The Leopard (Marakand) (43 page)

Holla-Sayan ought to be sleeping. He felt as if he could have slept even propped against a rock. But sleep wouldn’t take him. He folded himself around Gaguush, brushing lips over neck, but she didn’t stir again. She was so damned tired, she complained. Nobody had told her being pregnant made you so tired. Nobody had told her morning-sickness could last all day.

Nobody, including herself, had expected her to end up pregnant now, to be having her first baby when most women were having their last. She had been divorced as barren when she was, in Holla-Sayan’s Westgrasslander opinion, too young to have been married anyway. If she had ever pined for children in all the years since, she had never let on to him, and he had been her lover, off and on, since he had come over the Kinsai-av from the Western Grass and been hired into her gang. On their last trip south from At-Landi he had finally persuaded her to cross the river, to stand with him before his god Sayan, and, even more importantly, his mother and father and brothers and their wives and their sons and a scatter of other kinsfolk, to marry him. Going up into the mountains to Lissavakail to tell the goddess Attalissa and their friend Bikkim, her mortal husband, had been Gaguush’s idea, which he had taken to pointing out whenever she tried to blame him for her current state.

“My blessings,” Attalissa had said. “It’s about time.” She had kissed Gaguush’s forehead and winked at Holla. “Take good care of her, Blackdog. She’s earned it, putting up with you.”

They were carrying only Gaguush’s own goods, and some for kin of Varro’s the Northron was acting as agent for, not escorting any merchants, so they had lingered longer than a caravan could usually afford to, honoured guests of the temple. Holla-Sayan had fled temple and town after two days to run wild on the mountain, rejoining the gang only as they left. He was not Attalissa’s Blackdog any longer, and if the man he had been was glad to know his foster-daughter well and happy, that man had been possessed by an enslaved and soul-damaged spirit, and now that they were—he was—something whole and entire, and
free
, neither part of his twinned soul was particularly glad to be so near the goddess for long. The rest of the gang, those who had survived the battle at Lissavakail, enjoyed the leisure and the luxury of heroes, the goddess’s chosen companions in her exile, her saviours.

But now they were come at last to the caravanserai suburb of Marakand in the rift between the Malagru and the Pillars of the Sky, and Gaguush, who had thought she was poisoned by bad water or falling into some desperate illness, had finally, snarling and cursing, agreed with Tihmrose and Thekla, the other two women of the gang. She was, miraculously, pregnant. And it was, of course, all Holla-Sayan’s fault.

“I certainly hope so,” he had said to that as they loaded up just this morning, out in the Stone Desert, for the climb to the pass of Marakand. He’d had to duck a flying halter. “Is it so bad?” he had dared to ask. His own reaction was an urge to wander around grinning like an imbecile, singing happily and telling everyone he knew, an urge he heroically resisted as liable to result in things heavier or sharper than halters coming his way. “Gaguush, how was I to know Attalissa would decide you—we—needed a child? It’s not as if she asked me, and you can’t expect me to know what she’s thinking.”

“Of course I can’t, you hardly talk to her anymore and after six bloody years hardly letting her out of your sight—”

He couldn’t try to explain that to her. The gang didn’t understand, really, what he had been. What he had become since.

“Don’t stand there trying to look so sympathetic, you don’t understand, you can’t understand, you’re a bloody
man
. . .”

She ended up clutching him, sobbing on him till his shirt was wet through, while the rest of the gang pretended not to see.

He had untangled Gaguush’s words from the sobs, all choked in his shirt, eventually. Simply. “I’m scared, Holla.”

Afraid of the responsibility of a child, after so long resigned to childlessness. It was as life-changing as a death. And afraid, naturally enough, of all that could go wrong, and did go wrong, far too often. “I don’t think Attalissa would have wished your death on you,” he said, and hoped—trusted, because Attalissa was still Pakdhala too, still the girl he and the gang had raised—that the goddess had seen so far ahead. Gaguush seemed less jagged with nerves after that reassurance.

“We could call her Pakdhala, if she’s a girl,” she had even suggested, when they made up their bed among the bundles of Northron furs and amber and sea-ivory in this upper room of old Master Rasta’s caravanserai. They had an appointment come morning with a Family Xua elder, who would probably take the lot, though it would mean a day’s hard bargaining to persuade the man of that.

“We could not.” Holla knew she hadn’t been serious. “Try again.”

She had fallen asleep muttering over names.

In the night, colour washed out of her tattoos. The jagged Black Desert geometry in red and black made a pattern different than what daylight showed, to vision that wasn’t human in the night, which saw the flow of life in her, the memory of stone in the pigment, echoes of desert, sun, snow, in the blanket woven of camel’s wool. He ran a hand down the curve of her side, but she still didn’t stir, so he pulled the scattered bedding over her and rolled away, chin on arms. He couldn’t sleep and wished that either he could, or that Gaguush would wake up for company, because then he could be distracted from worrying, at least about things that shouldn’t be any concern of a landless caravan-mercenary. Even a heated debate about baby names, if nothing else was on offer . . .

When they’d ridden in that afternoon, grey with desert dust, the camels’ long strides swinging up the road with the same even pace at which they’d left snowy At-Landi in the north, they had found the suburb stirring like a trampled hill of ants. The caravanserais and coffeehouses and taverns were all talking of nothing but the Lady, who, following the assassination of her Voice by Praitan rebels and traitors, had left her well at last the day before. There was more than a little doubt in the suburb, at least among the folk of the road, of the divinity of the beautiful girl the Marakanders were in such a ferment over, though some of them had gone into the city the previous day to see her, as she rode in a procession through the wards of the city.

Attalissa had never felt there was any goddess in Marakand. Holla-Sayan wished the caravan had arrived a day earlier, so that he could have seen the alleged goddess. There was something lingering in the air of the city that he’d never . . . smelt . . . felt . . . before. Not here, at any rate. It took him back to the temple gate-tower at Lissavakail, with Tamghat on the shore. The same scent of ashy stone and tang of metal . . . no threat to Attalissa, who was not his any longer. It had not even been he who stood there, but Otokas, who had been the Blackdog’s host before him. It was the scent of Moth, of himself, maybe. Not even a scent. He simply had no words. If he shut his eyes, he thought,
fire, iron, ice, starlight
. It had ebbed with the coming dusk, a fresh breeze off the mountains blowing it away.

It was not the air of a god of the earth.

So what, then, had come out of the temple’s sacred well to ride through the city?

“Devils take it.” Holla-Sayan could laugh at the oath even as he whispered it, groping for his clothes and his sabre.

Gaguush flung out an arm, reaching for him.

“Can’t sleep,” he whispered over her. “I’m going out to run in the dark.”

She’d heard that often enough before, this past year. “Don’t eat anybody,” she mumbled, without ever fully waking. Old joke by now, and a bad one, but she couldn’t say,
I love you, come back safe, what’s bothering you?
—not Gaguush. He kissed her cheek and left her.

No curfew in the suburb. The caravanserai master’s own porter let him out the little door set in the greater gate with a nod and thought whatever she might think about a man creeping out from his wife’s side in the night. Not her business to think. There were men and women still out and about by the light of the moon, just past full, caravaneers, mostly, and mostly, from the smell of them, on their way back from taverns. He kept his head down, avoided any noisy clusters, and left the main spread of caravanserais and inns behind, passing the Gore where the city’s paupers were buried and the pens of the various dealers in beasts. Watchdogs growled warning at, not of, him but did not bark alarm. Horses snorted and stirred as he passed. Camels were more phlegmatic, grumbling where they lay. He dropped down into the ravine where it curved against the road, startled a pair of feral swine and followed their pattering hoofbeats along a path through dense willow-scrub. Holla-Sayan found the hard-beaten path used by guardsmen of the Riverbend Gate, patrolling for rebels or thief-gangs or whatever they thought might lurk there beneath the trees. The wall of the temple precinct was high; it would take the dog to leap it, but buildings backed onto the ravine and there was a faint old scent, diffused by rain. Not human. Rancid olive oil. Puzzling. He went exploring up the stone ledges and found a door beneath bruised leaves. Recently oiled, and it wasn’t even locked. He slipped inside.

There had been humans in this house, or whatever it was, but not in the past couple of days. The deep well was a great underground pool with a shrine of some kind over it, according to his friend Judeh, whose father had been a priest of the Lady before his death in the earthquake. He wouldn’t find the well in this outbuilding but more centrally, yet . . . here was a door, and a faint cooler air seeped beneath it. He opened it. As he had thought, the air of a damp cellar gusted up to meet him: musty staleness, rotten wood, musky beast, scent that was not scent but memory of cool green, earth and leaf, pines. Blood and, faintly, humans.

Her.

The Blackdog plunged snarling down the stairs, claws slithering, marking the stone. Changing shape was only an echo of the bone-cracking agony it had been when he was human and possessed, or maybe it was that, chest shattered, mortal body half-consumed and remade in the fire of the devil’s soul, the pain didn’t have such great weight anymore. He still didn’t shift form except when the dog was strong, the wordless passions of the wounded and broken devil’s soul too much to shape to coherency, or the threat too great or too sudden for spear or sabre to quell. A cellar, deserted, cluttered with abandoned baskets and broken shelves and jars, squeaking mice, but another stair, narrower, led deeper, to where the walls were stained with pale lines of lime, and damp seeped through the cracked corners. It was all abandoned, rooms empty save for some mouldering, rotting wood, whatever furniture or tool it had once been long past knowing. The scent of her was strong, and very recent. Blood, too, and terror, and diseased flesh. The scent of the woman was before him, running ahead of her on the rising air, up through a narrow, stone-cut passage that sloped down before levelling out. The floor was damp and uneven, lightless. He could call up a light, though Holla-Sayan was no wizard. The Blackdog did such things, odd powers half-remembered. He flung light ahead of him, silver, hunting streaks of fire. The stone had its powers and life, and he would not trip or run into walls, but true vision made the world real.

She was ahead of him, a pale wisp staggering forward under the weight of a large man who sagged against her, arm over her shoulder, head hanging. His snarl rose to a singing howl, and the arrowing streaks of light circled like live things, falcons stooping, showing her gaping face as she looked up, screamed, and hurled the man away from her.

She didn’t run but fell to her knees, gasping as if punched below the ribs, a hand up to shield her face. “Go back—run!” was her first coherent shriek, more of a croak, and then, “Leave him! Just me, he’s nothing to do with me, Holla-Sayan, let him go—Old Great Gods, please . . .”

The Blackdog came to a skittering stop, and the man, who had fallen behind her, came crawling back. A caravaneer, but he smelt of smoke, not camels, and blood, and pus, and with a shaking hand he tried to scratch what looked like Nabbani characters on the floor, while the silver light faded to something tenuous and slow, winding around them, circling the Blackdog, fading to rest on his fur, like a snowfall.

“Can’t run,” the man said. “Go. I’ll hold it here.” But whatever he was trying to build was like a weak breeze pushing against an ancient tree, and the Blackdog surged forward, grown to the size of a yearling yak, a paw obliterating the crooked marks. He shouldered the strange wizard sprawling aside. The woman made no move to defend herself, only shivered, huddled small, staring up at him. She might have tried to speak, but her teeth chattered beyond controlling.

He could grab her by the throat like a rat. One shake, hurl her into the wall. She’d left Bikkim lying with his throat cut, and if it hadn’t been her hand on the knife, it had been done by her order and her will. That Bikkim had survived was no lessening of the treachery. She’d bespelled Holla’s friends into trusting her, bound his Pakdhala helpless through wizardry and handed her over, sacrifice to a devil who would have consumed her to take on godhead himself.

She shivered like a rabbit and did nothing but wait.

Holla-Sayan flowed back into man’s form, brushing the light from his hair, flicking it off into a hovering fog, and with his sabre’s point under her chin forced her shaking to her feet.

“Ivah,” he said, and it was still half the wordless dog’s snarl.

Nour came stupidly trying to defend her, trying to scribble some syllables of defence, and the dog swelled into something twice the size of any natural hound and spurned the spell with a paw that looked taloned like a lion’s. Shadow roiled, and he was the man Ivah knew, with a greenish peridot fire still blazing in his eyes, as if he were some shell encasing light, a lantern only, but the steel against her throat was real enough, and she staggered to her feet obedient to its pressure as he rolled light into a silver mist hanging about them in the air. A Westgrasslander caravaneer, dark-brown hair in the many braids of the desert road, tattooed owls curving from temples down under the eyes, snakes coiling on his cheeks, a hint of the cheetahs twining and knotting on his forearms visible on the backs of his hands.