The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  Cold hells take it, anyway. She turned Nour loose. The Red Masks already knew there were wizards down here. The sun comes forth from the palace gates, pressed with a nail into her own right arm, and Great Gods, the relief when light bloomed, like a memory of sun, before her chest. She gestured it higher, pointed Nour down to where wall met floor. He nodded and slid, clumsy, to crouch there, not protesting, out of the way if more enemies appeared. She took a few steps back down the tunnel, her light gliding with her.

  Light met her, red torchlight. No need for the sabre; it was Holla-Sayan, human again, supporting the Northron by the arm. He was even taller than she had thought, head and shoulders above the Westgrasslander, and alarmingly pale, as if he’d bled nearly to death.

  “Red Masks?” she whispered.

  “Dead,” said Mikki. “Or something. They were already dead.”

  “I know,” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off Holla-Sayan. He could kill her. The Northron wouldn’t stop him. Nothing would. He hadn’t, but he could, he would, so she had to tell him, because someone had to know, someone who could do something to stop the Lady. “Ghu—a boy, a man I met, he killed one with a touch.” Her teeth still chattered, but the sabre in her hand, Holla-Sayan’s sabre, was steady, as though that arm belonged to some other woman whom nothing could ever rattle. “I saw him do it. He said they had to be . . .” A lifetime since. Was Ghu here too? She had not even thought to ask. “. . . to be cut off from what was feeding them. It’s some kind of necromancy.” She swallowed. Her voice croaked, parched.

  “Killing them enough they know they’re dead seems to work, too,” Holla-Sayan said, and his mouth twisted, as if at a foul taste. “How did you end up here?”

  “Red Masks,” she answered, and heard her voice sink to a whisper again. “I think that’s what happens to wizards. Maybe the Voice—the Lady, locks them up to die first, like us. Holla-Sayan, are there any other prisoners here? Ghu—when they captured us, he was behind. He was injured, lame. He wasn’t in the temple when they took us before the Lady.”

  Holla-Sayan studied her. She resisted the urge to wrap her arms tight, to hide herself. She stank. Even as a man, he must smell as well as a dog did, to have smelt the Red Mask coming. He was a man now; the yellow-green light had faded from his eyes. They were green-flecked hazel, she remembered. She’d always liked his eyes. Wanted them warmer, when he looked at her. Remembering that shamed her now.

  “Bones,” he said. “The only humans down here are you two. And the bear.”

  “Bear?” she asked, wondering what she’d misheard. Ulfhild had said something about a bear when they spoke by Ilbialla’s tomb.

  “Me,” said the Northron. “Dog, stop glaring at her, you’re scaring her out of her wits. Let’s get out, as you said. Moth’s not here.”

  “Who’s Moth?” Ivah asked.

  “Ulfhild,” said the Northron.

  “Ulfhild?” Ivah wouldn’t have thought she could know such relief at that name. “Is she here?”

  “No, she’s not,” said Holla-Sayan. “His name’s Mikki. And he belongs to her.”

  “Hah, other way around, foolish dog.”

  “Yeah, you can say so. I’m a married man now; I know how these things go.” He put a hand on Ivah’s arm, just a touch, which made her shiver, but he only wanted his sabre back. A glance at her light, and he stubbed out the torch on the floor, left it lying. “Take your friend and go ahead. I’m sure we haven’t killed, or whatever you want to call it, all of them yet.”

  “Wasps,” said Mikki, a bit indistinctly. “Reaction, I think, like wasps. I’ve broken into their nest and so some followed me, but they won’t come hunting now we’re out of sight and memory, not until their maker comes back to set them going with her will.”

  “You go ahead as well,” Holla-Sayan told him. “You’re no more use than the other two.”

  But when they came to stairs, endless stairs, Ivah thought, Holla-Sayan took Nour’s weight from her and left the Northron Mikki to guard their backs, or perhaps he could smell there was no pursuit. Up and up. Nour stumbled on a step, and Holla-Sayan lifted him bodily to a landing, saying, “Catch your breath. There’s a ways to go yet.”

  “Kharduin’s gang,” Nour gasped, the first he’d spoken in some time. Ivah wasn’t certain he even realized he was with strangers. “Shenar’s caravanserai.”

  “So you can die of wound-fever there? Yes, all right. I’m certainly not taking her anywhere near my gang. It’d be throwing a rat to the dogs. What were you doing in Marakand, Ivah? Looking for a new master?”

  “Dog,” Mikki rumbled, in what sounded like reproof.

  “I—I was studying Ilbialla’s tomb. You must have seen it, in Sunset Market.”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “A prison, Moth thinks,” Mikki said.

  “I can’t even translate it, I can’t read the writing, except a few words that might be really old Imperial Nabbani written out by sound in some Pirakuli script. Holla-Sayan, the Lady—she’s the same as my father, isn’t she?”

  He stopped, and she staggered into him.

  “Father?”

  “Father?” Nour asked, but she ignored him. Old Great Gods save her, bad enough he knew what she had done to Hadidu. And she’d thought, since Holla-Sayan knew Ulfhild Vartu—

  “You didn’t know I was—” She could hardly even whisper. “Tamghat—Tamghiz Ghatai—was my father.”

  Nour, lost in some fog of his own, had missed that and was muttering, “I never man’ged to read any words in’t a’tall. Wish we’d known wha’ you w’rup to.”

  After a moment Holla-Sayan tugged them both onwards, leaving Mikki to follow. And the stairs were at an end. Her knees shook on the blessed flat; she had to lean on the wall to catch her breath. Holla-Sayan batted at her light with a hand, and it was quenched, as if he’d crushed a spark. Darkness returned.

  “I’ve never noticed that there’s anything in the tomb in the Sunset Ward market,” he said, as if that last exchange had not happened, “but maybe I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’ve never bothered to go sniffing around it. Marakand has no gods that I’ve ever noticed, though, and none Attalissa ever knew of, either.”

  She tried to moisten her mouth. “That girl.” She realized he would never have seen her. “A girl in the great hall of their temple. They took us there, for judgement by the Voice, but they didn’t call her the Voice. They said—she said—she was the Lady herself, and I believed her. She wasn’t any priestess. Is she one of—of the seven?”

  “Probably,” he said, and Mikki growled, “Yes.”

  They couldn’t fight a devil. Even the Blackdog hadn’t been able to—it was Ulfhild who had killed her father, she knew, despite what the songs on the caravan road said, and Ulfhild Vartu wasn’t here. Great Gods, please, let there be water, somewhere.

  “What,” Holla-Sayan asked, “will you do now? Is Ketsim yours? They say he’s the temple’s man, ruling the westernmost Praitannec tribe. Will you go to him? Claim your rights as his lord? Take rule of that tribe from Marakand?”

  “You can kill Ketsim, for all I care,” she croaked. “You should have killed him at Serakallash, when you lot killed everybody else. I don’t want to be a damned Great Grass chieftain or make myself a warlord.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know!” She was shivering again. Old Great Gods save her, he was still thinking about killing her. Trial and judgement, staggering in the dark.

  “Don’t shout. There’s nobody in this house that I can smell, but don’t shout anyway.”

  Nour slipped and hung a moment from Holla’s grip. Ivah hauled his other arm over her own shoulders.

  “Water,” she said, as if that would produce it.

  “Bring back the gods,” Nour rasped. “Raise the city. Need the gods.” Each word was an effort now. “Can’t read th’ inscriptions. Been to Nabban, imperial wizards. Nobody knows. Can’t break the walls. Tried, long ’go. Hadi’s mother di
ed. Red Masks came. Killed e’ryone. But i’ kill Red Masks—Ghu—an’ if you can read the spell and take it apart—”

  “Hush,” Ivah said without thinking. “I can’t, I said I only thought I could read the script, a little, a few words. There are letters like nothing I’ve ever seen, as well. But we’ll talk about it later. When you’re rested.” Great Gods, she sounded like somebody’s mother. Not her own.

  “Goin’ die. Know it. You tell Hadi. Ghu. Got to be now or never. Get Ghu to kill the Red Masks. No Red Masks, city won’t fear the Lady. Pro’lem is they love her. Make them know her first. Make them remem’er wha’ she’s done. Make them hate.”

  Ghu’s dead, she wanted to cry. I never even got to know him, and he’s dead, because of us. Why should it seem suddenly to hurt so? “You’re not going to die. We’re going to get a physician.” A surgeon? Amputate the festering arm? A wizard-physician might save him, but if there were any among the caravans, only their own gangs would know it.

  “Am,” he said. “Blood poisoning. Seen it on th’ road. You go to Hadidu. He needs a wizard. Promise. You promise, Ivah.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  A door. An ordinary door. Beyond, clean outdoor darkness, with starlight and the moon sinking towards the west and the ending of the night. Pure, sweet air. Getting down what was a small and crumbling cliff with Nour—and herself—so weakened and clumsy was a drawing-out of the nightmare. Mikki managed on his own but didn’t have the strength to help either of them. She kept hearing things, a branch, a leaf, a rattling stone, and thinking she saw a flowing black shadow coming out the door after them, the Blackdog, veiled Red Mask, something that was both, her father wearing that girl’s white veil over his hair . . . Holla-Sayan had his hands on her waist, lifting her. He’d already more or less carried Nour down, though the Marakander was no slighter man than he.

  “Why aren’t you in Lissavakail with your goddess?” she asked, leaning on him without meaning to do so. His body was warm and solid, strong as stone to hold her up.

  “I don’t belong to Attalissa any longer.” He didn’t quite drop her on the broken rocks of the old riverbed, but he couldn’t get his hands off her fast enough, that was certain. Oh Great Gods, she hadn’t meant—it was only that for a moment he had seemed safe, a great sheltering wall. “I’ll take your friend. You follow. Stay behind and try not to leave too much of a track. There’s water, not far. Mikki, you all right to watch behind?”

  The man Holla claimed for a demon grunted.

  A long, weary stumble in the dark followed, broken only by a halt at some tiny reed-fringed puddle, where she drank, sucking the water like a horse, and then tried to get Nour to drink, cupping the water up in her hands. Much of it dribbled down his neck. He couldn’t hold his head steady. Holla-Sayan didn’t quite swear at them but muttered in his native Westgrass tongue and eventually put her aside and pulled Nour up again. Ivah started counting steps in her head with the rhythm of her breath, just to be sure she took the next one. Despite his wounds and the slow care with which he’d climbed down from the temple’s door, the Northron behind her moved silent as some great beast, only his breath, panting a little, or now and then a hand giving her a shove over some upheaved stones or sprawling willow trunk, reminding her he was there at all. Through bushes and brush, under trees. Branches snagged her and dragged at her hair. Ghost of a riverbank.

  The earth shuddered again, and Holla stopped so abruptly they all ran into one another; he flung up his head, eyes gleaming.

  “Ya,” the demon said, in answer to something Ivah must have missed.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Something in the temple.”

  “Ulfhild?”

  “No,” Mikki rumbled. “Dog . . .”

  “Leave it. I know. And we’ve probably left a trail even city folk can follow. Probably working wizardry against pursuit would bring Red Masks down on us that much faster.” He snorted and led them on.

  Soft churned earth of a road, cobbles, earth again, houses, a stone wall against which she leaned while Holla hammered with the handle of a knife. Light, and someone took her arm, exclaiming.

  “Sun and moon and Old Great Gods. Nour! Kharduin’s been having kittens. Where’d you find him, man, a brothel? She really doesn’t look his type.”

  Ivah blinked at a woman’s swaying face a moment, all blurry golden lamplight and shadows, then hauled off and punched it.

  The woman caught her wrist easily, as if she’d been a flailing child.

  “Easy! Gods forgive, I’m sorry, it was a joke and a bad one, girl. Come on, come in, you’re safe now. It’s all right, safe.”

  Arms about her, the strange woman all unheeding of how dirty she got, how Ivah stank. They were into the gatehouse of a caravanserai, a brick-vaulted stairway angling away into darkness, the arcaded courtyard before them. A man holding a cudgel hovered but was waved away by the woman.

  “It’s Nour, safe back at last, porter. Lock the door and shout for us if anyone comes following him.” Whispered debates, the woman and Holla-Sayan and, running down the stairs, a bushy-bearded man exclaiming in bastard Nabbani with the accent of the road, not the city, while Mikki slid down to sit, eyes shut and axe at his feet, with his back against the wall. Holla-Sayan hauled him to his feet, and they all staggered up the stairs and around a gallery. She missed something, woke gulping salty broth, insisting, Nour, where was Nour? She had to see Nour. He had vanished. They would see to Nour, they said. A crowd of faces, curious, horrified. A wizard of the caravans, saved from the deep well. They meant her. She was wrapped in sacking over the rags of her shift. No one wanted to sully their own clothes by giving her a coat. Only the women touched her, the rude one and a very young Grasslander and a dark desert woman with hawk-tattoos. Something important they wanted to know. She remembered agreeing, Yes, do it, but then couldn’t remember what she had agreed to. A tattoo? No, silly. She was dreaming, strange dreams, mortifying dreams, naked with the Blackdog.

  She woke up, ashamed, with the weary, dragging weight of sleep still on her. She was clean. She did remember a trip back down the stairs into the yard, two of the women with a pail of warm water, a rough cloth, soap, scrubbing at her as she crouched naked behind the camels, too weary to stand. Someone else’s clothing, just a long, loose shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and a quilt, and warm bars of sunlight slanting in through the slatted shutters onto her. Itchy fire, oozing blisters on her arm. She’d run into blister-vine somewhere along the way. Enough to drive you crazy. No right to complain, nothing like Nour’s face. But Nour . . . Nour was dying. He might already be dead, but she did not think she had been sleeping long. If she only shut her eyes again she could slide away for hours, days, she felt, but she wanted to see Nour. Ivah sat up. Her head felt light, dizzying.

  They’d cut her hair off.

  What? Ivah put a wary hand to her head. Gone. Cropped short and ragged, sticking up all over.

  “It looks—well, it will grow back,” a woman said, equally wary. “It was filthy, matted up and full of burrs and sticks and sap and worse. You’d never have gotten it clean, and, ah, it was my bed you were going to be sleeping in.”

  Ivah considered, slowly and carefully, just what her hair might have been like, unbraided, long as it was, and what manner of filth would have matted it. She very carefully put both hands in her lap, clasped together, where she sat in a room with scattered bedding on the floor, random untidy bundles of caravaneers’ personal belongings. Hair did not matter. It had been her mother’s obsession. A Nabbani imperial daughter did not cut her hair, but Ivah was not that, no matter what her mother had been. Her head felt absurdly light, and she wanted to cry. Stupid. Cry for Nour, if she cried for anyone. She had been crying too much lately. She was dry of tears.

  Yes, and she was alive and safe and free, against all expectation. Her lips were cracked, but her tongue was alive again, no longer a stiff and swollen baulk of wood in her mouth.

  “Nour?” she said instead.


  The woman, a Northron with sandy hair in desert braids to her waist, tilted a hand this way and that. “Better, a little. Old Great Gods willing. We had a wizard-surgeon in who was travelling with my cousin Ragnar’s gang. Holla-Sayan wouldn’t let him take Nour’s poor arm off and talked Kharduin into backing him somehow, so the wizard didn’t hold out much hope when he left, but he’s a Westron. What does he know of demons and their blessings? We think Nour’s certainly not any worse, and anyone can see that the poison’s ebbed more than a little, down the arm, which I don’t think any physician could have managed, wizard or not, it was so far along. Your friend Holla-Sayan says he’s no wizard, nor demon, but there’re some uncanny rumours going round the gangs about him, you know. Anyhow, he’s done something, he and the verrbjarn between them.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Nour? Next door with Kharduin, of course. They all are.” The woman offered a hand. “Well, not Ragnar’s Westron wizard, he’ll be on the road; Ragnar was heading out today. And Holla-Sayan said he and his boss had a meeting with some Family elder in the city to get to and took himself off not long ago. I’m Guthrun, what passes for a camel-leech in this gang. Nour’s sleeping, but I’ll take you to see for yourself.”

  Guthrun kept a hand ready to seize Ivah’s elbow, but she found she was steady enough, even if she did hobble. Her torn feet hurt. The next room along the upper gallery was warm and golden with morning sunlight, the shutters drawn open. Nour was straight and neat on his back as if laid out for burial, hands resting on his chest over the blanket. One was wrapped in bandages and marked with words in some stiff alphabet Ivah didn’t recognize, painted in thick ink, and three more beaded dark on his forehead. His left cheek was a mass of black crust, but he was neither pallid nor flushed, and he breathed deeply and easily.

  The man leaning against the windowsill must be Kharduin, the caravan-master, a burly man with black hair in desert braids, gold rings in his ears, and a thickly curling beard. Blue eyes were startling in his dark face, and black scorpions were tattooed on the insides of his wrists, no folk’s mark that she knew, but he might be from the eastern deserts. He came at her like a bear, lifting her onto her toes, squeezing the breath from her. “My thanks,” he said gruffly, and turned away to the window. Ivah blinked. Not, she thought, merely Nour’s gang-boss.