Free The Leopard (Marakand) by K.V. Johansen

flat on his back.
    “Do it now, because later you won’t be able to.” His voice shook.
    Ghu sat up, yawned, and put both hands on Ahjvar’s shoulders. “It won’t be tonight,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” And he took his own advice, rolling over on his side, a hand still out, resting lightly on Ahjvar’s ankle. He was asleep again almost at once.
    Ahjvar left him, took his sword, and set off walking for Marakand. They were good horses. Ghu could sell them and live off the money for a long while—if he didn’t give them away to the first beggar who looked like he needed a ride.
    Ghu overtook him around noon the next day. Ahjvar had left the tracks entirely and climbed juniper- and heather-grown crags to follow another ridge, then cut down through a dense growth of pines and across a bog. The man was, by his own admission, a slave born on an estate in northern Nabban, a horse-boy, then a runaway, a stowaway, a sailor, and a beggar in the Five Cities, where for all their sins, slavery at least was outlawed and the runaways of the empire found sanctuary. None of that allowed for any fieldcraft, and yet he tracked Ahjvar with no particular effort and appeared over the skyline riding the piebald with the white and the lion in a string behind him, unmuddied, unhurried.
    Ahjvar shrugged defeat and took the yellow gelding’s reins. “I should have taken the horses myself and left you to walk back overland to Nabban.” His head ached. He smelt smoke on the edges of the wind. Heavy, thick smoke, acrid, and the sweet scent of roasting meat. Bad. It coiled in the corners of his eyes. “I’d tell you to kill me, but it won’t let you, and it would end with me killing you.”
    Ghu kept silent. It was his amiable simpleton’s look, listening without any word seeming to sink deeper than the surface of that vague, sweet smile.
    “I walked off a cliff once, you know,” Ahjvar told him. “Years ago. Fifty years, maybe. I woke up in the rain. Bruised like I’d rolled down a hill. It was a cliff. It should have smashed every bone in my body. Woke up in the rain and an old man asking, did I have the falling-sickness? The four-day fever? I could hardly walk. He tried to take me home. I told him not to, I told him to leave me, to run away. It was rising, I could feel it. It keeps me alive, you know. She keeps me alive. She’s watching. She wants me to kill you. I knocked his arm off me and I staggered away into the hills again, with him shouting behind me to come back. But I guess—I found them—later. I buried them under their threshold. There was an old woman too, his wife, did I tell you that? Did you know? I set their cottage alight after I buried them and I tried, I tried—I can’t walk into a fire, I can’t, not fire, I tried.”
    “Hush,” said Ghu. “I’ll tie you up, tonight.”
    “Devils have mercy.” It was half a groan, half a laugh, but at least it brought him back to some edge of reason. “Ghu, that won’t . . .”
    “I’ll tie you up,” Ghu said complacently. “And then I’ll hit you over the head with something if I have to. We’ll be fine.”
    “It’s no wonder all Sand Cove thinks you’re only half there, you know.” But it might, it might be safe. It might get them both to Marakand, where he could hunt the Voice, who sought to make the city an empire and sentenced wizards to death in her Lady’s waters. So long as he was actually hunting, it would sit, watchful, but leave him in peace to his work, leave him in sanity, and Ghu would be safe.
    And it would be over? Did he trust Catairanach to keep her word, to pluck the curse out from his soul? And then? It would be over and he would die, maybe. Fall away to old bones and dust, as he should have been by now, in the mound of his fathers.
    How many more nights to Marakand? They had been travelling for ten days now, and sometimes from a high ridge they could see pale peaks floating, a smudge of mist on the western horizon. North of the