The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  The damned wizard-hunting Red Masks the Marakanders all feared so were wizards themselves. Didn’t the city know?

  The first struck towards him, low and fast with a short stabbing sword, the usual Marakander weapon, and he turned aside, in close, caught the arm on the left-hand dagger, grating on bone; their armour had no sleeves. The priest jerked free, and he met the other’s slashing blow; that one, taller, had a long Northron blade. He let himself be forced back so he could turn and get the wall behind him. More of the Red Masks slid into the room, silent, all of them silent, and fluid as water in their movements. These were unarmoured, carried only the white staves. Armour turned his sword, blade skittered on blade, the smaller priest was still using his torn arm strongly as ever. They seemed to care little for defending themselves, pressing in, till he stabbed through an eye-slit of the shorter priest’s mask. He lost his dagger, but that one fell without a cry, becoming a hazard to them all—devils forbid, trying to stagger up again, which was not right, not with a handspan of steel in the brain, but she or he failed and sprawled, clutching at Ahjvar’s foot, and the red light faded from the body. Faded from them all, first one, then another, but it didn’t stop them. Some wizardry they had collectively and silently decided was worthless.

  Catairanach’s champion, was he? It became like that, a duel between him and the taller Red Mask with the Northron-style sword, and he wished for a shield after all, gripping his bundle to guard his left side, but even if he did cut his opponent down, the Lady of Marakand would hardly accept it as the judgement of the Old Great Gods in Catairanach’s favour and let him leave. And it could not be a judgement to mere blooding, because the damned Red Masks didn’t seem to bleed. He should have noticed that sooner. He should have jumped for the window instead, but in the lamplight he wasn’t able to see if the bars were wood, with a hope of breaking, or unyielding iron.

  The robed Red Masks circling around were as faceless as the man he fought, wearing long, dull red veils, thick enough to show no shadow of feature, thick enough to blind them, but they didn’t move as if they had any difficulty seeing. Wizardry.

  He bled, if the Red Mask did not. Arm and ribs. The other’s armour was torn, gown slashed, a warding arm sliced half away, hanging, Great Gods, and only sluggish dark blood congealed on the wound. He made no sound, nor faltered. Ahjvar beat the other’s stroke aside with the bundle of his cloak and gear, drove forward for the damaged segment of armour where the stitching showed, and ran him through, falling forward, missed footing on slick stones, dizzy, his own blood, and the dead priest underfoot. He recovered, dragged sword free with both hands, makeshift shield abandoned. He swept at a veiled one’s neck, seeing a path to the door, a chance, as they stood about like onlookers to a tavern brawl, but they closed in, half a dozen of them; they had merely been waiting, watching, testing. There was no guarding against all the blows that beat him down.

  The main road of the caravanserai suburb forked at a triangle of land uncultivated and pitted, enclosed by a low drystone wall; the graveyard they had passed yesterday, with a charnel-house, its plaster flaking, squatting at the westernmost end. Ghu, who had melted into the shadow of a doorway as the lady and her wizard trotted past, took the right-hand fork. He could see in the distance that the Malagru-folk, if those were the pale, dark-haired country people who had been passing through the Eastern Wall yesterday, seemed to be taking the bridge to the Riverbend Gate with their produce. Most of the caravan-folk heading in to the city did as well. The southerly, right-hand road joined one coming down along the city wall from the south, and the folk there seemed mostly to be Marakander peasants, dressed in shawls and caftans, and not so free-moving and proud as the people of the Malagru. Well, if your goddess ruled you as an emperor through a corrupted viceroy, you probably learnt to walk warily, and cowed. Why Sunset Gate? An impulse. He trusted such impulses as a dog trusts its nose, not to keep him out of trouble but to tug him along to where he ought, or perhaps ought not, to be. Sometimes it was better to be where you ought not, if you meant to change the flow of the world.

  The bridge over the ravine was empty as he walked across, pausing to lean on the parapet and gaze down at the broken stone and lush greenery of its bed. No water. Not even any reeds, here; it was all thorny fruit-trees and creeping vines, busy with birds. A garden, but an untended one. This bridge was not old stone but new, barely wide enough for a single cart. The ruins of a broader one framed it on either bank. He went on, thoughtfully. An empty river, but not, not quite godless yet. There was the faintest trace of some presence. Perhaps only a memory? A ghost. Nothing he could call to. It was a sorrowful thing for a god to die, but the living world, even the world of stone and water, was not eternal. It had its currents and its tides.

  This Sunset Ward gate, if he remembered what Ahj had told him on the road, when he was sane again and the lady was travelling with them, was the one that had fallen in the earthquake. Unlike the gates of the pass in the Eastern Wall and the distant Western down where the caravan road dropped to the Stone Desert, the city gates were closed at dusk and opened at dawn. Ghu strolled along the fringes of a party not of peasants but of grander folk, a bulky, jouncing carriage like a box on wheels, with four armed men walking beside it and four horses to pull it. A swirl of writing on the tiny door and the same badge painted large between the shoulders of the men’s capes probably meant something. A senator? A clan-father or whatever the senior lords of the great families were called here. No one looked out the tiny, cloth-covered slit of a window. Miserable way to travel, when you could be out under the sun. There were great manors up along the southern road, Ahjvar had said, where servants and tenants of the lords of the Twenty Families or of the temple grew some of what fed the city, and where the lords of Families went to flee the summer’s heat. The carriage was followed by a swarm of hangers-on, a cart piled with baggage, servants on foot, one carrying a fluffy little dog that sighed and looked longingly at Ghu, envying him the freedom to use his feet. Even these servants wore long caftans; only the guards and the boys who led the ponies went bare-legged in short tunics, though the day was gathering to hot. Half of them had Nabbani-black hair; the folk of Marakand were descended from the folk of many gods. Ahjvar should maybe have thought to get him a caftan rather than a cameleer’s coat, but then, Ahjvar had not wanted him to come into the city. He should have thought of it himself.

  “May I pet the dog?” he asked, as they came up near the gate, and the woman who carried it looked over at him, then back at the carriage she followed, before smiling.

  “If he’ll let you. He has a temper.”

  Ghu would have a temper too, if he were forced to be carried everywhere so that he grew too fat to walk if he wanted, and to wear his hair tied up in a topknot of ribbons. But the panting dog leaned into his fingers as he scratched around its ears. It even licked his hand, so that the woman laughed and said, “You’re somebody special, I can see.” He strolled through the darkness of the gate hearing about how the dog always threw up in the carriage, past the bare-legged street guards in their grey tunics, armed only with staves, and nobody paid him any heed as a brown-haired man with a black band on the hem of his tunic and his russet cape and a short sword on a baldric came out from a square stone building, his helmet under his arm, to bow to the carriage. It didn’t stop, just passed on through. Ghu did likewise, just another servant of the carriage despite his western-road garb, then took his leave of the dog and its bearer, sauntering off.

  Marakand was more like the Five Cities than the capital or the ports of the empire, although even its main streets seemed unplanned, grown up from wandering paths, where the colonies were orderly. The broad road from the gate, lined with what he guessed were warehouses, windowless on their ground floors, was paved in stone and swept clean, though the morning’s traffic was already leaving it toll of dung and dust. It ended very quickly at an open market square, filled with rugs spread on the ground, bright awnings, and arrays of baskets, mostly of produce.
Interspersed with such displays were carts piled equally high, whose oxen switched their tails against flies and chewed their cud in unhurried peace, while the donkeys drowsed. The houses surrounding the square were mostly plastered golden with clay or washed bright with lime. Narrow streets and narrower alleys divided them, a web fanning out in all directions with only two broader roads fit to take a cart that he could see. Even those were dark, almost tunnel-like, overhung with balconies and galleries that almost touched. It made the market brighter, like a pool of sunshine.

  There was a weight to it, too, a heaviness drawing him down, as if it were water sweeping to some drain. Not in the centre but towards the southeast corner there was a single building, a squat, barrel-vaulted stone square. Ghu threaded his way towards it almost unthinkingly. Something ancient, something deadly, something that was no goddess of clean water, however diminished from her river.

  There was power in that stone building, which had no entrance he could see. Not power within, but power laid in the stones, in mortar, in the incised script that stalked along the frieze. What lay within he couldn’t tell. It was not an emptiness, though. A blindness. But he felt that only as he drew closer, close enough to read the script, if he had been able to read at all. No, the weight, the wind that stirred the market, the dangerous thing that drew him, was another woman, standing with the odd building at her back. He stopped, stood, heart running a little too fast. He had seen wizards, servants of the emperor, about their business. They wore an air of power that pressed against the world a little, as though they held more space than other folk. He had met demons, a time or two, and they swam in the currents of the world and were all that it was and all that made up the land of their heart, and the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters, too, had a weight and a presence, much greater than that a wizard carried. He had thought the wizard who called herself Lady Deyandara’s was a goddess, at first, when she came to the room in the inn, maybe the Voice or the Lady herself, and he would have felt her approach sooner if he had not been so distracted by the distant brooding threat within the city. No goddess, he had known almost at once, but she might be some halfling god, some child of a rash goddess or hill-god into whom too much of her parent’s divinity had been permitted to flow. Perhaps. But there were stranger powers in the world, not all indifferent or well-disposed to humanfolk. He did not think she was a dragon. But she had sworn protection to Lady Deyandara, and she had meant her oath, and she had seen enough of him to be wary. Not that he wished her to have done so.

  And now all in one morning here was another such, within the city where the darkness brooded, and he did not think, he did not think she was what Ahjvar had come seeking, either.

  “There is a cycle of tales told by the Northron skalds, and they begin like this . . .”

  The storyteller wore a bright shawl, black with patterns of red and brilliant blue, trailing over one shoulder, looped over an arm, flashing scarlet and kingfisher as she gestured. He had seen such patterns of jagged lines and borders in the cities, exotic soft yak-woollens of the Pillars of the Sky. The storyteller appeared to be no mountain woman, though, but a Northron, one of the skalds she spoke of, maybe, a bard of the north, a weaver of poetry, a singer of history.

  A power, choosing to appear road-worn and shabby, who would blur and fade from mind the moment she removed that brilliant shawl.

  The bard didn’t sing but chanted in trade Nabbani. Her eyes, grey as storm-clouds over the sea, held Ghu’s a moment. He made his way towards her, reluctant. A necessity, being here. Maybe. And if she were truly a storyteller, and only some wild godling child throwing off sparks all unwitting of threat, well, he had heard few stories from the kingdoms of the north, and perhaps he should hear one now. Nabban had looked inward too long. Besides, the sense of heavy menace underlying the city was not lessening, but his urge to hunt down Ahjvar, drag him away, hold him safe was being overruled by common sense. Ahj would be scouting around the temple, and it would be unwise to draw the attention of the Voice of the Lady. Just because the clerk at the Eastern Wall had set nothing down when he glanced over at Ghu and dismissed him did not mean that someone would not remember that the Praitans, who had most certainly drawn attention, had had a Nabbani servant with them. That courier who had galloped by so soon as they passed through had given them a studying look.

  Ahjvar would certainly shout at him if he came searching now. But something lurked, like a beast, waiting. He did not think it was this storyteller . . . but he was not absolutely certain. Another reason to listen.

  “Long ago, in the days of the first kings in the north . . .” The storyteller watched him as she did not watch the others drawn round her amidst the bustle of the market; her eyes flitted over them, and her smile was swift and practised, entirely belonging to her art, like the sweep of her arms, the flash of the scarlet and black and kingfisher blue, that invited them closer, to squat at her feet. He joined the others who had settled near, old men and women with little to do, children truant from errands, a few curious market-goers with their filled baskets pulled warily close against thieves. The woman was tall, lean, almost gaunt, a warrior’s, a traveller’s hardness. Neither young nor old, with the strong harsh bones of the north, a skin much lighter than the Praitannec tawniness he was used to seeing with pale hair; her long plait a faded silveriness that wasn’t due to age. She made no concession to the fashions of the land in her tunic and narrow-legged trousers, all brown and grey and shabby. A dark cloak was slung down carelessly on the ground at her side. Her open-handed gesture indicated the little wooden bowl at her feet, a small and lonely coin its only offering. None responded. She pulled a face at them all, sighed, shrugged, folded her arms, fallen silent and looking at the sky.

  A grinning imp of a boy carefully broke the corner from a loaf in his basket and tossed the crust to join the coin. He sat on his knees, ready to run if she swooped to box his ears, and Ghu almost held his breath, ready to hurl himself between her and the child, but she put her hands together and bowed deeply, Nabbani-fashion, as much in Ghu’s direction as the boy’s, and suddenly grave and formal, went on:

  “. . . who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise—there were seven devils, and their names were Honeytongued Ogada, Vartu Kingsbane, Jasberek Fireborn, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, Tu’usha the Restless, and Jochiz Stonebreaker. If other tellers tell you different . . .” she raised her brows, shrugged, “. . . they are ignorant singers not worthy of their hire. And these seven devils escaped from the cold hells, where the Old Great Gods had sealed them after the great war in the heavens.”

  Even in Nabban they had their stories of the seven devils, mostly fantastical. Wizards who flew on the wings of the wind, horses of bone, the dead rising from their graves to follow their lords to battle, a princess buried alive to call a demon from the sea . . . Dotemon had conquered and ruled Nabban until the gods themselves rose up to throw her down—but he knew that one was true.

  So was a devil truly a creature of the cold hells or merely some name, some excuse, for a wizard grown over-mighty and taken to lording it over his fellow men?

  “And in the days of the first kings in the north, who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, as I have told, there were seven wizards. Two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from over the western sea, and one was of a people unknown; one was of the Great Grass and one of Imperial Nabban, and two were from beyond far Nabban, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded or, as his enemies named him, Heuslar the Cunning, who was uncle to Red Geir, Ulfhild the King’s Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise, Anganurth Wanderer, Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship, Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, and Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie.” A stern look at the boy who had tossed the crust, as if he were suspected of believing suc
h ignorant singers.

  “These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet more, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

  “Now the devils, having no place, had no bodies, but were like smoke or like a flame and not of the earth at all. And these seven devils who had escaped the cold hells hungered to be of the stuff of the world . . . They made a bargain with the seven wizards, that they would join their souls to the wizards’ souls and share the wizards’ bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power.”

  Ghu joined those making themselves comfortable on the ground. This made the building loom in his vision, not comfortably. The inscribed frieze kept trying to pull his eye away from the storyteller. It . . . prickled. The woman swam in his vision, edged in shifting light. Her eyes found his again, a singer’s trick to gather her audience in, now this one, now that, except he did not think she looked at any but him. It raised the hairs all down his neck, and he wondered what she saw, in turn. That was twice in one day he’d seen such eyes, old eyes, too old, hot with suppressed fires. Yet he stayed where he was, listening.

  “But the devils deceived the wizards and betrayed them. The devils took the souls of the wizards into their own and became one with them, and it is said they devoured them.”

  A sandalled foot pressed against him, someone shifting nearer, out of the flow of people passing, slowing, yet going on their way. He glanced up, into striking amber eyes that flicked down, and the young woman muttered something, apology, maybe, in the speech of the western road, folded her arms and stayed to listen. He was suddenly only half attentive to the Northron woman. Amber eyes and a rope of blue-black hair, a heart that, like his, ran too fast—with fear? Afraid, and she paused to listen to a story?