City of Sorcery (30 page)

“Only to come after her as fast as I could manage,” Jaelle said, “but there was another message which Arlinda gave me.” But after this she was silent so long that Vanessa finally asked belligerently, “Well? Is this some great secret?”

“Not at all,” Jaelle said at last. “Tonight, so Arlinda told me, one will come, supposedly, from that place, and she will speak with us. And I could tell, from the way Arlinda spoke, that she was afraid. I cannot imagine why, if the Sisterhood is as benevolent as I have always heard, a woman like Arlinda would have anything to fear from her. What Arlinda has managed to do, in a city like Nevarsin, is all but unbelievable. Why should the Sisterhood frighten her?” Jaelle poured herself some of the spiced wine, and sipped at it, then shoved it away.

“So, we are to be tried,” said Camilla. “That is a part of every search, Shaya, love. The Goddess knows you have nothing to fear. Do you truly think they will find us wanting?”

“Oh, how am I to know that, how do I know what they require?” Jaelle munched cold rabbithorn, as uninterested as if it were packaged field rations, her face stolid and closed-in, betraying nothing. “They will judge me in the name of the Goddess and I do not know what to say to them.”

Camilla said, and to Magda she sounded fiercely defensive, “You are what you are,
chiya
, like all of us, and none of us can be otherwise. As for me, I have no more reverence for these women of the Dark Sisterhood than for their Goddess, who thrust me unasked and uninvited into a world which has treated me as I, who am no more than human, would not have treated the meanest of creatures. If their Goddess wishes me evil, I will demand of her why, since when it befell me I was too young to have done anything to deserve it; if she wishes me well, I will ask why she calls herself a Goddess when she was powerless to prevent evil. And when I have heard her reply, then I will judge her as she or her representatives think to judge me!” She poured herself another glass of wine. “Nor should you fear anything from these women who presume to speak in Her name.”

“I don’t fear,” Jaelle said slowly. “I wonder why Arlinda fears, that is all.”

Cholayna had spread out her sleeping bag - the single one of Terran make - on the floor, and, using her saddlebag and her pack as a pillow, was leaning back, writing in a little book. She had, Magda thought, admirably recovered the habits of a field agent. Vanessa was meticulously combing and sectioning her hair for braiding.

Magda was debating following either example, and had started to get her sleeping bag out of its pack when one of the young apprentices came in, carrying an embroidered leather hassock, an elaborate guest-seat. Behind the girl came Arlinda herself. Although Magda expected that Arlinda would take that seat, she did not; she backed against the wall and sat down there, legs crossed beneath her heavy canvas apron, her brawny arms akimbo, bristling all over with expectation.

Then a woman came into the room, and they all looked up at her.

She was not exceptionally tall, but she seemed somehow to take up more space than she physically occupied in the room. It was a trick of presence; Magda had met a few people who knew how to use it, but they were seldom women. She had dark-auburn hair, twisted into a tight coil at the back of her head and fastened there with a copper pin or so. She was dressed in clothing of rather better quality than anyone Magda had seen at the baths or in the leather-worker’s shop so far, and it fitted her well, something unusual for women in this chilly city of
cristoforos
where women were expected to efface themselves. Her eyes were pale gray, looking out with an imperious commanding presence from under her piled hair.

She took the elaborate seat quite as if it was the expected thing. Magda glanced at Arlinda and noticed that the brawny woman’s arms showed signs of goose-flesh, as if she were cold.

What in the name of all the gods on all the planets in or out of the Empire has
she
got to be afraid of
? Magda had not believed anything could make this old Amazon - better fitting the name than any Renunciate - afraid.

“I am the
leronis
Acquilara,” she announced. She looked them over, one by one. “Will you tell me your names?”

With one accord they waited for Jaelle to speak.

“I am Jaelle n’ha Melora,” Jaelle said slowly. “These are my companions.” One by one she repeated their names. “We are from Thendara Guild-house in that city.”

Acquilara heard them without motion, not a flicker of muscle moving in her face or a flicker of her eyes. An imposing trick, Magda knew. She wondered how old the woman was. She could not guess. Her face was less lined than Camilla’s; yet the boniness of her fingers, the texture of her skin, told Magda this was not a young woman. When she moved, it was with an air of complete deliberation, as if she moved only when she had decided to move and never for any other reason.

She swiveled her head to Cholayna and said, “I have known a woman with your skin color. She was poisoned in childhood with a metallic substance. It is so with you, is it not.” It was not a question but a statement. She sounded very self-satisfied, as if waiting for them to acknowledge her cleverness in solving such a riddle.

But Cholayna spoke with equal composure. “It is not. I have known such cases of heavy-metal poisoning, but my skin was this way at birth; I am from a far country where all men and women are like me.”

The eyes of the
leronis
flickered and jolted abruptly to Cholayna again. Her face was so motionless otherwise that Magda knew they had really taken her by surprise.
We were meant to be impressed and we spoiled that for her
. Arrogance was a part of the woman. Somehow Magda had expected that envoys from the mysterious Sisterhood would be like Marisela, benevolent and unassuming.

Was this some form of test? The words formed in her mind without volition. She looked at her freemate, trying to send her a warning;
Be careful, Jaelle
!

But she knew Jaelle had not received the warning, her brain felt dead, the air in the room an empty void that would not carry thought.
So we have had a demonstration of her powers, if not the one she expected
.

Arlinda was still cowering by the wall, and Magda looked at the old Amazon with displeasure, not at Arlinda for her fear, but at the arrogant
leronis
for imposing it. Why should an envoy from the Sisterhood try to terrify them? Suddenly Magda remembered the old woman of her dream in Ravensmark Pass. But she was more afraid of this Aquilara than she had been of that old woman.

Acquilara began again.

“I have heard that you are searching for a certain City.”

Jaelle did not waste words. “Have you been sent to take us there?”

Magda knew, without being sure how she knew, that Jaelle had displeased the woman. Aquilara shifted her position; after her stillness this motion was as surprising as if she had leaped up and yelled aloud.

“Do you know what you are asking? There are dangers - “

“If we were afraid of the dangers,” Jaelle retorted, “we would not have come so far.”

“You think you know something of dangers? I tell you, girl, the dangers you have met on the road - banshees, bandits, all the demons of the high passes - they are nothing, I tell you, nothing beside the dangers you still must face before you are taken into that City. It is not I who impose that test on you, believe me. It is the Goddess I serve. You call upon that Goddess, you Renunciates. But will you dare to face Her, if She should come?”

“I have no reason to fear her,” Jaelle said.

“You think you know something of fear?” Acquilara looked at Jaelle with contempt, and turned to Camilla.

“And you. You are seeking that City? What for? This is a City of women. How shall you, who have renounced your womanhood, be admitted there?”

Camilla’s pale face flushed with anger, and Magda suddenly thought of the Training Sessions in the Guild-house, when the young women, newly admitted to the Guild, were incited to anger and put on the defensive, to force them to clarify their real thoughts; to get beyond what they had been taught as young girls that they ought to think and feel. Were they being subjected to some such process now, and why? And why at the hands of this woman, this
leronis
, if she was a
leronis
at all?

“Why do you say I have renounced my womanhood, when you find me in the company of my sisters of the Guild-house?”

Acquilara seemed to sneer.

“Where else could you swagger and play the man so well? Do you think I cannot read you as a woodsman reads the tracks in the first snow? Do you dare deny that for years you lived among men as a man, and now you think you can become a woman again? Your heart is a man’s heart - have you not proven that by taking a woman lover?”

Magda watched Camilla’s face, angry and pained. Surely this woman was a
leronis
, or how could she strike so precisely at Camilla’s defenses? Yet she, who had been Camilla’s lover so long, knew better than anyone alive how unjust it was. Sexless as Camilla’s mutilated body might seem, the body of the
emmasca
, Magda knew better than any other that Camilla was all woman.

“You, who have denied the Goddess in yourself, how will you justify yourself to Her?”

Camilla was on her feet, and her hand was gripping her knife. Magda wanted to jump up, physically prevent her from whatever rash thing she might contemplate; yet she sat as if paralyzed, unable to move a muscle to warn or prevent her friend.

“I will justify myself to the Goddess when she justifies herself to me,” Camilla said. “And I will justify myself to her, not to her envoy. If you were sent to guide us to that City, then guide us. But don’t venture to test us; that is for her, not her lackeys.” She stood over the
leronis
, and for a moment it was a contest of arrogance.

Magda was never sure what happened next. There was a flash, something like blue fire, and Camilla reeled backward; she fell, rather than sat down, on her sleeping bag.

“You think you know the Goddess,” stated Aquilara, and now her voice was all contempt. “You are like the peasant women who pray to the bright Evanda to make their garden bloom, and their dairy animals to drop their calves without blight, and to bring them handsome virile lovers and healthy babies. And they pray to the sheltering Avarra to ease their pains of birth and death. But they know nothing of the Goddess. She is the Dark One, cruel and beyond the comprehension of mortal women, and her worship is secret.”

“If it is secret,” Vanessa said - all this time she had sat silent on her sleeping bag, listening but not speaking - “why do you tell us about it?”

Aquilara rose abruptly to her feet.

She said, “You girls - ” the term was frankly one of contempt now, and included even the mature Cholayna in its scorn - “you think you will use the Goddess? The truth is that she will use you in ways you cannot even begin to contemplate. She is cruel. Her only truth is Necessity. But like all of us, you are grist for her mill, and she will grind you up in it. Your friend saw this, and she has begged a place for you. Be ready when she calls you!”

She turned her back without looking round, and strode out of the room. The apprentice picked up the seat without a word and followed her.

Arlinda was still cowering against the wall in an agony of fear.

“You should not have angered her,” she whispered, “she is very powerful! Oh, you should not have made her angry.”

“I don’t care if she’s the Goddess herself,” Jaelle said, brusquely, “she rubbed me the wrong way. But if she’s got Lexie and Rafaella, we’ve got to play along with her, at least for a while.”

Vanessa had resumed combing her hair and was now braiding it into half a dozen small braids, for tidiness. “Do you think she has Lexie and Rafaella, then?”

Jaelle turned to Arlinda. “Did Rafi go with her?”

Arlinda shook her head and mumbled, “Nay, how am I to know of her comings and goings? She is a
leronis
, a sorceress, whatever she wills, so she will do… “

Magda was shocked, even horrified. Arlinda had seemed so strong, so hearty and tough, and now she was mumbling as if she were a senile old woman. Soon after, she kissed Jaelle good night and went away, and the women of the party were left alone.