Sisters of the Raven

by Barbara Hambly

Genres: Fantasy

Synopsis

The Yellow City is in crisis. The wells are running dry, and the Sun Mages have been unable to call the rains. Frustrated Mages across the land can no longer work the magic that once ran their empire. Now the magic lies solely in the hands of a few women--the first ever to have developed magical powers.

Release date: December 5, 2008

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 482

Sample

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