The Lady

by K V Johansen

The Lady, their goddess, surveyed them. Not vengeful. Not disdainful. Sorrowful, yes. Pitying their weakness, their frailty.

  No. The Lady could not harbour the weak and the frail. Marakand must be strong. He would come against her, out of the west, and Marakand must be strong. Yes.

  “The Lady sees your hearts,” she said from the pulpit, and the fourteen, huddling together on the swirling mosaic floor on which she had so often danced when she was only Zora, when she was only the foremost of the temple dancers, when she was the hidden eyes, the spy of her father’s stillborn rebellion against the tyranny of the Lady—they watched her, as the hypnotized bird watches the snake.

  They had hope. The Lady was mercy.

  Who says so? The Lady. Fools if you believe her.

  Hush.

  Behind them the priests and priestesses, saffron-robed, clustered. Fear was a rank cloud over them. Red Masks had died. The caravanserai suburb had risen against the Lady’s arrest of wizards. The gates were under attack. Enemies, treachery, hidden wizards . . . disorder. They liked their safe order, her priests. She had taught them so.

  “Never,” she said, “has Marakand faced such danger as it does now. Rebels walk secretly among the folk of the suburb, of the city itself, spreading the poison of their lies. Foreign wizards and demons work against us. And what strength have we? Not the strength of arms, if the faith of those arms is weak. Weakness betrays us. Weakness has betrayed us. When the temple guard should have stood firm, to protect their comrades-in-arms, my chosen, my Red Masks, from appalling wizardry, from foreign demons and spirits and the servants of alien gods, they fled, squalling like children and about as much use.”

  Unfair. She had fled, had she not?

  She must give them an explanation for that, a reason, an enemy, a plan. Not her own fear, her death in—

  —the sword the ice is coming the road of the stars is sealed against the ice is coming—

  Zora’s hands clutched the pulpit rail and she licked her lips. She was not the Voice, the mad Voice, to spill the eddying mind of the goddess. She was not mad. Mad Sien-Mor was dead and burnt away. She was Zora now. Zora was not mad. Zora had not spoken aloud, the words echoed only in her mind, she did not taste them on her tongue, she would not, she could not, she—

  Be still, be still, be still.

  “The Lady sees your hearts,” she said. “The Lady knows your hearts. Your coward hearts. Your traitor hearts. And I say, treachery must be cut out. There is no place for such weakness and cowardice within my temple. When I say stand, you stand. When I say hold, you hold. You do not doubt. You do not break. You do not run. You stand and hold and die, if that is what serves your Lady’s need. As it would have, this day, had you not been faithless.”

  No, no, no no no—don’t, I won’t, I can’t I must—

  She had no need for orders, for gestures. The Red Masks were hers, as her arms and legs were hers. The most faithful of her priests, so even the true priests believed, the holy warriors, with their vows of simplicity and silence, their isolated barracks where not a single servant attended them . . . fools. Even Zora, spying for the dead, had not penetrated to the heart of that secret, though she had wondered, she had known there was some truth that she could not see. A poor, lorn spy without a master to take her reports.

  Still, for the sake of the priests, she raised a hand. It might have been a signal. But it was her thought that sent her attendant Red Masks, grim in their silence, faceless, to the unfortunate officers.

  No need for their swords, for mess and blood and the fouling of the black-and-white floor on which she had danced. Like the street guard, the thief-takers, her Red Masks carried short staves at their belts. The white lightings of her will, their wizardry, crackled as they struck, a blow to the back of the head, to the chest, a smashed face as the already-bloodied lieutenant turned yelling to flee. A single blow was enough to kill. The room smelt of scorching, of burnt meat.

  Sacrifice.

  “The remainder of the company,” she said, when it was done, when a fainting priestess had been shunted aside amid her fellows’ feet and a vomiting priest had made it as far as the porch before disgracing himself and her holy Hall of the Dome, “will be confined to their barracks. No surgeon will attend the wounded. Let them look to themselves, let the Old Great Gods choose their own. They will have barley-porridge and water and nothing more. They will purify themselves. Let them offer me prayers and face the truth of their own hearts, for three days. In three days, they will be summoned here to the Hall of the Dome to stand before their Lady, and she will I will give my judgement.”

  They would be redeemed and love her for her forgiveness, their redemption. She would appoint new patrol-firsts, a new captain and pair of lieutenants. She could not afford to lose so many men. But they did not need to know that.

  “Revered Lady—”

  It was Ashir who dared to speak, the Right Hand of the Lady, highest-ranking of the priests, a bald and bitter man, loving her, hating her. The Beholder of the Face, his wife, had died by her command, flung down the stairs to the underground chamber of the deep well. Yet he still loved his Lady, and he still served. But she did not love him.

  “No,” she said, to whatever it was. “I will not hear. I will speak no more. I will speak no more judgements today, I will—just go! Out! Out, all of you! Out from this place, out from here, out with your noise and your doubts and your coward fears, out and pray yourselves, and pray I am merciful, because I know not all the traitors of the city are without the temple walls!”

  Her voice rose to a shriek in her own ears and her hands twisted together.

  “The sword waits still, can’t you see? Don’t you hear me? The sword is ice, the ice is death and from the north it came to me for me not here not now does she not see, does she not know? I have trapped her held her she would have betrayed me she should have seen she should have known she should have come to me to stand with me—It is he it is not I she should fear we should fear she is nothing she is gone she is lost and trapped and gone and still the sword waits unsleeping it sees my dreams it whispers it sings the voice of the wind of the ice of the night—the stars, the cold and distant stars they see—”

  She bit her tongue. The taste of blood shocked and silenced her.

  The priests stared. They were used to the ranting prophecies of the Voice of the Lady, but she was not the Voice. She was the Lady made flesh, in the flesh of Zora, the dancer they would have given to be her new Voice. She was—

  I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Who am I who speaks?

  “Get out!” she screamed, and the Red Masks moved.

  The priests and priestesses fled.

  The Red Masks began dragging out the bodies. Let the priests see to some burial, somehow. Let them prove their use by dealing with that one small problem, with the city gates sealed and no access to the graveyard of the Gore.

  Zora was going to be vomiting behind a pillar herself if she could not get out of here, into air, clean air, and space and sky and—

  Up. Climb. Yes. To where she could breathe again.

  The goddess, the Lady of Marakand incarnate, took the stairs so rarely used, cramped and dark, hidden with the walls, the passage left for workmen who might need sometimes to make repairs. She ran, forcing herself not to slow, revelling in the pounding of her soldier-booted feet, her racing heart. This, this was hers, this body, this strength, this lean beauty, this was she. She came out on the roof below the dome. There, for a moment at least, she had silence. Even in her own mind. Though not for long.

  CHAPTER III

  “My wife!” the old man at the gate howled. “Gate-Captain, look! Witness! My wife!”

  But what the old man held in his arms, staggering with the weight of it, arms and legs and long hair dangling limp, was the red-armoured corpse of a Red Mask. Jugurthos Barraya, captain of the Sunset Gate Fort, looked down from the northerly of his towers. He didn’t know the man. Some small trader of the suburb, by his dress. He was sur
rounded—supported, maybe—by a score or so of others, Marakanders and caravaneers both. Even from the tower Jugurthos couldn’t see what was happening around the bend of the wall to the north, but he had seen a band of temple guard and Red Masks rushing disordered to the east, and after them, pursuing, a surge of outlanders, armed, out of the smoking suburb. Pursuing. Red Masks fleeing. He’d sent a courier to Hassin at Riverbend Gate for news, but the girl hadn’t returned yet. Nothing worse had befallen than that she was waiting on Hassin, he hoped, and not caught up in some assault. The all-in curfew had rung from Riverbend shortly after that, and his own bells had perforce passed it on. It shouldn’t have kept his courier, though.

  If what had rushed east along the main road past the Gore had been an attack, this small party that had peeled off to take the road to the southern bridge and his gate seemed peaceable enough, thus far. Grim, though, and angry, violence only a word away, not that the bare score below could offer the gates any serious threat.

  “Witness!” the man called again.

  “Witness what?” Jugurthos called down. “A Red Mask?” A dead Red Mask, and they were invulnerable, protected from weapon and wizardry by the Lady’s blessing. They killed with a touch. What could touch them? That, indeed, needed witnessing. If it were true, and not some trickery, a corpse wrapped in a red cloak. Yet, that armour would be hard to come by and . . . there was a story going around that a Red Mask had died at the Eastern Wall not long before the Voice was killed. He had dismissed it as exaggeration, some mere temple guard murdered, even though he had heard it from Captain Hassin of Riverbend, who swore he had the story from his cousin, who saw the corpse, from some distance, before another Red Mask carried the priest away.

  “What killed her? How?”

  “My wife!” the man howled, and he laid the corpse down, kneeling over it, and stroked a dead, smooth cheek with his old, twisted hand.

  Jugurthos felt his stomach turn. Surely—

  “Don’t you dare,” his adjutant muttered beside him. “Captain, don’t.”

  He looked down at her. Tulip only came up to his shoulder, a compact woman, young for her responsibilities, with the round face and straight hair of the mountain-folk. She hadn’t even been a patrol-first when he appointed her his adjutant, and given her physique, which was rather better filled-out in all the right places than you’d expect of an unwanted bastard abandoned and farmed out on temple charity, everyone was fairly certain they knew why.

  Useful to let them think so, of course. That, on the other hand, she was his mistress, was just a further obscuration.

  Yeah, right, she would say. You really know how to make a girl feel wanted, Captain.

  Jugurthos pushed away from the parapet. “I’m coming down,” he called to the old man and strode for the stairs. Tulip, muttering imprecations, scurried after him. A patrol was just coming in; she drafted them as escort, grabbed a spear from his office—one of the few weapons not locked in the armoury—and glowered to the point that Jugurthos swallowed any protest.

  There was no sally-port in either gate-tower; they had to haul back a leaf of the main gates enough for the seven of them to slip out, two by wary two, with Jugurthos, giving in to Tulip’s common sense, in the middle. None of the mob beyond moved towards them, parting, rather, and standing back to give them passage. The old man had gathered the Red Mask into his arms again, held her on his lap, head lolling against his shoulder. He glared at them through tears, said nothing now but stroked the hair from her face.

  A woman in her prime, which the old man was definitely not, dark-haired. Jugurthos had seen corpses enough, victims of family quarrels and drunken brawls, sullen, stealthy murders, and alley robberies. This was different. Old. Her skin was dry and tinged with grey, the staring eyes cloudy, the lips shrivelled, colourless. No stink of death, though, and not the greasy, horrid rot of that infant’s corpse unearthed from a rubbish heap by stray dogs last winter. He swallowed against that memory and warily crouched, to put a hand to the face himself. Dry. Neither warm nor cold, like touching wood, cloth. The old man blinked at him.

  “Your wife,” he prompted, and fingered the slick lacquered leather of the armour scales, the crimson cloak, which up close was tattered, faded, and unexpectedly gritty to the touch, as if it had never been washed or even brushed clean.

  “They took her,” the old man said. “The week after they built that tomb for Ilbialla and butchered her priestess. You wouldn’t remember, you’re too young. You think there was always a tomb there in Sunset Market, but—”

  “I remember,” Jugurthos said. He was hardly so young as all that. Tulip put a warning hand on his shoulder. “Go on. Who took her?”

  “Red Masks. They came—I worked with my brother in those days, and we lived up above his shop, at the back. Sandal-makers, he and I. Aylnia read the coins, the Nabbani divination, but it didn’t bring in much, more just as a favour for neighbours, you know, and half the time nothing came to her and she just told them what she thought they wanted. Joking, almost, between friends. They came, Red Masks, and they took her as a wizard. We used to pray for children, we’d been childless so long. I’ve never prayed since, save to thank Ilbialla we had none. I wouldn’t stay in the city after that. I moved out to the suburb.” And all the while, he never left off stroking her hair.

  “But the Red Masks take wizards for execution by the temple,” Jugurthos said. “Condemned to death in the deep well, by the Voice’s decree. They’re priests, not—not . . .” He swallowed. “She can’t be your wife. She’s some priestess. She’s not thirty yet, this woman.” Stupid thing to say, stupid. The old man was manifestly not deluded. His eyes, though swimming with tears, burned. No confusion there.

  “She died that day, or not long after,” the sandal-maker said. “She hasn’t changed, hasn’t—she hasn’t—” He wailed and bowed his head over her. “They said—when they killed her out there now they said—the temple—a necromancer—a devil. One of the seven.” The words came out as half-strangled gasps, through sobs.

  A devil?

  “All right,” Jugurthos said inanely. “All right.” He put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “All right, just tell me. What about necromancy and a devil? Who—no, to start with, what’s your name?”

  “Ergos,” the man said, “Ergos Arrac.” A very distant connection to the Arrac-Nourril Family, then.

  “How did she die? This time,” Jugurthos amended. “What happened out there, when the Lady came?”

  “Bring him inside,” said Tulip in his ear.

  He nodded, recalled to sense. “Yes. Inside.” Kneeling on the road before his gates with a riot or worse in the suburb was folly. But the men and women who had followed Ergos Arrac to the gate stood watching, menacing in their silence, and now murmured, hands, some of them, on weapons.

  “I’m not arresting him,” he said loudly. “I’m not going to make him disappear.” Or let him disappear, if temple guards came for him? If Red Masks came? What choice would he have?

  “Cold hells. Fine then. I do—” he grinned, a hand on his sword’s hilt to stress that it wasn’t their threat he bowed to. A couple of the Marakanders stepped back; no backing off on the part of the caravaneers, though. “—see your point. We’ll all stay out here in the open. To witness. Tulip, go back. I want Itulyan out here, to set down everything that’s said. And Belmyn, too.”

  Belmyn was the senior-most patrol-first. He didn’t have to say, “Belmyn and her patrol as well as the clerk, and maybe a double patrol while you’re at it, to make sure we can make it back to the gate, afterwards.” Not to Tulip. She nodded understanding and strode away.

  “Wait till my clerk comes,” he told the old man. “Calm yourself. Get your words in order. We’ll set them down fair. You wanted witness. You’ll have witness. Testimony set down clear and true before the gods and the Old Great Gods.”

  And in the plural he betrayed himself, yes? “The gods” alone might have passed, been taken for “the Old Great Gods.” Old Er
gos didn’t notice, but at his side a sharp-faced girl’s eyes narrowed.

  Ergos laid the woman down again, folded her hands above her breast, and tried unsuccessfully to close the clouded eyes.

  The patrol hovered too close, their attention more on the corpse than the onlookers or the road. They whispered together. Jugurthos snapped at them to keep an eye to the bridge, and Tulip returned, with the clerk and three patrols, one of which, at a jerk of Belmyn’s head, hung back at the gate. The onlookers gave a little ground but muttered.

  Tulip’s face was grim and she crouched to whisper in his ear again. “Courier’s back from Hassin. The Lady’s fled to the temple in disorder. The Riverbend Gate’s being attacked by caravaneers. Nothing Hassin can’t handle.”

  “Fled?” Jugurthos said aloud, checking his own bridge yet again and the footpath that hugged the wall. Nothing stirred there, no trouble spilling around from the north. The suburb itself, though smoke rose, seemed quiet.

  “Don’t speak to them,” said a woman suddenly. “You were a damned fool to give your name, Master Ergos. We shouldn’t have come here. They’ll use your words against you. Come away while you still can.”

  The girl, the one with a face like a curious weasel, said, “No. You were right, Uncle. The city needs to witness, if we all die for it. Tell the captain.”

  But the old man was listening to neither, his eyes fixed on Jugurthos again.

  “Tell me,” Jugurthos said. “Itulyan, set his testimony down.”

  Because that was the law, wasn’t it? An accusation needed to be recorded, witnessed, brought to a magistrate. There were a score of auditors here from the suburb and as many street guard, and he felt he was balanced on a bridge like a sword’s edge, and the crossing—he would fall, they all would, disappear into the depths of the Lady’s well. Red Masks would come for the record, for those who dared accuse and those who might have listened . . . but that was a Red Mask, vulnerable and dead, long dead if the old sandal-maker were to be believed, and Jugurthos would stake—was staking—his life the old man spoke honest truth.