The Leopard (Marakand) (31 page)

Zora Tu’usha caught the edge of the well and vaulted out, to land gracefully on the lip of stone. She had trained grace into nerve and sinew, after all. It did not desert her now, and the strength of her body was . . . deceptive, she decided, was the word. Deceptive for those who thought strength was meant only to be used for force, for the sword’s blow or the spear’s strike. She thrust wet hair dripping back from her face and smiled around at her priests and priestesses. Shocked, silly, stupid faces.

“Now,” she said, “
now
you hear the Lady’s voice rather than the Voice of the Lady.”

“Zora, dear,” the Mistress of the Dance said, hesitating, “Revered Voice, will you let the dear sisters take you to your apartments now?”

“To my prison, you mean?” She had never been comfortable with the way Revered Shija watched her, Shija who had never married, who laughed and made jokes about the clumsiness and sweatiness of men, even when the boy dancers were there to hear.

“In the Lady’s name, put a robe on her and take her away, if the Lady has no more to say to us,” said Rahel. “Use the smoke again if you have to. That’s certainly not the Lady’s voice or the Lady’s manner; it’s the girl, taking undue advantage of the honour done her to put herself above us. Shija, since neither Revered Mina nor Revered Dur is in any fit state to resume their duties, I suggest you stay with the Voice for now. The Lady may speak again, when her Red Masks return with the priest and the wizard.”

“Oh, I think not,” Zora said. “Did you not listen? Do you not hear, when I speak? I am the Lady. My voice is my own, and no priestess now will stand between me and my folk.”

“Zora, dear, please,” protested the Mistress of the Dance. “Be a good girl, Revered Voice, and come with me.” And she reached to put a hand on Zora’s arm.

Tu’usha hissed and shaped the ghost of her sword from the air, sliced off the offending hand.

“Do not any of you think to lay a finger on me again!”

Shija didn’t even scream. She clutched her spurting wrist to her breast, mouth stupidly agape, and sank grey-lipped to her knees. Tu’usha frowned down at her a long moment, resting the sword tip-down on the floor. The priests bunched back. She raised her head and glared, no smile now. They froze. The Beholder of the Face, Rahel, was the first to bow, deeply, abjectly, Ashir only a breath behind her. Some even sank to their knees, faces to the ground.

“Zora . . .” Shija whispered, staring up at her. Tu’usha slashed her throat and, hoisting her sodden hem in one hand, sprang lightly over the pooling blood, letting her sword dissolve again to memory as she did so.

“Come,” she ordered her priests. “Leave that; the Red Masks will deal with it.” She started for the stairs. Her champion took a torch to light her way, preceding her. She swept the priests after her with a gesture, the Right Hand and the Beholder behind her. “Ashir,” she said over her shoulder, “after I eat and find fitting attire I will ride out and see my city, present myself to my folk. Arrange it. Find me a suitable horse, and one for my champion as well.”

“Your . . . my Lady?”

“The captain of my Red Masks, old man. There used to be a festival procession, didn’t there? At harvest or some such thing? Weaving through all the wards, ending up at the senate palace? Yes, I’ll address the folk there this afternoon. See that the word goes out. Yes,” she agreed with herself. “That will serve.” Careful. Zora ordered her thoughts.
We do babble, these days, don’t we?
The palace was destroyed, she had not forgotten that, but a long, broad flight of steps climbed up the steep hillside to its portico, now a long platform of tilted paving slabs and the stumps of the black pillars. That would be a fitting place from which to speak. Her folk could fill the plaza, and all would be able to see her, to hear, to worship their Lady. Yes.

Her champion . . . He had not quite died in the well. Some goddess claimed him to a sacred service and held him in life for it, but that didn’t really matter. The soul was what mattered, and the soul was hers. Easier to take it from a dead man, that was all; it was not quite necromancy and not quite possession, but she held him, and she did not think the strangely knotted soul of him would reassemble itself to anything of the man he had been, to fight her. The only strange thing was that he was wizard, and she could not reach his wizardry for her use. Something to do with his goddess. She would find a way around that in time, and meanwhile, she had plenty of others.

She would have more soon. She had lain quiet within Marakand long enough. Now the folk could see their Lady ride among them. Now their Lady could command them in her own voice, not the broken babble of her Voice. Now they would know her true strength, and love her, and worship her with their whole hearts, and she would not any longer have to walk softly, fearing the wrath of the deserts and the cities of the coast. No wizards in Marakand. Soon there would be no wizards in the suburb. The suburb was Marakand. Marakand was hers. The wizards would be hers, all hers. Soon.

Ashir, puffing, fell behind, into the crowd of priests trying to follow close on the stairs, but not too close. None, she was certain, would dare to look back at the body of the Mistress of the Dance.

Her champion did. He turned a moment on the stairs, looking back.

She frowned again, quickly smoothed it out, pushed him on with her will and almost thought she felt . . . anger, from him, quickly stifled. She touched the surface of his mind. Faint echoes, grief and anger, bright splashes of joy. That was what the mind always held. Nothing to alarm her. Perhaps he had heard some mutter she did not; his function was to guard her. He, none of them, were entirely puppets. They had some freedom to act within her will. So many senses she did not quite yet understand, that she, that Zora had not yet grown into. So many threads to hold. She would learn; she would grow into herself.

Some urgency tugged at her, but no, it was a lack of tugging, an emptiness. There were Red Masks, dead, in the city. A Red Mask slain at the Eastern Wall, the past morning; she remembered that. What could kill a Red Mask? What, in her city, could tear them from her? Fire? The ones she had sent to the Doves had burned. The Doves had burned. Oh, Hadidu. He should have had the sense to flee the city, he and all his family, years ago. She felt a sort of tired sorrow for the loss of him, the loss of all her father’s friends, but it was necessary. If she were opposed, Marakand would be nothing, a rabble ruled by a bickering council of old men and old women, who would fall over themselves in their haste to crawl to her brother’s feet when he came. The Doves burned. They were all dead, the last of Ilbialla and the Red Masks together, but the Red Masks should not have waited to be burnt to ash and bone, they should have retreated and brought their prisoners with them, they should . . . that whisper of wind, of cold, of mountain air around the walls of the city, yes, did she remember that or was it a dream of the well? A memory of her champion’s, a trailing gossamer thought, a halfling god, was it? A ghost who haunted him. No, the memory was gone. A forgotten dream. Hers? Hers-Zora’s, hers-Tu’usha’s, a dream-terror of mad Sien-Mor, a shadow of fear, of her brother grown great . . . The well held many fragments of dream.

Zora hesitated at the top of the stairs. The light from the dome’s eye was dawn-pale. How long had she floated, suspended without thought, without time, in the Lady’s waters, while Hadidu burned? An age, an age of ice, of . . . nonsense. It had been minutes, at the most, a quarter-hour. Surely the priests would have grown restive, begun to talk of dragging the sacred well for her corpse, if she had been drowned an hour or more. Surely. But they were very devout.

“The priest of the Doves is dead,” she said sadly. “Dead and lost to me. The priest of Ilbialla burned. I’m sorry for him. But the city will be safer, stronger, for it. Rahel, Ashir—today will be a day of peace, of celebration. Tomorrow . . . we shall see what comes tomorrow.”

“Yes, Lady. Lady, what of the Praitans? They’ve murdered your Voice. Your Red Masks killed the assassin, but if they go unpunished—we’ve had word the high king is gathering the tribes to march against Ketsim, your captain-general. This murder was undoubtedly done to his order. If words gets out in the city, if the folk learn that the Praitans have dared . . . And when we have only tonight put down an uprising of the loyalists of Ilbialla . . .”

Two children, taught to revere dreams, taught to wait in secret, forever and forever and forever, as she had been, later on, and they grew into fools and dreamed their parents’ dreams, never daring, because without their gods, what were they?

“When I,” she corrected gently, “have only tonight revealed a conspiracy, yes, of apostates, loyalists of the weak and forgotten gods. It was hardly an uprising against the Lady. Don’t give it more weight than it deserves.”

“You must not allow the temple to appear weak, Lady,” Rahel persevered. “They murdered your blessed Voice! Word of this will give the Praitans heart, and it will be in the suburb by tomorrow, and flowing the length of the caravan road, growing with every mile. A faithful captain could be sent with reinforcements. Captain Ketsim has clearly failed in his rule of the Catairnans, for this to have happened.”

“Do you suggest Ketsim is not a faithful captain, Revered Beholder? You don’t expect him to know what every lone Praitan plots in the night, do you?”

“He has been very lax about submitting the tribute due. As you no doubt are aware, Lady, in your wisdom and knowledge. He has not sent any message at all in a month.”

“He dreams he will be king,” Zora said sadly. Strange, how the knowledge came to her, not as vision, which she might have imagined, but just the knowing, upwelling in her heart. “Poor fool, he is only a pilotfish, feeding on the scraps.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Zora waved her away. “You will of course suggest a captain, Rahel?”

“I thought perhaps—”

“The captain of my Red Masks will ride to settle the Praitan rebellion, with a company of the Red Masks. That is all I will need.”

“The captain—” Rahel swallowed and bowed. “As you say, Revered Lady. We didn’t know there was a captain.”

She brought him forward to her side, out of the shadows. The priests moved back. As they should.

“My champion,” she said fondly, and put a hand on his arm. She felt his muscles bunch. “He will avenge the death of my beloved Voice. He will bring not only the Duina Catairna but all Praitan to kneel at Marakand’s feet.
My
high king will rule all Praitan Over-Malagru. Understand, Ketsim was a tool, and he has served. The Duina Catairna is taken, and that the Praitannec high king Durandau cannot possibly endure. He lingers only to gather his kings about him before he makes war on us in the Duina Catairna. Marakand will defeat him, and my champion will be crowned king of the seven tribes. The cities of the coast and their vassal tribes—” she waved a hand, “—can be dealt with another year. Do the kings of Praitan wear crowns? No matter, we will find the proper form, and he will be—” She shook her head, wet hair flying, and ordered her thoughts again. She must make Marakand great, and safe, and strong, yes. Enough. They did not need to know more. She understood the danger, and it sickened her; she understood what drove Tu’usha now.

“Come with me, all of you,” she ordered.

Rahel bowed, then scurried to catch up as Zora strode off again. Ashir grimly elbowed his way through the priests overtaking them, put himself at her other side. She smiled, turned to him, ignoring Rahel now.

“I’ll be a guest in your house, Revered Ashir, until the senate palace, yes, that seems fitting, can be rebuilt to provide your goddess with a suitable dwelling. And I need clothes. Not a priestess’s robes, or a dancer’s. White, I think, will be my colour now. The priests of Gurhan wore white when they walked in the festival procession.” And saffron for the Lady, and blue for Ilbialla, all the senior priests together, her father had told her.

She saw, out of the corner of her eye, Rahel’s lips move soundlessly, shaping, “Priests of—?” and pinching together again. Had she spoken that thought aloud?

“And order a meal for me, Ashir,” she said firmly, “as well as for yourself, your wife, and those senior priests and priestesses you think most deserving of the honour.”

Most useful, most loyal, most loving, least likely to dig in their heels at change and require messy decapitations in the dining hall. Zora Tu’usha trusted Ashir understood that. It would be a useful test, at any rate, to see if he did.

“Except for the under-master of the dance. He will be arranging the procession.” He was not among those who had come to find a new Voice. “Send to tell him so.”

That of her that was still Sien-Mor thought a few more priests and priestesses would have to die, before they learned to obey their Lady, but Sien-Mor had a taste for the dramatic. Sien-Mor, Zora Tu’usha thought, had always enjoyed it a little too much, when the need to hurt others arose.

“You honour us, Lady,” Revered Ashir said.

“Yes,” Zora agreed. “See you earn that honouring, if you please.”

But there was one Red Mask, one still living—she called it that—of those she had sent to the Doves. He had gone circling through the maze of alleys, watching, lest the priest flee. A wise man, he had been, and a cunning. He had that quality still. They were not utterly puppets such as Ghatai had liked to make, once upon a time. They had, if not will, if not memory, still some shape of themselves, some remnant of what she thought most valuable in them. And their wizardry, of course. Her servant brought her prisoners, now.

Wizards.

Nour.

“I will see the captain of the guard company that went to the Doves, first. And the prisoners.”

The priests looked at one another. They had not known the guards were returned, how could they?

“The prisoners have been taken to the Hall of the Dome to await the Voice,” Zora said. “But the Voice is no longer necessary. I will see them.”

Strange, to walk between the black marble pillars where she had so often danced, across the circling black-and-white mosaics of the floor that had measured her paces. The high pulpit of white marble, carved into a festival procession with priests and priestesses and offerings of fruit and grain, was for a moment a loathsome thing, the throne of Lilace’s degradation and shame.