The Lady Read Online Free Page A

and dragging them into rows, and there was none of the crowing he would have expected, the exuberance of victory over the feared and hated mute priests, only a horrible solemnity. What in all the cold hells had been happening?
    No flies swarmed on the slain Red Masks.
    There was weeping. People were seeking their own slain. There was crying and moaning, prayer and pleading. The wounded, the dying. He ignored them, ignored the burning buildings, the shouting, the knot of fighting that broke out between Marakanders of the suburb and caravaneers. They weren’t his dead, his wounded, his friends, he wasn’t theirs; no one was left to claim him. If that temple guardsman had hit a bit harder, if Sera’s hand hadn’t been on him (if it was on him at all—his exiled Grasslander parents had never let their Serakallashi children be tattooed and claimed for the goddess of their birth), he might be one of those dead lying in the streets, and would Holla-Sayan have come looking for him, or Gaguush, or any of them? Probably not. Nobody had gone to look for his mother, when she walked into the dust-storm.
    The gang dragging the magistrate took the northerly fork at the Gore and then crossed the bridge over the dry ravine to Riverbend Gate, where a sizeable crowd seethed and roared, beating against the timbers with what looked like the charred roof-beam of a house. There were street guard on the roofs of both the squat, square towers that flanked the gate, but they weren’t doing anything. Not worried by the improvised ram. People clawed rocks from the road and hurled them. Nobody among the attackers seemed to have a bow. What were they shouting? Murders, devil-lovers . . . Tamghati . . . ? Ketsim, Tamghat’s governor of Serakallash, had escaped, fled and formed a mercenary band from the Lake-Lord’s surviving followers. The temple had hired them, but they’d all been sent east to deal with some barbarian tribe that menaced the city, or so Zavel had heard.
    â€œSend out the Lady!” they cried. “Give up the necromancer!”
    Necromancer?
    â€œOpen the gate!” a new voice roared, a Red Desert man gripping the magistrate by an arm. “Captain, open the gate, or we kill the magistrate.”
    The woman shrieked and tried to wrench herself away, but too many hands held her and she was flung back and forth like a child’s doll that had fallen prey to a puppy. Her ornately piled hair had come loose, spilling about her face in wild hanks.
    â€œLet us in!” someone shouted, and most took up the chant. “Let us in, let us in.”
    â€œWe want the Lady!”
    â€œBring out the Lady!”
    â€œShow us your false goddess . . .”
    â€œ. . . necromancer . . .”
    â€œ. . . devil!”
    Devil? Zavel did not want to be here. Where was Holla-Sayan? Still off whoring with Tamghat’s wizard? Did these fools think they could do anything against a devil, if it did come to the gate? He began to struggle away, but more than he had followed the magistrate’s captors, and a crowd had closed up behind him, everyone shoving and shifting to keep their balance, trying to see, trying to hear. Many were taking up the cry of those closer to the gate, and the ones with the ram had propped the beam up like a ladder. Someone was inching up it like a cautious squirrel, though it didn’t reach high enough for him to gain the arch over the gate unless he meant to perch atop it like a bird. For a moment attention was distracted. Soldiers in grey tunics and leather armour leaned from the parapet over the gate and shoved at the head of the beam with spears. It slid sideways with a terrible slowness at first, while the climbing man clutched it and cursed, curses changing to a shriek as it passed its tipping point and plunged. Zavel didn’t see him hit, just heard the thump, the silence, the swell of roaring renewed.
    â€œDevil’s servants!” shouted the ringleader of