The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  “Of course I can’t, you hardly talk to her anymore and after six bloody years hardly letting her out of your sight—”

  He couldn’t try to explain that to her. The gang didn’t understand, really, what he had been. What he had become since.

  “Don’t stand there trying to look so sympathetic, you don’t understand, you can’t understand, you’re a bloody man . . .”

  She ended up clutching him, sobbing on him till his shirt was wet through, while the rest of the gang pretended not to see.

  He had untangled Gaguush’s words from the sobs, all choked in his shirt, eventually. Simply. “I’m scared, Holla.”

  Afraid of the responsibility of a child, after so long resigned to childlessness. It was as life-changing as a death. And afraid, naturally enough, of all that could go wrong, and did go wrong, far too often. “I don’t think Attalissa would have wished your death on you,” he said, and hoped—trusted, because Attalissa was still Pakdhala too, still the girl he and the gang had raised—that the goddess had seen so far ahead. Gaguush seemed less jagged with nerves after that reassurance.

  “We could call her Pakdhala, if she’s a girl,” she had even suggested, when they made up their bed among the bundles of Northron furs and amber and sea-ivory in this upper room of old Master Rasta’s caravanserai. They had an appointment come morning with a Family Xua elder, who would probably take the lot, though it would mean a day’s hard bargaining to persuade the man of that.

  “We could not.” Holla knew she hadn’t been serious. “Try again.”

  She had fallen asleep muttering over names.

  In the night, colour washed out of her tattoos. The jagged Black Desert geometry in red and black made a pattern different than what daylight showed, to vision that wasn’t human in the night, which saw the flow of life in her, the memory of stone in the pigment, echoes of desert, sun, snow, in the blanket woven of camel’s wool. He ran a hand down the curve of her side, but she still didn’t stir, so he pulled the scattered bedding over her and rolled away, chin on arms. He couldn’t sleep and wished that either he could, or that Gaguush would wake up for company, because then he could be distracted from worrying, at least about things that shouldn’t be any concern of a landless caravan-mercenary. Even a heated debate about baby names, if nothing else was on offer . . .

  When they’d ridden in that afternoon, grey with desert dust, the camels’ long strides swinging up the road with the same even pace at which they’d left snowy At-Landi in the north, they had found the suburb stirring like a trampled hill of ants. The caravanserais and coffeehouses and taverns were all talking of nothing but the Lady, who, following the assassination of her Voice by Praitan rebels and traitors, had left her well at last the day before. There was more than a little doubt in the suburb, at least among the folk of the road, of the divinity of the beautiful girl the Marakanders were in such a ferment over, though some of them had gone into the city the previous day to see her, as she rode in a procession through the wards of the city.

  Attalissa had never felt there was any goddess in Marakand. Holla-Sayan wished the caravan had arrived a day earlier, so that he could have seen the alleged goddess. There was something lingering in the air of the city that he’d never . . . smelt . . . felt . . . before. Not here, at any rate. It took him back to the temple gate-tower at Lissavakail, with Tamghat on the shore. The same scent of ashy stone and tang of metal . . . no threat to Attalissa, who was not his any longer. It had not even been he who stood there, but Otokas, who had been the Blackdog’s host before him. It was the scent of Moth, of himself, maybe. Not even a scent. He simply had no words. If he shut his eyes, he thought, fire, iron, ice, starlight. It had ebbed with the coming dusk, a fresh breeze off the mountains blowing it away.

  It was not the air of a god of the earth.

  So what, then, had come out of the temple’s sacred well to ride through the city?

  “Devils take it.” Holla-Sayan could laugh at the oath even as he whispered it, groping for his clothes and his sabre.

  Gaguush flung out an arm, reaching for him.

  “Can’t sleep,” he whispered over her. “I’m going out to run in the dark.”

  She’d heard that often enough before, this past year. “Don’t eat anybody,” she mumbled, without ever fully waking. Old joke by now, and a bad one, but she couldn’t say, I love you, come back safe, what’s bothering you?—not Gaguush. He kissed her cheek and left her.

  No curfew in the suburb. The caravanserai master’s own porter let him out the little door set in the greater gate with a nod and thought whatever she might think about a man creeping out from his wife’s side in the night. Not her business to think. There were men and women still out and about by the light of the moon, just past full, caravaneers, mostly, and mostly, from the smell of them, on their way back from taverns. He kept his head down, avoided any noisy clusters, and left the main spread of caravanserais and inns behind, passing the Gore where the city’s paupers were buried and the pens of the various dealers in beasts. Watchdogs growled warning at, not of, him but did not bark alarm. Horses snorted and stirred as he passed. Camels were more phlegmatic, grumbling where they lay. He dropped down into the ravine where it curved against the road, startled a pair of feral swine and followed their pattering hoofbeats along a path through dense willow-scrub. Holla-Sayan found the hard-beaten path used by guardsmen of the Riverbend Gate, patrolling for rebels or thief-gangs or whatever they thought might lurk there beneath the trees. The wall of the temple precinct was high; it would take the dog to leap it, but buildings backed onto the ravine and there was a faint old scent, diffused by rain. Not human. Rancid olive oil. Puzzling. He went exploring up the stone ledges and found a door beneath bruised leaves. Recently oiled, and it wasn’t even locked. He slipped inside.

  There had been humans in this house, or whatever it was, but not in the past couple of days. The deep well was a great underground pool with a shrine of some kind over it, according to his friend Judeh, whose father had been a priest of the Lady before his death in the earthquake. He wouldn’t find the well in this outbuilding but more centrally, yet . . . here was a door, and a faint cooler air seeped beneath it. He opened it. As he had thought, the air of a damp cellar gusted up to meet him: musty staleness, rotten wood, musky beast, scent that was not scent but memory of cool green, earth and leaf, pines. Blood and, faintly, humans.

  Her.

  The Blackdog plunged snarling down the stairs, claws slithering, marking the stone. Changing shape was only an echo of the bone-cracking agony it had been when he was human and possessed, or maybe it was that, chest shattered, mortal body half-consumed and remade in the fire of the devil’s soul, the pain didn’t have such great weight anymore. He still didn’t shift form except when the dog was strong, the wordless passions of the wounded and broken devil’s soul too much to shape to coherency, or the threat too great or too sudden for spear or sabre to quell. A cellar, deserted, cluttered with abandoned baskets and broken shelves and jars, squeaking mice, but another stair, narrower, led deeper, to where the walls were stained with pale lines of lime, and damp seeped through the cracked corners. It was all abandoned, rooms empty save for some mouldering, rotting wood, whatever furniture or tool it had once been long past knowing. The scent of her was strong, and very recent. Blood, too, and terror, and diseased flesh. The scent of the woman was before him, running ahead of her on the rising air, up through a narrow, stone-cut passage that sloped down before levelling out. The floor was damp and uneven, lightless. He could call up a light, though Holla-Sayan was no wizard. The Blackdog did such things, odd powers half-remembered. He flung light ahead of him, silver, hunting streaks of fire. The stone had its powers and life, and he would not trip or run into walls, but true vision made the world real.

  She was ahead of him, a pale wisp staggering forward under the weight of a large man who sagged against her, arm over her shoulder, head hanging. His snarl rose to a singing howl, and the arrowing streaks of lig
ht circled like live things, falcons stooping, showing her gaping face as she looked up, screamed, and hurled the man away from her.

  She didn’t run but fell to her knees, gasping as if punched below the ribs, a hand up to shield her face. “Go back—run!” was her first coherent shriek, more of a croak, and then, “Leave him! Just me, he’s nothing to do with me, Holla-Sayan, let him go—Old Great Gods, please . . .”

  The Blackdog came to a skittering stop, and the man, who had fallen behind her, came crawling back. A caravaneer, but he smelt of smoke, not camels, and blood, and pus, and with a shaking hand he tried to scratch what looked like Nabbani characters on the floor, while the silver light faded to something tenuous and slow, winding around them, circling the Blackdog, fading to rest on his fur, like a snowfall.

  “Can’t run,” the man said. “Go. I’ll hold it here.” But whatever he was trying to build was like a weak breeze pushing against an ancient tree, and the Blackdog surged forward, grown to the size of a yearling yak, a paw obliterating the crooked marks. He shouldered the strange wizard sprawling aside. The woman made no move to defend herself, only shivered, huddled small, staring up at him. She might have tried to speak, but her teeth chattered beyond controlling.

  He could grab her by the throat like a rat. One shake, hurl her into the wall. She’d left Bikkim lying with his throat cut, and if it hadn’t been her hand on the knife, it had been done by her order and her will. That Bikkim had survived was no lessening of the treachery. She’d bespelled Holla’s friends into trusting her, bound his Pakdhala helpless through wizardry and handed her over, sacrifice to a devil who would have consumed her to take on godhead himself.

  She shivered like a rabbit and did nothing but wait.

  Holla-Sayan flowed back into man’s form, brushing the light from his hair, flicking it off into a hovering fog, and with his sabre’s point under her chin forced her shaking to her feet.

  “Ivah,” he said, and it was still half the wordless dog’s snarl.

  Nour came stupidly trying to defend her, trying to scribble some syllables of defence, and the dog swelled into something twice the size of any natural hound and spurned the spell with a paw that looked taloned like a lion’s. Shadow roiled, and he was the man Ivah knew, with a greenish peridot fire still blazing in his eyes, as if he were some shell encasing light, a lantern only, but the steel against her throat was real enough, and she staggered to her feet obedient to its pressure as he rolled light into a silver mist hanging about them in the air. A Westgrasslander caravaneer, dark-brown hair in the many braids of the desert road, tattooed owls curving from temples down under the eyes, snakes coiling on his cheeks, a hint of the cheetahs twining and knotting on his forearms visible on the backs of his hands.

  He wasn’t supposed to be a wizard. He had spoken no word, made no pattern of power in any folk’s magic. She was weeping, she thought. Stupid, and coward. Her father’s daughter shouldn’t weep, didn’t weep. But she had decided not to be her father’s daughter. She wouldn’t be shamed if her eyes wept.

  Holla-Sayan blinked, entirely human now. He looked, if anything, confused, and Ivah tried to slow her panic-gasping breaths. She was going to faint and cut her own throat on the point of his sabre. Holla-Sayan lowered the blade, just enough, and Nour swayed to his feet, put his good hand to the flat of it and pushed sideways. It didn’t move.

  “What have you done to him?” Holla-Sayan demanded hoarsely.

  Ivah shook her head, wordless.

  “She’s a wizard.” Holla-Sayan snarled the word at Nour. “She bespells trust and then betrays it. Stand away from her.”

  “My friend,” Nour said.

  “I didn’t,” Ivah protested. “Great Gods, Nour, I didn’t, not to you, not to Hadidu, only to make him think of offering me the room, that was all, just the once and it was so slight an impulse, it wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been half in his mind already. I needed a safe place to live, I needed to be there, to study the tomb, and he liked me before that, he wanted to like me, and I only, I only, Old Great Gods be my witness, I never betrayed you or him, it wasn’t me!’

  “Know that now,” he said. “It was little Zora. Her mother’s face. Knew you’d messed about with Hadi, though.” He frowned almost drunkenly. “He wouldn’t be so stupid, otherwise, ’cept he was ha’f in love with you, ’a course, but it didn’t seem like he was getting anywhere with that.”

  She fell to her knees again, bowed as one might to the emperor, face to the ground, or to an executioner and couldn’t find any words adequate. She shivered and thought, so she was a coward at the end. At least it would be the sword and not the beast.

  “Bikkim lived,” Holla-Sayan said.

  “Please. Nour . . .” She herself didn’t know what she meant, a plea for Nour’s forgiveness or help, or that Holla-Sayan would save him once he had killed her. Her voice trembled so the words squeaked and stammered.

  “Something’s back there,” Holla-Sayan said flatly, “and it smells . . . dead.” His fingers dug into her shoulder as he dragged her to her feet. “Here.” He pushed past her, tossing his damned sabre back as though it were a stick, but she managed to snatch the hilt rather than the edge as he surged into the Blackdog’s form again, something half-mountain-mastiff, half-wolf, black and shaggy, just the faintest suggestion that for a moment he was nothing but formless darkness, a distillation of deepest night shot with starlight. The silver mist settled on him like dew and vanished.

  Something dead but not rotting. Cold, bitter with a power that was not wizardry, but it smelt of wizardry as well, that trace of the earth’s magic that ran in such folk from whatever long-forgotten god-ancestor had so blessed them. The thing had been a boy once, gangly-thin, on the cusp of manhood; now it was a shell, with chains like cobweb lace binding it to some other will, and rags of its soul pinned, still struggling, to the husk, the rest lost, drifting in the dark, name gone, heart gone, memory a jumble of meaningless fragments of image, as if someone had painted the boy’s life on a beaker of glass, then smashed it and swept half the shards away. One of the fabled Red Masks, his face hidden to hide it from anyone who had known him in life. He strode along the passage, sword in one hand, a short white staff in the other. Searching for Tamghat’s thrice-damned daughter and her friend.

  Sometimes the instincts of that ancient true dog, unfortunate parasitized first host to the broken devil’s soul, the anchor in the world it had taken in its dying desperation, were to be trusted. His growl rose to a snarl of rage at the wrongness of the thing, slavery beyond death and the destruction of a soul that should have long gone to the road. The Blackdog leapt, seizing the Red Mask by the throat as if he had been a terrier and the boy a rat, and hurled him into the wall and out of the web that bound him, out of the false perversion of life. The body fell and rolled, empty, nothing but a weight of bone and flesh now. The rags of the soul fled it; he waited, half hoping the boy might yet find himself, draw himself together as drops of water touch and merge, but they were lost in the dark.

  Grunt and muffled curse, and the smell of fresh blood, which he had been smelling, smell of—damn it, bear.

  Mikki?

  “Blackdog!” the man bellowed. The dog barked, deep, angry baying, took off running again. If he’d been paying attention to anything but the scent of Ivah . . .

  The bear-man was hard beset, with his back to the wall, three Red Masks at his feet, unmoving, but his own neck bled, and though one staggered, shoulder half carved away, the axe caught in the armour and slid from Mikki’s blood-slippery grip. A fallen torch still burned on the floor. Holla wove through them, grown without conscious will to the size nearly of a bear, bit through the back of a neck, smashed another into the wall. The last suddenly turned and ran. Mikki hurled his recovered axe after it and split the skull.

  “One got by,” the demon gasped. “Ivah?”

  Not by me, it didn’t. And I haven’t killed her yet. He had no speech when he was the dog.

  “Don’t.
Moth likes her.”

  Damn Moth.

  Mikki came down heavily on one knee, shut his eyes a moment. “What was that, six? And I killed five getting this far. How many are there supposed to be, in all?”

  “No idea,” Holla pulled himself back to man’s shape, took up the torch, and offered the demon a hand up. “Let’s get out of here. Or are you waiting for Moth?”

  “Is she here?” Mikki asked. The demon limped and staggered. Sayan help him, he couldn’t carry all three of them out.

  “You are, I thought she’d be too. But—” Holla-Sayan reached out, searching, “no. Did you think she was?”

  “She went to the temple this morning. Scouting, she said. Quietly. Promised, quietly. Said she’d be back by evening. Wasn’t. I came to find her.”

  “She’s not here. Nothing’s here. They say there’s a goddess, but where it passed through the city yesterday it smelt like a devil to me. But it’s gone, now.”

  “So’s Moth. She didn’t take Lakkariss.”

  “Not good.”

  “No.”

  After a while Holla-Sayan said, “If it comes back, and Moth doesn’t—”

  “I nearly got killed last time I tried to fight a devil on my own.”

  “I did,” Holla said drily. “Not that you’d notice. What do we do about it? I’m not touching that sword. It wants me.”

  “Moth will come back.”

  “If she can.”

  “She will.” Mikki staggered into him. Holla steadied him, a hand under his elbow. A nice mess to take back to Gaguush, and to take Ivah—no.

  Holla-Sayan had gone, and Ivah was blind again, with Nour somewhere by her. He touched her, and she gasped, flinched, found his arm with her left hand and clutched him there, so he couldn’t stumble in front of her, now that she was armed.

  A rib-shuddering growl rising into a snarl, a man’s shout, a thud. Great Gods, not the axeman, Holla-Sayan hadn’t met and killed the axeman. Silence again, except maybe there were voices she couldn’t quite catch.