The Lady Read Online Free

roiled as fingers found the swollen lump of his jaw, the broken, sticky-crusted egg-lump on his head, far worse. He remembered the guardsman’s cudgel. The man must have thought he was dead, or the Marakander bastard would have finished him. He’d had a sword.
    No swords here now. There was his knife, though. He’d been lying on it. He crawled to pick it up, slow and shaky, found the sheath still in the big square pocket of his coat and the other still heavy with coin. That was something.
    No Marakander guardsmen, street or temple, in sight. Whatever that boiling-over of rage had been about, the caravaneers must have won it. It was folk of the road mobbing the house across the street. He peered, blurrily. Desert folk and Grasslanders, Northrons and Westrons and Nabbani of the east. The woman screaming, she was Marakander, or at least, she was dressed like it, in a fine embroidered caftan, and they were dragging her stumbling down the steps. Not a shop, but a fairly grand, yellow-plastered house that would have looked less out of place in Palace Ward or by the Silvermarket. The porter lay limp before the door, and another, younger woman shouted, “Cowards! Traitors! Help her!” as she tried to struggle after the captive.
    Someone stabbed the young woman in the midriff with a spear, and she just stood staring down at it, the dark stain spreading, till they jerked it away and she fell out of sight down the stairs, into the crowd, and a skinny man, another Marakander, staggered into the doorway, bleeding about the head. Mouth open, he slammed the door against the mob. Coward, too, or maybe wise. Zavel watched, a bit stunned, as if it were all a dream. That wasn’t a fight; that was filthy murder. In broad daylight—murky, smoke-dulled daylight. In law-bound Marakand.
    The older woman kept on screaming and pleading.
    â€œLet me go! I’ve done nothing to you, I’m no priestess! Help! Someone help! I’m a magistrate of the city, a magistrate of the suburb! You know me, Old Great Gods witness, you all know me, I had no part in this, I knew nothing of it, I’ve wronged no wizards—” and then the threats, “You’ve murdered my clerks. The Lady sees, the Lady knows, the Voice will speak your names, you’ll all die condemned in the cages for this, outlanders or no, you’re not beyond Marakand’s law . . . help! Help me!”
    They dragged her away up the street, towards the city, and her cries changed again to wordless screaming.
    Zavel staggered to his feet to follow, uncertainly, not even sure why, except that he didn’t know what was going on, and the only way to find out was to follow. The threat of temple guard and Red Masks seemed past. He snagged the sleeve of a man with caravaneer’s braids and Stone Desert tattoos.
    â€œThe temple—” he said. “They’ll come. They’d better let her—”
    â€œDidn’t you see? The demons slew the Red Masks, and the Lady’s put to flight!”
    â€œWhat?” But the man pulled away from him, outdistancing his unsteady steps. “What demons?” Zavel called, but nobody answered.
    There were bodies, far more than had been mixed into the fight he’d taken part in; the street stank like a butcher’s market. Here the corpses were scattered like river-edge flotsam, in drifts and swirls amid the shops and warehouses and caravanserais just before the Gore, the triangle of land between the branching roads to the Riverbend and Sunset Gates. Zavel picked his way over men and women lying still, flies already settling in buzzing black carpets. Strange, how very still the dead, how different from the sleeping. You’d never mistake them. He wouldn’t. Not anymore. Folk of the road. Folk of the suburb. Temple guard. Many temple guard, in their red tunics and armour, and Red Masks, in crimson-lacquered scale and masked helmets, but people were pulling the helmets away