or anyone else by tampering with other types of spells. You don’t—”

The page glanced over his shoulder through the gate, as if he expected to see the greatest and most dangerous of the clan lords storming down the walkway at his heels, and cleared his throat. “My lord wizard, my lord said as how it was . . . That is, he told me to tell you—”

“That he wants me right away.” Aktis’s voice was very quiet, touched with pain. With anger, too, thought Shaldis, and no wonder: that even the lord of one of the great houses would command a mage to come, like a servant. “Of course he does. Come back to me tomorrow, child. Promise me that you will. We need to talk more of this. And between now and then, be careful. Don’t tamper with what you don’t understand. I assure you, only dreadful grief will come of it.”

“No sir.” Shaldis stepped back under the trellis, waiting to be taken back to the gate, as Aktis went into one of the several small rooms that surrounded the court. The page followed him to the door, having doubtless received instructions to make sure he didn’t delay. She heard the man say, “Just give me a moment, boy,” his voice muffled by the curtain that covered the door. Turning her head, she saw him through the window of what had to be the next room taking something from a locked cupboard in the corner opposite the window.

He opened the cupboard with a key, and she thought, He doesn’t use a ward sign.

What he took out was a black clay bottle, which he stood looking at for a moment. The late sunlight coming through the window stood clear on the sweat on his face.

He wet his lips, made as if to put the bottle back—then brought it to his mouth and took a small, a very small, sip.

And shuddered, with a look of such desperation on his face that Shaldis’s heart seemed to twist in her breast.

He put the bottle back, closed the cupboard.

Then opened it again fast, and rook one more desperate gulp, as if fearing that he would be observed. Past his shoulder Shaldis could see into the cupboard—saw a big gourd, stained dark and surrounded by dead roaches; saw a bundle of dried ijnis leaves and a porcelain mortar likewise stained; a small retort for distilling and a golden bottle, wrapped in three strands of iron and sealed with a crystal stopper. She knew he was going to look around and turned away, moved behind the post of the trellis and gazed across the garden, feeling shaken and sick.

Aktis reemerged from his door with a brisk stride and pulled it closed behind him. The page stepped respectfully aside as the Earth Wizard traced signs on the door with one finger: “One can’t be too careful, my child,” he said with forced heartiness. “Topeck will show you out, won’t you, Topeck? Good lad. Tomorrow?” he said, laying a hand on Shaldis’s shoulder.

She nodded. When he turned to go through the gate of the courtyard ahead of her, she reached out casually and brushed the door with her fingers, seeking the ward mark he had left.

She felt nothing. She could have gone in and helped herself to his supper—or his ijnis—for all the mark would do to keep her out.

The curly-haired page was waiting, with no very good grace. She slung her satchel up on her shoulder again and followed him through the gate and into the slatted shade of the covered walk, heading back toward the main court. For a few minutes Aktis’s stooped, black-clothed shoulders bobbed ahead of them under the flicking bars of shade. Then he turned down another walkway, ascended a flight of tiled steps to pass through a door.

Just because he’s taking ijnis, thought Shaldis, doesn’t mean he can’t teach me.

Or does it?

How soon did the drug begin to affect the mind? Immediately, everyone said, and far quicker for some than for others. He’d seemed perfectly in control except for the trembling of his hands. But if his spells weren’t to be trusted anymore—as they obviously weren’t, if he’d used a key rather than a ward spell on his cupboard—did that mean . . . ?

And as clear as a bell, sweet and strong as if she’d walked past a rosebush in full scent, she felt magic.

And turning, saw the fugitive glimmer of a freshly drawn rune, of ward on the corner of a wall.