The Leopard (Marakand) (49 page)

“Leave you here,” Mikki said, each word a grunt with his stride.

“No.” Great Gods, no, she needed to be far away, to have run far, far, sold her services to the emperor of Nabban, who might or might not be her grandfather, to be some dutiful, useful, obedient, unthinking servant of power, the weight of decision deferred to broader shoulders. “Find me a corner you can defend.”

Damned fool.
That was Holla-Sayan, the words, not the sound of his voice but the flavour of him, somehow, forced into her head.
Keep down and hold on, then.

He gave no warning, and the fools were maybe the outward-facing soldiers who only gaped and then shouted and thrust back into the threefold ranks of their fellows, starting a panic that at first had no idea where the danger lay. He leapt on a man, knocking him flat, grabbed the one beside and hurled him by his spear-arm. By then the whole rigid line had broken up into screaming confusion. One shouted, trying to rally them, but they were panicked as a mob of children. Her father would have executed half of any troop of warriors who broke like that at the first sign of the enemy as an example to the others. Or had one half execute the other. The Blackdog singled out the shouting commander, a lieutenant’s single black ribbon on his helmet, and brought him down by the throat. Ivah shut her eyes as Mikki took the shortest way through, which was over the officer’s still-thrashing body. They were both sprayed with his blood.

Holla-Sayan and Mikki hesitated then, slowing, maybe discussing something silently. The street here was deserted, but now doors opened, a wary crack here, another. A straggle of people emerged from a wineshop and sidled along the wall until they were past the demon; then they ran, scattering in twos and threes once they were beyond the line the temple guard had held. Over-Malagru tribesmen, Ivah thought . . . She forced her mind to focus, to be ready for some spear or arrow. The guards themselves had mostly taken refuge in an alleyway.

“Get indoors!” some shrill-voiced one among them shouted, as more people emerged. “Inside, in the Lady’s name. The Red Masks are coming.”

And then you’ll be sorry . . . ? He didn’t seem willing to enforce his own orders now, and that alone started a rush down the road to the west. Screams broke out, closer to the city. Mikki leapt forward, Holla-Sayan keeping just a little ahead. Here the street was deserted again, and five-man patrols of temple guard stood scattered along it. She wouldn’t have expected the suburb to be so tractable, but the Voice had only ever condemned wizards and rebels against the Lady. If you weren’t that, what did you have to fear, so long as you scurried indoors from the Red Masks and their divine terror? You could emerge later and tell yourself,
Well, anyway, I’m safe, and they brought it on themselves . . .

Smoke rose away to the north-east, and another plume, nearer, just off the road. The screaming came from there, like nothing human. They swerved that way.

A man on his knees in the dust, alone. A dead Marakander lay before a caravanserai’s gateway, a cudgel by his hand. The porter, no doubt. The double leaves of the door had been thrust inward, torn from their hinges, but were dragged back into place and wedged with their own bars, wedged closed from outside, and a sign scrawled on the gate in charcoal.
Traitors
, it said. Ivah thought hazily that she smelled the scorched air of wizardry, like a lightning strike, and wondered at that, because she had never noticed magic had a smell before. She could see it, too, like light on the edge of vision, colour without a name. The eyes of the horse of the sky, burning. Delirious. Raving in her weakness. It was the caravanserai burning. The screaming was nothing human. Some beast in terror of its life.

“Get up.” Holla-Sayan, human, had the kneeling man by the shoulder. “Come help me.”

The man looked up at them, eyes as empty as death. “They took her,” he said.

Blood matted his scalp, soaked down his desert-braided hair and stained the half of his face. Salt Desert tattoos.

A patrol of temple guard came nearer but only to huddle in the shadow of a porch, bristling with spears but advancing no farther.

“Mikki . . .”

“I can get down,” Ivah said, but Mikki shook his head and lumbered to the door, muttering something about his axe. A few swipes of his paws clawed the jamming boards away and they forced the broken gates. The wooden galleries of the caravanserai burned, and a stack of fodder smouldered, while men and women passed water from the central watering trough. Bodies had been left where they had fallen, a Salt Desert woman, a Black Desert man, a Marakander boy, a dog. Horses and camels were going mad with terror of the smoke, but it seemed the folk of the place might get it out.

“Dog!” Mikki bellowed. The temple guard had gathered courage to charge them. They scattered and ran as Holla-Sayan shifted form again. Someone within shouted at the man kneeling in the street, too, cursing him for bringing a wizard among them, for even trying to fight, for trying to follow and leaving them to be sealed in and burned.

“Fools,” Mikki grumbled under his breath, and then roared, “Call yourselves free folk of the road? There’s nothing out here now but coward temple guard. Hiding like slaves and children while your comrades are dragged away to die . . . Where are the damned Red Masks, dog? They’ve been here. The stink of them’s everywhere.”

Away down the lane to the south, quartering back and forth
, Holla-Sayan said.

“Come!” Ivah shouted at the kneeling man as they swerved around him, slowed now to a careful stalking pace, sniffing the air, reaching with whatever other inhuman senses they had. “Come and fight them!” She didn’t think the caravaneer heard and what would he think, a mad Grasslander riding a bear? What use would he be, anyway?

The lane was narrow, and every door marked with a sign in charcoal, a hasty “Clean.” Clean of wizards. They were searching house by house in the area the temple guard held, and—and a hole-in-the-wall herbalist’s burning, smoke pouring from its reed-thatched roof and “traitor” written again on its door, which was ajar. Holla-Sayan shouldered it wider, backed out, nose wrinkling.

“All dead,” Mikki said. “Old woman and a young man and children.”

Burning where they found what they sought, which might prevent folk opening their doors even to their neighbours, after they had been searched once, in case the guard came back. More temple guard watched the street but fled before the Blackdog. Why bother dying? The Red Masks would deal with them. The lane looped back to the main road and there, dragging two bodies now, a woman and an old man, strode Red Masks.

They paused and turned, horrible to see, a unity.

“Down!” Mikki roared and stood erect, so Ivah slid down over his side and somehow landed on her feet, her back to a wall, knees shaking. A corner, as she’d asked for, where a stone house abutted a caravanserai wall. She hadn’t meant it literally, but what did she expect, an impregnable tower?

Holla-Sayan was a man again, but his eyes belonged to nothing made of flesh and bone. “They’re coming,” he said hoarsely. “I think they’ve noticed us. Someone has.”

Ivah swallowed painfully. Her lips bled when she tried to speak, so she nodded. She was a fool. She couldn’t do this.

A sudden surge of people poured by, a house marked “Clean” emptying, heartened by the flight of the nearest temple guard or panicked past breaking by the Red Masks’ turning back. Their cries were empty of meaning, a flock of birds, wheeling and rising. She shut her eyes and saw them, black, flowing from the grass, seeking the blue, turning on the wind. Fell to her knees and felt Holla-Sayan seize her arm, shook her head. She couldn’t stand; she was too weak. Better to be on the ground to start with than to fall. There was nowhere safe to run anyway. She draped two of the loops of bloodied bark-twine over her shoulders, ready to take up when she needed them, wound her hands into the other, felt the characters in blood on wrists and forehead warm as the touch of the sun.

I am
, she told herself, falling into her mother’s Nabbani.
I am strong. I have no gods, but I am of the Grass and the wind of the grass danced for me as a horse sky-silver, and my eyes and no other saw. I am of Nabban that I have never seen, and the strength of the river and the mountain of eternal snows is in the truth of my tongue and the womb that bore me. I am . . . a thread of fire in the heart of the ice, even that, I am. He carried me on his shoulders, so I could see over the grass, and he was my father and I loved him. And all these strengths are in me, and I make them a wall against the devil of Marakand.

She opened her eyes, weaving figures, seeing her fingers only hazily, as if they were shadows in a dark mirror. Terror. The Red Masks carried terror like a stench. It struck at the animal inside the head, the little, scared, trembling animal that knew a mighty predator stooped over it. She wove encircling river and fortress mountain, kestrel and the wind, stone and grass. That was her safety. And the mountains of the southern fence below the deserts, the Pillars of the Sky, and the forests, because they guarded her now, and Holla-Sayan’s hand rested on the crown of her head.

This place I am. This place is mine. They cannot touch me here.

She heard boots pounding, opened her eyes on advancing Red Masks. Two of them, while four stood over the prisoners flung to the ground.

The second strand, and she had to use teeth as well as fingers to pluck and pass and turn. Mikki’s low growling rose to a snarl, and he was gone from before her, charging out, swiping, crushing, and wheeling back, and one Red Mask lay broken. Another, fallen, staggered to its feet again.

“Break the neck,” Holla-Sayan suggested with remote interest.

The four who had hung back charged now, senseless prisoners abandoned. Sullen fires played over the eyeslits of their helmets. A dog within some building whined piercingly, and a baby wailed. Ivah was able to look at the Red Masks, not to fail and faint. But she felt the pressure of their fear pushing at her, pushing back her defences, gnawing like rats on a corpse not quite dead, and her breath quickened. She forced it to slow again, but her fingers shook and she faltered, dropped a doubling of the thread. No. She could sense the shape of them, the unity of them in what made them and bound them, see it as it might be if it were a Grasslander weaving, too vast, too manifold to comprehend, and yet a little . . . she echoed it. Fear. Drew in the third loop, wove it under and over, and they rushed forward, six together and the wounded one limping slow behind them, because Holla-Sayan and Mikki would not come out.

She saw what followed only dimly. The Blackdog ripped them from their Lady’s web, and Mikki turned back and forth before her, so sometimes there was only a golden-furred flank and sometimes a great paw and once, twice, red-dyed boots and a white staff burning, a desert sabre striking when a Red Mask forced past the Blackdog, but the demon was always there behind him, between Ivah and her death. Claws raked or teeth tore and like the dog, Mikki dragged them dead from the chains that bound them. Ivah was knotting, twisting, tangling her threads now. She forced herself to slow down, to pick carefully, thumb and fingertip, sobbing with every breath, hands shaking. She felt as if she were being beaten down to the earth and yet was numb. There were more of them, more than six destroyed, and yet more came, wasps drawn to defend their hive-mates, to kill by a hundred stings. Mikki stumbled, sides heaving, head hanging, in a moment when she saw the Blackdog fall, but he rose up shaking free of them, and she had it, the shape of that one spell; she caught it and held it, and the threads of it led away though all the nest of them, to the queen herself.

The spell could be rebuilt, word by word, but not quickly; it was a song, she thought, in its making, but she saw it as cat’s-cradle, and cat’s-cradle was what she held to the sun in the moment when she was kestrel, between sky and grass.

She called fire, with the character held in her mind, no hand free to write it. Fire answered. White fire, the light of the stars. Her ribbons of bark burned, and the Nabbani characters in blood on her skin burned with them, cool as water, as starlight on snow. Her cat’s-cradles fell away into ash, and Holla-Sayan was again a man, slashing a Red Mask down, shouting something. He had been trying to tell her something for a while now, Ivah thought, but she had walled herself against him or made him into her wall, and she had not been able to hear till he spoke aloud.

“Wizards,” he said. “We might still save them. You’ve done it, haven’t you? The light on them’s gone out.”

She nodded, tried to find words, and even her whispers broke, rasping and choked as sand in the throat, swallowed and tried again, managing, “The fear’s broken. That’s all. Still can’t kill them.”

“All?” he said, and something else maybe, to Mikki, that she could not catch, but he was a dog again, loping away around a dune of bodies. Nothing stirred, except the hem of a red cloak in the wind.

And a man, Salt Desert tattoos, bloodied head, with a spear in his hands, running up from behind and nearly flattened by Mikki.

“Where have they taken them?” he asked. Two more men and a woman drifted up. They all looked ragged, tattered and beaten; her eye was seeing not the body but something of the heart. Tattered and beaten but on their feet again. They smelt of smoke. Caravaneers, armed and grim. “My lady?” the stranger asked. “They took my wife. Where?”

Ivah pulled herself up by Mikki’s flank. What did they take her for? Why ask her? She wanted to weep. She had nothing left. The demon turned his head to nuzzle her shoulder. For a moment she leaned on him, face buried in his fur.

“They had her there,” she said. “I didn’t see . . . more came.”

“Some took the prisoners and ran,” said Mikki. “We can follow. You can’t fight the Red Masks.” The desert man didn’t flinch. His mouth thinned. He meant to. “But you’ll stand when they come. This wizard of the Grass has torn their terror from them. Set your spears against the temple guard. They’ve hidden behind the Red Masks long enough. Ivah, up.” He crouched, and she mounted again, thinking, no, no, she couldn’t, not again, she’d done enough. But there wasn’t any such thing as enough, was there?