The Lady (28 page)

Silent Red Masks stood along the walls, stood at every door, watching. Awaiting her will.

—It is a lie. The devils lie. The caravans brought the songs of the Northrons, the songs of the Grasslanders. I heard my father sing them. The devils use. The devils devour. They have their own ends, and the wizards were deceived as I was deceived
.

No.
She
could see, yes, how it was, she, Tu'usha, was wiser than the girl. There were lies told against her, stories in the streets. Vartu had spread them, Ulfhild the skald had scattered the seed before Zora trapped her, or let her be trapped, and she had not seen. She had her ears on the streets now, her folk who loved her still, her priests, her loyal temple guard, who could walk abroad openly in the wards that still held true to their faith, Templefoot, Greenmarket, East Ward, and Fleshmarket . . . but Fleshmarket had fallen, and now its gateway into Greenmarket was barricaded and guarded against her folk. She had priests and loyal guard who dared the rebel wards; they were too trusting, those rebel street guard and the untrained militias, when a man or a woman said they had business, or family, and they let them cross over the walls, roof to roof or through the houses that straddled broken wall. As well, there were doors, more than one, in the ravine wall. Oh, it was so easy to send a man out, to bring word in, and supplies. They thought they caged her, but they did not see she sat in a citadel, watching them strut, kings of their little dunghill, while she sharpened her axe.

—This is not the city I would have made. The folk are afraid
.

The priest should have died. The wizard should have been hers.

—Hadidu lives yet. Nour lives. Red Masks sacrificed in vain.
No satisfaction in that, no, she did not feel it was only the girl's memory it was anger she felt, yes.

It did not matter. Her champion would come, with his Red Masks and the Grasslander mercenaries turned to follow a true leader, and her Praitannec army, out of the east. They would sweep up the road from the Eastern Wall and teach the suburb it was Marakand's, and the city would learn to obey their Lady's word, yes, and to bow their rebel heads. The wizard of the Great Grass, the mistress of demons, would not be made Red Mask, no, she would be hung in a cage over the temple gate, bound impotent, and left to die over many days; the Lady would grant her water, but no food, and so her suffering would be lengthened, yes, and she would know her sin in rebelling against the Lady of Marakand. The Warden of the City would join her. The traitors of the senate would die, all the senators would die, those who defied her and those who cowered in hiding, who had let the rebels take their name from them, they would all die together, slowly, publicly, and this time there would be no forgiveness, no pretence that the Twenty Families had any say in the rule of Marakand.

The city would understand its error. Soon.

—I understand my error. I can't say I was deceived. Because I knew. I was threatened, I was afraid, and I fell. Better I had died, better I had lived possessed as Lilace the Voice lived, and kept my soul. Papa would have been strong. That Grasslander woman would never have given herself away to this. I have sinned, worse than a harlot, selling my soul to keep my body. Gurhan knows it. He sees. He weeps for me
.

Gurhan is lost and will never wake. He sees nothing. Folly to think otherwise.

The folk of the city . . . so fickle.

They had loved her, adored her, only a few weeks before, and within days, mere days of that no it was hours by nightfall they had arisen in hatred of her they had turned against her they had betrayed their love—

—Because I killed folk in the suburb. Not even outlanders, caravan mercenaries, foreign merchants. I killed Marakander folk. Not wizards, not rebels. They made me angry and I killed them and the people saw and they know I am mad
.

Vartu had done that, forced her to it. Vartu was
his
spy, sent to find her, to tear down her walls, to leave her naked to the stars where he would see her—

—Why didn't the stupid girl kill her brother, back when . . . the days are so clear in my mind, the canoe dancing up the long breast of the ocean and sliding to the dark valleys, and rising again against the sky, and the distant islands are only circling birds and a roughening of the smooth horizon of the sea. I remember—I don't want to remember. Not my memory. I would have killed him. I know myself now, weak, foolish, I'm a stupid child trapped beyond my understanding, but even as a child I would have known such a wrongness should die, and that there would be no sin in a knife in the dark
.
Why did a devil, a power even the gods of the earth fear, how did she-Tu'usha fall into this mad and broken mind of Sien-Mor's and not sweep it all away, burn her clean and rule her?

Was am I she so weak?

Because we are one and Sien-Mor is dead she burned he burnt her the fire ate her bones.

—Then why am I are we mad?

She shut her thoughts to the whisper, which was not hers, she had no doubts of herself. She was safe, safe behind walls, safe behind the barrier of the divine fire, even the Blackdog of the mountains, whoever he was had been what was he—could not pierce that veil to come at her, and if she parted it, so briefly, to let her true and chosen folk in or out of the temple on her business, that parting was always watched. The Red Masks would not let any enemy in. The Red Masks were true.

The Red Masks were too few. She could not replace them without sending them out to capture the wizards of the suburb, who had either fled to the road or joined the rebels, and if she did send them hunting wizards, they would be destroyed by the Blackdog, and her strength weakened. She could not afford that. Their interwoven wizardry was her strength.

Zora danced. The Red Masks watched. Every day, she had done so, since she sealed the temple walls behind her undying fires. The priests gathered in secret corners, out of sight, out of mind, they thought, and whispered. Temple guard sent out on patrol of her faithful wards did not all return. Deserters. Traitors.

Vartu's lies grew and grew, even though Ulfhild Vartu was lost, gone, trapped, forgotten. Storytellers retold them. The Lady sent temple guard to kill the storytellers, the street-singers, but now they were guarded by the folk themselves, the rebels, and knowing the temple sought them only made more gather to hear them.

The streets said that Red Masks had burned down a house in Sunset Ward, where a hidden priest of Ilbialla had still lived and served his people, but the priest and his child had escaped, though his wife had perished. Proof they told lies against her. Hadidu's wife Beccan had been long dead. Zora had not killed her, kind, sharp Beccan, who had let her help make pastries in the kitchen of the Doves. They sang hymns in praise of Ilbialla again, Ilbialla, goddess of the well in Sunset Ward, goddess whose care had been Sunset and Riverbend. A kindly goddess. A humble goddess, who did not take from her folk. Like Gurhan on the hill, who had dug out earthquake victims with his own hands. Where had the Lady been, that night? Where had her priests been?

The Red Mask priests were no priests, the city said, and the old order of the yellow priests grew fat on taxes and tithes and tolls meant for the public good of the city. The rebels whispered everywhere. The folk listened. It was because they were hungry. There was still food, if you had money. She must remember to issue a ration from the temple granary. They had said it was empty, but that would be a lie. Her faithful wards would praise the Lady for it. The mountain villages sent nothing, had sent nothing even when she had held the Fleshmarket gate. The rebels had warned them, threatened them, they feared demons, or they were traitors, defiant of Marakand, they were—and the manors of the south road and the southern foothills, and the poor, proud, free villages of the Malagru were all denied her.

The Voice was dead. The Lady had ridden in procession through the city after thirty years of hiding. They had adored her, worshipped her, but it had been devil's magic. They were deceived. They knew it. “I knew it at the time,” each one said of himself alone, “but everyone else . . .”

She must remember there were those who held true. She must not be ungrateful. A goddess was not. The faithful senators were besieged in the Family Feizi mansion in Silvergate Ward, while the Families appointed traitors and false senators, men and women her Voice had long ago ordered disinherited from their Families, to their new senate, which perched like a flock of sparrows on the palace steps, pretending it listened to the spokesmen of the guilds and the folk of the wards. They had even named five senators of the suburb, which was not a part of the law of Marakand they claimed to embody. But her senate, the faithful remnant—they did nothing but send furtive messages, asking for temple guard to destroy their enemies.

Useless. They would die in the cages with the rest.

Liars and traitors and fools. She would burn the city and give it to her folk of Over-Malagru, settle them there, true folk, and turn the survivors of the city out to learn to till the fields. She would—

If she shut her eyes, she might be back dancing with the Voice in the pulpit and the secret honouring of Gurhan in her mind.

—Help me. Find me. Save me
.

She was become the goddess of the city. She danced to her own glory.

—Do you hear me? This voice, my Voice, not your own?

The sharp, water-on-stones music swirled and leapt, carrying her with it, then settled into its final coiling round, slower, softer, repeating, stretched out, ceased, and she held the final pose, head flung back, daylight red against closed eyelids. She could hear the man's breathing. He was old. The afternoon was hot. He had always been kind to the young dancers. If his hands shook, that was mortal frailty and to be pitied. She should, in turn, be kind. To turn him out into this besieged ward, out of the temple that had been his home since before the earthquake, would be cruelty unbefitting the Lady of Marakand.

“That's enough,” she said. “Thank you.” She found a smile for him, watched, with satisfaction, the answering smile, grateful, awed, devoted. Yes, he was hers. She should treasure him. He served for love.

Zora wrapped a white woollen shawl over herself against the sudden chill of sweating skin, and because her silk robe clung, sticky, too revealing even before the old priest, certainly too revealing for the bowing younger man in the entryway, in the darkness between the pillars. A lieutenant of the temple guard. Ashir had come that morning with a plan, a plea, and she had said—had said yes, yes? She had. She remembered. He had interrupted her meditations on the failure to hold the Fleshmarket Gate, the treachery of the street-guard captain there, her failure to take Nour, her morning dancing, she had forbidden them the hall, she dwelt there alone, and priestesses brought her water and cracked wheat, and that was all she took, not even oil to the wheat, or mountain butter, because she must be pure, she must be clean, she must be holy as she waited . . .

She had told Ashir, yes, because he was so humble, so grovelling, so devout. He grieved for his wife Rahel, strange though that was, as if despite their long years of estrangement and enmity he had lost a part of himself when the Red Masks threw her down the stairs to the well, and he grieved for his idea of the Lady, and in his fear he must serve her, must prove himself the most faithful, the most necessary.

And perhaps he could do what she did not dare risk Red Masks to do, and bring her the Grasslander wizard, against whom Nour was nothing, a weak child.

Besides, the Grasslander was a danger.

The rebels nipped and gnawed at the bindings on the gods. They had no understanding, the demons of the earth knew nothing of such things, and the merely human wizards, even this wizard, with her magic that jumbled Grasslander and Nabbani practices, could not see, could not know. The Voice had ordered the books to be burnt, any that might hint, and besides she Tu'usha had set words of her own, words Sien-Mor alone could never have commanded, words the Red Masks would burn if they dared to speak, had they the will and the tongue to do so, into the bindings. The merely human could do nothing. But their nipping and gnawing irritated her, and the wizard who led them might make herself a queen over Marakand, a warlord of the Grass. She must be stopped. Most of all, she must be stopped, because she spoke of Gurhan the god of the Hill, and his name on her tongue was wrong. He was her god, Zora's god, hers, he should have been hers, she should be the one to praise and plead, and she should have found wizards who could nip and gnaw at her the spells, she should have known the gods were not dead, she should have Papa should have they should have tried they should have found this wizard called the demons of the earth to Marakand sought foreign gods and powers asked them not sent the girl the child to the temple alone and scared and spying for dead men who would never hear her words for a dead cause for—it should have been Zora, there on the Palace Hill, adored by the folk, their freedom, their warrior and wizard their champion who showed the true face of the Red Masks and the madness of the Voice and the Lady's lies to the folk, it should have been she at Hadidu's side, she in whose words Nour placed his trust, she the priest of Gurhan serving her god not an outlander a mercenary . . .

She wanted the Grasslander wizard dead. She wanted that mirror of may-be might-have-been dead. She wanted no wizardry set against her Red Masks, when her beautiful champion rode home. He might, of all of them, kill a demon, yes, at his side she would ride against the demons herself, she could be warrior, she had been. She would not be afraid, with him at her side, the girl's fear would not take her, swamp her, make her forget she was Tu'usha, who had fought the allied chieftains of the Great Grass at her brother's side, who had duelled the chief of the Blue Banners and his wizards—

“What is it?” she demanded of the guardsman, and he bowed yet again. He was not in his red tunic but dressed like a caravaneer in dusty, baggy trousers, high soft boots, and a striped coat with square pockets and a hood. He looked quite convincingly a man of the road, save for his short hair and shaven chin and the smooth, clean nails. But the hood would hide his lack of braids, nobody would look at his nails, and some of the caravaneers were shaved at the baths so soon as they came to a town. Who was he? Surey, yes, junior lieutenant of the second company. The officers changed so often, lately. She did not bother to remember their names. But Surey, she should remember. He was Ashir's favourite, his errand-runner, his own right hand, of late. When had that happened? She should not allow her priests to form their own factions, to suborn her guard. She should send Surey back to his captain and his company. But tomorrow. Ashir might yet need him tonight.