City of Sorcery (43 page)

There was a circle of robed figures around a fire; dark hooded figures, gathered around something that lay at their center. Magda could not see what it was, nor see what they were doing to it; only that there was a sound like the screaming of hawks, and with every cry of the hawks there was a pitiable crying, so that for a moment Magda thought in horror,
it is Shaya, they have my little Shaya there, they are hurting her
. The fire at the center shot up and surged high, and Magda could see that it was no child, but the naked figure of a woman, lying bound in their circle.

Magda tried to rush forward to her, but it seemed that she was held in place by invisible bonds; chains like the chains of a Dry-Town woman.

“For the love of God, help me, Lorne! You got me into this, now you have a duty to get me out of it!
”

It was Lexie’s voice. She had known all along somehow that it was Lexie lying there helpless, and that she had been responsible for the act or omission that had landed Lexie there.

She struggled against her bonds, but the hawks went on screaming. She could see what they were doing now; with every surge upward of the flame, the hawks swirled, borne on the currents of fire, and swooped over Lexie’s inert figure, and with every downward swoop they tore into her naked flesh, carrying away great dripping hunks of blood and skin, while Lexie screamed, terrible screams that reminded Magda horribly of the time she and Jaelle had been marooned in a cave with rising floodwater, and Jaelle had miscarried Peter Haldane’s child. She had been delirious, not fully aware what was happening much of the time, and in her delirium she had screamed like that, as if she were being torn asunder, and Magda had not been able to help her. They had come so close to dying there.

And now it was Lexie screaming. And it is my fault; she was competing with me, and that was how she got into this.

Again Magda strained against her bonds to rush forward to Lexie, but there was a curious blue fire in the air, and in that evil glow she could see the face of the black sorceress Aquilara.

“Yes, you always want to ease your own conscience by being so ready to help other people. But now it is your task to learn detachment; that her troubles are not of your making, and that she must take the consequences of her own actions,” Aquilara explained callously. It sounded so rational, so reasonable, and yet the screams tore at her as if every stroke of the razor talons and cruel bloody beaks fell on her own heart.

“Yes, that is what they are doing,” Aquilara went on explaining. “They will tear and tear at that false and sentimental conscience of yours which you think of as your heart, until it is gone from your breast.” And Magda, looking down, saw a great bleeding hole opening in her chest, from which a screaming hawk carried away a piece of flesh…

No. Think. This is a dream
. Slowly a sense of reality penetrated Magda’s mind; slowly, slowly. She felt herself pull free, free of the invisible bonds, raised her arms, jerked herself up, and found herself sitting bolt upright in her cold sleeping bag. Her heart was still pounding with the nightmare. She heard Jaelle cry out, and reached over to shake her freemate awake.

“Shaya, Shaya, are you having a nightmare too?”

“Zandru’s hells,” Jaelle whispered, “it was a dream, a dream, I was only dreaming - Aquilara’s sorceresses. They were torturing Rafaella, and they had chained me up to Rafi’s big
rryl
and were making me play ballads on it, and she was screaming - ah, how she was screaming, like a girl of fourteen in childbirth - and the demons all kept yelling, ‘Louder, play louder, so we cannot hear her scream… ‘ ” She shuddered and buried her head against Magda’s shoulder.

Magda stroked Jaelle’s soft hair, comprehending what had happened. Even the themes in the nightmares they had shared had been all but identical.

She wondered if Camilla and the others were suffering nightmare too. She was almost afraid to try to sleep again. “I thought this place was guarded,” she said, “that even the names of that witch and her people could not be spoken here… “

“I think that was only while we were sick and exhausted,” Jaelle ventured. “Now that we are well again, and there are decisions to be made, nightmares can move in our minds, those demons - ” she hesitated, said tentatively “… torturing us?”

But Magda could not attend to the question. A wave of horror swept through her, making her physically ill with its impact.

She was lying on the ground, chained hand and foot at the center of a ring of robed and hooded figures… no; they were men, scarred bandits, wielding knives, naked, their gross hairy bodies and erect phalluses touching her everywhere, intruding into her everywhere, and they were like razors, like knives shearing off her breasts, invading her womb, tearing her womanhood from her. One of them, an evil hawk-faced man with a scar, held up the body of a naked, bleeding child, a fetus half-formed, shrieking
, “Here is the Heir to Hastur that she may never bear!”
Slowly, slowly, the face of the bandit changed, became, not gross and scarred, but noble, pale, detached, the face of the sorceress Leonie… No; it was a man’s face. The face of the regent, Lorill Hastur
. “How can I acknowledge as my own child a girl who has been so treated, so scarred?”
he asked coldly, and turned away
…

“Magda!” Jaelle clutched at her in horror; Magda freed herself from the terrible paralysis of nightmare. Once before during the waking of her own
laran
she had become a part of Camilla’s nightmares. A dreadful time; and the worst of it had been Camilla’s horror and shame, that she could not barricade these memories and horrors from her friend and lover.

She bent over Camilla and shook her awake.

“You were crying out in your sleep, love. Were you having a bad dream?”

Magda had seen this before: how Camilla struggled up from the paralysis of terror. With shaking hands, she wiped the sweat of nightmare from her face, fighting to compose herself.

“Aye,” she whispered at last. “My thanks for waking me, oath-sisters.” She knew, and she knew they knew, what she had been dreaming. But she could trust them to ask no questions, and she was grateful.

The next morning, Cholayna’s color was good, and her breathing so easy that the women who came to bring the breakfast porridge dismantled the steam tent and took it away. Cholayna sat up and dressed herself, all except her boots, saying she felt perfectly well.

But Magda knew this raised again the question they had been avoiding while Cholayna’s life was in danger, and she found herself dreading the debate. Cholayna could face no more rough weather and exposure.

Yet how likely was it that she would agree to go back, and could she turn over the search for Lexie to Vanessa and Magda?
Would
she? Magda doubted it.

So they carefully avoided the subject, and Magda felt the enforced silence fraying away at her nerves. It was a fine bright day, and Vanessa went out to walk along the cliffs, trying to scan out a route ahead. Magda walked with her a little way.

“Tell me, Vanessa, did you have bad dreams last night?”

Vanessa nodded, but she turned her face away, her cheeks crimson, and did not volunteer to say what she had dreamed, and Magda did not ask. They were under attack again; the Sisterhood of the Wise was most effectively guarded by the Sisterhood of the Dark or so it seemed… or could it be that the two were inextricably intertwined? Her own nightmare and Jaelle’s had come from their own inner demons and flaws, not from anything anyone had imposed on them from the outside.

But Camilla? This was no nightmare based on something she had done wrong, no background of mistake or cruelty or omission coming back to haunt her, as with Jaelle and Magda, but something done to an innocent child who had no way deserved any of it…

Jaelle had asked the unanswerable question:
Why do the wicked flourish
? But even the
cristoforos
had no answer to that question; they framed the question itself in poetic language and called it a mystery of their God.

Vanessa was involved at the moment not in philosophical speculations, but practical realities.

“We’ll have to go on from here, on foot. A couple of chervines might make it, but I can’t imagine taking a horse over those trails.”

“Do you think Cholayna can make it?”

“Hellfire, Lorne, I’m no mind reader. But she’ll insist on trying, and I don’t think I’d be able to stop her. You want to try convincing her? No? I thought not.”

When they went back to the building where they had spent the last few nights, Camilla was on her feet, bowing to someone in the lee of the fireplace. Magda and Vanessa came in, and Jaelle said, as if completing an introduction she had begun, “and these are our companions Vanessa ryn Erin and Margali n’ha Ysabet.”

Magda came around the fire and saw a small, slight young woman, with her hair in a long braid down her back, as the countrywomen around Caer Donn wore it. She wore a simple knee-length tunic, dark saffron-color, embroidered at neck and sleeves with a childish pattern of leaves and flowers, and simple unadorned brown riding breeches. Otherwise she wore no jewelry or ornament except for a plain copper ring in her left ear.

She said, “My name is Kyntha.” She spoke the ordinary
casta
of the hill country, but slowly and carefully.

“I have been sent for, and I must go soon. Tell me why you have come into this country, so far beyond Nevarsin?”

Jaelle leaned forward and whispered so softly that no one else could hear, “This is the woman Rakhaila told me about.” Aloud she said, “We came after friends of ours. Now we have cause to think they have met with catastrophe, or captivity.”

Kyntha said nothing, and Jaelle dug into a pocket and pulled out Rafaelle’s letter, which had started them on their travels.

“I do not know if it is the custom in your country for women to read and write - “

“I can read, yes,” said Kyntha, stretching out her hand for the letter. She read it slowly and carefully, her lips moving as if it were in some other language.

Then she said, “What do you want of me? If it is the Sisterhood of the Wise that your friend seeks, I think you know she failed before she started.”

“Can you help us rescue her?” Jaelle asked.

“No.” It was flat, final, left no room for discussion or argument, and had more impact than a dozen protestations or excuses.

“Nevertheless, for the sake of our friendship, I must attempt it,” said Jaelle.

“If you must, you must. But beware of being dragged into the causes which she set in motion. And if you save her from the effects of her own folly, what then? Will you safeguard her all her life lest she fall again into error?”

Vanessa began, “If she has trespassed unwittingly on your sacred Sisterhood, would you punish her for ignorance?”

“Does the snow punish the child who strays into it without cloak or hood or boots? Is the child less frozen for that?”

That was, Magda thought, another conversation-stopper. At last Jaelle asked, “Can you help us find the way to the City where the Sisterhood dwells?”

Kyntha said, even more deliberately:

“If I knew the way to that place, I should be sworn never to tell. I think you know this much. Why then do you ask?”

“Because I know that there are some who have come and gone,” Jaelle said, “and why should I look for a key to a strange lock when, perhaps, knocking politely on the door will gain me entrance?”

Kyntha smiled fleetingly for the first time.

“Some have gained entrance there. It is not for me to say you would not be welcomed. Who told you of that place?”

“My foster-mother, for one,” Jaelle said. “Though I never thought I would seek it. But now it seems to me that the time has come.”

“And your companions? Do you speak for them?”

Jaelle opened her mouth, then shut it again. Finally she said, “No. I will let them speak for themselves.”

“Good.” Kyntha looked at each of them in turn, but there was a perceptible silence. At last Cholayna said, “I have no wish to trespass upon your City. My interest is in one of the young women mentioned in the letter.”