The Leopard (Marakand) (24 page)

Light spilt in through a window-hole, jogging to clattering footsteps. The wizard had his head up, wide-eyed, teeth unconsciously bared, and still he shook. Ghu pointed at the window, urgently. He didn’t dare move, clumsy on his one leg, and if they tried the door with him sitting against it they might think it locked. The wizard, with no small effort, moved to where he could see out, crawling over rubble, rotting beams and plaster and bricks. The remains of the floor above roofed only the far side of the room. Here, rain misted down, gentle now, soft and warm. Ghu rubbed at his throat, not certain what life might still linger in whatever mark the wizard had put there. Enough to draw a Red Mask? Or was it only more street guard, passing on patrol? He doubted the caravan wizard would be so unmanned by fear of a mere street-patrol’s passing.

The last lantern bobbed on by, the last light faded. There had been other faces raised as well, three girls, two men, and a baby, all in a nest of rags in the far corner. Beggars who had claimed this place, but they were silent, not protesting the invasion, not yet.

“What were they?” Ghu asked softly, when the sound even of their feet was gone and there was nothing but the rain.

“Two patrols of temple guard, and Red Masks with them,” the wizard said, as if they hadn’t been trying to kill one another a moment before. Ghu warily shifted so he could open the door.

Still nothing from the beggars. Well, there had been light enough to show them two bloodied and battered caravaneers, and he knew what came to beggars who drew the attention of armed men.

“Sorry,” he told them and, “Thank you. Gods bless you.”

He edged the door open, stood half in, half out, listening, but there was no sound other than the rain, and the light had gone away west, into Greenmarket Ward. The wizard was at his shoulder, pushing past, reaching back to take his arm, half dragging him up to the street level again. The man was cut after all, hand, sleeve, wet with blood, worse than Ghu’s own. He didn’t seem to notice.

“You’ve really never been in Marakand before today?”

“I don’t lie.”

“All you had to do was call to them.”

“No.” All he had had to do was cut the wizard’s throat.

“I still don’t trust you.”

“Don’t then.” Ghu sighed, too tired to argue. The pounding pulse of his ankle was deafening him to all else. “Go away.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for my friend. I told you.”

“At the Doves?” The man drew him farther up the street, not letting go, and he was glad enough to let the wizard take some of the weight off his foot. He sank down on a doorstep, no windows near for eavesdroppers, and leaned back against the doorpost.

“The street guard were told to look for Nabbani men,” he said wearily. “Your scribe hid me. I left when I thought it was safe. That’s all.”

“Why are they looking for Nabbani men?”

“They think I’m a Praitannec spy.”

“You say, ‘I.’ So it’s not Nabbani men in general they’re after; it’s you yourself.”

Ghu shrugged, which the wizard probably didn’t see. “Yes, but they didn’t know that.”

The wizard sat down beside him. “Nour,” he said.

“Ghu.”

“Are you a Praitannec spy?”

“No. My friend,” he added, “is a Praitan. Someone followed him last night, when we came in to the suburb. He lost them, but maybe they’re still looking.”

“Is he,” Nour said with the patience of one talking to a child, “a Praitannec spy?”

“No.” Ghu didn’t mean to fall away into himself, into simplicity again. He was just so overwhelmingly tired all of a sudden. There was something wrong, something . . . there had been something wrong in his world for a time now, something lost to him, slipped from his grasp . . . “His goddess sent him to kill the Voice.”

Nour’s silence was deep. “How?” he asked at last. “With the hand of the Lady over her, how?”

Not “why,” not horror, and he was a Marakander born, Ghu judged.

“He’ll find a way.” But after, but after . . .

“Even if he does,” Nour said, “it won’t change anything. The Lady will appoint a new Voice. Nothing will change. Nothing ever changes, nothing ever has, in thirty years.”

“Is there a Lady?”

Another deep silence. “I do wonder,” Nour said. “A conspiracy of priests, maybe. But if that’s so, I don’t know how they can be killing wizards. And there’s some divine power behind the Red Masks.”

“I think,” Ghu said, “there is a devil in your temple. One of the seven from the stories. Maybe claiming to be the Voice. Maybe claiming to be the Lady. I think . . . I think Ahjvar is . . .”

Gone? Gone, sometime in the night.

“The Voice certainly acts like one, the way she sends folk to their deaths,” said Nour, not believing him. “I think,” he added, “that you’d better come back to the Doves with me. I’m not certain yet that I trust anything you say. I want you where I can see you. You and Ivah both. She’s very good at meekly getting her own way, and there’s wizardry behind that. She bespelled Hadidu into giving her lodgings, I’m sure of it. He’s not so besotted with her he’d risk his only child’s life on trusting her within his household, otherwise. And I’m very surprised, now I think about it, that I haven’t done something about her before. I’ve been home for a week. I wonder if she’s been working on me, too? You, at least, I’m going to send out to my gang-boss, tomorrow night when I can get you over the city wall unseen. He can keep you safe till I figure out what to do with you.”

Ahj was . . . lost. And the wizard thought he had Ghu a prisoner. It didn’t matter.

Dead. But Ahj always had said he was dead. Ghu bent over, his head on his knees. The Voice of the Lady was dead, and so was Ahjvar, and he had not believed that Catairanach would keep her promise, he had not, he would not have let Ahj go without him if he had, he would not, he would not have let him be alone. He did not want to be alone.

“Come,” Nour said, and touched his shoulder. “Give me your arm, Ghu. No wizardry to hide us, not with Red Masks prowling, Old Great Gods keep whatever poor souls they’ve been sent out for.”

Ghu let himself be helped up, arm around the other’s neck, and shut his eyes. It was easier to keep walking that way. If Nour turned him loose he would sit and wait for the Red Masks to find him. He wanted simply to fall, down into that emptiness, that darkness, after Ahjvar. Easier than going on.

Light burned through his eyelids, red and hot. Ahjvar turned his head away, tried to drag an arm up to shield his eyes before he forced them open. Too heavy. Even the weight of his eyelids seemed too much to force against the light and the kicking of the horse inside his head. Light blurred and swam and faded. A fire, which rose and fell with his pulse.

Not dead.

King. Champion. Sword.
The words whispered in his head, confusingly. Something the Voice had said before he killed her? The light must be a torch. Ghu? No. The light, whoever carried it, was probably not his friend.

Darkness returned. He tried, then, to sit up, but the horse that was kicking in his head had evidently trampled over him a few times first. Fire arced across his ribs as he twisted, hunched himself up. He managed to get sitting in the end, but a mewl of pain escaped him, and his breath came loud and gasping. If they were listening . . .

They weren’t. Whoever they were. No rustle, no breath, no scent of a body. Where was he, anyhow? Someplace cool and damp, with his back against a wall that curved up from the floor, all rough stone, it felt. It smelt of mud.

Cave, he thought, but could not think why he would be in a cave. He had lain up for the day under a ledge, dry rock. Not a cave.

He tried again and this time did get his eyes open. The world was not much different. There was light, a distant dim yellow. Tunnel. A tin-mine . . . he was not in a Duina Praitanna tin-mine. He tried to pull himself upright, using the rough wall as support but ended on hands and knees. Good. You had to crawl before you could walk. He blinked, licked lips that tasted of blood. Had they thought him dead and dumped him as so much refuse? Wouldn’t be the first time. But his sword was in front of his nose, the leopard of the hilt staring at him, accusing.
Dead king.
Who called him that? Sword, and dagger too, cast down beside him. Refuse they couldn’t be bothered plundering? Not very likely. Saved him going back for it, though. He didn’t abandon that sword. Stuck to it, empty defiance though that was. His, himself, when everything else was gone.

Everything else
was
gone, even his tunic and boots. He was barefoot, in trousers and a torn shirt. But they left him his sword? Stitches in his gashed arm, and the blood-filthy linen in tatters. Stitches on the deep slice under his breast, and the shirt sodden, edges sticky, not yet dry. Recent, very recent. Whoever had sewn him up had left with their torch only as he woke. So. Follow them.

Dagger in belt. Sword in hand. Knees, good. Hand on wall again, up. On his feet, ears ringing, a bit light-headed, not falling. Better if he just crawled into a hole and lay quiet a few days, like a corpse or a toad buried in the mud against the cold winter rains, while his curse put him back together, restored its wounded and aching shell. That was all he was, a much-darned and patched sack to give the curse a home . . . and obviously a delirious one at present, as well. He didn’t need Ghu here to tell him that.

He headed for the light, moving like an old man, feeling every year since his birth. Bare feet told him the floor was stone, coarse-grained but water-smoothed, seamed with earth. Natural, this tunnel, at least it had been, once. The walls were jagged with the work of the picks that had heightened and broadened it.

By the time Ahjvar reached the mouth and the light, he was walking without leaning on the wall, and the sword was no longer an unwieldy bar of iron he could barely lift.

He looked out into a rounded cavern. A mist of rain pattered down onto a muddy patch of floor from some shaft open to the sky. It was still night. A crack in the floor stirred darkly, some breath of moving air touching the water. No, there was no breeze at all, and the air was heavy with the smell of rotten wood and damp stone. Something dark humped and rolled below the water, and a man, a Red Mask priest still in his armour, spread arms on the lip of the crack, the well of the Lady, surely, and heaved himself out, dripping, a beached seal. Then he got a knee under himself and stood, shaking his head, water coursing down his chest from under the mask. For a moment, the eye-slits of the mask turned Ahjvar’s way. Then he crossed the chamber out of sight. Ahjvar leaned out, saw him climbing stairs without another glance, leaving a dark, wet trail in the light of the torch affixed to the wall at the foot of them. No chance he hadn’t been seen.

He had killed that man. He knew he had, the tall one with the Northron sword. But this one had two strong arms, and he had shorn the other’s left nearly away. But the same. The water-dripping sleeve had been in tatters, the scales over the breast twisted and rent apart.

Mist had followed the reborn, recovered Red Mask from the well. Now it rose, shaping itself to a pillar.

Dead king.

No words. A whisper in the mind. Ahjvar was on his knees without willing it, too weak to stand. He had no right to stand before this.

No bloody way did he kneel to gods, not foreign ones and not his thrice-cursed own, either. Hands on the hilt of the sword, he lurched up again, put his back to the wall and leaned there.

She stood between him and the well. He hadn’t seen her move. He shut his eyes and opened them again, and she was closer, the mist coiling around her feet, her knees. No, he hadn’t seen her form herself.

He saw
through
her. A reflection on water, a heat-shimmer on the baking dust of the road. She was naked, her skin burnished gold as if lit by firelight; her eyes caught and held it, blood and flame. Young. A girl just turned woman.

“Dead man,” she said, and saluted him, flat of her sword to her forehead. Her smile was quite, quite mad, like a little child that took pleasure in tormenting weak and helpless things. Hyllau, her foster-father had warned him, warned him to warn the king when Cairangorm first began to watch her in the hall, Hyllau as a little girl had penned frogs in stone in the sun, he said, to watch them die, she had taken a kitten . . .

Pay attention! The Lady had not held a sword a moment before. It was a single-edged slashing weapon, wider towards the point and red in the firelight, like her eyes, and she was solid flesh, not mist and shadow. He drove straight, two-handed towards her while she still posed elegant, smiling faintly, and did she think her body distracted him? More fool she. He had the longer reach and longer blade, and the leopard-dappled steel, demon-forged, they said, took her, as he leaned from her downward slash, felt his stroke meet flesh, grate bone. But though she could not have moved so fast, she had opened his ribs again, and he was on the damp floor, a wind rising in his ears that was his own blood failing him, fleeing him. She held his sword by the blade, slick with her blood, disdainfully. He hadn’t seen her withdraw it from her flesh. She rubbed the place below her breasts with the fist that held her own sword as if it merely itched, no gout of blood, no wound at all but a faint smear, and then set her point at the angle of his jaw.