The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  At her feet, though, a vessel of folded birchbark, no bigger than the cupping of two hands, half-filled with fine ash, and darker clumps of ash, too, curdled with blood. Fresh. Blood in the ashes was new. She had only whispered and sung over them, before. Telling them what she would have them be.

  “What are you doing, princess?”

  “Just—wondering,” she said.

  “Wondering in blood?”

  She rubbed ashes between thumb and forefinger, breaking up a sticky clump. “Wondering, if I were to call, what might answer.”

  “That’s not even she.”

  “Don’t tell the runes that. Don’t tell her. You don’t hear him, old friend, do you? You know who you are, still and always. You remember, now.” She was whispering, almost crooning the words, looking down into the ashes, not at him.

  Mikki growled, softly, to himself. Flexed claws. If he thought of stretching a paw out, striking the birchbark away, scattering the ashes…he did not.

  She had written on the outside of the bowl. A lie bound in words, a name. But Sien-Mor was dead and gone, her soul lost. Destroyed, maybe. Moth had said she thought Sien-Shava believed so, that he had thought to destroy Sien-Mor and Tu’usha together, and though the devil had fled to nest in the heart of a goddess, and it was certain he had torn one from the other and destroyed the conjoined being they were, Sien-Mor might only have died as mortal humans died, and found her long road to the Old Great Gods. Fire, like earth, and submersion in water, and salt in the mouth, was a ritual to free the soul. Even when it was also a means of murder.

  Necromancy might bind the souls of the dead before they had taken the road. It could not draw back those on their journey to the Old Great Gods, nor yet pull a soul from their safekeeping. Of the dead and gone, it might only wake and use a memory, an imitation. That was a tenet of every folk’s beliefs surrounding the dead, a truth of the world.

  Storm—challenged that, and he was a beast whose soul ought to have faded back into the life of the world, no matter that Moth had reclaimed his skull, no matter what she wrote on it. Of Sien-Mor, Moth had not a fingerbone.

  No bones left, not even a tooth, and teeth are always what remain, to go into an urn, into the earth, when the funeral pyre is cold. Only a barren little valley where nothing grows and no waters run, high on the northern face of a peak in the Malagru. The horses, Lark and gentle Fury, have been left below; Moth would have left Mikki, too, only he would not be left. Stubborn and silent, following her. He knows what she intends. They have argued it out, and she will not give up her intention. The place is still. No bird, no insect. No demon, though it had been a demon’s home, once. A creature of fire; salamander, the wizards named it, though Mikki thinks it more likely that the demon had been northern dragon-kin.

  There is no fire. Once this place burned undying, a crack of pale flame rising from the earth. His paws stir ash, not downy soft like wood ash, but like fine, light sand, black and white mingled to grey. Faint scent of sulphur. He sneezes. Moth gives him a reproving look. She squats down, takes up a handful of ash and blows on it.

  “There’s nothing of her here,” he says. “This is stone, burnt stone. Nothing that was ever a living being.”

  “Best leave wizardry to the wizards, cub.”

  “Leave necromancy to the necromancers, you mean. Moth, don’t.”

  “If there’s nothing of her here, you can hardly call it necromancy.” She pulls a small cloth bag from her belt. It held dried figs once, from the pantry of the Upper Castle on the Kinsai’av. He watches as she fills it with several handfuls of the ash.

  “You’re going to summon the memory of a fig tree, not a ghost.”

  “He has already summoned her, or a memory of her. It’s there, that tang, that taste—like a scent on his skin. It doesn’t matter if it is something of her he took into himself, unwitting, though I think that’s very likely, or if it’s merely a shaping of his own mind, his guilt. It’s there— she’s there, already. To breathe a little life into her—” She grins, knotting a cord about the neck of the bag. “If I must fight him, cub, I want him to have always half an eye behind.”

  Moth stirred the ashes with a finger, breaking up the rest of the blood-bound clumps.

  Down in the ravine, Storm whinnied, a trumpet of warning.

  Vartu! The silent cry came with a gust of wind that tore leaves and twigs from the trees, raised a plume of ashes, till Moth clapped a hand over the container, looking up. Gurhan was with them, not in any physical form, but a presence, the heart of that agitated wind. Mikki surged to his feet. Scent in the air, there, gone, back again. Above them. He gave a grunt of laughter, unexpected joy.

  Holla-Sayan? But it wasn’t Holla-Sayan he touched, reaching out. Something…broken ice, that was what was in his mind, the image of what he met. Cold. Edged. Sharp and brittle, and fires like a devil’s soul, but likewise broken, flaring and cold and flickering erratically. And chains, the touch of chains grinding over his skin, the raw tracks of them and he roared and swatted at what was no longer there, batting at the air about his head.

  Moth gave him one startled look, while he still struck out and backed away, stumbling, sliding when there was nothing under his hind feet. She flung the ashes skyward and yelled, “Go, then, and be what you will.” Came after Mikki, who had mastered himself, panting. Watching for movement that did not come, with Moth’s hand on his head.

  “He doesn’t hear me,” Gurhan said aloud, standing with them, something like a man, a shadow half-seen in the corner of the eye.

  “Don’t disturb the lines,” Moth said, not to the god, and then, “Go to your priests, lord of the hill. Let them pray. Every word raised in your defence is one word more to strengthen what I’ve woven.”

  “Holla-Sayan?” Mikki tried aloud. “Hey, dog? Your horses are in the priests’ stables down by the Silverward shrine. You can tell your young woman I didn’t eat them after all.”

  Old Great Gods, and what had become of Holla’s Jolanan, since he’d fallen into Sien-Shava’s hands? And what of the Rihswera of Nabban and his fosterling, who had gone into the mountains seeking the Blackdog on Moth’s word?

  Stillness. Gurhan was all about them, an awareness, but he was with his priests, centred there, and they added what they might to Moth’s defences. Mikki backed from under her hand, moved away, began a slow stalking sidelong up the hillside. A bear need not lumber and crash its way, forest beast in forest, soft and subtle for all his size, but he did not expect to circle the Blackdog unseen, unsmelt. Only let the dog’s attention be on him, let their enemy be drawn away from the lines of charcoal and the blood-painted runes.

  Holla, oh, Holla-Sayan. Can’t you hear your name?

  The dog came down the hillside in a rush, leaping over Mikki’s head as he wheeled and snapped, fangs closing on air. It struck Moth as she rolled from its path and they crashed down together. She grappled with it, trying to seize its jaws and hold them closed, her own teeth bared in a grimace. Silent, both of them. Mikki circled, slapped with a paw, knocked the dog aside and gave Moth space to rock to her feet. Still she did not draw her sword. Mikki swatted the dog flat when it would have leapt again, pinned it down with his forefeet, but it twisted under him, nothing of Holla-Sayan in its eyes, no recognition, no fear, no struggle, only the yellow-green fire of the dog. It changed its form, growing monstrous, more bear than wolf in bulk, and it flung him off, came after him and caught him by the ruff. He felt the teeth in the loose skin there, and in the stiff scars of the devil’s collar. Went limp, like a cub, a pup, unresisting.

  Holla-Sayan—Blackdog… He tried to find something, some crack, some chink through which a word might strike. Some fleeting memory. A scent, briefly, of bruised green grass, sun-warmed dry earth. He seized on that, held it like a spark that might be breathed into flame. Holla-Sayan!

  The dog snarled, released him, but only to turn on Moth again and he lost the touch of what he had held. Moth had Keeper in her hand, face grim; she struck with
the flat of the blade, dodging aside as the Blackdog charged her, fleeing down towards the path. Leading it farther from the plateau where the spell was drawn, but the charcoal lines and the runes binding them were only a part of it, the rest an active working that took some part of her attention even when she spoke with Mikki or Gurhan or whispered over the ashes.

  Mikki crashed down after them, heedless of brush and saplings, barely avoiding a stand of larger poplars. Moth had crossed the path, had her back to a cedar’s bare trunk; it did not look as though she used the flat of the blade any longer. The Blackdog was bleeding. Fighting to fend it off only, though, not striking to kill.

  “Holla-Sayan, in Attalissa’s name, for Gaguush’s memory, for Jolanan, try to hear us—”

  A snarl was the only answer. Mikki bounded over the path, slammed into the dog as it turned to sink teeth into his foreleg and they all three went down, tumbling, crushing ferns. There was fire in Moth’s eyes, red and silver, the flesh and bone of her become shadow over half-seen veins of flame, and she slammed the dog back when it would have seized Mikki’s throat, thrust it down to the earth and pinned it, knee and blade over its ribs, her other hand gripping its throat, a strength to match its own. Mikki sat back on his haunches, breathing hard.

  “Now what? Can we bind him?” Great Gods, to what end, though? “Can you see what holds him? Is he—is it Holla-Sayan at all, or is he already dead?”

  Wolves, running savage in the forest, ridden by a devil’s will…

  “I can’t see.”

  Vartu.

  That whisper had not been Gurhan. Not Holla-Sayan. Mikki did not know the…call it voice. The touch, the colour and the shape, a stranger.

  Distraction. Destruction. That was all their enemy’s intent.

  “Kill it,” he said. “If they’ve killed Holla-Sayan and this is some other using his form, enslaving the dog, kill them both. The dog’s something that should have been gone from the world long ago anyway.”

  “So am I,” Moth said, which did not entirely sound like disagreement.

  They were both watching for its reaction. Maybe it had not even understood the words. Maybe that mind’s voice did not even belong to it. Fast, shallow breaths, as if it still struggled, or was wounded more severely than it seemed. Eyes fixed on empty space between them.

  It twisted free of her grip, ignoring the sword that opened a new furrow across its ribs all unintended, and lashed up swift as a striking snake to seize Moth by the throat.

  CHAPTER X

  From this cloud-wrapped height, with half a waning moon high overhead, the pilgrim town of the All-Holy’s cult was all shadows, a suggestion of roofs, of roads, no more, beside the silver-streaked water of the river. Once Tiypur had filled the valley and climbed the hills south of the river. By daylight, pale stone might still show what had been on the sheep-cropped turf: the lines of it, streets and walls, arcades of broken pillars, hills once crowned with some great palace or temple. Before her time, Tiypur and its empire. A rival to the Golden City, her glorious work in the lagoon of the mouth of the Gentle Sister? Yeh-Lin might grudgingly grant so. Though nothing could ever have compared with the dawn view of the city from the palace on the mainland, the water smoking, the sun rising behind, the tall houses and palaces that floated, half-seen, in the golden mist…But all that remained of her city were forlorn pilings and a weed-grown reef, a hazard to shipping but a good fishing ground.

  Jochiz’s doing, that. And to be a person who could regret the city of which she had been so proud, and not the folk who died there and the lives and works and art and hopes destroyed, was not what her young god would have of her.

  She took a certain satisfaction in the fact that even viewed by night, the city of the All-Holy was a low, mean place, contrasted with what must once have been. It squatted amid the ruins on the river’s southern shore and spread up the old avenues, mostly inns and hostels to serve pilgrims, she thought. More reliably above the level of spring flooding were the towers and colleges of the cult, where the administrative machinery of Jochiz’s religion creaked its wheels round and ground out priests and— what, quartermasters? The whole of the land was now aimed only at feeding the army it had flung eastward, she suspected. Or had it marched, a hive dividing, swarming, and was the new swarm never to return to the old hive…and if so, was there some new queen, some priest or primate, or a committee of them, set to keep the faith alive after its god had marched away?

  Worth finding out. Worth doing what she could to disrupt that, for the sake of the folk of this land, while there were still those alive who remembered their old way of living. Cut off the head of the cult here, now, and let the lands of old Tiypur shake off empire once again and remember how to honour memory of its true lost gods. There were those hidden folk who still preserved what little was remembered. Humans were always so.

  Descend on the colleges of the circles, of the seers and teachers and priests, and go through them with the blade’s edge, a storm and a fury…

  No. She did not know over what distances Jochiz might leap, when he saw the desperate need. Folly to take the risk, so close to what she suspected was the heart of all his thought. This was not the Western Grass, a teat sucked nearly dry. This, he would defend, and she must not expend her strength on any secondary target.

  The east was lightening to another dawn. To ride the winds was no easy thing, and though she had broken her journey several times, sometimes merely to linger a day in some wilderness place, to rest and renew strength and resolve, to restore that calm within that threatened, more than once, to escape her. She had broken it not least usefully, though perhaps not most restfully, at the Westron bridge over the Kinsai’av. Now, further violence against Jochiz’s officers rejected, Yeh-Lin had wistful yearnings for a hot meal, a jug of wine—and the wines of the Tiy valley had been famous once, she thought, though before her time—a bath, and then to sleep in a clean, soft bed.

  None of which she was likely to get over in the town, especially at this hour of the—call it morning. A hot meal and indifferent wine, perhaps, and even a tub of lukewarm water and a dubious bed if she paid enough, and if she painted again some tattoo of rank on her wrist. She might alight on one of those hills, disguise herself, walk down into the town a pilgrim from the east.

  Procrastination. Below, the leaves of riverside poplars, still spring-soft, flashed silver in the moonlight and tore free. On the island, cypresses bent and hissed. Cats’-paws of wind swirled white on the water beneath the flying cloud that was herself. She dropped down, released the winds she had ridden, alighting in a small clearing on the hill of the island’s eastern point, where the thin soil over the stone supported little but creeping mats of weeds. For a moment she stood in the eye of a small hurricane, a storm of wind and torn leaf and grit. The rush and rattle of her landing calmed.

  She listened, but there was no sound of human activity near. Not that she expected any at this hour, or in this place, sacred and forbidden. Reached out with other senses, but no wakeful wizards probed to find the cause of the freak gale that had swept down the valley. Stillness settled about her. A blue warbler broke into sudden song, welcoming the advent of the dawn. Familiar, but one she had not heard since she took Nikeh up to the kingdoms of the north. No blue warblers east of the Karas. Such little differences, such wonders. Few even of the travelling folk marvelled as they should. Another reason to take delight in her god; he was one of the rare folk, human or otherwise, who understood how to truly see, how to be, in this glory of a world. She could just stand and listen. The smell of dew, the smell of bruised and broken green about her. Scent of water. Nearby. Enough of birds. Her mouth was like sand.

  Yeh-Lin picked her way through the trees, a close and snaring tangle, overgrown with chance-sown grapes. No sign that any human ever came up here, this hill like a ship’s prow facing upriver. The ruins of the old temple of Tiy were below, and stretching to the west, the overgrown remnants of tombs more ancient than the catacombs, where the folk o
f Tiy’s city had been buried in an earlier time.

  Somewhere under her feet, those catacombs. Somewhere there, too, the cave where it was said the hermit, the first to hear the message of the nameless god, had experienced his great revelation.

  Madman. Or Sien-Shava, laying the foundations of his myth. It little mattered which had been the start.

  She found her water, a little rain-fed rock-pool. Knelt to drink long and deeply, and to wash her face. Continued to kneel there, considering the reflecting surface of the water. Did not try to see beyond leaf and cloud and lightening sky, her own face, the helmet’s fox-mask raised. Only paused, feeling—

  Alone.

  In such case, a woman should pray. Should she not?

  She rose abruptly, thrashed her way back up to the hill’s crest. Trees, everywhere trees. No view beyond. Smothering.

  She was not the dead king, to let her environment, whether the world without or that within her own mind, overwhelm her. Only…she wanted to see. She wanted to look east, to see the first light break over the land, running over the world she had crossed.

  She followed where the ground sloped down, wound a way through trees and came out abruptly to the clear view she sought. Finally some sign of human hand as well, although it was ancient work. A paving, a parapet on the cliff’s edge. The stones of the platform were set so close no seedling had yet flung a thread of root down, to grow and lift and heave, though vines had crawled over all and were slowly burying the white pavement in leaf-mould, where young olives and figs sprouted. This had been kept clear long after the empire’s destruction. A dancing place, perhaps, or an observatory. Perhaps in Tiy’s day priestesses had watched the river here for the funeral boats coming down.