The Lady

by K V Johansen

  But Ahjvar dragged his sword from Ghu’s hand, muttering, “That’s not a bloody shield, don’t use it like one,” and added, “Good,” as Ghu kicked a Red Mask off and it did not move again.

  Something mastered them, turned them, and they all fled into the night, to where, he feared, they could do more harm at less risk.

  “Where are we?” Ahjvar asked.

  “Praitan. The Duina Catairna. A hill by a swamp.”

  Ahjvar swore. “Who are we fighting?”

  “You and I? Mostly everyone,” Ghu said, because without the Red Masks making them an island to be avoided, they probably would be. Even short of full, the moon was bright enough that staying still would not hide them. “I look like one of Ketsim’s mercenaries, and you—”

  “She’s been out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone’s tried to cut my throat.”

  “Yes. Sorry. I didn’t want to, but she wouldn’t—she didn’t kill only once, she kept hunting.”

  “Would you have?”

  “Yes, Ahj.”

  Hand on his shoulder.

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. But I think it was she who was commanding the army here, not you. She waited for dark, and you’re not such a fool as to start a battle in the dark. Half the dead have probably been slain by their own friends.”

  “How many?” And he didn’t mean friend and foe mistaken in the night.

  “Many, I think,” Ghu said gently. “Maybe,” he added, “at least, they were not all Praitans.”

  “Not on the road here, they weren’t,” Ahjvar said grimly. “I remember, a little. The soldiers were afraid. What Praitans are here?”

  “The high king—Duina Andara, Duina Broasora. Others. I don’t know all the banners.”

  “How many Red Masks?”

  “You had thirty when I followed you from Marakand. But there are more.”

  “If you’d cut my throat, Ghu—could you have killed me?”

  “You would have died, Ahj.”

  “Would I.” It was said carefully, not a question.

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t mean for what might have happened, either, and Ahjvar knew it. Not for what he might have done, but for what he had not done, in all the years of nights Ahj would have welcomed it. But he could not have, then. He could not.

  “You know you can’t let her loose with wizardry, Ghu. You know that.”

  “I know, Ahj.”

  “Promise me you won’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Then break that seal, before we make this a kingless land. I can hear. I remember the shape of the Lady’s spell, and it’s only human wizardry, no matter how many wizards are woven into it, working it, no godhead to it at all. All I need to do is break it from within, and she didn’t make it dreaming anyone could. Her defences all look outwards.”

  “She was never a goddess.” But he used teeth and his left hand to pull at the knots of his purse, never leaving aside his knife, letting Ahj, barely able to stand, guard him, while he felt around for the clay seal that Deyandara had thought a blessing-piece, what seemed so long ago. Catairanach’s token.

  “I saw a goddess in the well,” Ahjvar said.

  “Maybe she showed you a lie.” Ghu knelt again, with the clay disc in his hand, found a flattish stone for an anvil, and with the handle of his knife pounded the seal to dust. Nothing spectacular followed. At the first shattering there was, maybe, the fresh scent of water, a moment. That was all. He swept the dust into his hand, but, since Ahjvar had turned away, simply wiped it into the grass. A knot of fighting came their way, Praitans forcing Praitans back, and impossible to know which had come with the high king or which were the traitors. They saw the dark shape of Ahjvar, the Red Mask’s long cloak, black though it was in the moonlight, and all fled.

  Mist crept up the hillside. Ahj had a handful of stems, was muttering over them.

  “Don’t need the damned weeds,” he said, looking up. “Not really. Enough to know they should be here. Make me a circle and keep it clear.” But he began laying out whatever it was he had found anyway, starting at the east, so Ghu cut a circle in the turf around him, no more than drawing a line with his knife blade, but the light of the moon, low in the west, found it, and it glowed a spider-silk thread.

  The mist stopped at the line and followed it.

  Let me help you.

  “You can freeze in the cold hells for all I care.”

  “Ahj!” But there had been no help for Ahjvar when he sought it, from any of the gods or goddess of Praitan, had there?

  And what was I to do against Catairanach, whom the folk of this land had given care of this land? the little goddess asked. Here, in this, I can help. If you will allow it, king of the duina.

  “We need three,” Ahjvar almost snarled. “I didn’t want to have to count the damned hag anyway.”

  Which was yes. She took no form at first, beyond the mist, but though the ridge had no god, she was the brook that spread through the swamp, and she rose in shimmers of mist and moonlight, a shape that might be birdlike, a heron, maybe, or a crane. Ghu reached a hand and drew her in, and dew silvered them, mist-wrapped. He stood ready against anything human or Red Mask that rushed them, but the Red Masks were scattered, and the humans moved away from the eerily shimmering patch of light. There were drums again, but he didn’t know what they might signal. Horns distant to the north.

  “Poplar,” Ahj said, at the east, ignoring it all. “And gorse,” at the south. “Yew.” That was west, but the hill had been all grass and small flowering things. It was only knotted grass that he flung down at each point. He drove his sword in at the north, after a glance at the stars, and hung a crooked wreath of twisted weeds on the crossguard. “And we three, who are water and stone and blood.” Ghu shivered at that, but Ahjvar was half singing now and, Ghu thought, hardly heard his own tongue as the words flowed through him. “Through fire, through water, and the third is the fire and the water of the blood you have stilled, the hearts you have taken, the minds and the souls and the bodies you have profaned. These are the words you have made and I unmake them. You took me into your song and showed me the way of it, and I find my place in it again and stand there with a whole heart and a soul unbound, unbroken. The barred hall is unbarred from within, the gates flung open by those who stand within, the great citadel laid open by the least soldier who stands within. The chains you have laid about them with their own souls are unmade by we three together, strand by strand and link by link, word by word by note we unmake your making and lay it bare to the moon and the wind and the witnessing stars. Let it be ash, and let it be sand, and let it be dust flung to the four corners of the earth and the high stars their home on the cleansing wind.”

  He sang, then, words Ghu didn’t know, but they sounded of the sea and the sea-folk who built no ships but came sometimes from the south in the long outrigger canoes. He didn’t suppose Ahjvar knew what he sang, either, only that it was the shape of the binding of the Red Masks that the Lady had left in his mind, and he wove grass as he sang, where a spell with more time to consider its making might have used twigs. In his woven grass, he set the wizards’ alphabet of the trees against the wizards’ words of the sea, and the virtue went out of the Lady’s words and the shape of the binding frayed and loosened. The lingering silver song of the Lady faltered and failed, because it was woven of the Red Masks’ own wizardry on a framework already grown brittle, frail, the power behind it weak and dying. Ghu felt as if Ahjvar set his back against him, braced to face some great battering, and the little goddess of the brook wrapped wings of mist about them, all her will and her grief at the wrongness of the necromancy pouring through into Ahjvar’s will against the Lady.

  His voice grew softer, slower, lower, and the words faded. The last twist of sweet-scented bedstraw and wiry grass fell from his fingers and was caught by the wind, carried out of the circle. He swayed, but Ghu caught him before he could fall.

  “D
one?” he asked, when Ahjvar stood leaning on him, unspeaking, for so long he wondered if he had fainted. Or if it would be Hyllau who raised her head.

  “Better be. Let her out.”

  “Who—?” Ah, the goddess, who coiled now about their feet, a snake of moonlit mist. He cut the circle he had made with his knife again, brushed it away as if flinging back a curtain.

  Help him, the goddess whispered, for Ghu alone, he thought, as her presence faded down to the waters. But take him away, out of this land. We will not have him here.

  Ahjvar was on his knees again, shivering.

  “Come on,” Ghu said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Ahj managed at last, a hoarse whisper. “Great Gods, Ghu, where?”

  “Anywhere,” he said. “Away from here. If there are no Red Masks, let the Praitans win their own war. Come. But first we get you out of that red.” Though pausing to strip him of the Lady’s livery while battle still rolled about them—if it did, it had all gone silent, the only cries far in the distance now, except for the moans of some wounded man closer at hand. Another voice spoke, though, Grasslander, and the moaning was stilled. He got the dirty red silk off Ahjvar, anyway, and the shirt of scales, and led him like a blind man down towards the west. They almost stumbled on a body, a tall man with his hair in desert braids and a spear-thrust in the great vein of his thigh, with all the ground about him soaked, but he was tall, and not yet stiff, so Ghu hauled off his dark coat, trying to keep it out of the bloody puddle, though the hem ended up sticky with it, and made Ahj put it on, to stop his shivering as much as to change the look of him. Ahjvar seemed content to lean on him, too exhausted to walk. If he let him down, the man would sleep where he lay.

  Screaming. A man running, screaming, the Marakander western road tongue and bastard Nabbani of the eastern jumbled together, “Dead, dead, they are dead, he has come, he will not have me, I am not his not his not she he cannot how can he—the Lady has failed and they are dead but he was mine how could they all how could he see—we will all die and the city be empty, the Lady’s chosen the blessed are dead—”

  The priest might not have even seen them. He ran and screamed like he was mad, and the skirts of his pale robe were stained dark. There was nothing in his hand but a guardsman’s cudgel, but Ahj thought it attack, and that woke him so that he shoved Ghu back and stepped to the side of the priest’s path, taking his head as he went.

  Ahjvar’s hands were still shaking as he cleaned his sword on the grass, and Ghu had to tug him up again as he knelt, staring at the ground, at the hilt of his sword, at nothing. He talked Ahj on as he would a frightened horse, till the dogs, whom he had almost forgotten, came racing up. Jiot limped, little slowed, and Jui whined and thrust his head against Ghu.

  “Brave dogs,” he told them. “Good dogs, such good dogs,” but he didn’t have a hand to spare, keeping Ahjvar from falling. They didn’t seem to mind, closing in, one at either side, content.

  They came on a Red Mask, fallen, and the clothes and armour were hugged in close, nothing but bones within, withered and dry, and the roots of the grass and the bulrushes were reaching, crawling, pulling. It sank, slowly, taken into the earth. Ahjvar retched and swerved away.

  He wanted a horse, and there was a horse, his horse that he had ridden against the Praitan camp, he was certain, with the mist coiling about it, caressing and soothing, and another stray by its side.

  “Thank you,” he told the goddess.

  He had to shake Ahjvar to get him to look around, to see the horses and make for them, and guide his foot to the stirrup, he shuddered so badly.

  “Coffee,” Ahj muttered at one point, through clenched teeth. “Head hurts. Coffee.”

  “Hush,” Ghu said. “You’re frightening the horse.” But Ahjvar always frightened new horses, a little. They smelt his poisoned second soul.

  Ghu walked, leading both horses, the dogs ahead now, following a trail of mist and fox-light. The moon was sinking low in the west. It would set before dawn and leave them in darkness for the last hours of the night. They should find a safe place where Ahjvar could sleep, and ride again with the dawn, away from here. The goddess did not speak, but they crossed the swamp no more than fetlock deep and found a hard-bottomed ford through the brook. He turned northerly, for no good reason that he knew.

  Deyandara had not been with the kings here.

  He thought he heard his name in the wind, a whisper, in the little bard’s voice.

  A curse of ill-luck on the royal blood of the Duina Catairna. Ill luck and ill-chancing, in every choice. He hadn’t wanted her to come with them to the city, hadn’t wanted her following Ahjvar, but her inherited curse was on her no matter whom she followed, and there had been death, always, shadowing her, since she came into their affairs.

  “Ahjvar,” he said. “The Dinaz Catairna. Where is it?”

  Ahjvar looked around, as if he might see some hall of ninety years ago on a nearby hill, but he had only been looking at the shape of the horizon, the hills against the sky. He pointed, west and north.

  “Is it far?”

  A shake of the head answered.

  “How far?”

  “Leave it to the kings,” Ahjvar said, his words slow and slurred.

  “No,” Ghu said, slow himself, words rising unconsidered. He could hear her . . . feel the racing of her heart, as if he held her, her breath sobbing, choking, wheezing, and stilled. The dead weight of her. Not yet. But how far, how far, and these horses, too, were weary. “No. Not the kings. Fire, and treachery. They plan to burn the little bard.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  In Zora’s dreams, there was a steep green mountain, wrapped in mist about its feet, so that the white peak floated as an island in a pearly sea, and the moon was a silver canoe riding above it, a sickle for a harvest of souls. Bats, swallows, she couldn’t in the dream say which, even though it was night and swallows did not fly by night, swooped and soared before her, disappearing into the silver haze. A river coiled about the mountain like a nesting dragon, black and nacreous, breathing out the fog, whispering to the reeds and the willows along its banks. He is mine and I will take him home . . .

  Zora could not sleep, after that. Stupid human dreams, meaningless memories of some Nabbani scene on a lacquered tabletop, dead Rahel’s taste. She slept on cushions in an alcove at the back of the Hall of the Dome, curtained in white silk, when she did sleep. Priestesses had laid out fresh robes and linens for her. Was that a hint? She did not have time to waste in the bathhouse. The soul was all, the body nothing, the body only served to house the soul and give it an anchor in the living world. They should not have dared approach so close. She should have heard them. The body betrayed her, the girl betrayed her, weak and mortal, tossing in meaningless dreams. Dance disciplined the body; she carried over that knowledge from what the girl had been. Through dance she wove herself into the pattern of the stars, anchored herself in the light of the universe, yes, remembered, yes, that the world was greater than this little place and patience was the foundation of her victory.

  She danced alone, with a tambourine. The Red Masks watched, spaced about the walls, guarding. He would come, her captain. He might come, her brother. She had defeated Vartu, though. Surely she need fear no other. She was grown great, greater than Sien-Mor had ever dared to think herself, being the sum of such great wizardry. Many small stones made a great weight and a great wall, better than a single boulder.

  In Praitan there was battle. The kings had gathered, and her captain of Red Masks had penned them and held his hand, held his hand, till the night came and the death in him woke, finding its strength and its pleasure, death in the darkness. Let them then fight by night, she had thought, by moonlight, folly though it was, and they had, and they did yet. In Fleshmarket Ward it had gone badly, but it was Ashir who had thought they should try to take the drovers’ gate under cover of night, to give cover for his capture of the loyalists’ chief wizard, to distract any guarding her. The sacrifice, the Red
Masks sent to the Fleshmarket, had done their work and lured the Grasslander wizard’s guardians from her, they must have done. The demon had gone to the Fleshmarket. The traitor garrison of the gate had fled into the streets, abandoned their tower, and fled beyond the walls, and the demon had come to kill, and had killed, yes, two of her Red Masks, which she had not intended, and two had fled, because she did not will that they should stand and die, and the demon hunted them.

  Only the demon?

  They were not aware of the dog. It had not come. Only the demon in his night-form, the Northron giant with the axe. And now the rebels knew she had rebuilt the blessing of the Lady, and that they must fear fear itself again, the spearhead of every attack, cleaving a way for the temple guard. Should she have listened to Ashir, had she been lured into betraying her hand too soon? The fifth Red Mask, sent after Ashir, still stalked carefully in the wake of the Right Hand’s stealth. If Ashir could succeed in his plan, well and good.

  —No. I shouldn’t have listened, shouldn’t have sent them out from the temple, should keep all quiet within the temple and wait and wait, yes, I must wait, not fight them, wait, let the outlander wizard work—

  No.

  Her temple guard with Ashir had found a way between rebel pickets, found a shelter, a house among the trees, only an old man there and a toothless bear sleeping like a dog with its head on the threshold, and they had killed both, because there was a demon bear in the city, they all knew it, and this was a bear as well. A stupid and pointless little vengeance. Ashir and Surey had gone on alone, and then the caravaneer, which was not Ashir’s plan as he had presented it, but she had her Red Mask follow only distantly, because she was patient. She would give Ashir his chance. She would be fair.