The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  They’d gone through shouting at one another and accusations of betrayal, but after that Nour had said in a weak voice, “You came after me, in the street. I did see.” And he had added, “That was stupid of you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I meant, thank you.”

  She had heard him moving, groping towards her, and after a moment reached, catching his sleeve, not the one that was stiff with blood. They had sat pressed together, for what comfort that could give.

  “Is she coming for us, do you think?”

  She told him what she remembered of the Voice she had seen in the pulpit, lying eyes slitted, playing dead, or whatever they thought she ought to be, and how the girl had claimed to be Marakand’s Lady in the flesh, to the shock of the guard captain.

  “I remember. Like nightmare, all scraps. No words. I saw her. She saw me. I . . . she was the Lady and not a new Voice? She said so?”

  “The priests were all terrified. Yes.”

  “I thought she was—she looked like someone I knew, once. Samra, her name was, but she died years ago. It was Samra, her face in her youth . . . the first time I saw her, the most beautiful woman. She died but . . . her daughter looked like her even as a child, you could see how she’d grow. Lovely . . . tall. She disappeared, she and her father. She’d be twenty now, maybe, the daughter. Zora, her name was. This Lady was taller than Samra.” Ivah waited, but there was nothing more about the Lady. “No way out, without magic, unless we can kill whoever finally comes for us,” Nour said at last. “I suppose they’ll take us to drown in her well?” Another pause. “You’d better kill me.”

  So they had argued about that, and she had ended up, stupidly, in tears, because she wasn’t going to strangle him or smother him, which were his only two practical suggestions.

  “I know where Hadidu would go, and you don’t,” he had said. “Great Gods, Ivah, you risked your life and ended up here by saving Hadidu and little Shemal and the servants. Don’t destroy the good of that. I know too many names of the loyal folk of Ilbialla and Gurhan. I have to die before they take us to the well for the Lady.”

  “We’ve already been before the Lady. She’s already got that knowledge, or she can’t get it.”

  “Any goddess can know a man’s mind. She’s playing with us like a cat with a mouse. She’ll send for us again. You have to do it, Ivah.”

  “I can’t!” she screamed. “Don’t ask me. I can’t murder you, I won’t!”

  “Then what did you get involved for in the first place? Why didn’t you just run? You’re betraying Hadi and Shemal to her just as much as if you’d led the Red Masks to the Doves yourself, if you let the Lady have me.”

  “I can’t! No!”

  Nour had huddled silent in a far corner after that and had let the matter drop. He had been quiet, calm, friendly even, as they had tried to work out which was the most downhill corner to relieve themselves in. They quickly found they had gotten it wrong.

  He had tried to strangle himself with his shirt the first time she fell asleep. Ivah woke, hearing a wheezing, squeaking sound. Nour vomiting again, she thought. The hangover of the Red Mask’s staves still lingered. He gasped horribly, breath squealing, and she flung herself to the sound, groping, finding the twisted rope of cloth, dragging his hands from it. He clawed at her weakly, then more strongly, gasping for air, getting his hands on her own throat, thumbs pressing. She kneed him in the belly so that he lost what breath he had, and his hands fell away. She gasped for breath herself and rolled him over, half-lying over his back, pinning his hands above his head. She got hold of the twisted shirt and hurled it away, and he just lay there, not struggling. Not dead, either. His ribs heaved under her. Defeated. His wounded cheek was pressed to the floor. She let him up, and he still didn’t speak. Maybe he couldn’t. He was shivering, face wet, though she couldn’t tell if it was tears or the oozing burn or the unclean dampness of the floor, as she held him, cheek to his good cheek, muttering, “Don’t, oh don’t. Don’t leave me here alone in the dark.”

  Nour had said nothing, but his arm went around her, clutching, only for comfort, not to try again to throttle her. They sat so through what might have been the rest of the night, but for all they knew, could have been a sunny afternoon.

  After that Ivah hadn’t dared sleep.

  Nour was quite justified. What right did she have to prevent him, if it was all he could do to save his kinsman’s life and the lives of his friends, before the Lady got around to questioning him? But she still couldn’t allow herself to sleep, staying wakeful for as long as she could, pacing, pinching herself, sitting so that she was too uncomfortable to do more than nod. By then Nour’s hand and slashed arm were swollen and hot, as were the seeping burns on his face where the white fire had flared from a Red Mask’s staff. He alternately sweated and shivered. Ivah tried what spells she could think of and felt their virtue snap away from her like snatched threads. All she could do was wet his shirt in the seepage down the damp wall and try to cool his forehead with it. She didn’t dare wash the wounds; Great Gods knew where the water came from, and her father had always sworn dirty water was deadly to broken skin. Pointless precaution; they drank it, licked it from the wall, and sucked it from the shirt.

  It was too late anyhow. He’d lain with that cheek to the filthy floor, and her own weight pressing him into it.

  Sometimes he raved and muttered and cried out for Hadidu and someone called Kharduin, or Shemal his nephew, and flailed as though he sought them through the fire.

  “Hush,” she would tell him then, catching his hands in the dark. “They’re safe, everyone’s safe. Go to sleep.” It would be a mercy, she thought, to kill him in his sleep, as he had said, before it grew any worse or the Lady remembered them. This was going to be a long and agonized death, whether through wound-fever or thirst. Once she wadded up his shirt and pressed it over his face, but as he stirred and gasped and tried to turn his head she flung it away and held him instead, crying.

  Coward.

  Sometimes he cried out that he had to warn Talfan, warn Farnos, warn Jugurthos against Zora. Ivah knew all three of those names; Talfan was an apothecary from Clothmarket Ward, married to some outlander caravaneer, who came around for private coffee in the kitchen every month or so and whom Ivah had assumed to have an interest in Hadidu that went beyond coffee, given the absent husband and all. Old Master Farnos was the baker a few houses up the street and a good friend of Hadidu’s. Jugurthos might be Jugurthos Barraya, who was gate-captain of Sunset Ward, though she had never seen him in the Doves except having coffee in the front parlour, like any other street guard of that garrison. Now Nour’s death wouldn’t save his friends after all, unless she could bring herself to kill both him and herself.

  It didn’t matter anyway. The damned goddess, whether she was really this girl Zora he had once known or not, had forgotten them. The Voice had executed people who defied her by that means before, denying them water, but in public. The senators who defied her had died so, in cages in the palace plaza. Maybe it was how every single wizard had died, hidden, forgotten in the darkness, not drowned in the deep well after all. Maybe there were cells beneath the temple compound full of rat-gnawed bones.

  Ghu had said the Red Masks were dead. Necromancy. Corpses woken to serve the Lady. Great Gods, no.

  The floor beneath her feet trembled, dying away before she was certain she had felt it.

  “Nour?” she whispered. He didn’t answer.

  If the building above collapsed in earthquake, they might escape. Or die, trapped, but they were already doing that. Another great quake, please, Old Great Gods, to leave the city in rubble, priests and goddess and all, a wasteland, forgotten, a tale of the road, no more . . . but maybe she had imagined it. She was dizzy and dreaming, that was all.

  Water from the wall wouldn’t keep them alive forever. Nour would die first, as his wounds festered. Then she could eat him. She hadn’t thought that. She had not. Besides, what good would it do? S
he tried again to open the damned door, to blow it thunderously across whatever open space lay beyond, as her father might have done, to pull down the masonry walls or delicately tease the lock or bolt outside to open, which would have been her mother’s approach. She tried to shape a dream to call to the devil Vartu, to Ghu, whatever he was, to anyone who might hear, but she still felt the magic flow away like sand between her fingers as she shaped it, and she knew nobody heard.

  But then there was sound. A Northron voice called, which was a dream, but she woke and reached, found nothing, scurried for Nour and grabbed him, checking that he was alive. He moaned and clutched at her. Soft scratching at the door. She didn’t dream the sound. Better to die attacking Red Masks than to be taken to the Lady’s well.

  “Nour,” she croaked, and dragged him to sit against the wall. “Wake up.”

  He groaned.

  “They’re coming. I think we should—we should make an end of this.”

  Nour understood. He said nothing but crawled to arm and knees, and then to his feet, swaying. Ivah helped him to get propped against the wall, stood at his shoulder, thinking: face, throat. Rip the veil away and hurt the bloodless—thing—at the very least, before it could summon up its divine blessing and knock them cowering down in unreasoning terror. Enrage it so that it struck with fire on its staff and they fell dead as the city folk said rioters and rebels had in the past.

  Cleaner to have stayed and burnt in the Doves in her own fire.

  There was a voice again, and the door slammed and thudded.

  And opened. She felt the draft of it, the change of air, clean. She clawed up at where a face should be, punching with the other hand, but she was weak and slow. Her fingers met no veil, her fist no flesh, nothing, and she lurched off balance, was caught and held. Nour simply flung himself and fell into the open space beyond.

  “Easy, easy!” the man said in the Northron of her father’s favourite noekar, his vassals and tent guard, “I’m a friend.” And then, as he lowered her to the floor, “Eh, it’s the daughter of Tamghiz.”

  No red robe, no veil. There was light, coming dim and distant, enough to see shapes. A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing only a tunic. He set down a long-hafted axe and reached a hand to Nour, who found his feet and put his back against the far wall of what was a roughly cut stone passageway.

  Ivah lunged to put herself by Nour. They were out. And the door was only bolted outside, not locked, one shove and they could shut the man in. Foolish thought. It would be like shoving a mountain. She huddled against Nour, trying to frame a coherent question. The man was Northron, and—and the light wasn’t his. She felt stunned and stupid, as if her thoughts were mired in spring clay. Someone else was coming.

  “What’s going on?” Nour demanded, sounding like a truculent child woken suddenly from sleep. “Red Masks?”

  “Coming,” the stranger said, taking up his axe again. A few Nabbani characters ran across the door in smudged black lines, partially splintered away. In some access of anger, he struck the door another blow that left it wrenched and broken on its hinges. “Sorry, I think they knew when I broke the spell on the door. No idea where this goes, but get going, that way. Up. I’ll deal with these and follow you.” He wasn’t a caravaneer; the Northron accent was heavy on his tongue, and the words came slowly in the speech of the desert road. “Can he walk, Ivah?”

  “Yes,” Nour answered, but she doubted it. He staggered, trying to stand. She put an arm around him and started up the passage, into utter blackness, around a curve. She hoped that they weren’t heading for the deep well, but she did think the uneven, toe-catching floor was rising, ever so slightly.

  After a while Nour, breathless, said, “Friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Knew your name.”

  “No—” But he had. And her father’s, too, his true name, which she had only learned at the end of everything. “I don’t know him.” Not one of her father’s followers; he certainly wasn’t a man you’d forget, once seen. “Don’t talk,” she gasped. Her knees felt weak, trembling, and where were they going, how far, and how long could even an axe-wielding giant stand against Red Masks?

  When the faint silver glow, flickering like moonlight through wind-tossed trees, came sweeping towards them, she barely had time to be alarmed before the dog appeared, a clotted shadow of night.

  Of course the Blackdog had been going to come for her sometime. She had always known it. She shoved Nour behind her. “Go back!” she screamed at him. “Run!”

  The charge faltered, and the silver fire touched her but did not burn, slithering water-cool over her upraised arm. “Leave him!” she tried to plead, but what she felt was worse than the terror the Red Masks could inflict, because it was truly her own, and she deserved whatever the Blackdog did to her. Nour did not, but the Blackdog was mad, her father always said, mad and unreasoning, not a man at all. “Just me, he’s nothing to do with me, Holla-Sayan, let him go—Old Great Gods, please . . .”

  Gaguush mumbled in her sleep and turned over, catching him in the ribs with an elbow. Holla-Sayan had been lying wakeful anyway, despite the weariness of the last long haul of the road. They’d unloaded, tended the camels, sent messages to their contacts, the merchants with whom Gaguush usually dealt. They’d been to the bathhouse, ended up dining well in a wineshop, those of the gang who hadn’t taken themselves off to their Marakander families in the city, Tihmrose and Northron Varro, whose wife Talfan was an apothecary in Clothmarket Ward, and Judeh the camel-leech. The others were asleep down in the arcade room with the larger bales of goods, except young Zavel, who had disappeared after the wineshop and would no doubt stagger in tomorrow or the next day, surly and bleary-eyed, his pay spent and wanting to borrow against the next trip. Gaguush was running out of patience with him. Not Holla’s problem. He’d keep the boy in line on the road, but he wasn’t Zavel’s uncle or his brother, to be chasing him in the city. If Zavel wanted a man’s privileges, he had to take on the responsibilities of one.

  Holla-Sayan ought to be sleeping. He felt as if he could have slept even propped against a rock. But sleep wouldn’t take him. He folded himself around Gaguush, brushing lips over neck, but she didn’t stir again. She was so damned tired, she complained. Nobody had told her being pregnant made you so tired. Nobody had told her morning-sickness could last all day.

  Nobody, including herself, had expected her to end up pregnant now, to be having her first baby when most women were having their last. She had been divorced as barren when she was, in Holla-Sayan’s Westgrasslander opinion, too young to have been married anyway. If she had ever pined for children in all the years since, she had never let on to him, and he had been her lover, off and on, since he had come over the Kinsai-av from the Western Grass and been hired into her gang. On their last trip south from At-Landi he had finally persuaded her to cross the river, to stand with him before his god Sayan, and, even more importantly, his mother and father and brothers and their wives and their sons and a scatter of other kinsfolk, to marry him. Going up into the mountains to Lissavakail to tell the goddess Attalissa and their friend Bikkim, her mortal husband, had been Gaguush’s idea, which he had taken to pointing out whenever she tried to blame him for her current state.

  “My blessings,” Attalissa had said. “It’s about time.” She had kissed Gaguush’s forehead and winked at Holla. “Take good care of her, Blackdog. She’s earned it, putting up with you.”

  They were carrying only Gaguush’s own goods, and some for kin of Varro’s the Northron was acting as agent for, not escorting any merchants, so they had lingered longer than a caravan could usually afford to, honoured guests of the temple. Holla-Sayan had fled temple and town after two days to run wild on the mountain, rejoining the gang only as they left. He was not Attalissa’s Blackdog any longer, and if the man he had been was glad to know his foster-daughter well and happy, that man had been possessed by an enslaved and soul-damaged spirit, and now that they were—he was—something who
le and entire, and free, neither part of his twinned soul was particularly glad to be so near the goddess for long. The rest of the gang, those who had survived the battle at Lissavakail, enjoyed the leisure and the luxury of heroes, the goddess’s chosen companions in her exile, her saviours.

  But now they were come at last to the caravanserai suburb of Marakand in the rift between the Malagru and the Pillars of the Sky, and Gaguush, who had thought she was poisoned by bad water or falling into some desperate illness, had finally, snarling and cursing, agreed with Tihmrose and Thekla, the other two women of the gang. She was, miraculously, pregnant. And it was, of course, all Holla-Sayan’s fault.

  “I certainly hope so,” he had said to that as they loaded up just this morning, out in the Stone Desert, for the climb to the pass of Marakand. He’d had to duck a flying halter. “Is it so bad?” he had dared to ask. His own reaction was an urge to wander around grinning like an imbecile, singing happily and telling everyone he knew, an urge he heroically resisted as liable to result in things heavier or sharper than halters coming his way. “Gaguush, how was I to know Attalissa would decide you—we—needed a child? It’s not as if she asked me, and you can’t expect me to know what she’s thinking.”