Read The Leopard (Marakand) for Free Online

Cattiga, against Lord Angress’s advice, had permitted it.
    The champion seemed to have been struck with a fist of lightning. White sparks and spiderwebs crackled; there was a stink of smoke, and he dropped.
    Gilru, the prince, a brat of nine or ten, red-haired and freckled, had been by Deyandara’s feet. Probably considering his chances of tying her bootlaces together. He shouted—she could never afterwards recall the words—and flung himself away around the hearth, running to his mother even as Deyandara grabbed for him. After that it was all swords and spears and shouting, taller, broader people between her and the queen and the boy she was still trying to reach, and the fire gone mad, leaping and twisting and then dying away to embers and choking smoke as if someone had smothered it in wet straw. Lord Marnoch, chief huntsman and the seneschal’s son, came down the stairs from the upper room with an axe in his hands and felled two yellow priests before he himself was laid low by a glancing blow from a Red Mask’s white staff, something that hit his axe-haft, not his body. One of his own hunters stumbled on him, was struck across her shoulders, and did not get up. The lamps on the posts that supported the upper storey, an enclosed loft, went out then. In the darkness someone’s elbow struck Deyandara’s chin and she fell.
    “Gilru!” she heard Syallan screaming. The champion’s shield-bearer was a young woman some few years older than Deyandara, everything Deyandara was not—she didn’t tell the assassin that—handsome, skilled, respected and honoured in the hall even though she was the bastard-born daughter of the queen’s late husband—loved.
    And what followed . . . Dim light from the embers on the hearth, painting everything in faded red and shadow. Someone trod on Deyandara’s hand as she tried to reach Syallan’s voice, to be what aid she could to the prince, and then a trampling foot struck her head. Sick and momentarily blind, she grabbed it, heaved, and the man fell on her. He was one of the queen’s bench-companions, and as he rolled away a Marakander temple guardsman stabbed down with a Praitannec spear, and the man grunted and spewed blood over her. She didn’t dare move, face to face with the dying man, whose eyes, surely, looked beyond her and did not accuse, please, Andara, she hadn’t meant—Great Gods forgive her, it wasn’t her fault, everything she did went twisted, but that didn’t mean she was cursed, it did not.
    One of the queen’s household, slain, fell beside her; that was what she told the Leopard, who had his eyes shut, as if he saw the hall and the smouldering light and the dying men and women there. Deyandara had snatched the dead warrior’s dagger from his hand—she was lying on her own—and come up onto her knees, driving the long blade upwards with both hands into the Marakander temple guard’s back ribs under his short shirt of lacquered scales. He had tried to look around at her and come down on top of her, coughing and bubbling, spitting blood onto her face. His helmeted head had struck hers, a last savage blow at his enemy as he died or plain ill-chance. That second blow to the head had been one too many, and that was all Deyandara had seen of the battle in Cattiga’s hall.
    By some miracle, her komuz had survived unharmed.
    Gilru and Syallan they found in the morning, hacked down in the yard as they tried to flee, the young warrior’s body still lying over the boy’s, protecting him. It had not been enough against the axes.
    And the Marakanders, the red priests and the yellow and the temple guardsmen who had escorted them, were all fled, those that lived. Of yellow priests and guards they had bodies enough, but not a single one of the mute Red Masks seemed to have fallen. The tales of the road called them divinely protected, of course, but no one had thought that was more than poetry.
    “Gilru was the youngest son,” the Leopard said, opening his eyes