by K V Johansen
“A hostage?” the supposed lieutenant asked, and glanced sideways at Varro. “Give me, ah, a full report. Guardsman.”
“A prisoner, at any rate.”
“Are you sure he’s not allied with them? A rebel himself.”
“No, he’s just a fool.”
Ya, temple and street guard were not known for their brotherly relations. What started it? What had they heard, to rise in rebellion? And how many? Holla had said there were only three patrols of street guard here, and thirty or forty temple guardsmen. Ask, ask. Varro would have kicked the woman in the ankle to prompt her, but she didn’t need it.
“How many?” she asked.
“The whole damned lot of the street guard and a few of our own, too, and I’ll deliver them to the foot of the Lady’s pulpit myself once I get my hands on them. Orta’s lieutenant’s the traitor; she took them all off and had the doors barred before we realized what was up. We expected some help before now.” The guardsman’s look of baffled weariness began to tighten into a frown. Taking in, maybe, their unavoidably ragged and bloody appearance. Not-so-fresh from battle. They filled the small anteroom, the last rank still holding the door open, blocking it so with their bodies.
“You’re not first company. I don’t know you.” The man’s hand went to his sword, and he took a step backwards, frowning at the false officer.
This wasn’t some great empire’s army. There couldn’t be more than a handful of captains and lieutenants in the entire temple force, known to all. The first impression of the uniforms had gotten them as far as it was going to. Varro raised a hand and swept it down. They all surged past him, through the opposite door and up the stairs, through into other doorways. The guardsman opened his mouth as shouts of alarm came from some inner room. The woman clipped him hard on the jaw with the hand clutching her guardsman’s club. She gaped in astonishment when he actually dropped, looked at her fist, and grinned. “I wish my brother had seen that.”
Varro left her behind, taking the stairs two at a time to catch up with the leading edge of the surge. A disorganized roar followed him from behind. “Ilbialla! The gods of Marakand! Ilbialla and Gurhan for Marakand! Death to the false Lady!” Accents of the road dominated.
Kharduin caught up with him at the top of the stairs, where Varro pulled off his helmet. The protection it offered was little use when he couldn’t see what he was doing. He hurled it at a cluster of temple guardsmen impeding one another on yet another set of stairs, over the heads of some other Red Masks who were likewise shedding helmets.
No shields. Forcing stairs held against them without shields was going to be deadly. His men were already hesitating, faltering back. Varro shouted and seized a bench from along the wall, a long, unwieldy weight, but Kharduin caught the other side, and with it between them like a ram they ran for the stairs, their own folk pressing back to let them through, closing in to put their weight behind it. The temple guard fell and were run over or fled scrambling up.
“On your knees!” Kharduin roared, as they burst into a chamber filled with red tunics. Some were already coming towards them, weapons in hand, but others still clustered to a door in the far wall, which they had been driving another bench against, trying to force it open. Hah, the passage over the gate to the southern tower. “On your knees and ask mercy of your true gods!”
“Murderers! Devil-lovers!” someone else cried.
Some of the caravaneers below set up a yell and came boiling up in an incoherent clamour, pursued by—dear Haukbyrgga, Holla had said a mere thirty or so temple guard, hadn’t he? No time to count, and these were scarred and scared and desperate, some at the back still lacing helmets or barefoot. They’d been sleeping. Varro damned himself for a fool. The yards out back. Barracks there. Of course. These were survivors of yesterday afternoon, cut off and abandoned when the Lady ordered the city gates closed. And a tide came down yet another flight of stairs, forcing back those of his own band who had started up. Lanterns had been dropped or gone out when their bearers flailed with them as weapons, and only a couple of the torches still burned, waved aloft, though one smouldered on the floor. They were packed too tightly into this room and another adjoining it, hardly room to swing. Those with the short stabbing swords did better, but in places it seemed mostly grappling, hand to desperate hand like a damned tavern brawl, fists and heads and boots and even teeth. In the dim and swirling nightmare light friend and foe looked one.
“Ilbialla’s guardsmen, get down!” Kharduin roared. “Down on the floor, for your lives! Now! Down and out of the way, for the gods of Marakand!”
Some, obedient without thought, dropped; others hesitated. “Get down or lose your damned heads!” Varro roared, and then they understood, most of them, and not only dropped but crawled away between legs, seeking a safe corner. Now there were fewer rebels standing in the clothes of the dead, but gods and Old Great Gods, ya, those on their feet had room to use the longer swords and sabres favoured by the caravan mercenaries, and in the chaotic torchlit flare and shadow any guardsman’s silhouette was enemy. Or had only its own slow wits to blame.
Made the fact they were outnumbered worse, of course, with so many of their allies ordered out of it.
Varro drove forward, the sweep and swing of the blade a dance. Cursed sword, hah. A damned excellent sword was what it was, and if the enemy faltered, confused by his Red Mask armour, so much the better.
“The Lady is dead!” he howled and watched a man’s eyes widen, a hesitation, overcome as he tried to close in to stab, but Varro sliced the flesh of his arm away and trampled him down. Another voice, Kharduin’s, took up the cry from the foot of the stairs to the uppermost storey. Others added theirs, made it the battle cry, and there were more temple guards huddled on the floor than they had brought with them, surely.
“Throw down your arms! The Lady is dead! The Red Masks are dead and the Blackdog comes for you!” Kharduin cried. “Death comes for the devils! Death for the false Lady!”
Varro had cut a clear way to the landing of the stairs from below, stood there with an undisguised Marakander and some grey-haired Nabbani man at his back, to hold it against any further push from below, but the handful of temple guard left down there, apparently as rear-guard—and hadn’t Kharduin done that himself, or had the whole mob ignored him and pushed on up?—had dropped swords and staves and held out empty hands.
The Nabbani ducked around him and walked cautiously down, sword ready. “Sit,” he told them. “Along the wall, there. Don’t move.” He kicked weapons out of reach, shouted without looking around, “A little help, down here?” A couple of the Marakander street guard, pale in their grey tunics, edged by Varro and clattered down. A third stood with him.
Movement in the corner of his eye. Varro turned just as a red-tunicked guardsman who’d been crouched on hands and knees by the wall rocked forward and stabbed through his ragged red cloak. He yelled and struck with all the force of his turning. The man’s head lolled back, throat fountaining, and the knife, tangled in dirty silk, scraped shrieking on the armour beneath as the man fell away. The Marakander beside Varro, so slow to see, to move, now finally yelped and leapt back, wide-eyed and sprayed scarlet. “I didn’t see,” he stammered. “I didn’t see him there, I—”
“Damn your eyes, watch them!” Varro snarled. More street guard pushed up around him, dragging another temple guardsman, terrified and stammering his innocence, to his feet.
“Take their weapons and lock them in the gaol for now,” a woman shouted. “Sort them later. We’ll find an oath they’ll fear to break.”
“Not me, damn it, I’m a weaver of the suburb, I’m for Gurhan,” someone cried.
“All the warden’s folk in temple uniform, the three gods’ folk, get over here. Get someone to vouch for you.” That was Kharduin. “And someone stamp that fire out.”
Varro threaded a way through the throng to him, trying to wipe at least his gloved hand and hilt clean.
“And who in the cold hells are you
?” a woman with a burgeoning black eye was demanding. Single wide black stripe on her hem; a lieutenant of something or other. Grey tunic. Street guard. Hadn’t come with them from Magistrate Pazum.
“Kharduin,” Kharduin said. “You’re—Lieutenant Jing.” Of course, an eastern road master, he’d know the officers of this fort. They’d have taken the tolls off him often enough. “Where’s Captain Orta?”
“That fat—dead.”
“How?”
“He fell.”
“Fell where?”
“Onto the road.”
Kharduin’s expression said what Varro thought.
“Lady my witness, he did. He got away from us and was trying to get over here to the north tower on the roof in the dark.”
“Pick another god,” Kharduin said darkly, dismissing Orta.
“Gurhan be my witness.” Her voice shook and her hand was tight on her sword’s hilt. “Orta fell. It might have been the judgement of the gods.”
Kharduin merely nodded. “Ally of Jugurthos, are you, Jing?”
“Jugurthos? Sunset Gate? No, not in particular. What’s he got to do with it?” An assessing look over both of them. “That,” and she poked at Varro’s torn armour with her sword, “should have been fatal.”
“It was,” he said. “Or would have been, if the man hadn’t been dead already, Great Gods help him find his road.”
“True, then? They’re walking dead, the Red Masks? Wizards. Dead slaves. I believe that. I saw. . . . And the Lady’s the necromancer?”
“Who told you?” Varro demanded.
She scratched her chin, considered the pair of them.
“Kurman,” she said. “Cousin of mine in the temple guard. He’s the one over there stripped to his shirt, or what’s left of it. We didn’t have any spare grey for him. His idiot mother put him into the temple guard, but his heart was never in it, you know. We’re from Silvergate Ward, Gurhan’s folk from long back. Anyway, you, Northron, I don’t know you, but you’re Master Kharduin. I heard your Nour was taken for a wizard.”
“He escaped,” said Kharduin shortly. “He’s alive. Did Hassin tell you there’s a Warden of the City been proclaimed by the folk and the senate? Jugurthos Barraya.”
By a few of the folk, anyway.
“Him? Warden of the City? The Lady really has lost control, then. No, but I haven’t had any couriers from Captain Hassin in a while.” She waved her few patrols away. “Give these a hand. They’re on our side, outlanders notwithstanding.”
“What was going on here?” Kharduin asked. “What started the fighting?”
“The temple guard showed up here fleeing the battle in the suburb. They put their heads together with Orta, and the bastard ordered us all to barracks. He was going to turn the place over to them. Kurman got me aside and told me what had gone on out there, folk butchered in their homes and the demons that came for the Red Masks. I’d have had trouble believing him, but he was so shaken he could hardly stand, and I’ve never seen the boy cry before. Anyway, we’d had a few caravans bolting out before the order to close the gates came, and Master Lu, the horse-dealer, he’s an old friend, he told me what was going on up past the Gore before he fled, and what Kurman said meshed with that. Something’s wrong in the city, and I wasn’t going to be locked up unarmed by temple bully-boys with lies in their mouths. They’d already locked up three of ours, the ones that survived that Nabbani wizard or assassin or whatever she was, the day before the Voice of the Lady died. Because we let her escape, they said. As if we could have stopped her, after she beheaded a Red Mask! And she’d killed everyone on gate-duty. If that’s the great wizard who’s fighting the Lady for us, then I’m not sure there’s much to choose between them.”
But Holla-Sayan was still on the road with us, Varro thought, and even Ivah couldn’t kill Red Masks; Holla said so.
“I—I don’t think it was our wizard,” Varro stammered in the face of the lieutenant’s accusing glare. Defending Ivah, devils take him. No, not that, not when they were real and present in the city. Old Great Gods forgive him. Sneaking murder was more Ivah’s style than bold assault, but he couldn’t offer that in her defence. Kharduin was her devoted servant now, and she probably hadn’t had to bespell him to it, though she was quite capable of that. “No,” he said firmly. “It couldn’t have been Ivah, the wizard of the suburb. She was—” what had Talfan said about her, “she was living in the city then, at the Doves, disguised as a scribe. She hadn’t,” and he was surprised the words didn’t choke him, spinning legends for the traitorous bastard Tamghati, “revealed herself to the city yet.”
“I hadn’t heard anything about another wizard killing Red Masks either,” said Kharduin, plainly fascinated. “Lady Ivah’s full of grief for her friend Ghu. He showed her they could be killed, she said, but he died at the Doves—at least, he wasn’t imprisoned with her and Nour, and no one’s found a trace of him since. But this wizard you saw left the city before the Doves burned?”
“She was an old woman anyway, not a man,” said Jing.
“Old, you’re sure?” asked Varro. “Not just pale-haired? You might think sort of silvery-old, but really just a sort of autumn beech-leaves colour?” They didn’t have beeches, here. Or any real autumn. “Maybe a really fair-haired Northron?”
“She was Nabbani.”
Not Moth, then. Damnation. One wizard—one devil he wouldn’t mind having turn up.
“And a swordmaster, what a swordmaster,” Jing went on reflectively.
Varro shook his head. “We don’t know anything about that. Pity she’s gone, though. The more Red Mask killers we can find, the better.”
“Not if they’re going to kill three or four of my guards for every Red Mask,” said Jing. “But you wanted to know how this fighting started. When they told Orta to arrest us too, we took the south tower and dragged Orta with us. That’s all. I didn’t really think it through. Stupid. I just didn’t want to be locked up.” That seemed to remind her. She shouted in the direction of the stairs to someone to “Let Young Ead and the others out. And so,” Jing went on, turning back to Kharduin. “Master Kharduin. What are you doing here? Aside from the obvious.”
“Taking the Eastern Wall for the Warden of the City, in the name of the senate and the true gods.”
She snorted at “senate,” rubbed her face. “Lady, that hurts. All right. You’ve taken it. Now what?”
He bowed, mockingly. “Captain Jing Xua, it’s all yours.”
“Thank you. Going to clean up your mess?”
Kharduin looked around. Bodies and blood. Not much sign of the quick and easy overrunning they had hoped for. No, this had been quick and easy, comparatively. Varro remembered Lissavakail.
“Will you look to our wounded and the dead? I don’t think we can carry them all away.”
“I don’t think we can tell them apart,” Jing muttered.
Varro had crouched by the woman who’d been so proud of knocking down that first temple guardsman. Dead. Some sword had found the damage in her stolen armour. The magistrate’s boy bore only a cut cheek and a sombre look; he was leading an effort to carry the wounded down to beds in the barracks below.
“Tell them apart? No,” said Kharduin. “You probably can’t. That’s the problem when a tribe fights itself.” He turned away, scowling. “Lay the dead out decently somewhere, Jing, all of them. People may come seeking them. Varro, round up our lot, count heads, and go let Warden Jugurthos know we have the Eastern Wall.”
Varro thought about protesting being conscripted as a mere errand-boy, considered the cold ice of Kharduin’s eyes, and settled for a nod. By the time he’d hauled the Red Mask armour off, Jing was pressing a sealed tablet on him for Captain Hassin, too.
Demoted to courier, was he? At least he’d be the one carrying news of the victory to Talfan. He plundered the horse-pen for the best of their ponies.
CHAPTER VIII
The scouts didn’t see their enemies coming, didn’t hear the two stalking the
m afoot until the first arrow whined from the hazels and took one of the three in the cheek. She’d aimed for the eye. Deyandara didn’t swear, just nocked another arrow. It was not, after all, so very different from hunting deer. The man had fallen, but she didn’t think the angle had been such that he could be counted dead and out of the action yet; it wouldn’t have struck up into his brain. The other two scattered left and right, one making it to the horses, the other disappearing on his belly into the gorse that rolled down the hillside behind the campsite. The horses panicked suddenly, swinging haunches around, heads into the wind, ears back and eyes rolling, and the man who’d been about to mount had to spring away or be trampled. He turned, too, which gave Deyandara a brief clear shot between helm and the thick leather collar of his coat.
Dead, but now she’d lost the other from the corner of her eye, and in the dusk the first to fall had vanished as well. No, he was trying to keep out of sight, creeping down towards the stream and the horses, the arrow broken off. A second bit through the jerkin he wore, deep into his ribs, the leather little use at this range. He scraped frantically, then feebly at the earth, trying to pull himself onwards, before he stopped moving. Up the hillside, a man cried out. One of the horses broke free and bolted downstream.
Rustle and crack to her left. Wrong. There were only three. Arrow on the string, she swung to face into thickening shadow, deeper in the thicket of hazels that had let her creep so close along the bottom of the hill. Nothing moved. Slowly, she sank down on one knee, looking between the stems. Still no movement. And where was Lin? Lin didn’t break twigs. She was uncannily silent in her stalking.
Deyandara heard the Marakander at the last moment, a new rustle that sent her leaping back as his sword thrust from beside her. She loosed the arrow, but with a bush between them it tore twigs, snagged, and tumbled harmless. The man dodged around, a Grasslander with matching scars on both cheeks, his sabre raised for a proper slash now. It caught on a branch; she had her knife, but he kicked at her as he wrenched his blade free. She fell, rolling away, slashed at his following legs and made him dance. Squirming to put another many-stemmed hazel between them again, she bounded to her feet and shouted for Lin, who had a sword, damn her, and was wizard besides. The Grasslander bared his teeth, circling. She kept moving, kept hazels between them, and there was Lin, running doubled over, weaving through the brush like a coursing hound. The man turned in time to see her before she cut him down.
