The Leopard

by K V Johansen

  “I haven’t done—” she protested. “Mikki freed us. Holla-Sayan got us—”

  Guthrun grinned and put a wary hand on her arm. “Holla-Sayan says you were practically carrying Nour out when he found you.”

  She shouldn’t have gotten up. She was going to faint. No, it was the floor trembling, not herself. She clutched at Guthrun, who braced a hand against the wall and looked up at the ceiling, as if expecting its imminent collapse. A cobweb danced and trembled, then hung still.

  “It keeps doing that,” Kharduin said, and turned back, shrugged. “Maybe the city will fall and change the temper of the Lady again.”

  And what she had hazily thought to be heaped bales of furs spilling along the far wall heaved to its feet, stretching into a huge dusty-gold bear, bigger than any her father had ever taken her hunting on the northern edge of the Great Grass.

  Her ears rang, and everything went red and distant. Kharduin caught her as she started to crumple.

  “Mikki’s a demon,” the caravan-master said. “Didn’t you know?”

  She shook her head, swallowed, and blinked till her ears stopped ringing. “All right,” she said, and managed a weak smile. “How—uh, how are you?”

  “Half-demon. I’ll do. I generally heal quickly.”

  “You speak!”

  “Well, yes.” He ambled over and gave her a light shove on the shoulder with his nose. “You’re thinking of Holla? He’s a thing. A monster, if you like. Why shouldn’t I speak? I’m natural, I was born this way.”

  “That must have been, um, a bit of a surprise for your mother.”

  “She was a bit taken aback with the whole naked pink screaming baby thing happening every night,” he said, and grinned, which made him look as though he’d just seen his dinner, and she was it. “But she got used to it eventually.”

  “Oh.”

  “Put some clothes on, now you’re up,” he advised. “We’re not staying.”

  “Nour is staying, Lord of Forests,” said Kharduin firmly. “He’s not fit to be moved.”

  “Do you want him to be here when the Lady comes to smash your door in? I should take him and Ivah and a couple of your gang to carry a litter, and head up into the Malagru, for his sake as well as yours.”

  “The Voice of the Lady never paid any attention to the suburbs. We’re fine, here.”

  “We’re not. The Voice of the Lady is dead, and the Lady is a devil set on murdering wizards so she can bind their souls and use their corpses for necromancy. We destroyed a dozen of her tools last night. She’s going to want to avenge that, if not to replace them.”

  “You can’t go dragging him up the cliffs into the hills. You’ll kill him.”

  The door banged open, and they all grabbed for weapons. The Grasslander girl strode in, with Holla-Sayan grim behind her.

  Zora broke the surface of the water and breathed deeply. The cave was dark, but the eye of the dome was not quite so black as the shadows. Dusk. She had fought daylong. Small wonder that she felt so weary . . . No. She felt it, her Red Masks knew it. She had dived into the well in pursuit of Vartu and the goddess in the morning, and morning overtook them again. It was the first faint lightening of the coming dawn she saw overhead. Her body ached. Her arm throbbed, and her breast. She pressed the palms of her hands to the ugly parted lips of flesh, leached of colour by the water, and sang of healing, until the flesh knit again and the pain had mostly ceased. Both gashes left a white line of scar; her gown had not rinsed clean of the brown stain even in the well.

  Ulfhild did not follow. Not yet, but Zora would not trust to the darkness of her spell or the slow dreaming of the true Lady to hold Ulfhild Vartu forever. With a thought, she brought Red Masks down the stone-cut stairs from their barracks. The empty shells of four others lay in a neat row by her well, killed with brutal strength, but carefully set with mangled limbs and severed heads in their proper places, arms folded on the chest, awaiting her—repair. The Red Masks did not leave their dead out to be seen, but these were beyond saving, even in the well. They were empty, useless. The head of one was missing. She knew where that had gotten to. These weren’t the only ones who had been ripped from her binding, though. She sought after them. Empty corpses in the tunnel that led to the Voice’s hospice and a lingering trace of some power.

  The Red Masks didn’t know what it had been. None of them had seen and survived, and what knowledge they held in common was confused. Fire and darkness, high snows and stone; a forest in the mind, leaf-rustling, moss-deep, green-scented. Fear, and longing; they would seek . . . whatever it had been . . . if they could.

  “You will not,” she said aloud. “You are mine.”

  It was outside the city. It had passed through the empty hospice and into the suburb, and the cell into which she had shut Nour while she delayed settling his fate was shattered, empty as the husks of the Red Masks were empty. He was hers, and he had been taken—

  She brought her mind back to the task in hand, found long strides had taken her halfway to the tunnel. So—the prisoners were gone, more Red Masks had been slain in their liberation, and whatever power it had been, she could not go chasing it this moment. Ally of Vartu’s? Ghatai? No, the road said he was dead. Ogada, perhaps, or Dotemon. Later. She would deal with this second enemy who stole her wizards from her later. She must secure what she had first. Her temple, her priests, would be wavering, doubting her divinity, deserted.

  Red Masks escorted her up the stairs. Foolish to feel a little trepidation. What tale had the worshippers carried out to the city of their goddess fleeing in the midst of the morning dances? Zora was no truant girl to be quailed by Revered Rahel’s tongue.

  Two Red Masks still stood guard at the broken door of the Dome of the Well, good and faithful servants, obedient to her overruling intent that they should always protect her and the well and their own secrets. They had come to replace the first who had fallen and carried the bodies below and taken their places. She would have them relieved by others, lest any wonder at priests, however ascetic, who could stand a watch of a day and a night, but there was no point until someone was nearby to witness the change of guard. For now, they could continue to stand.

  Singing echoed faintly from the Hall of the Dome. Zora went to it, wet as she was, torn and bedraggled. She carried her sword naked in her hand again. More Red Masks came from the barracks to stride ahead of her and fling back the doors with a bang. The singing faltered.

  Faces looked around, shadowed beyond reading in the feeble light of the lamps that burned about the walls. The fading of the sky that was the harbinger of dawn, much brighter now and not merely the hint of the night’s fading, fell through the broken window of the dome, but did little to relieve the shadows. She drew fire to the lamps, set pillars of golden light climbing from them, strode through the hastily parting dancers—they had been performing “Tempest on the Mountain,” a plea for the Lady’s aid in times of peril and weary they were of it, reeking of sweat—to the pulpit.

  “The Lady,” she said in a voice that carried to the far corners of the hall, “knows all your prayers, those you make together in the harmony of word and body, and those you tell over in the silence of your mind.”

  She let her gaze pass over them, lingering on certain ones. Ashir. Rahel. Ashir flushed, and Rahel’s mouth thinned. The woman was afraid.

  “My enemy—Marakand’s enemy, who dared to profane my sacred waters, will trouble us no more.” She brandished the sword, which exposed the slashed bodice of her gown. No matter. “But there are others. Even as I fought in the darkness of realms you cannot tread, allies of the wizards who threaten us dared breach the defences of the temple to assault my sacred Red Masks, who have died, some of them, protecting me as I strove against my enemy in the well.”

  They cried out at that. She swept on, ignoring the doubts, the running voice of her mind that said, No weakness no doubt no you say too much but better they fear and fearing follow fearing obey, and they may have seen, some may have seen
the Red Masks lying broken before others carried them down to the well, too many windows look out, too many . . .

  “Lady, they have attacked temple guardsmen too! None were killed, but one still lies senseless, and the other can’t say who attacked him. It was some foul wizardry, that they were overcome and their enemy passed unseen.”

  “No one is safe,” she said solemnly, “not even within the sacred precincts of the temple. For not all within the temple are faithful.”

  Silence, then.

  “Did not the Beholder of the Face urge you to enter the Dome of the Well, though the Red Masks barred the way?” That, she knew. The Red Masks remembered.

  “Revered Lady, I feared for you,” Rahel said.

  “Feared for me. For me? And this is why you allowed the worshippers of the morning to return to the city carrying tales of the Lady’s flight—”

  “I said—” Ashir coughed. “Lady, I spoke from the foot of the pulpit and I said that without doubt the Lady had become aware of some danger and flew to prevent it! I assured them, you would protect us, and I ordered that we should all sing the prayers for protection of the city.”

  “And did you?”

  He shuffled. “Many left, Lady. We couldn’t prevent them.”

  “You have the temple guard!” she shouted. “What do you think they’re for?” Zora swallowed her sudden rage, terrified by it, and made herself smile. “Have many worshippers returned?”

  “The folk gather at the gates,” Ashir confessed. “We haven’t been admitting them, not knowing—not knowing what your will might be.”

  “And meanwhile, Rahel urged that you violate the well, though my Red Masks were guarding it.”

  The assistant master—now the master of the dance—shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot. “She said—” he began, and his voice broke.

  “She said . . . ?” Zora kept her voice sweet and serious. “What did she say?”

  “She—” The man could barely speak.

  “Yes?” Zora said, encouraging as though she already knew the answer.

  “She said that you—forgive me, Lady, that the—the former dancer Zora was only the Voice, grown mad and deluded through being weak and unfit to bear the goddess, and that we must find you—her, if she had not already drowned your-herself in the well, and—and free the Lady from you, so that a new Voice could be chosen.” The man went down on his knees. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “I’m only repeating what she said.”

  “Rahel?” Zora asked, with sorrow in her voice. A goddess must be a merciful mother to her folk. And a stern one, when need was. “Did you say this?”

  The Beholder of the Face raised her chin. “I was wrong.”

  “But you were among those who insisted that Zora was the chosen of the Lady, that the Voice-that-was had spoken of her as the Voice that would be. I remember,” she said, so gently. “And so quickly you doubted my fitness?”

  “I thought I had misunderstood the Lady’s Voice. I thought to correct my mistake, to serve the Lady. I—I know I was wrong, I see that. I never intended any—”

  “I am the Lady, and you thought to serve me by murdering an innocent girl, whose form I have chosen to wear when I come among you? You sought to persuade these virtuous men and women to my murder?”

  “Lady!” Rahel went down on her knees, not out of any true contrition. Did she think Zora did not see the bitter anger in her heart, the hatred of—of the Lady, of the temple, of the Voice Lilace who had all unwitting and unwilling stolen her husband’s love, long before her mind broke under the—when—It was not my fault she was too weak and went mad.

  “Oh, Rahel,” Zora said, and let the sorrow in her voice deepen. Some of it she even truly felt. Poor, bitter, lost soul. “You should have been stronger in your faith. Take her away,” she told the Red Masks. “The times are too dangerous. Mercy for the weak in faith is a luxury I cannot afford.”

  “But—” said Ashir, and then fell to his knees, his face to the floor. By ones and twos, and then whole swathes, the priests and musicians and dancers did likewise. Zora alone stood, and her Red Masks. “But where—?” Ashir mumbled.

  He was weeping and trying to hide it. She ignored his question. Where indeed. Not the deep well; she did not want to disturb its waters, not with Vartu trapped within. A cell, to await her judgement, as a few others, that wizard-child too young to make Red Mask, brought to her by his own parents twenty years ago, had waited? No, she did not want to risk any other incursions freeing her prisoners, when she did not yet know what exactly it was that had trespassed. No. She knew what. What else could it be? Who, it was only who she did not know.

  Two Red Masks took the priestess, and when Rahel screamed and tried to pull away they put on the blessing of the terror of the Lady and dragged her half-senseless and wailing, all control over her limbs lost, from the Hall of the Dome, through the cowering, shivering, weeping, and moaning priests.

  Zora didn’t have time to deal with these petty matters. There were real enemies at her very gates. She had the Red Masks throw the Beholder of the Face from the top of the stairs to the well, while she remained behind to order Ashir to his feet.

  “I have no time for traitors and the faithless,” she told him. “Summon the captains of the temple guard to my house. My enemies hide in the suburb,” she added, leaning forward in the pulpit, sweeping them all with her eyes. The columns of flame above the lamps climbed higher. “The Lady has shown too great a mercy to them, too long. As of today’s dawn, the law of the city runs from the Eastern Wall to the Western, and no wizard found there will be permitted to live.”

  She heated the flames from yellow to white, scorching the stone, and let them die, left the still-cowering priests and the dancers blinking after-images away in the darkness as she paced from the hall.

  “Ashir,” she called back. “The captains. Now!”

  A muffled choking escaped the Right Hand of the Lady. He rose and scuttled after her, his clerk trailing behind.

  Ivah stumbled and fell halfway down the stairs, and without thinking Holla-Sayan pulled her up, an arm around her waist. Kharduin’s gang had rushed to find her clothing, giving up their goods as if she were one of their own. There were gangs that were master and hirelings, and gangs that settled into families. Kharduin’s, like his own, was one of the latter, and Ivah had brought Nour back to them. They would have given her more than trousers and coat and someone’s newly purchased, bead-trimmed felt boots; she could have had a camel to ride for the Western Wall and the fifty-mile journey down the pass to the Stone Desert, far out of the Lady’s reach if anyone had thought she had the strength for such a journey.

  If she would have taken that gift.

  Uncomfortable thought, that she would have turned down the offer of escape. But Holla-Sayan thought she might. She’d thrown her life onto the table for Nour three times now at least, by his count. That wasn’t the woman he knew. She had nothing to gain from Nour, so far as he could see, nothing worth her very life.

  Maybe she didn’t think her life worth so very much. Not a comfortable thought, either. Great Gods who’d damned him, he was not still in some corner of the Blackdog’s soul shaped to be a protector of girls. Ivah didn’t like his hand on her any more than he did. She pulled away once they were at the bottom of the stairs.

  “If you’re going to have to carry me, better to leave me on the street,” she snapped, and the young Grasslander woman, Nasutani, running after them, pulled Ivah’s arm over her shoulders instead.

  “I’m to go with you,” she said. “Kharduin says so.”

  “The fewer the better,” Holla said.

  “Mistress Ivah’s too weak. They’ve been days without food or water. She’ll need help on the way, and whatever you and Lord Mikki are thinking about hiding in the hills, if anyone does follow, you’ll want an archer.”

  “Kharduin says that, too?”

  “Kharduin’s coming with us,” she said, matter-of-fact. “He says if they take Nour a
gain, it’ll be over his lifeless corpse.”

  “It will be. How many others?”

  “Vardar and Seoyin to carry Nour. Vardar’s Malagru hillfolk. He knows mountains.”

  “So do I,” Holla-Sayan growled. “Why not bring the whole gang and some banners and trumpets to see us off?”

  “Are you and the lord demon planning to carry both the wizards up the cliffs on your own? Don’t be a fool.”

  “More a fool than walking through the suburb with a bear, right.” But the girl was right, he and Mikki, with or without Kharduin, couldn’t get a semiconscious Nour and Ivah so weakened up the steep sides of the pass themselves. Though if Mikki would let Ivah ride . . . he snorted. Ride a bear up a cliff, yes, without saddle or stirrups, forget that.

  Hells and hells and hells damn them all. He shouldn’t be here. He should be in the city with Gaguush, drinking syrupy coffee and keeping his mouth shut, looking decorative, had been her words, while she and the Xua merchant talked polite and effusive circles around one another. Instead she had taken Kapuzeh and Varro, and left a message that he thought Thekla, using as excuse her poor command of any language of the road, had softened far beyond what Gaguush would have wanted. If he wasn’t too busy, could he perhaps meet her at Varro’s wife’s house, where they were dining after the meeting with the merchant lord? Sarcasm that was diffused by Thekla’s conciliatory smile, but he wasn’t going to make it. He started on his way and met a frantic pair of Red Desert sisters he knew slightly, one a minor soothsayer, who’d left their gang and were heading for the Western Wall, fearing to find it sealed against them. In the early hours of the morning the captain of the Eastern Wall had sent soldiers through the pens and paddocks of the horse dealers, expropriating mounts and gear. They’d been sent into the city by their gang-boss to find out what the stir was about, only to see from the Gore the splash of red that was a company of temple guard, with armoured Red Masks at their head and a woman in white, with a shirt of red scale armour over her robes, riding at their head.