The Leopard (Marakand) (30 page)

“You’re dead,” Ghu said. “Know it again. Go. Be free. Find yourself if you can and take the Old Great Gods’ road.” He clenched his fingers, twisted the fiery umbilical that was not quite only poetry for what he felt.

The Red Mask folded up at his feet, and Ghu went down on one knee, propping himself on the body, which was cold. His arm hurt, his ankle hurt. His heart hurt; he wasn’t sure he could stand much more, in any sense.

“Wizard!” shouted a guard, a one-ribbon woman, who with her patrol had turned to watch, crowded tightly as frightened sheep, as fearful of the Red Masks as he had been meant to be. Slowly, too slowly, Ghu pulled himself back up the wall. He couldn’t fight six living human folk. The sullen fire on the one remaining Red Mask was only a reflection of the odd firelight; the Lady’s divine terror was fading, and with that the temple guard grew more menacing, spreading out, courage and will returning.

The last Red Mask—he hoped the last—seemed to have no interest in the slayer of its companions. It still stood halfway up the stairs, staring towards the web of darkness barring the way at the top. The glow of the fire leaked from beyond. It raised a hand. Smoke suddenly began to pour along the ceiling like a river, cascading down the stairs, too, a strange waterfall, as if some barrier had given way. Smoke shouldn’t sink and crawl. There had been wizardry at work, barring passage to the upper floor. He could hear the fire now, hungry, feel the air of the house stirring with it, hear the roar. The Red Mask left off staring, or listening, or whatever it had been doing, and started up the last few steps.

A yell, a screeching cry. Something came flying down the stairs, careening off the Red Mask, knocking it sprawling. All black silk and firelit steel. The temple lieutenant fell, neck half-severed and spewing blood like a fountain. The rest came tumbling back in panic, into Ghu, knocking him into the wall. His vision went dark and dizzy, but the black silk whirled and another guardsman fell, and then ribbons were floating, knotted ribbons, loops of cord flung high and caught between fingers and teeth. The sabre slashed in front of her face, towards her own ribbon-stretching arm, and stopped short. Ribbons parted. The temple guards fell senseless, all the three or four of them left.

The Red Mask sprang up. The fury in black silk was only Ivah, panting, with a banner of dishevelled hair hanging half in her face, in knots to her knees, and a gory sabre in her hand.

“The red priests won’t die,” she gasped, as the smoke rose, flowing upwards now, as it should, on a wind sucked through the passage. The web of wizardry that had been blocking the doorway was torn, dissolving away, and the fire roared above them. The Red Mask picked itself up and turned to face them, weaponless, no sword, the short staff still hanging from its belt. Ivah put herself between it and Ghu. She was shaking, though the red light on it was only fire from above and the poisoning fear was in abeyance, as if judged useless and not worth the effort.

“No.” He limped after the wizard, put a hand on her arm and edged past. “Me,” he told the poor dead thing. “I’m the one you want. I’m the one can let you go.”

It swayed, as if about to spring down the stairs.

“Come,” he invited.

He met it again with his open hand, staggering back, falling with the force of the body that was abruptly dead weight, as he told her, “You died, years ago. Remember. Find yourself. Find your road.” She had come in secret to the library, a scholar of Two Hills, not a wizard, she told them at the gate, oh no, just a woman of the law, seeking certain books. She had trusted the fellowship of scholars, but a librarian had reported her to the temple because those books, though they were still to be found in the lists of the great catalogue, were ones that had been burnt by the Voice’s decree; they were books that wizards had studied, on the nature of godhead as the fount of wizardry. She had been arrested by Red Masks, whom her magic could not touch. They shed her spells like water, and they clubbed her with their white staves and bore her away senseless from the library. She woke gripped between them in a great black-pillared hall, with yellow-robed priests in curving ranks about her and a dome overhead shedding broken blue light from the stained glass pattern of its eye. A woman in a black robe, with a white veil over a silver mask, swayed and spoke, a child’s sing-song in a high carved pulpit.
She is wizard she is damned she is not his she may be his she may see she may know she is wizard she is dead let her be drowned dead deep in the deep well . . .
And her nerve failed her, and her knees, and her bladder, and they dragged her because she could not walk, into another domed house and down, and down into darkness and damp, a cave. No priests followed, only Red Masks, and torches lit it, water stirring in a crack in the floor, slopping into glistening oily puddles. A goddess grew from mist and stretched out her hands, crying, “Tell them, warn them, see me—” but the mist crawled and the face of the goddess changed, and she said nothing, only smiled and licked her lips and reached to the wizard, reached inside her, took her beating heart and said, “No wizards in Marakand, my servants, my dear and loyal soldiers, my Red Masks, my own,” and something tore. It wasn’t her heart. She thought it was her soul, and she cried out to the twin gods of Two Hills as she drowned in the well, but water brought her no release, though it was one of the clean burials. Her soul was ripped, and braided, and knotted, and some flung away to drift broken and screaming in the caverns and the cracks of the stone, and some woven into a web that centred on the Lady who was not the Lady, and some knotted into her bones, reins, chains, with hooks that tore and . . .

“Go, little sister,” Ghu said. “Peace.”

The corpse folded up, empty, and he sat, head back against the wall, eyes shut, not caring that there was fire over him.

“Ghu!” The Red Mask knocked against him as the body was dragged aside. Ivah seized his hands.

“They don’t die,” he said. He thought he spoke quite clearly and sensibly, but perhaps not, if that was his voice. It wavered and wandered and faded to a whisper. “They don’t die, because they’re already dead and they don’t know it; they’re just rags, broken husks. You have to cut them off from what’s feeding them and holding them here. Let them go, let the ghosts go.”

He shook the last trace of the poor Five Cities wizard from his mind, the poisoning madness of the Lady with it, and opened his eyes.

“Necromancy, then,” Ivah said. She was wearing only a short cotton shift. It was scorched, though she had the bundle from her bed slung over her shoulder, intact. Miracle her unbound hair hadn’t turned her into a torch. “Who? Not Ulfhild, she wouldn’t—”

“Who? The necromancer? She’s in the well. The Lady.”

“Not the Voice, then.” Ivah offered a hand, heaved him up, and got an arm around his waist as he slumped against her. He fumbled to clean his knife on his trouser leg and sheathe it, clutched Ivah to keep from falling.

“Is she really the Lady?” the wizard asked.

“Yes. No, what they call the Lady is she, but I saw . . . the Red Mask saw, when she died, not now but then, when she was taken—the goddess is . . . not quite dead. Not so dead as the Red Masks. Nearly. Ivah, your storyteller. What is she?”

“Ulfhild.”

Hazily, he wondered why that was an answer. But Ivah
had
answered “what.” The storyteller had answered.
In the days of the first kings in the north, there were seven wizards . . .

Ivah, almost drunkenly, giggled, the hysteria of being alive after all. “You could call her my stepmother. After a fashion.” And choked on a moan. “Oh, gods and Old Great Gods. What are you, Ghu? What have I done, coming here? I just wanted to run away.”

“From what?”

Something crashed. A beam.

“Down,” he said. It was a furnace up there now. There could be nobody left alive. She was already trying to run, dragging him for the stairs.

“Temple guard started the fire?” he asked, choking. What kind of people burned out a house with children in it?

“I did. I didn’t mean to. I heard—they smashed the door open. They were shouting. It wasn’t me they were after at all. I thought I’d brought Red Masks by hiding you, but they were shouting about rebels and heretics and the priest of Ilbialla. ‘Take the priest of Ilbialla alive for the Voice, take the wizard for the Voice, but kill the rest.’ Hadidu got his son and his servants into the room where the girls slept, to try to get over next door. He was shouting for Nour, but Nour didn’t answer.”

“City. With me.”

“Oh. Temple guard went after them and Shemal—the little boy—was screaming. They’d grabbed him. I ran out of my room behind them. I felt the Red Masks coming up the stairs, like some kind of—some kind of death. I panicked. I cast a fire on the guards who’d come up first—I couldn’t think of anything else—and they dropped the boy and started shrieking and blundering around, and everything started burning, the beds and the rug on the floor and the doorframe. It was a—a strong fire. Not easy to beat out. It wasn’t meant to be. I wanted them dead. I didn’t think. Hadidu grabbed his son and the rest all came running with him. They’d all come back, just children themselves, and they’d all come back to help when the child started screaming. They could have gotten away. But the gallery was on fire and it was too late. Hadidu started them up the ladder to the roof, and I blocked the stairs, to stop the Red Masks coming up while Hadidu got everybody out, but the spell wasn’t holding. As fast as I wove it, the priests seemed to just—just melt it. And everything was on fire behind me then.”

“Held a while,” said Ghu. “And they say nobody casts spells on Red Masks.”

“Nobody kills them.”

He shook his head.

In the kitchen, smoke was feeling its way over the ceiling with long fingers as they came down the last steps. Nour crouched in the yard door. He lurched up when he saw them, hissed, “You—”

“No,” said Ghu, trying to put the woman behind him. “Not she, not your traitor. She saved Hadidu. They’re gone. Safe away over the roofs.” He hoped.

A blast of hot air rolled down the stairs, following a noise like thunder.

“Roof coming down,” said Ghu, heading for the yard door, leading Ivah by the hand, catching hold of Nour’s shoulder, shoving him out.

They all fell together, picked themselves up, scrambled for the gate. The fire roared overhead now; the last crash had been part of the roof, caving in, as he’d thought. In the distance, there was a lot of shouting. He could see people up on the roofs of the nearby houses, small fires being beaten out.

Ivah pulled free of him, tucked her sabre under her arm, and stood just outside the gate, fingers weaving what looked like a game of cat’s cradle. She looked up, looked around at the fire, and pulled a string loose with her teeth. The rest of the roof of the coffeehouse, the weight of plaster and the brick and stone of its enclosing wings, collapsed, the burning beams of the roof and the uppermost floor crashing down, and down, right into the cellars, a pyre roaring into the heavens, scarlet planks whirling from the galleries it shed, window-screens flying, painting a tracery of light against the night. The sound was deafening and the heat unbearable; they’d be roasted where they stood. Ghu took her sleeve to drag her on in pursuit of Nour, who, stiff and slow, was plodding along the back alley towards the one that led up from the market.

“Burn the bodies!” Ivah shrieked in explanation, over the roar. “Even the bones. If they can’t count them, they won’t know that anyone escaped.”

But a fire that burned even bones would seem unlikely in a house like this.

“Let’s go,” he said wearily. “Catch up with Nour.” Ghu hoped he knew where he was going. It was all very well to believe the neighbours had been willing to help and hide Master Hadidu, but he and Ivah were strangers, foreigners, and terrifyingly battered and bloodied figures, he rather suspected.

Ghu saw Nour stop and look back, waiting, but there were more figures, a gleam of firelight on helmets beyond him.

“Devils damn!” Ivah swore. “Stay here.”

“No, don’t—” But she shed her bundle and ran, fleet-foot, nearly naked, hair streaming behind her, flinging out a hand that trailed knotted ribbons and launched an arrow of fire that died on a Red Mask’s armour.

Just the one. It was enough. The white staff flared and crackled as the long-dead wizard struck her on the side of the head. Nour fell, swarmed by shouting human guards. Too many for Ghu to kill, unless he were Ahjvar, as mad as Ahjvar, and he tripped on Ivah’s dropped bundle, staggering to run to them anyway, hit his head and lay stunned and breathless and for a moment dead to everything. When he picked himself up to hands and knees the world was tilting and swimming like the sea in a storm and the guards were retreating, dragging—prisoners. Bodies. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t feel them, couldn’t feel anything beyond exhaustion and failure and loss.

The fire roared. It was too close, too hot. They were gone. He sat up, rubbed his face with a hand that was sticky-slick with blood from the arm Nour had slashed. There were voices. Men. Shouting. Another house had caught beyond saving. He picked up Ivah’s bundle, because it was there, staggered up, took a shuffling step, holding the wall. His foot kicked against something that for a slow, stupid moment meant nothing except that he was too tired and too mistrustful of his ground to take another step, but then he thought,
Sabre
, and that Ahj wouldn’t leave something of use lying, so he picked it up too. Besides, it was better than no prop at all, as he hobbled onwards. The alley was deserted now. Dark, silent, dead. He turned away from the Sunset Gate market and went, without thought. Bad foot and sabre down, quick hop, pause for breath, weight on the good leg. And again. And again.