The Leopard (Marakand) (14 page)

“I was nearly ravished by a woman with an enormous bosom.” It was funny now, yes. He could make it so by telling Ghu.

Ghu’s hand found his face, a light touch, no more. Ghu knew it wasn’t funny, not deep in the marrow. He’d told Ghu too many things in the dark nights.

“It’s your yellow hair. They can’t help themselves. You should stay out of taverns.”

“It was a respectable wineshop, I thought. And someone was following me.”

“Did you kill him?”

“He might have just been after my purse, so—no. I bought you a coat.”

“Do I need a coat?”

“In case you need to turn into a caravan guard. It has nice big pockets you can put things in.”

“Ahj, you sound drunk.”

“I’m not.”

“You smell drunk.”

“I spilt a lot of wine.”

“Wasteful.” He could hear the smile in Ghu’s voice. The hand slid down to his chest. Not possessive, not intrusive. Just . . . there. “You must have spilt some of it down your throat, I think. For such a big man, it doesn’t seem to take much to make you silly. Go to sleep.”

“I’m leaving in the morning. Soon as I get a little sleep. I think Mistress Deya and Clentara had best have had a falling-out. Better yet, you can hint delicately that I’m just some godless mercenary she took up with on the road. Blame it on yellow hair. And once I’m gone I want you to take her and get out of here.”

“Out of this inn?”

“Out of Marakand. Head back east. Wish for a different clerk on the gate. Don’t make it an obvious rush, but go tomorrow. I’ll give you a day before I do anything to stir anyone up. Try to time it so you’re going out with all the home-going market-folk, lots of bustle, right? You know what you’re doing. We’ve done it before.”

“Leave you a horse?”

“No. And devils take her tongue, put her on the best horse and some baggage on the pony. Someone’s bound to question if she’s really the one in charge, otherwise. Get the lot of them good and dusty. Better, sell them and buy yourself a couple of hill-ponies. Or if you think you’ll have to run, desert-breds, but don’t buy pretty ones. You have appallingly lordly taste in horses, for a slave, y’know. Change her name. Call her your wife. Put a scarf over her shiny hair. Tell her I’m going to kill her if she opens her mouth at all before you’re a day’s ride from the eastern fortress. I don’t like the attention we’ve gotten, and I’m liking less, the more I think of it, that someone tried to tail me coming out of that wineshop.”

“I’ll come back after I find someplace safe for the lady.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Ghu made no answer to that and seemed to fall asleep, close against him.

Ahjvar did not. The girl’s breathing was too loud, too—present. It hadn’t been so bad when they camped, she on her side of the fire, he as far from her as he could be without making it obvious, and Ghu choosing to lie close by him. Under a roof, within four walls, he could hear her, smell her. She and Ghu had found a bathhouse; they both smelt of soap and scented oil, but she had chosen poison jessamine, not jasmine. He could
feel
her there, between him and the window, which he didn’t like, which was foolish, when he could throw her with one hand.

Don’t be stupid, he told himself. You’re used to her by now. She’s nothing to do with Hyllau; red hair and upturned nose or not, she’s never heard of Hyllau but in a song; she certainly doesn’t know what scent the hag wore. Go to sleep.

He did. But the smoke stole into his dreams.

Not here, he said. Not now, not yet, but the words made no sound. A blackened claw of a hand bright with the wineshop-keeper’s rings seized him, pulled him down, rolled onto him, heavy flesh that crackled, skin flaking, and Deyandara grimaced above him, face contorted in what could have been a grin or a leer or a snarl of agony, hand wound in his hair, pinning his head down, forcing her mouth onto his, and the flames roared louder than his screaming. A sudden sharp pain in his ear.

Not his screaming but the girl’s, and Ghu had an arm around his throat, was gripping his wrist with his other hand, dragging his arm back, hissing, “Ahj, Ahj, wake up!
Wake up!
”

He froze. Night. Dark. Not sure where he was, where they were, not sure for a moment of anything except that Ghu had him, Ghu was safe, his ear hurt, and the stink of heavy smoke was fading. It was only nightmare, only the old nightmare, back too soon, but not the sick burnt-hollow feeling the curse’s tide left behind when it swept through, consuming him, not that yet, not yet. He didn’t remember dreams then, didn’t remember anything, which might be a blessing. Some would say so. Not knowing what he had done, whom he had slaughtered to feed
her
could be worse. But he remembered the dream, so he hadn’t been killing.
She
stirred, but didn’t wake. Not yet. He was not empty, not hollow, scoured, burnt to a husk. Not yet.

He was muttering that under his breath.
Not yet, not yet, no.

“Ahj, are you awake?” Ghu asked.

He sighed, which the man took for answer enough. Ghu’s arms relaxed, turned into more of an embrace, a hand sliding down to his, a gentle pressure prying his fingers loose . . . he was gripping his sword, and he had not even known where Ghu stowed it after he gave it into his hands in the afternoon. “You can let go now,” Ghu said, his gentle, talking-to-idiots-and-horses voice. “It’s all right, let go.”

There was a whimper, just a breath, hardly that, and far too close. Ahjvar flinched and dropped the sword, found he was standing with one knee on the bed.

“Ghu . . .”

“It’s all right. She’s all right.” Ghu spoke Praitannec, then. “You didn’t hurt her. You only scared her a little. That’s all.”

“Scared . . . ! Seven d-devils!” Shadow of an indignant squeak. It turned into a stuttering, gulping chain of sobs. Ahjvar slid boneless to the floor, sickened. Ghu let him go and crawled onto the bed. By the sound of it, he was being thoroughly wept-upon.

“It’s all right now, it’s all right.” More of the horse-soothing voice. “He has nightmares.”

Ahjvar made some inarticulate noise, head bowed to his knees, shivering. Nightmares.

Someone rapped on the door. “Mistress Deya? Mistress Deya!”

Another frozen moment. He hauled himself to his feet, sword in hand again. “What?” he snarled.

“A woman screamed,” said the voice on the other side of the door, warily. “I—I’d like to speak to Mistress Deya.”

“The lady has nightmares,” Ghu called. “She’s well enough now. Thank you.”

“Nevertheless . . .” That was a second voice, the innkeeper himself, not the young porter.

Ahjvar ground his teeth on obscenities. Good people, brave people. No idea where the sword’s scabbard was. Ghu trod past him and kicked it skidding his way over the floor. It hit his foot as the door opened onto lamplight. He sheathed the blade, hoping it would look as though he had merely grabbed it up at the unexpected knock.

“I beg your pardon,” Deyandara said, and she came forward too, wan and dishevelled and shivering, wrapping a blanket over her nakedness. She’d undressed fully with Ghu in the room? But she no doubt thought him uninterested. Not, Ahjvar was fairly certain, the case. There’d been something between the boy and the Widow Akay’s eldest daughter, nighttime walkings-out unknown by the village and the girl’s mother, that first year he’d come to Ahjvar, till the girl up and married a fisherman down the coast.

“It’s . . . it’s been an affliction since childhood,” Deyandara almost whispered. “I thought it had passed off for good, but . . .” An embarrassed smile, apologetic, ashamed, directed half at the floor. “I do thank you for your concern.”

The innkeeper peered around warily, careful not to look at her too directly, undressed as she was. Nodded, said gruffly, “Well, then. Sorry to disturb you.” Took his boy firmly by the scruff of the neck—the porter had no courtesy to match his master’s and was frankly gawking at the girl’s smooth shoulder where the blanket slipped. Ghu held them up a moment, lighting the room’s lamp at theirs, and then they were gone. He dropped the bar of the door again.

“They’ll ask us to leave in the morning,” Ghu said matter-of-factly. “Disturbing the house.”

Ahjvar swore and crossed to the girl in a stride, seizing her by the shoulder. She stifled her shriek, gone stiff, wide-eyed and trembling in his grasp. He ran a thumb over the darkness at the base of her throat, not shadow in the tiny flame of the lamp but slick blood. A nick, no more. When he dropped his hand, she fled back to the bed.

He sat down with his back to the door, sword across his legs, watching his hands on the cracked red leather of the scabbard.

“There was a woman who killed me once,” he said at last. “You look like her. It’s not your fault. But you get into my nightmares.”

“Who killed you . . .” Deyandara repeated. He heard Ghu crossing the room, the creak of the ropes supporting the mattress as he sat by her.

“He thinks he’s dead,” Ghu explained. “It’s all right. He isn’t really.”

“It won’t happen again.” Ahjvar got to his feet again, wearily, found himself a clean shirt and the tunic chequered in muted greens and greys that he’d worn most of the long road since the south, the dull brown trousers likewise, still stiff with mud and dust, a headscarf of the caravan road. In the corner of his eye the girl was huddled, watching, wrapped in her blanket in the half-light of the lamp. Well, Ghu was in his drawers, too, and was probably a more pleasing sight to her, under the circumstances. He unpacked, found knives, a wider assortment than it was politic to carry on his person, other gear, and repacked, so he had one small but heavy bag. He hung the belt of his sword over his shoulder as well and slung his cloak over all. Usefully dark.

“Did you bite my ear?” he asked, not for the girl’s understanding.

“It woke you up. I didn’t dare let go to do anything else.”

“You—.” Ahjvar almost laughed, but couldn’t, quite. “Go first thing in the morning,” he told Ghu. “Don’t wait. There’s too much smoke in my dreams. I can’t trust I’ll be given time. I’ll find you when I can.”

Ahjvar unbarred the shutters and dropped lightly down onto the porch roof. Ghu, silent, closed them again, locking the lamplight away behind him.

Any footpad fool enough to jump him now was going die. He’d kill of his own will if only some useless thug would give him a halfway honest excuse. Feed it, stave it off a little longer. But the night didn’t oblige, and he hiked to the ravine without a human soul seeing him. By then, the east was lightening, dawn creeping near, and he found a way through the scrub of the riverbed easily enough. Hard to avoid disturbing the birds, but there were feral dogs, foxes, some long-snouted cat-beast, and no doubt other creatures to explain the birds’ stirring as he passed. It was treacherous underfoot, stones tilted, broken. The rubble of the earthquake must have been dumped here, what could not be salvaged or built over, and no flood great enough to settle it or fill it in with silt had ever come down out of the mountains. He saw no sign of human passage save one well-trodden track that ran lengthwise, broad enough for three abreast, lush with nettles and honey-scented angelica towering to either side, sweeps of daylily, the night-closed buds like cold fingers stroking over him as he brushed past. A patrol-route, almost certainly. The trees along this stretch were mostly willow and poplar woven with grape and blister-vine, which he recognized by its rank scent in time to avoid crushing it with more than a boot.

Little sign the patrols ever ventured off their beaten track.

By the Riverbend Gate, city wall topped the ravine. Along most of Riverbend and Greenmarket Wards, the cliff was enough of a defence, and likewise in much of East Ward. Along the temple, though, the level of the ground dropped. The last time he had been in Marakand, the low-lying temple precinct had been fenced from the riverbed by a combination of city wall and temple buildings. He remembered a hospice, a pleasant white-plastered place. His quarry had gone there to make a donation for the temple’s charitable works, all part of winning over some son of one of the banking Families with whom she sought an alliance. A marriage that would have destabilized the delicate balance of the clans in far-distant Sea Town, where he’d lived then, under a Nabbani name. It was the woman’s own father had hired him, he remembered. He hadn’t killed her there, merely followed, watching, followed her through a week and shot her in the twilight from a rooftop as she walked up the steps to her new betrothed’s Family manor. She would never have exposed herself so carelessly in Sea Town.

Dusk or grey dawn twilight, Ahjvar was certain he could get up the cliff and through the jumble of houses that made a tight wall along its brink. He could see small gaps, alleys, with mounting mounds of nettle-grown rubbish and street-sweepings beneath. But from what he had seen of the wall the day before, he could just as easily climb it and get right into the temple grounds, or get in through one of the buildings that formed part of the wall and had looked half-ruined themselves. He found himself what was not exactly a cave but a narrow darkness under a lip of stone in the shelving cliff. There he crawled in and lay down, with his dark cloak pulled over him, making him a shadow behind a screen of olive saplings, as near invisible as could be. Sleep. He hoped. And if he did have nightmares here, there was no one to hurt. He’d probably just brain himself on the ledge overhead.

The smoke had faded. He’d go scouting come evening, before it grew full dark. Find out if the wineshop-keeper’s description of the Voice’s so damned convenient living arrangements were true. He rather wished they weren’t. Too simple. Not enough to keep
her
entertained for long. Simple execution, no long stalking.

Though the Red Masks might make it more interesting, if there were any about. Not a word he wanted Ghu to hear him use of it. Interesting, Great Gods forgive him.

And if Catairanach kept her promise, what then?

He would die as he should have, gone to dust long since? Well enough. But if he’d thought of that, he’d have taken a longer farewell of Ghu.

The truth was, he didn’t believe her. He would kill the Voice, and, assuming she was the ruler of the temple as Catairanach believed—which he still doubted, but it made no difference to what he did—maybe, if he killed some other powers of the temple too, that would sow enough confusion to give time for a strong lord to arise from the Duina Catairna. The Marakanders would be thrown out, Durandau would confirm some lord in the Catairnan kingship, with or more likely without Catairanach’s blessing, and in a month, or three months, the smoke would steal into his dreams again, he’d find a victim or
she
would take one, and the nightmare would cycle round again. And maybe Ghu would be there, the only person he had willingly let near him, body or heart, since Miara, and that was eighty years, trying to convince him there was yet some grace in the world. And maybe he wouldn’t.