The Leopard (Marakand) (35 page)

“Priests,” muttered a black-haired woman to his other side. “Ashir and Rahel themselves. And Red Masks behind them.” She subsided, chewing her lip, and carefully shaped a smile, jiggling the baby on her hip. Ghu gave her an innocent smile in turn and looked away again. The priests came on, singing.

They walked, men and women in yellow robes. Most were carrying long yellow silk banners, with characters black on white medallions that looked like simple Nabbani, though he hadn’t the faintest notion what they said. In the midst of them a group of girls and boys in facepaint and scarlet robes played flutes and drums, while others danced before and through them, figures far more complex than those the spontaneous young people of the street had performed, all moving as one girl, one boy, bells on their ankles sweet and silver.

Behind them came Red Masks. They were veiled, not armoured, and though there was a tightening up of the crowd, a more concerted pressing back against the walls, people did not react with the limb-loosening terror he had seen even temple guard afflicted with at the coffeehouse, though the woman with the baby clutched it tightly to her breast, a hand up as if to shield its head from their very gaze. As if that wasn’t protection enough, she then sank down on her heels, head bowed over the little thing, whispering to it. Ghu wanted to see, but he had to crane and twist, bobbing up and down to find any clear line of sight; too many taller folk in the way. Following the Red Masks were two riders. One was another Red Mask, armoured, a spear braced in his stirrup and a saffron banner with three tails trailing from it, the other a young woman dressed in a white tunic and leggings of leather, with her head uncovered, soft black hair rippling unbound over her shoulders. She had a lovely face, like a desert woman without tattoos, dark and narrow, the line of her nose a perfect parallel to her brow, her eyebrows flying up at the outer corners, like a lilting laugh in ink. Her keen eyes searched the crowd, with a smile for every person whose gaze she captured. No laughter on her lips. None in her eyes. Some cried out, reaching hands to her or fell to their knees, weeping. She rode a coppery chestnut stallion that sweated and rolled its eyes, chewing its bit, not a horse that should be in the midst of a crowd at all, and the mounted Red Mask’s black mare was sidling and fidgeting, held on too tight a rein, showing the whites of its eyes as it tossed its head. Frightened horses, constrained by more than leather and iron and human will. No goddess frightened horses or tolerated those who mistreated beasts of any sort; no sane god of the earth would view kindly any human who did so. Ghu felt in his own knees a little of what the Red Masks seemed to inflict on those nearby when the red light of the Lady’s power touched them.

The Lady began to turn, looking his way. He bowed his own head, a simpleton child, a stray of no account. There were enough taller folk before him that he would have had to make great effort to see her face again. He felt her eyes, though. They passed over, moved on. He did move a little aside then to watch her passing, the slender shoulder, trim waist. Not, he thought, a rider. That stallion would have her off and be into the crowd and probably killing in its angry panic if she let the grip of her will on its mind falter. The Red Mask, though . . . the armoured Red Mask like a captain at the Lady’s side, he rode well, if only his horse were not so terrified.

The Red Mask wrenched the horse’s head savagely around, and it wheeled, reared and struck out, scattering the second group of Red Masks who followed close on foot, though they moved only so much as was needed, without fear, even without urgency, while ranks of spear-bearing temple guard behind shouted alarm and the onlookers shrieked and shoved back against those behind. But the horse plunged trampling in place, mouthing the bit, and was hauled around again even as the Lady glanced back. The Red Mask took station at her side once more, her dumb shadow.

Ghu was on his knees, and as the crowd, exuberant in the aftermath of its brief alarm, surged past, pressing against the temple guard, crying out for the Lady’s notice, he wrapped his hands over his head against their kicking and shoving. Darkness. Snow, and wind, and the mountain night. The cold depths of the river. His mother had drowned him.

Ahjvar.

Ahj had died and died and his soul was chained to his body and Catairanach’s curse twisted fate and chance so that he never was free to die. Ghu had known since last night, he had known it, if he had dared to chase what he heard in the silence; he had felt the hollowness, the place where Ahj should have been, become an emptiness in the world. She took wizards, and if she drowned them in her deep well as the city said, she did not discard them afterwards. Living or dead, ghost or monster, Ahjvar was a wizard, and so was the thing that possessed him. If he could not reach his magic, that did not strip it from his blood. He was a wizard, and the Lady had taken him and severed his soul; it was not the freedom, not the death he had longed for. It was possession worse than Hyllau’s murderous-mad ghost; it was perversion worse than any slavery, an abomination, a defilement of the dead and a torment of the soul that could not escape the world’s pain.

It was beyond weeping for. Ghu stayed where he was, curled up in the darkness, shivering, with the blizzard of Father Nabban’s mountain thrusting fingers into his bones. There were distant voices, but they passed, faded, a tide ebbing and leaving him, the street clearing, pursuing the Lady. Someone touched his shoulder once and spoke kindly but went away when he did not stir. Someone, less kindly, tugged at the bundle still slung around his body, but someone else shouted and footsteps ran clattering away. Vague voices poured over him, something about awe of the Lady taking them that way, sometimes, leave him. They went away.

Another touch came thrusting at him, butting. Beyond weeping, but there were tears, and something found the salt on his face, two muzzles, one licking, one sniffing, each shoving at the other. There was no spring blizzard, and if there were, he had still the mare and foal to find, and there was no voice of the god, no whisper of his goddess, only the need to get up, to go on, because he had been lent life and it was not his to throw away, was it?

Ahjvar was not his, only something he had found for a little time, and there was still his road to follow. He could do one more thing, though. He could destroy the body and unchain the last rags of the dismembered soul. He was sorry for Ivah, sorry for Nour, but Ahjvar had the greater claim on him.

The dogs flinched back when he pushed himself up, sitting on his knees. One crouched and growled. It was a gaunt, dun-coloured dog with a black stripe down its back and black wolf’s ears, which flattened when he looked at it, changing its growl to a whine. A second shadow, paler, mottled ash and silvery like sand under moonlight, flitted around behind it, tail stirring, ears folded back. It rolled over, exposing its belly. All legs and ribs. He leaned back against the wall, tilted to find the sky, blue and clear and beyond human reach forever. He could drown in the sky. Maybe he did. The sun moved, and the dogs disappeared. People hustled up and down the streets, talking, uneasy, excited. The Lady came to them, rode among them warning of danger. Their enemies gathered strength in the west and in the east, their land of Catairna, their province, given to the Voice of the Lady by the desperate goddess there, who had been beset by wizards and so sought her sister’s aid, rose in rebellion and sent assassins into the city. The faithful Voice was dead, murdered. No one was safe. Enemies, wizards prepared to assault the city. An enemy gathered strength far in the west, but the Lady would make Marakand great once more. They must all be prepared to fight when the day came, or the men must. The women had a greater task. Marakand needed folk, true-born Marakander folk, who could go out to the new lands they would win Over-Malagru, to serve the new king, the Lady’s chosen, who would go to Praitan to teach and civilize the seven Praitannec tribes. Young men went to the palace plaza, to take an oath to join her militia, to be assigned companies by ward, to learn to stand and fight for when the fated day should come and Marakand would close the bronze gates of its Western Wall. Ghu slowly drifted down from the sky and frowned across the street. Shadows stretched out, the sun turning towards setting.

He understood, he thought. Ahjvar
was
his. To this last.

The feral dogs came slinking back, crouched, both of them, in the mouth of the next alley along, watching him with the patience of stalking predators, yet most unpredatory. The pale one carried a dead rat in its mouth, waiting to be noticed.

Half-grown strays, with sores on their faces and the tawny one with a dirty, blackened bite on its shoulder.

A one-eyed cat watched from a porch roof, watched
him
, not the sparrows that hopped, took flight and circled only to return farther along. They, too, watched, with their shiny lacquer eyes, twittering at him. He drew them. He didn’t want to, didn’t mean to. Not here, not now. Not yet. If even the sparrows saw him, what else might?

Red Masks. The storyteller. Lady Deyandara’s wizard.

Not Red Masks. No, not Red Masks, yet; the Lady hadn’t seen him, not with her own eyes to see, and he had been lost in the crowd. But Ahjvar, Ahj . . . had seen him. Ahjvar had seen him, and yet the Lady had not turned back.

He drew a long, shuddering breath and felt sun reach through the dying storm, thought, a blessing on Catairanach’s curse, a binding in the white-hot rage and fury of a goddess, a mother . . . a curse no other god, and there had been other gods asked, could break.

The Lady was . . . mistaken, perhaps, in what she thought she held. Perhaps.

The pale dog crept nearer, on its belly, dropped its rat and gave the slightest wag of its tail.

He had eaten rat, raw, on his first ship, when he was stowaway rather than crew, but this one had been dead too long. Both dogs turned and ran when Ghu went to hands and knees, pulling himself up by the wall. His ankle throbbed and he swayed, dizzy. Hungry, but not enough for the gift of bloated rat.

“Thank you,” he said gravely, because it was well to be thankful for gifts, all gifts, when they came from a clean heart. The dogs had turned and crouched again, staring. The pale one had dark eyes; the other, amber-brown. “I think, not now.”

The sparrows took flight in a twittering cloud. The cat stretched, blinked, and slid fluid along the roof and away. The dogs sat up, staring fixedly.

“I don’t think I can give you anything in return,” he told them.

An old woman clearing away a tray of coloured threads from a tiny shopfront little wider than her door laughed at him, not pleasantly, went in and came out with a broom. Both dogs vanished. “You get off,” she said. “Or I’ll send for the street guard. I’ve been watching you. Overcome by the Lady’s presence, hah! We don’t need dirty opium-smokers from the Five Cities hanging around here, begging and stealing.” He gave her a wide-eyed, dream-hazed look. Maybe he did seem so. He felt half-wrapped in dreams, still. “Go join the blessed Lady’s militia and learn to be a man, why don’t you?”

He shook his head and limped up the street. “Come on, then,” he called softly, as he passed a crack between two buildings, shoulder-wide, no more. “If you will, come.”

If Ahjvar were dead and could only be killed as Red Mask and freed, Ghu had still a duty of friendship to do so, and set him free. And after . . . and after . . .

It would be a long, lonely road home to Nabban. There was nothing else for him here, now.

His dogs slunk out to follow. It would be good to have company on the road.

There is a storyteller’s cycle of tales, and they begin like this:

Long ago, in the days of the first kings in the north—who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, as all but fools should know—there were seven devils, and their names were Honeytongued Ogada, Vartu Kingsbane, Jasberek Fireborn, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, Tu’usha the Restless, and Jochiz Stonebreaker. And these seven devils escaped from the cold hells, where the Old Great Gods had sealed them after the great war in the heavens.

And in the days of the first kings in the north, there were seven wizards. Two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from over the western sea, and one was of a people unknown; one was of the Great Grass and one of Imperial Nabban, and two were from beyond far Nabban, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded, who was uncle to Red Geir; Ulfhild the King’s Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise; Anganurth Wanderer; Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship; Yeh-Lin the Beautiful; and Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie. These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet more, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

Now the devils, having no place, had no bodies, but were like smoke or like a flame, and not of the earth at all. Some folk even call them kin to the Old Great Gods, though this is heresy. And these seven devils who had escaped the cold hells hungered to be of the stuff of the world, as the gods and the goddesses and the demons of the earth may be at will, and as men and women are whether they will or no. But they did not desire loving worship and the friendship of living men and women, as do the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters. They did not watch and judge and cherish the souls of human-folk after death, as the Old Great Gods are said to do in the land beyond the stars. The devils craved dominion as the desert craves water, and they knew neither love nor justice nor mercy. They made a bargain with the seven wizards, that they would join their souls to the wizards’ souls, and share the wizards’ bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power.