The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  “Wizard!” shouted a guard, a one-ribbon woman, who with her patrol had turned to watch, crowded tightly as frightened sheep, as fearful of the Red Masks as he had been meant to be. Slowly, too slowly, Ghu pulled himself back up the wall. He couldn’t fight six living human folk. The sullen fire on the one remaining Red Mask was only a reflection of the odd firelight; the Lady’s divine terror was fading, and with that the temple guard grew more menacing, spreading out, courage and will returning.

  The last Red Mask—he hoped the last—seemed to have no interest in the slayer of its companions. It still stood halfway up the stairs, staring towards the web of darkness barring the way at the top. The glow of the fire leaked from beyond. It raised a hand. Smoke suddenly began to pour along the ceiling like a river, cascading down the stairs, too, a strange waterfall, as if some barrier had given way. Smoke shouldn’t sink and crawl. There had been wizardry at work, barring passage to the upper floor. He could hear the fire now, hungry, feel the air of the house stirring with it, hear the roar. The Red Mask left off staring, or listening, or whatever it had been doing, and started up the last few steps.

  A yell, a screeching cry. Something came flying down the stairs, careening off the Red Mask, knocking it sprawling. All black silk and firelit steel. The temple lieutenant fell, neck half-severed and spewing blood like a fountain. The rest came tumbling back in panic, into Ghu, knocking him into the wall. His vision went dark and dizzy, but the black silk whirled and another guardsman fell, and then ribbons were floating, knotted ribbons, loops of cord flung high and caught between fingers and teeth. The sabre slashed in front of her face, towards her own ribbon-stretching arm, and stopped short. Ribbons parted. The temple guards fell senseless, all the three or four of them left.

  The Red Mask sprang up. The fury in black silk was only Ivah, panting, with a banner of dishevelled hair hanging half in her face, in knots to her knees, and a gory sabre in her hand.

  “The red priests won’t die,” she gasped, as the smoke rose, flowing upwards now, as it should, on a wind sucked through the passage. The web of wizardry that had been blocking the doorway was torn, dissolving away, and the fire roared above them. The Red Mask picked itself up and turned to face them, weaponless, no sword, the short staff still hanging from its belt. Ivah put herself between it and Ghu. She was shaking, though the red light on it was only fire from above and the poisoning fear was in abeyance, as if judged useless and not worth the effort.

  “No.” He limped after the wizard, put a hand on her arm and edged past. “Me,” he told the poor dead thing. “I’m the one you want. I’m the one can let you go.”

  It swayed, as if about to spring down the stairs.

  “Come,” he invited.

  He met it again with his open hand, staggering back, falling with the force of the body that was abruptly dead weight, as he told her, “You died, years ago. Remember. Find yourself. Find your road.” She had come in secret to the library, a scholar of Two Hills, not a wizard, she told them at the gate, oh no, just a woman of the law, seeking certain books. She had trusted the fellowship of scholars, but a librarian had reported her to the temple because those books, though they were still to be found in the lists of the great catalogue, were ones that had been burnt by the Voice’s decree; they were books that wizards had studied, on the nature of godhead as the fount of wizardry. She had been arrested by Red Masks, whom her magic could not touch. They shed her spells like water, and they clubbed her with their white staves and bore her away senseless from the library. She woke gripped between them in a great black-pillared hall, with yellow-robed priests in curving ranks about her and a dome overhead shedding broken blue light from the stained glass pattern of its eye. A woman in a black robe, with a white veil over a silver mask, swayed and spoke, a child’s sing-song in a high carved pulpit. She is wizard she is damned she is not his she may be his she may see she may know she is wizard she is dead let her be drowned dead deep in the deep well . . . And her nerve failed her, and her knees, and her bladder, and they dragged her because she could not walk, into another domed house and down, and down into darkness and damp, a cave. No priests followed, only Red Masks, and torches lit it, water stirring in a crack in the floor, slopping into glistening oily puddles. A goddess grew from mist and stretched out her hands, crying, “Tell them, warn them, see me—” but the mist crawled and the face of the goddess changed, and she said nothing, only smiled and licked her lips and reached to the wizard, reached inside her, took her beating heart and said, “No wizards in Marakand, my servants, my dear and loyal soldiers, my Red Masks, my own,” and something tore. It wasn’t her heart. She thought it was her soul, and she cried out to the twin gods of Two Hills as she drowned in the well, but water brought her no release, though it was one of the clean burials. Her soul was ripped, and braided, and knotted, and some flung away to drift broken and screaming in the caverns and the cracks of the stone, and some woven into a web that centred on the Lady who was not the Lady, and some knotted into her bones, reins, chains, with hooks that tore and . . .

  “Go, little sister,” Ghu said. “Peace.”

  The corpse folded up, empty, and he sat, head back against the wall, eyes shut, not caring that there was fire over him.

  “Ghu!” The Red Mask knocked against him as the body was dragged aside. Ivah seized his hands.

  “They don’t die,” he said. He thought he spoke quite clearly and sensibly, but perhaps not, if that was his voice. It wavered and wandered and faded to a whisper. “They don’t die, because they’re already dead and they don’t know it; they’re just rags, broken husks. You have to cut them off from what’s feeding them and holding them here. Let them go, let the ghosts go.”

  He shook the last trace of the poor Five Cities wizard from his mind, the poisoning madness of the Lady with it, and opened his eyes.

  “Necromancy, then,” Ivah said. She was wearing only a short cotton shift. It was scorched, though she had the bundle from her bed slung over her shoulder, intact. Miracle her unbound hair hadn’t turned her into a torch. “Who? Not Ulfhild, she wouldn’t—”

  “Who? The necromancer? She’s in the well. The Lady.”

  “Not the Voice, then.” Ivah offered a hand, heaved him up, and got an arm around his waist as he slumped against her. He fumbled to clean his knife on his trouser leg and sheathe it, clutched Ivah to keep from falling.

  “Is she really the Lady?” the wizard asked.

  “Yes. No, what they call the Lady is she, but I saw . . . the Red Mask saw, when she died, not now but then, when she was taken—the goddess is . . . not quite dead. Not so dead as the Red Masks. Nearly. Ivah, your storyteller. What is she?”

  “Ulfhild.”

  Hazily, he wondered why that was an answer. But Ivah had answered “what.” The storyteller had answered. In the days of the first kings in the north, there were seven wizards . . .

  Ivah, almost drunkenly, giggled, the hysteria of being alive after all. “You could call her my stepmother. After a fashion.” And choked on a moan. “Oh, gods and Old Great Gods. What are you, Ghu? What have I done, coming here? I just wanted to run away.”

  “From what?”

  Something crashed. A beam.

  “Down,” he said. It was a furnace up there now. There could be nobody left alive. She was already trying to run, dragging him for the stairs.

  “Temple guard started the fire?” he asked, choking. What kind of people burned out a house with children in it?

  “I did. I didn’t mean to. I heard—they smashed the door open. They were shouting. It wasn’t me they were after at all. I thought I’d brought Red Masks by hiding you, but they were shouting about rebels and heretics and the priest of Ilbialla. ‘Take the priest of Ilbialla alive for the Voice, take the wizard for the Voice, but kill the rest.’ Hadidu got his son and his servants into the room where the girls slept, to try to get over next door. He was shouting for Nour, but Nour didn’t answer.”

  “City. With me.”
/>   “Oh. Temple guard went after them and Shemal—the little boy—was screaming. They’d grabbed him. I ran out of my room behind them. I felt the Red Masks coming up the stairs, like some kind of—some kind of death. I panicked. I cast a fire on the guards who’d come up first—I couldn’t think of anything else—and they dropped the boy and started shrieking and blundering around, and everything started burning, the beds and the rug on the floor and the doorframe. It was a—a strong fire. Not easy to beat out. It wasn’t meant to be. I wanted them dead. I didn’t think. Hadidu grabbed his son and the rest all came running with him. They’d all come back, just children themselves, and they’d all come back to help when the child started screaming. They could have gotten away. But the gallery was on fire and it was too late. Hadidu started them up the ladder to the roof, and I blocked the stairs, to stop the Red Masks coming up while Hadidu got everybody out, but the spell wasn’t holding. As fast as I wove it, the priests seemed to just—just melt it. And everything was on fire behind me then.”

  “Held a while,” said Ghu. “And they say nobody casts spells on Red Masks.”

  “Nobody kills them.”

  He shook his head.

  In the kitchen, smoke was feeling its way over the ceiling with long fingers as they came down the last steps. Nour crouched in the yard door. He lurched up when he saw them, hissed, “You—”

  “No,” said Ghu, trying to put the woman behind him. “Not she, not your traitor. She saved Hadidu. They’re gone. Safe away over the roofs.” He hoped.

  A blast of hot air rolled down the stairs, following a noise like thunder.

  “Roof coming down,” said Ghu, heading for the yard door, leading Ivah by the hand, catching hold of Nour’s shoulder, shoving him out.

  They all fell together, picked themselves up, scrambled for the gate. The fire roared overhead now; the last crash had been part of the roof, caving in, as he’d thought. In the distance, there was a lot of shouting. He could see people up on the roofs of the nearby houses, small fires being beaten out.

  Ivah pulled free of him, tucked her sabre under her arm, and stood just outside the gate, fingers weaving what looked like a game of cat’s cradle. She looked up, looked around at the fire, and pulled a string loose with her teeth. The rest of the roof of the coffeehouse, the weight of plaster and the brick and stone of its enclosing wings, collapsed, the burning beams of the roof and the uppermost floor crashing down, and down, right into the cellars, a pyre roaring into the heavens, scarlet planks whirling from the galleries it shed, window-screens flying, painting a tracery of light against the night. The sound was deafening and the heat unbearable; they’d be roasted where they stood. Ghu took her sleeve to drag her on in pursuit of Nour, who, stiff and slow, was plodding along the back alley towards the one that led up from the market.

  “Burn the bodies!” Ivah shrieked in explanation, over the roar. “Even the bones. If they can’t count them, they won’t know that anyone escaped.”

  But a fire that burned even bones would seem unlikely in a house like this.

  “Let’s go,” he said wearily. “Catch up with Nour.” Ghu hoped he knew where he was going. It was all very well to believe the neighbours had been willing to help and hide Master Hadidu, but he and Ivah were strangers, foreigners, and terrifyingly battered and bloodied figures, he rather suspected.

  Ghu saw Nour stop and look back, waiting, but there were more figures, a gleam of firelight on helmets beyond him.

  “Devils damn!” Ivah swore. “Stay here.”

  “No, don’t—” But she shed her bundle and ran, fleet-foot, nearly naked, hair streaming behind her, flinging out a hand that trailed knotted ribbons and launched an arrow of fire that died on a Red Mask’s armour.

  Just the one. It was enough. The white staff flared and crackled as the long-dead wizard struck her on the side of the head. Nour fell, swarmed by shouting human guards. Too many for Ghu to kill, unless he were Ahjvar, as mad as Ahjvar, and he tripped on Ivah’s dropped bundle, staggering to run to them anyway, hit his head and lay stunned and breathless and for a moment dead to everything. When he picked himself up to hands and knees the world was tilting and swimming like the sea in a storm and the guards were retreating, dragging—prisoners. Bodies. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t feel them, couldn’t feel anything beyond exhaustion and failure and loss.

  The fire roared. It was too close, too hot. They were gone. He sat up, rubbed his face with a hand that was sticky-slick with blood from the arm Nour had slashed. There were voices. Men. Shouting. Another house had caught beyond saving. He picked up Ivah’s bundle, because it was there, staggered up, took a shuffling step, holding the wall. His foot kicked against something that for a slow, stupid moment meant nothing except that he was too tired and too mistrustful of his ground to take another step, but then he thought, Sabre, and that Ahj wouldn’t leave something of use lying, so he picked it up too. Besides, it was better than no prop at all, as he hobbled onwards. The alley was deserted now. Dark, silent, dead. He turned away from the Sunset Gate market and went, without thought. Bad foot and sabre down, quick hop, pause for breath, weight on the good leg. And again. And again.

  Zora Tu’usha caught the edge of the well and vaulted out, to land gracefully on the lip of stone. She had trained grace into nerve and sinew, after all. It did not desert her now, and the strength of her body was . . . deceptive, she decided, was the word. Deceptive for those who thought strength was meant only to be used for force, for the sword’s blow or the spear’s strike. She thrust wet hair dripping back from her face and smiled around at her priests and priestesses. Shocked, silly, stupid faces.

  “Now,” she said, “now you hear the Lady’s voice rather than the Voice of the Lady.”

  “Zora, dear,” the Mistress of the Dance said, hesitating, “Revered Voice, will you let the dear sisters take you to your apartments now?”

  “To my prison, you mean?” She had never been comfortable with the way Revered Shija watched her, Shija who had never married, who laughed and made jokes about the clumsiness and sweatiness of men, even when the boy dancers were there to hear.

  “In the Lady’s name, put a robe on her and take her away, if the Lady has no more to say to us,” said Rahel. “Use the smoke again if you have to. That’s certainly not the Lady’s voice or the Lady’s manner; it’s the girl, taking undue advantage of the honour done her to put herself above us. Shija, since neither Revered Mina nor Revered Dur is in any fit state to resume their duties, I suggest you stay with the Voice for now. The Lady may speak again, when her Red Masks return with the priest and the wizard.”

  “Oh, I think not,” Zora said. “Did you not listen? Do you not hear, when I speak? I am the Lady. My voice is my own, and no priestess now will stand between me and my folk.”

  “Zora, dear, please,” protested the Mistress of the Dance. “Be a good girl, Revered Voice, and come with me.” And she reached to put a hand on Zora’s arm.

  Tu’usha hissed and shaped the ghost of her sword from the air, sliced off the offending hand.

  “Do not any of you think to lay a finger on me again!”

  Shija didn’t even scream. She clutched her spurting wrist to her breast, mouth stupidly agape, and sank grey-lipped to her knees. Tu’usha frowned down at her a long moment, resting the sword tip-down on the floor. The priests bunched back. She raised her head and glared, no smile now. They froze. The Beholder of the Face, Rahel, was the first to bow, deeply, abjectly, Ashir only a breath behind her. Some even sank to their knees, faces to the ground.

  “Zora . . .” Shija whispered, staring up at her. Tu’usha slashed her throat and, hoisting her sodden hem in one hand, sprang lightly over the pooling blood, letting her sword dissolve again to memory as she did so.

  “Come,” she ordered her priests. “Leave that; the Red Masks will deal with it.” She started for the stairs. Her champion took a torch to light her way, preceding her. She swept the priests after her with a gesture, the Right Hand and the
Beholder behind her. “Ashir,” she said over her shoulder, “after I eat and find fitting attire I will ride out and see my city, present myself to my folk. Arrange it. Find me a suitable horse, and one for my champion as well.”

  “Your . . . my Lady?”

  “The captain of my Red Masks, old man. There used to be a festival procession, didn’t there? At harvest or some such thing? Weaving through all the wards, ending up at the senate palace? Yes, I’ll address the folk there this afternoon. See that the word goes out. Yes,” she agreed with herself. “That will serve.” Careful. Zora ordered her thoughts. We do babble, these days, don’t we? The palace was destroyed, she had not forgotten that, but a long, broad flight of steps climbed up the steep hillside to its portico, now a long platform of tilted paving slabs and the stumps of the black pillars. That would be a fitting place from which to speak. Her folk could fill the plaza, and all would be able to see her, to hear, to worship their Lady. Yes.

  Her champion . . . He had not quite died in the well. Some goddess claimed him to a sacred service and held him in life for it, but that didn’t really matter. The soul was what mattered, and the soul was hers. Easier to take it from a dead man, that was all; it was not quite necromancy and not quite possession, but she held him, and she did not think the strangely knotted soul of him would reassemble itself to anything of the man he had been, to fight her. The only strange thing was that he was wizard, and she could not reach his wizardry for her use. Something to do with his goddess. She would find a way around that in time, and meanwhile, she had plenty of others.

  She would have more soon. She had lain quiet within Marakand long enough. Now the folk could see their Lady ride among them. Now their Lady could command them in her own voice, not the broken babble of her Voice. Now they would know her true strength, and love her, and worship her with their whole hearts, and she would not any longer have to walk softly, fearing the wrath of the deserts and the cities of the coast. No wizards in Marakand. Soon there would be no wizards in the suburb. The suburb was Marakand. Marakand was hers. The wizards would be hers, all hers. Soon.