The Leopard (Marakand) (44 page)

He wasn’t supposed to be a wizard. He had spoken no word, made no pattern of power in any folk’s magic. She was weeping, she thought. Stupid, and coward. Her father’s daughter shouldn’t weep, didn’t weep. But she had decided not to be her father’s daughter. She wouldn’t be shamed if her eyes wept.

Holla-Sayan blinked, entirely human now. He looked, if anything, confused, and Ivah tried to slow her panic-gasping breaths. She was going to faint and cut her own throat on the point of his sabre. Holla-Sayan lowered the blade, just enough, and Nour swayed to his feet, put his good hand to the flat of it and pushed sideways. It didn’t move.

“What have you done to him?” Holla-Sayan demanded hoarsely.

Ivah shook her head, wordless.

“She’s a wizard.” Holla-Sayan snarled the word at Nour. “She bespells trust and then betrays it. Stand away from her.”

“My friend,” Nour said.

“I didn’t,” Ivah protested. “Great Gods, Nour, I didn’t, not to you, not to Hadidu, only to make him think of offering me the room, that was all, just the once and it was so slight an impulse, it wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been half in his mind already. I needed a safe place to live, I needed to be there, to study the tomb, and he liked me before that, he wanted to like me, and I only, I only, Old Great Gods be my witness, I never betrayed you or him, it wasn’t me!’

“Know that now,” he said. “It was little Zora. Her mother’s face. Knew you’d messed about with Hadi, though.” He frowned almost drunkenly. “He wouldn’t be so stupid, otherwise, ’cept he was ha’f in love with you, ’a course, but it didn’t seem like he was getting anywhere with that.”

She fell to her knees again, bowed as one might to the emperor, face to the ground, or to an executioner and couldn’t find any words adequate. She shivered and thought, so she was a coward at the end. At least it would be the sword and not the beast.

“Bikkim lived,” Holla-Sayan said.

“Please. Nour . . .” She herself didn’t know what she meant, a plea for Nour’s forgiveness or help, or that Holla-Sayan would save him once he had killed her. Her voice trembled so the words squeaked and stammered.

“Something’s back there,” Holla-Sayan said flatly, “and it smells . . . dead.” His fingers dug into her shoulder as he dragged her to her feet. “Here.” He pushed past her, tossing his damned sabre back as though it were a stick, but she managed to snatch the hilt rather than the edge as he surged into the Blackdog’s form again, something half-mountain-mastiff, half-wolf, black and shaggy, just the faintest suggestion that for a moment he was nothing but formless darkness, a distillation of deepest night shot with starlight. The silver mist settled on him like dew and vanished.

Something dead but not rotting. Cold, bitter with a power that was not wizardry, but it smelt of wizardry as well, that trace of the earth’s magic that ran in such folk from whatever long-forgotten god-ancestor had so blessed them. The thing had been a boy once, gangly-thin, on the cusp of manhood; now it was a shell, with chains like cobweb lace binding it to some other will, and rags of its soul pinned, still struggling, to the husk, the rest lost, drifting in the dark, name gone, heart gone, memory a jumble of meaningless fragments of image, as if someone had painted the boy’s life on a beaker of glass, then smashed it and swept half the shards away. One of the fabled Red Masks, his face hidden to hide it from anyone who had known him in life. He strode along the passage, sword in one hand, a short white staff in the other. Searching for Tamghat’s thrice-damned daughter and her friend.

Sometimes the instincts of that ancient true dog, unfortunate parasitized first host to the broken devil’s soul, the anchor in the world it had taken in its dying desperation, were to be trusted. His growl rose to a snarl of rage at the wrongness of the thing, slavery beyond death and the destruction of a soul that should have long gone to the road. The Blackdog leapt, seizing the Red Mask by the throat as if he had been a terrier and the boy a rat, and hurled him into the wall and out of the web that bound him, out of the false perversion of life. The body fell and rolled, empty, nothing but a weight of bone and flesh now. The rags of the soul fled it; he waited, half hoping the boy might yet find himself, draw himself together as drops of water touch and merge, but they were lost in the dark.

Grunt and muffled curse, and the smell of fresh blood, which he had been smelling, smell of—damn it, bear.

Mikki?

“Blackdog!” the man bellowed. The dog barked, deep, angry baying, took off running again. If he’d been paying attention to anything but the scent of Ivah . . .

The bear-man was hard beset, with his back to the wall, three Red Masks at his feet, unmoving, but his own neck bled, and though one staggered, shoulder half carved away, the axe caught in the armour and slid from Mikki’s blood-slippery grip. A fallen torch still burned on the floor. Holla wove through them, grown without conscious will to the size nearly of a bear, bit through the back of a neck, smashed another into the wall. The last suddenly turned and ran. Mikki hurled his recovered axe after it and split the skull.

“One got by,” the demon gasped. “Ivah?”

Not by me, it didn’t. And I haven’t killed her yet.
He had no speech when he was the dog.

“Don’t. Moth likes her.”

Damn Moth.

Mikki came down heavily on one knee, shut his eyes a moment. “What was that, six? And I killed five getting this far. How many are there supposed to be, in all?”

“No idea,” Holla pulled himself back to man’s shape, took up the torch, and offered the demon a hand up. “Let’s get out of here. Or are you waiting for Moth?”

“Is she here?” Mikki asked. The demon limped and staggered. Sayan help him, he couldn’t carry all three of them out.

“You are, I thought she’d be too. But—” Holla-Sayan reached out, searching, “no. Did you think she was?”

“She went to the temple this morning. Scouting, she said. Quietly. Promised, quietly. Said she’d be back by evening. Wasn’t. I came to find her.”

“She’s not here. Nothing’s here. They say there’s a goddess, but where it passed through the city yesterday it smelt like a devil to me. But it’s
gone
, now.”

“So’s Moth. She didn’t take Lakkariss.”

“Not good.”

“No.”

After a while Holla-Sayan said, “If it comes back, and Moth doesn’t—”

“I nearly got killed last time I tried to fight a devil on my own.”

“I did,” Holla said drily. “Not that you’d notice. What do we do about it? I’m not touching that sword. It wants me.”

“Moth will come back.”

“If she can.”

“She will.” Mikki staggered into him. Holla steadied him, a hand under his elbow. A nice mess to take back to Gaguush, and to take Ivah—no.

Holla-Sayan had gone, and Ivah was blind again, with Nour somewhere by her. He touched her, and she gasped, flinched, found his arm with her left hand and clutched him there, so he couldn’t stumble in front of her, now that she was armed.

A rib-shuddering growl rising into a snarl, a man’s shout, a thud. Great Gods, not the axeman, Holla-Sayan hadn’t met and killed the axeman. Silence again, except maybe there were voices she couldn’t quite catch.

Cold hells take it, anyway. She turned Nour loose. The Red Masks already knew there were wizards down here.
The sun comes forth from the palace gates
, pressed with a nail into her own right arm, and Great Gods, the relief when light bloomed, like a memory of sun, before her chest. She gestured it higher, pointed Nour down to where wall met floor. He nodded and slid, clumsy, to crouch there, not protesting, out of the way if more enemies appeared. She took a few steps back down the tunnel, her light gliding with her.

Light met her, red torchlight. No need for the sabre; it was Holla-Sayan, human again, supporting the Northron by the arm. He was even taller than she had thought, head and shoulders above the Westgrasslander, and alarmingly pale, as if he’d bled nearly to death.

“Red Masks?” she whispered.

“Dead,” said Mikki. “Or something. They were already dead.”

“I know,” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off Holla-Sayan. He could kill her. The Northron wouldn’t stop him. Nothing would. He hadn’t, but he could, he would, so she had to tell him, because someone had to know, someone who could do something to stop the Lady. “Ghu—a boy, a man I met, he killed one with a touch.” Her teeth still chattered, but the sabre in her hand, Holla-Sayan’s sabre, was steady, as though that arm belonged to some other woman whom nothing could ever rattle. “I saw him do it. He said they had to be . . .” A lifetime since. Was Ghu here too? She had not even thought to ask. “. . . to be cut off from what was feeding them. It’s some kind of necromancy.” She swallowed. Her voice croaked, parched.

“Killing them enough they know they’re dead seems to work, too,” Holla-Sayan said, and his mouth twisted, as if at a foul taste. “How did you end up here?”

“Red Masks,” she answered, and heard her voice sink to a whisper again. “I think that’s what happens to wizards. Maybe the Voice—the Lady, locks them up to die first, like us. Holla-Sayan, are there any other prisoners here? Ghu—when they captured us, he was behind. He was injured, lame. He wasn’t in the temple when they took us before the Lady.”

Holla-Sayan studied her. She resisted the urge to wrap her arms tight, to hide herself. She stank. Even as a man, he must smell as well as a dog did, to have smelt the Red Mask coming. He was a man now; the yellow-green light had faded from his eyes. They were green-flecked hazel, she remembered. She’d always liked his eyes. Wanted them warmer, when he looked at her. Remembering that shamed her now.

“Bones,” he said. “The only humans down here are you two. And the bear.”

“Bear?” she asked, wondering what she’d misheard. Ulfhild had said something about a bear when they spoke by Ilbialla’s tomb.

“Me,” said the Northron. “Dog, stop glaring at her, you’re scaring her out of her wits. Let’s get out, as you said. Moth’s not here.”

“Who’s Moth?” Ivah asked.

“Ulfhild,” said the Northron.

“Ulfhild?” Ivah wouldn’t have thought she could know such relief at that name. “Is she here?”

“No, she’s not,” said Holla-Sayan. “His name’s Mikki. And he belongs to her.”

“Hah, other way around, foolish dog.”

“Yeah, you can say so. I’m a married man now; I know how these things go.” He put a hand on Ivah’s arm, just a touch, which made her shiver, but he only wanted his sabre back. A glance at her light, and he stubbed out the torch on the floor, left it lying. “Take your friend and go ahead. I’m sure we haven’t killed, or whatever you want to call it, all of them yet.”

“Wasps,” said Mikki, a bit indistinctly. “Reaction, I think, like wasps. I’ve broken into their nest and so some followed me, but they won’t come hunting now we’re out of sight and memory, not until their maker comes back to set them going with her will.”

“You go ahead as well,” Holla-Sayan told him. “You’re no more use than the other two.”

But when they came to stairs, endless stairs, Ivah thought, Holla-Sayan took Nour’s weight from her and left the Northron Mikki to guard their backs, or perhaps he could smell there was no pursuit. Up and up. Nour stumbled on a step, and Holla-Sayan lifted him bodily to a landing, saying, “Catch your breath. There’s a ways to go yet.”

“Kharduin’s gang,” Nour gasped, the first he’d spoken in some time. Ivah wasn’t certain he even realized he was with strangers. “Shenar’s caravanserai.”

“So you can die of wound-fever there? Yes, all right. I’m certainly not taking
her
anywhere near my gang. It’d be throwing a rat to the dogs. What were you doing in Marakand, Ivah? Looking for a new master?”

“Dog,” Mikki rumbled, in what sounded like reproof.

“I—I was studying Ilbialla’s tomb. You must have seen it, in Sunset Market.”

“Yes. What is it?”

“A prison, Moth thinks,” Mikki said.

“I can’t even translate it, I can’t read the writing, except a few words that might be really old Imperial Nabbani written out by sound in some Pirakuli script. Holla-Sayan, the Lady—she’s the same as my father, isn’t she?”

He stopped, and she staggered into him.

“
Father?
”

“Father?” Nour asked, but she ignored him. Old Great Gods save her, bad enough he knew what she had done to Hadidu. And she’d thought, since Holla-Sayan knew Ulfhild Vartu—

“You didn’t know I was—” She could hardly even whisper. “Tamghat—Tamghiz Ghatai—was my father.”

Nour, lost in some fog of his own, had missed that and was muttering, “I never man’ged to read any words in’t a’tall. Wish we’d known wha’ you w’rup to.”

After a moment Holla-Sayan tugged them both onwards, leaving Mikki to follow. And the stairs were at an end. Her knees shook on the blessed flat; she had to lean on the wall to catch her breath. Holla-Sayan batted at her light with a hand, and it was quenched, as if he’d crushed a spark. Darkness returned.

“I’ve never noticed that there’s anything in the tomb in the Sunset Ward market,” he said, as if that last exchange had not happened, “but maybe I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’ve never bothered to go sniffing around it. Marakand has no gods that I’ve ever noticed, though, and none Attalissa ever knew of, either.”

She tried to moisten her mouth. “That girl.” She realized he would never have seen her. “A girl in the great hall of their temple. They took us there, for judgement by the Voice, but they didn’t call her the Voice. They said—she said—she was the Lady herself, and I believed her. She wasn’t any priestess. Is she one of—of the seven?”

“Probably,” he said, and Mikki growled, “Yes.”

They couldn’t fight a devil. Even the Blackdog hadn’t been able to—it was Ulfhild who had killed her father, she knew, despite what the songs on the caravan road said, and Ulfhild Vartu wasn’t here. Great Gods, please, let there be water, somewhere.

“What,” Holla-Sayan asked, “will you do now? Is Ketsim yours? They say he’s the temple’s man, ruling the westernmost Praitannec tribe. Will you go to him? Claim your rights as his lord? Take rule of that tribe from Marakand?”