The Lady (6 page)

Useful to let them think so, of course. That, on the other hand, she
was
his mistress, was just a further obscuration.

Yeah, right, she would say. You really know how to make a girl feel wanted, Captain.

Jugurthos pushed away from the parapet. “I'm coming down,” he called to the old man and strode for the stairs. Tulip, muttering imprecations, scurried after him. A patrol was just coming in; she drafted them as escort, grabbed a spear from his office—one of the few weapons not locked in the armoury—and glowered to the point that Jugurthos swallowed any protest.

There was no sally-port in either gate-tower; they had to haul back a leaf of the main gates enough for the seven of them to slip out, two by wary two, with Jugurthos, giving in to Tulip's common sense, in the middle. None of the mob beyond moved towards them, parting, rather, and standing back to give them passage. The old man had gathered the Red Mask into his arms again, held her on his lap, head lolling against his shoulder. He glared at them through tears, said nothing now but stroked the hair from her face.

A woman in her prime, which the old man was definitely not, dark-haired. Jugurthos had seen corpses enough, victims of family quarrels and drunken brawls, sullen, stealthy murders, and alley robberies. This was different. Old. Her skin was dry and tinged with grey, the staring eyes cloudy, the lips shrivelled, colourless. No stink of death, though, and not the greasy, horrid rot of that infant's corpse unearthed from a rubbish heap by stray dogs last winter. He swallowed against that memory and warily crouched, to put a hand to the face himself. Dry. Neither warm nor cold, like touching wood, cloth. The old man blinked at him.

“Your wife,” he prompted, and fingered the slick lacquered leather of the armour scales, the crimson cloak, which up close was tattered, faded, and unexpectedly gritty to the touch, as if it had never been washed or even brushed clean.

“They took her,” the old man said. “The week after they built that tomb for Ilbialla and butchered her priestess. You wouldn't remember, you're too young. You think there was always a tomb there in Sunset Market, but—”

“I remember,” Jugurthos said. He was hardly so young as all that. Tulip put a warning hand on his shoulder. “Go on. Who took her?”

“Red Masks. They came—I worked with my brother in those days, and we lived up above his shop, at the back. Sandal-makers, he and I. Aylnia read the coins, the Nabbani divination, but it didn't bring in much, more just as a favour for neighbours, you know, and half the time nothing came to her and she just told them what she thought they wanted. Joking, almost, between friends. They came, Red Masks, and they took her as a wizard. We used to pray for children, we'd been childless so long. I've never prayed since, save to thank Ilbialla we had none. I wouldn't stay in the city after that. I moved out to the suburb.” And all the while, he never left off stroking her hair.

“But the Red Masks take wizards for execution by the temple,” Jugurthos said. “Condemned to death in the deep well, by the Voice's decree. They're priests, not—not . . .” He swallowed. “She can't be your wife. She's some priestess. She's not thirty yet, this woman.” Stupid thing to say, stupid. The old man was manifestly not deluded. His eyes, though swimming with tears, burned. No confusion there.

“She died that day, or not long after,” the sandal-maker said. “She hasn't changed, hasn't—she hasn't—” He wailed and bowed his head over her. “They said—when they killed her out there now they said—the temple—a necromancer—a devil. One of the seven.” The words came out as half-strangled gasps, through sobs.

A devil?

“All right,” Jugurthos said inanely. “All right.” He put a hand on the man's shoulder. “All right, just tell me. What about necromancy and a devil? Who—no, to start with, what's your name?”

“Ergos,” the man said, “Ergos Arrac.” A very distant connection to the Arrac-Nourril Family, then.

“How did she die? This time,” Jugurthos amended. “What happened out there, when the Lady came?”

“Bring him inside,” said Tulip in his ear.

He nodded, recalled to sense. “Yes. Inside.” Kneeling on the road before his gates with a riot or worse in the suburb was folly. But the men and women who had followed Ergos Arrac to the gate stood watching, menacing in their silence, and now murmured, hands, some of them, on weapons.

“I'm not arresting him,” he said loudly. “I'm not going to make him disappear.” Or let him disappear, if temple guards came for him? If Red Masks came? What choice would he have?

“Cold hells. Fine then. I do—” he grinned, a hand on his sword's hilt to stress that it wasn't their threat he bowed to. A couple of the Marakanders stepped back; no backing off on the part of the caravaneers, though. “—see your point. We'll all stay out here in the open. To witness. Tulip, go back. I want Itulyan out here, to set down everything that's said. And Belmyn, too.”

Belmyn was the senior-most patrol-first. He didn't have to say, “Belmyn and her patrol as well as the clerk, and maybe a double patrol while you're at it, to make sure we can make it back to the gate, afterwards.” Not to Tulip. She nodded understanding and strode away.

“Wait till my clerk comes,” he told the old man. “Calm yourself. Get your words in order. We'll set them down fair. You wanted witness. You'll have witness. Testimony set down clear and true before the gods and the Old Great Gods.”

And in the plural he betrayed himself, yes? “The gods” alone might have passed, been taken for “the Old Great Gods.” Old Ergos didn't notice, but at his side a sharp-faced girl's eyes narrowed.

Ergos laid the woman down again, folded her hands above her breast, and tried unsuccessfully to close the clouded eyes.

The patrol hovered too close, their attention more on the corpse than the onlookers or the road. They whispered together. Jugurthos snapped at them to keep an eye to the bridge, and Tulip returned, with the clerk and three patrols, one of which, at a jerk of Belmyn's head, hung back at the gate. The onlookers gave a little ground but muttered.

Tulip's face was grim and she crouched to whisper in his ear again. “Courier's back from Hassin. The Lady's fled to the temple in disorder. The Riverbend Gate's being attacked by caravaneers. Nothing Hassin can't handle.”

“Fled?” Jugurthos said aloud, checking his own bridge yet again and the footpath that hugged the wall. Nothing stirred there, no trouble spilling around from the north. The suburb itself, though smoke rose, seemed quiet.

“Don't speak to them,” said a woman suddenly. “You were a damned fool to give your name, Master Ergos. We shouldn't have come here. They'll use your words against you. Come away while you still can.”

The girl, the one with a face like a curious weasel, said, “No. You were right, Uncle. The city needs to witness, if we all die for it. Tell the captain.”

But the old man was listening to neither, his eyes fixed on Jugurthos again.

“Tell me,” Jugurthos said. “Itulyan, set his testimony down.”

Because that was the law, wasn't it? An accusation needed to be recorded, witnessed, brought to a magistrate. There were a score of auditors here from the suburb and as many street guard, and he felt he was balanced on a bridge like a sword's edge, and the crossing—he would fall, they all would, disappear into the depths of the Lady's well. Red Masks would come for the record, for those who dared accuse and those who might have listened . . . but that was a Red Mask, vulnerable and dead, long dead if the old sandal-maker were to be believed, and Jugurthos would stake—was staking—his life the old man spoke honest truth.

A bridge like a sword's edge, and if crossed, if he dared—run, and don't look down.

“The Lady rode to the suburb with a company of Red Masks and temple guard,” Jugurthos prompted. “What then?”

“They came for wizards,” Ergos said. “There's always a few wizards among the caravaneers, there's diviners and such in the suburb, a few, in secret. But they killed—the temple guard started it, they killed honest tradesfolk for no reason, and the Lady looking on, and—and they accused wizards and the Red Masks took them and if their friends and kin tried to save them they died and then—and then the wizard came.”

“What wizard?” Jugurthos asked. Itulyan's bronze stylus jabbed and flicked over the wax.

“I don't know. Outlander. Caravaneer. Someone said she was Grasslander, but she looked Nabbani to me.”

A Grasslander who looked Nabbani, a Nabbani who looked Grasslander—one face came to mind at once. Old Great Gods, if the black-haired Grasslander Ivah, Hadidu's lodger, were not dead, then Nour, maybe Nour . . .

No one had ever escaped, once taken by Red Masks, and Ivah and Nour, both wizards, had been taken, staying behind to let Hadidu get his child and the young servants away, when temple guard and Red Masks burnt the Doves to the ground.

“What's this wizard's name?”

“I don't know. A great wizard. Sent to us by the Old Great Gods, maybe. She came out of nowhere, riding a bear.”

“What?”

“A bear, a great demon bear, golden, a servant of the gods. And a giant dog like, like a nightmare of a dog, black as night, with them, and when they struck Red Masks, they fell. She broke the terror of the Red Masks,” Ergos said, and gripped his wrist. “Captain, the wizard, she did that. Suddenly—we were afraid, all of us afraid, but it was our own honest fear and we could stand. We could think. We could fight the temple guard, we could dare. We could stand against the temple, then, and the Lady saw it and fled back into the city. And we—and people thought—they stripped the Red Masks and they weren't—they weren't—we thought they were priests and soldiers and they were—they were dead.”

“Old dead,” said the sharp-faced girl, with a look at Itulyan. “Not dead of the bear and the dog and the wizard. Set that down. My mother's aunt, since you're setting it all down for our deaths. I never knew her, she was arrested and executed before I was born. But
he
knows her, my uncle, my master. Don't you dare look him in the face and deny it.”

“I'm not,” said Jugurthos.

“The wizard said the Lady was dead, the true Lady, and a devil had taken her place,” said Ergos, but someone at the back contradicted, “No, she said the Lady was a devil and a necromancer,” and someone else said, “There was a devil in Lissavakail, and the goddess of the lake drove him out and he's come here.”

Argument followed among caravan-folk as to whether that devil had been slain or driven away. The clerk Itulyan gave Jugurthos a harried look. He made a dismissive gesture. Enough, it was enough.

“The Red Masks are no priests!” the old sandal-maker shrieked, jerking to his feet, hands fisted. “They're dead! The enslaved dead! The violated dead! And the Lady of Marakand's the necromancer. I accuse her, I'll swear it to any magistrate, I'll cry it in the streets, I'll cry it from the Voice's own pulpit, from Ilbialla's tomb, the Lady is a devil and this is the proof if I die for it. This was my wife!”

His supporters surged up around him, shoving, and the patrol reached for their clubs. Tulip's knuckles whitened on her spear, but she only held it sideways, putting herself between Jugurthos and the throng.

“Will you come into the city?” Jugurthos said.

“Captain . . .” said Tulip in apprehension.

“Uncle!” the niece-apprentice cried.

“Bring her into the city. To the market square.”

“
Ju!
” Tulip hissed.

He was running the sword's edge, and dizzy with it, and it might not even reach to the far bank of the chasm beneath.

“To the tomb of Ilbialla,” he said. Where better?

The old man took a deep and shaking breath. “And what will that do?”

“I don't know. Let's find out. Belmyn, bring the—the sandal-maker's wife, the diviner, with due respect. Itulyan, I want—” Jugurthos made hasty calculations, “—ten fair copies of that testimony made at once. Draft every literate guardsman you need and dictate it, but ten at the very least.”

“We don't—”

“Find them! Send someone to roust out a few scribes, then, folk who live near. Merchants' clerks from the warehouses. Go! Don't waste time.”

Time would run through his hands. A lifetime waiting for what he had thought would never come, a vague
someday
. The Lady fled to the temple. The Red Masks—maybe not impotent. But proven vulnerable, proven—an abomination and a testimony against the temple, against the Lady.

Patrol-first Belmyn and three others used the Red Mask's own cloak to wrap and lift her, and the old sandal-maker let them, watching, with his niece—great-niece—standing arm about his waist, chewing her lip.

“Don't trust them,” a tattooed Black Desert caravaneer urged. “They'll hand you over to the temple. They'll bury the truth.”

“The Riverbend Gate's being attacked by the suburb,” Jugurthos said. “They know all this?” A hand spread towards the body.

“We all know the truth, now.”

“The city doesn't. The city's not your enemy. It's as much a victim of the Voice, the Lady, whoever and whatever this necromancer is, as you. It's been as afraid as you. Moreso. You can leave, caravan-man. We live here, with the Red Masks walking our streets.” Not that they did so all that often. But there was always the one day they would come, and their terror would leave you helpless, broken and shaking as a beaten child. “We all need to know this truth.”

“And then?” Tulip muttered. “Old Great Gods, Ju, what follows then? Riverbend's under attack, and it'll be a massacre if a horde of caravaneers out for revenge gets through.”

“Law,” said Jugurthos. “Law, the street guard, and the senate. We're Marakand. Not the temple. The suburb needs to remember that. Come inside, all you here. In. To witness, as you said. And then leave, leave freely, and rein in whatever madness for revenge is still brewing out there.” He jerked a hand at the smoke-shrouded buildings beyond the Gore. “You all came here, with Ergos Arrac. You didn't go to Riverbend raging for blood.”