The Lady

by K V Johansen

  The bones were still there. Not the ghosts. Furtive charity had set them all free to take the road to the Old Great Gods, over time, as the temple watch grew disinterested. All it took was a handful of dust.

  Senator Beni Sessihz had survived by not being there for that vote. Many who feared to assent but could not bring themselves to openly sanction the temple’s formation of an illegal private army had done likewise. Jugurthos had come, perhaps not to forgive, but to understand those who had done so, as he left childhood rage behind.

  Beni had never stepped aside from his place as senior-most elder of the Sessihz Family or given up his rights in the senate to some younger relation. He had defiantly abstained from any vote on any temple-prompted matter, or slept through the votes, or missed them altogether. Falling into his dotage, it was said, and had been for thirty years, a frail old man, a place-holding ghost of the past. Jugurthos had never thought so. The old man had turned up hard on the heels of the messenger sent to his house with the sealed testimony of the sandal-maker. There were others in chairs as well, a handful, senators or magistrates or the elderly heads of great merchant branches of the Twenty Families, but they all kept back beyond the bonfires, in the mouths of lesser streets, and the Family emblems on the curtains or the wooden doors of their chairs were one and all covered. Sensible caution, perhaps. There might be others, even more sensible, or younger and fitter, who had come afoot and anonymous. He hoped there were.

  Word of this could go straight to the temple, but how it would get in through the circling wall of unnatural fire his scouts had reported, Jugurthos didn’t know. No doubt the Lady would have her ways.

  He had posted lookouts at the five gateways into Sunset from other wards. If the temple came in force they were done for, but maybe the folk would have time to scatter innocently to their homes. There were few actual gates left between wards to close. Tulip had suggested barricading the gateways with carts, but that would only let them control the day’s traffic, not prevent any rush of temple guard. No point, tonight. Tomorrow . . . gates could be improvised. Some of the warehouses had great doors that might almost do. And then? He shoved that thought away. Hold this ward. And take the next. And—find that wizard of the suburb and her demons, all hung upon that. A power to put the Lady to flight? Old Great Gods, Ilbialla and Gurhan, speed Varro’s search. Could the spirits of the mountains really have come to their aid?

  A patrol of guards emerged from a northern street, and folk swirled away, fading into shadows. Jugurthos put himself in front of Hadidu, tensed to shove him down. He saw spears, no bows, a helmet crested with ribbons, the tension of his own guards about one of the fires, confronting this. But then one stepped back and nodded, and the new patrol came on. Tulip moved as if she would drop the horn-paned candle-lantern on its pole away over the side of the tomb, to leave them in darkness.

  “No, wait.”

  Only a five-man patrol, but the sixth, the officer, the short, stocky shape, Jugurthos knew, and then stepping deliberately into lantern-light, Hassin Xua of the Riverbend Gate pointed questioningly up at the roof of the tomb.

  “Hah.” Jugurthos went to catch his reaching hand and help him haul himself up. “Hassin, you’re mad, coming here.”

  “I? You should have seen her, Jugurthos, smiling like she thought she scattered blessings with her gaze and soaked in the blood of folk of the suburb, all over her face like—like some barbarian war paint. That was no goddess. Is it true the Red Masks have been destroyed? Because if it isn’t, we might as well cut our throats here and now and have—” He stopped, seeing what lay down to the other side of the tomb, the corpse, the old man sitting by it, the niece standing sharp and nervous over him, with the other folk of the suburb who had dared accompany the sandal-maker close about. The caravaneers were subdued and wary now, feeling themselves few and outnumbered for all they were armed, marked by their coats and braids as folk of the road. Such had beaten to death one of the magistrates of the suburb, in mindless vengeance for the Lady’s attack. That word had come around, as the dusk fell. Hassin looked down at them, and his lips tightened.

  “Master Hadidu of the Doves.” Jugurthos drew his attention back. “Hadidu, Captain Hassin of the Riverbend Gate Fort.”

  Hadidu nodded. Hassin glanced over at the darkness on the eastern side of the square, the pit and rubble where the coffeehouse had stood. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I had a fondness for your almond cakes. Forgive me—there was a little boy. Is he . . . ?”

  Hadidu’s petrified look broke into a smile. “My son. He’s safe.” The smile died. “My brother, though, and my lodger . . .”

  Hassin murmured his sympathy.

  The Lady had made a mistake, allowing her temple guard to gossip of the outcome of their errand to the Doves. Not only the capture of two wizards, but the death in the fire of a priest of Ilbialla and his family. That, Jugurthos thought, was what had brought Hassin to him, not only horror at the Lady’s deeds. The temple said there had been a priest of Ilbialla alive in secret, and then the city heard that for all the temple’s efforts, the secret priest lived yet. Hassin was a native of Riverbend, which like Sunset had been Ilbialla’s especial care. He would have been a young man on the day of the earthquake. Well old enough to remember his goddess and her priestess.

  Yes, the word was out there, in the errant, twisting breeze of rumour. Priest of Ilbialla . . . there was a priest of Ilbialla, still, all these years later. And following that, tonight, like slow eddying in the depths of a pond, There was a priest of Ilbialla, and he escaped. He lives. He calls us . . .

  Hadidu stirred. The market square was not filled, not nearly that, but the clusters of folk were numerous, and there were more than could be accounted for by the curious of the neighbourhood. Rumour spread, regardless of the curfew. Red Masks slain, the captain of Sunset brought proof. Priest of Ilbialla, at the tomb of Ilbialla. And, There is a devil in the temple.

  “In the days of the first kings in the north,” Hadidu said abruptly, and stopped, stepping into Tulip’s light. His voice shook only a little as he began again, more loudly. He folded shaking hands into the sleeves of his caftan, which gave him a look of calm assurance Jugurthos knew he did not feel. “In the days of the first kings in the north, the songs say, there were seven wizards, wise and powerful. And there were seven devils, who had escaped from the cold hells where the Old Great Gods had sealed them after the last great war in the heavens. Bodiless, they roamed the earth. And being bodiless, creatures with no bond to it, they could not be sustained by it. They hungered to be of the stuff of the world, as the wizards hungered for knowledge and power, and so a bargain was struck between the seven and the seven, that the devils would join their souls to the wizards’ souls and share the wizards’ bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power. But the devils deceived the wizards and betrayed them, taking the wizards’ souls into their own and devouring them, taking their bodies for their own, becoming as gods upon the earth. In the end they were defeated, as the tales tell us, by the valour of humanfolk and the strength of the gods and goddesses and demons of the earth, with the aid of the Old Great Gods of the distant heavens. The seven devils were defeated, yes, but not destroyed. They were bound in eternal imprisonment upon the earth, dead and not dead within their graves, and they were guarded by gods and goddesses and demons. But the tales also tell that some, at least, have escaped. One, for certain, we know. He drove the human incarnation of the goddess Attalissa from her lake, scattered her priestesses, made her temple his own, and ruled her land as a tyrant in the body of a Grasslander warlord, powerful almost as a god himself. But he was defeated. You’ve heard this story also. The folk of the road tell it. Attalissa returned, with her guardian Blackdog at her side. Her priestesses emerged from hiding, her folk rose up and threw off the yoke of Grasslander tyranny, and the devil was destroyed.”

  A listening silence.

  “It was only a story of a distant land,” Hadidu said. “Even though it was but last sum
mer that Attalissa returned to her lake. Even when the Tamghati survivors came up the pass from the Four Deserts, fleeing the wrath of the mountains and the Red Desert, it was only a story, and the Voice of the Lady hired them to fight the temple’s wars in Praitan. We have had peace with the tribesfolk Over-Malagru for long years now, and the temple hired this warband that had followed a devil to make war on them.”

  “The Praitans murdered the Voice!” someone called, shadow against a far fire.

  “A conquered folk will use what weapons they can,” Jugurthos retorted, as Hadidu hesitated. “They were conquered by the treacherous murder of a Praitannec queen by temple ambassadors and by terror of the Red Masks, but we’re not here to talk about Praitan.”

  “Show us the dead Red Mask!” someone else shouted. “We’re not here for a storyteller!”

  Hadidu drew a long breath. He put Jugurthos’s reassuring touch off and raised a hand. “You know me, many of you. Hadidu. The coffeehouse of the Doves, there, the ruin, was mine. And I am not here to tell you stories, save one. This is all one story, do you not see it yet? You know me, and some of you know me truly, a story you’ve buried in your hearts and kept secret, keeping faith with me. Keeping faith with my mother. Keeping faith with Ilbialla, who was goddess of our ancestors here, with her brother Gurhan of the Hill and sister the Lady of the well, in equal respect and equal love, time out of mind. I was the orphan the master of the Doves took to raise with his own children. The little cousin who was no cousin. My name was Esau, once. On the day the Lady’s temple guard murdered the priestess of Ilbialla, my mother, and hacked my grandmother and my infant sister to pieces in the earthquake-ruins of our house, the master of the Doves saved me. You all, all you folk who live about the market square, all who knew or suspected and kept silent, saved me, so that I am here today to tell you, now is our time. Now we, who kept faith in the shadows and the silence, must save our city.”

  Jugurthos forced his attention back to the audience, drawn nearer by the passion of Hadidu’s words. He watched for the incongruous movement against the light of the bonfires, the reach for bow or javelin or stone. Hard not to turn and stare at the priest, though, as rapt as they. If he didn’t know Ilbialla to be sealed or dead within the tomb, he would have thought his friend god-touched, inspired, speaking, if not prophecy, then words of divinity nonetheless.

  “Do I need to tell you of the evils done in the Lady’s name, these three decades past? The murders, the folk slain in the streets by bullies and thugs in the uniform of a private army, no better than an invading barbarian horde, acknowledging no law of the people? The men and women and even children taken, who are never seen again? Marakand was a great city, famed for its library, for its scholars, its wisdom. Where are our wizards now? What folk slaughters its own divinely blessed, who should be there for its aid and comfort? The temple of the Lady, which used to feed the homeless and the hungry, became nothing more than an invading warband, led by a tyrant such as took Lissavakail in the mountains, oppressing the folk, killing those who spoke against it as the senators faithful in upholding the law of the city were killed, with a barbarity you wouldn’t find even in Nabban. Was that the act of a goddess? Of a holy priesthood, a temple founded to care for the poor and the sick? Such charity was ever the true Lady’s calling. And like a warband the false temple has robbed the folk for its own gain, its priests grown fat on your poverty, your taxes supporting its agents of your oppression, feeding an army, the temple guards, whose only real enemy is you, the folk. It has divided us from our neighbours, turned kin against kin, friend against friend—suburb against city—to stop us uniting against our oppressor, who is the false Lady of Marakand.”

  Movement, far closer than Jugurthos expected. He had seen no one crossing the square. He turned, crouched into the darkness, saw a man intercepted by a pair of guardsmen to stand, hands raised in a gesture denying threat. Caravaneer; he made out the silhouette of knee-length coat and braids. And a sabre at his side. He wasn’t one of those who had come in with the sandal-maker; none of those had moved from the group on the other side of the tomb. No way any others should have been let armed through the city gate. No way anyone should have been let through the city gate at all.

  “And we must unite. We must stand against this devil—for the rumours you have heard are true. The thing that calls itself the Lady is a devil, one of the seven of the north. We have a duty, not only to ourselves, to our parents, our dead, not only to our living, to our children, our future, not even a duty to our lost gods, but to all humanfolk, and to the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the wild. We have a duty, under the Old Great Gods, to stand against the devils and deny them the place they would take in this world.”

  Jugurthos dropped from the tomb and went to the detained man. The caravaneer had folded his arms now, head cocked a little to one side, listening, face expressionless, but it might be just the damned tattoos that made him look so dark and unreadable. His face was covered in them, temples and cheeks. A man of the deserts or the Western Grass.

  “You Captain Jugurthos?” he asked in the desert dialect that was the common tongue of the western road and one of the two languages of the city, the other being a Nabbani dialect, not that real Nabbani of the far empire would admit it as such.

  “Yes,” Jugurthos answered warily. “You are—?”

  “Holla-Sayan!” Talfan elbowed and ducked around a guardswoman, halted in confusion. Ah. Owls flaring wings, curling around the eyes, snakes writhing on his cheeks, those were Westgrasslander markings. This was the man she had thought she had known. The Blackdog. Talfan steadied the baby with a hand. “Oh. Holla-Sayan. Is Varro . . . ?”

  “He’s talking. Still.”

  “With whom?”

  The caravaneer shrugged. “People. A magistrate—the one they didn’t kill, some caravanserai owners, some caravan-masters and such. I’ve a message for Hadidu, from Nour.”

  “Nour!” Talfan silenced herself with a hand over her mouth, a hasty glance up at Hadidu, who spoke on unreacting to her shrill cry. Perhaps he had not made out the word.

  “. . . Not in vengeance, not in the blood-lust of a roused barbarian. We are Marakand. We must be true to Marakand. We are a civilized folk, a folk of law, and we have our law still, we have our senate, the senate of the three gods, we have our street guard—” Some dodging in from Captain Hassin, a murmured word. Hadidu nodded, not pausing. “We have, under the law, provision for a militia, when the city is threatened. It is threatened now, and not by Praitan. How many of you offered your names to the temple or the magistrates, swept away by the false Lady’s charms or thoughts of Praitannec plunder? You were willing to fight for a lie. For the sake of the three true gods, hold yourselves ready to fight instead for the truth, for Marakand, and for your gods, lost though they may be.”

  “Nour!” Talfan hissed. “Alive?”

  Jugurthos didn’t have words. Nour, in defiance of all hope.

  “That’s Hadidu up there, is it?” Holla-Sayan asked, looking around the market square. “You won’t take the temple with this few.”

  “We’re not planning to,” Talfan retorted. “Not tonight, anyway.”

  “You don’t want to give her time to recover her balance. A speech isn’t going to keep her behind her walls.”

  Jugurthos silenced them both with a lifted hand.

  “I beg you, if you hear me with an honest heart, if you do nothing else, carry these words to the city. The folk must know. They must be warned of the cost of denying the truth. Will you have the city follow this devil, this slayer of our true gods, to destruction? Each one of you must choose, must stand for what you know is right before the gods and the Old Great Gods. The Red Masks are fearsome, yes. Pitiable, corrupted, and abused shells, victims of necromancy, their souls, we trust and pray, gone to the Old Great Gods. We still cannot fight the Red Masks, you and I, mortal as we are, but we have allies who can. The Lady’s unfortunate slaves cannot infect you
with the madness of their terror any longer. That is our greatest weapon, that is why we must act now, while the false Lady, the devil in the temple, is weakened by the loss of her greatest weapon, which was our fear.

  “Marakand’s gods are lost, maybe, or maybe dead, I don’t deny it. But the Old Great Gods are over them, and you all, every one of you, will come at the end of your long road to stand before them. Will you have to confess then that you broke faith with memory of your gods, that you denied Ilbialla and Gurhan and the true Lady of the Deep Well, whatever dire fate has befallen her, to worship a damned and outcast devil? To give honour to a murderer, a child-killer, a necromancer who torments even the dead? If you do not now stand against her sin, now that you see it and know it for what it is, you make it your own. You will carry that guilt when you come at last before the Old Great Gods. It is better to die fighting for what is right before men and gods and Old Great Gods, than to live long, corrupting your soul by partaking of such wrong as this Lady has brought to Marakand.”

  Hadidu fell silent. Tulip took him by the arm, looking around. This was no time to show uncertainty. Jugurthos caught the edge of the tomb and swung himself up to the roof again.