The Leopard (Marakand) (19 page)

But the lamps were lit for something, for someone. Finally he found stairs and started up. Lamps burned in wall-recesses at every turning, polished brass or silver, not clay, and the oil was scented, an incongruity with the abandoned rubbish below. It was the fourth floor on which he had seen the moving light, but Ahjvar checked each as he came to it, listening, smelling, wary for the faintest gleam of illumination, before he ever opened any door. The second-storey rooms were empty, as were those of the third, except for one, which was scattered with wooden chests and lacquered boxes. It smelt strongly of mice and mouldering cloth. The fourth floor, then.

The central passageway of the fourth floor, when he cautiously let himself out onto it, was carpeted, silent, and well-lit. It felt lived-in. He opened doors more warily, no need to go in and feel his way around, with the puddles of light shed by the passage lamps. Empty. A storeroom, but a neat and tidy one, clearly not abandoned. A . . . library? A wall that was floor to ceiling with what looked like nest-boxes, anyway, each filled with scrolls, and another wall with shelves of codices, a table of waxed tablets for notes and drafts, paper and reed-pens and pots of Westron ink, a tall writing-desk by the window. He went in. These shutters pulled open easily. He looked down on the mist-filled ravine. The taller trees made floating dark islands above it, and moonlight turned the fog to a flowing ghost-river. He closed the shutters, as the breeze threatened the orderly papers on the table.

A woman’s wail checked him in the doorway as he would have slid out into the passage. He stepped back and closed it to a crack, keeping an eye to it, dagger in hand. Wordless, the cry rose to a howl like that of the newly and suddenly bereaved, helpless, without hope of comfort.

The door across from him opened. Two women hurried out, both in white nightrobes, the younger struggling into a grey caftan, the elder shielding the flame of a lamp with her hand. They pattered barefoot down the corridor to a farther room on the ravine side, and the elder, with a key on a long cord around her neck, unlocked a door.

“Revered One? Revered Lilace, Voice, what’s the matter?”

He felt the satisfaction of the lock turning over. The wine-seller’s tale had been truth. The Voice lived in the old hospice. But locked in. A prisoner of the temple, or mad?

Either way, he thought, not a power to make war, murder queens, and steal a kingdom. Not the fit object for Catairanach’s vengeance. Not his place to point that out. He was no champion, whatever the goddess said, to question his king as was any free Praitan’s right and a lord’s duty. An assassin of the Five Cities with a commission did not protest that a particular killing was bad policy. And the goddess had promised him an ending in return for this. So. Though she had demanded others, too, and he might serve damned Catairanach and his—her—folk, better if he found, afterwards, who truly set the temple’s course and dealt with them as might the Leopard, if not an honourable champion of the
duina
.

“I will go,” a voice wailed. “I will go, I will go, I will go now, oh, spare the child, don’t heed her do not heed me I will not—I will have youth I will have beauty I will have the dancer the orphan girl to be my daughter my child my beloved my own my beautiful queen and he is come for me let him come let me go . . .”

The voice trailed off into sobbing once more, and another said, “Set it down, when she speaks, set it down.”

“But Dur, she’s said all that before, this afternoon, in the pulpit.”

“Even subtle differences can have significance. Go fetch a tablet, girl, and set it down. Always bring a tablet. You’ll have to learn that, if you want to keep this position.”

The younger woman hurried out—and where else was she going to find a writing-tablet but in this library?

Now or later. This had been scouting. He had more than half meant to return to the ravine, to plan his way once he knew the place. To draw it out over days. Odds were the priestess would fling open the door, dash in, dash out, never see him if he kept still in the corner behind it.

Great Gods, he didn’t ask for mercy, just let there be an end to this. A few more murders and an end.

Ahjvar caught her as she darted in, a little slip of a thing, hand over her mouth. She struggled and bit him but, pinned against the wall, couldn’t get herself free. He slashed the thin cotton of her night-robe with the dagger in his other hand, then ripped the whole hem off and stuffed it in her mouth to gag her, tying it with the sash of her caftan, which he dragged free one-handed, forcing her to the floor. More or less sitting on her, both hands free again, he tore further strips of the night-robe and bound her hand and foot, propped her in the far corner, comfortable as she could be, and left her with her caftan decently wrapped over her naked legs for her modesty. Sheathed the dagger and went swiftly, then, to the door, shutting it quietly behind him on her terrified eyes.

The elder priestess—nursemaid or secretary or perhaps both—had not yet called in impatience to hurry her on.

In the Voice’s apartment, the lamp burned on a low table, surrounded by cushions in the fashion for desert dining. The room’s carpet muffled his footsteps. There was a bed, high and ornately carved in the Five Cities style of fifty years ago, all animal grotesques and squinting faces peering out of foliage. The shutters were open, but the window was barred. The Voice, surely the Voice, an elderly woman of desert ancestry, brown-skinned, black-robed, tall and gaunt, white hair the dingy yellow of old cotton all in flyaway wisps, knelt on the floor by the bed, rocking her body back and forth.

“It will be done it will be done it will it will I do
not
will I did
not
see I see I see him now I will not will have him take her let her go she is done she is finished she fails she is yours I will have youth oh let me go let me go let me go—”

Old Great Gods have mercy. Spittle bubbled at the corner of her mouth, and the priestess crouching before her, hands on her shoulders, did not move to wipe it away but merely said, in an echo of Ghu’s talking to horses and nightmare-mad fools tone, but with all the kindness worn away, “Speak more slowly, Revered Voice, I need to remember your words till the clerk returns. Who do you see?”

The Voice’s dark eyes glanced aside to his and what was almost a smile twisted her face. “Now I will escape you,” she whispered. Her rocking stilled, hands, writhing and fluttering, settled to her lap. “Now, now, now, you cannot keep me now not now not here but oh why oh why oh why my lady where is she where is she where are you?”

“Mina, what kept you? I’ll set down what you’ve missed—”

The priestess climbed stiffly to her feet, a hand held out for the tablet even as she turned. Ahjvar was already crossing the room. He punched her, hard below the ribs, before her mouth was halfway open on a cry. Too hard, maybe, for an ageing woman, when a blow like that could lay out senseless a well-muscled man in his prime. He caught her as she crumpled, lowered her to the floor; she still breathed, anyhow. The Voice continued to gaze up at him.

“I’m tired,” she whispered. “Did you know she is mad? The Voice is mad, the Lady is mad, the city is blind, and you should kill her too. Someone should.”

That sounded halfway sane.

“You should be quick,” she added. “Dead king of the Duina Catairna, she sees you, she dreams the Lady dreamt she sees you she wants you she says no gods but the Lady in Marakand and you brought him here I see him I dream him if she does not no wizards in Marakand no powers in Marakand she eats wizards so you will be hers she will make you hers no champion but hers and you will be high king under the empress of Marakand and she will feed the death that lives in you on her enemies on the enemies of Marakand on the wizards of the tribes and the cities will fall but we will stand against the west that is coming the death that is coming, the sword that is coming out of the north but he will destroy her tell her the west is death is—
No
—we will build the fortress here and hold the east and he will break against us against the swords of the tribes against the fleets of my cities against my king who cannot die who carries death who—” She screamed abruptly and bit her own arm, wide-eyed, rocking again. “Let me go!”

He had stood, shocked, when he had let nothing of this victims stay him, distract him, move him, not in long years. He crossed to her in a stride, with the thin waxed strangler’s cord in hand.

“I am sorry for the girl, though,” he thought she said. She reached to clutch not her throat but his hands, not struggling, holding them as if to make sure he didn’t leave her, till her fingers grew slack and fell away, and
she
uncoiled.
She
embraced the death, the torn moment when earth touched the road of the heavens, and rose stronger, and the fire felt like it would split his bones, but she fell away like the slumping dead priestess, like a sated snake, to sleep. A little while.

Ahjvar didn’t die. He hadn’t really expected to. Hope had gone to ash long ago. Anyway, Catairanach wanted more than the one. And the Lady had known her servant was about to die. He ran for the door, drawing sword and dagger, but they were already crossing the threshold, two priests in red armour, faces hidden by masked helmets, naked swords in hand. A third came behind them, armed with a white staff. An eerie light crept over them, like slow lightning, sullen red.

The damned wizard-hunting Red Masks the Marakanders all feared so were wizards themselves. Didn’t the city
know
?

The first struck towards him, low and fast with a short stabbing sword, the usual Marakander weapon, and he turned aside, in close, caught the arm on the left-hand dagger, grating on bone; their armour had no sleeves. The priest jerked free, and he met the other’s slashing blow; that one, taller, had a long Northron blade. He let himself be forced back so he could turn and get the wall behind him. More of the Red Masks slid into the room, silent, all of them silent, and fluid as water in their movements. These were unarmoured, carried only the white staves. Armour turned his sword, blade skittered on blade, the smaller priest was still using his torn arm strongly as ever. They seemed to care little for defending themselves, pressing in, till he stabbed through an eye-slit of the shorter priest’s mask. He lost his dagger, but that one fell without a cry, becoming a hazard to them all—devils forbid, trying to stagger up again, which was not right, not with a handspan of steel in the brain, but she or he failed and sprawled, clutching at Ahjvar’s foot, and the red light faded from the body. Faded from them all, first one, then another, but it didn’t stop them. Some wizardry they had collectively and silently decided was worthless.

Catairanach’s champion, was he? It became like that, a duel between him and the taller Red Mask with the Northron-style sword, and he wished for a shield after all, gripping his bundle to guard his left side, but even if he did cut his opponent down, the Lady of Marakand would hardly accept it as the judgement of the Old Great Gods in Catairanach’s favour and let him leave. And it could not be a judgement to mere blooding, because the damned Red Masks didn’t seem to bleed. He should have noticed that sooner. He should have jumped for the window instead, but in the lamplight he wasn’t able to see if the bars were wood, with a hope of breaking, or unyielding iron.

The robed Red Masks circling around were as faceless as the man he fought, wearing long, dull red veils, thick enough to show no shadow of feature, thick enough to blind them, but they didn’t move as if they had any difficulty seeing. Wizardry.

He bled, if the Red Mask did not. Arm and ribs. The other’s armour was torn, gown slashed, a warding arm sliced half away, hanging, Great Gods, and only sluggish dark blood congealed on the wound. He made no sound, nor faltered. Ahjvar beat the other’s stroke aside with the bundle of his cloak and gear, drove forward for the damaged segment of armour where the stitching showed, and ran him through, falling forward, missed footing on slick stones, dizzy, his own blood, and the dead priest underfoot. He recovered, dragged sword free with both hands, makeshift shield abandoned. He swept at a veiled one’s neck, seeing a path to the door, a chance, as they stood about like onlookers to a tavern brawl, but they closed in, half a dozen of them; they had merely been waiting, watching, testing. There was no guarding against all the blows that beat him down.

The main road of the caravanserai suburb forked at a triangle of land uncultivated and pitted, enclosed by a low drystone wall; the graveyard they had passed yesterday, with a charnel-house, its plaster flaking, squatting at the westernmost end. Ghu, who had melted into the shadow of a doorway as the lady and her wizard trotted past, took the right-hand fork. He could see in the distance that the Malagru-folk, if those were the pale, dark-haired country people who had been passing through the Eastern Wall yesterday, seemed to be taking the bridge to the Riverbend Gate with their produce. Most of the caravan-folk heading in to the city did as well. The southerly, right-hand road joined one coming down along the city wall from the south, and the folk there seemed mostly to be Marakander peasants, dressed in shawls and caftans, and not so free-moving and proud as the people of the Malagru. Well, if your goddess ruled you as an emperor through a corrupted viceroy, you probably learnt to walk warily, and cowed. Why Sunset Gate? An impulse. He trusted such impulses as a dog trusts its nose, not to keep him out of trouble but to tug him along to where he ought, or perhaps ought not, to be. Sometimes it was better to be where you ought not, if you meant to change the flow of the world.