The Leopard (Marakand) (48 page)

“Nour and Hadidu take wizard-talented children out of Marakand, if they can find them,” said Nasutani. Her voice shook. “There’s kids now that showed up after the fire; Nour was supposed to bring them, but Master Hadidu sent them on their own. They’d been living in his house as servants. We passed them on to Lu’s gang that runs down to the Five Cities. They usually put up quite close to the Eastern Wall; Lu’s a horse-dealer.”

Ivah had shut her eyes again. Hadidu’s servants. She could see their faces. “We can’t just sit here and let them—”

“The Lady’s a devil,” Holla-Sayan said. “Mikki’s not invulnerable, you’ve seen that. Neither am I.”

“Where’s Ulfhild? She could stop this. Couldn’t she?”

“Maybe dead,” Holla-Sayan said. “She went into the temple looking for the Lady.”

“And Ghu’s dead too.”

Whoever that was. The thought seemed to give Ivah some resolve. She gave a long sigh and opened her eyes, began peeling long strips of stringy bark off the nearest trunk.

“Wizardry will attract the Red Masks.”

“I know.” She began braiding the strips, making thin ropes a yard long. “I’m just . . . thinking. Do you have a knife?”

He handed one over from the pocket of his coat. She nodded, checked the blade, single-edged and sharp, sheathed it again and slipped it into her own pocket. Nasutani watched uneasily.

“I held off a Red Mask for a little while, back in the Doves,” Ivah said. “I don’t know how. Mikki’s father was human.”

“Yes.”

“He’s a demon.”

“Yes.”

“Am I human?’

“You’re certainly no demon.”

“What are you? What’s the Blackdog? What’s that mean, when people call it a mountain spirit?”

Nasutani’s lips moved, repeating
Blackdog
, wide-eyed, but she said nothing.

“That was never true. I’m—” None of her business. He glanced at Nasutani. “Like the rest of them. You’ve guessed? A lost one. From an earlier war. Weaker. Wounded, she says.” No need to say who. “Crippled.”

Ivah watched her braiding fingers and asked, low-voiced, “So if you had a child, would it be human, did she say that?”

That felt like a punch in the stomach. “What?”

“Am I human?”

“Of course you are.”

“Are you sure?”

“You don’t smell like a devil.” She didn’t. That was that. She was human. So was his child.

Nasutani put a hand over her mouth, eyes showing white.

“Oh,” Ivah said, sounding almost glum.

“Old Great Gods! You should be relieved!”

“You don’t need another wizard who can’t fight the Red Masks. You need something else.” She looked up. “But I’m not that. You need the gods of Marakand.”

“They’re gone.”

She nodded, coiling up her braids of bark, as Kharduin and the men with the litter came in under the trees. Nour lay limp. Mikki shambled up and snuffled him.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Up,” said Kharduin. “There’s a dry stream cuts a way down under these trees, lots of fissures and crevices and caves up there. We get Nour into one we can defend against whatever comes and wait it out. And if they don’t come, we wait till it quiets down and he’s fit to ride, get what carriage we can even it’s no more than a few bales of camels’ wool for the Five Cities, and get the hell out of Marakand.”

“Every wizard they take in the suburb is another Red Mask,” Ivah said. “The problem with fighting Red Masks isn’t only that they’re already dead and so wounding them doesn’t stop them. They have too many layers, the fear, the way spells run off them. The fear’s the worst. It means people just collapse and don’t fight any further. Who knows, a wizard might find a way through their other defences, if someone had a clear head and could try. If there are Red Masks among them, the temple guard doesn’t even have to fight. If you take a shield from an armoured man, he still has his armour, but he’s that much more vulnerable. If taking his shield meant you could go on standing on your feet and fighting . . .”

“Can you?” Mikki asked.

“I don’t know. I wonder. Now that I know what they are . . . The suburb would fight if it could.”

“The Lady’s there,” Mikki said.

“I know. Holla-Sayan?”

“You know,” he said. “What you asked, Ivah, earlier? Gaguush is pregnant.”

Ivah looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You should have just killed me.”

He cuffed her shoulder.

“We need to go,” said Kharduin. “It’s all very well, but we can’t save everyone. We do what we can and don’t throw our lives away for nothing.”

“There’s no one following,” Mikki said, low-voiced, looking at Holla-Sayan. “These should be safe enough on their own. When the Lady works her way to Shenar’s, they’ll be set on our trail, not before. No one’s going to keep secrets from her, however much they want to, and I would think she could track you, dog, if she tried. We’ll be fighting them all anyhow, one way or another.”

Unless we just abandon these and run.
He sighed.
Sooner rather than later, you think?

The two of us together might have a chance, even against one of the seven.

I doubt it. It was a handful of human warriors killed the last Blackdog. It didn’t take the Lake-Lord himself.

He wasn’t what you are.

Maybe not. Moth’s still missing? Mikki, is she dead? I’m sorry, but what else could hold her?

“Not dead,” Mikki said aloud, quietly. “I’d know. But gone. Like the gods of Marakand.”

“Nothing we can do about that here and now, then.”
And if the Lady overcame her, what hope do we have?

None, although—she went without Lakkariss. She went not wanting to fight. She might have done something stupid, trying to talk to this Lady. They were friends—she had friends, you know. I could see her being taken unawares.

And what about Ivah?

She should stay here
, Mikki said.
She’s only a human wizard, no matter what her father was, and half an idea about one part of the Red Masks’ spells is not any use at all.

Maybe.
But she had stood against Red Masks. What other human wizard had managed that?

“Ivah,” said Holla-Sayan, “a vague inspiration’s no good. Can you break their fear?”

“I don’t know. I won’t know till I see it again and try. But to try, when I’m not fighting for my life—maybe.”

She was desperate. Desperate to die, maybe, in a cause she thought would redeem her.

You’ve paid for Bikkim.
Her eyes widened. She did hear.
Stay with Nour. You don’t need to do anything more. I’m not going to come back and kill you. Probably not going to come back at all.

“No,” she said, and, “I can’t walk all that way. I’ll be too slow.”

He considered a long moment. “Mikki can carry you.”

“Do I look like a camel?” the bear rumbled.

“No!” said Kharduin. “Are you mad, the lot of you?”

“I am,” said Holla-Sayan. “Just ask the storytellers. Take Nour, hide, defend him as long as you can and kill him when you can’t. Nasutani can tell you why. He’d ask for it if he were awake. Like Mikki said, we can fight them in the suburb, or we can fight them here, eventually.”

“Up there’s a lot more defensible. Height and a narrow place.”

“It’ll come to the same thing in the end.”

“But Ivah—!” Nasutani cried. “She’s—”

Ivah stood up. “Look after Nour,” she said. “Old Great Gods defend you.”

“I think you should ride the dog,” Mikki said.

“I think she shouldn’t.” Holla-Sayan cupped his hand for Ivah’s foot and heaved her up to Mikki’s back.

The demon’s shoulders bunched and stretched under her hands, and Ivah tightened the grip of her legs, unloosing her fingers to make loops of the braided bark. She was a child of the Great Grass, riding nearly before she could walk, but a bear was not the same as a horse and she was so weak and weary. Hungry. But she needed her hands free.

She was going to die. It was a calm, remote, strange thought. She had been living inside death delayed for days now, ever since she chose to stand and fight for Hadidu at the Doves. Red Masks, the Lady, slow starvation, the Blackdog, now the Lady and her Red Masks again. It didn’t matter when she died, early or late. Every breath was an unexpected offering from whatever gods held her in their hands, every deed she lived to attempt a repayment of that gift.

The bear’s rolling lope slowed, and he turned after the Blackdog down a dusty lane between walls of dusty stone. What had Kharduin and his people made of that? Nobody had warned them. Holla-Sayan had flung himself down the slope of the rising cedars, a black mountain dog, quite ordinary-looking, between one stride and the next, and she had clutched at the long, thick hair of Mikki’s shoulders as he bounded after. If there was any cry behind, she hadn’t heard it.

She felt for the knife in her coat pocket, eased it partially from its sheath, and, not without a wince, closed the heel of her hand over the edge of the blade.

Her mother had not believed one should mix together rituals foreign to one another, the way her father always had, but for breaking a devil-created spell of terror she had no carefully memorized set of characters with their layers of meanings, from literal through to the most secret known only to imperial wizards, declared by long tradition to be correct. No Grasslander string-weaving on its own would carry much weight against a devil’s will. What she needed was hidden in some deeper place, in the marrow of her being.

Ivah felt she was floating, not in water but in the sea of grass, one of her earliest memories, standing, a little child, and the wind running towards her. Almost it had seemed a horse, a great silvery sky horse running, hooves touching the tips of the blades. The wind, of course, and a small girl’s dreaming. Now it was the delirium of exhaustion, but maybe it was also the trance her father had sought with his drugs and meditation, which had always eluded her. She floated. The waves of the grass were green and silver, shoulder-high, and she rose on the wind over them, hovering like a kestrel. The grass-waves and the wind and the racing white clouds, small in the burning blue depths of the sky, hung about her, and she could feel the shape of the world, the balance of being and not-being, the fire in the heart of life, and the dark and the cold poised against it, a breath, a shadow’s barrier, between. And this weaving of disparate strands was right, was hers.

Her hair was gone and what was left too short to use, but blood was hers to her last breath, and the Northron wizards used their own blood to colour their runes. She wrote Nabbani characters, smearing the blood from finger to finger, on the inside of each wrist. The words rose from the grass, rained from the blue sky of her birth.

Mother Nabban, great river holds me.

Father Nabban, great mountain strong beneath my feet.

And on her forehead,
Grass, sky, I float to strike, the kestrel between
.

The flow slowed and oozed, but last she drew the three loops she had made for the Grasslander cat’s-cradle over that hand, staining her braided bark strings, and only then pressed the wound to her coat, blinking against the ache of it, falling back into the world, and clutched again at Mikki’s fur, dizzy. They were on the main street of the suburb, the caravan road itself, and the Blackdog had grown again, more giant wolf than guardian mastiff. A caravan was just emerging around the corner from a narrow lane, camels stepping with their deceptively slow, ground-eating pace, bells shrill. The leading rider shouted and caught up his spear but then swung it erect, reining his camel aside, and they passed unchallenged.

“The Blackdog of Lissavakail!” she heard someone cry out in the accent of Serakallash. “That’ll teach the Voice of the Lady to shelter the Lake-Lord’s murdering
noekar
-men!”

There were people abroad on the streets, Marakanders, caravaneers, merchants, but more pressing west than east. The Marakanders yelled and fled before them down the lanes or indoors. Caravaneers, though, clustered armed and alert around caravanserai gateways. You saw things, in the deserts and the wild places . . . demons, gods. They watched, warily, as they had been watching, listening to the growing rumour, before the beasts ever came. You didn’t ready a caravan for the desert on an hour’s notice. They were trapped here, many of them. A horde of warriors waiting to be roused . . . No. Caravan mercenaries. They wouldn’t fight for any but their own.

A cordon of temple guard blocked the street ahead of them, facing inwards, making a living barricade. Ivah could see the logic. The main road of the suburb was like a spine, and its alleys and lanes sprang off between the caravanserais and warehouses like ribs, with no other street running parallel to the road for long; cut off a segment of the suburb, subdue it, capture what miserable wizards or soothsayers you found, only then extend to the next. Where could any wizards go, if the Western Wall was held against them, as it must be, if the Lady were not utterly a fool? There were message-riders in the temple and swift ponies. No one could hide on the sides of the pass for long, whatever Kharduin believed, and not many of those caught nearest the city walls when the Lady rode out were likely to have had the time to flee to the Eastern Wall ahead of her or to take the road south to the silver mines. No escape. How many wizards? A handful, a dozen, a score? Was she going to throw her life away trying to save half a dozen folk who should have known better than to be in this place? She had been willing to offer it for one. How many folk in the suburb, how many wizard-born in a thousand, how many—her mind was wandering into nonsense, dizzying spirals, and her belly ached.