The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  “Yes, I wonder where the rest of him is? Anyway, I did not promise anyone to make you a queen. If you did run away from that fate, you don’t have to lie to me about it, and if you decide to run away again, I fear I am bound to run with you, though how we then get these horses back to your assassin and his tame—his friend, I don’t know.”

  “You swore an oath to Durandau when you took service as his wizard.”

  Lin waved a hand. “I’ve sworn lots of oaths in my time, child. Some I meant to keep and some I didn’t. You’re allowed to think, ‘Perfidious outlander,’ if you like. I am.”

  “So why would you keep an oath to Ghu, then? He’s only Ahjvar’s groom.”

  “Oh, child. Answer me. What do you mean to do?”

  “Go back to Yvarr and Marnoch. They needed me, they said. If they still do . . . then I’ll be what they want me to be.”

  Until the Marakanders murdered her too.

  She needed to find them, to tell them she hadn’t intended to flee. She owed them that for their friendship. She owed herself, to prove she was no coward, to prove that she could keep faith after all. That if the goddess pushed her again, she would demand to know why. She would push back.

  Lin coughed. “Why did you go south, anyway? I traced enough of your trail to see that you did, eventually. If you were afraid, and didn’t want to go to Durandau, running to the duina of your mother’s father would have been much safer.”

  Deyandara sighed and told it again. “Catairanach came to me, right after Yvarr had spoken with me and those couriers had gone out with the letters in my name. Right when the dinaz was being abandoned. She told me she couldn’t fight the power of the Lady of Marakand, and that she would not have a queen born to another tribe, and that she wanted me to carry a message to a Five Cities assassin. Ahjvar. They call him the Leopard. She wanted me to tell him to kill the Voice of Marakand for her. And by the time I seemed to be thinking my own thoughts again, I was heading south in the fog, and there were Marakanders between me and the dinaz.”

  “Oh.” And that seemed to silence Lin at last.

  The road might have been paved, but it was not swept and for the most part they travelled in a cloud that caked the nose and tasted of old, dry barnyard on the tongue. To swing out and around the caravan would have been easy enough, as the caravanserais thinned out to a straggle of horse-pens and fodder-sellers’ yards. Lin showed no wish to do so, keeping them in the dust.

  “Come nearer,” the wizard ordered abruptly, and Deyandara obeyed. Lin leaned over to her, spreading her hand, fingertips pressing cool on her face. They moved, some pattern made.

  “Improbable that they would be looking for you rather than for Catairnan Praitans in general,” Lin said. “However, your young man is not someone whose vision I would fault.” She snorted, most unladylike. “He sees all too clearly. Keep your eyes down and stay quiet, and nobody will notice you.”

  The towering fortress of the gate drew nearer, floating in the haze. The dust died away as the camels trod clean stone, wind-scoured now as no buildings lined it; the day was growing hot, the sun beating down the pass.

  The city guards in their grey tunics took no interest in the departing caravan, beyond noting the master’s name and the number of beasts and running a cursory eye over the caravaneers as the camels ambled by. No, they were summoning one man at the rear out of line. A pale-bearded Northron, he called them names, amiably, and when two guards in red tunics rather than grey, and scale-armour shirts as well, came out to question him, he settled into grumbling, growling Northron speech, baffling and annoying them, till they tried to drag him from his camel. One got a boot in the face and the other the butt of his spear, and like wasps when the nest is disturbed, the caravan guards closed in to defend their comrade, a seething mass of camels, shouts, spears blocking the gateway.

  “We should maybe go back?” Deyandara suggested. “Wait till later?”

  Lin considered. “I wonder what he’d done?”

  Been mistaken for Ahjvar—for Clentara—was Deyandara’s thought.

  The shouting swelled to a triumphant baying and yelping, as of hounds, and the camels surged on their way, the Northron caravaneer in their midst. Lin gave the yellow gelding a touch of her heels and cantered after. Deyandara followed, glad of the concealing scarf over her hair. Guards tumbled out of the doors behind which they’d retreated from the caravan, grey tunics and red, arguing. Two of the red tunics, whose numbers had increased since the caravan’s escape, stepped out into the broad roadway and snapped an order to halt in the language of the western road. Easy to tell what they meant, even without understanding the words. Lin reined her horse back to a walk and turned her smile on them all.

  “Barbarians,” she said cheerfully, speaking trade Nabbani. “What was that about?” She failed to halt. Deyandara, therefore, didn’t either, but the reins grew sweaty in her hand. Both men in the roadway, big men, had spears, and a woman to the side of the gate a bow. She had her own bow and quiver close to hand now, but a move to take it up would be a mistake.

  “Some fools can’t tell a Northron from a Praitan,” said one of the grey tunics. “Some fools need to get out of the city a bit more, maybe, and see the real world.” One of his comrades scowled him to silence; they made no move to stop Lin or even ask her name.

  But, “Where’d you get those horses?” demanded one of the red tunics.

  “A dealer,” said Lin, her face going just the right degree of wary.

  “What dealer?”

  “Are you suggesting I stole them?”

  “No, mistress. I want to know who you bought them from.”

  “Some dealer at the horsefair.”

  “What horsefair?”

  “By the north gate.”

  “North gate? There’s no—”

  “In Star River Crossing,” Lin added helpfully. “I don’t remember her name. It was months ago.”

  “Told you,” said one of the red-tunics to his comrade, stepping away. “A woman and two men, it was, anyway.”

  And Lin hadn’t even worked any wizardry, not that Deyandara could see. People believed what she wanted them to.

  That was worth considering, when she trusted the woman so unthinkingly.

  “A white and a silver-maned lion and a piebald,” said the other, hesitating. “And a Nabbani servant-boy. This one’s Nabbani.”

  “Servant!” snapped Lin, with no smile at all now. “Boy!”

  “Apologies, mistress,” said the guard. He even managed a bow. One of the grey-tunics hastily hid a smile behind her sleeve.

  “It’s ‘lady,’ not ‘mistress’ to you, and I should think so. Come.”

  Lin crooked a finger at Deyandara as the yellow horse broke into a trot, the piebald the wizard led following, bunching close. A shadow moved in the doorway of the tower, flowed forward and detached from it, a darkness becoming a man, a woman, a slight figure in a long, faded red robe, with a shirt of lacquered leather armour the colour of old blood and a helmet equally red, the face completely masked, rising into a triple crest of flaring fins, like waves or flames. The grey tunics withdrew hastily towards the other end of the archway. The red tunics saluted. “Revered One?”

  Red Mask. A light flared over the priest, a dirty red light that crawled along the edges of the armour segments, up the sweeping crest of the helmet, made the air sizzle on the pale carved staff she carried. The white mare, ears flattening, head up, skittered sideways. A wash of panic roiled through Deyandara’s stomach as though she looked down to find herself at a cliff’s edge.

  “Cold hells!” a man hissed, and a woman almost whimpered, “Lady bless, Lady bless.”

  “Revered One,” said the nearest red tunic, his voice shaking now, backing away, right to the wall of the arch. Deyandara found her teeth were chattering. Nightmare. Nightmare. She had thought the story of the Lady’s divine terror some city boasting; they had shown no such power at Dinaz Catairna, only the white crackle of their staves, only . . . Cr
icket kicked and bolted, the leading-rein jerked free. He took off after the vanishing caravan.

  “The much talked-of blessing of the Lady, I see,” Lin murmured. “The divine terror of her presence. Indeed.”

  Deyandara couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. She clutched the saddlebow to keep from falling, and the thing reached out a hand in a red gauntlet. The white mare squealed, reared, and Lin’s sword hissed, the tassel floating like a bright banner. Lin and the sweating, eye-rolling yellow gelding suddenly thrust between Deyandara and the Red Mask, the priest’s grab turned to a two-handed strike with the white staff against Lin.

  “Ride!” the wizard snapped, but if Deyandara’s fingers, her body, had not been frozen, locked up like a sleet-entombed branch, she would have slid boneless and shivering to the ground. The mare bolted a few steps and turned with her tail to the wall. The piebald fought his rope. A white fire blazed over the Red Mask’s hands, over the length of the staff, as the priest swung not at Lin now—the first blow had somehow failed—but at her mount. The wizard interposed her own left arm, shieldless, and Deyandara choked on a cry as the blow—again—failed, held on a shadow, a smoke in the air that sheeted between wizard and priest, a slow and lazy drift of eddying grey. The Red Mask recoiled and Lin brought the gelding around, left-hand fingers flickering. Her own sword’s edge sparked white as she shifted to a two-handed grip and struck the priest’s head from shoulders.

  The body crumpled; the yellow gelding flinched away sideways. Lin gathered up her reins while Deyandara gulped bile and found she could sit up straight again, though her heart still raced and her skin was cold with sweat.

  “Huh.” Lin frowned at the corpse, then swung to face the gate guards, her bright smile sweeping over them, as if she had completely forgotten Deyandara was even there.

  Deyandara snarled, “Lin—ride!” and kicked the mare, who took off with good will now. No looking back for the battle-mad wizard; she didn’t slow her mount’s pace until Cricket, grazing by the roadside, panic forgotten, came lurching up out a stand of reeds after them. Then Deyandara trotted, circled, caught his trailing rope and made it fast again. Andara and the Old Great Gods be thanked he hadn’t tangled his legs and broken his neck. Only then did she think to fumble her bow free, trapping it between knee and saddle to string it. Lin cantered up, holding her bloody sword off to the side.

  “She didn’t bleed much,” the wizard said.

  Deyandara couldn’t speak, but she pointed at Lin’s dripping blade, hand holding the bow still shaking a little. The pony shied away, nostrils flaring.

  “Oh, they bled,” said Lin. “But the Red Mask did not. A little, only. Very strange. Unfortunately she was the only one. A Red Mask prisoner might have proven very useful.”

  There were several scattered mounds in the roadway at the gate, grey and red.

  Deyandara found her voice. “You killed the guard? All of them!”

  “No, two fled into the tower and I thought it was better we run while we could. One had a bow,” Lin added. “She missed. I’m sorry; she shouldn’t have had even the one chance to shoot. I’m out of practice. We should ride; they do keep courier ponies at the forts, I think, to carry messages into the city, and it’s possible the Red Masks will come hunting us. I wish I had thought to take the head.”

  “The—why?” Deyandara asked weakly. She wanted to scream, I thought you were a wizard only, I thought your sword was for show, you’re an old woman, not a warrior. I thought the Lady’s blessing on the Red Masks made them immune to wizardry and why weren’t you frightened, why didn’t you fall down quaking in terror, when even the horses and the guard did and I think I wet myself and then the panic just—stopped. But she swallowed hard and straightened her fingers, shaking her cramping hands to ease them, first one, then the other. Swallowed again. “What would the head tell you?”

  “Whatever I asked it, perhaps,” said Lin, and gave her a grin like the one she had flashed on the guards. “No, sorry, dear. That was a joke. But I’d like to find out why she didn’t flood the road with blood when she fell. In my experience people usually do, when you cut their heads off.”

  Had Lin great experience in cutting off heads? She didn’t dare ask that. “Does Durandau know you’re such—such a swordmaster?”

  “What does he need another champion for?” Lin asked. “He has Lord Launval the Elder, whom I would not for the world discomfit. Besides, I’m not so young as I once was.” She coughed. “You’re supposed to say, no, no, you’re not so old as all that.” She eyed Deyandara, who was not at all in the mood to play along. The wizard sighed. “Well, I think this proves your pretty friend right. They are looking for you or rather, for the company you’ve been keeping. Suspicious Praitans, you are, obviously. Or . . .” her voice went slow and thoughtful. “Or perhaps this Voice of Marakand dreams true dreams, and they were troubled by a vision of the heir of Catairanach’s land. I really should have taken that head.” She grinned again. “Next time. Now let’s make what speed we can, lest these Marakanders find good horses or camels somewhere, and men capable of riding them.”

  But the wizard dismounted to clean her sword first and rode with the reins slack, fingers weaving patterns in the air. A fog began to smoke from the dry riverbed, from the stagnant pools and the hot stones. It crawled over the road, overtook them, filled the rift between the mountain walls and wrapped them from sight.

  “Better,” said Lin. “Now we ride.”

  By noon Ahjvar was awake again. He wanted coffee, but since he wasn’t going to get any, he made do with a broken biscuit and a drink from a drying, algae-slick puddle in a hollow of the stone ledges, the last of some rain. He couldn’t see the road for the broad band of ravine-scrub, and if patrols used the path along the ravine bottom, none came by that afternoon. He could have been alone in a wilderness, rather than squatting on the edge of a teeming city. He made a foray into the trees, found cherries already ripe, which made a better meal than the very stale biscuit baked by Ghu on a stone at some campfire days gone, and wondered whether the city folk were forbidden the ravine or only afraid of it. The reed-cutter of the previous day had not acted as though he had been about any illegal harvest. Perhaps it was fear; here under the trees he thought he felt the dead. Not ghosts, unburied, no lingering trapped souls, but death nonetheless, a grave-hill’s calm. The river had dried long ago; the stands of fruit-trees amid the willow scrub, the silver-leafed, whispering poplars, were all only just come to maturity. Let grow since the earthquake? His foot, kicking at the mould of fallen leaves between the broken stones and plaster, turned up broken bone, a human jaw. So they had dumped not only the ruins of the city here but its dead of the catastrophe. They might fear to eat the fruit or burn the timber that grew from their parents’ bones, yes.

  He retreated to the crevice, lay half-drowsing, waiting for the dusk, and slept once more, dreaming. It was not a bad dream, as dreams went. Miara. Not her death. Just Miara, a long time ago, and no pain in the dreaming, no murder, but he woke with damp eyes and thought about dropping from the top of the cliff, once he climbed so high, or a roof, but he would somehow survive, battered and broken maybe, but still, by miracle and luck, as alive as he was now.

  It was having sent Ghu away brought that on, but at least the man would never haunt his sleep. One death he needn’t carry.

  The lengthening shadows made black pools of the wooded ravine. Ahjvar set out, while he could still see enough to stop him turning an ankle in a crack or blundering into a tangle of blister-vine. The cliff to his right dropped lower, topped here with crooked buildings, some roofless, abandoned. He skirted a heap of nettle-grown rubbish that was just asking to be used as a ramp, and the cliff, dropping lower, was again surmounted by a stretch of wall. The temple grounds occupied what might have been a bay of the river once, or perhaps some earlier earthquake had made the land sink, a depression like the hoofmark of a giant’s horse, stamping down. Here the south shore of the ravine rose in shelves of stone and steep ban
ks of broken rock intermingled to meet crumbling wall and the blank backs of temple buildings, all the lower windows bricked shut, most of the doors, though not all, likewise. Some of the doors that still might be usable from within were overgrown with vines, though, or opened from empty space, landings and water-stairs long crumbled. Between buildings, the temple’s wall was in even worse repair than that of the city. An old man could climb it. He did, as the last of the red-tinged twilight wrapped around him.

  Lying flat atop the wall, the faded black cloak pulled over him, Ahjvar could see into a courtyard. It looked abandoned. Dry weeds grew between its stones, and the laurel trees at the four corners were scraggly and unkempt, wind-broken twigs and dead weeds littered around their feet. The building that backed onto the yard seemed in better repair. Light glowed through piercings in its carved window-screens. The building which made the eastern end of the courtyard was roofless and looked to have burnt long ago. Perhaps this was the abandoned backside of the temple, the equivalent of old outbuildings left in case they came in useful someday. There had been talk in the caravanserai suburb of rising tolls and duties; the money wasn’t showing here. But then, Grasslander mercenaries probably did not come cheap. To the west, the wall on which he lay abutted the old hospice. He recognized its placement, at least. Four storeys high, with wide windows for fresh air, and a pitched roof. There had been arcades running along the east, and if he remembered correctly, the unseen south, the front. There had been wooden galleries above the arcades, too, but on this eastern face they had been stripped off. It was blotched now as if with bruises, plaster crumbled away, and what was left dirty, stained with dust and soot, fading into the night. Abandoned, maybe, despite the wine-seller’s tale, but it was a place to start.