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CONTINUED
“I LIVED IN AJANABH AS WELL AS A GOOSE IN ITS flock. But it was no more than a year, I think, before the Khaighal came. They did not bring an army. They did not bring their books. They brought a cage. Not because I had wished for my wives—they could say nothing on that score—but because I had abandoned my Alcazar, and left Kash without one of her Queens.” The Djinn laughed as bitterly as a veteran. “Dereliction of duty. They poured out their smoke over me, white and roiling, and when it cleared a cage was in its place. It is not iron—it is made of Djinn-bones, and I can no more melt them than I can breathe at the bottom of the sea. I cannot slip through the bars. They keep me here, in the wasteland, and until you, there has been but one other visitor to my prison of bone and sand and sage.”
The leopard and her mistress waited with the patience of stones.
“She came when I had been here through a full summer, and my heart was as dry as cedar bark. Kohinoor, without her salamander, a pillar of smoke and ash in the desert. She came near to my cage, though not too near.
“‘I am sorry they decided this,’ she said. ‘But it will not be long. You are old now; you will not last. Nor will I—ash is ever older than flame.’
“We played the scene that angry, soured old women will play: We taunted, we sneered, we threatened. It hardly matters, really. She stood there a long time when the words were done, silent, staring.
“‘Why did you come?’ I asked.
“‘She was mine.’ Kohinoor sighed, as though she no longer believed it herself. ‘Who will fill me with flame now?’
“I understood. I was not Queen long, but I understood. Sisters, even such motley sisters as we, do understand some simple things. The simplest things there are. I extended a long hand from my cage, and she walked into my fingers. Into her smoke, into her throat, into her eyes I reached, and the flame of my palms and my wrists and my fingertips passed into her, lighting the darkness of her bones to a radiant gold, red flames opening like funeral flowers in the base of her belly, streaming from her navel. The roots of her hair glowed incandescent, and in the desert, the Ash-Queen burned.
“‘Oh,’ she breathed. ‘Yes.’
“She wept then, real tears, liquid fire, dripping to scald the earth. And then her body fell into ash, true ash, and her last breath scorched the wind.”
“Thank you,” said the leopard, sitting at attention. “We are grateful to hear such things, though we are disturbed—rather, I am disturbed on behalf of my mistress.”
Indeed, the veiled woman wrung her hands and looked imploringly at her cat with great red eyes. Scald reeled in a length of her hair and obscured her face for a moment, overcome by the memory of the old Queen. “Why?” she said from behind her screen. “It is my tale, it was not meant to disquiet you, it is nothing to you but a story told by a devil caught in a cage.”
Rend frowned and pawed the thirsty ground. She purred softly.
“That is not entirely true…”
THE TALE
OF THE LEPRESS
AND THE LEOPARD
IN URIM, EVERY WINDOW IS HUNG WITH BLACK.
This is not so monotonous as it might seem—shades of black differ as greatly from one to the other as oxblood and cobalt. In our long black banners are infinite designs, spirals and mandorlas of ghostly and intricate design. Within tall citadels the people of Urim contemplate these banners, and it calms them.
For Urim is a city of plague.
It is a hopeless place, and those who are hopeless are its priests and its citizens. Lepers and other ailments of as many varieties as spices in Ajanabh by the thousand gather there, treat one another as they can, salve one another as they may, and die in each other’s arms. The wildflower fields surround it in a wide, green-rose circle, like the window of a church, where cures of all fashions are bred and planted and culled. Some of them taste sweet as apples, some bitter as banyan root. Most of them do nothing. But we hope, we always hope. In their ailments, Urimites are brothers, and no city is so full of gentle, exhausted, beneficent folk.
They tore out my mistress’s tongue when we came, and chained me to her while she lay broken on their streets.
But I get ahead of myself. It is a cat’s habit. We bound and leap and leave the tale far behind, when we should hold it between our paws and worry it to the bone. I shall pierce it with two claws: She found me in the grasslands, and I was cold and gray as slush-snow.
Do you know how a leopard is born? We are mules, soft-nosed and long-tailed. My mother was a lion, my father was a pard of many colors; his pelt was like a war flag. On a day of hunting he found her, her muzzle bloody with antelope, and against the custom of both feline tribes they coupled in the long glare of a screaming sun. They went their ways, as cats will do. And my mother gave birth to one cub, dead as an antelope, as all leopards are born. Our mothers must breathe into our snouts, or our fathers roar into them, or we will take no life. But a new lion with a mane of tangled gold had padded into my mother’s pride, and did not care for cubs which were not his own. She left me in the saltbush, unbreathed, unroared.
That was how my mistress found me. Little gray paws curled up toward the sun like old mushrooms, spots like specks of mold, a tongue that never tasted light or meat. Even in her extremity, the woman I came to know as Ruin knelt by that bedraggled, infant cat, fur still stiff with birth water, and without knowing what she did, looked closely at my half-lidded eyes, and breathed into my spotted face.
I woke. I saw her. She was not a lion, or a pard. Her veils were parted to show her face: her cheeks flushed, her eyes scarlet as the inside of a deer, and her skin peeling from her like paper, layer after layer, like pages falling out of a book. I gripped her fingers with my paw and pierced her skin in my eagerness—but drew no blood.
“You cannot hurt me, little one,” she said, her voice rough as a tongue. “And as you are quite yellow and black and neither peeling to pieces nor turned to stone, I think perhaps I cannot hurt you…”
THE TALE
OF THE
