The Lady Read online

  Lightning seared his vision, and Jugurthos flung up a warding arm before his eyes. It had arced, not from the clear night sky but from the tomb itself. People cried out and scattered, but there was no second strike. Jugurthos ran, but there was nothing to do for the stonemason. He was manifestly dead, the cloth of caftan and shirt burnt away in a patch broad as a spread hand, and the skin beneath charred black and flaking in the lantern-light. The haft of the hammer, too, was charred, and the iron head lumpish and deformed.

  “Gods have mercy,” whispered Hadidu, catching up, falling to his knees at the dead man’s side.

  “The Lady is not here!” Jugurthos shouted. People were fleeing. They were going to be useless. At least his own guards stood their ground. “The spell is in the tomb. Attempt no violence against it, not yet. We’ll free our gods, but not this way.”

  He heard the words even as he said them and thought, how, when even the scholars of Nabban had no answer? But the folk had to believe it.

  Hadidu was praying, the old blessings for the road, invoking the three gods of Marakand and the Old Great Gods. Some folk, the older, who knew the words, joined in.

  “Remember, there is a wizard in the suburb who has come to aid us, a wizard who has fought the Lady and put her to flight, who has stripped the Red Masks of their blessing of terror and shown us the truth of their torment. If our gods are to be freed, it is wizardry will do it.” Please, Ilbialla and Gurhan and the Old Great Gods, that they still existed to be freed.

  The rush away had checked. People grimly gathered again to the street guards who had been organizing them. The stonemason’s men, stunned and silent, gathered him up. “His wife,” one kept saying. Just that. “Who’ll tell his wife?”

  Was he going to lose them all? Claim the ward, he had said. Holla-Sayan was right. Take the city while he still had something to take it with. Don’t give the passion Hadidu had kindled time to die. They waited, but it was already cooling, in sudden death before them, in the blazing reminder of the Lady’s power.

  He held up a hand, holding them a moment. “Forty at the Eastern Wall fort,” he told Holla-Sayan in haste. “Maybe fifteen are street guard under Captain Orta Barraya, and he commands the four patrols of the suburb blockhouse too. Six or seven patrols of temple guard as well. The two don’t mix well. Captain Orta aspires to be temple guard. I doubt he’ll rush to join us; he’s from Ashir the Right Hand’s branch of the Family Barraya, not mine. Ashir’s the chief of the Lady’s priests,” he added, since he didn’t suppose the caravaneer had ever paid that much heed to the temple before. He raised his voice, shouting, pitching his voice to carry. “People of Ilbialla! People of Gurhan! The Lady strikes at us even here, but we can stand! We can, we will hold this ward for the gods, for Marakand free again. The wizard of the suburb, the Lady Ivah, leads her army of the suburb to take the Eastern Wall. Will you break faith with your true gods, when even the outlanders fight for them?”

  The Westgrasslander made some noise that might have been a choking laugh, and then he was gone, a shadow, a darkness that twisted the night, and a black shape like a wolf bigger than any dog Jugurthos had ever seen was loping away.

  Talfan abruptly sank to her knees. “In my kitchen,” she said. “With my children. How could he? Varro is such a fool.”

  Holla-Sayan didn’t head back to the suburb but went away through the city, through Riverbend and Greenmarket, into Templefoot, strangely named, as it stood above the temple, not below. The streets were empty, curfew kept here. He didn’t even see any patrols. When he came where he could see the pale glow of unearthly fire he took man’s shape again and walked even more warily. He touched the white pebble in its amulet-bag at his throat. A token of his god, such as nearly all wanderers carried, to remind themselves they were not godless and lost. Sayan had himself sworn Holla-Sayan was still his, after he became the Blackdog. And sworn so again, when he blessed Holla’s marriage, though he knew, he could see the change—and Holla-Sayan himself confessed it because he would not lie to his god—what he had truly become, and of his own will, to save the girl he had loved as his daughter.

  Which was a devil. The man he had been ought to have died under Attalissa’s altar. The two of them, man and devil dying together, had done what they must to survive, to go on, to save not the goddess but the girl. The Blackdog spirit had in truth been a wounded and crippled devil, forgotten, overlooked by the Old Great Gods, soul-scarred and lost to itself in a war fought across the lands of the old empire of Tiypur. Not even the bards of the road remembered those stories; it had all been long before the devils’ wars in the north that had made the seven such figures of fearful renown. A crippled and soul-wounded devil, but a devil nonetheless. Enslaved by Attalissa of the lake, bound to but not bonded with a human host. Free now, and whole as he could be, bonded one, not two, not they, not he and it. He might still think of the dog as something separate, sometimes, but it was no longer the truth.

  He could smell the fire, as he had told Talfan and the Warden, not the clean water-on-stone scent of wizardry but something like fire and metal. It was more than scent. It was a feeling, a pressure, a twisting of the world from its nature, as wizardry was not. It was . . . a wrongness, like a wound.

  There were plenty of people here, hiding in the houses, watching from shuttered windows. He only imagined he smelt their fear.

  The fire—smelt him. Or something. It leaned, licked the street. Heat reached for him. He stepped back. True fire he might risk. Not this. And what could he do if he forced a way into the temple? Fight the Lady and die? Slink furtive through its half-ruined buildings again and find no more trace of Moth than he had before? Defeated? Dead? The demon said not, but that could be a lover’s hope, not any demonic certainty. Holla-Sayan could not believe Vartu Kingsbane, so old and—and whole, had been overcome by that confused child he had fought in the suburb, vicious though the girl might be. But what, then? And what hope for any of them, if the Lady could defeat even Vartu?

  He should go back to Master Rasta’s caravanserai, go home to Gaguush. She would be worried and worse than worried, furious. It was last night now he had gone off into the restless dark. Seemed a month, at least.

  Something knew he was there. Not Moth, but the Lady. He felt her attention fix on him, strangely dreamlike, remote, as if she hardly knew what she did.

  You. What are you?

  He didn’t answer, made himself quiet and still.

  You are not he.

  What did he see of her? Not the fury of battle now, the baffled rage of a thwarted beast as the fight turned against her and her servants were broken one by one. Confusion. Doubt. A great weariness. Fear. They were not all one. It was as though he touched two souls. Or three? The third, in terror, slid away, deeper.

  Where is he?

  —What is he?

  Listen.

  He listened. Nothing spoke. The impression of her awareness faded from him. If he had not been alone, when he first began watching the temple, he was now.

  What had he seen? What had the dog understood?

  She was young. Now he understood. They had said the Lady never left the well, and then she had, in form like a young priestess. Too many minds. In this bonding, this body, she is young.

  She didn’t realize how old and strong she was; she didn’t remember. That was why she had fled him. She feared he was—someone else. You are not he.

  He flexed a hand. A reborn devil, confused and uncertain? She was a roiling disharmony, fractured, twisted, discordant in her soul. Souls. Perhaps she could not see very far out of her own confusion. He knew madness. He, a part of him, the part that still could not find its words, had been there. But he was whole, now. He was one.

  The Lady did not feel whole. Not yet. But she would be, surely. Varro and his friends were right. They needed to take all the resources they could from her, before she realized her strength and regained her confidence. Even Tamghiz Ghatai had needed his warband to hold Lissavakail.

  Or to
hold himself human, to be a warlord, a ruler, and not a mad tyrant over abject or mindless slaves. Could Ghatai have slain every priestess of the temple and nested there among the ruins, greater than a god of the earth, awaiting Attalissa’s return? Holla-Sayan rather thought so. Tamghiz Ghatai had been sane enough not to want to. Strange thing to respect a hated enemy for.

  So the Lady was broken, insane, but she was still far the stronger, and he could not breach her walls. He did not think anything but the sword Lakkariss would sever her from this world, a thought that brought cold sweat out on his skin. Had Moth taken the black sword with her, when she disappeared into the temple? If that shard of the cold hells, obsidian, ice, tear in the world, whatever it might be, fell into the hands of the Lady . . .

  No. Or that mad girl would have come after him with it before now.

  While she still feared him, though, while she still hid, they could at least strip her city from her, steal the resources of her tyranny, leave her nothing but her own self, and buy time for . . . for what? Aid to come? From where? Were they to wait for Moth to return? With the sword she had warned him would be his own death, if ever he came to the notice of the Old Great Gods?

  Wait for the gods to awaken? What could they do against a devil? One god, alone, might only be able to die, but there were at least two in Marakand. And him. And Mikki. And Ivah’s wizardry, and other wizards furtive in the suburb and now owing Ivah so much. . . .

  The spells on the tombs felt, smelt, only like human wizardry, though they were woven with another will, another strength, the devil’s touch. Still, wizardry was the framework of it, and you didn’t need to bind what had been destroyed. And Ivah had already destroyed one great work of the Lady’s, taken one weapon from her. Maybe she could give them one against the false goddess, as well, in the gods of Marakand themselves. Maybe, even as symbol and hope alone, they might prove to be Marakand’s strength.

  He didn’t think Varro was right. He had not brought this down upon the city by failing to leave Ivah and Nour to die, by inciting the Lady to attack the suburb in search of them. No. He, they, he and Ivah and Mikki between them, had done it by giving the faithful of the old gods a hollow hope, by luring them out of their patient, fruitless hiding. Which shouldn’t make him responsible for their damnable rebellion.

  Gaguush’s argument, he was sure. It wasn’t going to sound any less hollow when she made it. He was in this now, no walking away. All it would take was for the Lady to send a handful of her invulnerable Red Masks out, immune to weapons and wizardry even stripped of their miasma of terror, to strike down Hadidu and Jugurthos with the fire of their staves. The city would fall at her feet again, wizards would be taken again, murdered and enslaved as Red Masks, and a devil come out of hiding to grow stronger, sitting at the nexus of the trade of the world. She was already reaching east to Praitan. How far would she stretch? West to Lissavakail? Beyond? To the Sayanbarkash, his parents, his brothers? His god?

  No. Lying quiet and waiting only served so long. Too long. Time the city fought, and it could not do that, if its leaders had every moment to fear a death they had no hope of defending against. That fear was what had kept it lying passive so many years already.

  No turning away. He’d already come too far.

  Holla-Sayan let the dog take him and loped away through the empty streets. If the fearful eyes behind the shutters saw—let them.

  CHAPTER VII

  Come the grey hour before dawn, Varro was at the Eastern Wall. He had half hoped for Holla-Sayan to appear to back him up, but no surprise he hadn’t. He’d probably gone back to Shenar’s to sleep, or if he was rash enough, to Gaguush at Rasta’s. The man had looked dead on his feet. Still, he shouldn’t need the Blackdog here, even though he and Kharduin had just a hundred or so men and women, and half of them Marakanders of the suburb, tradesmen and grooms and the like, people he wasn’t sure he’d trust not to pick up a sword by the sharp end. At least there were a handful of real street guard, ordered to join the expedition by Magistrate Pazum, the surviving authority of the suburb. Kharduin had led the man to think he had an equal share in directing things, wily desert snake that he was. He’d practically offered the caravaneers as mercenaries for the three gods, and somehow, within a very short time, they were all talking that way, folk of the road and folk of city, that they were all folk of the suburb together, serving the priest of Ilbialla and the three true gods of Marakand as if there’d been no murder mere hours past, as if the blood of the suburb’s other magistrate and her clerks didn’t still stain the earth.

  The only brief problem had been Magistrate Pazum’s own son, who had at first seemed to think he was in command of the expedition against the Eastern Wall, though he’d shut up and had the wit to stay shut up when Kharduin gave him a long, slow, considering stare from his icy blue eyes and asked him, “Led many raids, have you, boy?” Probably he’d been put up to it by his father. Truth was, he’d seemed more relieved than anything to be shoved into one of the Red Mask uniforms and told to follow Varro and do as he was told.

  The Eastern Wall was ancient work. It flowed, partially ruinous, from the cliffs and steep scree slopes that were the southern edge of the Malagru Mountains to cross the dry riverbed of the ravine with only narrow arches for the passage of the forgotten water, ending where lesser cliffs rose to the city. The road from the east passed through a gateway of massive square towers. The ravine here was not dry but a swampy bed of tall reeds, their feathery heads whispering together. Too much whispering behind him. Varro turned to glare back over his followers. A few carried torches or the candle-lanterns of the street guard swinging on tall poles. Behind the dozen or so Red Masks and an equal number of equally false temple guard, the latter mostly Marakanders whose short hair would not betray them, the remainder of the force, under Kharduin’s command, hung back in the darkness.

  The fortress of the Eastern Wall was very like the city gates, double towers flanking the gateway, but dwarfing the defences of the city proper as a bull did a calf. The long wall and the fort were mirror to the one at the Western Wall, through which he had passed on every trip he’d ever made to Marakand. There would be doorways into both towers within the tunnel under the arch, and along the road ran lower walls enclosing stables, kitchens, other outbuildings, probably disused and half ruinous if the Western Wall were anything to go by, and pens for the courier-ponies. And, of course, the back doors. They were not necessarily unlocked or undefended back doors, but, the odds were, neither would they withstand Northron axes, if it came to that.

  Not that he had an axe. He’d kept his own sword. It wouldn’t stand out. The Red Masks had been armed with a variety of blades and some had had Northron weapons. Murdered Northron wizards, or just whatever weapons the temple had acquired? Whose had been the swordsmanship of the dead—the Lady’s or their own?

  And why was he worrying? Varro hitched his cloak over the ragged tear that ran from the neck down towards the left breast of his armour—Mikki’s work. He wasn’t facing Red Masks here. They were Holla’s problem.

  He’d better not be facing Red Masks here. He should have taken a longer farewell of Talfan, not just gone blithely jaunting off like that on her errand to send the Blackdog to her. He didn’t like the way Talfan looked at Hadidu now, so fondly possessive, as if the priest were some creation of her own. He didn’t dislike the man at all. He still didn’t have to like finding him living in his own house with his wife.

  Silence fell, no whispering now, as they marched up alongside the low wall enclosing the backside of the fortress. He hesitated. They hadn’t been certain. Unconvincing if they pounded for admittance on what might turn out to be a gate into a corral or something. Nothing that he could see in the dark through the wretched narrow eyeslits of the suffocating helmet showed which of the several solid wooden doors was the commonly used way into the fort. The moment’s hesitation was hardly noticeable, he hoped. Surely they kept some sort of watch. He led his troop on, into the deeper darkness benea
th the arch. At the far end of that long, cool tunnel between the towers, the gates themselves were faced with beaten bronze, never closed except when an enemy threatened the pass, but they were closed now.

  Pointless, when your enemy was within rather than without, and you opened your doors to him. Which was what the garrison of the fort did now, even as he lifted a gloved hand to pound with his short white staff of office upon a door in the northern wall. Why the northern? He chose at random. It might just as easily have been the southern he chose.

  Obviously they had been observed coming. The masked, triple-crested helmets of the Red Masks were distinctive, and in the torchlight the red glowed with sullen fire. His heart raced. If they were challenged—

  A temple guardsman saluted, stepped back, and saluted next some Marakander woman in temple guard officer’s ribbons who stood near Varro. “Lady be praised, you’ve come at last,” he told her. “We were starting to think the courier must have deserted or been taken by the rebels.”

  Red Masks didn’t, Varro supposed, wait for invitations. He shouldered forward and oh, Haukbyrgga, goddess of the lake in the high dale of his youth, be with him now, let the others follow. He cut off the motion to touch the stone snail-shell in the amulet-bag about his neck.

  The others did follow, flowing after him, gratifyingly, menacingly silent.

  “Tell them up above!” the temple man shouted over his shoulder. “The reinforcements are here.”

  Reinforcements for what? Another temple guard peered around a doorway and thudded off up some stairs. And where were the officers? This man was only a patrol-first, by the thin stripe on his hem.

  The man bowed to a point halfway between Varro and the woman in lieutenant’s ribbons. “The rebels still hold the southern tower. We don’t know if Captain Orta lives or not.”