The Leopard Read online

  But now she was dead, or near enough. Flesh had long rotted, and it was over. Now she was her own. She could sleep through the centuries, a conjoined soul bound still in the remnant of a human body, a lace of bones buried in ash and cinder, protected by a fire that never died. The Old Great Gods and the wizards allied with them had thought it a prison as well as a grave when they left her here, bound in spells that they believed the seven devils themselves could not break. And that meant even he, who was the strongest of them all, could not come at her. She was . . . her own, as the long years did pass, and she knew peace.

  But the bonds of the Old Great Gods failed. Not all at once. Slowly, fretted away by cautious and patient work. First one, then another, ravelled them to nothing and stretched again into renewed life, crawled from the grave, walked the world.

  Not she. She did not want the world. She wanted sleep; she wanted forgetting. The wall of flame, which would burn so long as the strange gases roiled in the earth and found vents to the air, was no prison but a safe castle, all her own. Her undying fire would hold her, safe and warm, forever, and the spells that bound her in what could pass for death were spells of sleep and safety, like a lullaby woven over a baby. The little soul of the earth that guarded her, a creature of fire, a demon whom she knew only as a flicker lizard-like over her mind, was all the companion she needed. It never spoke.

  Her brother called her.

  She did not answer. She would not wake. He could not reach her here, safe behind her wall, behind flame born of earth and lightning, of deep and secret wells. Like a little child, she curled her soul-self up small and still, trying to be invisible, intangible. She was dead, but not dead enough. He had found her.

  One day, he was there amid the broken mountains, standing on the edge of her flame.

  Come, he said, and when she pretended she was not there, he dragged the chains of the Old Great Gods from her interwoven double soul, from her bones, and forced flesh to those bones again, shaping her, not as she had been, not the woman she had grown into, but the girl of the islands, the little sister.

  Open your eyes, he ordered. See me. Come with me. We are betrayed.

  The little demon of the fire flung its flames about him, trying to keep her, to defend her as no one ever had—her gaoler, warder, companion of centuries. Her brother snarled and burned into flame himself, golden, brilliant, furious. He tore down the walls, found the demon’s heart, the heart of the flame, and crushed it, reached for her—

  Her flames. Her guardian. Her castle of peace. Her abhorred body woke and stirred, and she sang the names of cold at him, of ice, of the deep black of the sea. No more. Never again. Never, never, never, never, never . . .

  She had never raised a hand against him, never a word in all the long years. He screamed, drowning, freezing; screamed more in fury than in pain, that she, she of all people, she who belonged to him and him alone, should dare.

  And he lashed out. He sang the names of fire, the fire of the forge and the burning mountain, the fire that lay in the secret hearts of stars. Her walls of flame roared hot and white, closed in, a fist clenched upon her, upon new flesh and old bone, upon ancient soul and baffled child. If not mine, he screamed, then whose are you? Then whose, traitor?

  His fire devoured her. She screamed and could not scream, flesh consumed, bone flaking to ash, and she burned, burned. Her souls, soul, two spun into one, fled down and down, following the vents of the flame that had not, in the end, been enough to keep her safe. Down to the deep ways, the hidden, secret ways of the earth, down the chain of the mountains, far beneath their roots. She fled and pain followed, but then between the layers of the stone there was water. It was cold, and kind. It eased the pain of her twofold soul, which had not even bone left to feel. Old water, patient water, it waited for the day it could course free again. Could she become water? Without form belonging to the world to anchor her in the world, she would perish. Suddenly she was afraid. True death, true finality, true oblivion held out the arms she had thought she longed to have enfold her, and she fled them. She tried to shape herself to water and could not, but all unexpected the water opened to hold her, to hide her; in pity and mercy it offered sanctuary, embracing her, and the water said, Who are you? What are you? Don’t fear. Rest here, be safe.

  She saw how she could be safe. She could hide within water. Her brother would not see her; he would not know her; he thought he had killed her. So long as he thought her destroyed, she was safe. So long as he did not come to this place or send eyes to this place, she was safe. The water, the old, patient, mild water, all its wild and its wilderness forgotten, held her as a mother holds her child, offering love and comfort.

  But then she realized the truth. She was a small, weak, lost thing, an ember, a guttering light with the great cold darkness reaching to her. So was the water. It was only a reflection of broken light, a whispering echo that had not yet ceased to sound. It was weak; this goddess was weak. This deity of the water could not offer shelter or mercy or safety. This was a trap. Her brother would hunt her. He would come, he would . . .

  But not if he did not see her. She would make certain he did not see her. He would see water. She could wear water. She could be water, within the water’s shell, within the shape of water, within, within, within, deeper within, burning, where the heart of water lay . . .

  And in the days of the first kings in the north, there were seven devils . . .

  The Voice of the Lady of Marakand, the goddess of the deep well, was serving pottage in the public dining hall when the ladle dropped unheeded from her hands. The old man whose bowl she had been filling backed away, nervous.

  “Revered?” he asked. He knew who she was, of course. Though the priests and priestesses of the Lady of the Deep Well served, in humility, the poor of the city, feeding any who came to their hall for the evening meal, the white veil over her black hair proclaimed her not merely any priestess but the Lady’s chosen, the one who spoke face to face with the shy underground goddess and carried her words from the well. He knew also that she—or the goddess who sometimes spoke through her—was occasionally gifted with prophecy.

  “Lady?” the Voice whispered. Her eyes fixed on the old man, wide and black. He backed farther away, looking around, and the queue shuffling along the serving table, taking bread and pottage and sweet well-water from the hands of saffron-robed priests and priestesses, bunched in confusion behind him. “Where—? Lady? Lady!”

  “Revered one,” he whispered hoarsely to a young priest hurrying up, a sweating pitcher of water in each hand. “Revered one, I think . . . I think the Voice has need of you.”

  “Lilace?” asked another priestess. “What is it? Are you ill?”

  The Voice flung up her arms before her face as if to shield it, shrieking, and then turned her hands, clawing at her own cheeks. “No!” she cried. “No! No! No! Out! Get out! It hurts! It hurts! It burns!”

  “Voice!” cried the young priest, and he dropped the pitchers, spilling the sacred water, to lunge across the table for her wrists.

  “Death! Not like this! No!”

  Priests and priestesses clustered around.

  “Lilace, hush! Not here! And who is dead?”

  “Stand away from her, you people.”

  “Give us room here.”

  “Go to the benches, sit down, out of the way.”

  But the line of charity-seekers did not disperse, of course. They pressed in about the clerics, those at the front staring and silent, those at the back clamouring to know what was happening.

  “The Voice prophesies.”

  “What does she say?”

  “A fit, she’s having a fit.”

  “My brother has fits. You should lay her down on her side . . .”

  “Away, away!” The Right Hand of the Lady pushed through, Revered Ashir, a youngish man for his high office, but balding, easy to take for older. He elbowed the other priest aside and leaned over the table to shake the Voice, which did no good, and then
to slap her, which drew shocked murmurs and hissings of breath from those around, but likewise achieved nothing useful. The priestess who had been serving the bread wrestled Revered Lilace from behind, trying to force her arms down, but she could not overcome the Voice’s frenzied strength. Lilace’s nails grew red with her own blood; she turned on the priestess who held her, raking that woman’s face. The Right Hand cursed irreligiously and scrambled over the table, but the Voice, breaking away from his snatching hands, fled, the white veil of her office floating behind her.

  “Lilace—Revered Voice!” Ashir gave chase, leaving others to look to the injured woman. “Lilace, what did you see?”

  The entrance to the well was covered by a squat, square, domed building of many pillars, the double doors in the entry porch carved and painted with flowering trees. The Voice reached it before the Right Hand and fled within, down the stairs, not stopping to light a torch at the carefully tended lamp, down into cool, moist air, where the walls were carved from the layers of living rock and the stone sweated. The stairs ended at a dark, still reservoir.

  “Lady!” Ashir heard her wail as her feet splashed into the water. “Lady, come to me!”

  The earth heaved. The earthquake tossed Marakand like a householder shaking dirt off a rug.

  It was three days before the survivors of the Lady’s temple thought to dig out the entrance to the deep well, to recover their Right Hand and their Voice. Revered Ashir was alive, though weak with hunger. The dome of the well-house had stood firm; only the porch had fallen in the earthquake, blocking the door.

  The Voice, however, rocked and muttered, playing with her fingers like a baby, as she had, Ashir said, ever since he dragged her out of the heaving surface of the sacred pool onto the stairs. Her eyes focused on nothing, blank as stones, but she spoke as they carried her to the hospice, which, by chance or the Lady’s grace, was the least damaged of the temple buildings other than the well-house.

  “Let all the wizards of the temple go to the Lady in her well. She calls them. She calls, she calls, she calls, let them go now, they must go now, make haste, haste, haste, haste, she calls . . . Let the wizards of the library be summoned to her, let the wizards of the city be brought before her, she has need of them, she will have them, she must—they must—No, no, no, no . . .”

  In the end they drugged Revered Lilace into sleep to silence her, and prayed for her. The several priests and priestesses who were wizards, the one weakly wizard-talented of the temple dancers, and a son of the Arrac-Nourril, who, being devout, had come to help dig out the temple’s survivors rather than those in his own ward, answered the summons at once. All went down the steps of the deep well to face their goddess.

  None came back. Not that day. Nor the next, as Revered Rahel sent messengers out to the city and the undamaged caravanserai suburb north and west of the city walls with the summons. Hearing that the Voice summoned wizards in the Lady’s name, they came, scholars from the library, both native-born and foreign visitors, scruffy outlander rovers from the caravans, wizards in the service of the Families or soothsayers from the nearby villages of the hillfolk of the Malagru and the silver-mines of the Pillars of the Sky. Some thought it meant a paid commission, involvement in rebuilding and restoration; some for pity and mercy, wanting to use what skills they had to bring aid to the stricken city.

  None came back from the deep well.

  And after that, two of the three gods of Marakand fell silent, and there was only the Lady of the Deep Well, and the Voice of the Lady to speak her will.

  The assassin’s house was reached by a mud path up along the cliffs from the village; Deyandara, who had been calling herself a bard outright since she left the Duina Catairna two months before, found it by asking a young widow. Not that she asked for the assassin. A mercenary, she said, as she had through all her wanderings. Ahjvar, by name, called the Leopard, a lordless spear for hire, who dwelt somewhere on the coast, at a place called Sand Cove. She had wandered long through what her own folk called the Tributary Lands, where the folk looked like Praitannec folk but spoke a language that was half the bastard Nabbani of the Five Cities and, though they lived under little chieftains of their own tribes, owed allegiance and paid tribute to this city or that. Sand Cove, in either language, was unheard of, though once she reached the south she had been helpfully directed to both Sandy Bottom and Sandy Creek, in the green lands between Two Hills and Gold Harbour. Neither sheltered the Leopard under any guise she could penetrate. He wouldn’t be calling himself an assassin; they had law, in the cities, though it wasn’t the law of the kings. Everyone knew that such killers for hire flourished, that the lords of the cities hardly dared trust their own kin and harboured assassins among their own household folk, but even so, such a man would hardly deck himself in whatever the assassin’s equivalent of the bard’s ribbons were, to proclaim his trade.

  But finally, south of Gold Harbour, when she was near despairing of ever finding the place she sought, Deyandara met a shepherd who had heard of Sand Cove and then encountered a donkey-cart of seaweed driven by an old man—she never did find out where the seaweed was going or why—and was set on the right path. And finally, the place itself, round, stone-walled, thatched houses that looked almost homelike, a muddy lane meandering through, and a helpful inhabitant.

  “Master Ahjvar from the inland hills? Is that the man you mean? But he’s no mercenary. He’s a man of law, I think. Of course I know him. I send one of the little ones up there every morning with bread and milk.” The woman left off her task of spreading laundry to dry over the wall of her yard and propped a haunch on the stones instead, ready to gossip. “He’s always being called into the cities by the clan-fathers there, the great lords and ladies. And he has a book of the law, a fat scroll. He showed the headman once, when there was a quarrel between him and his sister over their mother’s inheritance. Master Ahjvar settled it fairly and they’re good friends again. A wise man, and a kind one.”

  “I thought he was a fighting man.”

  The widow frowned. “Oh, no, Master Ahjvar’s not that. A peaceful man, and a quiet neighbour. But maybe he’s not the Ahjvar you’re looking for.”

  A name of the eastern desert, belonging neither to Praitan nor the Tributary Lands nor the cities themselves; it was hardly common. “He lives in a ruin, I was told—” Had she been told that? She didn’t remember it, if so. It unfurled in her mind like a memory only now. “On the cliff, near Sand Cove in the south, on the sea.”

  The widow—she had already introduced herself as such, as if it were a title, Widow Akay—laughed. “He’s on a cliff, that’s true enough. And this is Sand Cove. Master Ahjvar has been living in that ruin on the headland to the west there, oh, it seems years now. Since before my husband died, anyway. Just him alone, and now the boy, too.”

  “What boy? I didn’t hear he had a child.”

  “Ghu, of course. Not his son, at least, I don’t think he is. A city boy, a Nabbani. He came along a few years ago to do for Master Ahjvar, you know, look after his horses, cook his meals.” A smile touched the widow’s lips. “Maybe he’s something more. We all thought it a pity Master Ahjvar didn’t marry. The sea takes so many men, you know. But wherever he came from, anyone can see they’re fond of one another, and the boy’s been good for him. Master Ahjvar was—well, he didn’t look after himself properly, didn’t think about regular meals. You know what men are like when they live alone. Now that the boy’s there, he does whatever it is lords can’t do for themselves, and Master Ahjvar’s the better for it, even if young Ghu is a bit short in his wits. I can’t see there’s any harm in his being simple, myself, so long as his master treats him fairly, and Master Ahjvar’s not a man to hurt the innocent. A quick wit’s more likely to grow restless and discontent, when the Old Great Gods’ doom for you is nothing but a spade and stewing-kettle, now, isn’t it?”

  Deyandara smiled, consolingly, she hoped, as one who had never had to face that fate. “Master Ahjvar’s a lord? Of where?�
��

  A godless man could not be a lord of anywhere, not among the tribes of Praitan, surely not even among the tribes of the Tributary Lands. And godless he was. The goddess of the Duina Catairna had told her so.

  “Where from? That I couldn’t tell you. He’s never said as much, but we all know. He has that air about him. The north, maybe, by his speech. Praitannec. Maybe you’d know better than I?”

  Deyandara shook her head. “He might be the man I’m seeking. He might not be.” But he had to be.

  “You’re a bard, mistress?”

  A question asked for mere courtesy, to introduce the topic, with the bard’s ribbons garlanded around her brow and fluttering down behind, and the komuz at her shoulder. Deyandara’s bow was wrapped and slung behind the saddle, the muddy leathers she wore when she was not about to enter a village cleaned and bundled away. This close to the cities, the tribes were peaceful, and a bard could not afford to look like a straying hunter.

  “You’ll be coming back when your errand’s done? The smith’s our headman, and his wife keeps the tavern. Travellers always have a good welcome from them. You’ll be heading inland to the chief’s hall, of course, but stay a night here, first. If you go to the smithy and ask . . .”

  “Tell them I’ll be back by this afternoon, then, if not before.” Or else she’d have the whole village trooping up to Master Ahjvar’s to make sure she didn’t escape them. That she was a bard was a lie, of course, but wearing the ribbons seemed safer than not. Still, the woman should have questioned it. Or was she so worn by the road that she looked old enough to be what she claimed?

  It was simple ignorance on the widow’s part of what it really meant to be a bard, that was all; there were few left among the tribes of the Tributary Lands. They took their news from tramp pedlars and drovers and entertainers from the city, their stories from play-actors and puppeteers. Nabbani stories. These here were a lost folk who had forgotten their own tales. Deyandara’s tutor Lin, no bard but a foreign wizard, had said so. She had given Deyandara old stories of the southlands of Over-Malagru, stories from before the colonies were ever planted, from the days when the tribes had had kings and paid tribute to no overlord, from even more ancient times, from the great years of peace under the emperor of Marakand, and back and back, to when the summer rains were frequent and kind, and the forest stretched all the way to the coast and the folk, using only axes of stone, cleared lands in the river bottoms, worshipping the goddesses of the waters. They had feared the darkness under the oaks and burnt the hills of the gods to make new pastures . . . Deyandara might not believe all the tales, but she had drunk them in.