The Leopard (Marakand) (23 page)

When the sweepers were gone and night had fallen, Ghu went on, still hugging the walls, a shadow within shadows. It was a dark-striped coat, a dark scarf. Ahj thought of such things, and the shadows had always been kind. In Greenmarket Ward he took a wrong turning, down a lane that ended not at city wall but a broken cliff, with a rubbish dump below it in the ravine. He nearly stumbled over the edge in the dark. It had begun to rain, quietly and steadily, and the air was growing swelteringly hot. Bells rang again. That would be the second curfew; some professions were allowed the first hours of the night, Ahj had said. The city was dark and mostly silent. A brief chorus of dogs down in the ravine set off barking in the streets around him, which rose and died. He shivered despite the heat. Turning away, his ankle betrayed him and he fell. He groped his way up another doorstep to sit a long moment, too long. The longer he sat, the more terribly getting up and going on loomed. He shook out the bandage and wrapped his ankle again, trying to ensure it would not fail him if he had to run. The swelling was far worse, now; his foot bloated like a frightened toad. He needed a crutch, but crawling down the cliff into the ravine in search of a bush wasn’t something he wanted to try by feel in the dark. He would end up at the bottom with a broken leg or neck.

What was he going to do, anyway? Ahjvar didn’t want him around when there was killing to be done, and he could hardly persuade him to simply abandon Marakand and what little hope Catairanach’s doubtful promise had held out. He wanted to keep the man safe, safe and his, in the ruin on the cliff’s edge by the sea, and that was hardly his right, or right at all, when it damned Ahjvar to possession, to the cycle of madness and murder. He made Ahjvar into an excuse to stay as he was, where he was, made him a refuge from . . . the vastness of what might come. He used him, that was the truth of it. And did not Ahj deserve better, out of love, out of common humanity?

Distant and deep under the temple, he could feel the presence of the thing that was not a god, though he might have taken it for godhead had he not twice in this day met a similar shape of power, and had a name that might belong to it given to him in a story. Finding Ahjvar, trying to persuade him this Voice was something beyond his ability to kill, beyond the reach of any single small goddess of the earth such as Catairanach, would simply suggest to Ahj that maybe death was within
his
reach at last.

Maybe that would be so, and if it were, did Ghu have any right to stand between him and an end, however it came? Right, no. Need, yes. He needed Ahjvar. He did. He couldn’t let him go.

Which was what mad Hyllau had thought, yes? Mine, mine, mine.

He sighed and turned back to find a street heading more towards the temple. Though how he was to get over the temple wall with a foot so swollen and blindingly painful when he put any weight on it, he didn’t know. Knock at the gate with an urgent need for prayer? That, at least, would bring him swiftly to the Voice, if it did not send him straight to the deep well. Perhaps there would be some easy stretch of wall. The ward-walls seemed half-abandoned; perhaps the temple wall would be in no better repair, or one of the patches of old ruin that crowded cheek by jowl with inhabited houses would provide some easier way to scramble up.

And then?

He shoved that thought away angrily and felt himself sliding down into childhood again. Child’s thought. Slave’s thought. Child’s words, slave’s words. Simple words for simple thoughts. Later didn’t matter. Later wasn’t his. Nothing was his but here. Now. Here and now, he wanted Ahjvar safe and away.

He’d learnt harder words and harder thoughts, and values harder to hold, maybe, and had anyone asked him, would you, will you, before they took him and said, be ours? Well, the ones who had claimed him had asked, he couldn’t pretend they hadn’t, and he’d said, yes, not understanding, maybe, what he took and what he gave. Was it fair, what they’d done? A child’s question. Most things weren’t fair, though they should be. Was it right? Was it needful, for what was right? Ghu who had been a horseboy in the stables of the high lord of all Choa, Ghu who had been Mother Nabban only knew what poor girl’s secret and sorrow, thrown into the river to drown before he’d hardly drawn breath, to be caught in the reeds and fished out wailing by a horseboy watering his charges, couldn’t say. He’d been, if not utterly a simpleton as they called him, simple enough, till he’d gotten benighted on the high slopes seeking a foaling mare in a spring snowstorm. He had come down with mare safe, and foal, and a fever the head groom had thought he’d die of. Maybe he had. The world had been broken, melted down and reforged for him, in those few fevered days when the river and the mountain’s snows had flowed together into light.

The bout of fever, the head groom said resignedly, had done simple Ghu’s wits no good at all.

He couldn’t go back to that place. Wear it as a cloak, yes, carry it as a shield upon his road, yes, but he couldn’t crawl back inside that boy. And that meant he could not go on staggering blind and thoughtless in pursuit of Ahjvar this night without thinking why he did and what he meant to do, and what greater harm he might bring to what was already set in motion, drawing the eye of the Lady, the attention of the Red Masks, upon Ahj.

He passed from Greenmarket into Templefoot Ward through a gateway with houses built over it and had to fold himself into a doorway as a patrol of five street guard came by, led by a man with a lantern on a pole. They clattered along, hobnailed sandals loud on the street’s stones, hoods pulled up against the rain, grumbling, never glancing his way. But when he went on, because he did not know what to do if he stopped now, there was a sound behind that wasn’t the noise of the guardsmen. A scuff without the ring of nails, a grunt, hastily stifled. Someone had walked into something in the dark. A moment’s hesitation. The house alongside was another old earthquake ruin; even in the night apparent as a jagged shell, barely rising above its first storey, its windows black pits and the plaster mostly flaked away, so that it hulked darkly between its paler neighbours. Door, somewhere, but he couldn’t see the shadow of it.

Thunder broke over Palace Hill to the south, streaking the street with white and black, shadows running too swiftly for the eye to catch before the night took everything again and left him blinded by the glare.

It wasn’t a knife or club that came at him out of that moment of blindness, which he’d been expecting, but a fist. He trapped it between his hands as much by luck as anything, and hopped sideways from the kick that was probably following, jerked his attacker towards himself and punched hard. He missed the face in the dark, hit solid, bony shoulder and was flung back into a wall. Playing the innocent fool didn’t work on people who attacked without warning out of the night, but he dropped to the ground anyway, not cowering but not where he was expected to move. His attacker lurched off-balance as his following punch met air and then, with a suppressed hiss, the wall. The man crashed down, his legs hooked out from under him, but before Ghu could get him pinned he rolled away, striking out as he went. He hit the swollen ankle. Ghu gasped and curled up small, for a moment unable to think. He’d been ignoring it, floating on the pain, all night; he didn’t need it brought to his attention now. He hit out in anger, then, wanting, just for a moment, to hurt, and the man, back on his feet, doubled over. Ghu swept his legs out from under him again and dug fingers into his throat. He had his forage knife out. Picking up bad habits from Ahj.

“Don’t,” he said, as the man tensed. Lightning showed the blade. His attacker held no knife. Think why. He didn’t want Ghu dead; he wanted him captive, and he was neither thief nor street guard. Someone he’d seen, briefly, this day; there was that familiarity in the feel of him, the air about him. He was the man from the kitchen of the coffeehouse; not the thin worried one, the other, who had thought something stirred and looked around for it, when Ivah led Ghu to the stairs unseen.

Ghu felt movement, the man’s arms moving stealthily, or hands, whispering under his breath. He felt the magic gathering, dropped his own knife and grabbed for hands and mouth, put the knee of his bad leg over the man’s throat instead, pressing a threat, fingers clapped to his lips over wiry beard.

“Wizard,” he whispered. “Hush. You’re from the Doves. I thought you were the guard.”

A stillness. He lifted his hand slightly. The wizard should have been trying to bite; he would have been.

The man rolled. Ghu sprang back and let him go, leaned with the wall behind him, balancing on one foot and a toe, his knife in hand again. They were washed in lightning, and he saw the man standing, wary, arms spread, a short knife now in hand. Desert-braided hair and a cameleer’s coat, not the caftan of earlier.

He waited for the thunder to die. “What do you want?” he asked. “I stole nothing from your house. I’m only looking for my friend.”

“Why call me a wizard?” Was it fear that underlay the voice?

“Because you are,” he said.

Now he knew the man’s fear, yes, in the catch of breath, the utter stillness.

“Red Mask,” the wizard said then, not even an accusation, just a whisper. Resignation, as of one who knew his own death.

“No! I’m not from the temple. Anyway, I thought they didn’t speak, or is that a lie you tell to foreigners?”

“Who knows what you do, when you lay your veil aside and creep out spying in the city?”

“I’m not from the temple,” Ghu repeated. “I only came to Marakand today. To the suburb yesterday. Truly.”

“Why come sneaking around the Doves, spying on us? Don’t deny you were there with her, and both of you hidden. I smelt her perfume cross the kitchen. I felt the air move. I should have hunted for you there and then, but I thought it was nothing, imagination, till my nephew at bedtime said a man jumped off the balcony. It took me far too long to pick up your trail, and that’s not natural, either. You or Ivah, one of you’s still hiding you.”

Ghu admitted, “I’m hard to see. I know. It doesn’t make me a Red Mask. It doesn’t make me anything. I’m not even a wizard.”

“So what are you to the lying scribe, then?”

“Nothing. No spy. The scribe hid me from the street guard.”

He saw it, felt it, rather, in the man’s gathering tension, like a bow being drawn. Ghu might be a temple spy or he might not, but now he had to die, because he, a stranger, knew there was a living wizard in Marakand.

“No,” he said. “You don’t have to do that. I’m no enemy to you or yours.”

But the man came at him, not to capture this time, and he was a caravan guard, a fighter. But the forage-knife was a wicked tool and used for butchering as much as cutting brush and green fodder. The man knew it, left him wary room till the last. He could have laid the man’s arm open as he guarded his face, but he only knocked aside the sudden slash from the darkness and punched for the arch between the wizard’s ribs with the knife reversed, the hilt a weight to knock the wind and maybe the sense out him, but the man was already rocking back and out of reach, slipping aside in the dark. The rain poured down, no thunder, just the dark curtain of the water and the night, the drumming of it loud on the stones. Ghu didn’t dare move from where he stood braced against the wall, because to fall now was to lay himself open to the wizard’s knife.

This wizard who only wanted to keep his family safe, or Ahj—did it come to that choice?

No, it was this wizard or himself. Ahj’s fate lay beyond Ghu’s grasp.

“I’m not your enemy,” he tried again. “Wizard, can’t you tell truth from lie?”

Movement he didn’t see. The knife bit, slashing a sleeve and his arm beneath. He seized the hand that held the blade and smashed it into the wall, almost easier to feel, to know where the blow came with his eyes shut rather than straining in the dark. He heard the grunt, the thin noise of the knife falling, and let go before he was jerked off balance. Wet arm, but his sleeve was wet anyway, and he hardly felt the cut. Did the man have a second knife? He didn’t follow with any second blow. Maybe he thought he’d missed. Ghu slid his own knife away to its sheath once more.

“No weapon,” he said, a bit breathless, a bit desperate, voice raised reckless over the rain. “Look, take my hands, see? Trust. For the sake of the Old Great Gods, trust me, work your spells and see that I speak the truth.”

No answer, just a rushing body. The night became desperate scuffle, Ghu grabbing the wizard as he flung himself in close, both of them on the ground, locked together. The other had the advantage there, a greater weight and resolved on killing, but Ghu was fast, at least, and had a better sense of his enemy’s body in the dark. He jerked away from the hands that closed around his throat and for a moment the uppermost body, got a thumb against the other’s eye, a grip on the edge of bone, enough to be real threat. He pinned one hand down where it could do no harm.

The other came up against Ghu’s throat, not to seize but a nail scratching, a word gasped, and there was a ringing in his ears, a muffled rushing, as if he were drowning, fainting. He let the other go, rolling to draw the knife one last time, to use it, at last, because he could not die here. The wizard’s spell might be only to hold him senseless a moment, it was not so easy as all that to kill with a simple working, but he judged the man was desperate enough to cast honour aside and kill an unconscious enemy.

The tramp of nailed sandals and of boots was abruptly louder than the rain, and he shook off whatever half-formed spell it was that slowed his movements, slid off the wizard and dragged himself to darkest shadow, tumbling down the sunken doorstep of a house, a pit of black with jumbled uneven stone. The door of the ruin. Lantern-light made hazy gold of the rain down the street to the east and the wizard came after him, a hot, blood-reeking body pressed against him, hardly even knowing he was there. The man was shaking.

Ghu felt his way up the door, which was still closed, found the latch and pressed it down, pushed with his shoulder until it opened. He laid a hand on the wizard’s shoulder, tugged him. The man had the wit left to follow silent, despite the terror near unmanning him. The door closed as softly, as silently behind them, in good shape for a ruin. Ghu put his back to it, holding it shut against any investigation. The air stank of rats and dirty humans.