TWENTY-FOUR

The Summer Concubine sat still for a long time after she finished weeping, looking sightlessly out at the brittle early sunlight on the garden pavement, her hands pressed to her mouth. She had not uttered a sound. Shaldis wondered if this was something Pearl Women were trained to do. To weep in silence lest they disturb their men.

Feeling awkward as she always did, Shaldis took refuge in the commonplace, fetched a linen towel from the washstand behind its inlaid door in the corner, wrung it out in the scented water of the basin there. When she came back to the bed, her friend was sitting with hands folded, long tracks of black and green marking where her tears had flowed.

“Thank you.” The concubine’s voice was barely a whisper as she took the towel. “He will pay for that.”

“If we catch him,” said Shaldis. “And we will.”

“I don’t mean the killer.” Her hands trembled as she wiped away the remains of her paint. “I mean Enak.”

She sat still again, the cloth forgotten in her hands. Shaldis took it from her, looked around and saw the breakfast tray on its spindly-legged stand. Beside it, a brazier warmed the blue-and-golden inner chamber from the morning chill. She folded the damp cloth onto the tray, felt the side of the coffeepot. It was tepid, but she poured a cup anyway, and rang the silver bell on the tray. The stout maid Lotus appeared at once:

“More coffee, if you would, please.” Shaldis went to hand the woman the tray, and Lotus hastened to intercept it, visibly scandalized that a visitor should even consider doing a servant’s work. She glanced at the motionless figure on the edge of the bed.

“Is there anything else I can do? Any way I can help?”

Shaldis shook her head. “Bad news about a friend.” She replied in the same whisper Lotus had used, though she knew quite well that the Summer Concubine could hear the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings in the terrace garden outside.

“One of her ladies, that disappeared ?”

Shaldis hesitated, knowing the speed with which any tale, any scrap of information, spread through the servants’ quarters, then only raised her brows. Lotus nodded, both at the mild rebuke—Of course you know I can’t speak of it—and at the reply that lay behind it: Yes.

“I’ll pray for her,” Lotus whispered. “The god of women—he must be getting stronger these days. And they’re saying that maybe he hasn’t been a god all along, but a . . . a lady god in disguise.”

When Lotus had gone, Shaldis turned back to the bed. “He was within his rights, you know. Enak. If he had killed her himself, he would still have been within his rights.” She was thinking about her grandfather as she spoke.

Almost inaudibly, the Summer Concubine said, “Even so.”

Shaldis wondered how long that state of things would last. The world was changing indeed. No wonder men clung in fury to those like Lohar who promised to keep things as they were.

The set of the favorite’s mouth, the look of infinite weary anger in her eyes, did not bode well for Enak and Barbonak.

Then the Summer Concubine sighed and got to her feet, pulling more closely about herself the robe of embroidered white wool that covered her pale green underdress and chemise. “And this woman who called you back out of the darkness, Pomegranate Woman—I hope she slept somewhere safe last night!”

“I tried to get her to come to the Citadel with me.” Shaldis followed the Summer Concubine to her dressing table, neat with its porcelain pots of ointments and paints. “She refused. She said she’s been a shadow for the past ten years and wants to remain that way. He can’t catch a shadow, she said. He or it, as the case might be.”

“You’re thinking of the . . . the wight, the thing, whatever it was . . . that Urnate Urla tried to trap among the tombs? But surely it was a living man who attacked you?”

“It was a human being, anyway,” said Shaldis. “I’m pretty sure it was bigger and heavier than the Red Silk Lady, at least as tall as I am—and I’m ready to take oath it was a man. But I was taken by surprise, and of course I couldn’t see anything. Now that I think about it, I can’t even swear that he was alone. There could easily have been two of them . . . .” She-paused, her mind snagging on a thought that would not quite form. “You don’t happen to know where Lohar was on the first night of the full moon, do you?”

“But Lohar has no power. I know he’s supposed to spend every night in the temple, in communion with Nebekht.”

“Which tells us exactly nothing.” Shaldis sighed. “Having followers everywhere, he’d have known about Corn-Tassel Woman, and Turquoise Woman . . . and me, of course.” She watched for a moment while the Summer Concubine smoothed ointment on her face and rubbed a trace of cochineal powder on her cheekbones and lips. Her eyes she painted again with kohl and malachite, fine lines with a squirrel-hair brush: Shaldis wondered, even with her thoughts of power and murder and blood black in the moonlight, how it was that this looked so beautiful on the Summer Concubine and made her, Raeshaldis, look like a girl acrobat in the circus whenever she tried it.

“Pomegranate Woman said that the attacker was looking for her, that she’d dreamed about it,” she said after a time. “Did you? Or did you ever feel that you were being watched?”

Only a Pearl Woman’s training, thought Raeshaldis, kept the Summer Concubine’s hand from jerking at the question; she saw how she froze, and how the delicate muscles of her back and shoulders tightened at memories of things half forgotten. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Sometimes. There have been times—in dreams, or in the shadows of night—that I felt that I wasn’t alone.”

“But whoever it is,” said Shaldis, “knows better than to come after you, because if anything happened to you, the king wouldn’t rest in hunting him down. What about the other Ravens, Cattail Woman and Pebble Girl? Did they ever speak of . . . of this sense of being watched in their dreams!”

“No.” The Summer Concubine turned from her mirror, set the fragile brush back in its holder, a frown pulling at her brows. “Cattail Woman I don’t know: She’ll never admit that there’s anything she can’t cope with. But I asked Pebble Girl and she said she’s never had this . . . this experience of someone trying to take her. Unlike the others, she’s kept her powers a secret, even from her family.” She smiled with gentle indulgence at the young woman’s simplicity of heart.

“She used her powers mostly to make flowers grow in the harem courtyard of her father’s house, and to make pictures appear in the flames when she told her younger brothers and sisters tales around the nursery fire at night. Her father’s a contractor, as I think I’ve said, a kindly, simple man who depends on her. Sometimes she’ll heal his mules when they get ill, but she doesn’t tell him because she’s afraid he’ll be shocked. She’s a solitary girl, and shy—a little slow, I think, judged by the ways of the world. But such a treasure inside.”

She folded her hands, gazing out through the doorway to the terrace, where the big cat Gray King stalked a lizard along the tiled edge of the pool. Uneasy stillness lay on the city, like the pall of smoke from the scattered fires that had been started and quenched in last night’s sporadic rioting. Shaldis’s nape prickled, and she went to the dress stand to fetch the gown the Summer Concubine would wear to consult with Hathmar that day, gray-blues and greens, changeable silk like lake water.

The Summer Concubine went on, “Last night when I reached here after the attack by Lohar’s mob on the road, a girl was waiting for me, the Moth Concubine—she belongs to one of the silk merchants allied with House Jamornid. She’s had dreams of power for nearly a year, she told me, and never dared to put it to the test. But when I asked her to, she could make fire by looking at a candle and find things that I hid. I don’t know the extent of her power, nor what she’s capable of. Like Pebble Girl, she’s never felt any sense of threat.”

“So it’s only women who were known to have power,” concluded Shaldis. She helped her friend into gown and jacket, sashes and veils and scarves, all the intricate embroidered costume of perfection. “Maybe we’ve been looking too much at what the attacker is, and why he still has power, and haven’t asked the simpler questions: Who knew about the victims and where to find them? You can’t scry someone who has power, not against their will. And the answer to that”—Shaldis gathered up her own veils and wrapped them over her tawdry dress—“lies back in Greasy Yard.”

“Spare nothing in finding that answer.” The Summer Concubine finished tying her three sashes in pleasing knots and came over to lay her hands on Shaldis’s shoulders, looked up into her eyes. “For you can besure that whoever he is, he is watching. And once we go up to the Citadel tonight—once we start with the new Song at tomorrow’s dawn—even those who are hidden, like Pebble Girl and the Moth Concubine, will be known to him too.”

Shaldis made her way toward the Golden Court and the outer gates of the palace compound, but a thought crossed her mind and she turned her steps aside to the smaller Court of the Guards. It lay like an enclave off the larger, semipublic space, bare walled and unbroken by the usual arcade, forbidding and stark. If nothing else, Jethan deserved thanks for his willingness to act as a messenger. The Summer Concubine had told her that he had gone straight to Greasy Yard upon his arrival in the city with the king’s party, only returning to the palace that morning. He would be annoyed, Shaldis feared—of course by the time she’d thought to send a message from the Citadel telling him not to wait, the city gates had been closed. He was entirely too arrogant and he’d go on and on about how she shouldn’t be gallivanting around the city by herself.

But she didn’t want him to be angry with her. And he had had a difficult couple of days on her account.

So she went to the Court of the Guards, and one of the men there said Jethan was in the baths, they’d send for him.

“No, please don’t trouble him.” That was all Jethan needed, thought Shaldis, to clinch his contempt for her, that she call him out of the baths.

“Sweetheart”—the guard grinned—”if you knew how many of the boys here have been waiting to see our Jethan take up with some pretty little fox from the city . . . Don’t deprive us of the sight, I beg of you.”

So Shaldis, blushing under her pink veils, which the Summer Concubine had redraped for her, settled on a marble bench to wait. She felt more flustered than she had thought she would, to be described as a pretty little fox. It was certainly something no one had ever said of her before. She was still waiting a few minutes later when Lord Mohrvine and his guards rode into the court.

The court was long and narrow, running back from its gate to a fountain at the far end. The clash of the hooves echoed against the bare cobbles and walls. The guards dismounted, bringing their horses to drink at the troughs around the fountain; Mohrvine on his black mare was still speaking to Aktis, who rode beside him, and such was the tone of his voice, and the swift, angry gestures of his hand, that none dared come near.

“Soth used to be a wizard and is now nothing but a chamberlain,” the king’s uncle was saying, his beautiful voice hard. “And by the gods that’s what you’ll be if there are more humiliations like that one! Love potion forsooth! After all your vows that there was power in it.”

“There was power in it,” returned Aktis doggedly. “I swear to you.”

“If that’s the best power you can come up with these days, you’d best learn to keep household accounts, then, because that’s what you’ll be doing for your bread. Do you have any concept of what’s at stake! The king has two days, and then we must prove our strength.”

“I won’t fail you.” The Earth Wizard looked half dead, cheeks hollowed and eyes sunken with fatigue. Sweat stood glittering on his balding forehead and his hands shook as they gripped the pommel of his saddle. Did he see, Shaldis wondered, the fate of Urnate Urla waiting for him? To be cast out by his patron, to finish as a clerk to some water boss hiding in his dung-spattered house for fear of the True Believers?

“Best you don’t.” Mohrvine swung from his saddle and strode through the doorway that led to the Green Court and the inner realms of the palace beyond, trailed by a small army of his black-clothed guards. Aktis stayed mounted for some moments, clinging to the pommel and swaying slightly, his face waxen with weariness and despair.

Shaldis went over to him, took the reins in one hand and held out the other to him. Aktis’s hand groped for it gratefully, and he dismounted with the slow care of one who has not the strength to get down alone.

“Thank you, child,” he whispered. “I shall be better presently. It passes.” His hand was as cold as dead mutton in hers.

She left the horse ground-reined and led Aktis to the bench. When he sank down on it, she went back, wrapped the horse’s rein around one of the wall rings by the fountain and held one of the public cups beneath the trickle of cold, rust-tasting water. Looking back, she saw the Earth Wizard slumped on the bench, hands folded on his knees to stop their trembling, narrow shoulders bowed. With the amount of ijnis she knew he was taking, it was no wonder some important spell went awry—it was only a matter of time before one did, she thought. Like Ahure, he had probably been fighting for years to maintain the illusion of the power that was his only way of making a living. Five years ago, he would have gone with Lord Mohrvine to see the king, and not be left here in the harsh open sun of the guards’ court with the horses.

Five years ago there would have been half a dozen of the palace guards who’d have come out and offered him the hospitality of the barracks watch room, a drink of wine, jockeying to sit by him and talk.

What would he be, she thought, when it was shown that that power was no more?

And it would be shown. Sooner or later, he would be able to hide his weakness no longer. He would stand stripped before their eyes, revealed not only as a failure, but as a fraud for many years. And then what?

She had the feeling Mohrvine wouldn’t even keep him to do the accounts, as he’d threatened, but would turn him out, as her grandfather had turned out his hunting dog when it grew too old to run.

He looked up at her as she handed him the water, squinting a little at her eyes between the diaphanous pink folds of the veils. “Do I know you, child?”

She raised and lightened her voice, and thickened her Market District accent, lest he realize that she was someone who had known him in better times—that she was someone who now had what he did not. “I don’t think so, sir, though I seen you in the markets. Are you all right, sir? Can I get you aught?”

Aktis sighed and forced a smile of politeness, though it was clear he only wanted to lie down somewhere and rest. “Thank you, no.” By his tone it was clear he thought her only one of the barracks whores, veiled or not. “What I most need these days no one can bring. But I truly appreciate your kind thought.”

Jethan appeared in the main doorway of the barracks looking impatiently around the yard; Shaldis was aware of half a dozen other palace guards suddenly loitering around the several lesser barracks doors in the sun. Afraid that Jethan would call out to her, she dipped a quick salaam to the wizard, hurried to the door: “Where are you bound for?” he demanded, running a disapproving eye over her gaudy—and now much tattered—dress. “You can’t be going down to the Slaughterhouse again, surely? Don’t you know the whole city’s on the edge of riot? They were burning cafés and astrologers’ houses last night—and any place else where they thought there was money to be looted—and it looks like there’ll be worse trouble tonight.”

“Then I’ll watch out for myself tonight,” retorted Shaldis, keeping her voice low and glancing back at the little brown-clothed form of the wizard slumped on the bench in the sun. “Anyway, tonight I should he back where it’s safe. Keep your voice down.”

“Why! So those louts I share quarters with will conclude that I’m whispering words of love to you?”

“If you don’t,” said Shaldis, “I’ll throw my arms around you and kiss you.”

“What’s so important that you need to go back to Greasy Yard?” whispered Jethan. His dark hair, slicked back into a warrior’s knot, was still wet from the baths; standing close to him, she smelled the soap scent that lingered on his flesh and the faint muskiness of ointment. Somewhere in his journeys to and from the aqueduct camp he’d taken a small cut above one eye. “I understood from her ladyship’s message that you’d learned what you needed to learn, elsewhere than—”

She put a hand over his lips. “I need to speak to Melon Girl,” she said. “That’s all. We can’t talk now. I only wanted to thank you for doing what you did.”

“I did no more than her ladyship commanded.” Jethan’s voice was stiff, but she saw worry and puzzlement, as well as disapproval, in his blue eyes.

“That doesn’t make it less appreciated—or less difficult for you.” She reached toward the cut on his forehead but did not after all touch his skin. For a moment they stood awkwardly facing one another, unsaid things flickering in the air between. She noticed how his nose had once been broken, long ago, and that he had a small curved scar near the corner of one eye. That his eyes were bluer than the lobelia that blossomed across the highlands on the other side of the Lake of the Moon. “Thank you.”

And turning, she hurried away across the long courtyard, to disappear into the wide arcades of the Golden Court beyond its gate.

Without the voices of the mages, without the groaning of the horns, the silence in the Yellow City was shocking. Such merchants and market women as remained on BoSaa’s Square were barely pretending to do business, and crowds lingered on every street corner talking angrily among themselves. Now and then Shaldis would see men lugging buckets of lake water on yokes, but there were still long lines around the city wells, where the water was cleaner and there wasn’t the risk of crocodiles or competition with the herds. The murk that slopped out of the lake-water buckets didn’t look remotely drinkable. Near the East Gate men were selling charcoal to boil it into some semblance of potability. When she passed through the square a brawl erupted around one man who everyone shouted was charging too much. His cart was overturned—boys and young men snatched up the fuel in their clothing and ran away into the Slaughterhouse’s impenetrable maze.

In the Slaughterhouse itself, streets were barricaded, carts and furniture piled into walls where the water bosses’ bully-boys lounged with arrows and bows. The crop-haired Believers were much in evidence, on the barricades as well as in the streets. The cafés were empty, but men clustered uneasily in the squares and intersections; half the streets were choked with herds of skinny cattle and sheep being driven down to the lakeshore and back, trampling the dry dung underfoot into a haze of stinking dust.

Rosemallow Woman sat as usual in her doorway, spinning goat-hair yarn, which she sold to one of the big jobbers; she was teaching her little Five-Fish to handle a spindle and distaff as well. “You’ll always be able to make your own living, girl,” she was saying as Shaldis came into Greasy Yard. “You won’t have to depend on a man for your bread.”

Arrayed in last night’s tawdry finery, Melon Girl straddled an old saddle buck beside the door, her usual stool, and pestled up coffee beans. They both greeted Shaldis with pleasure and Rosemallow Woman sent Five-Fish into the house for some of yesterday’s grounds to eke out the fragrant grit in the mortar. Both complimented Shaldis on the drape of her veils (“A friend did it for me,” Shaldis said, knowing she’d never get them right again, and slung them back over her shoulder).

Both women seemed perfectly willing to provide any information Shaldis wanted about Amber Girl, Xolnax, Urnate Urla or anyone else.

“He always did keep her close,” said Rosemallow Woman. “Sounds funny, that a bullyboy’s daughter should be raised right here in the Slaughterhouse—in that big old palace he’s taken over for his own on Sheepbladder Court—but it’s true.”

“I think he was always afraid she’d fall in love with one of his thugs, or with somebody else’s,” added Melon Girl, dumping the ground coffee into the top portion of the brass pot. “So he raised her to be stuck-up and la-di-da—when she’d go out in her litter you’d just catch a glimpse of her eyes, cold as topaz above her veils. Even as a little thing she thought she was someone special and didn’t have a good word to say to servants or Xolnax’s boys or anyone. She had servants following her with parasols by the time she was six. And after all that, to run off with some thug after all! Serves old Xolnax right.”

Shaldis, who knew what had become of the girl, only shivered. No one deserved what Pomegranate Woman said had befallen her. “You said before that he had her educated to be an astrologer. Do you remember who her teachers were?”

The women looked at each other. “Urnate Urla would know about her, if anyone would,” said Rosemallow Woman.

“If you can sit through how Urnate Urla used to be the best mage in the city, and could heal the sick by looking at them and raise rainstorms all by himself.” Melon Girl’s painted mouth twisted with the memory of the former wizard’s private pleasures. “Nasty old bugger.”

“Now, whatever he did with his powers, it’s got to be a comedown for him to he just a clerk,” said the softer-hearted Rosemallow Woman. “Damn those rats!” she added as a huge one streaked out through the doorway behind her, hotly pursued by Murder Girl. “I swear I should have got Turquoise Woman to do a rat guard while she was here. Did you ever find her, honey? Or hear what happened to her?”

“Urnate Urla says she was a fake.” Melon Girl got to her feet, stretched her spine, and went into her friend’s room to fetch the coffeepot and the water bubbling on the little stove.

“Urla hated her because she could do spells and he couldn’t anymore.” Rosemallow Woman wrapped her skirt around her hand to take the water pot. “He never had much good to say about Amber Girl, that’s for sure. He taught her High Script, and the gods know what-all else, but he felt it was a comedown, as I said. I gather she wasn’t a very nice pupil.”

“Well, would you expect her to be!” Melon Girl resumed her seat on the saddle buck. “He’d come out of lessons and go straight to the Eyes of Love tavern—that was before Lohar and his men took over the temple and were still meeting at his house and weren’t enough to cause him trouble. And the mess they left of that house, with blood all over the walls!”

“He said Amber Girl was an eager pupil,” said Rosemallow Woman, “but he’d go on to anybody who’d listen about how she was a stuck-up liar and a whore.”

“Well, he called most women whores.” Melon Girl dribbled the boiling water, a few spoonfuls at a time, through the coffee grounds. “He said that about Turquoise Woman—you ever notice how that’s the first thing men say about Raven girls, that they’re whores?—and about Cattail Woman down in the Fishmarket, which she isn’t, though she’s just about the bossiest woman I’ve ever met. And anyway I think Urnate Urla is sick. For two days now when I’ve seen him in the streets, he looks like a dead man, creeping around like he just learned his parents had died and left him a chamberpot. He didn’t even spit at Lohar last time he passed the temple.”

“Who were the others?” asked Shaldis. “The other tutors?”

The two women looked vaguely at one another. “Xolnax got just about whoever he could get, like I said.” Rosemallow Woman set down her distaff and took the small coffee cup from her friend’s hand. “Starbright Woman. Mooncircle Woman—whose horoscopes are all over Starbright’s, if you ask me. He got old Lord Mohrvine to send his court mage Aktis over, the gods only know how.”

“Lord Mohrvine has a deal with Xolnax, of course.” Melon Girl cocked a wise eye at her friend. “I mean, look at it! Xolnax has always gotten favors—look how his bullies never get cleared away from the wells, the way Rumrum’s do. If your pal Jethan’s boss, whoever he is, wants to do business in the Slaughterhouse, girl, he’d best be careful how he deals with Xolnax. Most of the other clan lords don’t think there’s power here in the slums, but—”

Her head jerked up, and at the same moment Shaldis heard, like the throbbing rush of wind in the date groves, the rising storm of voices.

“Shit.”

“It’s another riot.” Rosemallow Woman scooped up distaff and wool, ducked through the door of her room to set them on the table with the half-brewed coffee. Through the door Shaldis could see a mouse flee for its hole at the sight of her. “A big one.”

It sounded like battle as the three women hurried through the streets. People were emerging from doors, running in the direction of the shouting—some of them, Shaldis saw, carried weapons, clubs or knives. Others simply carried sacks.

They turned three corners and she realized the trouble was in BoSaa’s Square, just in front of the city gates.

As she came out of Chicken Lane, Shaldis’s first impression was of dozens of individual struggles, of knots of men beating and kicking downed soldiers, or soldiers doing the same to laborers, beggars, workmen who’d fallen to the ground. Men ran between the groups, or fell on combatants from behind with walking sticks, ax handles, pieces of lumber or firewood; men in the red-lacquered armor of the king’s men struggled to hold their ranks, to thrust their way out of the gate and through the square to the East Road. Dust churned into the air, burned Shaldis’s eyes, and through the haze she could see flame—bonfires of café tables or overturned barrows. Rocks flew, and she ducked back as one splintered on the corner of the house that had sheltered her and her two companions. Horses whinnied crazily, donkeys brayed. Men yelled rumors about an attack on the Slaughterhouse—a square, red-mailed form on a black horse shouted to the troops for order.

But there was more here than just fighting. The air seemed weighted with hatred, like the lightning in the air of a summer thunderstorm, as if the very air would explode. Around her, behind her, Shaldis was conscious of men and women running to the square, and of others running along the streets, yanking on the doors of houses, looking to seize what they could. Fights were starting there, too, as servants or householders defended their property—more than one small moblet of thieves formed up, hammering at locked doors with benches or beams,

“What started it?” yelled Rosemallow Woman, catching the arm of a boy pelting by.

He skidded to a stop and said, “Nebekht’s lot. They was throwing rocks at the soldiers and yellin’. I gotta go get a stick.” And he plunged away down the street.

More shouting, and from beneath the shadows of the gate a second column of riders appeared. The men were armored as if for battle, helmed and bearing shields against which the rocks and bottles clattered with a terrible sound. Shaldis recognized the blue armor of Lord Sarn’s men, and flinched as the riders plunged into the melee swinging battle maces and flails.

Men were down, crawling in the dust of the square. Horses rode over them and fleeing rioters trampled them. Somewhere a child was screaming in pain.

“You all right?” A hand touched her arm from behind, and, swinging around, Shaldis saw it was Pomegranate Woman. She felt around her the shimmer and flicker of some kind of cloak—not a spell she knew, but one she guessed was like her own childhood zin-zin rhymes, one the old woman had made up and used because it was all she knew. Rosemallow Woman was still watching the clamor and shoving in the square as if it were a play put on for her edification: Melon Girl had disappeared into a nearby house whose inhabitants had gone running to see the fighting. Shaldis nodded back along Chicken Lane and she and Pomegranate Woman ducked around a corner into a quiet alley where they wouldn’t be seen.

“I’m fine,” said Shaldis. “Thank the gods I’ve found you! We need you—the Sun Mages need you—need us. They’ve made a new Song, a new Summoning, a Song that’s centered around the Ravens’ power. All of us, all the Ravens in the city, must be up there tomorrow before daybreak.”

“Us?” whispered the ragged woman, her bright eyes growing wide. “Us, in the Ring? At last? Singing?”

“They have to,” said Shaldis. “You heard about Lohar’s challenge to the king: If the rain doesn’t come by midnight tomorrow all of his followers will rise.”

“Huh!” Pomegranate Woman sniffed. “Midnight tomorrow I don’t think!” She twisted a hank of her ash-gray hair and the trailing end of one of her scarves into a knot, stabbed it into place with a jeweled fork. “They’ll be at it long before that, it looks like. I’ve seen ’em,” she added when Shaldis stared. “I’ve seen ’em all morning, coming in and out of the temple by that side gate, the one they bring in the animals through. And I’ve heard their voices over the wall. They’re bringing in weapons, and when they come out, it’s to go straight to the men on the barricades. I didn’t know what it was about, but it’s plain as a pikestaff somebody’s got word about this new Rite, this new Song. And they mean to stop it.”

Damn it! Shaldis shivered, heat rising through her, anger mingled with disgust that she’d simply assumed Lohar would keep to the three days he himself had declared. Probably he’d say Nebekht had changed his mind.

“Can we get into the temple?” Or at least have a look.”

The two women passed along Chicken Lane as they spoke, down Pig Alley and Shambles Court, leaving the riot behind. Rioters fleeing from the battle behind them hurried past. As they went deeper into the warren of alleys away from BoSaa’s Square, the noise behind them grew less, the streets nearly deserted save for housewives in veils taking advantage of the shorter lines at the wells to go for water.

“Pontifer”—Pomegranate Woman looked down at her imaginary friend—“what do you say?”

When they reached the narrow court before Nebekht’s Temple, the iron-strapped doors were shut. The porch before them stood empty, as if it were the fourth hour of the night instead of the fourth hour of the morning.

Yet the place had not the feel of a deserted building. A little distance down the lane, Shaldis closed her eyes, reached her mind out toward the building. She heard immediately the mutter of voices within. She thought she identified Lohar’s hoarse mumbling—instructions, it sounded like. Certainly not his usual harangue. She caught the words “Rite” and “Citadel” and “morning.”

Among the strands of bead and chain wrapped around Pomegranate Woman’s neck Shaldis saw a mirror hung on a long red ribbon. “Let’s see that,” she asked. In the shelter of a doorway she angled the glass to the daylight, concentrating on the gloomy maze of old cells and courtyards she had from time to time glimpsed through the narrow gate where the meat was doled out; on the flat, dark stone of the facade with its empty niches, its defaced statues of other gods.

She saw nothing but her own face in the glass, and the walled gloom of the street behind her. Whether this was because she had the position and timing of the sun slightly wrong or because there were scry wards on the temple, she didn’t know.

Like so much else about the magic of women, she thought. She simply didn’t know. No one knew.

Hot wind sniffed down the alley like a jackal questing for food. She smelled incense from over the temple wall and the metallic, sour reek of rotting blood: the stink of the Slaughterhouse District rising with the day’s heat. Now and then distant voices from BoSaa’s Square gashed the day’s stillness, but here things were ominously quiet.

Still listening for the slightest preliminary scrape of the temple’s great doors, Shaldis stepped out of the sheltering niche and tiptoed across the garbage of the lane to the dark porch. She drew—swiftly—the double sigil on the black panels.

And she felt it. Evil, alien, burning, jangling . . . felt only a glimpse, a glancing breath, then obscured again in the shadow.

She fell back trembling, hearing Lohar shout, “Who’s that! Who’s there?” and retreated, fast, across the lane, to grab Pomegranate Woman’s arm and drag her away. Men shouted behind them, pouring into Chicken Lane, but they’d turned the corner already. Shaldis felt Pomegranate Woman’s spells cover her, hiding her from sight as men, heavily armed with pikes and swords, ran past them without a glance.

She was so shaken, so shocked, for a few moments she could conjure no spell of her own.

“There’s something in the temple.” Shaldis had to lean against the adobe wall for support. The silver disk on its ribbon around her neck felt warm, as if it had passed through flame. “Something . . .”

What? Magic?

Oh, yes.

Evil?

Yes.

Sane?

No.

Human?

She didn’t know. She didn’t think so. But whatever was in the temple, whatever power imbued those black granite walls, it felt very similar to the rotting hum she’d felt in the air when Urnate Urla struggled with the thing among the tombs. And even more similar to the power that had muttered and snarled as it hunted her in the darkness.

Slowly she stammered, “It feels like the thing that killed the other women. Xolnax’s daughter, and Turquoise Woman . . . . Like the thing that came after me.”

And like the thing among the tombs, the corpse-wight Urnate Urla had summoned and tried to capture.

She drew a shaky breath. Pomegranate Woman stood close to her in the doorway of Greasy Yard, and her blue eyes were dark with horror and shock.

“So what can we do?” she asked. “Do we send word to your lady? Get her to help us?”

Shaldis was going to say, Of course, and then thought, The Rite. The Song.

I can’t take them away from the Song. Not from the first time they’ll have to be recognized for what they—we—are. Not with Lohar waiting for them to fail.

Her heart sank and her hands and feet felt like ice.

Shit. Damn. God of Women—Lady God of Women . . . I’m really going to need your help.

As are they. Every bit of it.

She said, “No. What they’re doing is more important. It can’t wait. The gods only know what Lohar has in mind, or if they’ll get another chance. I’ve got to take care of this—or at least see what it is—alone.”