The Leopard (Marakand) Read Online Free

silent, and there was only the Lady of the Deep Well, and the Voice of the Lady to speak her will.



The assassin’s house was reached by a mud path up along the cliffs from the village; Deyandara, who had been calling herself a bard outright since she left the Duina Catairna two months before, found it by asking a young widow. Not that she asked for the assassin. A mercenary, she said, as she had through all her wanderings. Ahjvar, by name, called the Leopard, a lordless spear for hire, who dwelt somewhere on the coast, at a place called Sand Cove. She had wandered long through what her own folk called the Tributary Lands, where the folk looked like Praitannec folk but spoke a language that was half the bastard Nabbani of the Five Cities and, though they lived under little chieftains of their own tribes, owed allegiance and paid tribute to this city or that. Sand Cove, in either language, was unheard of, though once she reached the south she had been helpfully directed to both Sandy Bottom and Sandy Creek, in the green lands between Two Hills and Gold Harbour. Neither sheltered the Leopard under any guise she could penetrate. He wouldn’t be calling himself an assassin; they had law, in the cities, though it wasn’t the law of the kings. Everyone knew that such killers for hire flourished, that the lords of the cities hardly dared trust their own kin and harboured assassins among their own household folk, but even so, such a man would hardly deck himself in whatever the assassin’s equivalent of the bard’s ribbons were, to proclaim his trade.
    But finally, south of Gold Harbour, when she was near despairing of ever finding the place she sought, Deyandara met a shepherd who had heard of Sand Cove and then encountered a donkey-cart of seaweed driven by an old man—she never did find out where the seaweed was going or why—and was set on the right path. And finally, the place itself, round, stone-walled, thatched houses that looked almost homelike, a muddy lane meandering through, and a helpful inhabitant.
    “Master Ahjvar from the inland hills? Is that the man you mean? But he’s no mercenary. He’s a man of law, I think. Of course I know him. I send one of the little ones up there every morning with bread and milk.” The woman left off her task of spreading laundry to dry over the wall of her yard and propped a haunch on the stones instead, ready to gossip. “He’s always being called into the cities by the clan-fathers there, the great lords and ladies. And he has a book of the law, a fat scroll. He showed the headman once, when there was a quarrel between him and his sister over their mother’s inheritance. Master Ahjvar settled it fairly and they’re good friends again. A wise man, and a kind one.”
    “I thought he was a fighting man.”
    The widow frowned. “Oh, no, Master Ahjvar’s not that. A peaceful man, and a quiet neighbour. But maybe he’s not the Ahjvar you’re looking for.”
    A name of the eastern desert, belonging neither to Praitan nor the Tributary Lands nor the cities themselves; it was hardly common. “He lives in a ruin, I was told—” Had she been told that? She didn’t remember it, if so. It unfurled in her mind like a memory only now. “On the cliff, near Sand Cove in the south, on the sea.”
    The widow—she had already introduced herself as such, as if it were a title, Widow Akay—laughed. “He’s on a cliff, that’s true enough. And this is Sand Cove. Master Ahjvar has been living in that ruin on the headland to the west there, oh, it seems years now. Since before my husband died, anyway. Just him alone, and now the boy, too.”
    “What boy? I didn’t hear he had a child.”
    “Ghu, of course. Not his son, at least, I don’t think he is. A city boy, a Nabbani. He came along a few years ago to do for Master Ahjvar, you know, look after his horses, cook his meals.” A smile touched the widow’s lips. “Maybe he’s something more. We all thought it a pity Master