The Leopard (Marakand) (40 page)

Not I
, she thought,
You promised me nothing. I promised you I would show . . .
but she was water . . . There was a song in the water, arms about her, holding her fast. Not Mikki, not dead Tamghiz, her husband whom she had slain. Arms of fire, and they burned, as her nightmare had burned, and Sien-Shava said,
You will all come to me in the end, Vartu Kingsbane
, but the singing voice was not Sien-Shava’s. High and clear as a child’s, it drank in the magic of fourscore wizards or more. How many more? She could not hear their voices, not see the fire of their souls, dark and twisted and broken as they were. The voice drank their magic and spat it out again in words of weight and power, light and strong as silk.

Human wizardry. The Old Great Gods did not fear human wizardry. They hardly took thought to notice it, but the seven devils of the north had learned to wield it. It let them work in the world, beneath notice, till they grew too loud, and it did not wound the world, as the unleashed full force of their own will and soul might. Too many such scars on a world and the walls of it weakened, and the annihilating void waited, hungry . . . They had nearly broken the world, long and long ago, and Tiypur in the west bore the worst scars, a godless land, with hills where all life perished.

Thunder that was stone, a roof falling. The weight of stone came down, entombing goddess and devil. Real, illusion, dream of the sinkhole falling that had been . . . it held them.

Darkness. Deep water.

Traitor
, the Lady whispered, Tu’usha whispered into her slow and sinking mind.
You brought me to this. I followed you out of the cold hells, Vartu, and you brought me to mad Sien-Mor. She is dead, and I am the Lady of Marakand. Sleep here with the nameless goddess, till even your souls fade from the earth and you wail like her, a nameless ghost. Sleep here, until you die the final death and are forgotten even in the sagas you shaped yourself, Ulfhild Vartu.

The entrance to the cave that felt as if it had been the root and anchor of the hill-god Gurhan’s presence in the world had been mostly buried in a landslide, long enough ago that the slope of scree was bound in place with tall poplars, suckers grown to a leaf-shimmering grove. What was left had been closed with stone and mortar and sealed with a deeply cut inscription in letters Mikki didn’t recognize, though some looked a little like the writing in an old Pirakuli almanac they’d once owned, and some uncomfortably like the inscription that twisted like vines on the hilt of the obsidian-bladed sword of the Old Great Gods. Digging away the fallen rock was not going to undo that binding. Even if he did find some shaft or passage that led into the cave from behind or beneath, he would hardly find the god waiting, laid out in deathlike sleep. Gods had no physical form in the world but by their own choice and at their own will.

Gurhan’s steep hill was not a clean and simple upswelling, some foothill of the Pillars of the Sky but an older stone, ridged and furrowed and closely folded, a knot of hills pressing together, worm-gnawed within by forgotten waters, covered in forest which the folk of Marakand either feared or revered; they left it uncut, unharvested, almost untrodden, not venturing far under its eaves even in search of summer fruit, though there were raspberries and currants ripening in plenty over the stonier ground where the trees were thinnest. Mikki made what second breakfast he could off of such fruit and stalked and killed a couple of fat red squirrels, which was better. There didn’t seem much point in further exploration of the caves and tunnels. He had found all that a bear of his size could get into and, by night, most of those that would allow a man passage. Nothing below ground held any lingering trace of the god. It was up to a wizard, which meant Moth, to make some counterspell of unbinding. All a demon could do was call. He had called; he couldn’t make himself heard and wasn’t answered. He couldn’t go down into the city, and no matter what he threatened, he wouldn’t go back to the mountains leaving Moth restless and evasive behind him. The Old Great Gods drove her. He didn’t think she would ally herself with whatever old comrade it was who had taken up this sick-minded cult of wizard-murder, and he didn’t think she had any ambition left to move the tides of human affairs, but—they should have gone to the temple and challenged the Lady to come out, to justify herself and face justice if she could not. Called her out, in the old Northron way, and had done with. Scouting, hah. Moth was working herself into a state of paralysis again, as she had hunting Tamghiz, and that she had once loved the man, and that he had been working spells against them to keep them wandering, she said, had been some excuse, but here, no. What mercy for such a butcher and an oppressor of men, whatever friendship there had been once between you? They had come to carry out the Great Gods’ justice; they should do so and be gone, and maybe Lakkariss would then leave them in peace another score or century of years. They could retreat to the north, to the pines and some loon-haunted lake.

To the south, the unreachable white peaks of the Pillars of the Sky floated, a distant dream of snow, above the blue of their slopes, fading again into blue. Even in the deep gullies of Gurhan’s hill the day was already hot. Mikki was making for a cool gully where a trickle of water found its way down an old, man-made channel when a deer leapt up almost at his feet. A small deer. A decently supper-sized deer, and surely after dark it would be safe to make a fire, when night would hide their smoke. He wheeled about after it, crashing through thickets of raspberry cane and hazel, down steep ferny plunges and up through poplars again, to where the ground was broken and treacherous, all rubble beneath the deceptive green, and the pillars of the palace porch stood like survivors of a forest fire. The deer bounded lightly through it all, not breaking a sapling-thin leg in a crevice as it ought to have, and darted away into the woods beyond with a taunting flash of its tail, but he knocked some ill-balanced stone loose and started a rockfall, clatter and rumble into an unseen opening, and had to swerve and land stumbling, nearly twisting a shoulder, when he smelt almost too late the rank scent of blistering blister-vine at his feet. By the time he recovered, the deer was gone and he was already panting, dizzy with running in the heat. Bad idea. The Salt Desert had almost killed him; he should have learnt from that. He didn’t belong in the cursed south.

It took most of the rest of the day, circling the ruin, stalking through the thick woods of precipitous western slopes, to run down his deer again. He gutted it where he had killed it and ate what offal was worth eating, dragging the carcass back to the camp on the far side of the hill, his mind running on roast collops of venison and stewed marrowbones, and whether there would be much left worth drying over what smoke they dared; it was not a large deer at all. He could probably finish it before it went off. Pity they wouldn’t have time to cure the hide, as well. Wasteful. He was tired of wandering.

He climbed the dyke around the priestly ruins with the weary contentment of homecoming after a fair day’s labour. No one to greet him. Moth wasn’t back, but he’d known that by the absence of her scent. No sign of Storm, though, and it was hard to lose a large and very solid horse, however dead, in a small enclosure. He dropped the deer by their fire-pit and sniffed the air. There was too much bone about this place to distinguish Storm, and besides, he and the butchered deer reeked of blood. Flies were settling on the both of them.

“Styrma?” he called, unease growing. “Hey, horse?” No ghost-shaping crashed like a boar out of the tangled cornel trees to give him an indignant and unhorselike glower.

Lakkariss was where he had left it, shoved under grapevine along a ruined wall a few courses high. Nothing had disturbed the camp, human or beast.

He found the horse-skull in the far corner where poplars had invaded the fruit-thicket; it lay amid trampled ferns. The marks of an unshod horse in the dirt were real enough, but Storm was a bone-horse, spell and memory bound to his skull. That he was not mere bone-memory, and that he seemed to grow in cunning and will every time Moth drew him into the world again, was not usual, but he was still only a bone-horse, one of the less sinful necromancies, and without Moth’s own will behind the beast, he was nothing even a hungry dog would bother with.

Mikki nosed at the skull. The rune, drawn in blood between the eyes, was brown and faded, with older traces staining beneath it. Impossible to say when it had fallen to the ground. Ghosts he could see, but Storm wasn’t a true ghost, lingering trapped in the world. There was nothing he could call, and the horse could hardly answer if he did.

He prowled down towards the menagerie, and then back and down the much more overgrown path of many stairs that led down to a fallen gateway and the blind end of a shabby street into Silvergate Ward, but did not find Moth returning by either route. Methodically he rolled in the mould of fallen leaves beneath the trees some way from the priests’ compound to clean the drying, sticky blood from his coat and end the torment of the flies and then in the dust of the path from the menagerie, which finished the job. He drank from the trickle of water that came down the bottom of the gully beneath Gurhan’s cave and cached the deer high in a poplar in Storm’s favourite corner of their camp. Paced again, waiting, feeling the tide of night gathering in his blood. The shadows grew too slowly, darkness pooling in their enclosed dell, but the sun, hidden behind the rise of the hill, still struck fire on the crest of the hill above.

No Moth. When he sought, he did not feel her, like distant sun warming the blind and seeking face, in the city at all. She was not dead. He would know if she were dead, how could he not, when she was sun and moon and the throne of his heart? But she was gone, and he did not think it was by her own will; she had said she would return by evening, and of all the world, Ulfhild Vartu would not break faith with him. Even in the small things. Perhaps especially in the small, on which all else was built.

Bats flitted overhead and a fox yelped. Down in the city, the bells began to toll, the first curfew. They were early by several heartbeats. But sun did set. Moth had not returned, and when he shut his eyes, not even thinking, just reaching . . . she was not there. So. As methodically as he had cleaned his fur and stashed the deer against later need, deliberation and careful movement keeping the urge to run shouting and roaring well leashed, he found his tunic and his double-bitted axe.

Better to be a man breaking curfew than a beast by daylight. He would probably get farther before he had to fight. Fewer people about, as well. He took the path down to Silvergate Ward, knowing only that he had to go north from there, through several wards and gates, but that the gates within the city were never closed, where they existed at all.

He still smelt of deer’s blood. Probably he had blood yet in his beard. It didn’t much bother him. Anyone close enough to see was going to have other things to worry about.

Two patrols of street guard had not seen him, a demon passing wrapped in night; one had, but Mikki had swarmed to the top of a yard wall and gone away over porches and galleries into another street and left them shouting and ringing their handbells far away. The temple, when he found it, could be nothing else, a silent wall, a gatehouse where strangely nervous guardsmen stood together in the red light of pitch torches, hands too tight on the shafts of their spears, twitching at shadows. Mikki went over and found beyond the wall a crumbling cliff-face, dropping into a shadowed dell, easy enough to scramble down. He dropped lightly to his feet, axe in hand, in what seemed to be a garden, cool and sweet-scented with herbs. A patrol of ten soldiers passed, murmuring and too tightly huddled together. A gap in the wall took him into a stone-paved courtyard, narrowly avoiding another patrol, and he passed in quick succession through a musty-smelling hall given over to storage of books bound and in scrolls, and a bath-house, empty, its pool dark and still, its rooms smelling of human sweat and soap and oil. There seemed to be guards everywhere here, marching in clattering patrols or standing sentry duty at corners and alleyways and the doors of buildings, where lamps still burned behind the screened windows and every now and then a shadow paused, looking out. The place looked as though it thought itself under siege. No sign of Moth. Mostly he managed to avoid the temple guard by scaling the walls between courtyards. Once, growing frustrated, he knocked one on the head from behind and dropped his partner with a blow to the jaw as he turned. That got him through into a narrow alley alongside a massive, dark hulk of a building, beyond which he could see torchlight.

Quiet as a cat, hah. Something had certainly stirred up the temple. He headed for the torchlight. In a sunken courtyard, a handful of guardsman . . . armoured priests . . . no, walking corpses in scale armour, stood before the smashed door of a squat, domed building.

A broken door and the air of a holy place beyond, guarded by a necromancer’s slaves? That was his road.

“Damn it, wolf,” he muttered, and strode down into the courtyard. By the time the necromantic guards reacted, drawing weapons, swords and short staves, he was running.