by K V Johansen
Then the whole was burning, plaster crumbling to dust, roofs falling, almost as one, almost silent, only a dull and distant rumble. No great scarlet flames striking high, no roar of furious air. A shimmer, a heat haze, and the small yellow-white flames, dancing on the ruins. It was their own fault they lost all, those wailing folk; each and every house had been built contrary to the city law, hard against her walls. Most folk had made it out. Most. Not all. Even Zora could not care, mesmerized by the dancing of her flames. She must not care. If she screamed and shrieked and wept—
The Lady did not scream. She was their goddess and their lives were hers, to spend as she needed.
The Lady wept. Did she? Her face was wet. Pointless. Tu’usha—she was Tu’usha, she must remember she was Tu’usha, true name, true self—laughed and opened her arms to the city.
“Come to me now, if you dare!” But who it might be she taunted, she did not know.
She left the roof, down the narrow stairs, the dark ones, down within the walls, to the maze of mundane rooms that backed the great central hall under the dome where the dancers danced the worship of the Lady, where the Voice in days now ended had conveyed the Lady’s will from the high pulpit, hidden behind her silver mask, muttering and shrieking, hands writhing, her mind long ago broken.
Murdered, the Voice, by the assassin who was now captain of her Red Masks. His fault, he had done this to her, Zora would have been gone out of the temple in a month more, free. . . . No. She is I am the Lady. The death of the Voice had set her free, given her the spur to action, the sign that her time of passive hiding was past. The Lady had no need of a Voice. The Lady was incarnate now and spoke in her own voice. Zora’s voice.
I am my own Voice. I am Voice. I am—
She had danced here. Zora had danced here. In the dance, there had been only Zora, and she had not danced to the Lady’s glory, but for her own lost god Gurhan, and for herself.
She could dance for herself again. The swirling, circling patterns of the floor called her, woke the rhythms in her mind. She could. Yes, dance. She would. Find the stillness within. In dance, there was stillness. In silence, hear. In drumming, in the pad and scuff of bare feet, there was silence.
Zora shed her wraps, her boots, raked fingers through her hair, stretched.
There was no drummer but her own heart. No music, but memory brought it.
Yes . . .
Zora danced.
Red Masks held the doors, and the Lady of Marakand danced.
CHAPTER V
The lack of his sword nagged at Varro, like an itch that wouldn’t be eased. Red Geir’s sword, or so Holla-Sayan claimed that the devil Ulfhild Vartu had told him. It looked a kingly sword, that was certain, and old enough to have come over the sea with Red Geir. Cursed, Holla-Sayan also said, and told him to throw it away. They’d had a rare fight over it some months ago, and he had completely failed to knock Holla down, of course, but at least the Westgrasslander had left off nagging. Rocking the baby’s cradle with a booted toe, Varro bounced daughter number three on his knee, singing, as his father had sung to him:
A white horse, a black horse, a red horse for thee,
But mine is a grey horse, from over the sea.
There’s a moon on the towers and frost on the hill,
And when the wind blows, I can smell the sea still.
It was nonsense, and only Jasmel the eldest spoke any Northron, but the child shrieked and yelled, “Again, again, dada!”
Bread on the hearthstone,
Butter in the churn,
Honey in the beehive—
The door to the shop opened with a bang, and Watcher shot up barking. Varro swung little Iris to the floor and put himself in the connecting doorway between kitchen and shop, thrusting the clattering bead curtain aside. He felt naked without the sword, and he wasn’t obsessed with it, no matter what Holla said. Holla was more than a little prone to obsessions himself. When a man had a treasure, of course he didn’t like leaving it behind, even locked in the boss’s room at the caravanserai. Just like Talfan couldn’t stand it long, when she had sent the girls and the priest’s little boy away into hiding with allies among the Barraya family manors, back when the Lady first revealed herself and destroyed Hadidu’s house, executing his brother-in-law, the partner of Master Kharduin, who ran one of the more celebrated eastern road gangs. They’d thought they were about to be arrested and dragged off to death themselves, his wife and Hadidu and probably some others Varro didn’t know about. He’d arrived to find Talfan’s house dark and locked and, after climbing over the yard wall and kicking in the shuttered kitchen window in a bit of a panic, had discovered his wife, a baby, and Master Hadidu living in a second cellar he hadn’t even known existed.
But when several days went by and nobody came searching, and there was no rumour at all that anyone but Hadidu was under any suspicion, Talfan got word to her aunt, and the whole gang came creeping home, by some secret route over the wall in the night, as furtively as they’d left. Thank all the gods that were and ever had been. When a man came home after so long away, he wanted his family about him.
A girl—a pleasantly buxom girl—in a street guard’s grey tunic slammed the door closed and turned to drop the bar, panting for breath. She clutched a messenger’s white baton.
“Tulip!” Talfan said. “What’s wrong?”
“Not sure,” said Tulip, eyeing Varro. Appreciatively, he hoped, but she seemed more to be considering whether she should invent some intimate rash and send him back to the kitchen in male embarrassment.
“This is my husband, Varro, home from the road. Jugurthos knows him.”
“Oh,” said Tulip, visibly relaxing. “Right, then. Hadidu?”
“Upstairs with the girls, grinding herbs for me. What’s—”
“The Lady,” said Talfan. “Took a company of temple guard to the suburb. Red Masks. Started arresting wizards, or trying to. Someone started fighting back. Killing Red Masks. Some great wizard with demons and—” she shook her head, “maybe even the Blackdog of Lissavakail’s out there.”
“The Blackdog?” Varro raised his head sharply. “No. He wouldn’t—” He clamped his teeth together on the words. The women didn’t notice his interjection, too absorbed in their own excitement.
“The suburb’s rising and the Lady fled, Talfan, back to the temple and ordered the gates of the city shut, even against her own temple guard, any that didn’t make it back with her. People must have seen, Talfan, seen her fleeing from Riverbend Gate to the temple.”
“We heard the bells.”
The rhythmless clanging of the general alarm, Talfan meant. There had been a quick scurrying around the neighbourhood as people tried to find the cause, but it meant a general all-in curfew, and a patrol had come by, so everyone had retreated, to wait and breed their own rumours of Praitannec war and desert raiders.
“That won’t keep it quiet for long, and that’s not the worst of it. Or the best. I think Jugurthos is mad, but maybe he’s inspired. I don’t know. I knew who he was when I told him yes, that first night, I knew then what he dreamed, and I meant yes forever, not one night. I’m not running now. But Old Great Gods—he must be mad. We’re all damned.”
The street guard seemed as elated as she was fearful, though. Varro caught Iris as she tried to push past him, crying, “Auntie Tulip! Look! This is my dada!”
“Be a good girl and go get Uncle Hadi,” Talfan said. “Varro, you were at Lissavakail.”
He admitted as much, warily. He’d been juggling secrets longer than he cared to remember, a burden for a man well able to admit he loved a good story and that most of the pleasure was in the telling. But it was young Zavel, not he, who swaggered round the taverns with a nod and a wink and a dark hint about his friend. Varro didn’t boast of the Blackdog, and he never told the gang why he seemed to save so little from his own personal trade of Northron goods, letting his friends think it was all flung away through high living when he got home to Marakand or lost b
y a spendthrift wife. Perhaps she was that. His earnings bought apprenticeships for young wizards in the Five Cities, weapons that were stockpiled—somewhere, he didn’t know where. He’d have raged about his daughters being put as playthings on Talfan’s board, except, well, he’d known she was mixed into the forbidden worship of the old gods when he’d married her. Part of the bargain. But he wanted to take daughter number one to the road with him this time. She was old enough, and Gaguush could use the hands. Get her out of it, at least. Show her a larger, saner world.
“The Blackdog,” said his wife. “A demon servant of the goddess Attalissa—he really exists? He killed the Lake-Lord?”
“Um,” he said. “I think—well—he’s not a demon. Definitely not a demon.” Not anything so safe and natural and belonging to the world as a demon, though just what he was, Varro couldn’t guess. A mad spirit bound to a human host to serve the goddess Attalissa, except that, now, he wasn’t. Bound to serve, that was. Mad, yes, and unfortunately bound to a host Varro did not think was all that human anymore, love him like a brother though he might.
“And they say the Lake-Lord was one of the seven devils of the north. A human priest like a Red Mask, even with his goddess’s blessing on him, is nothing to that.” Talfan’s dark eyes were shining as if he’d brought her rubies. “The Blackdog killed the Lake-Lord. And now the goddess of the lake has sent him here? If we can rid ourselves of the Red Masks—”
“It was a bit more complicated, and it wasn’t—” Varro began.
“But the Red Masks aren’t priests; that’s the truth that’ll unravel all the lies—” cried the soldier.
“Tulip,” said Hadidu, grave in the kitchen doorway, a lean, hollow-eyed man, his black beard already greying about the mouth, though he couldn’t be any older than Varro, if that. Varro stepped aside for him.
Tulip launched into her tale—report—again.
Bare feet came pattering down the stairs.
“Mama—!”
“Not now, Jasmel.”
“But, Mama—”
“Not now, Ermina.”
“Mama, the temple’s on fire and the suburb now. We can see it from the roof.”
A general rush for the rooftop followed, Talfan pausing on the way to gather up the baby.
There was certainly a fiery glow to the northeast, though little haze of smoke. The smoke over the suburb also seemed mostly to have died away.
“Someone attacking the temple?” Tulip wondered aloud, but she seemed doubtful. “Jugurthos? No. He’s waiting for you before he does anything, Hadidu.”
“Hadidu can’t—” Talfan began.
Tulip raised a hand. “No one’s letting me finish. Hadidu, listen.”
Necromancy, that was what she told them of. Wizards murdered and enslaved as Red Masks, and a wizard capable of putting the Lady, goddess or devil, to flight. A monstrous dog and a wizard riding a demon bear.
“Er,” said Varro. “A bear? A northern bear, tawny-gold, not brown?”
“A golden bear, that’s what people said.”
“A woman?”
“The wizard’s a woman.”
Varro nodded. “And the Blackdog of Lissavakail?”
“That’s what they’re saying. You see what Jugurthos is thinking, Hadidu. The Lady is false; she’s a necromancer, no goddess. A devil, maybe, an incarnate devil. Ju thinks he can use this. Now, before the Lady rallies, whoever or whatever she is. The suburb’s ready to burn the city down to get at her, but if we can get them on our side, if we can raise the city for ourselves—Hassin at the Riverbend Gate will be with us—Ju has the testimony of the sandal-maker about his wife, proof of necromancy. He has the body. He thinks he can swing the other ward captains to our side and get the temple’s lapdogs out of the senate or call up a new one from the old family elders or something . . .”
“We can’t fight a devil,” Hadidu said. The gods are dead, he had said bitterly, only this morning. And he had wanted Varro to find some merchant’s company that would take him and his son south to the Five Cities, abandoning his goddess and the secrets he had been raised all his life to keep and serve.
“Lissavakail and Serakallash did fight a devil,” said Varro slowly. “And they won.” Was that hope, a little, like an uncoiling shoot of green, in Hadidu’s dark eyes? “We need to find the Blackdog.” Devils take all—devils, he was as mad as the rest of them. He should keep his mouth shut and drag his daughters off to the desert, with Talfan gagged on a camel till they’d gone too far to turn back. “I can. . . . Look, Talfan love, I’ve never told my friends your secrets, right? And I’ve never told you theirs.”
“What secrets?” asked Talfan.
Sorry, Holla. “You know my friend Holla-Sayan? Great Gods, you know his daughter Pakdhala?”
“The one who married and stayed in Lissavakail last year.”
“Her. Yes. Um. Pakdhala, ah, would be the goddess Attalissa of the Lissavakail. The lake, you know, not the town. Well, goddess of the town, too, of course.” Babbling. He should shut up now.
Talfan blinked. “In my kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Playing with my girls?”
“Yes.”
“So Holla-Sayan . . . but he’s from the Western Grass.”
“Well, yes. And he’s the Blackdog regardless. I did tell you he was a bit mad,” he added defensively.
“All caravaneers are a bit mad,” she said. “You as much as any. Sweet Ilbialla, Varro! You brought the Blackdog to my house, a creature like that, in this city. The Red Masks can smell magic and you didn’t think to tell me—”
“I didn’t know! I didn’t know, then, not till last summer. And he’s not a wizard, he’s—”
“We need to find him,” said Tulip. “We need to find him now.”
“And contact whoever’s in charge of the uprising in the suburb,” Talfan said.
“I doubt anybody is. It’s just a mob, mad for revenge. Once they cool, maybe they’ll hear sense.” But Tulip sounded doubtful. “Maybe. Maybe we can find someone they’ll listen to. Jugurthos thinks so.” She eyed Varro, seemed to dismiss him. “Someone they respect. And the city’s going to be in the same state, unless someone takes charge quickly.”
“In that case we’d better make damned sure it’s Hadidu,” said Talfan.
“Hadidu?” Varro’s involuntary protest meant no insult to the man, but Hadidu? Priest, all right, he could accept that, but . . . Hadidu ran a coffeehouse. He baked pastries. He didn’t lead men.
“We need someone all the city can put their trust in,” said Talfan. “Otherwise we’re doomed. We’ll die arguing, fighting, city against suburb, Family against Family, till the temple gets its nerve back and we’re all in the cages, dying in the sun.”
Maybe Varro had nodded a bit too vigorous agreement with the last. Talfan scowled at him.
“You’re right in one thing, Talfan,” Hadidu said. “We can’t afford to have suburb set against city or caravaneers against Marakanders. Varro?” His voice dropped, becoming even quieter. “Can you find your friend?”
“The Blackdog’s hard to miss,” said Varro. “And Mikki—you did say a bear—he’s, um, well, demon, yes. Half-demon. He’s a half-blooded verrbjarn, and it’ll be night by the time we can get out there. You just need to look for a seven-foot-tall, yellow-haired Northron. That’ll be him. With a spooky sort of silver-blonde woman with eyes like ice and steel beside him, glowering at you. Find her, and that’ll be the end of your Lady, I imagine.” Though not the end of devils in their city. What did Vartu Kingsbane want, anyway?
He wasn’t half so optimistic as he tried to sound. Holla was going to—Gaguush was going to kill him, getting Holla-Sayan into this.
On the other hand, Holla seemed to have managed most of it himself.
“Let’s go, then,” Hadidu said. “Talfan, get Shemal ready to travel. Send him to—to someone. I don’t want to know who. Send your daughters. Get them all away again, over the wall to some manor on the south
ern road where we have friends, up to the mining towns, anywhere out of here, and don’t tell me. Do it now, start now. We can’t fight this war with hostages against us so readily to hand. And if the temple takes me, and you somehow survive—don’t bring my son up to this. If the temple takes me, let it be over.”
Her lips thinned, but she nodded. “Auntie can take them, like last time. I won’t know where. The baby stays with me.”
Hadidu didn’t suggest Talfan go too. Varro didn’t suggest that it was maybe his job to order his children’s comings and goings and take thought for their protection. He just nodded, obedient as the rest.
“I’m going down to Ilbialla’s tomb,” Hadidu said. “Varro, find your friends. Jugurthos and I need to talk to them.”
Varro slipped out the Sunset Gate into the eerily quiet dusk of the suburb, where bonfires burned at many intersections and people lurked, guarding against they hardly knew what, with the native Marakanders mostly barricaded in their houses. Not good. He asked wary questions and hunted the demon and the Blackdog down eventually, in Master Shenar’s caravanserai, licking their wounds, figuratively speaking.
No sign of the devil Vartu.
Holla-Sayan was watching a Northron camel-leech putting stitches into Mikki’s bare and impressively hairy chest. And the damned great Red Mask killing, bear-riding wizard turned out to be the absolute last person Varro would ever have thought to see slumped asleep against his friend’s shoulder. Ivah. She’d bespelled and abducted Pakdhala to hand her over to the devil of Lissavakail, she’d had her noekar-woman kill Bikkim, and only Vartu’s devilry had saved him, she’d—Holla-Sayan knocked him down without stirring from the bench where he sat, when Varro swung his fist to rearrange the Tamghati traitor’s pretty little face.
