The Lady

by K V Johansen

  “Sleep,” Ahjvar said with weary relief. “And if I don’t—you promised.”

  “I know.”

  He could feel the sunset, the darkness, a weight pressing on him. He could feel the hag, too, still wailing for her mother and the shattering of her world, twisting, a worm in his heart. He stumbled at hollows and tussocks. If he fell, Ahjvar was going to lie where he landed, and the Praitan army could damn well go around him. A few dogs came alert and watched them, and horses turned, prick-eared and nostrils flaring, but the men and women didn’t look, except maybe one or two, wizards, perhaps, who looked, and frowned, and looked away. They were shadow, that was all, and the mist of Orsa’s swamp; the little brook that wound between the hills was filling the valleys with fog. Ahjvar followed Ghu down into it.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  Holla-Sayan went to the suburb through the Riverbend Gate. Dust hung thick and high over Sunset, staining the sunlight. Crowds of folk pressed that way, patrols of street guard trying to send them to their homes. Fire, earthquake, a fireball from the sky . . . rumour was rife in the air. The death of Ilbialla and, already, the death of the Lady had somehow run ahead of him, though that last must be speculation, and no one retelling the news seemed to know if they meant the true Lady or the devil. He might wonder if they even remembered there had been a true Lady of Marakand at all, or how long it would be before it was forgotten. Greenmarket and Riverbend did not seem much affected by the destruction of the holy places, beyond yet more cracked plaster and on the main thoroughfare, paving stones humped and rippled into odd ledges, as if the earth sank beneath city’s weight. Even four-legged he stumbled at them, one-eyed, vision gone flat.

  Captain Hassin of Riverbend Gate came tearing out of the tower guardroom after him, shouting for news, but he jogged on, pretending he didn’t hear.

  Holla-Sayan was through. Let the captain wait for messengers from Jugurthos Barraya. Making the city free again was what Jugurthos and Nour and Hadidu had planned for, been raised for, the younger two, all their lives. It was up to them. They didn’t need him or shouldn’t, and he didn’t want to be needed by them. He was no magistrate, no captain. The dog killed. That was all. He was only a caravan mercenary, a camel-driver, and his wife owned camels and half of the least-profitable caravanserai of the suburb.

  He caught scent of Gaguush before he saw her, but then he found her amid the shadows, sitting on the ground at the caravanserai gate in the shade of the draggled incense cedar. Just sitting, chin on her knees. Hurt, he thought, and then, disaster come to the baby . . .

  She looked up, found him, and surged to her feet, into his arms as he shifted to meet her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, but of course she was, the light that had come to her face when she raised her eyes to his . . .

  “Am I all right? Am I all right?” Her hand cupped to his face, didn’t touch. “I am now. Bashra damn you, can you see at all?”

  “It’s getting better.” It didn’t hurt so drowningly as it had; that had to be better, didn’t it? “The Lady’s dead, the devil.”

  “I didn’t mean you had to go and—”

  “I didn’t. I’m afraid the city’s going to say that, though.” Holla-Sayan thought of Lissavakail, where the priestesses and the folk of the town had seen the death of the Lake-Lord at Vartu’s hands, and still the stories ran up and down the road, now, that the Blackdog had saved them. “Again. What were you doing out here?”

  “Waiting,” she said. “What did you think? Just waiting. It’s what the wives of heroes do in all the tales, isn’t it? Come inside. I’m putting you to bed, and I’m going to sit across the doorway with a naked blade to make sure you stay there, this time.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “And why not?”

  Because he wanted to hang onto her. He wanted to burrow into her warmth and be wrapped in her arms and legs and never move again. He didn’t know what she saw in his face, but she took his head in her hands, carefully, and backed him up against the wall and kissed him, pressed hard, body to body, for all they were out on the public street. She did let him up to breathe, after a while, when someone leading a skittish camel colt by paused to make remarks, which were, on the whole, approving.

  “Come inside,” she said. “Idiot.” That, amiably, to the boy with the camel. “Come inside, Holla. We’ll clean up your face. And there’s tea.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  In the cave, time passed. The earth, sometimes, trembled, but only as a faint wave rippling over a calm lake. Ivah felt fear ebb. Maybe it was the cool twilight, lit by the one small high windowlike opening in the stone wall behind her. It was not so large a cave that it could hold any deep darkness, with the morning sun outside, but she made a small light and let it drift. The cave was dry and empty, clean of the debris of animals and birds, but then, it had been sealed from the world for thirty years or so, and a holy place tended by priests before that. Exploring in the dim far reaches—it ran maybe forty feet back and downwards, no more—she found tarnished silver lamps set in natural niches in the wall, not symmetrically arranged, just here and there, where a ledge or a hollow gave place for them. She set light on them, though any oil was long since gone, and they made a star-scatter around the walls.

  Mikki had said this mountain, dwarfed to a hill by the Pillars of the Sky beyond, was wormholed with caves, but there was no other opening into here, not the narrowest crack for a fox to squeeze through. She did not think she would have had the courage to explore into any tighter and darker place, anyhow. It was not as though the god were locked in some physical space, which she could find and rap knuckles against for a signal. Knock twice if you’re still alive.

  She settled herself and watched the silvery lights until they seemed to float, and the rocky wall beyond to swim into mottled cloud, a cloud of tiny suns burning through. She could hear water, distantly running. Imagination. She put thirst from her mind, and the pounding of her head. After a while she fished in her pocket for charcoal and wrote on the uneven, clean-swept floor, in long, vine-curving tendrils, the word she had become certain was the name of the god Gurhan, in the script from the tombs that no one could read.

  After another while she cut a left-hand finger and began to shadow the black lines in blood.

  Nothing changed. The light of the lamps dimmed with her weariness, that was all, and as the sun climbed higher over the ridge and the dust of the air outside settled, the daylight grew stronger.

  But did the silence of the cave grow stronger, more aware, listening?

  How much of the inscription on the cave had been the actual spell, and how much merely its defences, the killing words to protect what lay within? Had it been symbol of the thing, or the thing itself? Focus of the wizard’s active will, like a sign calling light, which was nothing once one’s mind was off it, or something set to endure beyond her death? That mattered. If the former, then the damage was only minor; it might weaken it a little, but not be the start of any great unravelling. If the latter, then the wizardry lay in the words, and they were flawed, now, a hole knocked through by the devil’s own attack.

  “Gurhan?” she tried. “Gurhan, your people need you. Can you hear?”

  There was nothing, except that the cave did not feel empty. But it hadn’t when she crawled—was shoved—into it, and that might be imagination. Mikki would have noticed; he was demon, kin in nature to the gods of the earth.

  Mikki hadn’t come inside.

  “Gurhan, what do you need me to do?”

  There was a listening air to the silence, and was the water louder? She set hands against the stone floor, either side of the name, and let her lights go out. The shaft of sunlight slanted golden, dust-dancing, over her shoulder to strike the far wall.

  There was thunder, and the earth shuddered yet again. A cascade of pebbles rattled down the far wall, and grit rained from the roof. Ivah hunched against it, heart jumping, but the hill did not come down around her.

  A crack had op
ened in the far end, or something cast a shadow, black, narrow, and the sound of water was suddenly loud, a bright chiming stream over stone. She didn’t dare move. If shadow, it stood behind her. But it broadened, split, and there was still a fissure into darkness, and a shape that came forward. First it drifted, being shadow, and then dust-motes golden against the dark, and then a man in a white caftan, bare feet silent.

  He crouched down, still silent, and took her hands. His were cool, like earth merely shaped to mimic flesh and bone. His face was not an old man’s, though his hair was silver-white.

  He said nothing. She could not speak, but she felt as though he drank, somehow, from her, all the memory of what had been, and yet withdrew his seeking and delicately looked away when she felt burgeoning all the life that had brought her to Marakand. He leaned brow to brow and then kissed her forehead, let her hands go to brush a trail of tears from the corner of her eye with his thumb, though she had not known she was weeping.

  “The devil is dead,” the god said then, in a voice that was soft, and deep with the colours of the earth, and yet not so deep as Mikki’s. A singer’s voice. “The devil is dead and her works undone, but the Lady Marakanat my sister is dead, and Ilbialla, beautiful Ilbialla is burnt from the world. My poor Mansour’s child is dead and gone to her long, long road. But there is still one priest who thinks of the good of the folk in this city, and honest and honourable men and women who will seek to bring justice to its laws and its rule again. Daughter of the Great Grass and Nabban, come with me to find them.”

  There had been no place in Jugurthos’s foray to Templefoot Ward for a caravaneer still too weak to walk even half a mile without sitting down for a rest, or a wizard whose chief strength lay in minor wardings. Or for Hadidu, still stunned and devastated with his grief, too wounded for mourning. Nour and Hadidu stayed, sometimes joined by Tulip, watching the patrols go to and from the ruin of the market, couriers clattering up, getting occasional reports. They heard how the valley of Gurhan’s cave had been swept by fire before ever Ilbialla was attacked, the details of Fleshmarket’s bloody night and victorious morning, with the temple forces pushed out once again. The Red Masks had all been mysteriously destroyed in the night, as well, and the old menagerie keeper murdered, and a gang of priests and temple guards badly disguised as caravaneers were found slaughtered to a man far too near the library for anyone’s peace of mind. Extra patrols of the militia were sent to the hill. They heard how Jugurthos, forcing the barricaded gateways into Templefoot easily, had found the ward mostly undefended, but the temple itself a battleground for—he didn’t know what, his confidential messenger to Tulip and Hadidu said, and so he held back, waiting, uncertain at the last.

  But the fires died, and after one final concussion that shook the city and set the dogs and babies howling, there was stillness, and only a golden haze, like the aftermath of a sandstorm, in the bright noon.

  Nour had just spotted one of the couriers again, the woman with the piebald who tended to have the more personal of the verbal reports for their ears alone, when Hadidu, who’d been kneeling, eyes shut and head cradled on his arms in the crenel of the tower’s battlements, lurched to his feet.

  “Gurhan,” he said, almost whispering.

  “What?” Nour took his arm, thinking he was drowsing and might topple over the edge.

  “Gurhan! Did you hear him?”

  Nour didn’t accuse him of dreaming then. Hadidu’s eyes were fixed somewhere else, remote, shadowed with grief and yet no longer hopeless in defeat. Seeing—Nour couldn’t imagine what, something beyond Ilbialla’s death, that was certain. And he’d had nothing stronger than sweet coffee.

  “No. Hadi, wait—”

  But Hadidu was running down the stairs, leaving Nour to follow.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  The scent of smoke was strong in the air, but that was drifting over from the Praitannec camp; it was nothing to do with the ghost. Or maybe it was their own hair and clothing. The smell of corrupting bodies was only his imagination, though the crows still squabbled and the ravens cried harshly, on the ridge over the Orsamoss. Ghu would have gone farther, but Ahjvar, who had gone down to hands and knees in the brook to drink, heedless even of his sword, had simply collapsed again as Ghu tried to take him along a folded furrow of the hills, away from the smell. Ghu had dragged his arm over his shoulder, forced him to walk a little farther, just a little, to where a thicket of juniper poured down a steep and stony bank, and there he had fallen again, crawling in under the spiny boughs. It was shelter enough. There were no fugitives here, and they had passed through and beyond the roaming Praitannec pickets in the fog.

  “Food?” Ghu suggested, crawling in after him and sitting by his side, back against a trunk and branches brushing his hair. Jui and Jiot settled a little away, each curled into a knot, sleeping the moment they lay down. Food. Not that they had any. He would have to make a raid on the camp and steal a couple of waterskins while he was at it. Maybe find Deyandara and make his farewells. She would be all right, now. Ahjvar’s curse on her ancestors was cleaned away, and she was among friends. The death he had felt lying over her was lifted. Even Yeh-Lin meant well by her, though how long that would last. . . . And the goddess Orsa had gone to the kings. Praitan could save itself, now. “Bread, Ahjvar, if I can find any?”

  Ahjvar, lying with his head on his arm, didn’t answer.

  “Ahj?”

  He stirred, just enough to roll over. “No. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Food and drink. You look like a dead man.” He did, frighteningly so, gaunt and grey.

  “I am a dead man. Don’t leave me alone.”

  Food and water and dry clothes. Ahjvar was soaked from his plunge into the brook, and shivering, but his skin burned, not a good sign, Ghu thought. He unrolled his bundle and wrapped the blanket around Ahjvar.

  “Catairanach’s gone and I’m still here. It should have ended. She should have ended. We should have died with the damned goddess.”

  “Yeh-Lin didn’t kill the goddess.”

  “She should have killed me.”

  “Ahj, no.”

  “You will kill me. You promised you would. When the hag wakes again—before she wakes again, Ghu, Great Gods, please.”

  “If—”

  “You can. You didn’t lie to me, gods, you didn’t. Because she’ll kill you, she’ll kill you first of all, and Ghu, I can’t, she’s a wizard again, with all my strength and her own will, and you can’t just tie me up this time.” His voice rose, panicked.

  “Hush, hush. I haven’t lied to you, Ahj. I don’t lie.”

  “You don’t tell me things.”

  “Sometimes I don’t. I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t know things. I don’t see myself.”

  Ahjvar’s hand was on his wrist, fingers digging in like claws. “You’re not another devil.”

  “No.”

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Ghu.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nabban,” he said, reluctant, as if the words alone made it true and if he could hold them back, they might still find the ruin on the coast of the Gulf of Taren again, and the sea, and the south winds on the downs. “I am . . . becoming . . . Nabban. But I don’t always see that. I forget it, for long times. Believe that, Ahj. I don’t—didn’t, always know. Yeh-Lin says . . . but I could not have saved you, when I sat on your garden wall in the rain. I only knew I wanted to—to be some light, in your shadows and your pain.” A breath. “You drew me like a fire,” he whispered.

  There was no retreat. He did not think he could go back to not seeing himself, to drifting, simple and wide-eyed, waiting, not knowing what he waited for. Some step had been too far. When he freed the first of the Red Masks, maybe. When he pulled the dogs to him, into the current of becoming, and they forged ahead on his road, looking back, tails wagging. Hurry up, then, if we’re going this way, things to do. . . . When he killed a man for a horse, for Ahj. That was not his road, but it fractured the shel
l of innocence, left him no retreat. Or when he put a devil of the north into the earth, even if only for a little, because she threatened what he had taken it upon himself to protect.

  His. He did not want to become like Catairanach, destroying what he most desired to hold.

  “The sun’s setting.”

  “Yes, I know. Come here.”

  Ahjvar rolled over, laid his head in Ghu’s lap like a weary child. Ghu pulled the blanket over him again, fingers in his hair. He burned, and shivered.

  It had been so easy to thrust the broken souls of the Red Masks out of the web the Lady had made. They had no real bond to the husks of their bodies any longer; they had yearned to be free, even though the soul itself was broken and decayed, the self lost, the road of the Old Great Gods beyond reach. It was so easy to kill a man. Not Ahjvar, though. Catairanach had made him to endure in the world, and if Ghu did not unmake that, he would so endure. Maybe Ahjvar was right after all, and he had been dead these ninety years, and was only a thing, shaped by the goddess’s curse to be a vessel for the entangled souls. Simple, perhaps, if not easy, to pluck them free and cast them to the road to start their long journey. But together? He had no idea. What if Hyllau still battened on Ahjvar, still clung, rooted in him? What had Yeh-Lin said, If you have to kill him, let it be for his own sake?

  “Ahjvar? I could—send you to the road. Both of you. I could.”

  “I’m tired, Ghu.”

  “I know. I know.” He stroked his hair, soothing.

  “I don’t want to wake up wondering who I’ve killed. No more mornings.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s not going to let me go, this time. She’s strong. The Lady—”

  “Hush, Ahj. Ahjvar, if I—”

  Too late. Ahjvar shuddered, and dogs both came alert, growling, as the man rolled over and the eyes glared up at him, but Ghu held him, fingers touching the lips, the other on his heart.