The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  But it was the name Ghu called him by.

  Names mattered, if you would hold the shape of a thing.

  “Myself?” the storyteller asked. “Or him? I’m Moth, mostly. It…fits very comfortably. Sien-Shava, though—is Jochiz and only Jochiz, in his own mind. He despises what’s human in himself and yet it shapes who he is, so strongly. More than many of us, I think. So, I call him Sien-Shava. He hates it.”

  “Petty.”

  She grinned. Always startling. She was so sombre, in manner, in dress. In mood. Mostly she smiled for the bear-demon, for him alone. He had been there too, a great golden bulk slouched between the cedars of Gurhan’s hill. Opening dark eyes, at that.

  “Petty,” Mikki rumbled. “But a good thing for us all to remember, Rihswera of Nabban. There is a human soul within him yet, for all he wants to think himself a god, and it was a nasty, corrupted and corrupting little soul when he was nothing but an outlawed wizard. Holla-Sayan is no traitor.”

  “No,” Moth agreed.

  “Prisoner,” the bear said. “Slave.”

  “The Lady did so,” Ahjvar said. He could hardly find his voice. Ailan, sitting chin on his knees a little apart from them all, but where he could watch Ahjvar, frowned at that.

  “The dead wizards? That was necromancy.”

  “But nonetheless.” It was Gurhan who spoke. The god of this hill, gnarled, worm-holed stone, dwarf held in the feet of the Pillars of the Sky yet more ancient than any of their peaks. He was sole god of Marakand now, and with the devils and Ahjvar in their counsels. A committee, perhaps, preparing for war, in parallel with the senate and the wardens. Out of nowhere he was there among them, standing beside Ahjvar, looking down. His face varied. Malagru hillman, today, long brown hair knotted up in looped braids, pale skin, grey eyes. A city caftan, though, green as the cedars, grey as the stone. He settled down to sit there, put a hand on his shoulder. Ahjvar would have flinched from a human touch. Gurhan’s hand was only a steadying warmth.

  “Look for a collar,” Mikki said.

  “Speak with him, if you have the chance,” Moth said. “Call yourself an ambassador of the city. Even Sien-Shava may respect that, once or twice.”

  “See him,” the god said. “Look into the Blackdog with all that is in you. Weigh what is in him. Then we’ll know. Then we can do, what we might do.”

  “Just don’t surprise him,” the demon said. “He doesn’t deal with being startled any better than you claim you do. He bit me once.” He rubbed his shoulder against a tree-trunk.

  Moth snickered.

  “Laugh, princess. He’s got bloody sharp teeth.” But Mikki was laughing.

  “He is of Marakand,” Gurhan said. “He may never have called himself one of my folk, but he fought for us and bled for us and very nearly died for us. He lived here; his descendants live here yet. I don’t care that he is a devil. I find—I do not much care what kind someone’s soul is. He is a good person, Holla-Sayan, and this is his home as much as any place, and I am his god, even if he does not choose to call me so. One of his gods, perhaps. I have the right, and the duty, to claim him. I do. For what strength that may give, whatever you might do.”

  “We can’t do anything, yet.” Moth sighed and rubbed her face. “I can’t spare anything from your defence, god of this land. If I look away— Sien-Shava is waiting.”

  “Which may be why he’s taken the Blackdog,” Mikki said. “He lost one hostage, so he’s seized another.”

  “But Holla-Sayan walks free. There’s something more.”

  “Ahjvar?” Gurhan spoke.

  Ahjvar looked at the god.

  “Holla-Sayan is my son of this city, my adopted son of this city…You know there is more than wizardry in you. If he is lost—please—if you, if the two of you, if Nabban can find the way—make him a road back.”

  Dipped his head in a bow. “My lord,” in his own tongue. Gurhan was not that, but he was lord of this hill.

  Ailan was so tired he thought he might be falling asleep, only dreaming he was walking, trying and failing to move cat-silent, to be nothing but a flowing shadow. Trying to be what Ahjvar was, and, failing that, to be someone he wouldn’t despise.

  Missed his footing in the dark. Missed the ground altogether, a sudden drop he hadn’t seen Ahjvar descend and he pitched forward, jolting fully awake even as the other man reached back and grabbed him, thrusting him upright, not letting go till he’d found his balance.

  Somewhere water was burbling, but he hadn’t fallen into it.

  “Dark,” Ailan said, stupidly, as if Ahjvar might not have noticed. Angry at himself. Clumsy. Useless. The moon had set.

  “You need to rest?”

  “No.” He wanted to fold up to the ground, wrapped in his warm new coat, and wait for the waves of exhaustion to roll over his head and bring the safe blackness of sleep.

  Ahjvar sighed. Frustrated, probably. Ailan knew he should have gotten some sleep while he was left behind by the pool, but he’d been too frightened, his mind gnawing the bones of fear over and over till he was near whimpering with it—what if Ahjvar didn’t come back, what if they caught him, killed him, tortured him so he told them where to find Ailan, what if he simply decided never to come back…

  “Lie down,” Ahjvar said, and pushed him down when he just stood stupidly, words not connecting with anything. “Sun’ll be rising in an hour or so. Get a little rest. We’ll be climbing, come daylight. I need you awake then, not groggy as a drunk.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t. You haven’t done anything wrong. I forget things, is all.”

  “Like what?” Ailan asked blearily. The ground was stony. A hollow. Out of the wind. If Ahjvar had forgotten the way back they would wander forever in the timeless mountains, like in a grandmother-tale, and come out when the wars were all over and all the folk of the land were dead.

  “I forget that you can’t see in the dark. That you’re only human.”

  “I know what you are,” Ailan said, which he hadn’t meant to. He coiled up, head on his arm. Stones dug into him and he didn’t care, hardly felt them. “I go to plays, you know. They come to the cities from Nabban, sometimes. The acting troupes. They play in the guild-courts.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not just a priest. You did tell me that you’re his. I know what that means. The man who gave himself to the god of Nabban—he’s a foreign king who came back from the dead. The actor playing him wears a black mask, like a ghost, but with gold. Not white and black like the gods or red like live people. Black because he died once, died over and over, there’s one play says, after the false empress turns into the devil and—”

  “All right, never mind.”

  “—and gold because he’s holy, like the god. He comes from the shadows with a sword, and there’s a flash of light and the drums sound like thunder. Just when you think all’s lost, you know.” And he travelled, sometimes, with one of the seven, tamed to Nabban’s service, at his side. Scholar Daro Jang, hah. The ambassador bowed as if she were the empress herself. Well, she had been. Twice. But she had obeyed when Ahjvar summoned her, so that was all right. Though he wasn’t sure he liked the way she looked at him sometimes. As if he were in himself a joke he didn’t see. “I knew you’d come back, when you left me there. I did. I just—I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

  “Not going to leave a fool from the city lost in the mountains while I’m still breathing.”

  “They call you Rihswera, in the ambassador’s house. Like in the plays. As if it’s your Nabbani name. It isn’t. I know what it means, rihswera.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s the warrior who stands with the king or the queen. Their sword and shield. It’s country-folk talk, from old tales. Tribal. Praitannec.” That was Ahjvar’s name for what he spoke, what he tried to teach Ailan, those stray words in Taren that didn’t always follow the patterns, that made folk from imperial Nabban mock that they called themselves Nabbani at all. Whole lines of them, in t
he songs his mother had sung. “It’s not a Nabbani word at all.”

  “Thought you didn’t speak any Imperial.”

  “I have some. From the plays. I know whole poems. But rihswera was in the songs my mother sang. She used to sing. Someone broke her lute. And her hands. She didn’t sing after that. Her fingers were all crooked.” He was falling asleep. Thought Ahjvar said something, muttered, angry. Began to struggle awake in case it was at him. Babbling again like a fool. But the man was silent, sitting by him, and maybe there was a hand resting on his head, or maybe he was only dreaming.

  The young man was asleep. He was going to break him, dragging him along so relentless, but they had to get themselves lost in the mountains, hidden from Jochiz, from whatever he might send hunting them. The Blackdog, if he hadn’t died of whatever struck him down.

  That worried Ahjvar still.

  Didn’t think he could have done anything to bring the Blackdog down so dramatically. He was a devil, Moth said, one forgotten by the tales. Didn’t think even Ghu could have.

  Something sidelong. Something…

  Ailan mumbled in his dreams.

  “Sleep yet,” he told him. “I’m watching.” Under Ahjvar’s hand, he was still.

  Ahjvar wondered what Hyllanim had been like, who he’d grown into, other than the cursed king of the songs. He’d only known the infant, never the boy, the unhappy man whose children had wasted the duina in their feuding. A solemn baby, as babies went. Ahjvar hadn’t taken much interest in a brother so much younger. Had taken him up on a horse once. That had made the toddler crow happily. He’d been happy too. They’d only gone out around the walls of the dinaz and back by the goddess’s spring. Remembered feeling, then, how small a thing a child was, how warm and alive and easy to delight. How someday he’d have a son, a daughter, and take them up in his arms…not even glancing sideways, very deliberately not even glancing sideways, at the thought, the shadow clinging to his heels, that Hyllanim wasn’t his brother for all he was his stepmother’s child, and someday was not the future.

  Mistrust every damned distracting thought. He couldn’t tell what was stirring them up.

  He reached—listening, smelling, feeling the dying night…Nothing.

  Put it from his mind.

  And whatever he had done to the Blackdog, it was done. If the shape-shifter were traitor, better he were dead, and if not—better to be dead than a soul enslaved, with one’s memory, will, self all ripped away, if there was no road to freedom.

  Be stone. Be stillness. Be stone and shadow and moonlight, even to a devil’s searching. It wasn’t wizardry he worked. It was…another heart, another hand, resting on his own. Another breath, that should never have reached to this far and alien land, and yet breathed through him.

  He wished he were home, and the wish was warm against him, touch of knotted cords binding shells and acorns about his neck.

  CHAPTER IV

  …early spring, a day or so before the full moon

  The prisoner had not tried to free himself, through struggle or persuasion. He had been on his knees, chained to the wall since he was brought here. Praying, ignoring Yeh-Lin as she sat watching him, waiting for Ulfhild to arrive. A priest of the fifth circle, a knight. One who had striven hard to attain rank in his faith, who had served wittingly and willingly; who had not come so far on the road from the west of the world without committing what any god would call sin, killing, knowingly, to seize what was not his, killing in the service of one who slew gods.

  Deserving of a swift death, and condemned thereafter to a very long road of atonement, until knowledge of himself should make him finally fit for the presence of the Old Great Gods. Except that the faithful of the All-Holy were spared that penitential, revelatory, and cleansing journey. Snatched away—either to be with the Old Great Gods in that instant, by the grace of their emissary, the nameless god of the west made incarnate in the All-Holy, or held safe in his bosom, to be released into the presence of the Gods when their emissary should return to them. Their doctrine was unclear on some details.

  “Be silent,” Yeh-Lin said. She spoke Tiypurian. The priest, on his knees, ducked his head a little lower and continued his mutter of prayers. She struck him, a backhanded blow to the cheek, and seized his arm.

  She had stripped him of his armour when she brought him here.

  She and Nikeh had captured him as he led a patrol afoot into the hills, seeking to come around the southern tower and the end of the Western Wall. Easier than she had expected. That doomed dozen men had gotten themselves what a Malagru shepherd would call cragfast, and the hillfolk who had accompanied Scholar Jang had picked them off as if they were shooting at ripe mangos hanging from a bough, until Yeh-Lin and Nikeh, creeping near under cover of a simple working, had seized their commander before he could fling himself off the ledge.

  No need to take him to the Warden, Scholar Jang had said. He was wanted for questioning in the city.

  No need either to say by whom. And she had bade Nikeh stay at the south-end tower of the wall with a friend of hers stationed there. This was no business for an apprentice scholar, even one who had lived all her life as if she trained to be Wind in the Reeds, the spies and agents of the empire.

  Yeh-Lin pulled the sleeve back from the man’s wrist. The tattoo of the cult was a round-cornered rectangle enclosing a swirl of symbols. It was not unlike the badge of ownership that might indicate a clan’s property, or be found on their banners, or a potter’s or painter’s stamp. Or the brands that had once marked a person a slave, she supposed. She wondered, even, if that was what had given Jochiz the idea, during his meddling in Nabban. This was not the searing of an iron but ink, though not ink only.

  “You’re tattooed,” she said, “with the All-Holy’s blood. Do they tell you that, your priests, when they mark you for the first time?”

  She knew they did. The man sneered.

  “The All-Holy binds his own in one blood, one fellowship. We are all brothers and sisters.”

  “Such a vast reserve of blood, he must have,” she reflected, tracing the border with a fingernail. Not, alas, an empress’s, carefully filed and lacquered. A trifle nicked, jagged at a corner. Blackened beneath. One could not expect to go clambering up cliffs like a monkey and keep immaculate.

  The man shivered. She smiled and turned her attention to the pattern within. The script was both jagged and flowing. Nothing that he, nor any scholar even of the library up on the knees of Gurhan’s hill, could read. The pattern expanded outward, smaller satellite designs, but those were only to denote his rise through the circles. There was no power in them.

  “Your All-Holy must spend his life opening his veins, to accommodate all his many converts.” She pressed a little, marking him. His breath caught. It seemed some small corner of his mind might be enjoying that.

  And Ulfhild was there, slinking like a grey wolf down the stairs. Yeh-Lin had not felt her approaching through the Suburb, or over it. Stealthy.

  She came to stand by Yeh-Lin. She looked…somewhat disapproving. Yeh-Lin smiled warmly at her, and turned back to the prisoner.

  “Or,” she suggested, “perhaps his blood is so holy that a few precious drops are enough for the vast jars of ink you must go through?”

  Unfortunately, that seemed to be the case.

  “Can we get on?” Ulfhild asked, speaking harsh Northron. “I mislike being so far from the god.”

  Yes, there was an abstracted air about her, a sleepwalking slowness. Even here, in this cellar beneath the burnt shell of the red priests’ mission-house—boarded up by order of the Warden of the Suburb after the arson that had followed its inhabitants’ flight—Ulfhild maintained a watch over Marakand’s last god and a shield against Sien-Shava Jochiz. Set runes, and songs, and kept them live and thrumming with power like the notes of a harp still ringing. If she listened, Yeh-Lin might almost hear.

  “The bridge and the road,” Yeh-Lin said, which was the meaning of the signs, what was not mere ornamentat
ion. “Bridge or gate. Signifying, I suppose, that he is the bridge over which their road must cross.”

  “I don’t much care at this point,” said Ulfhild. She had taken the long dagger from her belt in her hand and was turning it restlessly. Tapping the disc-shaped pommel on her thigh, flipping it, catching it by the point, tossing it, hilt again, tap, flip, catch, toss—

  “Stop that.” Yeh-Lin snatched it from the air. “You’re as fidgety as the dead king.”

  Ulfhild plucked it back. “He’s one of the few humans I’ve met I can really understand.”

  “You would say so. Given he’s mad. He and his sweet god together.”

  “They’ve ensnared you.”

  “Yes, well. You don’t need to mock me for it. At least I’ve found something to believe in.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Hope, dear heart. The hope that one single being, one action at a time, can make things better.”

  “I’ve only ever made things worse.”

  “Black bile.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. A stray remark. The dead king would understand. No, I knew Ivah well. You set her feet on a road once. A few words. A mother’s talking-to, she told me, or at least an elder sister’s. And that road led her to her god, and that—all Nabban, and lands that are no longer Nabban’s, are the better for it.”

  “Says Yeh-Lin the conquerer. Those were your conquests they gave away, Ghu and Empress Ivah between them.”

  “Why does no one ever believe I’ve reformed?” Yeh-Lin sighed, as theatrically as the dead king’s acolyte Ailan could manage when he was feeling hard done by. Nikeh had been tasked over the winter with improving his very haphazard literacy in the simplest Nabbani syllabic script, which was shared between Tarens and empire. Neither young person was enjoying it.

  “But as you say.” She resumed speaking in Tiypurian. “Is there anything we actually need to learn from this devil-worshipping killer of children?”