The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  It took most of the rest of the day, circling the ruin, stalking through the thick woods of precipitous western slopes, to run down his deer again. He gutted it where he had killed it and ate what offal was worth eating, dragging the carcass back to the camp on the far side of the hill, his mind running on roast collops of venison and stewed marrowbones, and whether there would be much left worth drying over what smoke they dared; it was not a large deer at all. He could probably finish it before it went off. Pity they wouldn’t have time to cure the hide, as well. Wasteful. He was tired of wandering.

  He climbed the dyke around the priestly ruins with the weary contentment of homecoming after a fair day’s labour. No one to greet him. Moth wasn’t back, but he’d known that by the absence of her scent. No sign of Storm, though, and it was hard to lose a large and very solid horse, however dead, in a small enclosure. He dropped the deer by their fire-pit and sniffed the air. There was too much bone about this place to distinguish Storm, and besides, he and the butchered deer reeked of blood. Flies were settling on the both of them.

  “Styrma?” he called, unease growing. “Hey, horse?” No ghost-shaping crashed like a boar out of the tangled cornel trees to give him an indignant and unhorselike glower.

  Lakkariss was where he had left it, shoved under grapevine along a ruined wall a few courses high. Nothing had disturbed the camp, human or beast.

  He found the horse-skull in the far corner where poplars had invaded the fruit-thicket; it lay amid trampled ferns. The marks of an unshod horse in the dirt were real enough, but Storm was a bone-horse, spell and memory bound to his skull. That he was not mere bone-memory, and that he seemed to grow in cunning and will every time Moth drew him into the world again, was not usual, but he was still only a bone-horse, one of the less sinful necromancies, and without Moth’s own will behind the beast, he was nothing even a hungry dog would bother with.

  Mikki nosed at the skull. The rune, drawn in blood between the eyes, was brown and faded, with older traces staining beneath it. Impossible to say when it had fallen to the ground. Ghosts he could see, but Storm wasn’t a true ghost, lingering trapped in the world. There was nothing he could call, and the horse could hardly answer if he did.

  He prowled down towards the menagerie, and then back and down the much more overgrown path of many stairs that led down to a fallen gateway and the blind end of a shabby street into Silvergate Ward, but did not find Moth returning by either route. Methodically he rolled in the mould of fallen leaves beneath the trees some way from the priests’ compound to clean the drying, sticky blood from his coat and end the torment of the flies and then in the dust of the path from the menagerie, which finished the job. He drank from the trickle of water that came down the bottom of the gully beneath Gurhan’s cave and cached the deer high in a poplar in Storm’s favourite corner of their camp. Paced again, waiting, feeling the tide of night gathering in his blood. The shadows grew too slowly, darkness pooling in their enclosed dell, but the sun, hidden behind the rise of the hill, still struck fire on the crest of the hill above.

  No Moth. When he sought, he did not feel her, like distant sun warming the blind and seeking face, in the city at all. She was not dead. He would know if she were dead, how could he not, when she was sun and moon and the throne of his heart? But she was gone, and he did not think it was by her own will; she had said she would return by evening, and of all the world, Ulfhild Vartu would not break faith with him. Even in the small things. Perhaps especially in the small, on which all else was built.

  Bats flitted overhead and a fox yelped. Down in the city, the bells began to toll, the first curfew. They were early by several heartbeats. But sun did set. Moth had not returned, and when he shut his eyes, not even thinking, just reaching . . . she was not there. So. As methodically as he had cleaned his fur and stashed the deer against later need, deliberation and careful movement keeping the urge to run shouting and roaring well leashed, he found his tunic and his double-bitted axe.

  Better to be a man breaking curfew than a beast by daylight. He would probably get farther before he had to fight. Fewer people about, as well. He took the path down to Silvergate Ward, knowing only that he had to go north from there, through several wards and gates, but that the gates within the city were never closed, where they existed at all.

  He still smelt of deer’s blood. Probably he had blood yet in his beard. It didn’t much bother him. Anyone close enough to see was going to have other things to worry about.

  Two patrols of street guard had not seen him, a demon passing wrapped in night; one had, but Mikki had swarmed to the top of a yard wall and gone away over porches and galleries into another street and left them shouting and ringing their handbells far away. The temple, when he found it, could be nothing else, a silent wall, a gatehouse where strangely nervous guardsmen stood together in the red light of pitch torches, hands too tight on the shafts of their spears, twitching at shadows. Mikki went over and found beyond the wall a crumbling cliff-face, dropping into a shadowed dell, easy enough to scramble down. He dropped lightly to his feet, axe in hand, in what seemed to be a garden, cool and sweet-scented with herbs. A patrol of ten soldiers passed, murmuring and too tightly huddled together. A gap in the wall took him into a stone-paved courtyard, narrowly avoiding another patrol, and he passed in quick succession through a musty-smelling hall given over to storage of books bound and in scrolls, and a bath-house, empty, its pool dark and still, its rooms smelling of human sweat and soap and oil. There seemed to be guards everywhere here, marching in clattering patrols or standing sentry duty at corners and alleyways and the doors of buildings, where lamps still burned behind the screened windows and every now and then a shadow paused, looking out. The place looked as though it thought itself under siege. No sign of Moth. Mostly he managed to avoid the temple guard by scaling the walls between courtyards. Once, growing frustrated, he knocked one on the head from behind and dropped his partner with a blow to the jaw as he turned. That got him through into a narrow alley alongside a massive, dark hulk of a building, beyond which he could see torchlight.

  Quiet as a cat, hah. Something had certainly stirred up the temple. He headed for the torchlight. In a sunken courtyard, a handful of guardsman . . . armoured priests . . . no, walking corpses in scale armour, stood before the smashed door of a squat, domed building.

  A broken door and the air of a holy place beyond, guarded by a necromancer’s slaves? That was his road.

  “Damn it, wolf,” he muttered, and strode down into the courtyard. By the time the necromantic guards reacted, drawing weapons, swords and short staves, he was running.

  One of the helmet-masked corpses struck at Mikki with her staff. It snapped the air like lightning. He blocked the blow with the haft of his axe and roared at the flare of pain that for a moment blinded him, losing the grip of one hand as an edge of white sparks touched him. The rest of the Red Masks closed up in the doorway.

  “You—are—dead,” he snarled at the bodies in his way, and the one who had struck him blocked in turn the swing of his axe with her white staff. She should have been flung off-balance, if not right out of his path. No human woman came near his weight and the strength of his shoulders. Instead she rocked a little, and his blade slid and turned. Wizardry, rooted and bound in them. His snarl had no words in it, then as he turned and with his next stroke, his whole strength in it, found the threads and the weave of it, the flow of will behind its making. He cut through the spell and took head from body. The next in his way he split like a baulk of timber, broke a sword and flung aside another, not swiftly enough to save himself a moment’s searing pain on the hip, as if he’d been struck with a red-hot iron, smell of scorched wool and meat. Not heavily enough to kill, either. The dead man found his feet again, but Mikki was through.

  Stairs, down. Three came after him, so he turned and threw them off. He could smell now that Moth had been here, but some time ago. The moon had risen high enough to shed some light through the dome’s eye; a cra
ck of water gleamed with the dull lustre of pewter and stirred as he drew near, but no godhead woke to acknowledge him when he knelt and dabbled a hand in it.

  Mikki was rising to his feet when a blow to his back sent him staggering forward. He caught himself on the lip of the crack, turning, following the sweep of his axe, and the Red Mask fell headless, the helmeted head rolling into the water with barely a splash, short sword falling by the outstretched hand. Wet on his lower back, and cold. He went down on one knee to steady himself, breath caught in his chest, leaning on the haft of the axe. The other two Red Masks were broken from their fall but crawling towards the well, like blind kittens seeking their mother’s warmth.

  The headless one did not bleed, only leaked a dark sludge. No ghost that he could see, nothing but a faint and fading keening, as if someone, far away and long ago, wept. Mikki heaved himself up and aside, beheaded both, which seemed to sever the spells binding them to their false life, and half-knelt, half-fell again. His back ached; the blood was flowing too freely when he pressed a hand to it. It might kill a man, depending on how deep the thrust had gone and what it had opened up inside, but he wasn’t a man, and he thought maybe it was not so deep as all that, anyway. It slowed under the pressure of his hand. A weak stab from a failing arm, he told himself, and sat still a while, listening for the stir of feet, of more Red Masks sent to the aid of their comrades. Nothing. The bleeding did slow. Hurt, though, and he would get stiff with sitting. How long had he been there, slipping half into sleep? Found the whetstone in his pouch to put some edge back on the blade while he nerved himself to stand again. Stone was no good chopping block. He rocked to his feet again, cloth tearing from his burnt and oozing hip, shut his eyes against a moment’s dizziness. There was another way out, a tunnel opening towards the north. He limped to it warily, sliding around the corner. No ambush waited and no scent of Moth, either.

  The ground beneath Mikki’s feet shivered, just enough to make him put a hand to the wall. The roof seemed sound enough. He went on in the dark till he found narrow stairs rising. The main passage continued on. Up or onwards? He couldn’t guess. He didn’t think Moth was here at all. The stair smelt of Red Masks; some private way to the well, perhaps, for the dead. He passed the narrow opening by.

  The passage seemed now to be rising. He could smell bodies, living bodies.

  A rough door in the wall swung to his weight on an empty closet. Cell. Another, on the other side. Neither had housed prisoners, at least not recently; he felt his way around them and found them utterly bare. Another, and here were bones, a child’s, he thought. No ghost, though he called softly, in case it merely feared him. A last, and the door was bolted. When he put a hand to it he felt some wizardry stir, something gathering itself. He didn’t wait for what it might do; his fingertips came away with a slick of dust that felt almost oily; rubbing them, he could smell charcoal.

  “Anyone in there?” he called softly. No one answered, but there was a scrabbling noise. Not, he thought, rats.

  Then a voice, too low to make out.

  “Stay back,” he warned, and struck the door a slicing blow, splintering away a slab from the surface of one of the broad boards in the centre. Iron and a demon’s hand and will behind it. He felt the spell shatter, words torn away. Freeing the gods wouldn’t be so simple. This had been a little human spell, the sort of thing Moth might set with a simple rune or two. Good enough for a prisoner who couldn’t reach it. The bolt pulled easily. Mikki dragged open the door.

  Zora stood, her white gown wet and clinging, on a ledge of rock at the edge of a dark pool. Sien-Mor’s sword was in her hand. Ulfhild was here; she could almost . . . there. Standing, her gaze fixed on some distance Zora could not see, sword drawn, hands resting on the hilt. There was nothing to see but the water and the far wall, curved, ridged and rippled, gleaming a little in what could not be moonlight, because they were underground, and yet something held her. Zora looked again. Nothing. The Northron woman had vanished. No, she was still there, that upthrust rib of stone . . . tree, pine leaning out from stone, and the river below, gleaming sleek in the moonlight that had lit the cave, white where it clawed the rocks. Its murmuring and the faint thrumming of the current around the rocks filled her head. Only a tree, dead and broken. Not Ulfhild. Stone. She floated in the depths of the pool, and was that shadow . . . ?

  Vartu! she cried, and raised her sword.

  Ulfhild turned like a sleeper, slow and heavy in the water, but that was illusion of the shifting dream, maybe, because her blade was there to block Zora’s rage-wild swing and strike the next moment, unexpectedly vicious.

  She leapt away and turned to see hanks of her hair curling, coiling, falling away. The river churned in flood beneath them and yet the hair fell as if in water.

  They were friends, she thought in outrage. How dare Ulfhild try murder in what was a friendly bout in the hall, a trial of skills . . . Don’t, Sien-Shava had said. You’re no match for the King’s Sword unless you mean to sing against her. You don’t need to make a fool of yourself before these foreign folk.

  I don’t have a brother, Zora told herself, backing away, and for a moment the sword was heavy, unwieldy in her hand, unfamiliar and terrible. She wanted to fling it from her. Revered Shija, staring at her severed wrist.

  They had gone laughing down to the beach after, playing ducks and drakes like children, and Sien-Shava, whose stones always flew farthest and skipped most, had laughed with them and told Ulfhild that next time the hall wanted to see the Northron sword set against the blade of the south Nabbani coast, she should spar with a master.

  And Ulfhild had said, Ulfhild had said, with the grey, sea-gazing feyness that came on her at times, Not till we seek one another’s deaths, my lord. She, Sien-Mor, had laughed, to make it a joke so that the cold anger would not swim up behind her brother’s eyes, and he had laughed, carefully, because she did, and she was always his guide in such things, smoothing his way among the folk he would otherwise offend. Ulfhild had looked at them like a sleeper waking, saying abruptly that the evening was cold; she was going back to the hall and the fire.

  Sien-Mor was not so poor a swordsman as her brother told her, Ulfhild had made her believe. It was only that she moved among masters.

  Water bound her, slowed her arms, her thoughts. She danced in water. No. There was stone beneath her feet, and Ulfhild was where she had not been, sword sweeping for her legs. Zora leapt back again, found stone at her back. The blades rang and clashed, no water slowing them now, sparks flying. She raised her head and sang, weaving words of defence about herself and hesitation, the fatal moment, against her enemy.

  Ulfhild’s eyes were focussed now, cold and undreaming. Ulfhild, Sien-Mor had always thought, found joy in that place where there was nothing but the sword’s edge and the red blood, always blood underlying the Northron magic, that was what they had gone seeking, the mystery of it, a new folk come out of the sea. Ulfhild’s lip curled in contempt at that falling-back on magic maybe, and she sketched runes in the air with her left hand, but Zora’s songs held strong and true. Wizardry to wizardry, she was Ulfhild’s match, yes, and perhaps her master. She drew power to herself to bind Ulfhild in chains of air, and Ulfhild stumbled, but it was Zora who was bleeding.

  Blood stained the air like smoke. No, it coiled in water. There was no riverbank, no ledge of stone in the cave, the Lady’s underground reservoir. The Lady held them both and whispered of their deaths, drowned in her water, slow fading, long dying. Ulfhild seemed to pay heed to nothing but Zora before her, and for all the spells she set to wrap herself in safety, the blows came like hail and her arms ached countering them. This body wasn’t trained for such work, and water or not, the Lady had them believe they stepped on stone, herself forced back and back, and she felt it broken and treacherous underfoot and knew Ulfhild’s blade would be her death—

  Something fell past them, dark, flash of white, turning, rags wavering. Helmeted skull, rotten flesh pale, gone to mush in long immersion
, shredding away. Hers. Her Red Masks, her wizards and their wizardry was in her. She was Zora, not the wizard Sien-Mor, she was Tu’usha, new Lady, true Lady, she was Marakand. She was wrapped in the Lady’s soft embrace, her own shaping turned inside out, but the Red Mask had been hers too long; dead and empty it might be, but the path it had made as it fell into the Lady’s waters was a pale thread burning in her mind’s eye even as it faded, and she remembered she had no human magic of her own. What she did she drew from her servants, and that thread, those many threads, that great weaving she held wound about her heart. She sang a great, calling darkness, the blindness of black night, about Ulfhild’s mind, and she rose through it, an arrow slicing back up the path her servant had made ready for her, last unwitting service, tearing through the cocoon the goddess wove.

  Ulfhild she left, lost and dream-drowned in the Lady’s embrace.

  Nour sweated and shivered in alternate fever and chills. Two days, had it been, or five? Ivah was no longer certain. Surely not five. They would be dead. Maybe only one. Better, maybe, to be forgotten, to die of thirst, than to end up drowned in the Lady’s well. Water seeped down the wall of the cell, but she doubted licking it would keep them alive for much longer. Maybe it was a game and servants of the Lady would come bringing light and water, to find them grovelling in gratitude for that mercy before they were taken to their deaths.

  No light. Ivah had never minded darkness, because she had never thought she could be without light at will. When she had come round, with a sick headache and a swollen lump on the back of her skull, she had tried to call up a flame, first with the hexagram of The sun comes forth from the palace gates drawn out on her forearm and then, when that failed, by weaving her fingers through her hair in a cat’s cradle. She felt the magic gather, both times, and then it was as though it leapt from her, lightning seeking the earth or the heat of some tiny spark lost in a mountain of ice. She had panicked then and run into the wall in a moment’s blind terror that she had been buried alive. Only smashing her hand into it and the belated realization that she stood upright brought some sense back. She had resorted to feeling her way around on hands and knees and discovered that the floor was roughly hacked stone, two walls masonry and two carved from rock, the door splintery wood, windowless, and that the body in the last corner, which had sent her bolting back again with a stifled shriek, was too warm to be lifeless. Nour, of course. He woke some time later with a worse headache than hers, which meant he did vomit and didn’t have the strength to go blundering around the cell battering himself on the walls trying to find a way out. He did try to work a spell, of course, with no more success than she.