The Lady

by K V Johansen

  “Bastard,” he said mildly, picking himself up, keeping his distance, but Holla-Sayan didn’t seem inclined to move farther, and the girl slept on, steadied by Holla-Sayan’s arm about her.

  Holla-Sayan said nothing in retort, which Varro figured was a bad sign. And he had that dangerous look, a fire behind his eyes that wasn’t Varro’s perception breaking out into poetry. Sliding into the mad dog’s view of things, a view which was a bit simplistic, to put it mildly. Varro had his suspicions that the Blackdog’s world broke down into mine and enemy. Best not to put yourself into the latter category. He settled down on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, non-threatening as he could be.

  “All right,” he said. “Be that way.”

  Holla-Sayan rubbed his face, some sanity returning, maybe? “Leave her alone.”

  “Why?” There, a simple, mild question. That wasn’t threatening, was it?

  “Because she was carrying Nour.”

  “Nour.” Hadidu’s brother-in-law. Caravaneer. Secret wizard, Varro now knew. Taken by the Lady when the coffeehouse burned, and therefore dead.

  Not dead?

  “Kharduin’s bringing him back. We took him away up the cliffs, when the Lady came after him. He’s—he’ll live. I think. Maybe.”

  “He’ll live,” Mikki rumbled. The camel-leech sat back on her heels, shrugged at him.

  “Best I can do. Sorry.”

  The demon’s white skin, untouched by sun, had a sheen of sweat, but he hadn’t flinched from the needle, only baring his teeth once or twice in a grimace of pain. He leaned back against the wall and sighed. “It’ll do. I heal quickly. What did you want, Varro?”

  It wasn’t he who wanted anything, but Talfan and Hadidu, who wanted—who dreamed. Peaceful folk who’d never faced so much as a bandit raid, who’d never seen a battle, not even the one fought at their very gates this past day. And they were going to overthrow a goddess who was really a mad devil? He didn’t want to be trying to bring up four girls alone, a widower on the road. Marakanders talked and talked. He wasn’t sure they were good at much else. They needed—someone to show them what to do next.

  “Holla-Sayan, really—did the Lady flee you? Really? Because you’ve started something and they’re all going to die, my wife and her friends who’ve been waiting for some never-come day when they’ll overthrow the Lady, unless you finish it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. The Lady’s never left the city before. I don’t think she’s ever sent Red Masks beyond the city walls before, except for this expedition east to Praitan they’re talking of. All this death and burning out there today, that was her looking for you, wasn’t it?”

  “She was looking for Ivah and Nour.”

  “Same thing. You’re the one took them from her, ya?”

  “You’d have left them to die?”

  “What were you doing in the temple in the first place? No. Never mind. I don’t care. But you began this, and you can’t just skulk off to the deserts pretending you didn’t and leave us to—”

  “What us?”

  “Talfan. My wife. She’s, look, you know how Attalissa’s temple went underground when Tamghat came? Same thing here. But they were all children. A couple of youths hardly men and a handful of children, hiding and keeping faith with their gods best they could. Waiting for the Old Great Gods alone knew what. And now they think it’s come, the time. In you. They’ve seen that the Red Masks can be faced and killed, they’ve seen the Lady run, and they’re going to follow through on it. But if you abandon them, they’re all going to die. You did all that, out there—” Varro waved a hand towards the door, “—for Ivah? Then you can’t leave decent folk to be murdered by the Lady for something you’ve done.”

  “I can’t kill the Lady, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “She fled you.”

  “She didn’t need to.”

  “She obviously doesn’t know that. Look, you know what they’re thinking now, Talfan and Master Hadidu, the priest of Ilbialla? They’re thinking that we—they—have the gods on their side. The Old Great Gods have given them a sign that their time has come.”

  “You’re not serious! You can’t tell them that.”

  “I don’t need to. The great wizard—” his lip curled at Ivah, “—and her demons have proven it. You’re a demon now, by the way.”

  Holla-Sayan just shut his eyes. The man looked done in. Well, he’d come through the thick of the past day’s battle and been fighting Red Masks in the temple before that. And even Ivah—no, Varro did not, would not pity her. But she looked pathetic. She was wrapped in a too-large coat, snuggled into Holla-Sayan’s side like a child to her parent, only a bit of face poking out, ragged-nailed hands clenched up tight on her lap. She looked aged and frail, the golden-brown of her skin grey-hued and lined, marked with dark scabs from earlier injury, wisps of her once-wealth of midnight hair now cropped and clinging.

  The real demon watched him watching them, black eyes thoughtful.

  “Ivah is Ghatai’s daughter,” Mikki said softly. “Did you know?”

  Tamghat’s daughter? That shocked Varro. “It’s no excuse,” he protested. “She tried to murder my friend. She had her hearth-woman cut his throat.”

  “I know. But it is an explanation. Now she leaves her father behind and grows into something else.”

  “Does that make her a devil too?” Better to cut her throat now, while she slept helpless, in that case.

  “I doubt it.”

  Holla-Sayan opened his eyes. Ah, damn his tongue for a fool’s, Holla’d finally succeeded in getting barren Gaguush in a family way, right. That’s all he needed, to be talking of unnatural halfbreeds and making the man fear she’d give birth to puppies. Varro eyed Mikki, whose father had been human, his mother a bear-demon. That . . . no, he didn’t want to picture how that came about.

  “What do you want?” Holla-Sayan asked.

  “Go talk to Master Hadidu. He sent me to find you, to ask you to come to him. Talk to him, before you decide to pretend all this is nothing to do with you, all right?”

  “And what’s your place in it, Varro? You weren’t out in the suburb today.”

  “I didn’t know! They shut the gates, remember? I was in the city.” But that was what Talfan would be thinking of him, too, no matter that he had been where he belonged, with her. People had fought the Lady, and he hadn’t been among them. “But I’ve been thinking, I have an idea—I need to talk to some people.”

  And here came one of them, Master Kharduin, surely. Varro knew of him by reputation. Wealthy in camels, trading in silks and spices and drugs of Nabban, master of a gang that travelled hard and fast, taking branches of the eastern road others did not dare. Possibly because he was allied with the lawless folk that plagued the badlands. He was a burly, black-haired man with the gleam of gold in his ears and a beard that curled like a ram’s fleece, blue-eyed and brown-skinned. An exile of the eastern deserts, they said he was, a chieftain’s warleader outlawed from his tribe for some grave crime or betrayal that varied with the gossiper, but there were always such stories about anyone who drew the interest of the road. Even a western road man like Varro had heard those stories of Master Kharduin. Lots of speculation about the meaning of the black scorpions tattooed on the insides of his wrists, which matched those on the backs of his partner Nour’s hands. No tribe’s markings of west or east. Some brotherhood of outlawry, some secret vow of death to be fulfilled . . . probably the scorpions signified nothing more than some personal bond or lovers’ whimsy. Whatever Kharduin had been or done—and maybe it was nothing more than leave his home for the caravans and make a success of it—the caravaneers respected him and the Marakanders likewise. If Varro could persuade him to Talfan’s cause and Talfan’s gods . . .

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to do that much persuading. It was surely Nour’s cause, Nour’s goddess, even more than Talfan’s, given his close kinship with Hadidu the priest, foster-brother and brother by marriag
e. The pair of grim, dusty, silent men who came with Kharduin were carrying what Varro first thought was a bier of spears and blankets between them. On it lay Nour, whom he had met once or twice at the coffeehouse, though he hadn’t known him for a wizard. The Marakander caravaneer looked dead, his face gaunt, grey, and hollow about the eyes, his lips cracked and scabbed, but he breathed.

  Ivah woke as suddenly as if someone had called her name, stumbled to her feet and went to Nour with only a brief, vague look at Varro, as if she didn’t even remember him.

  “He’s doing better,” she said, like a prayer.

  If that was better. . . . She lifted the blanket from over his chest, touched the hand of his linen-wrapped left arm. Scarlet blood seeped through the bandage. The camel-leech craned to look as well. “Much better,” the Northron woman agreed. “That’s clean. The swelling’s down. I thought the skin of his fingers was going to burst when you first brought him in. Hah, I’ll take a demon’s blessing over surgeons, any day.”

  Mikki smiled faintly.

  “Upstairs,” Kharduin said, looking past Varro with little more interest than Ivah had spared him. “Get him to bed. If he wakes up, get some broth into him. Lord of Forests, would you . . . ?”

  “I’ll sit with him,” Mikki said.

  They all ended up climbing the stairs together, Holla making an unnecessary point of keeping himself between Varro and Ivah. Mikki was stark naked and nobody seemed to mind. The women politely didn’t even look. Since someone had to do the decent thing, Varro ducked into the first open door he saw and snitched a blanket. Not even Kharduin’s broad shoulders matched Mikki’s; no one’s coat or caftan was going to hide anything. Mikki took it with grave thanks and a wink, and twisted it around his hips as a kilt of sorts.

  Varro gave Master Kharduin time to get his partner settled, to take a swallow of tea, before putting himself forward.

  “Master Kharduin,” he said. “You don’t know me, but my wife’s the apothecary Talfan, a good friend of Master Hadidu of the Doves, and of Captain Jugurthos of the Sunset Gate.”

  That got his attention, ya. Practically made him family, didn’t it, since Kharduin and Nour weren’t partners merely in business?

  “You know what they’re up to, those two, and Nour?”

  A nod.

  “You can guess what they’re thinking, with what’s gone on out in the suburb, Red Masks destroyed and the Lady fleeing and all. But what odds they let the moment slip? They’re city folk, even the soldier. Talkers.”

  “Gods, Varro, and you’re not?” Holla-Sayan muttered. “Your tongue’s hinged in the middle.”

  “If we can take what’s begun and push it further . . .”

  “No,” said Holla-Sayan. “I can’t kill the Lady. Mikki can’t kill the Lady. Moth is lost, the gods of the city are lost—”

  “Hear him out,” said Kharduin. He squatted by the bed, hands laced together, watching Varro’s face. “It might not be your fight, Blackdog, but it’s become most definitely mine.”

  Revenge, he understood. Varro took a breath, carefully didn’t look at Holla-Sayan, who might believe himself when he said the Lady had no cause to fear him, but Varro didn’t need to. She had run. What more proof did they need? And Holla wasn’t a man to turn his back on his friends.

  “So,” he said. “Here we are, with the suburb and the Marakanders ready to start fighting one another, two stupid gangs quarrelling over whose camels drink first, and desert raiders sitting up the hill watching, right?”

  Kharduin raised an eyebrow.

  “We need to knock some heads together and remind them who the real enemy is.”

  “And?”

  “And we’ve got a stronghold of the Lady’s folk cutting us off from the road east. Do we want that?”

  Kharduin grinned. “Ah. The thought had crossed my mind, actually. Think we can do it?”

  Nour woke up briefly while he and Kharduin were talking over one another, ideas flying. That gave Varro a means to shut up Holla’s objections and insults of his intelligence, by sending him to Talfan and Hadidu with the apparently-not-dying man’s messages. Hadidu had asked to speak to the Blackdog, Hadidu was the priest of a lost goddess; Holla-Sayan was, looked at a certain way, the priest of Attalissa, so could he refuse, holy man to holy man? And Hadidu didn’t even yet know his brother-in-law lived, reason enough for Holla to make haste with that news—which, admittedly, Varro should have sent by someone the moment he heard it. Privately, Varro thought that Hadidu, so intense, so, ya, gods-touched, could persuade Holla, if anyone could, that he was needed in Marakand. Was meant to be in Marakand, to serve this. The Old Great Gods had put him in the way of becoming the Blackdog for some purpose, surely, and why think it had ended with Lissavakail? He made the mistake of voicing that last aloud.

  “Not in all the cold hells,” Holla-Sayan snarled. “Don’t you ever name the Old Great Gods so to me . . .” He rubbed a hand over his face, what had seemed real fury dying into confusion. But he shrugged and left with his message for Hadidu, making no more arguments.

  Kharduin set out to round up a few respected gang-bosses and caravanserai-masters, and some leading Marakander men and women of the suburb as well. Rather him than Varro. Some of Kharduin’s gang headed for the Gore to strip the collected Red Mask and temple-guard corpses, if they hadn’t already been looted. Ivah had been put to bed by the camel-leech, who fussed over her as if she’d singlehandedly saved the city from all seven devils at once and flatly forbade Varro to conscript her for his scheme. Saved Varro having to say he’d as soon trust a real Red Mask to watch his back. He would have liked to have had Mikki along, but the demon had rolled in his blanket by Nour’s bed and gone to sleep while they still debated.

  He’d said he would go help strip the corpses, which was going to be no pleasant task, especially the mess the Blackdog and a bear were likely to have made of the Red Masks—though at least they wouldn’t have bled, from what he’d heard—but first Varro borrowed a pony from the caravanserai yard. He would ride out to Rasta’s caravanserai at the far western edge of the suburb to collect Red Geir’s sword. And to let the boss know her giant, bone-crushing black monster coward dog of a husband was still in the land of the living, since he’d noticed how Holla-Sayan had been avoiding any suggestion he carry that message himself. Gaguush would find a leash for her dog for certain after this, dragging them all into another gods’ war.

  Holla was going to owe him for the shouting he was about to endure in his stead, indeed he was.

  CHAPTER VI

  They drifted from the houses, warily, defiantly. Bonfires burned in the market square, heaped at the far corners, and it was street guard who tended them. Anyone venturing within would be putting themselves against the light. But street guard with lanterns on poles stood around the goddess Ilbialla’s tomb, and a handful of people had climbed atop its barrel-vaulted roof. A woman with another lantern, they could see, an officer with ribbons on his helmet, four archers, kneeling at the corners. And a man they ought to know, all who lived in the streets about the Sunset Market square. So they came. A few had been told he would be there. They had whispered it to others, rumour spreading fast as feet could creep from house to house in the curfew-empty streets. The priest of Ilbialla. So they came.

  Jugurthos had thought they would.

  The tomb of the goddess had brooded over the place where once stairs had descended to the well of Ilbialla since Jugurthos was a boy. It had been built in a night, by Red Masks, the folk of the neighbourhood had said. The cave of Gurhan among the folded gullies and ridges of the Palace Hill, Gurhan’s Hill, had been sealed as well. The frieze beneath the eaves of the tomb, like the wall sealing the cave, was carved with a long, flowing line of script that no scholar could decipher, though Nour had taken furtive copies as far as Nabban and the imperial wizards of Nabban, seeking aid. Since the two tombs were built, the gods had been silent. Those who had tried, in the first day, to break up the stonework had died, but it could be touc
hed safely if you didn’t intend harming it. Children played stalking games around the tomb. Beggars and singers sat in its shade. Dogs marked it.

  It made a fine podium, if you did not forget you stood on a curving roof.

  Hadidu had his eyes shut. Praying, maybe, to a goddess who could not hear, who at best slept beneath their feet, sealed in the prisoning tomb, or at worst was beyond hearing any prayers ever again. But maybe he only sought for words. His lips moved, silently. Jugurthos put a hand on his shoulder and found him trembling. He spared a moment for a prayer himself, to gods that could not hear and the Old Great Gods, who did not intervene in such minor affairs of life—death and what came after being their province. Let Hadidu not faint from sheer nervousness, let him not fumble his words and hem and haw, let him, at the very least, stammer out something moving and to the point, before he dried up altogether and Jugurthos was forced to take over and present the arguments of their hastily sketched harangue. It would be better coming from a chosen of the goddess of this ward, even Hadidu admitted that, but being born to the priesthood did not make one an orator, and Hadidu had always been so shy . . .

  Talfan was down there, in the front row of the faces looking up. Arms folded under the baby sleeping in her sling, Great Gods, what risk. But her outlander husband hadn’t yet returned from the suburb to gainsay her and was thoroughly under her thumb anyway, and who else had the right to order her home? Eyes wide, intense. Beside her was one of the magistrates for Clothmarket Ward, a scarf pulled up to hide much of his face. To the other side a pair of armed men, two of the four bodyguards a senator was permitted. The senator, Beni Sessihz, lurked in his enclosed chair, with his other two guards and the four burly chairmen standing close about. He’d been old when Jugurthos was young, no blame to him for staying put now. He walked only painfully, and that with two sticks. But he’d come, and moreover put himself in the front, from which it would be difficult to flee if they were—interrupted. A lesser Family of the Twenty, Sessihz, but Beni himself still commanded some respect among the elders of the Families. He had been a scholar of the law and a magistrate in his younger days, was a survivor of the earthquake collapse of the senate palace dome that had killed so many of his colleagues. He was likewise a survivor, in his way, of the purge of the so-called rebel senators, which had followed not long after. Jugurthos’s parents, both so newly risen to senatorial status, young elders of their respective branches of the Family Barraya after the earthquake deaths of their parents, had been leaders among those who dared speak out against the temple’s arbitrary assumption of unprecedented powers. They were arrested by the temple guard and Red Masks whose disbanding they had called for and were executed without trial. Locked in iron cages in the palace plaza below the senate palace and library, to die of thirst and sun.