The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  A halt came at noon, with a narrow lake before them. Time for a bite to eat, time to rest the camels. Time, apparently, to consider that they were lost.

  “We want to go that way,” Iarka said, pointing out over the grey sheet of water that filled the steep-sided valley. “Old Great Gods damn, what’s wrong with—with everything? Where’s the damned road?” Her voice shook.

  “That’s not Lissavakail? Not the goddess’s lake?”

  “No! It’s—there’s no goddess, it’s just water and it shouldn’t be here.”

  “How do you know?” Jolanan asked. “Did he tell you?” And if Holla-Sayan had described their route in such detail, why hadn’t he told all of them—why hadn’t he told her?

  “I wish he had. Why in the cold hells do you think I’ve been hunting and searching and risking some bastard Westron diviner catching scent of us all these days? This shouldn’t be here. I know it, I feel it—it’s wrong.” Her hand was on her belly again, and Rifat edged his camel up alongside, laid a hand on her arm.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll find a way around. Let’s have something to eat, a bit of rest, and Jolanan and I can go scouting.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

  “ Don’t—”

  A shout, above. No words in it, a wordless hail, meant to carry.

  Jolanan set an arrow to the string and Rifat reached for his bow. Silence, then a gust of stinging snow off the mountainside. Another cry followed it, words, maybe, this time.

  Iarka tipped her head, listening. Her eyes were pinched with cold, scarf wrapped to cover most of her face, frosted over.

  She pulled her scarf down, cupped her hands to her mouth and called back her own name, three singing syllables. Looked over at Rifat, grinning. “Lissavakaili,” she said. “And our cousins. Kinsai be thanked, we are here after all.”

  Figures were moving on the mountainside above them, scrambling like goats. Jolanan couldn’t help but brace herself for the cry, the tumbling fall that never came.

  Rifat was waving both arms shouting, asking about someone called Besni. His younger brother, Jolanan remembered, gone with the rest when the folk of the Upper Castle evacuated.

  No kin or friends to welcome her here. Let them have their reunion. The wind slapped her hard, racing up over the water; it thrust icy lances under her scarves, inside her coat, stinging tears from her good eye. Her scars ached like fresh bruises.

  She could see sixteen, eighteen, maybe a score of people spilling down the slope; women in blue coats, shorter than most Westgrasslanders; some taller folk among them, pale-skinned and brown and two very dark, in sheepskin or caravaneer’s coats, ribbons in their hair, bright random scarves—folk of Kinsai. There was a tower up there, she saw now, a squat round thing looking like just another outcropping of the mountain, snow roofed. The people in the lead came dropping down to the track. Iarka and Rifat were afoot, engulfed in them, being embraced from all directions. Jolanan climbed down her camel’s side, stood, watching, feeling a weariness, a loneliness that seemed old and entirely her own, like a coat she had misplaced, settle on her.

  “Jolanan of the Jayala’arad,” a mountain woman said, leaping lightly down the last drop to the track. One of the—priestesses, she supposed all the women in blue must be. Warrior-priestesses of Attalissa, guardians of these mountains. She was young, not much older than Jolanan, but spoke with the assurance of rank. She wore a circlet from which golden discs like coins dangled in twos and threes, woven through her short black hair, bright on her forehead. They chimed like little bells. Gold earrings and a collar of turquoise.

  Young face, maybe. Old, old eyes. Wise. Kind. Angry.

  Words failed.

  “I saw the devil in my dreams,” the goddess Attalissa said. She reached a hand. Jolanan took it. Was embraced. She clung, as if to a sister found.

  CHAPTER II

  …the early spring, following the year in which the All-Holy crossed over the Karas.

  The sun hung low in the west. Down below in the camp, where the roots of the mountains dug into the edge of the stony desert, they performed the service of the evening prayers. The All-Holy prayed apart, as was right in the eyes of his folk. He led the songs, half-sung, half-chanted, of his seventh-circle commanders of the faith, with the most honoured of the sixth-circle diviners summoned to weave their words and their powers with his, in the privacy of his great tent. The folk of the faith—soldiers and knights, teachers and followers, converts and conscripts—prayed in their marching-squads and companies, arrayed in ragged lines, droning rote responses to the song-leaders, who were often mere third-circle teachers, not even priests. Many of those below did not understand more than few words of the Tiypurian dialect of Westron that was the language of the faith. Folk of other tribes of the west, folk of the lands east of the Karas, of the Western Grass and the Great.

  Their lack of understanding did not matter. That they mouthed the words at all was power. It bound them, made them a fellowship, made them kin, the chosen, beloved servants of the All-Holy, whom the Old Great Gods had sent to save them.

  Or something like that. Sarzahn didn’t pay the tenets of the faith much mind. That was his brother’s affair.

  The singing grated on him, though. A flat drone, no true music in it. No true power.

  No life.

  Something else about the evening was grating on him.

  There was a wrongness to the air, the scent of a stranger. Not even that alone. The taste of the colour of death, of old bone. Faint, though. Perhaps only a memory.

  Memory was strange, deceitful. Sometimes he remembered…Sarzahn could not think what. Voices. Scents, sharp and clear as faces, but scent, face, voice—all unknown. He did not think he had ever known them, any of those mist-thin dreams. He did not think he had ever been, before. There was—now. This. All else a dream, a shadow in the water.

  Now, here. A wrongness in the air, a stranger’s scent, high on the mountainside, where no scouts had been dispatched. There were lookouts, yes, but they were ahead, the next ridge. Up there—broken stone, a narrow hanging valley, all stone teeth between the tree-trunks, a pale forest of still-leafless birch, bent and broken by the storms of a brutal winter. Down here, the last straggling companies of the Army of the North were coming into the camp, humans half-dead on their feet. Stink. Noise. Dust. Hard to breathe, for the dust. It was always either dust or miring muck now, as winter lost its grip. Here, there was broken stone and gritty sand in long fingers reaching from the west to the mountains, and in bands between, like valleys filled with what the steep slopes could not hold, soft and clinging clay. Water, too, shallow pools that buzzed with midges. But mostly clay, and the last weeks had been all clay, which seized the wagon wheels and would not let them go, sucked them axle deep. Clay that pulled the boots off the feet of those fortunate enough to possess boots. Few were. It made this march’s return to dust seem desirable.

  Over the winter they had lost many to frostbite, fingers and toes, noses and ears turning purple, black, rotting and sloughing away and the blood-poison spreading. Lost many outright, dead of cold and found frozen come the morning. Engineers and the diviners and the All-Holy himself had cut and broken stone and made a hard road down the cliffs of the Undrin Rift and up again, and they had left bodies there, too, crushed by stone, fallen from the heights. Blessed in their god’s service. Such thoughts comforted a human servant.

  Sarzahn didn’t much care, himself. Humans were such brief things, a flash of colour, of song, of pain. Soul passing through the world in a shell of matter and gone again. Possibly it was a relief to them.

  Hard to sort out the scents of the air, to think clearly. Mind wandered. He leapt down from the rock on which he had lain, padded away to a higher vantage where the ground began to climb more steeply. One might think them some desperate retreat, but they were victorious, and marching to greater victory. They had crossed the Dead Hills, barren and poisoned lands. They had climbed the Karas and
spilled down onto the Nearer Grass and conquered that thinly-peopled land and the gods of that land, and the folk of those gods had given themselves to the worship of the All-Holy, or they had died. Which the priests of the All-Holy said was fitting.

  Human things. Faith. Belief. He had neither. Sarzahn had his brother, and all his heart beat for him. It was not faith. It was—existence.

  They had crossed the Kinsai’av—shadow-memory flickered in the water, deep in his mind. Dangerous, that river. Had he been there?

  His brother had not yet found him, saved him, then. No. He had been lost, still, and dying. That flicker of—was it pain?—when he thought on the river and the long march to it was only dream as well.

  The winter’s skirting of the Great Grass, the engineers and wizard shattering of stone, making a road down into the Undrin Rift and up again, the bodies left buried in the rubble there—that he remembered.

  The children dead, and the gods and goddesses, small powers of the grasslands, and the chieftains defeated when they came dashing their riders against the lines of spears or the ditches of the camps…

  Kill me the chieftain of the Red Wind Banners, his brother might say, had said. Or the Blue, or the Grey-Tail, whoever opposed them. Swift and sure, take the heart out of them, to spare our folk for the march, to save our strength for Marakand.

  And he had done this, for his brother, gone as a stalking beast in the night, to do what was murder, not war. Because it was his brother who asked, and he was his brother’s faithful dog.

  In his mind was a picture, such as a bard’s words might make from a song. A land of low, slow hills, grass rolling in waves, green and silver, and clouds running, small, swift, white against blue, and horses below, running, and a bird unseen high in the sky, singing heartbreak…

  A song he had heard once, perhaps. An interlude in some bard’s tale. But there were no singers, no storytellers, with the armies of the All-Holy. Only the teachers and the priests, to teach and repeat the stories of the coming of the All-Holy, the hermit who became the embodiment of the Nameless God. Only the priests of the sixth circle, the diviners, the wizards, to sing the prayers of power, to weave miracles from song.

  Scent drifting down the mountainside. A bit curious, beginning to be also a bit irritated, at the way his mind wandered, as if—

  —as if something nudged him aside, nudged him away from paying attention to that faint betraying air, human skin and leather and oiled steel, sent him wandering into the past, other thoughts leaking…The voices on the edges of the mind. He pushed them down.

  Wizardry. Not quite wizardry. Almost like the touch of a god, but there was no god in this region of the mountains, not even a small wild one of no folk. Wizardry, then. Something of Marakand, and it thought to hide from the All-Holy and the All-Holy’s servant.

  He flowed down off the ridge like a shadow, keeping to bare stone, off the snow that still lay in the hollows and the northern shade. Followed a wandering course, circling, climbing where no man could go.

  The All-Holy was still with his commanders and the song-leaders of the sixth circle. There was much preparation to be done before they joined with Dimas and the Army of the South for the assault on the defences of the Pass of Marakand. This straying wizard of their enemies was not worth his brother’s attention.

  Dusk was falling by the time he had worked his way to where he wanted to be, uphill and, if not directly downwind, at least not where the cold night breeze rolling from greater heights would carry his scent straight to his enemy. Human. Wizard. Prey, but not an animal, to be alerted by the smell of him in turn. But it was instinct, not thought. Something in the memory of the bone and blood, the pattern he shaped, was shaped in.

  Sarzahn had sight of his quarry now. A man nested in rocks among the birches. From where he lay, the camp would be in view. Had he been set there to count their numbers?

  A spy and a wizard. Some divination worked on the camp. Some spell set against them. Sarzahn did not understand the working of such things, but there was, now he sought it, that faint tang in the air. Something of power, subtle in its strength. Knotted bundles of herbs and twigs scattered about, like nosegays gathered by a child with no eye for flowers, little twists of dead weeds. Not a magic he had ever seen.

  Stirrup-crossbow, spanned and lying by the man’s side. He should have noticed that first of all. Why leave it spanned, stretching the cord, when he could not from this height make a shot to the camp? Defence against sudden discovery—a rider’s short bow would be better: swifter, more practical, lighter to carry. Sword unsheathed, too. Northron, long and ornately hilted. The man wore a grey wool shirt and trousers, a brown jerkin, high-collared, which might be reinforced with plates of horn or steel within, a headscarf in muted greys and faded green. Faded himself into the land. Made himself part of it. Was hard to see, for a moment. Rock and bark and winter-sere brush. Was lying on a long, tawny coat, settled in for a wait on the frost-bitter ground.

  Maybe he hadn’t been lying there long with the bow spanned. Maybe—

  Maybe Sarzahn was not the only one who felt a presence by means of a sense that had no name, felt what had no words, tasted the colour of powers that moved in the world—

  Sarzahn was already moving, charging to attack as the man came up on one knee, turning, the bow levelled and the trigger squeezed—

  He felt the bolt; it stroked his fur, furrowed flesh, struck stone and he was leaping down the steep slope, through the trees—the man on his feet, sword in hand.

  Fast. He went for the arm, to have that biting edge out of the reckoning before he took the man’s throat, but his enemy—moving, striking—it was the flat of the blade smacked hard across his muzzle and he snarled rage, twisted away, turned back when the man might think he would run and seized—but the man had caught up his coat to muffle his warding arm and though Sarzahn bit into flesh he didn’t crack bone, mouth full of camel-rank wool and the man clouted him with the hilt this time, top of his head, shouting something he couldn’t hear, words strange and buzzing like wasps, like fainting, sound gone distant and strange, or maybe—

  No!

  Voice, thought, his, not his, and he had flinched away, crouching, snarling. The man moved warily. Blood stained the coat. He spoke the whole time he moved. To distract, maybe. Seeking better footing. Sarzahn watched till almost he had his ground, and then launched himself, but the man saw the movement. So swift in his movements, Sarzahn hadn’t fought anyone so swift, so assured, as if he read every nerve and muscle, since—

  He did not know.

  But he was just as quick and the man was down under his paws—not swift enough. The man’s sword, drawn back, was pressed, just biting, below his throat, the soft centre of his chest. Cold. Wet. Sarzahn was bleeding. Inches, a thrust to his lungs the man hadn’t made.

  The restraint could be nothing but deliberate.

  Sarzahn could tear the face off him. He could survive that steel even were it pressed further, survive the blade even in his lungs. He was fairly certain. He’d known such wounds before. He thought. Maybe. The man wouldn’t live.

  Afraid. Of course this swordsman-wizard was. Fear of death every mortal carried, pitiable and brief. Even a wizard’s life was pitiable and brief. But he spoke again and it was painful, whatever words he shaped. Some wizardry. No smell of it, no hot ash, water, stone, dust scent of a spell. Just words Sarzahn couldn’t grasp the shape of, which seemed to mean something to the man, because his voice grew softer, more urgent, as he if argued, persuaded. He could not understand. He should understand, and he could not, as if some failing in his mind suddenly took comprehension of the language, of any language, from him.

  Sarzahn snarled.

  No. No. No!

  He was bleeding, angry, growing dizzy, which he should not with so slight a blood-letting…

  He lunged, jaws snapping, forgetting the sword on which he should have skewered himself but the blade was withdrawn—teeth met flesh but he was weak, as if something sa
pped his strength, denied him his own muscle and sinew. The man struck him with the hilt again and he let go, was flung off as if he weighed nothing. The man rolled aside as Sarzahn fell.

  Poison on the quarrel? That first shot, wounding, hadn’t been meant to kill. Disable him. They wanted to take him. Use him against his brother, his secrets, his knowledge. Poison, wizardry—he staggered splay-legged, swaying, vision swimming in shadows and flaring light, the man a tangled knot of it, ribbons, chains of light flying off him, binding him—he too himself was bound, knotted tight, he saw chains, wrapping him, wrapping something within him—

  Called desperate, as the man crouched over him, sword sheathed and it was some of those bundled dead weeds the wizard held, his lower face masked with blood. Twigs, straws—they pulsed and shivered and changed their shapes, light beyond colour. The man prised open Sarzahn’s jaws, though he snapped feebly and would have finished what he’d begun and ripped away his face, except vision betrayed him and he missed, clacking on air. Fingers, strong, gripping him, thumb at hazard. He could taste sweat and his enemy’s blood, and what was rough, dry— the bundle of weeds forced between his teeth, crumbling. He fought and bucked and struggled, clawing, but he was flailing like a drunk and fell into his human form, which was worse, weaker, no hope of resisting then and he choked and gagged and could not breath, throat crammed with hay, scratching, tearing, coughing, till he was the dog again and could gulp and swallow even that, too much of it—