The Leopard (Marakand)

by K V Johansen

  “I . . . am not sure. Yet. I’m going to find out.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, cub, that’s all. You think I’m trying to charge off to get killed without you?”

  “I think I’m happier when I can keep an eye on you and watch your back, and that unless you want to go in pretending to be a . . . a juggler with a dancing bear, you should wait for nightfall. Come prowl caves with me instead.”

  “Seductive offer.”

  “Well, if you like . . .” He grinned, fangs gleaming.

  “I was thinking of the dancing bear, not the caves, but no, I’m scouting. Something changed yesterday and the folk of the city say their Lady has appeared to them. I didn’t see her. I made damned sure she didn’t see me. Now I want to find out who and what she is, that’s all.”

  “And you didn’t see fit to mention this last night.”

  “I wanted to consider what it might mean, first.”

  “You wanted a good excuse to leave me behind in safety.” Mikki sighed and came to butt at her with his broad head. He was right, of course. Last night, human, if she had told him of a newly emerged goddess who had never before left her well, he would have insisted they both go to the temple to investigate. “Fine. If you’re truly only scouting. Going in as a worshipful pilgrim of Marakand? See if you can raid their kitchens while you’re at it. I bet the priests eat well. Such folk usually do. Steal some pies.”

  Moth laughed and pulled her boots on, unrolled her byrnie, and shrugged into the mailshirt, jingling. She didn’t need armour. She’d had neither helmet nor shield for years, but the old ring-mail hauberk was a reminder, an anchor. Memory of the King’s Sword of Ulvsness and all she had been meant to be.

  Last night she had crawled from Mikki’s side to cast the runes by moonlight, waiting like an angler to see what rose, three by three.

  Devil. Water. Devil.

  Water. Boar. Sword.

  Devil. Death. Devil.

  Water she read here for a goddess of the earth. Boar was for protection. Death and Devil and the Sword spoke for themselves, generally. And literally, the devil meaning not misfortune and plans gone awry or contrary fate, but just what it said, and the sword betokening not war or violence, not when she cast the runes, but Lakkariss. But devil and devil, devil and devil, any reading, any crossing that touched the corner-posts of the square . . . two? Together? In opposition? Herself? She did not usually think Devil told her of herself, but for there to be two others in the city . . . who? It told her nothing she did not already know. She had carved this new set of the soothsaying runes in slips of birch while Mikki slept the mountain winter away, but she had not used them. She did not remember that she had carved so many with the rune that signified devil and meant ill-luck.

  Moth had turned down all the carved slips of wood, hiding the faces that drove her, all but the boar, and sat a long time contemplating that, while the leaves stirred and the shadows walked, and the bone-horse Storm, solid flesh most of the time, seemed to fade to moon-shadow and leaf-dapple in the darkness, no more substantial than the thin night-mist where he stood, hip cocked, head hanging, tail switching at midges in his dreams. If he dreamed, being little more than memory and dream himself.

  What was the boar to her now, she had asked, when she was no longer Ulfhild the King’s Sword, the king’s captain, but Vartu Kingsbane? And if she hadn’t killed Hravnmod with her own hand, as all the sagas said, then at least she had doomed him, the brother she was sworn to protect . . . long ago in the days of the first kings in the north, as so many tales began.

  The Boar. That which protects. The guardian. The armed warder at the king’s door. None of that was the Great Gods’ will for her.

  And she had looked aside at where Mikki slept, or pretended to sleep, pretended not to know she was restless, casting the runes again.

  The Boar. A reminder. Perhaps.

  But when she had crawled back into bed beside Mikki and he had turned to put his arm over her, she had slept, and she had dreamt the dreams that had haunted her in the mountains. She dreamt she came upon Mikki, dead, gutted, his paws cut away, the teeth smashed out of his skull so some Great Grass warrior could swagger with fangs in his braids. She dreamt his head stared at her, wordless and weeping, from the cave of skulls where the old bear-cult had carried out their most secret rituals.

  She had dreamt Sien-Shava, who had become Jochiz, the one erstwhile comrade she thought might make her fear, wrapped her in arms of golden fire and drank her, and left Ulfhild’s bones shattered under uncaring stars. That one had not seemed warning sent from the Old Great Gods, threat to keep her to her bargain, but something else.

  Out in morning’s new light, Mikki snorted. “Mail, wolf? You said you were scouting.”

  She gave him half a smile, belted on Kepra, Keeper, her own ancient sword, a royal sword, the hilt gold and garnets and the blade cut with runes. The Wolf made me for Hravnsfjall. Strength. Courage. Wisdom. Not so much of the last of those, in her long life. There were words on the cross guard, too, which she preferred to forget. A curse, a blessing. Hard to say which. And she would take her feather-cloak rolled small, tucked through her belt at the back.

  “I am scouting.”

  “You’ll jingle.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Mikki said. “If you can hide yourself walking armed through the city, you can hide me. You’re hunting the Lady, and I’m not letting you go alone.”

  “I’m not. I’m not even certain this Lady is one of the seven. There are other powers in the world, you know. I’m sure I met one of them two days since—”

  “You’re not going alone—”

  “I am.” Lakkariss leaned against a broken stone. Waiting. Watching her, she could feel, sometimes. Hungry. The sheath was covered in black leather, cracked with age, though recently oiled, and the grip of the silver and niello hilt wrapped in braided leather as well, hiding the twining inscription in letters that belonged to no folk of the earth. Curse and invocation, or maybe statement of fact. She preferred to keep it covered, to not feel it against her palm, striking cold to the marrow. She caught it up, holding it out across her hands.

  “Here.” Even the scabbard felt cold. “Keep Lakkariss here. I am not hunting the Lady today, I swear it. I’ll go quiet and soft as a cat—”

  “Jingling,” he said, but his lip pulled up over a fang, reluctant smile, not a snarl.

  “She’ll never know I’m there, whatever she is, and then we’ll know . . .”

  “We’ll know what?” He swiped the sword from her hands with an ivory-clawed paw and knocked it to the ground at her feet, one heavy forefoot holding it down.

  “. . . whatever I find out, I guess. Who and what and—and what I want to know is why? This killing of wizards is senseless.”

  “Senseless bothers you more than wrong, princess?”

  Moth shrugged, not certain herself and not about to answer. “Keep it safe. It would probably just draw the attention I’m trying to avoid, if I took it into the temple, anyhow. I’ll try to bring you something for supper.”

  “You’d better, or I’ll be reduced to gnawing old bones.”

  Storm blew down his nose and moved away.

  “We have plenty of them.” Moth grinned, leaned in to kiss his soft and bristly upper lip. “I’ll take care. Don’t worry about me. Don’t get yourself trapped in a rockfall.”

  “The earth is quiet enough here now, anyway. You—quiet as a cat, you swore. Don’t go hunting trouble without me.” He followed her as far as the fern-grown dyke into which the old compound wall had settled and stood atop it, still there watching every time she glanced back, until the greenish-white trunks of the thick poplars of the Palace Hill forest hid him.

  She was only scouting, and Mikki was not foresighted; he had inherited nothing of such powers from his demon mother. She shouldn’t feel such an urge to turn back.

  The old keeper of the once-famous Xua menagerie was out alr
eady, pottering in his vegetable garden with the only remaining beast, an elderly black moon-bear who seemed to be his pet as well as his charge, nosing about for grubs at his side. Moth slipped by among the ruined and empty enclosures like nothing more than a stirring of leaf-shadow. The bear only raised her head, turning it from side to side to catch the wind, sneezed, and went back to her grubbing. The old man reached absently to scratch the bear’s ear, leaning on his hoe a moment, and did not look up at all.

  A zigzagging path of many steps led down the north of the hill from the menagerie to the far corner of the palace plaza, a walled, empty place of blowing leaves and dusty stone, decorated less than elegantly with caged old bones along the south-facing wall. No ghosts, whatever the folk of the city believed. Some brave few must have defied the Voice to give the senators the mercy of a handful of dust, long ago. Pity the mass of the city folk hadn’t nerved themselves to the greater mercy and freed the men and women so tortured before sun and thirst killed them. But there were the Red Masks, always the Red Masks, as the excuse for paralysis and submission. She very much wanted to meet one, but Mikki would probably look on that as hunting trouble.

  Yesterday afternoon the Lady had addressed her folk here, while Moth was over in the Fleshmarket Ward where the butchers and the livestock dealers congregated, singing for pennies. The pavingstones were still scattered with recent rubbish, lost sandals and scarves, trampled fruit, dog dung.

  The city woke as Moth passed through, market traders setting up, produce-sellers streaming in from the manors of the south hill roads with donkeys and oxcarts, and the white-kilted free Malagru hillfolk with their own language lilting on their tongues. No one turned to watch her, exotic and armed Northron though she was; thought and memory slid from her, shadow in the corner of the eye, no more.

  Templefoot Ward was thronged with folk. She found out why when she drew near the gates and found herself part of a flowing stream of humanity. Young men, old women leaning on their sticks, moneyed Family elders in closed chairs, their chairmen sweating, bare-shouldered. Beggar-children in ragged short gowns, most likely with an eye and a half on the purses of the rest. Prosperous-looking citizens too, decent in clean caftans, nervous, expectant. But mostly young men in packs, noisy, elbowing, yelping at one another. Recruits eager to sign up for the new city militia, she gathered, and the rest were queuing for admission to the morning’s public service of worship, in hope that the Lady would again appear.

  “She watched the dancing of the evening prayers last night,” one chairman assured an old woman. “My grandfather made it in and had a place at the front, even. The most beautiful lady you’ve ever seen, he said.”

  “I know that,” the old woman said. “I saw her yesterday when she rode through the Greenmarket. She blessed my grandson and he hasn’t cried with colic since.”

  They talked, too, of the company of Red Masks that had marched out early that morning. “Hundreds of them, going to fight a rebellion of the barbarian Praitans,” as though they were some long-conquered province. “No, it was a dozen.” “It can’t have been so few.” “My cousin watched through his shutters. Fifty Red Masks, that was all, ten patrols.” The militia would soon be following, was the general opinion in the line, and the young men boasted of glory to be won, and wealth, because everyone knew the Praitannec kings hoarded gold in their hovels, though their folk were only poor tillers of the soil and herdsmen.

  Moth sidled amongst them, putting herself into the fastest-flowing current, leaving not a few quarrels and at least one brawl in her wake as this person and that accused another of shoving.

  The entrance to the temple was a gatehouse like a pillared shrine, at the head of a deep, dark passageway that plunged down through a rock-cut tunnel. The temple grounds were below the level of the city, nearly at the level of the bottom of the ravine. Built in a sinkhole, was her guess. There were no priests in sight, only ten guards uniformed like those who patrolled the city, but with red tunics, armed with broad-bladed spears. They lined the head of the passage and fed the people through the one open side of the double-leaved, gilded doors. One kept a tally on an abacus.

  “Tell them we can take fifty more, and that’s it for this morning,” said a man with a black ribbon depending from his helmet, leaning over the abacist’s shoulder, and one of the guardsmen shoved his way upstream to bellow at the crowd, with predictable results. Moth felt the surge coming and dodged ahead of it, through the gate and down the cool passageway. Behind her, shouts and cries rose to a roar, and the officer shrieked above it, “The gate, close the damned gate!”

  The eager stream flooded into sunlight, a grassy courtyard with a paved path crossing it. Here there were priests, a young man and a woman in saffron-dyed gowns.

  “Through the doorway in the wall ahead, please, good people, and to the right past the gardens to the Hall of the Dome. Through the doorway . . .”

  “Will the Lady come to the dancing?” someone asked.

  “The Lady’s will is her own,” the priestess said. “Perhaps she’ll favour us in her physical form, but it’s not for us to know beforehand. Her spirit fills the city. Be blessed in it.”

  An answer got by rote and repeated too often, unheard now. Both young clerics were wondering that very thing themselves, and were no more contented than the folk to be told to be satisfied with the Lady’s spirit alone, Moth guessed. Once through the next doorway, into another courtyard formed by the walls of buildings, she followed to the right but turned aside into the first garden, all herbs in square beds, bay trees in the four corners, where she waited till the sounds of people passing faded away.

  The temple was a complex of a dozen or more great halls, most in poor repair, a scatter of lesser buildings and some outright ruins. Courtyards and gardens seemed trapped between them. The Hall of the Dome, into which the last worshippers were hurrying, had a pillared portico like those of the palace and library, but on a much smaller scale. Even its dome did not lend it grace. It crouched against the earth, toadlike. Powerful and earthbound.

  Power did move there; the folk would have their wish and see their Lady. As two companies of scarlet-gowned youths, boys and girls, met and ran together with a chiming of bells and rattle of tambourines through the wide doors of the Hall of the Dome, Moth skirted it on its cold and shadowed north. There was another power in this place, a thin, weak thread of it. She followed, as if it were a scent in the wind, along a well-used path, down a few steps into a sunken yard, along the wall of a newer dun-brick building that looked like nothing so much as a warehouse, only a few narrow windows letting any light into even its upper floors, and to a miniature of the Hall of the Dome, square, squat, grey, with a pillared porch and its own dome. Carvings decorated half its doorframe, old and weathered: laden camels, sheaves of grain, branches of fruit, but part had been redone in plaster, without skill. Thick and hasty mortar showed much repair had been done to the formerly fine wall. New cracks ran jagged up to the roof. The temple extracted tolls from the caravan road to the most it would bear, levied tithes on every member of every guild, the streets grumbled. Only the Families were able to buy themselves freedom from the net of licences and fees and fines that ate up the earnings of the working folk, but where did the money go? Into the treasury of the priests? This certainly looked no nest of an exceptionally wealthy priesthood. Grasslander mercenaries and the rebuilding of the Eastern and Western Walls of the pass might account for it. Or someone was hoarding gold against some greater need foreseen. Ketsim’s rabble were not so numerous as all that, and even to defend the pass for long against a determined enemy would require the arming—and provisioning—of a much larger force. If it were Moth ruling this city, working to make it a fortress, as seemed the Lady’s idea . . . She would not undertake such a thing. Driving humans to your will was more frustration than it was worth. If they wanted to follow where you led, well and good, but this was not how to win followers worth having. Cattle. Better to be a lord of wolves.

  City a
nd village folk were different, of course, than the scattered and independent folk of the steadings of the north. Cramped in their souls from living too tightly together. Mikki would call her an arrogant and prejudiced Northron, naturally.

  The door of the smaller domed hall was locked. The rune of Day opened it, deliberate wizardry. She had promised Mikki . . . but she wanted to see what would follow. The Red Masks, Ivah had told her, could smell wizardry. Well then, let them smell her runes. There was something unpleasant and most definitely dead, snared in a web of necromancy, in the ugly warehouse overlooking this sacred hall.

  She left the door unlocked behind her and, having circled once the chamber within on the unrailed gallery about the central pit, finding nothing of interest, started down the stairs that clung to the outer wall. The light grew twilight-dim and the air cool, cellar-like.

  Something followed before she was halfway down, not warily at all. Boots. The curve brought her to where she could see them, two men in red robes and face-concealing veils, armed with white staves. She could see the reins that bound them too, poor corpses, and the soiled light of the torn remnants of soul woven into what they had become. A cold, deep anger stirred. Even Ghatai, who had found the dead apt tools in his time, used only the bodies. He might have been indifferent to the fate of the soul, with no compunction about leaving ghosts trapped in the world, had done so to punish his enemies, but he had never debased them, destroyed them past all hope.

  Moth leapt over the edge of the stairs to land on the uneven, water-stained floor, mud and stone and the rotting remains of a small boat. The Red Masks ran, taking the stairs two at a time. Light flared and leaked, a muddy red, as if they burned beneath their veils, and white sparks fizzed on their staves.

  Childish display, meant to inspire awe and fear. There was a spell working, a will brought to bear, that said, You are nothing, you are already dead, a weight of terror and despair. They were woven around with other spells, protection against metal’s bite and the force of any arms, against spell and human will. If she listened, she could catch the echo of the words, singing; the power that fed the spells came from a great weaving, a mighty net of song and wizardry, in which their own power was bound up.