The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  “I’ve never harmed a child!” the knight protested, finally trying to jerk his arm from her grasp. She gripped it tight as the manacle on his other wrist by which he was chained to the wall. Her nail, that jagged corner, cut red lines on his wrist, outside of the black border of his initiate’s tattoo, just touching it. He winced, but then held proudly still.

  Thinking she tormented him so pettily for her pleasure. “You call me devil-worshipper, when your own gods consort openly with the seven? It’s no secret Vartu Kingsbane has fled to your city after the All-Holy defeated her at the Kinsai’av.”

  Four characters, she scratched into him. Court Nabbani, the complex symbols only a few scholars and poets still studied.

  Ulfhild, playing with her dagger again, cut herself. Holding the prisoner’s gaze, being certain he saw. Dipped a finger in the welling blood and traced runes at the corners between Yeh-Lin’s characters. They were not the ordinary ones of Northron inscriptions or spell-casting. He whimpered. Seemed more repulsed and fearful of that than of Yeh-Lin’s cutting of his own skin.

  “Are we ready?” Yeh-Lin asked.

  “Ya.” Ulfhild stepped over behind the man, seized him by the hair, and cut his throat.

  “Cold hells!” Yeh-Lin darted aside from the spewing blood. Further outrage at the lack of warning had to wait. He was still there for a moment, a breath, a roiling thing of confusion. So swift had been the execution he had hardly felt the pain grow, hardly had time to understand.

  Ulfhild let him fall and stooped after him, dropping her dagger. Scooped red blood from the puddling flagstones. She knelt there and Yeh-Lin had perforce to kneel across from her, knees in the spreading pool. Her own hands under Ulfhild’s, cradling them. The blood leaked, as anyone who had ever scooped up water in their hands to drink would know it must. She bowed her head—thank common sense she wore her hair short and grey as Scholar Jang and had not changed herself for this, even to annoy Ulfhild, who thought her unduly frivolous and always had. Breathed on the cupped blood, and her breath was mist, smoking over river-water.

  Island, long and narrow, dividing a river. Broken pillars. Cypresses towering dark. Small roofs, peaked or barrel-vaulted, fallen. Tombs, they were, and ancient. Overgrown. Vines, even trees, thick and ancient, rooted on what remained. Ridge of stone, and stone terraces, supporting more broken pillars, one arch still standing. Foundations, crumbled. Dark water swirling past.

  A town, white walled, red roofed, south over the water. Glimpsed, forgotten. Unimportant.

  They rushed, dove like swallows into the darkness of a barn. Now they were in a narrow place, the walls brick, the low roof vaulted. Cold. Damp. Water pooled on the floor. They were one—an unnerving brief awareness, she and Ulfhild Vartu, uneasy sharing of soulspace. Pain, a heavy weight of it. Grief. For what? The Northron had her beloved verrbjarn back from Sien-Shava’s torments—

  Bones. A chamber of bones, stacked in niches where once shrouded bodies might have lain, jumbled on the puddled floor. Painted walls, bubbled with damp, flaking…

  The walls were bright and fresh, not new but often renewed. Lamplight. No bones on the floor, only the dead decently laid out. Singing. Westron, the ear said, but not one of the languages she knew. Women’s voices. Women with shaven heads, white-robed. Girls preceded them with lanterns. The grown women carried between them a byre, a linen-wrapped figure on it. Those following sang. Prayers. Grandmother Tiy, she heard. They passed and faded. Memory of this place, that had seeped into the stone. Then—not lamplight. These latter days of scattered bones. They rushed, flying, fleeting, themselves wrapped around the soul of the dead knight, which struggled, now. Not against them. He hardly knew their presence, faint shadow-souls trailing his flight. No, he struggled to be free of this current, this—this chain, that pulled and dragged and drew him against all the weight of the Heavens, the opening of the road. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and he fought as a caged thing fights, battering, breaking himself, mad. Futile. She would have reached, have torn him away, let him fly blessed and free to the road that reached for him and his long journey, but Ulfhild pulled her back, prevented that mercy.

  Not the purpose for which they had taken him. Not mercy.

  A cavern. Part of these catacombs? She had not seen. The link between themselves and the captive soul began to fray. Cavern. Soft glow of light, not the seeing of vision, a light that was truly in that place. Pearly, rose-tinged. Moonglow.

  Stone. Teeth, fangs. Not the dripping spears and daggers of slow water’s work. A crust of crystal. A pool of water beneath and curving from it, walls, meeting overhead, narrowing further away.

  An egg. They were within an egg lined with jagged crystal. A cavern. She wrenched around, vision spinning dizzily. Black fissure, narrow, vertical.

  Egg, womb of crystal.

  And what might gestate there, and why such images in the mind, why such thoughts, such fear—

  Within the water, crystals reflecting, crystals breaking the light they themselves cast. A stillness, there in the pool’s centre. A darkness. A black stone. A shivering. There was a hollow carved in the centre of it, a basin. The liquid surface rippled. Not water. Blood. Black, in this monochrome place all pale rose and black and pearl-white glow. She did not need to strain to see it crimson, to touch, to feel the viscous, living touch, to taste or smell. It was blood, his heart’s blood, living here, and the soul of the knight they had executed—even her god would not say murdered, would he, he who had once cried, no quarter, no mercy, for those who torture children—was drawn inexorably to it, though that Westron knight fought with all that was left in him, to answer the call and the demanding pull of the road, the summons of the Old Great Gods his faith had denied to him.

  There was nothing that eyes might see, but the mind made a picture. A butterfly lands at the edge of a puddled rut in the road, uncoils its proboscis to drink. The water rises, a living thing, and engulfs it. But this butterfly landed fluttering wildly, beating its frail wings to pieces.

  It did no good. The dark liquid swallowed it. The blood pulled, as if it were a well and she some trickle of water, rolling down its stones.

  No. Ulfhild hurled them away while Yeh-Lin still strove to linger, fascinated. If she let it pull, let it take her too, just a little way—in that moment she had—not seen. Felt. Felt the vastness, the weight, the mass of what was there, growing, within that egg, that womb of crystal—

  The glorious, terrible strength of it.

  Not salt. Not quartz. Souls, made stone. Generations of them, bound in blood, and he had left his heart’s blood there and walked half-dead, a necromancy of his own, sustaining himself—

  What were souls, in the end, but the sparks that made the life of the world—

  They were in the cellar of the burned mission-house, kneeling in a puddle of sticking, stinking, cooling blood.

  “Old Great Gods,” Yeh-Lin said. She still clasped Ulfhild by the hands. “Old Great Gods, Old Great Gods be merciful to us all. Vartu, did you see—did you taste the air of that place, that—did you see?”

  “He steals their souls and seals them in stone.” Vartu—they must be Vartu and Dotemon now, this was no human matter, though humans were very much the matter of it—Vartu shook her head. “I already suspected as much. Though not that he could have bound so many. To what end?”

  And gods, Dotemon said. He devours gods. He swallows them, in the ritual by which he destroys them. My spies have witnessed. The weight of them in the world is gone from their land. No self, no one and another. Dissolved into his blood, held in crystal, not souls but soul. Soul of the earth, growing and growing, as water in a cistern, drop by drop—

  Vartu agreed. His own blood, binding them.

  Trust the Northron to focus on the blood-magic of it. And Northron magic was worked with one’s own blood, most often.

  Sien-Mor, Sien-Shava—they had gone north following the rumours of a new folk come over the sea, a new magic, worked in runes and blood. Admit it, so had she. Wandering,
angry and outcast. Old bones aching in the bitter winter.

  Not binding them, Dotemon said. Binding it.

  He will make himself a god. In the end, when he has gathered enough souls— when they are such a weight and power in the world—he will take them into himself and become a god of this world.

  Or the god of this world? she wondered. Oh, my horseboy, to be swallowed by that, and your bright burning king. And my lady of the baobab in her grace and patience and—every innocent babe and old man marked with his blood, witting or unwitting of what it might mean.

  “I will go,” she said aloud.

  “We.”

  “No. You have work here. Gurhan still to preserve. And there is your Mikki. And—I am not a fool, Ulfhild Vartu. You never trusted Jochiz and you always loathed Sien-Shava. I do not think for a moment that you ever intended to serve out some penance here, guarding the god of Marakand until all is lost and Jochiz uses your own sword to cut the head from your neck. You are not defeated, and you are not through. I will go.”

  Ulfhild Vartu was still. Then got to her feet and bowed, very Nabbani in manner. “What shall I tell your apprentice, Yeh-Lin Dotemon?”

  “Tell her I’ve gone where I must in my god’s service, and she must stand tall and find her own road now. Tell her—tell her she has been a daughter to me, and she is—oh hells, tell the girl I love her and she must take care in conjugating ‘to know’ in the poetic form, because it does not conjugate like ‘to understand’ no matter how similar they seem in their root, if ever she would write good Nabbani prose. There. And tell the dead king, tell Ahjvar, to give my love to his beautiful shield-bearer, and kiss him, which I have never yet done, much as I have wanted to.”

  “I have no intention of kissing either of them for you.”

  “Not you, fool Northron. Though—”

  “No.” But Ulfhild’s grin escaped her. One forgot, the woman had dimples when she smiled.

  Yeh-Lin laughed aloud and hugged her, hard, as if they were children and sisters.

  “Oh, Gods and devils and cold hells all forgive us, Vartu. We have had a strange road of it. Come, leave that Westron’s body to rot. I suppose there’ll be company enough for it soon enough. The Western Wall can’t hold whatever you do and it won’t be long. Jochiz is not prepared for a siege, whatever pretence of it Dimas has been making thus far. Come see me off.”

  She strode to the stairs, blood drying on the knees of her leggings. She dusted it away, and from her hands, her immaculate short nails. Shrugged her shoulders, settling her armour, the long coat of black lacquered scales and blue cord fastenings which she had not been wearing when she came into this cellar. Hair streaming back, no grey in it.

  Ulfhild Vartu, behind her, sketched a rune. Yeh-Lin felt the shape of it. A simple one. Fire.

  Oh well, Northrons must have their little excitements.

  The ruins of the mission-house were burning bright over them even before they reached the top of the stairs.

  “Perhaps you overdid it?”

  “Never.” Ulfhild gave her a shove. She jumped down into the street, through the boarded-up window by which, dragging her captive, she had prised her way in. A crowd was already gathering, a desultory effort being made to form a bucket-chain. No great urgency. There was little left to burn inside the mud-brick walls, and the neighbouring houses had lane-ways between.

  No one noticed them walk away. Yeh-Lin turned up the first empty lane they came to, caught a window-ledge, pulled herself up, caught and swung to a screened gallery, smashing the screen in the process. And from the railing there to the flat roof. The household below slept. Ulfhild landed beside her in a flutter of feathers.

  “Show-off.”

  “Says you.”

  Yeh-Lin smirked and drew her sword. Bowed solemnly, seriously. “Wish me luck, King’s Sword.”

  “Luck, and fair winds, and all good fortune, Empress of Nabban. For all our sakes. I’ll buy you a drink when you come to Marakand again.”

  “You’ll buy me a whole jar, and it will be the best twelve-herb white-spirit, too, not the thin wine of these hills.”

  She settled her helmet on her head, the long ribbons, Nabban’s sky blue, mingling with her unbound hair as she turned, drawing the circle in the air with her sword’s point, its own scarlet ribbons and blue floating, and then began the dance.

  Yeh-Lin called the winds, and the winds answered.

  CHAPTER V

  …early spring, the night after the full moon

  Cloud was gathering on the mountains, threatening to hide the stars and the moon, only a day past its full, all the light Nikeh needed. She could pass as Westron—which she was—and as an initiate or even a priest. She knew the prayers of the lower circles. Languages, history, arithmetic, the nature of plants and the movements of the stars, Teacher had taught her these things and many more. Sword and knife and bow…All that, given to her. She had wanted only to grow in knowledge and in skill, to become what her Teacher was. But there was no wizardry in her.

  And Teacher had abandoned her, once she had gone to take the prisoner to the city, to the wardens or whoever had had need of him. Yesterday a letter had come, carried by a messenger of the Nabbani ambassador’s house but penned by the Northron wizard who guarded the god, an unfamiliar hand. It made it far more final, somehow, to hear Teacher’s words—Tiypurian words and script, which she was surprised the Northron knew, save the joke about grammar, which was in Nabbani syllabics and the ancient characters at the centre of the joke. It was proof the Northron, who looked a shabby mercenary, was a scholar of surprising knowledge, and proof moreover that the words in the letter really were Teacher’s own. Hateful though they were to read.

  She was loved. She was never to forget that.

  She would rather have had not the words, but a summons to join Teacher wherever it was she went.

  But that, like so much else, was apparently now beyond wishing for. No one even knew where or when Scholar Jang had gone.

  It did make this night’s work easier. She felt guilty, to be grateful for that. Nikeh’s intention had formed when first they learned the name of the general commanding the desert army. Dimas, Prince Dimas. Lord of Emrastepse, wherever in the cold hells that might be, the Warden of the Western Wall had said.

  “On the coast,” had been her answer, from her place at Teacher’s side, startling him. He had not truly meant a question. “A little place of no account. You would call it a village.”

  There had been something hot and hard growing within her chest. A hunger that had been in her nearly all her life, unfolding like a chick from the egg. In Marakand, all the long years—not so many at that—it had stirred, wanting to live, and she had kept it balled up tight. Not yet, she had told it. Not now. Not safe. Marakand was a city of law and of scholar-wizards, and even strangers who were not citizens could rely on the protection of the street-guards, the justice of the magistrates, the services of diviners of the ward-courts to seek out their murderers.

  She never confessed this desire to Teacher. Nor to her friend, her best and only comrade her own age since the days when Teacher had been tutor to the son and daughter of a queen in the north.

  Lia Dur had been a street-guard, a patrol-first. They had met when Nikeh was out wandering long after the last curfew-bell had rung, which should have cost her a fine, but she was the apprentice of Scholar Daro Jang and Lia had a fascination with travellers and travellers’ tales. Which had grown into a fascination with Nikeh, or a friendship, or—it was hard to know how to be herself. She had been other people so long. Teacher’s little girl, Teacher’s apprentice…but a new person every time Teacher changed her own name. She was always Nikeh, her own name, but who, underneath, was that?

  Someone who walked the streets of Marakand at night, stalking, lying in wait, for the priests she had never killed.

  But now they were at war, and the red priests who had lived in the mission-house in the Suburb and strutted the city streets in arrogance, enemie
s and spies under the shield of the law and the god they plotted to destroy, had fled before they could be arrested, west into the arms of Prince Dimas’s advancing army.

  Priests of the third circle. Mere teachers.

  They no longer interested her.

  And Lia Dur, a soldier now, had listened to one more of Nikeh’s traveller’s tales, and had said, not, “You can’t,” or “Don’t,” or “The captains of the towers and the Warden of the Wall have to decide that sort of thing,” and most of all not, “Your mistress won’t allow it.” She had said, “I’ll do what I can.”

  The camp seemed almost deserted, but it was only sleeping. Few fires. Fuel was precious, rationed, their spies said, like grain, which followed the Westron army in camel-caravans from the Western Grass. The patrols through the laneways carried mutton-fat lanterns, dim yellow lights drifting in orderly lines, few and far between, easy to spot. People crowded together for warmth under makeshift tents. A blanket was almost worth killing for in this place, but, Nikeh guessed, there were more to go around than there had been. Winter on the caravan road had winnowed the folk.

  Too many, still.

  Like any town, the camp had its better neighbourhoods. Proper tents where she passed now, orderly. The priests of rank, the diviners and knights, those who could command the use of the camels of the baggage train, those who hadn’t shivered with cold in the desert winter and watched their friends lose fingers and toes to it, or cough their lives away. Not a neighbourhood where a mere fourth-circle priestess and a first-circle convert, a ragged camel-driver of the baggage train, should have any business. Heads down, no haste. Istva bumped her shoulder and they turned into a narrower way. Less open, darker…no one had seen them. They moved slowly, wary of unexpected obstacles, guy-ropes and the like, came out behind a guarded tent, larger, grander than the rest. From the wall it could be identified by the pale banner drooping from the peak, but the camp was out of range of the trebuchets on the tower platforms.