The Lady (5 page)

That was neither here nor there. These, these had proven coward, all the temple guard had, faithless betrayers who broke and ran when they found the shield of the Red Masks did not protect them. They had failed their oaths, failed their faith, failed
her
, their goddess, when they found that the folk of the suburb, who ought to have been cowering unmanned and witless before the divine terror of her servants, were willing and able to fight. They had thought they went at no risk to themselves to arrest wizards made impotent and witless by the divine blessing of those same Red Masks, to take for the Lady's well even the least of the diviners who had thought themselves safe and outside the Lady's ban and reach, beyond Marakand's city walls. They were used to such easy tasks, secure in the shadow of the Lady's greater servants.

That the folk had lost their terror of the Red Masks—no, that the divine blessing of terror had been stripped from them by inexplicable wizardry—did not excuse the cowardice of the temple guards. To fail and flee because you found the enemy capable of fighting back was the mark of a bully, not a soldier. Zora had told them so.

No captain stood among them. He was dead, killed by caravaneers, outlanders. He had not been standing, no, that she had seen. He had died running, knocked down from behind, hacked and pummelled to death in the dust. A fitting end for a coward. The company's senior lieutenant, nearly unable to stand, one eye bloodied, cheek open and not yet stitched, had done no better, except that he had lived to make it to the gate.

As had she. She had fled with the rest of them.

That was different. That was . . .

. . . a sensible tactic. She had needed to remove her Red Masks from danger. Without them . . . without them the city might fall, without them she might fail, and what followed her failure. . . . She had been right to run, to take her damaged Red Masks out of reach of the wizard and her demons. Yes. She had brought them back to the temple, even the one stationed at the Eastern Wall to watch for Praitannec enemies, and the one at the Western. Did she dare leave the Eastern Wall unwatched by eyes she trusted? The first whisper of this, the first stir and swirl of a changing current, had not come from within the city. There had been a spy. Spies? The first Red Mask to die had died there. She had nearly forgotten. She had not been Zora then.

Doubt would cripple her. She had enemies all about her and she did not even know who they might be. She had sent her captain and his Red Masks, all who were not now in the city, east to Praitan, but death came from the west, from the north, not east.

North?
No.

The sword of the ice. . . .
She had muttered that aloud. She heard the words. Zora pinched her lips together.

A small sound escaped the huddled guards. One of the women, stifling a whimper. Weak. Other than the senior lieutenant, they were all patrol-firsts, the leaders of the five-man units modelled on the patrols of the street guard. Leaders of their patrols. Examples to their men. These were the ones who had swept with their goddess through the Riverbend Gate.

Retreated. Fled
. And some part of Zora's heart crowed, a part that might still be Zora.

Fool child.
I am we are Zora is we are the Lady of Marakand
.

The Lady, their goddess, surveyed them. Not vengeful. Not disdainful. Sorrowful, yes. Pitying their weakness, their frailty.

No. The Lady could not harbour the weak and the frail. Marakand must be strong.
He
would come against her, out of the west, and Marakand must be strong. Yes.

“The Lady sees your hearts,” she said from the pulpit, and the fourteen, huddling together on the swirling mosaic floor on which she had so often danced when she was only Zora, when she was only the foremost of the temple dancers, when she was the hidden eyes, the spy of her father's stillborn rebellion against the tyranny of the Lady—they watched her, as the hypnotized bird watches the snake.

They had hope. The Lady was mercy.

Who says so? The Lady. Fools if you believe her
.

Hush
.

Behind them the priests and priestesses, saffron-robed, clustered. Fear was a rank cloud over them. Red Masks had died. The caravanserai suburb had risen against the Lady's arrest of wizards. The gates were under attack. Enemies, treachery, hidden wizards . . . disorder. They liked their safe order, her priests. She had taught them so.

“Never,” she said, “has Marakand faced such danger as it does now. Rebels walk secretly among the folk of the suburb, of the city itself, spreading the poison of their lies. Foreign wizards and demons work against us. And what strength have we? Not the strength of arms, if the faith of those arms is weak. Weakness betrays us. Weakness
has
betrayed us. When the temple guard should have stood firm, to protect their comrades-in-arms, my chosen, my Red Masks, from appalling wizardry, from foreign demons and spirits and the servants of alien gods, they fled, squalling like children and about as much use.”

Unfair.
She
had fled, had she not?

She must give them an explanation for that, a reason, an enemy, a plan. Not her own fear, her death in—

—
the sword the ice is coming the road of the stars is sealed against the ice is coming—

Zora's hands clutched the pulpit rail and she licked her lips. She was not the Voice, the mad Voice, to spill the eddying mind of the goddess. She was not mad. Mad Sien-Mor was dead and burnt away. She was Zora now. Zora was not mad. Zora had not spoken aloud, the words echoed only in her mind, she did not taste them on her tongue, she would not, she could not, she—

Be still, be still, be still
.

“The Lady sees your hearts,” she said. “The Lady knows your hearts. Your coward hearts. Your traitor hearts. And I say, treachery must be cut out. There is no place for such weakness and cowardice within my temple. When I say stand, you stand. When I say hold, you hold. You do not doubt. You do not break. You do not run. You stand and hold and die, if that is what serves your Lady's need. As it would have, this day, had you not been faithless.”

No, no,
no no no—don't, I won't, I can't I must—

She had no need for orders, for gestures. The Red Masks were hers, as her arms and legs were hers. The most faithful of her priests, so even the true priests believed, the holy warriors, with their vows of simplicity and silence, their isolated barracks where not a single servant attended them . . . fools. Even Zora, spying for the dead, had not penetrated to the heart of that secret, though she had wondered, she had known there was some truth that she could not see. A poor, lorn spy without a master to take her reports.

Still, for the sake of the priests, she raised a hand. It might have been a signal. But it was her thought that sent her attendant Red Masks, grim in their silence, faceless, to the unfortunate officers.

No need for their swords, for mess and blood and the fouling of the black-and-white floor on which she had danced. Like the street guard, the thief-takers, her Red Masks carried short staves at their belts. The white lightings of her will, their wizardry, crackled as they struck, a blow to the back of the head, to the chest, a smashed face as the already-bloodied lieutenant turned yelling to flee. A single blow was enough to kill. The room smelt of scorching, of burnt meat.

Sacrifice.

“The remainder of the company,” she said, when it was done, when a fainting priestess had been shunted aside amid her fellows' feet and a vomiting priest had made it as far as the porch before disgracing himself and her holy Hall of the Dome, “will be confined to their barracks. No surgeon will attend the wounded. Let them look to themselves, let the Old Great Gods choose their own. They will have barley-porridge and water and nothing more. They will purify themselves. Let them offer me prayers and face the truth of their own hearts, for three days. In three days, they will be summoned here to the Hall of the Dome to stand before their Lady, and she will
I will
give my judgement.”

They would be redeemed and love her for her forgiveness, their redemption. She would appoint new patrol-firsts, a new captain and pair of lieutenants. She could not afford to lose so many men. But they did not need to know that.

“Revered Lady—”

It was Ashir who dared to speak, the Right Hand of the Lady, highest-ranking of the priests, a bald and bitter man, loving her, hating her. The Beholder of the Face, his wife, had died by her command, flung down the stairs to the underground chamber of the deep well. Yet he still loved his Lady, and he still served. But she did not love him.

“No,” she said, to whatever it was. “I will not hear. I will speak no more. I will speak no more judgements today, I will—just go! Out! Out, all of you! Out from this place, out from here, out with your noise and your doubts and your coward fears, out and pray yourselves, and pray I am merciful, because I know not all the traitors of the city are without the temple walls!”

Her voice rose to a shriek in her own ears and her hands twisted together.

“The sword waits still, can't you see? Don't you hear me? The sword is ice, the ice is death and from the north it came to me for me not here not now does she not see, does she not know? I have trapped her held her she would have betrayed me she should have seen she should have known she should have come to me to stand with me—It is he it is not I she should fear we should fear she is nothing she is gone she is lost and trapped and gone and still the sword waits unsleeping it sees my dreams it whispers it sings the voice of the wind of the ice of the night—the stars, the cold and distant stars they see—”

She bit her tongue. The taste of blood shocked and silenced her.

The priests stared. They were used to the ranting prophecies of the Voice of the Lady, but she was not the Voice. She was the Lady made flesh, in the flesh of Zora, the dancer they would have given to be her new Voice. She was—

I don't know. I don't know anymore. Who am I who speaks?

“Get out!” she screamed, and the Red Masks moved.

The priests and priestesses fled.

The Red Masks began dragging out the bodies. Let the priests see to some burial, somehow. Let them prove their use by dealing with that one small problem, with the city gates sealed and no access to the graveyard of the Gore.

Zora was going to be vomiting behind a pillar herself if she could not get out of here, into air, clean air, and space and sky and—

Up. Climb. Yes. To where she could breathe again.

The goddess, the Lady of Marakand incarnate, took the stairs so rarely used, cramped and dark, hidden with the walls, the passage left for workmen who might need sometimes to make repairs. She ran, forcing herself not to slow, revelling in the pounding of her soldier-booted feet, her racing heart. This, this was hers, this body, this strength, this lean beauty, this was she. She came out on the roof below the dome. There, for a moment at least, she had silence. Even in her own mind. Though not for long.

CHAPTER III

“My wife!” the old man at the gate howled. “Gate-Captain, look! Witness! My wife!”

But what the old man held in his arms, staggering with the weight of it, arms and legs and long hair dangling limp, was the red-armoured corpse of a Red Mask. Jugurthos Barraya, captain of the Sunset Gate Fort, looked down from the northerly of his towers. He didn't know the man. Some small trader of the suburb, by his dress. He was surrounded—supported, maybe—by a score or so of others, Marakanders and caravaneers both. Even from the tower Jugurthos couldn't see what was happening around the bend of the wall to the north, but he had seen a band of temple guard and Red Masks rushing disordered to the east, and after them, pursuing, a surge of outlanders, armed, out of the smoking suburb.
Pursuing
. Red Masks
fleeing
. He'd sent a courier to Hassin at Riverbend Gate for news, but the girl hadn't returned yet. Nothing worse had befallen than that she was waiting on Hassin, he hoped, and not caught up in some assault. The all-in curfew had rung from Riverbend shortly after that, and his own bells had perforce passed it on. It shouldn't have kept his courier, though.

If what had rushed east along the main road past the Gore had been an attack, this small party that had peeled off to take the road to the southern bridge and his gate seemed peaceable enough, thus far. Grim, though, and angry, violence only a word away, not that the bare score below could offer the gates any serious threat.

“Witness!” the man called again.

“Witness what?” Jugurthos called down. “A Red Mask?” A dead Red Mask, and they were invulnerable, protected from weapon and wizardry by the Lady's blessing. They killed with a touch. What could touch them? That, indeed, needed witnessing. If it were true, and not some trickery, a corpse wrapped in a red cloak. Yet, that armour would be hard to come by and . . . there was a story going around that a Red Mask had died at the Eastern Wall not long before the Voice was killed. He had dismissed it as exaggeration, some mere temple guard murdered, even though he had heard it from Captain Hassin of Riverbend, who swore he had the story from his cousin, who saw the corpse, from some distance, before another Red Mask carried the priest away.

“What killed her? How?”

“My wife!” the man howled, and he laid the corpse down, kneeling over it, and stroked a dead, smooth cheek with his old, twisted hand.

Jugurthos felt his stomach turn. Surely—

“Don't you dare,” his adjutant muttered beside him. “Captain, don't.”

He looked down at her. Tulip only came up to his shoulder, a compact woman, young for her responsibilities, with the round face and straight hair of the mountain-folk. She hadn't even been a patrol-first when he appointed her his adjutant, and given her physique, which was rather better filled-out in all the right places than you'd expect of an unwanted bastard abandoned and farmed out on temple charity, everyone was fairly certain they knew why.