The Lady

by K V Johansen

  “Lady Hyllau—the wife of King Cairangorm, was your daughter?” Deyandara asked stupidly. “Hyllau of the day of the three kings?”

  “She wasn’t meant for Cairangorm, but she was beautiful and she wanted to be the king’s wife and the mother of kings. She was young and impatient. She didn’t want to wait.”

  “To wait for what?”

  “For Cairangorm to die,” Catairanach answered, as if it was of little importance. “She shouldn’t have accepted him, but she did, because he was king, and Catairlau wasn’t. Since she did choose Cairangorm, she could have waited. He was old.”

  Hyllau wasn’t meant for Cairangorm, and Deyandara not meant for Ketsim. She shivered. The water of the spring was icy, and the branches of the mountain ashes weaving together overhead looked like flexing claws. Ketsim moaned again and the tower room was back around her.

  “That’s—the bards don’t say she was your daughter.”

  “Hyllanim her son didn’t like them to sing those songs.”

  Deyandara looked at the goddess’s profile, her golden-brown eyes, like pebbles under water in a brook of the peaty hills. If she had been Hyllanim’s grandmother, and Hyllanim was her own great-grandfather . . . that was very far removed. She didn’t feel any kinship to the goddess. It took more than descent to make family. “I’m sorry. But it was a long time ago, and now—now we’re here, with Marakand still ruling us, no matter how ill Ketsim is, and the Red Masks are still out there somewhere, even if they’ve abandoned Ketsim. Marnoch may be dead—”

  “He lives.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You’re not meant for him, either.”

  “I don’t—”

  “They’ve named you queen, but without my blessing. You wear the leopards of Cairangorm’s house that Hyllanim rejected, but you are not queen of my folk and land, child of Andara’s hills.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You are meant for the mother of a queen, the mother of a line of kings.”

  “Then I had better get out of here, hadn’t I?” She wanted to go home, where her god was kind and thoughtful and—everything a father should have been, but which hers had not. This was like talking to her second brother’s wife, who brought everything back to her gowns and her babies, in that order of importance, no matter what you said, as if she were deaf to any words but her own. “Maybe helping me walk out of here, as you took me out of the dinaz before, when Ketsim was coming to attack it, would get me out where I could find—your queen is going to need a father.”

  “She will have one. He carries her now, until the time comes he can give her to you to bear and bring into the world again. But he can’t hear me. He’s denied me, and he cannot hear, and I think—I cannot even see him, but I know he is near, very near. The Lady has him, but she can’t have slain him. The world holds him. It will, it must, till Hyllau is born into it again.”

  “What? Catairanach, blessed lady, what do you mean?”

  “He won’t hear you. He won’t hear me. But I think there is one he will hear. You will have to deal with that, afterwards, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. You are so lovely, so like her . . . you can win him back. He wasn’t meant for a lover of men. But the Nabbani spirit has already walked in your dreams. He still touches you. Perhaps he sees you, already. Perhaps he will come in time and bring Catairlau with him. If he doesn’t—perhaps you will live long enough to bear a child, but you will be very unlovely to look upon, I fear. I don’t think I can do for you what I did for him. So much of my heart went into him, to cradle her safe . . . I have made myself hollow.” The goddess touched one cool finger to Deyandara’s forehead, her sing-song voice sharpening. “The Nabbani spirit who rides with the Leopard. Call him to you. I will not have the mother of my darling die this way, not have Catairlau come back to you too late. She needs you. Call him.”

  “The Nabbani—you mean—you mean Ghu. You’re talking about Ahjvar?”

  “They are plotting treachery below. You don’t want to burn as my Hyllau did, and I can do little here but touch your dreams. Red Masks sang silent words over the raising of the walls to keep me out. They brought me in with the water you drank, their little fragment of the marriage ritual.” She laughed. “If Ketsim had drunk the water as he ought to have, he might have found ease from his suffering sooner. Pity they dug their own well down between the dykes.”

  The water rose into mist, filling the room, flowing from the windows like smoke, and then it was gone.

  Deyandara sank down on her knees by the south window again, eyes shut, shivering and sick.

  Through the north window, there was a sudden outbreak of shouting. Below, someone shrieked and was abruptly silent.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER XIII

  “Blackdog!”

  Holla-Sayan rolled up to a knee, sabre in hand, uncertain, for a moment, of where he was. The days and nights began to run together in the past three, almost four weeks now, since the Lady retreated to her temple and raised her wall of undying fire. Outbreaks of fighting in the narrow streets, patrolling the walls of the temple-held wards, patrolling the ravine at least once most nights, alert for signs of a second foray out those forgotten doors in the abandoned buildings that formed part of the wall of the temple precinct along the dry riverbed. . . . Mikki was guarding Ivah at her work up at Gurhan’s tomb, and they had no one else who could see in the dark, who could smell the Red Masks, or whom the Lady’s enslaved dead would flee.

  No one else who could stop them, at all.

  He wasn’t some godless mercenary to sell himself into this war. A caravan-mercenary, a caravaneer of the road, still rooted in the land of his birth, tied to his own folk and home, had no place here, save to defend what was his, his gang-boss’s camels and what they were contracted to carry. But here he was, and he, or the men who had carried the Blackdog before him, had seen more warfare than ever the Warden commanding this city had, though maybe in worse causes, Attalissa having not always, in times past, been a peaceful goddess or a good neighbour. So somehow he had ended up carrying, it sometimes felt, half the weight of this fight, advice and planning, the forays into the temple-held wards where Jugurthos, the commander men would follow, could not be risked, and, too, when the Blackdog was not needed even more urgently elsewhere, guarding the priest Hadidu, in case the Red Masks came.

  They might.

  They had, though not for Hadidu, when the temple first tried to retake the Eastern Wall. Only a handful, they lacked the spell-gifted, unmanning terror that reduced even the bravest to cowering, whimpering, beaten children, but they were deadly enough without that, invulnerable themselves, capable of killing with a single blow of their short white staves. Captain Jing Xua of the Eastern Wall had died so, the side of her face seared to bone as if she had been struck by lightning, trying to hold the gate till aid arrived in answer to her bells. Holla-Sayan had come, too late for her, and he had destroyed three of the Red Masks who had been methodically butchering the street guard and caravaneers there. He had torn the long-dead bodies from the Lady’s control, letting the wretched rags of soul that were all that remained fade way. One Red Mask had fled east, probably to cross the ravine and reenter the city by the Fleshmarket Gate, which the temple had still held, then. Holla had been too busy rallying the remnants of the garrison, fighting a near-overwhelming rush of temple guard through the spell-blasted doors of the towers, to follow.

  Since then, they woke and slept with the fear of Red Masks, though the Lady had not sent them out again, even in the second assault on the Eastern Wall. That had mostly involved conscripted men of East and Greenmarket Wards, who had turned on their temple-guard leaders and defected. But no matter how mad she was, she had to realize that Red Masks sent against Hadidu or Ivah could undo all that Jugurthos and his senate had gained. Sooner or later, they would come.

  The Lady awaited reinforcements, the company of Red Masks she had sent Over-Malagru against the Praitans, that was the word they had from tem
ple-guard defectors. A great army of Praitannec tribal warriors led by Red Masks was coming . . . but the loyalists were going to call back the old gods, and their demons could destroy the Red Masks, and the Lady was mad and killed her own. And there was food in the loyalist wards. Despite the talk of a Praitannec army, men slipped away to them, every day. Families came over the walls in the night.

  How many Red Masks in the temple, Jugurthos wanted to know, but there was never a certain answer. A handful, no more. Dozens, waiting in the Dome of the Well, but the loyalists could send their demons, they no longer needed to fear, and why hadn’t the demons come to lay siege to the temple itself . . .

  Only Red Masks could part the curtain of fire, when guard patrols passed in and out, and there were always Red Masks at the temple gatehouse, they said. No temple defector had seen more than three or four at a time, but they all agreed the Lady kept them by her in the Hall of the Dome, and rumours that could not be confirmed, but which had their source in temple agents, Jugurthos was certain, said that there was a large company of Red Masks yet, fifty, a hundred—had there ever been more than that, and how many had been sent Over-Malagru?—waiting in the cavern of the Lady’s well, for the day of the great attack from Praitan. And the greatest of the Red Masks, a slayer of demons, the will of the goddess incarnate, was coming from the east.

  There had been a few Red Masks in the Fleshmarket, cutting a way towards the Warden’s rooftop command post this day past. But men and women of the street guard had put themselves before them, and an untutored, wizard-born Marakander girl at the Warden’s side had warned Nour by some pre-arranged spell; Nour, with Hadidu and Holla and Captain Hassin at the Riverbend Gate, had sent the Blackdog. He had been in time. Jugurthos said the Red Masks had turned in their tracks and fled the moment he hurtled over the rough and ready wall blocking the gateway from temple-held Greenmarket, scattering the temple guard there. That didn’t make Holla-Sayan think the Lady had even fifty more hidden waiting in the temple. The Red Masks were all murdered wizards, and she had tried to take the suburb when she first emerged from the temple, in order to arrest and sacrifice the very few wizards there. Not a resource she could easily replenish, once they met their second, final, death. He had stayed in the Fleshmarket to guard Jugurthos, and fought, merely another sword among them, when the Warden finally went down to demand the surrender of the last cluster of Fleshmarket temple guard.

  He had been called again not long before midnight, sentries claiming shadows on the wall, but there had been nothing at all when he came to the patrol on the Greenmarket border.

  For too long a moment Holla-Sayan thought it was that summons again, that he had not yet gone to them. He was in—Spicemarket blockhouse, and the night had grown swelteringly hot, the air ripe even on the roof, rising from the narrow stairwell. Too many sweating bodies lying close in too small a space, twoscore militia recruits packed into a tower meant to house a few patrols of street guard.

  Nour, still frail and so easily tired—he had had a foot on the road to the Old Great Gods, not so long since—gripped his shoulder and whispered again, “Holla-Sayan . . .” The Marakander wizard crouched beside him, and the priest was stirring on his rug.

  In the corner of the parapet, a lone watchman turned, yawned, hand over his mouth. “Sir . . . ?”

  Nour gestured to the north, and the militiaman turned back, taking up his bow, alert now, the scent of his anxiety strong, but obviously seeing nothing, peering down, this way and that, over the jumbled rooftops of the covered marketplace of the traders in spices and dyestuffs and dried fruit. Valleys of shadow and moonlight.

  Holla-Sayan smelt their nearness. Old, dry death and a tang like hot metal. Jugurthos insisted that Hadidu not sleep two nights in the same place, for what safety that might give against human spies, if not against a devil’s divination, though Ivah had worked some warding against that, she hoped. They had begun to think it was only the human they had to fear, after all.

  “There’s something . . . cold. Near.” Nour was no fearful man, but his voice cracked. Memory of the spell of unnatural terror Ivah had stripped from them was enough, for those who had faced Red Masks before, and Nour’s fate had nearly been to join them. That fear was memory burnt into gut and marrow, not something the rational mind could easily overrule. But maybe, too, it was what had woken Nour before him, that whisper of wrongness in the world.

  Silence below. Hadidu joined them, a weighted cudgel swinging in his hand, face grim. Nour took up his spear and stepped in front of his kinsman as Holla moved to the open trapdoor over the stairs.

  Still and silent, only the sound of breathing sleepers.

  “Stay here.” Holla-Sayan started down, paused at the bottom to wake the woman nearest the stairs. She mumbled groggily. “Up,” he whispered. “Wake the others. Quietly. There’s danger. Be ready.” She cringed from his touch but squeezed the ankle of the man nearest her, crawled to his side to whisper.

  No armour, not even the leather and leg-wrappings of the street guards, just their everyday tunics or caftans. Their spears were no weapon for fighting in the confines of the blockhouse. He hoped they remembered that, before they skewered one another. Maybe he should have left them sleeping, for all the good wakefulness would do them against Red Masks, but that went against the grain, to leave them facing death utterly unaware.

  “You, you, you,” he heard behind as he went cautiously down to the ground floor. “To the roof, guard the priest and do what Master Nour tells you.”

  Silence here as well, but some were waking at the pad and shuffle of bare feet on the floor above. One door to the street, one to the roofed passageways of the Spicemarket. A sentry should be outside each, and a lamp burning within. Both lamps were extinguished, and recently. Scent of soot and hot olive oil and wizardry. Nothing inside yet that should not be, and the men did not see him in the dark.

  The Marakanders feared him as much as they welcomed him. City folk knew little of demons, lacked country people’s ease with the spirits of the wild, which is what they mostly thought him. He’d tried, even in—especially in—the fighting to stay human, when he could, because to kill with spear and sabre, no matter that he was faster, stronger, did less harm to the trust of these green soldiers. This company had been in the Fleshmarket, though; they’d seen him come through a patrol of temple-allied citizens no better-armed than themselves, when the Red Masks had been closing in on Jugurthos. They’d seen what he left behind.

  The dog rose in him, a breath from being. His will; they were one now, and yet, there was still that fury waiting within that he did not want to call by his own name. He set a hand to the latch of the door. There was a freshly dead man beyond it, the sentry. Blood and urine.

  A shout from above had him turning back, the soldiers waking noisily, just as the door flew inwards, torn from its hinges, careening off his shoulder, knocking him aside. He caught himself from falling outright and wheeled around. His blade jarred and slid on the lacquered scales of the Red Mask’s armour, and without thinking he caught the deadly descending staff barehanded and jerked it away, small lightnings spitting, wrapping his arm, searing skin, as he smashed the thing under the jaw with his sabre’s hilt, hard enough to snap the head back. He felt the devil’s threads tear, the fragments of soul unfurling, beginning to drift up like mist from a lake in the dawn, so he wrenched, he couldn’t have said how, at what was left holding it to the Lady in the temple and tore it from her, let it go, and flung the lifeless weight at the men hanging back behind, with the body of the sentry tumbled before them. Not in uniform, but they carried the short swords of the temple guard. Another Red Mask presence out there somewhere, but the priest of Ilbialla was on the roof, where men yelled and something thudded heavy on the floor, while living bodies crowded the stairs, shouting that the temple was attacking over the market roofs.

  “Bar the door,” he snarled, and he sheathed his sabre and leapt for the stairs, letting the dog free. The old bone-cracking pain of the chang
e was almost forgotten. He was smoke and dark fire holding, held in, blood and bone, and the Marakanders flung themselves out of his way, breaking the railing, to flee him.

  Not so large as the dog could be, only the big herd-guardian of the mountains, but weight enough to bowl over the fool who wasn’t fast enough getting aside as he leapt the bleeding body of the woman he’d sent up to Hadidu, prone at the top of the stairs.

  No Red Mask on the roof but a seething knot of blood and fear and anger, bodies down writhing underfoot, bodies trampling them, shoving, locked together with knife and sword or bare hands. Hadidu stood alone in a corner, club hefted ready and a man motionless at his feet. Nour was between him and the general brawl, the only real fighter they had, beset, shieldless, unarmoured, and with a weak left arm. Holla-Sayan hauled Nour’s foremost opponent down, tore the shoulder and cracked the bone, left the temple man coiled and screaming, abandoned the other to Nour and plunged into the mass of them for the one who’d been shouting something about taking the wizard alive.

  When next Holla saw him, Nour had Hadidu by the arm, heading for the stairs, though they broke apart, Hadidu beating aside a spear-thrust with his club as Nour circled and cut that man down.