The Lady (41 page)

“Hah,” Mikki said.

Rather more than what he had intended. Someone was bound to notice that.

He was no damned wizard, to blast the gates out of his path, but knocking did not seem likely to gain them admittance. Barred or locked? Mikki reared back and smashed his shoulder against them, once and again, and the second time they lurched inward. Without needing to discuss it, they shoved them wide. Holla-Sayan was dizzy, pulled off balance, vision still filled with a wash of copper light and hearing with a howling, empty wind. He went cautiously down the dark slope of the tunnel with Mikki at his side, but nothing came to oppose him, not so much as a trembling priest. Lakkariss was easy in his hand, but the air was very cold. It smoked like a river in a winter's dawn, and the fog wrapped tendrils around his arm.

The remnants of two Red Masks lay one to either side of the end of the passageway, dirty red robes, swords, staves of some pale wood, as threatening as any cowherd's stick and no more.

He could smell the devil: old sweat, unwashed skin, illness, metal and stone. And stone-dust over all. Timbers burnt, several buildings had fallen and were burning from whatever kitchen fires or lamps had been lit within. No one gathered to fight the flames. There were folk about, he could smell them, but they hid. Shadows scurried in the corners of his eyes, pale, ghostlike things, but they were living folk. Nothing, to Lakkariss. Ephemeral creatures of a lesser world. The great Hall of the Dome, where once when he was new to Marakand he had gone to see the pretty young dancers in a public worship, was a pile of rubble. The courtyards, as they followed paths that way, were littered with bodies, mostly ash and bone, as if fire had rained down from the sky on a gathered crowd.

A white-robed figure moved atop the rubble, swaying, twisting, feet light and sure on the shifting stones that grated and tumbled clattering beneath her.

A column of light and smoke, nacreous shimmer against the rising sun. She saw him, too, and stood in her dance as if frozen.

The air was very cold.

“Mikki . . .” He couldn't look away.
Moth went into the well, looking for the true Lady
.

I've been to the well. I found Ivah and Nour. You were there
.

I can—not smell—just—far away. In the well. Within the Lady.
Thought slowed, alien. The dog had no words of its own.

It wasn't he the devil watched. It was the sword.

You'll have to go, Mikki. Call her somehow. Make her hear. Take Lakkariss
.

You need—

No!
He could feel himself falling, feel the sword's edge, piercing, to sever soul from soul, the blade turned against him in his own hand and the false Lady's fingers closing the leather-wrapped grip.
Take it out of that one's reach
.

The dust-heavy air was coppery-sullen and lit with streaks of silver light, blurs and swirls. There was ice, and the wind howled, pulling him. Pressure on his wrist, and the world was gold again, and grey with stone, white plastered walls and blowing ash. He was on his knees, and Mikki had taken his wrist in his jaws.

I see what you mean, yes
.

Did she—

She, nothing. You were starting to, ah, dissolve, I suppose, into a sort of cloud of light and smoke? Very dark. Like a slow thunderstorm. Wonder what that says about the state of your souls? Hold onto me and sheathe the damned thing, then
.

The demon let him go, and grounded, forehead pressed against the bear's flank, Holla-Sayan shoved Lakkariss home, hauled the baldric off again. Frost shook away from his hand, sparkling.

“I envy your hands now, bloody unnatural beast that you are,” Mikki said. “Give it here.”

He wrapped the belt about the scabbard, watching the devil over Mikki's humped shoulder. She still stood. No fire gathered about her, no indrawing of power prickled along his spine. Hands hidden. She didn't know what they did.

Run
, he said, and went over Mikki's back as the bear snatched the sword. The dog was faster, and making for the devil, weaving through courtyards and over ruined garden walls, up the mountain of rubble.

She swung to face him, arms raised, and lightning washed over him, but he flung it aside as if he'd raised an arm. Maybe he had no body, maybe he was light, smoke, the fire of another world, and maybe she was a column of light and liquid flame, but she smelt like an ill and unwashed woman. His teeth met in her shoulder and as he struck he flipped and threw her.

She landed on her feet with a sword in her hand, came down on him silent, teeth bared in pain or ecstasy, and then she was beside him, where she had not been, and he had not seen her move. Her sword was real enough and so was the slash in his flank. He rolled away and came up on two feet, sabre in hand, circling, drawing her so her back was to the Dome of the Well. He could hold her off longer so, maybe. Maybe. If she would be drawn to fight sword to sword and play him a little while, before she struck to kill.

CHAPTER XXV

They rode only a couple of miles from the
dinaz
before Ghu called a halt. Ahjvar was falling asleep and jerking awake with coughing. Deyandara couldn't understand why she wasn't in as bad a state, or worse, but the time when the air seemed to freeze her lungs slipped like water through her mind, past and away, nightmare memory, no more. She eyed the pale dog, running ahead. A demon, maybe? It seemed to belong to Ghu. And Catairanach had called him a spirit, not a man. He seemed like a man when he embraced her, all smoke and old stale sweat and horses, needing a bath as badly as the rest of them. And how had she been able to smell him at all? More proof the dog—it had to have been the dog—was something more than what it seemed. Ghu's face had left a smear of blood on hers. A spirit should be—she didn't know what. Shaped of air and light, the servant of some god or goddess of the earth, sent—what, out of Nabban to follow a cursed and undying assassin? To rescue, three times and hopefully she would not need rescuing a fourth, an unregarded Praitannec princess? The gods of Nabban should have greater cares.

But there were halfling gods in the world, the songs said, human children of gods or goddesses, wizards, some of them, or seers, or ordinary men and women who spoke truth and saw more of the shape of things, and grew into wisdom that shared, a little, in their divine parent's nature. What Hyllau should have been.

Ghu led them in under the eaves of a walnut grove, a royal woods, it had been. There was a spring there, godless, no more than a trickle, running away between green mints and bulrushes, but he went to it as if he had known it was there. Ahjvar drank with his face in the water, drank as if he had not seen water in a month, and rolled over among the roots with his arm over his face and his sword flung yards away. He said something to Ghu in the true Nabbani she couldn't follow, and Ghu answered with what seemed reluctance. Something about waking up, she thought. She drank almost as greedily and moved down the channel to the next small pool to wash herself. Ghu came and prodded her shoulder, then took her arm from the sling and cut the immobilizing bandages off. It hurt, but it felt better that way, too.

“Don't use it much for a while,” he cautioned.

“Yes. Ghu—” She couldn't ask him about the dog. She knew it had breathed into her; she had felt it, felt her lungs eased, but it sounded so strange to say it.
Did you know your dog was a demon, or something?
“Are you a physician, too?” That sounded like it was a joke, like she was making fun of him, when he'd said he was a slave and a groom.

He laughed. “No. But I've fallen off a lot of horses.”

“You?”

“How do you think I learnt not to fall off of horses? Go to sleep, lady. I'll watch.”

“You look not as bad as Ahjvar, and that's all. You should rest, too.”

“Later.”

“Wake me up after a little. I can at least keep watch.”

“You can keep watch. No ‘at least.' But later. Sleep now. Not,” he added, “too close to Ahjvar.” His eyes grew solemn, tired. Sad. He was years older than her, she thought. Strange. She couldn't think he was a boy at all now, even when she tried to see under the smoke and the blood and the grey weariness. She nodded and lay down where the ground was dry and the sound of the running water a comfort. The black-and-tan dog, she saw, had gone to lie by Ahjvar, head on its paws, eyes closed but still alert. Guarding, or guarding against.

The pale dog curled into a ball, tail over its nose, but it opened half an eye to watch her a moment, and shut it again. It looked as though it were winking.

Deyandara woke with a jerk at noise, the sudden roaring of the wind in the leaves as if a great river rushed by, creak of branches bending, both dogs barking and the horses whinnying. She was on her feet before she was fully awake, the small knife she had stolen in the hall in her hand, for what good it would do. Ahjvar was on his feet, his sword drawn. Ghu stood by a little fire and a pair of steaming pots with a dog to either side, but his arms were folded. He looked skywards. Leaves, twigs, tore and spun. There was cloud lit by streaks of fire, white like lightning, red like blood and glowing coals, pouring down before him. And then a woman, standing legs braced, hands on hips, her hair, long and black, still rising and twisting with the wind.

“
You!
” she hissed. “You
buried
me.”

“Yes,” said Ghu, and caught Ahjvar as he would have put himself between Ghu and the woman. Wizard. Lin.

“Lin!” Deyandara said, and then, uncertain. “Your hair—”

“Yes, yes, really, child, you need to learn to see what matters. You should have said, long ago, ‘You're not half so old as you look.' Which would have been more perceptive and less true. And why aren't you with Marnoch?”

“You left me. You crept away in the night. Ketsim's men attacked—” She could hear the tears starting in her voice and shut her lips, furious.

“I was on my way to Marakand, to find the master of the Red Masks.”

“The Red Masks,” Ghu said softly, “are free and gone. You gave your word to protect Deyandara.”

He hardly ever used her name. Ahjvar had shifted off to the side, where he had more room to move. As if he were Ghu's spearman. Lin hardly seemed to notice him.

“I would have done so. The Red Masks are—were—the keystone of the Marakander occupation. Without them, do you think any rabble of Grasslanders and city thief-takers could hold a
duina
of Praitan?” But Lin's anger seemed to have evaporated with the cloud and died with the wind. She sighed, giving him a long, long look, after which she glanced aside at Ahjvar at last, frowning. Then turned to Deyandara, not with her usual amused, superior smile, but solemn, and put her hands together, bowing.

“I'm sorry, my lady,” she said. “I judged my duty badly. I'm grateful there were others on hand able to save you from my—impulse.” To Ghu she bowed even lower. “I am not,” she said, “become so wise or so patient as I had thought, it seems.” She looked again at Ahjvar, her frown deepening, and said something to Ghu in Imperial Nabbani.

Ahjvar made some retort, and Ghu smiled. Lin looked a little abashed and gave Ahjvar a brief bow before walking away, with an again-imperious jerk of her chin at Ghu.

He followed. What man wouldn't, Deyandara thought. But he touched Ahjvar's hand as he passed.

“I made coffee,” he said. “There's soup. Eat. My lady, see he does.”

Ahjvar scowled after them and looked as if he would follow. The dogs did, hackles bristling. But then he sighed and sank down on his heels by the fire. “Deya, what is she?”

“A wizard,” Deyandara answered. “My tutor. But that—” she pointed vaguely skyward, through the leaves. “You saw? That wasn't wizardry. Was it?”

“Stories,” he said. “The emperor's wizards of Nabban could tame the winds. Maybe. But I'd never heard they turned themselves to smoke and lightning.”

The coffee was boiling over in froth, and he just sat, head hanging, so Deyandara wrapped the end of her sooty shawl around the handle of the pot and took it off the fire. The other pot was soup, or at least, what looked like chunks of breadroot, famine food, boiling with some very small joints of meat. Squirrel? Two squirrels? It was cooked, whatever it was, and hot, and since Ghu and Lin were having what looked like an intense conversation away among the trees, she rummaged in his bundle and found not only a very old-looking scroll-case but a carved wooden cup for the coffee, a wooden bowl, and horn spoon. She served out about half the soup and gave it to Ahjvar, who seemed only interested in the coffee, wrapping his hands around it, eyes closed, but he did look less grey after he had drunk it. The burns on his arms and face were already healing. He ate when she told him to, throwing the bones of whatever small beast it had been into the fire, and his hands stopped shaking. He didn't look at her but at the flames.

She had to speak. She couldn't ride on with him, not knowing.

“Catairanach said . . . but I didn't believe her. She said—is she mad?”

“Not mad,” he said slowly. “I don't think mad. That thing in Marakand is mad. Catairanach is merely obsessed, on one point alone, past reason. And that is the root of evil. I think.” He opened his eyes and looked at her, really looked at her, thoughtful, not annoyed, or disdainful, or seeing her some burden he had to deal with. “I wonder if Hyllau poisoned her, too, fed that all-consuming instinct of a mother for the protection of an infant child, made it grow into that obsession? Catairanach has not acted as a goddess for the whole of her folk since, oh, my grandmother's day, I think, given the stories I've heard. Maybe longer. The hag used to boast she'd been lifetimes in the womb of the goddess, before she ever was born into the world.”

“Catairanach said you were—she wants you to marry me, and she says you're my—if it's true, that's—wrong.” Deyandara blushed and poked a few sticks into the fire. It was a small fire, mostly old twigs, and they burnt up quickly.