The Lady

by K V Johansen

  Actually, he had been picturing her making tea so, with a black-haired toddler clinging to the skirts of her coat. Coat, not caftan. On the road, of course, which they wouldn’t be, not with a toddler.

  “Now what?” she asked, sounding exasperated. “I liked it better when you were so obviously having indecent thoughts.”

  “I need to find Mikki.” Sudden urgency clawed at him. He stood up. “No tea.”

  He felt the brickwork shake beneath his feet. There was the sound of thunder, not so distant. Camels heaved to theirs, groaning complaint, and the cat shot past, disappearing up the nearer stairs.

  “No clouds,” said Gaguush, peering skyward. “Bashra grant it’s not another big quake, just when I’ve sunk everything in a heap of mud bricks and stone.”

  If he’d had hackles then they’d have been bristling. Holla-Sayan barely held himself human, felt the change of form shivering, crackling under his skin. Not thunder. Not an earthquake. He started for the gate, but Gaguush caught his sleeve and said, “Up,” so they ran to the upper gallery and then took the narrower stairs on the far side to the roof, which was cluttered with drying racks and Rasta’s private garden of scented herbs in pots, to which favoured patrons were invited to drink wine and watch the moon rise.

  Dust piled high into the sky over Gurhan’s sacred hill, a sandstorm haze obscuring half the city, and the first edge of the rising sun burning livid scarlet through it.

  Others were following: Master Rasta and the servants of his small household, Tamarisk, a handful of mountain folk who must have come with the mules from the mining villages, all bleary with sleep and babbling.

  “If there’s going to be another, I want my camels out in the open. Tamarisk!”

  The master of the muleteers had had the same thought, and in the jostling for the stairs, Gaguush let the mountain men push ahead and turned back to take Holla-Sayan’s arm. “Don’t,” she said, “jump off the roof, not with all this lot watching.”

  “What?” She was hard to hear, very small, very far away. Something gathered itself, heavy, like the feeling of impending thunder over the Stone Desert, the air heavy, pressing. Yellow-white light flared over the city, near the Sunset Gate, he thought, and there was thunder, but it was not sound, not storm, not the cracking of the earth but the world itself, maybe, that cried out. He staggered under the weight of it, leaning on the parapet of the roof. Gaguush seized him by the shoulders. For a moment he could not remember to breathe, and the world was strange, heavy and broken, meaningless lumps and jagged streaks of matter that had no order, no sense, and he was lost in it, nameless. Gaguush put a hand on his cheek, and he gasped, finding sense there, pattern, in her eyes, her touch, the world re-forming itself, plaster of the parapet smooth and cold under his fingers again, real. But her hand shook.

  “Your eyes are burning,” she said. “Go, if you have to. But come back, Holla-Sayan. You promised me. You’re mine. For all my life.”

  Words had fled him. Too far, too alien, lost in the sound that was not a sound, dying slowly, and dust like smoke rising, broken stone, stone burning, and the cry of a god. He turned his face into her hand, kissed her palm, and went over the side of the caravanserai, straight down, landing on all fours, then fast as a horse could run, for the temple.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Hadidu woke with a cry, and Nour, who had just been drifting on the edge of waking, bolted up from the gate-captain’s bed they were sharing, Jugurthos and Tulip having decamped to a sleeping-mat in the office and records-room so that anything coming after Hadidu would have to get by them first. They’d broken Hadi’s promise to go up to Mikki, but they knew and trusted the men and women of the Sunset Gate, and besides, who knew they were here beyond those who’d been in the watch-room as they came in?

  The room was lit white for a moment, and thunder crashed about them, but there was no sudden rumble of rain off the mountains beating on lower roofs below, only Hadidu like a child wakened from nightmare crying, “No! No!”

  Ilbialla. In the blindness after the flash Nour saw her as he remembered her from childhood, as he remembered Hadidu’s parents, the cobbler and his priestess wife: vaguely, and yet vivid in outline, important, essential. Ilbialla standing before him, in the form of a woman younger now than he would have thought her then, a plain and pleasant woman with her hair loose over her shoulders and a caftan that somehow rippled and seemed still deep water, touched by breath beneath the sky, blue and dark. It wasn’t him she came for. She reached for Hadidu, and kneeling up on the bed he seized her hands, but they faded from his grip.

  “Esau!” she cried. “Esau . . .” And there was nothing but Hadidu bowed over his knees, weeping.

  Nour scrambled over to haul Hadidu to himself, as if he had been little Shemal, safe away in hiding outside the city. No need to ask. He needed to be of no family consecrated to the goddess to feel that loss, as if the earth beneath his feet had been torn away and he was falling. Being wizard was enough.

  Hadidu, without a word, pulled away from him and flung back the shutters, letting in the murky dawn.

  “She’s dead, Nour,” he said, turning back, methodically fastening his sandals, pulling on a caftan and tying the belt with hands that shook. “We’ve taken the city and won nothing.” Nour found boots and coat and sabre, feeling old, and slow, and stunned, but his nerves woke when the latch of the door jumped. Tulip froze before the sabre’s edge.

  “Ju says, stay here till he sends back to let you know it’s safe,” the adjutant said. “We don’t know what—”

  Nour got out of the way, and Hadidu thrust her aside, striding out.

  “Yes, that’s what I said you’d do,” the adjutant muttered. “Nour, I have to stay here. Don’t let him go alone.”

  “No,” he said, agreeing, and had to break into a run to catch his brother-in-law up. Still weak, he was out of breath by the time they reached the market square.

  Nothing. No folk. The warehouses here, the houses along the market, gone. Impossible to tell even where the burnt ruin of the Doves had been. Broken timbers, drifted stone and brick, plumes of smoke where some kitchen or courtyard cookfire had already been kindled in anticipation of the day and now burnt debris. No living thing, not man or woman, child or dog, or cat or fowl, crawled over the rubble. A branchless stalk might have been the persimmon tree that had shaded the baker’s stable. Their ally, though he had called them names and shaken fists when they were boys, climbing his persimmon tree and heedlessly bending the too-weak branches. The market square was pitted, thrown up in waves of mud and cobbles, and Ilbialla’s tomb was gone.

  They had prayed for that.

  Jugurthos was there ahead of them, armed and stubble-chinned, looking like another sleepless night. He left off urgent converse with a courier-rider and caught Hadidu by the arm.

  “Don’t. The ground’s hot.”

  Hadidu pulled free and continued on, as if deaf and blind to him. Nour perforce followed. The air shimmered over the ground. He would not have put a hand to the stones, but it seemed safe enough for shod feet. Jugurthos muttered and caught up with him.

  “What was it?”

  “A thunderbolt, an eruption of the earth, and earthquake and lightning together, how should I know? You’re the damned wizard. There weren’t many witnesses, and most can’t agree what they saw. If it’s over, we need to search those ruins. There might be survivors.” But Jugurthos sounded doubtful. “Hadidu!”

  Hadidu had dropped from sight, down the steps, the descent to Ilbialla’s well. Nour kicked aside, then picked up a fragment of the tomb’s carving. It carried the script no one could read, the word Ivah said must be Ilbialla’s name, but the word was incomplete.

  The water was low, murky. Nour remembered the place as always cool, damp, sweet with the scent of moss and water, and householders chattering as they came for water or to make some prayer, the garlands of flowers they would lay about the moss-grown grey block of stone they called the seat of the goddess, though she
would more often be found, if you were not seeking her in need for some private word, sitting on the low wall surrounding the well in the evenings, while her priestess told the old stories and the folk of the ward gathered to listen.

  It smelt stagnant, now, like a fouled cistern, as if underground the water no longer flowed clean.

  Hadidu dropped to his knees there, where the water and the last step met, and dipped his hands. If he prayed, his prayer was silent. And brief. He rose abruptly and came back to them, sweeping them up the steps with a jerk of his head, his face set.

  More than Jugurthos’s street guards had ventured out onto the hot wasteland, now, and the folk of neighbouring streets were already at work shifting stone, crying out at a discovery amid this ruin and that, but they brought out nothing but bodies, most burnt beyond recognition, or they turned up naked bones.

  “Ilbialla is dead,” Hadidu said, and that set up a wailing among those gathering, though for many—but Nour was cynical as Talfan—it was an empty ritual of grief. They hadn’t known her, grieved for her these thirty years, loved her. But they might grieve for loss of the hope they had had.

  “Ilbialla is dead, but Marakand needs to keep her memory alive,” Hadidu said, and they fell silent to listen. Nour hoped they didn’t hear how Hadi’s voice shook. Jugurthos glanced around and nodded at his guards, trying to hold more of the gathering folk of the ward back, and they parted to let them through. “We need to remember, how Ilbialla wanted us to live . . .”

  It was good preaching, though there was no hope behind it; Nour knew his friend, close as a brother, in his bleak and defeated moods, when there was no purpose to going on except that not to do so was to break faith, and without that, what had all those folk up and down the marketside—so many dead now, who had gone to bed last night in hope—risked their lives all these years to shield him for? The false Lady still ruled in the temple, and an enemy who could slay the very gods could not be starved to surrender, which had been the hope of Jugurthos and the senate.

  In the end Hadidu, sounding calm and practical, sent the folk to be directed by the street guard in the search for survivors and for bodies for burial. He tried to slip away, but he needed to be engulfed by Jugurthos’s own guards to free him from the press of people wanting blessing and reassurance. Nour linked arms. He felt—strange, wounded, and dreaming, himself, but Hadidu looked chilled and grey, like a man pulled from drowning.

  Lightning flared over Templefoot Ward, and the ground shuddered beneath them. Hadidu clutched Nour’s arm. He hardly felt it. Something . . .

  They retreated to the Sunset Gate fort again, for what safety that could offer—none, against the Lady—and watched the play of lightning, or whatever it might be, that lit up the dusty air. The Hall of the Dome had fallen. That wasn’t all.

  “There’s no light,” Nour said, realizing it, late, slow, and stupid. “No fire on the walls themselves. In this haze, we’d see the glow of it. The temple’s unwarded.”

  Jugurthos gave him a long look, nodded once, something decided, but if Nour had been consulted, he didn’t know for a moment on what. The Warden of the City headed down, snapping out names. Couriers. Orders to captains. Companies of militia, the wall-wardens . . .

  Ah. Ilbialla was dead, but something had come upon the Lady, and now they were going for the temple. Too late.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Cursing. Northron cursing, worse than anything she’d ever heard from her father’s noekar, damning the Lady and all devils and their unlikely ancestors, and she was choking. Ivah moaned, rolled over, difficult because—because she was being dragged backwards down a steep hillside, over stones and broken branches, by the hood of her coat. Nausea overwhelmed her and she threw up. Mikki’s nose pressed to the back of her neck, cold and easing the pain a little. Her head throbbed as if she were being beaten with a hammer.

  “Up,” he rumbled. “Please, Ivah, up, if you can.”

  She wiped her mouth on a fistful of leaves and tried to obey, shaking, hands and knees first and then an arm over his shoulders. The morning light was thin and dim, barely dawn.

  “What—” she croaked, and looked back, up the slope. Broken and tattered branches, but higher, near the crest, the trees were blasted flat, stripped of leaves, lying like grain swept by the sickle, all aligned.

  “There’s nothing we can do. Come down to the priest’s hut. Your head’s bleeding.”

  She touched the back of her head gingerly, found a swollen lump, and nearly squealed at the pain of it. Sticky fingers, but no great flow. She let go of the demon and started back up the hill. They had only come a few yards from where she had fallen.

  “You can’t help,” he repeated, but he followed, thrusting his head under her hand when she groped for a supporting trunk and missed. The air was harsh and stinging with dust, wind swirling every which way, barely settling from whatever had done this. She had only been knocked out for a few moments. There was Mikki’s axe and a caftan ripped to rags at the seams. He’d been upon her when the dawn took him. There the cloak and armour of the Red Mask, there her sabre, on the edge of the flattened trees.

  “I slew three Red Masks in Fleshmarket,” he said, low-voiced. “And sent some temple guard running, those that got away from me. I think the captain of the drovers’ gate and all her guards are scattered, but the temple didn’t hold it yet either, when I left. The company Jugurthos sent was in there when I left, but it was hard for them to tell who was who in the dark. I hunted a fourth Red Mask through into Templefoot, and he was nearly to the gates when he was suddenly an old corpse, and the earth of the lane began to take him. But that whole attack was meant to be a distraction, nothing more, I think, to lure me and the Blackdog away while the Lady slew you or took you. It was you she feared, not us, you and your spell to free the gods. I should have thought at the time and stayed put to protect you. I’m no war-leader, Ivah. I followed a captain when I sailed with my raider cousins, and now I leave the long thinking to Moth. Jugurthos would have known better than to leave you. Varro’s dead.”

  “I know.” She leaned on him a moment, catching her breath. “Zavel brought priests and temple guard.”

  “Zavel,” he said, and then, unhappily, “Red Geir’s sword. It draws betrayal, witting or unwitting, treachery or ill-luck. Someone should have thrown it down a well.”

  “The guardsmen that came with Ashir—are they—”

  “I found them sneaking along the path from the menagerie when I was coming back to you. They’re dead.”

  “All of them?”

  “Ya. I think so. Covered in the blood of the old man and his poor old bear. They were too stupid to run. They thought I was one man, and easy.”

  She nodded, which made her retch. “A priest, the Right Hand, tried to betray the temple. Zavel killed Varro. I killed him.”

  “There’s a dead priest tied to a tree, down there.”

  “I tied him while I went to warn Belmyn the temple was here, but the Red Mask came. I heard him die. You didn’t see the other one? The other priest or soldier or whatever he was? Dressed like a caravaneer?”

  “No.” He let her scramble after all up the last few yards, over the fallen trees. The view down into the next narrow wrinkle of the hill was eerily open, the bare-stripped trunks of the trees slanting uphill. Partway down the trees ended, and there was only a shifting greyness. Ash, she realized, stirring in the morning breeze. Just ash, and stone, earth baked hard and the stone fired glossy. Her eyes fixed on a white stone that was a skull, half buried in ash. The little stream that flowed from a spring across and up the valley still found a way down, bare and naked to the sky rather than fern-shrouded and secret. Steam hung over it. Ivah found she was on her knees.

  “The library’s still standing,” Mikki said. “Hadidu and Nour would have been at the gate, if not out in the suburb with Kharduin. They should—they must be safe. Nothing you can do here. Come back down to the priests’ steading now.”

  But then he flung his h
ead up, teeth bared, and a heavy paw slammed her flat. He crouched above her as away over the city the sky lit white, like sheet-lightning over the desert. A breath later the deafening thunderclap struck them, and a wind. Ash swirled and rose from the valley, stinging against the skin.

  “Great Gods have mercy,” Ivah heard herself saying. “Old Great Gods have mercy. Mikki, that was—”

  “Not wizard’s work,” he said, and his teeth dragged at her hood. “Up. That was over Sunset Ward.”

  “Nour—”

  “Nothing you can do.” Muffled, through clenched teeth and cloth, pulling her. “Come.”

  “Let me go, I can stand.” But she shook, and tears were streaking her face. “Where?”

  “You—Gurhan’s cave. She’s already attacked here. What need strike again? And if she does it’ll be some shelter. Come!” He was ahead of her, angling down the naked hillside. She caught his urgency, tried to run, slithered into him, and went on clutching the thick fur of his shoulders, down to where ash swirled up about their feet, and he picked his way, keeping to the ash, twisting and leaping to avoid the bare baked earth. Heat beat up from it as from the sands of the Black Desert in the noon sun. No trace of her spell. There was a sword, twisted, melted, and hardening again, and a spearhead, no shaft. A helmet filled with ash, and another skull. Dead for nothing. Guarding nothing. Much of the devil’s spell carved into the wall sealing the cave was still intact, but a hole was broken, gaping dark, and with Mikki shoving to hasten her she climbed over the old mound of landslide rubble and crouched on the edge of the blackness.

  “Go.”

  “What about you?”

  “Something I have to do. Go. Stay there till—till night, I don’t know. Then get out of the city, unless—just get out.” He pressed his muzzle to her cheek, warm breath and bristles, a kiss, she realized. “Save yourself. I don’t know that this city can be saved, if I can’t find Moth—just go.”

  “How can you find Moth? You couldn’t before.”