The Lady (31 page)

“I did! I was sent to capture you, I admit, but I've ordered the rest of the men to wait down below the hill while I scout the way, and you can—if you'll hear me out, you can send your own guards to take them.”

“I can do that anyway,” she said, half an eye on Varro's stealthy creeping along the dyke to get behind them. “What did you say you were, the Right Hand? The first of her priests then, aren't you? Who's the other one?”

“No one. Only my guard.”

“So what does a priest of the Lady want to talk about?” And how had he known to look for her here, and by name?

“They say you're working to free the gods.”

“Who says?”

“We have our informants,” he said haughtily. “Is it true? Can you do it?” And then in a rush, “Mistress, this false Lady is mad and growing madder. None of us are safe. She murdered my wife, she murdered the Mistress of the Dance with her own hand, when she first possessed the girl, for all I know it was she who had the Voice murdered too. We're not safe in the temple! She's shut herself up in the Hall of the Dome to dance, and she hardly does anything else, day and night, but dance and mutter to herself, and tell us to wait, when the dead king comes from Praitan we'll take back the city and she'll be empress Over-Malagru. If you can bring back the old gods, the true Lady, then there are those of us in the temple willing to acknowledge your senate as the true one.”

“Generous of you,” said Varro, and when the guard whirled around, a knife in his hand, the Northron clipped him on the jaw with the hilt of his sword. He grunted and fell; Varro kicked the knife away. Ashir backed from him, hands raised open, empty.

“I doubt the Lady—assuming there is still or ever was a true Lady—will really want a nest of priests who followed a usurper so willing and devoted,” Varro almost purred. “I think you've seen which way the wind's blowing and just want to save your own hide, priest Ashir.”

Ashir said nothing to that. Ivah went down to join Varro, sabre in hand. Ashir looked her over and couldn't, for all his evident fear, quite hide his disdain. Remembered her cowering before his goddess in the temple, maybe. Not his idea of a fearsome enemy? No, not his idea of a wizard who could threaten his Lady. Well, she was used to being a disappointment.

“I didn't come to trade words with mercenaries,” the priest said, resolutely ignoring Varro. “I came to make a bargain. If you can free my true goddess and promise to allow her her true place in Marakand, I can lead the priests of the temple to you.”

Ivah shrugged. “The Northron here's a better Marakander than I am, and whatever you think you can offer, it's neither of us you should be offering it to. It's the priest of Ilbialla and the Warden of the City who'll want to speak to you. Or not.”

“I came to make a bargain with you, wizard.”

“I'm nobody. A servant. I don't make bargains.”

“Thirty years,” said Varro abruptly. “We both know there were priests disappeared in the temple, Right Hand, for protesting the Lady's new decrees, after the earthquake. For protesting massacres in the streets, children, babies, murdered.” His passion was honest, too, not put on for rhetorical effect. Hadidu had had an infant sister . . . Ivah had heard a little about that, one night, from Nour. “Did you speak then?” Varro demanded. “If your true goddess does come back, you'd better meet her with your face in the dust.”

Ashir pinched his lips shut and refused to look at the Northron.

“We can—” No, they couldn't take the priest and his guardsman to the street guard over the ridge by Gurhan's cave; they'd found out about Ivah and where she stayed, which few knew; they might know about the spell being slowly cast there. Their true mission might be to destroy it and set back the work by days, or they might at least take the opportunity if it were offered. She and Varro would have to take them to the library themselves, and hand them over to the street guard stationed there, who could lock them up in some cellar room and send for Warden Jugurthos. She began to say so to Varro, speaking halting Northron, but his eyes narrowed, and he yelled what she only after understood—

“Down!” And he struck her with his shoulder and his whole weight behind it, sending her staggering sideways, leapt past her swinging his sword now two-handed, stumbling. Someone cried out in pain, a shape reeling back on the edge of the light, someone who had come creeping while they spoke. She sent the light high, flaring bright to rival the declining moon, and followed it, springing over Varro, foot just touching his bloody sword, the spear . . .

Zavel, and she had never given him a thought since that day in the suburb. His face was ghastly, grinning, gaping with pain, and he threatened her with a Marakander guardsman's short stabbing sword, but he swept it like a sabre, flailing almost blindly, panting. Rags flapped from his coat, and he hugged his body tight with his left arm, falling backwards. “Traitor priests! Tamghati whore! You've bespelled them all!” he was shrieking when Ivah sliced half through his neck.

Nothing moved behind him. No other shadows stirred. She watched, listened, trying to breathe silently, mouth open, and still there was nothing, except the terrible gurgling behind and a whimpering that was Ashir, so she turned back to Varro, who had fallen on his side, with the spear meant for her in his chest.

He breathed still, after a fashion, and his eyes were open. She knelt down by him and felt the wound. Hot, wet. His coat was already sodden, and the spear deeply embedded, the length of its head at least. She knew she wouldn't get it out without doing worse damage. She knew it wouldn't make any difference. She spread her hand, with the shaft between thumb and fingers, and felt the urgent pumping blood. Bubbling. He was drowning. Her light had died, all her will gone from it, and the night was dark, the moon dropping behind the hill or lost in the trees, but she thought he was trying to find her face. She could feel his fear.

“Varro . . .” She didn't think even a wizard trained as a surgeon could do anything for a spear in the lungs. Moth, maybe. Who was lost. Mikki . . . but a god, a demon, they could only work with what the world gave them. His breath panted and choked, blood and air spluttering together. He was afraid, and cold. It was dark, and none of his friends were here.

She didn't dare set down her sabre. Where had the priest and his guardsman gone?

“Can I help?” Unknown voice.

“No,” she said, and with a forefinger drew light again,
the sun steps forth from the palace gates
, the dawn, hope, new beginnings . . . useless here but for its light. This was small and near and golden. Varro's eyes were very wide and didn't follow it, as if they already saw some other landscape, the long grey road to the distant heavens. The guard, a bruise already coming up on his chin, crouched warily by her. Ashir stood a safe distance back, fist to his mouth. She felt dimly surprised they hadn't bolted.

“Not my orders,” Ashir babbled. “Zavel was supposed to wait with the guards, he had no business following us up here.”

“He brought you here. He told you I was here.” Because Zavel had found Varro, somewhere, and gone on about Holla-Sayan being with Ivah, and hitting him, and Varro had told him . . . something. Enough. Justifying Holla's having hit him, not having killed her, oh, she could almost hear his voice, how it must have gone, Varro speaking when he shouldn't have, thinking to defend his friend's honour. Varro's hand twitched, so she took her blood-slick hand from his chest and held his, still not setting down her sabre, still watching the shadows. She should say something to him. She should pray. Her fault. He had a family. She wasn't worth his death. Even if she could free the gods, who weren't his gods or hers, she in herself was not worth his death. If she freed the gods and saved all Marakand, she was not worth his death, because he had daughters and he loved them.

She began to sing; any fumbling words she spoke would be wrong. It was a Northron lullaby her father had sung to her, old, he'd told her. Maybe something he'd sung to his other children, long ago in the Hravningasland, when he was Ulfhild's husband, before the devils escaped the cold hells.

A silver moon on the tower walls,
And the surf white on the sand,
He rides a grey horse over sleeping hills.
Listen child, do you hear the sea?

A song that went with some forgotten tale, ancient and slow and sad. With a forefinger, in Varro's own blood, Nabbani hexagrams and Northron wizardry, she wrote,
Night mist fills the valleys, the mountains float as islands
. Which meant, peace, stillness, welcome dreams, and the easing of pain. She sang all seven verses, though Varro's choking struggle to breathe ended in the fourth of them.

She was not one who saw ghosts easily. If Varro had last words for his wife, it should not be she who carried them, anyway.

“Holla-Sayan will come,” she said aloud, still in Northron, because the Marakanders did not need to understand. “Or Mikki. Wait for them.” She still held his hand. She made herself let it go, closed his eyes, and stood.

Two prisoners and only she to deal with them. Ivah was not in a mood to deal with prisoners. Enemies dead, yes, not prisoners, who were an annoyance and a bother and, these two, without any use whatsoever.

She would not be her father. Though she did not think this Lady would have held long against her father, if he had ever decided he wanted Marakand for his own. She must not grow into him.

Ashir had gone over to Zavel, a sprawl of arms and legs and lolling head for which she felt no emotion at all. Varro's stroke, which had struck arm and ribs both, and deeply, would have killed him anyway. Her blow had merely hastened him on his way. The priest was chanting a prayer over him, a blessing of the Lady for the road, swaying from side to side and making sweeping ritual gestures.

“Don't!” she snarled. “Leave him—” But Ashir in his last bowing sweep of the arms crouched and scraped the dirt of the track and opened his hands over Zavel's empty face, scattering earth with the final words of his prayer. Freeing him to seek his road, conveniently beyond reach of even a seer's questioning. She seized the old man by the collar of his caftan and jerked him away, back towards—but the guardsman had vanished.

She and Mikki should have had a patrol of guards here with them, as Jugurthos had wanted, and now, now she felt like weeping. She forced the priest to a tree and tied him there with the sash of his own caftan, gagging him as well with his headscarf. His eyes were terrified. If the guard came back—she had to risk it. In all likelihood he had fled to bring the rest of his comrades.

“I'm sorry,” she told Varro. “Old Great Gods bless you and make your way easy, Varro. I'm sorry. I'll be back.”

With her light very small, not much more than a butter-lamp's glow to stop her tripping or putting an eye out on some stabbing broken twig, Ivah set off straight up the ridge opposite, to drop down on the valley of Gurhan's cave from above, and the nearest allies.

She had not reached the height of the ridge when she heard the gagged priest scream. He might have worked the scarf loose; she had carefully not been so brutal as she felt inclined to be, but that had not been a cry for help. Terror, and unless Holla had returned, what was on this mountain to terrify him? She began to run, an arm before her face to shield it, torn between brightening her light and extinguishing it altogether, but ended up scrambling nearly on all fours, using both hands to catch at limbs and trunks to pull herself along, stealth forgotten, crashing through interwoven, snaring branches, sweating, cold, heart pounding, gasping for breath and whimpering—

Red Mask. There was a Red Mask behind her, and the holy terror of the Lady clutched her. It should not, could not, she had destroyed it. It was restored and she must destroy it again, but she could not, she could not, she could not think. She ran like a mad animal, her will unanswering. She led it straight to her spell at Gurhan's cave, but she could not stop her flight; she would crest the ridge and crash flailing, stumbling, whimpering down through the poplars, down into the narrow valley where Belmyn and her patrol guarded the god's cave and the drawing of the spell, scattering her careful painting of powders and salt and ash, the coiled and knotted cat's-cradles . . . and the Lady would kill her and make her a Red Mask and know all she knew and—

Ivah caught a tree and swung herself around it, put her back to it, fists clenched, eyes closed for a moment's space, trying to slow her breathing, master her galloping heart. She had destroyed the Lady's spell of terror once, she could—it was a new spell, she knew that, she could feel it. There was Grasslander work woven into it, defying her, designed to catch and hold her magic and hers alone—but she had done it once. It could be broken again.

If she had time.

Like a child in nightmare, she was crying out, calling for her father, her mother, for Mikki, for Ghu, for Holla-Sayan, but there was nobody to come to her, there never had been, and the Red Mask came through the trees breaking branches and thrusting down saplings, armoured, with murky light leaking from his armour and white fire sizzling on his short staff.

“St-st-stupid juggler's tricks!” she screamed. “You are dead!” But the words meant nothing when she said them; she didn't have Ghu's power. Her teeth chattered, and with the tree against her back she drew her sabre and thrust it into the earth before her, began weaving a cat's-cradle with strands of braided bark and yarn out of her pockets, a three-pointed thing between her shaking hands and the sabre's hilt. And thoughts came suddenly pouring as if she had opened her mind to a river. Not burning, not binding. Give it to earth, let earth take it, set it free to seek the stars, a pattern that echoed and altered, that opened the gate, that loosed the knotted weaving. Let there be mercy. The ideas came from nowhere, the shape, the form. She could almost see—no, it escaped her and her web faltered, she held a loop hooked over a thumb with no idea, no instinct of where it should go, and the thing, which had hesitated, feeling . . . something, came on.