The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  None, although—she went without Lakkariss. She went not wanting to fight. She might have done something stupid, trying to talk to this Lady. They were friends—she had friends, you know. I could see her being taken unawares.

  And what about Ivah?

  She should stay here, Mikki said. She’s only a human wizard, no matter what her father was, and half an idea about one part of the Red Masks’ spells is not any use at all.

  Maybe. But she had stood against Red Masks. What other human wizard had managed that?

  “Ivah,” said Holla-Sayan, “a vague inspiration’s no good. Can you break their fear?”

  “I don’t know. I won’t know till I see it again and try. But to try, when I’m not fighting for my life—maybe.”

  She was desperate. Desperate to die, maybe, in a cause she thought would redeem her.

  You’ve paid for Bikkim. Her eyes widened. She did hear. Stay with Nour. You don’t need to do anything more. I’m not going to come back and kill you. Probably not going to come back at all.

  “No,” she said, and, “I can’t walk all that way. I’ll be too slow.”

  He considered a long moment. “Mikki can carry you.”

  “Do I look like a camel?” the bear rumbled.

  “No!” said Kharduin. “Are you mad, the lot of you?”

  “I am,” said Holla-Sayan. “Just ask the storytellers. Take Nour, hide, defend him as long as you can and kill him when you can’t. Nasutani can tell you why. He’d ask for it if he were awake. Like Mikki said, we can fight them in the suburb, or we can fight them here, eventually.”

  “Up there’s a lot more defensible. Height and a narrow place.”

  “It’ll come to the same thing in the end.”

  “But Ivah—!” Nasutani cried. “She’s—”

  Ivah stood up. “Look after Nour,” she said. “Old Great Gods defend you.”

  “I think you should ride the dog,” Mikki said.

  “I think she shouldn’t.” Holla-Sayan cupped his hand for Ivah’s foot and heaved her up to Mikki’s back.

  The demon’s shoulders bunched and stretched under her hands, and Ivah tightened the grip of her legs, unloosing her fingers to make loops of the braided bark. She was a child of the Great Grass, riding nearly before she could walk, but a bear was not the same as a horse and she was so weak and weary. Hungry. But she needed her hands free.

  She was going to die. It was a calm, remote, strange thought. She had been living inside death delayed for days now, ever since she chose to stand and fight for Hadidu at the Doves. Red Masks, the Lady, slow starvation, the Blackdog, now the Lady and her Red Masks again. It didn’t matter when she died, early or late. Every breath was an unexpected offering from whatever gods held her in their hands, every deed she lived to attempt a repayment of that gift.

  The bear’s rolling lope slowed, and he turned after the Blackdog down a dusty lane between walls of dusty stone. What had Kharduin and his people made of that? Nobody had warned them. Holla-Sayan had flung himself down the slope of the rising cedars, a black mountain dog, quite ordinary-looking, between one stride and the next, and she had clutched at the long, thick hair of Mikki’s shoulders as he bounded after. If there was any cry behind, she hadn’t heard it.

  She felt for the knife in her coat pocket, eased it partially from its sheath, and, not without a wince, closed the heel of her hand over the edge of the blade.

  Her mother had not believed one should mix together rituals foreign to one another, the way her father always had, but for breaking a devil-created spell of terror she had no carefully memorized set of characters with their layers of meanings, from literal through to the most secret known only to imperial wizards, declared by long tradition to be correct. No Grasslander string-weaving on its own would carry much weight against a devil’s will. What she needed was hidden in some deeper place, in the marrow of her being.

  Ivah felt she was floating, not in water but in the sea of grass, one of her earliest memories, standing, a little child, and the wind running towards her. Almost it had seemed a horse, a great silvery sky horse running, hooves touching the tips of the blades. The wind, of course, and a small girl’s dreaming. Now it was the delirium of exhaustion, but maybe it was also the trance her father had sought with his drugs and meditation, which had always eluded her. She floated. The waves of the grass were green and silver, shoulder-high, and she rose on the wind over them, hovering like a kestrel. The grass-waves and the wind and the racing white clouds, small in the burning blue depths of the sky, hung about her, and she could feel the shape of the world, the balance of being and not-being, the fire in the heart of life, and the dark and the cold poised against it, a breath, a shadow’s barrier, between. And this weaving of disparate strands was right, was hers.

  Her hair was gone and what was left too short to use, but blood was hers to her last breath, and the Northron wizards used their own blood to colour their runes. She wrote Nabbani characters, smearing the blood from finger to finger, on the inside of each wrist. The words rose from the grass, rained from the blue sky of her birth.

  Mother Nabban, great river holds me.

  Father Nabban, great mountain strong beneath my feet.

  And on her forehead, Grass, sky, I float to strike, the kestrel between.

  The flow slowed and oozed, but last she drew the three loops she had made for the Grasslander cat’s-cradle over that hand, staining her braided bark strings, and only then pressed the wound to her coat, blinking against the ache of it, falling back into the world, and clutched again at Mikki’s fur, dizzy. They were on the main street of the suburb, the caravan road itself, and the Blackdog had grown again, more giant wolf than guardian mastiff. A caravan was just emerging around the corner from a narrow lane, camels stepping with their deceptively slow, ground-eating pace, bells shrill. The leading rider shouted and caught up his spear but then swung it erect, reining his camel aside, and they passed unchallenged.

  “The Blackdog of Lissavakail!” she heard someone cry out in the accent of Serakallash. “That’ll teach the Voice of the Lady to shelter the Lake-Lord’s murdering noekar-men!”

  There were people abroad on the streets, Marakanders, caravaneers, merchants, but more pressing west than east. The Marakanders yelled and fled before them down the lanes or indoors. Caravaneers, though, clustered armed and alert around caravanserai gateways. You saw things, in the deserts and the wild places . . . demons, gods. They watched, warily, as they had been watching, listening to the growing rumour, before the beasts ever came. You didn’t ready a caravan for the desert on an hour’s notice. They were trapped here, many of them. A horde of warriors waiting to be roused . . . No. Caravan mercenaries. They wouldn’t fight for any but their own.

  A cordon of temple guard blocked the street ahead of them, facing inwards, making a living barricade. Ivah could see the logic. The main road of the suburb was like a spine, and its alleys and lanes sprang off between the caravanserais and warehouses like ribs, with no other street running parallel to the road for long; cut off a segment of the suburb, subdue it, capture what miserable wizards or soothsayers you found, only then extend to the next. Where could any wizards go, if the Western Wall was held against them, as it must be, if the Lady were not utterly a fool? There were message-riders in the temple and swift ponies. No one could hide on the sides of the pass for long, whatever Kharduin believed, and not many of those caught nearest the city walls when the Lady rode out were likely to have had the time to flee to the Eastern Wall ahead of her or to take the road south to the silver mines. No escape. How many wizards? A handful, a dozen, a score? Was she going to throw her life away trying to save half a dozen folk who should have known better than to be in this place? She had been willing to offer it for one. How many folk in the suburb, how many wizard-born in a thousand, how many—her mind was wandering into nonsense, dizzying spirals, and her belly ached.

  “Leave you here,” Mikki said, each word a grunt with his stride.

&nbs
p; “No.” Great Gods, no, she needed to be far away, to have run far, far, sold her services to the emperor of Nabban, who might or might not be her grandfather, to be some dutiful, useful, obedient, unthinking servant of power, the weight of decision deferred to broader shoulders. “Find me a corner you can defend.”

  Damned fool. That was Holla-Sayan, the words, not the sound of his voice but the flavour of him, somehow, forced into her head. Keep down and hold on, then.

  He gave no warning, and the fools were maybe the outward-facing soldiers who only gaped and then shouted and thrust back into the threefold ranks of their fellows, starting a panic that at first had no idea where the danger lay. He leapt on a man, knocking him flat, grabbed the one beside and hurled him by his spear-arm. By then the whole rigid line had broken up into screaming confusion. One shouted, trying to rally them, but they were panicked as a mob of children. Her father would have executed half of any troop of warriors who broke like that at the first sign of the enemy as an example to the others. Or had one half execute the other. The Blackdog singled out the shouting commander, a lieutenant’s single black ribbon on his helmet, and brought him down by the throat. Ivah shut her eyes as Mikki took the shortest way through, which was over the officer’s still-thrashing body. They were both sprayed with his blood.

  Holla-Sayan and Mikki hesitated then, slowing, maybe discussing something silently. The street here was deserted, but now doors opened, a wary crack here, another. A straggle of people emerged from a wineshop and sidled along the wall until they were past the demon; then they ran, scattering in twos and threes once they were beyond the line the temple guard had held. Over-Malagru tribesmen, Ivah thought . . . She forced her mind to focus, to be ready for some spear or arrow. The guards themselves had mostly taken refuge in an alleyway.

  “Get indoors!” some shrill-voiced one among them shouted, as more people emerged. “Inside, in the Lady’s name. The Red Masks are coming.”

  And then you’ll be sorry . . . ? He didn’t seem willing to enforce his own orders now, and that alone started a rush down the road to the west. Screams broke out, closer to the city. Mikki leapt forward, Holla-Sayan keeping just a little ahead. Here the street was deserted again, and five-man patrols of temple guard stood scattered along it. She wouldn’t have expected the suburb to be so tractable, but the Voice had only ever condemned wizards and rebels against the Lady. If you weren’t that, what did you have to fear, so long as you scurried indoors from the Red Masks and their divine terror? You could emerge later and tell yourself, Well, anyway, I’m safe, and they brought it on themselves . . .

  Smoke rose away to the north-east, and another plume, nearer, just off the road. The screaming came from there, like nothing human. They swerved that way.

  A man on his knees in the dust, alone. A dead Marakander lay before a caravanserai’s gateway, a cudgel by his hand. The porter, no doubt. The double leaves of the door had been thrust inward, torn from their hinges, but were dragged back into place and wedged with their own bars, wedged closed from outside, and a sign scrawled on the gate in charcoal. Traitors, it said. Ivah thought hazily that she smelled the scorched air of wizardry, like a lightning strike, and wondered at that, because she had never noticed magic had a smell before. She could see it, too, like light on the edge of vision, colour without a name. The eyes of the horse of the sky, burning. Delirious. Raving in her weakness. It was the caravanserai burning. The screaming was nothing human. Some beast in terror of its life.

  “Get up.” Holla-Sayan, human, had the kneeling man by the shoulder. “Come help me.”

  The man looked up at them, eyes as empty as death. “They took her,” he said.

  Blood matted his scalp, soaked down his desert-braided hair and stained the half of his face. Salt Desert tattoos.

  A patrol of temple guard came nearer but only to huddle in the shadow of a porch, bristling with spears but advancing no farther.

  “Mikki . . .”

  “I can get down,” Ivah said, but Mikki shook his head and lumbered to the door, muttering something about his axe. A few swipes of his paws clawed the jamming boards away and they forced the broken gates. The wooden galleries of the caravanserai burned, and a stack of fodder smouldered, while men and women passed water from the central watering trough. Bodies had been left where they had fallen, a Salt Desert woman, a Black Desert man, a Marakander boy, a dog. Horses and camels were going mad with terror of the smoke, but it seemed the folk of the place might get it out.

  “Dog!” Mikki bellowed. The temple guard had gathered courage to charge them. They scattered and ran as Holla-Sayan shifted form again. Someone within shouted at the man kneeling in the street, too, cursing him for bringing a wizard among them, for even trying to fight, for trying to follow and leaving them to be sealed in and burned.

  “Fools,” Mikki grumbled under his breath, and then roared, “Call yourselves free folk of the road? There’s nothing out here now but coward temple guard. Hiding like slaves and children while your comrades are dragged away to die . . . Where are the damned Red Masks, dog? They’ve been here. The stink of them’s everywhere.”

  Away down the lane to the south, quartering back and forth, Holla-Sayan said.

  “Come!” Ivah shouted at the kneeling man as they swerved around him, slowed now to a careful stalking pace, sniffing the air, reaching with whatever other inhuman senses they had. “Come and fight them!” She didn’t think the caravaneer heard and what would he think, a mad Grasslander riding a bear? What use would he be, anyway?

  The lane was narrow, and every door marked with a sign in charcoal, a hasty “Clean.” Clean of wizards. They were searching house by house in the area the temple guard held, and—and a hole-in-the-wall herbalist’s burning, smoke pouring from its reed-thatched roof and “traitor” written again on its door, which was ajar. Holla-Sayan shouldered it wider, backed out, nose wrinkling.

  “All dead,” Mikki said. “Old woman and a young man and children.”

  Burning where they found what they sought, which might prevent folk opening their doors even to their neighbours, after they had been searched once, in case the guard came back. More temple guard watched the street but fled before the Blackdog. Why bother dying? The Red Masks would deal with them. The lane looped back to the main road and there, dragging two bodies now, a woman and an old man, strode Red Masks.

  They paused and turned, horrible to see, a unity.

  “Down!” Mikki roared and stood erect, so Ivah slid down over his side and somehow landed on her feet, her back to a wall, knees shaking. A corner, as she’d asked for, where a stone house abutted a caravanserai wall. She hadn’t meant it literally, but what did she expect, an impregnable tower?

  Holla-Sayan was a man again, but his eyes belonged to nothing made of flesh and bone. “They’re coming,” he said hoarsely. “I think they’ve noticed us. Someone has.”

  Ivah swallowed painfully. Her lips bled when she tried to speak, so she nodded. She was a fool. She couldn’t do this.

  A sudden surge of people poured by, a house marked “Clean” emptying, heartened by the flight of the nearest temple guard or panicked past breaking by the Red Masks’ turning back. Their cries were empty of meaning, a flock of birds, wheeling and rising. She shut her eyes and saw them, black, flowing from the grass, seeking the blue, turning on the wind. Fell to her knees and felt Holla-Sayan seize her arm, shook her head. She couldn’t stand; she was too weak. Better to be on the ground to start with than to fall. There was nowhere safe to run anyway. She draped two of the loops of bloodied bark-twine over her shoulders, ready to take up when she needed them, wound her hands into the other, felt the characters in blood on wrists and forehead warm as the touch of the sun.

  I am, she told herself, falling into her mother’s Nabbani. I am strong. I have no gods, but I am of the Grass and the wind of the grass danced for me as a horse sky-silver, and my eyes and no other saw. I am of Nabban that I have never seen, and the strength of the river and the mountain
of eternal snows is in the truth of my tongue and the womb that bore me. I am . . . a thread of fire in the heart of the ice, even that, I am. He carried me on his shoulders, so I could see over the grass, and he was my father and I loved him. And all these strengths are in me, and I make them a wall against the devil of Marakand.

  She opened her eyes, weaving figures, seeing her fingers only hazily, as if they were shadows in a dark mirror. Terror. The Red Masks carried terror like a stench. It struck at the animal inside the head, the little, scared, trembling animal that knew a mighty predator stooped over it. She wove encircling river and fortress mountain, kestrel and the wind, stone and grass. That was her safety. And the mountains of the southern fence below the deserts, the Pillars of the Sky, and the forests, because they guarded her now, and Holla-Sayan’s hand rested on the crown of her head.

  This place I am. This place is mine. They cannot touch me here.

  She heard boots pounding, opened her eyes on advancing Red Masks. Two of them, while four stood over the prisoners flung to the ground.

  The second strand, and she had to use teeth as well as fingers to pluck and pass and turn. Mikki’s low growling rose to a snarl, and he was gone from before her, charging out, swiping, crushing, and wheeling back, and one Red Mask lay broken. Another, fallen, staggered to its feet again.

  “Break the neck,” Holla-Sayan suggested with remote interest.

  The four who had hung back charged now, senseless prisoners abandoned. Sullen fires played over the eyeslits of their helmets. A dog within some building whined piercingly, and a baby wailed. Ivah was able to look at the Red Masks, not to fail and faint. But she felt the pressure of their fear pushing at her, pushing back her defences, gnawing like rats on a corpse not quite dead, and her breath quickened. She forced it to slow again, but her fingers shook and she faltered, dropped a doubling of the thread. No. She could sense the shape of them, the unity of them in what made them and bound them, see it as it might be if it were a Grasslander weaving, too vast, too manifold to comprehend, and yet a little . . . she echoed it. Fear. Drew in the third loop, wove it under and over, and they rushed forward, six together and the wounded one limping slow behind them, because Holla-Sayan and Mikki would not come out.