The Lady Read online

  “Devil’s servants!” shouted the ringleader of the hostage-takers. “Let us in to the necromancer, or the magistrate dies and her blood will be on your hands!”

  “I’ll let you in,” an officer called down, and there was silence. He was an old man, grey-haired, weary-faced, with two black ribbons trailing from his helmet and two wide black bands on the hem of his grey tunic. A captain. He stood in a crenel of the wall, exposing himself to any missile, a hand gripping the edge of a merlon with fingers like claws, as if he really, really did not like his perch. No one threw a stone. Yet. “You and the magistrate, no other. We’ll talk about this.”

  “Open your gates!”

  “And let drunken murder loose on the folk of the city? You know I can’t do that.” The captain was trying to sound reasonable, to pretend he thought the man making the demands could be reasonable. “I don’t know anything of devils, but—”

  “Open the gates! Open the gates!”

  Zavel really did not want to be in the middle of this. His stomach churned and his skin was clammy, slick with sweat. He was going to be sick, he knew it. He needed to get out of this close and reeking crowd, get some air, a drink of water, needed to sit down somewhere quiet and let this damnable headache pass.

  A couple of big Northrons had axes out and were hewing at the gate, long splinters slivering away. The crowd surged forward around a woman who’d got an improvised torch alight. They piled sticks and rags and dry dead weeds to kindle a fire. The ones about the magistrate were hurling her back and forth among them as she wailed like a baby, arms raised, clutching her head, trying to protect herself. They threw her to the ground and kicked her, took the butts of spears to her head and back as she rolled and hunched up small. The captain was gone from the crenel, and a spatter of arrows from above scattered them, left the ringleader lying dead, with others still or yelling, dragging themselves wounded. The magistrate tried to crawl but only flopped like a landed fish.

  People shoved and shrieked and the guards above kept shooting, not a battlefield rain of arrows but carefully, picking targets. Zavel fell, unsteady on his feet, retching again, but he crawled anyway. Safer to keep low amid the legs. Someone walked on his hand, someone tripped on him, someone fell and didn’t move, and he half rose and scuttled, yelling with the rest, but in his dizziness he’d gotten turned the wrong way and he tripped over the battered magistrate. She moaned, not dead, but her face was a blood-slick pulp with only one eye, which stared wide and unseeing in its terror. Zavel yelled again and rocked away. But nobody had gone looking for his mother. Too late, they said. The sand took her. He dragged the magistrate’s arm over his shoulder, shouted at her, “Up, stand up, come on!” Somehow he heaved her up, though she dangled limp, feet fumbling. An arrow stuck the ground at his feet and he looked around wildly for shelter, any shelter, a bush would do. Nothing. Shouting. Guardsmen over the gate were dumping jar after jar of water down onto the fire, which hadn’t done more than stain the gate with soot, and the ram-carriers had fled, though some of the mob were sheltering behind a cart abandoned on the bridge, whatever beast had drawn it gone.

  “The gate!” someone was yelling. “Old Great Gods, man, the gate, now, hurry!” and it was him that she shouted at, a guardswoman up on the tower, gesturing.

  Zavel looked to see one leaf of the axe-scarred gate drawn back, just a handsbreadth. He didn’t for a moment understand, till the magistrate moaned again.

  Great Gods, yes, the gate. He broke into an unsteady run, the magistrate a dead weight dragging half behind him. He caught a toe in the pit left by up-prised paving stones and fell, both of them striking heavily, struggled up and heard voices behind him. Looked back. Shouldn’t have. Blood-crazed men daring the arrows, running to overtake him. Arrows from the towers took some, gave the others pause, but a hurled javelin bit into the magistrate’s thigh as he dragged her on again, and then a man was hauling her from his grasp, another grabbing him, and he himself was pulled bodily through the gate as another thrown spear thudded against its timbers. It thumped shut again, the bars dropping home.

  It was the grey-haired captain himself who had come out for the woman, and he swung her up like a child, running with her now, down the long arch of the gateway, turning through a dark doorway where guardsmen crowded. Zavel, with less urgency, was trundled after by other street guard.

  He ended up in a windowless room with a table and a couple of chairs; they dumped him on a long bench along one wall, where he sat, a bit dazed. A watch-room, Zavel supposed, where the duty officer would be found and the clerks would scratch away at recording whatever it was the Marakanders were so keen on always writing down, yes, there were tablets and a big ledger on the table, and through another doorway a single, barred cell, the gate-fort’s gaol, where brawlers and curfew-breakers would cool their heels overnight. Not, for a change, his destination. Someone pounded him on the shoulder and said, “Good man!” He clenched his teeth, which made his jaw hurt worse, and shut his eyes, holding his throbbing head.

  That brought a woman’s solicitous murmuring, and he was given a blanket, offered a cup of sweetened wine and a warm, wet towel for his wounds. Gentle, efficient hands bound up his head. It helped, at least when he lay down afterwards, eyes shut against the glaring clay lamps in the wall-niches opposite. He breathed carefully, to keep all within still and settled.

  A hand on his shoulder shook him awake. Zavel rubbed his eyes. However long he’d been sleeping, it hadn’t been enough. A fraction of a watch, no more, maybe, but now he had a stiff back to go with his sick headache. The grey-haired captain was sitting at the table, with a clerk beside him, stylus and tablet in hand. Typical Marakanders: you couldn’t tell which folk their ancestors had come from. Like their languages and their very names, picked up bits of this and that. The clerk was a pugnacious-looking bastard for a soft-handed scribe, with his crooked, flattened nose. He’d be the one to fear most if he had to bolt, Zavel was sure. A young guardswoman helped him to sit up, smiling anxiously, and pressed a cup into his hand. He smiled back. Thick-curling hair and a dark, heart-shaped face, well worth smiling at. He wasn’t going to have to run. These were his friends, now. The cup was coffee this time, thick and steaming. He couldn’t stand the stuff, but it wasn’t exactly cheap, though even the poorest Marakanders made shift to drink it; it came all the way from beyond the Gulf of Taren and the Narrow Sea out of the south. You didn’t give your prisoners coffee, so he murmured his thanks and sipped it. The sweetness seemed to settle his stomach some.

  The captain cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, young man, that Magistrate Tihma has taken the road to the Old Great Gods, Lady bless her.”

  “I didn’t—” Of course they weren’t accusing him. “I didn’t know her name,” he amended, and added, “I’m sorry.”

  “Your courage is all the greater for that,” the captain said earnestly. “To risk your life for a stranger . . .”

  In the darkness behind him, a shadow stirred, and Zavel realized there was another man in the room, another guardsman. The other stepped forward. Temple guard, a man with a single ribbon to his helmet and a single dark stripe on his red tunic showing below the leather skirt of his armour. An under-officer of some sort.

  “Captain Hassin would like to commend you,” the temple man said. “But I would like to know what other part you played in the uprising and assault on the gates.”

  “None!” Zavel protested. “I—I was only passing by, I saw the—I saw Magistrate Tihma being pulled from her house and I followed. An old woman! I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what’s caused this madness in the suburb, it’s nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t let—it was just wrong, beating an old woman to death that way. I—I waited till I saw a chance I could help her. I—she made me think of my mother.”

  The temple officer nodded. “Naturally.” He appeared to consider something, but Zavel had grown up in market bargaining and on the road; he wasn’t wet behind the ears when i
t came to such things, and the man had already decided whatever it was he affected to consider. Zavel’s stomach clenched.

  “These are sad times for our city,” the temple officer said. “The Lady has always looked on the folk of the road as friends of the city, and it will be a great sorrow to her that the outlanders of the suburb have been so misled by the lies of this wizard.”

  “Wizard?” Zavel asked, confused now. It had been demons, hadn’t it, that the caravaneer had told him of?

  “A Grasslander woman—or Nabbani, I’ve heard both. A great wizard commanding demons. For a lifetime the Voice of the Lady has warned of the evil wizards would bring and it’s finally come to pass. We could use a man who might know how to keep his ears open—”

  “Wait, this wizard. Sir. You said a Grasslander or a Nabbani? You don’t mean Ivah?”

  “You know of her? Is that her name?”

  “I don’t—probably. She’s a servant of Tamghat. The Lake-Lord, the one defeated by the goddess Attalissa last summer in Lissavakail in the mountains. I was—” Probably best not to claim any closer acquaintance with Attalissa. The Lady was said to fear other gods, too.

  Both officers fixed him in a keen stare, waiting, and the clerk scratched swiftly at his wax.

  “I—I just heard. I met her once or twice.”

  “I came here to get a report on the assault on the gates for the Revered Right Hand of the Lady,” the temple man said. “But your witness could be much more useful than what Hassin here’s been able to tell me.”

  The street-guard captain frowned at this. He didn’t like it. Well, if it came to a choice between street guard and temple, Zavel had a feeling the temple was the one to align himself with. Street guard were mere thief-takers, after all, and had to give way to the Lady’s men. Look at this one-stripe man walking all over the gate-captain, and in his own fort, too. The clerk looked up, glanced at his officer, and went back to scratching.

  “Captain Hassin would like to give you a pat on the back and turn you loose,” the temple man went on. “I, however, think perhaps I should arrest you. You were clearly part of the assault. Perhaps you saw ‘rescue’ of the unfortunate magistrate as a way of ensuring your safety, when you realized the futility of storming the Lady’s gates?”

  “I never thought at all! I just—”

  “And you seem to have great knowledge of the leadership of this uprising. You know their commander’s name.”

  “I only guess—”

  “In her inner counsels, perhaps?”

  “That traitor? I’d cut her throat if I got close enough! If it is her at all,” Zavel added hastily. “I never saw any evidence she was that great a wizard. A soothsayer, nothing more. But she was a liar, too. Probably she lied about that. And a murderer—”

  “However,” said the temple officer, “perhaps I do believe you. I could arrest you. I should arrest you. However, if you were to volunteer to come with me, the Right Hand would likely take that as earnest of good intent and honest goodwill towards the Lady. Any information we can put together about this wizard, now, is bound to be an offering the Lady will approve.”

  “If you can get me next to Ivah with a sabre in my hands, I’ll even join your temple guard,” Zavel said hotly. “I had nothing to do with whatever’s going on out there, I’m an honest caravaneer—”

  “We do need your name and gang, for our records,” Captain Hassin said.

  “No,” said the temple man decidedly, “you don’t. Young man.” And he came around the table, taking Zavel’s arm to help him up, a bit roughly. “That will be all, Hassin. Send your report to me—Lieutenant Surey of the second company—and be sure to include how Magistrate Tihma came to be murdered with an entire company of street guard looking on.”

  He swept out, dragging Zavel stumbling with him.

  A change in his fortunes, definitely, but whether for good or ill, Zavel wasn’t about to guess. If it gave him a chance at Ivah, though . . . and Holla was mad. Was he making war on a goddess now? It looked that way, if he was one of the demons the caravaneer had been going on about. The monster inside him had corrupted his soul and broken his mind, turned him against his friends and all right thinking. A devil in the city was lies and nonsense. Tamghati lies. Some scheme Ivah and Governor Ketsim had cooked up to turn the suburb against the goddess. Odds were Ketsim and his Tamghati mercenaries weren’t off fighting in the east after all, odds were they were coming back up the eastern road and would be at Marakand’s gates before you knew it. Ketsim and Ivah had been working closely together when they abducted Pakdhala—and the Lady’s people would not only give him a chance to pay the lying wizard back for that, and avenge his parents’ deaths, but maybe even reward him, if he could help them stop her. It wasn’t like he had a gang to go back to. Gaguush had sacked him when he asked her for money yesterday, and in his heart of hearts he’d known this time she meant it. Besides, he wasn’t happy bedding down for the night with a possessed madman sleeping so near, out in the empty desert, not at all. Holla’s pacing and prowling in the dark was enough to give anyone the creeps.

  They were always telling him to grow up and take a man’s place in the world. Time he did.

  CHAPTER II

  A dozen men and two women stood before her, not one daring a whisper, not one daring raise eyes to meet the gaze of their goddess. They stood close-bunched and cowed before the high pulpit, the surviving officers of the company of the temple guard who had gone to the caravanserai suburb with the Lady of Marakand and her Red Masks, her silent, invulnerable, divinely blessed and protected warrior-priests. But those Red Masks had been proven very vulnerable indeed, to the magic of a yellow-eyed Grasslander wizard who rode into battle on a demon bear of the north, with what could only be the Blackdog of Lissavakail a tide of death before her.

  That was neither here nor there. These, these had proven coward, all the temple guard had, faithless betrayers who broke and ran when they found the shield of the Red Masks did not protect them. They had failed their oaths, failed their faith, failed her, their goddess, when they found that the folk of the suburb, who ought to have been cowering unmanned and witless before the divine terror of her servants, were willing and able to fight. They had thought they went at no risk to themselves to arrest wizards made impotent and witless by the divine blessing of those same Red Masks, to take for the Lady’s well even the least of the diviners who had thought themselves safe and outside the Lady’s ban and reach, beyond Marakand’s city walls. They were used to such easy tasks, secure in the shadow of the Lady’s greater servants.

  That the folk had lost their terror of the Red Masks—no, that the divine blessing of terror had been stripped from them by inexplicable wizardry—did not excuse the cowardice of the temple guards. To fail and flee because you found the enemy capable of fighting back was the mark of a bully, not a soldier. Zora had told them so.

  No captain stood among them. He was dead, killed by caravaneers, outlanders. He had not been standing, no, that she had seen. He had died running, knocked down from behind, hacked and pummelled to death in the dust. A fitting end for a coward. The company’s senior lieutenant, nearly unable to stand, one eye bloodied, cheek open and not yet stitched, had done no better, except that he had lived to make it to the gate.

  As had she. She had fled with the rest of them.

  That was different. That was . . .

  . . . a sensible tactic. She had needed to remove her Red Masks from danger. Without them . . . without them the city might fall, without them she might fail, and what followed her failure. . . . She had been right to run, to take her damaged Red Masks out of reach of the wizard and her demons. Yes. She had brought them back to the temple, even the one stationed at the Eastern Wall to watch for Praitannec enemies, and the one at the Western. Did she dare leave the Eastern Wall unwatched by eyes she trusted? The first whisper of this, the first stir and swirl of a changing current, had not come from within the city. There had been a spy. Spies? The first Red Mask to
die had died there. She had nearly forgotten. She had not been Zora then.

  Doubt would cripple her. She had enemies all about her and she did not even know who they might be. She had sent her captain and his Red Masks, all who were not now in the city, east to Praitan, but death came from the west, from the north, not east.

  North? No.

  The sword of the ice. . . . She had muttered that aloud. She heard the words. Zora pinched her lips together.

  A small sound escaped the huddled guards. One of the women, stifling a whimper. Weak. Other than the senior lieutenant, they were all patrol-firsts, the leaders of the five-man units modelled on the patrols of the street guard. Leaders of their patrols. Examples to their men. These were the ones who had swept with their goddess through the Riverbend Gate.

  Retreated. Fled. And some part of Zora’s heart crowed, a part that might still be Zora.

  Fool child. I am we are Zora is we are the Lady of Marakand.