CHAPTER III

“My wife!” the old man at the gate howled. “Gate-Captain, look! Witness! My wife!”

But what the old man held in his arms, staggering with the weight of it, arms and legs and long hair dangling limp, was the red-armoured corpse of a Red Mask. Jugurthos Barraya, captain of the Sunset Gate Fort, looked down from the northerly of his towers. He didn’t know the man. Some small trader of the suburb, by his dress. He was surrounded—supported, maybe—by a score or so of others, Marakanders and caravaneers both. Even from the tower Jugurthos couldn’t see what was happening around the bend of the wall to the north, but he had seen a band of temple guard and Red Masks rushing disordered to the east, and after them, pursuing, a surge of outlanders, armed, out of the smoking suburb. Pursuing. Red Masks fleeing. He’d sent a courier to Hassin at Riverbend Gate for news, but the girl hadn’t returned yet. Nothing worse had befallen than that she was waiting on Hassin, he hoped, and not caught up in some assault. The all-in curfew had rung from Riverbend shortly after that, and his own bells had perforce passed it on. It shouldn’t have kept his courier, though.

If what had rushed east along the main road past the Gore had been an attack, this small party that had peeled off to take the road to the southern bridge and his gate seemed peaceable enough, thus far. Grim, though, and angry, violence only a word away, not that the bare score below could offer the gates any serious threat.

“Witness!” the man called again.

“Witness what?” Jugurthos called down. “A Red Mask?” A dead Red Mask, and they were invulnerable, protected from weapon and wizardry by the Lady’s blessing. They killed with a touch. What could touch them? That, indeed, needed witnessing. If it were true, and not some trickery, a corpse wrapped in a red cloak. Yet, that armour would be hard to come by and . . . there was a story going around that a Red Mask had died at the Eastern Wall not long before the Voice was killed. He had dismissed it as exaggeration, some mere temple guard murdered, even though he had heard it from Captain Hassin of Riverbend, who swore he had the story from his cousin, who saw the corpse, from some distance, before another Red Mask carried the priest away.

“What killed her? How?”

“My wife!” the man howled, and he laid the corpse down, kneeling over it, and stroked a dead, smooth cheek with his old, twisted hand.

Jugurthos felt his stomach turn. Surely—

“Don’t you dare,” his adjutant muttered beside him. “Captain, don’t.”

He looked down at her. Tulip only came up to his shoulder, a compact woman, young for her responsibilities, with the round face and straight hair of the mountain-folk. She hadn’t even been a patrol-first when he appointed her his adjutant, and given her physique, which was rather better filled-out in all the right places than you’d expect of an unwanted bastard abandoned and farmed out on temple charity, everyone was fairly certain they knew why.

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.”

“Some of that crowd would have torn her to pieces, dead as she was,” sniffed the niece. “So we turned off. These just followed.”

“The senate,” remarked Tulip, to the sky, “is more or less appointed by the Beholder of the Face of the Lady.”

“Oh,” said Jugurthos. “I meant the other senate.”

“There isn’t another senate.”

“No. But I think—since the Red Masks appear to have enemies who can destroy them at last—there will be.”

A curt order and his patrols headed back to the gate, shepherding the sandal-maker and his niece with them. About two-thirds of the suburb-folk followed, more than Jugurthos expected.

“The law against bearing weapons in the city streets is not in abeyance,” he said, as the gate shut behind them. “But—” as there was a growl from some of the caravaneers, “—under these circumstances, for this one time only, you can consider yourselves requested to assist the street guard in protecting Master Ergos.” Aside to Tulip he added, “Get the damned armoury unlocked and arm the patrols. Tell them right off, there’s a devil ruling the temple in the Lady’s name. Tell them, they’re sworn to protect the city and see the law’s kept. The city’s law, not the temple’s. But any you decide you can’t trust, don’t arm.” He named a few names. Tulip added several more. “And then, take a messenger’s baton in case you’re stopped and get to the apothecary’s. Tell Hadidu I need him here. I need him to speak to the people.”

“Are you serious?”

All or nothing. The last rush, the last leap to the far lip of the chasm, the sword-bridge falling away beneath him.

“Yes.”

“Captain,” said the old man. “Captain—what’s your name?”

“Jugurthos,” he said. “Barraya. Son of Senator Petrimos Barraya and Senator Elias.”

Ergos was more than old enough to remember those names. He breathed out a long “Ahhh,” and nodded, something understood. Stood a little straighter, took his great-niece’s arm, rather than leaning on her. “Look, girl,” he said. “Here’s the true head of Family Barraya. He’s no temple puppet. We’re all right.”

Or all dead together.

“We’re going to carry your wife to the market,” said Jugurthos. “The priest of Ilbialla—”

“Priest? A priest of Ilbialla? Are the gods returned?”

“No,” said Jugurthos. “But that doesn’t mean Marakand can’t keep faith with them. The priest will come to give your wife a blessing for the road at Ilbialla’s tomb.” Not that the poor empty corpse was likely to have any ghost yet clinging to it. “Itulyan,” he called back over his shoulder. “Get those copies made, now. And add at the end, Come now to the Sunset Gate Market. Witness for yourselves. Hear what must be said, in the name of the true gods of Marakand. I’ll see to their sealing myself.” With his mother’s seal, which he’d managed to hold onto through everything.

Testimony, for some few of the gate and ward captains he was almost certain of, for particular senators and magistrates he thought, maybe, he could move. For certain elderly men and women, powerful in the Families, who were not high in the temple’s favour, who had lived quiet and retired long years now . . .

And then?

And then, what followed, followed.

Ilbialla and Gurhan and the true Lady, if there had ever been a true Lady, be with them all.