by K. Johansen
“They’ve taken the halfway tower!” she called down. “We’re cut off from the gate-fort.”
A strong gust of wind lifted the banners. Out of the west. Like a bad omen. Could the devil control the weather? Probably. The banner of Marakand on the halfway tower was down. Something white flying from the battlements. No easy passage through, at least. Only the gate-fortress showed anything but a blank wall to the west at the lower storeys. But to spread to the other towers now the enemy had not only the track along the eastern side of the wall that ran its length from south to north, but the wall-walk, wide enough to drive a team of ponies, she had heard someone say with pride in the ancient builders. As if anyone would want to. A clear street to them, was what it was. A weakness that meant one tower taken could lose them all.
She was by the ladder to leap back to the rooftop platform, intending some warning to Captain Sulloso about barricading all the entrances to the tower, when she saw the All-Holy, the devil Jochiz himself, riding up through his lines. Even he had to go around the burning wreckage. He rode a white horse and was all in white himself. A holy man. For a moment even she felt it, his holiness, the shivering touch of the Old Great Gods. He seemed to glow, to hide starlight in his robes.
Illusion. Wizardry. Lie, forced into her emotions. Nikeh rubbed her eyes, scowled. And absurdly, her stomach growled. Past noon, and she had nothing in her belly but a swallow of wine and a hunk of bread passed around at some point in the morning.
To be hungry, when a man she knew was dead at her feet.
They were all animals. Scrambling and squabbling far below the view of the Old Great Gods.
No. The Old Great Gods saw, and reached arms to enfold all who fell. But the devil denied his own folk their sanctuary, however long it would have taken them to attain that state, and surely the Gods wept for that greatest of all sins ever a devil had committed against the folk of the earth.
She half thought the skies might open over Marakand, the Old Great Gods themselves descend in radiance, as once they had, to bind the devils. But even then they had not destroyed them, and the seven had worked some great evil, to prevent the Gods travelling the road from the heavens. Not human souls, no, that had never been said till the lies of the nameless god became the lies of the All-Holy, but the Old Great Gods—perhaps it was true, perhaps not. Certainly they had never come again.
The All-Holy’s primates and commanders were around him. If the Old Great Gods answered prayers, let a bolt of the great ballista strike him, let the trebuchets hurl wizards’ fire over him. Let his folk see and understand what he was…
He raised his arms, turned his face to the sky in an attitude of prayer. A sword in one hand. All his folk flung wide their arms in imitation, praying. As if the Old Great Gods might hear. Let them. Let them hear, and smite him down with all the lightning of every storm that yet might be, oh, let fire pour from the heavens—
He pointed with his sword at the gate-fort, and Nikeh did not at first understand what she saw, the heave and hump of earth and stone, not fire but a wave travelling through the earth, and it struck the bronze-clad gate, a great mass of earth and rubble and broken stones the size of horses, of wagons and houses, and the boom was thunder, smashing between the cliffs and crashing back again. She felt it, yelled, and the tower swayed beneath her feet.
The Marakanders had expected engines. They had expected siege. They expected to sit behind their walls, with all the lands Over-Malagru to supply them, while Jochiz battered away at the gate in the Western Wall that held the pass against him, and never an arrow to fall in even the Suburb of the caravanserais, the second city outside the circle of the city walls proper.
They would find themselves mistaken in their expectations. Senate, wardens, wizards and scholars of the library…even Vartu? Did she think even now he would fight this war by Marakand’s rules and the limitations of human flesh, of engines and mortal wizardry?
It’s a trap, Sien-Mor’s voice said in his ear. They pretend they see you for less than you are. They pretend they think it can’t happen, to lead you on. But they know better. This is Marakand. I taught them to fear you, the god who would come out of the west.
He shut his ears to his sister.
“Most Holy,” Clio murmured at his elbow. “Should you ride so near the gate?”
“Do you think their stones and arrows will be permitted to touch me?”
“No, Most Holy. But I do think that they may try to insult you by killing your horse.”
The earth kicked against them; he felt it smack upwards, his big Westgrasslander stallion leaping away as if it had trodden on something alarming, coming down splay-legged, snorting, reluctant to heed the rein, to stand. He forced it to turn in a tight circle. Men, horses, camels screamed. Some were fallen. Some were burning.
“All-Holy!” Clio called. She had her beloved axe in her hand, as if that might be any use here. “Come away out of range, please, Most Holy.”
The smoke was grey, tinged with dirty yellow and it smelt of pitch and sulphur and wizardry. A seer failed to fight her camel out of its billowing clouds swiftly enough. She and the beast alike coughed and choked. She fell first, and then the camel. Pity. She had been one of his best, a wizard of some strength, unusual among the Westron folk, who had lost much of their wizardry when they lost their gods and demons.
And whose fault was that? Sien-Mor asked.
Sarzahn never expected the gods would involve themselves, he protested, stung.
She tried to goad him. Ignore her. She was nothing but the voice of his own doubts.
He had no doubts.
He stopped the seer’s heart, stilled the screams of the burning knights and animals. Silence, save for Ambert’s coughing. The smoke had caught him. That would shorten his life considerably, but it hardly mattered. Jochiz caught up the wind in his hand and swept the clouds away. They dissipated before they reached the wall. Disappointing.
The Marakanders were reloading their ballista. Jochiz watched, eyes narrowed. Sang the word in his mind alone, set fire to the timbers. They burned to ash in a breath, a roar, a ball of flame like the anger of the Great Gods. The fire did not spread as he intended, to consume all the lives on that platform. Wizardry against him.
The next tower south had been taken. Closer to the gate, the companies were pushed up against the wall if they would claw a way through with their hands. No ladders had managed to hold near the gate-fort so far, and his siege-towers were all burning.
“What god doesn’t care for the lives of his folk?” Sien-Mor asked. Aloud.
His head whipped around. Movement in the corner of his eye, as if someone that moment stepped away.
Only the fluttering of a banner.
“Their lives are mine,” he answered.
“All-Holy?” Clio asked.
He drew his sword. Raised it to the heavens. An attitude of prayer, of summoning, beseeching. Let the Old Great Gods hear and bless their emissary, let their will flow through him…something like that. Whatever pleased the folk. Those near copied him, crying various phrases of praise and prayer. He gathered himself, tasting the strength, the weight and life of soil and stone. Swallowed it and spat it out with a word, searing the air, the earth, pushed it burning with a fire that could not be seen, a wave of force, of desire and will, a shaping. The fortress of the gate, built by engineers of Marakand’s brief and near-forgotten empire against the rising of a dynasty of unifying warlords on the Great Grass, rode the heaving crest of the earth like a ship rising on a swell, but as an unlucky or ill-guided ship might, it foundered in its descent. Or rather, towers heaved skyward, shook stone from stone, and fell. The bronze-faced gates twisted from their hinges and bars, crashed like thunder. Bells rang themselves the length of the wall, the wave spreading onwards, outwards, weakening, but cracking mortar and stone. Jangled to silence in a rising cloud of dust.
Silence about him, but for the thudding, the sound of ripe fruit falling.
“All-Holy…” It wa
s a whisper, a breath. Lost. Clio.
Not lost. Gathered. Saved.
“She did love you,” Sien-Mor said matter-of-factly. “She thought you were beautiful, and filled with the wisdom of the Old Great Gods, and strong.”
She wasn’t there. Only the commanders, the primates, the message-riders and signallers, the horses and camels…still on the bare earth. Clio. They fanned out from him, the fallen. Dead creatures, dead leaf and flower, root and stem. Dust and straw, and not a cricket, not a spider, a worm. His own horse shifted its weight nervously, snuffing the air. Hot stone and metal, maybe. No screams, no shrieks of the crushed and trapped and dying from the towers. Crushed, maybe, but dead. Those of his own who had struggled there beneath the rain of arrows, beneath the stones dropped against the ladders, dead, too, but at least their souls were gathered safe.
A necessary sacrifice. The Old Great Gods themselves could not work from nothing, not when pinioned, constrained, within the physicality of the world.
“Old Great Gods preserve us…” Primate Ambert, safe on the edge of the circle of dead.
The stunned pause broke in roaring, as if life returned, the dead field waking—at least aside from the gate and his path to it, where it was unlikely seed would ever spring again. Jochiz looked around—shut his mind to the woman on the red horse that shadowed his own…Northron horse, the tall, heavy breed that the Westgrasslanders had crossed into their own stocky herding horses, giving rise to these he so favoured for his knights, but he knew that red horse with its white nose and stockings…she had wept over the damned thing when she lost it in the battle at the Hill of the Claws, the last Vartu and Ghatai had fought as allies—and won, but that had been the weakness of his own chiefs and they had paid.
Sien-Mor smiled at him, sweet and secret as ever.
You are not even a ghost.
The man who killed me and burnt my bones to ash should know, of course.
His sister rode past him, towards the gate. The hooves of the red horse stirred no dust.
Sien-Shava—he was Jochiz, Sien-Shava was a vessel, no more than that—spurred his horse after her. It kicked against Clio’s sprawled corpse. She should have died when she was arrogant enough to attack Vartu and Sarzahn, anyhow.
The army—most of the commanders had been too close and were dead but what did it need them, when its function was so nearly fulfilled—surged forward, as if the All-Holy’s moving—his survival, as they would see it, from a vicious attack of the Marakanders and their devil-loving god, and the glorious grace of the Old Great Gods manifest in his will, the destruction of the gate—were a signal.
As it must be. He nudged at one of the commanders of the knights who had been outside the life-searing unleashing of his power, and the man—woman, one of the few to be admitted to that circle or permitted once there to rise—wheeled her horse and dismounted to prise the main standard from the hands of its bearer. It left a plume of ashy dust in the air as she rode to his side. She felt the touch of the All-Holy. He saw it in her eyes, all warmth and wonder…
Oh no, Sien-Mor said, in his mind, a whisper in his ear, he could not tell. You made me yours and never let me free to find another. You are mine, now. Leave her be.
The remaining siege-towers had found their lodging, bridges down, the defenders undone as much by their own fear as the assault, the faithful who climbed the bodies of their comrades and kin to come at them, at the heathen who defied the will of the All-Holy and the Old Great Gods. He added fuel to that fire, as he had through all the long march. He could not seize them all, ride them, but he could stoke what was there, stir it when it sank in exhaustion, wake hope in despair, quell doubt and fear. The faintest touch of them was in him, as he in them. Their god, in truth, held them all in his heart. And would more fully, soon enough.
The army of the All-Holy poured through the gap in the wall, moved out along the tracks behind it that linked tower to tower. They swarmed the ladders and the siege-towers, cleared the wall-walks, fought their way down the towers floor by floor, chamber by chamber…
Bells rang again, without pattern or message, only a wild alarm. From the southernmost tower, rockets screamed into the sky, shrieking like beasts in torment, bursting with colour and smoke. A desperate signal. He did not think there would be any answer, though the north tower, moments later, launched its own. So perhaps Marakand would know its wall had fallen. It made little difference. Their wizards would no doubt be aware regardless.
Sien-Mor, dismounted to lead her horse over the mound of rubble that filled the gateway, stopped and stood there where the root of a broken arch still launched itself skyward, carrying nothing. She halted, waiting for him. Smiled again, leaning back against her horse’s shoulder, arms folded.
Sien-Shava rode slowly to join her.
CHAPTER IX
The night air of Marakand smelt of smoke and barnyard, but the god Gurhan’s forested hill breathed the scent of cedars and ferns, water and stone and moss. There was frost in the air, cold rolling down from the Pillars of the Sky.
The horse that grazed nearby had no scent at all, save a whiff of old bone. Why Storm grazed, tearing at the grass along the edge of the path as if he had not eaten in centuries—which was the case—Mikki could not imagine. Habit, perhaps. How he grazed—that was another question. Something for the wizard-philosophers of the library to debate, if ever they had time for such things again. The shaggy-legged blue roan stallion left no piles of dung on the forest floor.
Click of hoof on stone. Sigh. Gust of air blowing Mikki’s hair, and a great soft muzzle brushing over the top of his head. Nearly two centuries abandoned, a skull set carefully on a ledge in the god’s own sacred cave, had given Storm time to grow sentimental, it seemed. Or whatever passed for that in an ancient, frequently contrary, bone-horse, which was to say, a creation of Northron necromancy meant to summon, for a brief period, the seeming of a horse into the world for a wizard’s use. Not to recreate, in body and soul and excess of character, a particular horse, whom Moth said had not only been slain in battle under her, but cut up and thrown into a well in hatred of his rider.
“Jealous?” Mikki asked. “Don’t like her playing with other ghosts? Neither do I.”
He considered the burl of grey olive-wood he had been working by the light of the fire and the moon. It wasn’t only the skull of the horse Styrma that Ivah had left in the god’s keeping when she set out east for Nabban, but Mikki’s abandoned axe and chisels.
He wasn’t sure what he was making. Had made? It seemed—nearly finished. A little roughness here and there to smooth away, a little delicate detail to add: a feather’s edge, a horse’s eye, maybe. There. Done? He thought so. The god of the hill had asked what he did, and had nodded, understanding, when he answered that he was finding something that seemed to need discovery. He had roughed it out over the nights since finding the burl, cutting it free from the old storm-broken bough of a wild olive, years weathered. A bowl, rounded, but irregular. It looked right, so. The inside he had smoothed like the inner curve of an eggshell. The outside he carved with tiny figures, ships of the north and swans, bears and wolves, horses and eagles, all flowing one into another, circling, spiralling inwards, covering every surface save the base.
The figures he made cast shadows. In the moving firelight, they seemed to swim, run, fly. Rushing away.
The horse nosed at him again. Mikki got to his feet, taking the carving and the chisels back up to the god’s cave, a well-worn path between tall grey trunks, the ground beneath cushioned with fallen needles. He had to duck to enter the low opening, a curtain of ivy hanging down, trailing over him. A holy place, a shrine, but not a home. All the hill was riddled with caves and tunnels, water-worn long ago, and all were of the god. Gurhan took human form, but he was not and never had been human; he had no dwelling-place and needed none. If his guests treated this sacred place as a shed out of the weather for their convenience, the god did not complain of it, and so neither could his priests and priestess
es, who would rather, Mikki suspected, have the god’s somewhat worrying friends conveniently lodged under their eye in their rambling family compound down towards the library, rather than camped like tramps within the god’s holiness.
He left the bowl sitting alone on a ledge of stone. Gift. Offering.
Felt something whole in himself again, for having made it. Hands that might still shape.
The horse trailed Mikki like a dog as he went back down the hillside, crossing the track and climbing again. Like a shelled walnut, the hill was seamed with gullies and channels, little dark ravines to which the sun never found its way. Moth had laid out her ground on a small plateau, a shelf of stone across from the cave of the god, and above it, facing the east. The high moon was growing faint, the sky lightening. Sun would not find her there till nearly noon, but its still-unseen rising found him as he climbed. He was already shedding his caftan, the only clothing he wore, leaving it hanging on a cornel sapling, as the dawn this ravine did not yet see ran through blood and marrow. An ache in the bones, an old man’s pain, as he went down on four legs. He was white about the muzzle now. Moth never mentioned it. White streaks in her pale hair, frost on oat-straw.
Left behind down on the path, Storm grumbled and tore mouthfuls of twigs from a hazel, dropping them, snorting, looking up to see if his tantrum were noted. Mikki did look back, to laugh. Offended, the horse plodded away.
Moth only looked up when she heard Mikki climbing through the scrub, held out a fending hand as he leapt to land beside her. Something caught in his shoulder, twinge, like someone drove a nail into the joint. Old man, old bear. He lowered his muzzle to her palm, closed his eyes a moment, just to drink the scent of her.
And of charcoal, chalk, blood. New cuts on her arms, and she had her sleeves rolled back still, healing lines of red, faded white that might be yesterday’s bleeding. A devil’s healing. He settled down behind her where he would not disturb the working, but could keep his head pressed to her thigh. She had been extending the pattern. It looked like a Grasslander cat’s-cradle painted on the stone, with runes set at its crossings. He could feel the power that flowed in it, a barrier like moving water, like wind and the rising draft of a fire. A shield against Sien-Shava Jochiz, an armour wrapping the city and Gurhan, held against the devil’s presence, his reaching power.
