The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  The innkeeper peered around warily, careful not to look at her too directly, undressed as she was. Nodded, said gruffly, “Well, then. Sorry to disturb you.” Took his boy firmly by the scruff of the neck—the porter had no courtesy to match his master’s and was frankly gawking at the girl’s smooth shoulder where the blanket slipped. Ghu held them up a moment, lighting the room’s lamp at theirs, and then they were gone. He dropped the bar of the door again.

  “They’ll ask us to leave in the morning,” Ghu said matter-of-factly. “Disturbing the house.”

  Ahjvar swore and crossed to the girl in a stride, seizing her by the shoulder. She stifled her shriek, gone stiff, wide-eyed and trembling in his grasp. He ran a thumb over the darkness at the base of her throat, not shadow in the tiny flame of the lamp but slick blood. A nick, no more. When he dropped his hand, she fled back to the bed.

  He sat down with his back to the door, sword across his legs, watching his hands on the cracked red leather of the scabbard.

  “There was a woman who killed me once,” he said at last. “You look like her. It’s not your fault. But you get into my nightmares.”

  “Who killed you . . .” Deyandara repeated. He heard Ghu crossing the room, the creak of the ropes supporting the mattress as he sat by her.

  “He thinks he’s dead,” Ghu explained. “It’s all right. He isn’t really.”

  “It won’t happen again.” Ahjvar got to his feet again, wearily, found himself a clean shirt and the tunic chequered in muted greens and greys that he’d worn most of the long road since the south, the dull brown trousers likewise, still stiff with mud and dust, a headscarf of the caravan road. In the corner of his eye the girl was huddled, watching, wrapped in her blanket in the half-light of the lamp. Well, Ghu was in his drawers, too, and was probably a more pleasing sight to her, under the circumstances. He unpacked, found knives, a wider assortment than it was politic to carry on his person, other gear, and repacked, so he had one small but heavy bag. He hung the belt of his sword over his shoulder as well and slung his cloak over all. Usefully dark.

  “Did you bite my ear?” he asked, not for the girl’s understanding.

  “It woke you up. I didn’t dare let go to do anything else.”

  “You—.” Ahjvar almost laughed, but couldn’t, quite. “Go first thing in the morning,” he told Ghu. “Don’t wait. There’s too much smoke in my dreams. I can’t trust I’ll be given time. I’ll find you when I can.”

  Ahjvar unbarred the shutters and dropped lightly down onto the porch roof. Ghu, silent, closed them again, locking the lamplight away behind him.

  Any footpad fool enough to jump him now was going die. He’d kill of his own will if only some useless thug would give him a halfway honest excuse. Feed it, stave it off a little longer. But the night didn’t oblige, and he hiked to the ravine without a human soul seeing him. By then, the east was lightening, dawn creeping near, and he found a way through the scrub of the riverbed easily enough. Hard to avoid disturbing the birds, but there were feral dogs, foxes, some long-snouted cat-beast, and no doubt other creatures to explain the birds’ stirring as he passed. It was treacherous underfoot, stones tilted, broken. The rubble of the earthquake must have been dumped here, what could not be salvaged or built over, and no flood great enough to settle it or fill it in with silt had ever come down out of the mountains. He saw no sign of human passage save one well-trodden track that ran lengthwise, broad enough for three abreast, lush with nettles and honey-scented angelica towering to either side, sweeps of daylily, the night-closed buds like cold fingers stroking over him as he brushed past. A patrol-route, almost certainly. The trees along this stretch were mostly willow and poplar woven with grape and blister-vine, which he recognized by its rank scent in time to avoid crushing it with more than a boot.

  Little sign the patrols ever ventured off their beaten track.

  By the Riverbend Gate, city wall topped the ravine. Along most of Riverbend and Greenmarket Wards, the cliff was enough of a defence, and likewise in much of East Ward. Along the temple, though, the level of the ground dropped. The last time he had been in Marakand, the low-lying temple precinct had been fenced from the riverbed by a combination of city wall and temple buildings. He remembered a hospice, a pleasant white-plastered place. His quarry had gone there to make a donation for the temple’s charitable works, all part of winning over some son of one of the banking Families with whom she sought an alliance. A marriage that would have destabilized the delicate balance of the clans in far-distant Sea Town, where he’d lived then, under a Nabbani name. It was the woman’s own father had hired him, he remembered. He hadn’t killed her there, merely followed, watching, followed her through a week and shot her in the twilight from a rooftop as she walked up the steps to her new betrothed’s Family manor. She would never have exposed herself so carelessly in Sea Town.

  Dusk or grey dawn twilight, Ahjvar was certain he could get up the cliff and through the jumble of houses that made a tight wall along its brink. He could see small gaps, alleys, with mounting mounds of nettle-grown rubbish and street-sweepings beneath. But from what he had seen of the wall the day before, he could just as easily climb it and get right into the temple grounds, or get in through one of the buildings that formed part of the wall and had looked half-ruined themselves. He found himself what was not exactly a cave but a narrow darkness under a lip of stone in the shelving cliff. There he crawled in and lay down, with his dark cloak pulled over him, making him a shadow behind a screen of olive saplings, as near invisible as could be. Sleep. He hoped. And if he did have nightmares here, there was no one to hurt. He’d probably just brain himself on the ledge overhead.

  The smoke had faded. He’d go scouting come evening, before it grew full dark. Find out if the wineshop-keeper’s description of the Voice’s so damned convenient living arrangements were true. He rather wished they weren’t. Too simple. Not enough to keep her entertained for long. Simple execution, no long stalking.

  Though the Red Masks might make it more interesting, if there were any about. Not a word he wanted Ghu to hear him use of it. Interesting, Great Gods forgive him.

  And if Catairanach kept her promise, what then?

  He would die as he should have, gone to dust long since? Well enough. But if he’d thought of that, he’d have taken a longer farewell of Ghu.

  The truth was, he didn’t believe her. He would kill the Voice, and, assuming she was the ruler of the temple as Catairanach believed—which he still doubted, but it made no difference to what he did—maybe, if he killed some other powers of the temple too, that would sow enough confusion to give time for a strong lord to arise from the Duina Catairna. The Marakanders would be thrown out, Durandau would confirm some lord in the Catairnan kingship, with or more likely without Catairanach’s blessing, and in a month, or three months, the smoke would steal into his dreams again, he’d find a victim or she would take one, and the nightmare would cycle round again. And maybe Ghu would be there, the only person he had willingly let near him, body or heart, since Miara, and that was eighty years, trying to convince him there was yet some grace in the world. And maybe he wouldn’t.

  A man could crave simple human touch as he could water.

  It was a good time to run, while Ghu had the girl in his charge.

  He could go west, to Tiypur. Escape Ghu, force him to get on with his own life. Let Ahjvar vanish and take a new name.

  He’d miss Ghu.

  Never feed a cat.

  He fell asleep, exhausted, and if he dreamed, it was only to twitch a little, as a dog might, unsettled.

  The Leopard had not returned and the cut on her throat still stung. Deyandara pushed barley porridge about the bowl and watched Ghu, who had climbed out the window, squatting on his heels on the roof of the porch. He hadn’t touched his own food, though he had been up at dawn, requesting their breakfast, seeing that the horses had theirs. Apparently Ahjvar had ordered them to leave the city. She hadn’t even seen it yet; this dirty
sprawl that served the caravan road was not Marakand of the golden-roofed library, the markets where the goods of the world were bought and sold, where you could hear songs in a dozen languages from the folk of two dozen gods, just walking down the street.

  Ghu did not seem happy with his orders, if that was what they were. She touched the rough and still sticky scab and felt it move as she swallowed. Ahjvar could have killed her. A little more pressure . . . Nightmares. He had been going to kill her. There had been a noise, and she had thought she smelled smoke and woken out of some horrible dream to hear what sounded like Ahjvar and Ghu fighting. Ghu had shouted at her to get out the window, but she had been too sleep-muddled to even think where the window was. The sword had been cold, pressing her skin, but the hand that held it shaking—

  “Ghu!” she called. He didn’t respond. She’d learnt that over the past days; he might be Ahjvar’s servant—or whatever. He certainly wasn’t hers. He went deaf whenever she gave him anything approaching an order. She went to the window. “Ghu?” And uncertainly, off-balance, because . . . because whatever had gone on last night, Ghu had saved her. He had been the one with the quick and believable lie; he had been the one holding all in balance, and . . . and he was not quite what she had thought him. His voice, not her screams, woke and mastered the madman. “Can I come out there?”

  Ghu looked back at her then. It was the same mild, simpleton’s look, but . . . had she ever truly seen his eyes before? Black eyes, not mere poetry, not dark brown: black like the night sky and deep enough to drown in. He still said nothing. She took that for an answer, of sorts, and climbed out to join him, sitting down carefully. The tile roof sloped.

  “There’s something wrong with him, isn’t there? Beyond being—what he is.” Godless and lordless, she meant.

  Ghu looked away again.

  “He was afraid,” she persisted. “He really did not know what he was doing.”

  “No,” he agreed at last. Nothing more. And then, “There’s something bad in the city,” Ghu said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Something old. Ahj isn’t safe.”

  That he wasn’t, in any sense of the word. She had been coming to think him tame, a short-tempered man who was no unwelcome companion to have on the road, a reassuring strength, however irritable. She had wanted to see some kind of honour in him, too, the champion the goddess Catairanach named him, like her brother’s man Lord Launval the Elder. That vision in blood and fire, the savagery of the night he, they, had saved her, had faded swiftly to almost a dream, the whole affair of the brigands had, except when she reached to touch Badger’s head, and the mastiff was no longer at her knee, no heavy head weighing down her ankles and groaning complaint when she rolled over in the night, no grinning shadow looking up at her whenever she glanced aside.

  “You’re worried about him. You said he told you to take me away. He thinks I’m an idiot.”

  Ghu’s smile startled her. “He does, yes. He thinks you’re very young.”

  She bit her lip. “Maybe I am.”

  He did not rush to contradict her.

  “Would he beat you, if you disobeyed him?”

  “Ahj? He never hits me. Except by accident.”

  “By accident?”

  “He has nightmares.” As if she hadn’t learnt that this past night. And he said it as though it were of small import. “Lady, Ahjvar needs me. Will you go back to your brother? We can find a caravan going east; you could travel to the lands of the Duina Broasoran in safe company and ask escort of the queen there.”

  “I—” She shut her mouth on indignant protest. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No. There’s death in the city.”

  “There’s death everywhere,” she snapped.

  “True. But—there’s death on your heels, most of all. Better you go.”

  “I don’t want to go to my brother.”

  Ghu’s head tilted. “Why?”

  Deyandara shook her head.

  “Why?” he repeated gently.

  “I’m their—they want me to be their queen. The Catairnans.” It was suddenly easy, telling Ghu, laying the words at his feet as if he could somehow carry them for her. “But their goddess sent me away. She—it was a dream. It seemed like a dream. But then I was out in the hills, and the night was around me, and I heard voices, the speech of the western road. The Marakander mercenaries. I didn’t know where I was, and I was afraid. So I went on. South, through the Tributary Lands, back and forth, to within sight of the walls of Two Hills, then down to Gold Harbour and around it. Wandering, doing what she had told me. Going to you. To Ahjvar, I mean. And I followed you because I couldn’t go back, not after what I’d done, running away, and to run and then go back with my brother, as his, his tool . . . I didn’t want to do that. But Marnoch will—they’ll think I ran away no matter how I return.”

  “Did you not tell Catairanach it was wrong, to make you go when it was not your will?”

  Deyandara shook her head, about to protest that she couldn’t have, not refused a goddess, no, but she could see Ghu doing just that, saying wide-eyed and simple and kind, as if explaining the obvious to a child, “But I don’t want to. I won’t.”

  If she had tried—had she thought to try? Had she tried to wake, as she led Cricket out to the gate, Badger running ahead? Or had it all slipped into her so easily, because it was what she wanted, because it was easier, to run and to be able to say, it wasn’t my fault? Catairanach wanted me for a messenger, not a queen, it’s her fault, not mine?

  Her eyes were watering, and she would not cry like a scolded child. She blinked furiously.

  “I don’t know what to do.” It was a whisper. “Ghu, what should I do?”

  His arm was around her, holding her, and she wanted to lay her head on his shoulder and weep for loneliness, but that wasn’t right, and how had he turned into someone she wanted to lean on, anyway? She wound her hands together in her lap and took a deep breath, blinking at the city rising over its walls away beyond the caravanserai. House piled upon house, it looked, steep tiers of flat roofs and roofs with shallow domes or red tile, all yellow-mud plastered or lime-washed and gleaming in the sun. She could even see the glare of what must be the famous library, a golden roof that burned the eye. Real gold, or some illusion? Hadn’t the senate palace fallen during the earthquake, killing all the rulers of the city? She turned her head and found Ghu studying her, far, far too close, and if she leaned just a little more . . .

  His smile was sweet, like a little child’s. But then he looked away. “Do you see that man, down the street?”

  Deyandara shaded her eyes. “The one sitting in the doorway?”

  “He’s waiting for us.”

  “You don’t know that. Why would he be?”

  “I saw other Praitans ride down the road. He didn’t watch them. He doesn’t think they’re all spies. Just us. Just you, maybe.”

  “Me? If he’s looking for anyone, it’s Ahjvar. Even the goddess of the Duina Catairna knew he was an assassin.”

  “Catairanach knows him. No one else Over-Malagru who knows him knew we came here. I don’t think Catairanach would sell him to Marakand when she sees the death of the Voice as her only possible vengeance for Gilru who should have been king. The Marakanders only know Master Clentara, who came to the city with you. They don’t know the Leopard. They may know Clentara attacked a man following him last night.”

  “Did Ahjvar kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “Because he’s not that kind of man.”

  “He’s an assassin. He murders people for money.”

  Ghu hushed her, took her hand in both his own. They were warm and rough, a servant’s hands, distracting, overwhelming, and she shivered, as if he’d touched her far more intimately. She wanted to shut her eyes and just . . .

  “He isn’t meant to be that kind of man,” Ghu amended. “Does your brother know you went to the Duina
Catairna?”

  “No! Yes.” She swallowed, opening her eyes again. “He would by now. Lord Yvarr sent letters, in my name as queen, asking him to raise the tribes. It’s—it’s a king’s right, a queen’s right, when the threat is to all Praitan Over-Malagru. Our right to ask aid of all the duinas, and the high king’s duty to give it. The messengers had left before I did.”

  “So he’ll have had the messages by now. He’ll know you’ve declared yourself queen.”

  “But I haven’t!” But in signing those letters and setting Cattiga’s seal to them, she had.

  “And he may have heard you’re missing. And your folk—”

  “Not my folk. I’m not fit to be their queen.”

  “Your folk—your lords, at least, know you are their queen, and that you are gone in the night. They may think you went to your brother, following the messengers. They’ll have sent to him again to find you.”

  “Yes, but even if, even if they did, and a messenger was captured by Marakanders and made to talk, they didn’t know I was coming to Marakand. I didn’t know I was coming to Marakand.”

  “But even if no messenger were captured, someone else may have been taken and told the Marakanders that the high king’s sister was wandering alone in the west of Over-Malagru. A girl alone, a bard too young to be a bard, with hair like copper in the sun.”

  That was—nice. Copper in the sun. His finger was tracing the lines of her palm.

  “They might keep an eye out for such a one, in the event she crossed their path. A hostage against the high king, perhaps. Or perhaps to kill, as Cattiga and Gilru were killed. The Voice of the Lady of Marakand wants your land for her own, and she does not seem to care what offence she does to the goddess of the land to get it.” He frowned. “Though I do not think your goddess is a wise one, to have sent you away, and in secret from her lords and yours. Ahj calls her a fool, often.” He considered again. “And worse. With cause. Lady, what do you want to do? What’s in your heart, now, if you could choose, now and for the rest of your life? Where would you be?”