The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  An edge of sun over the dark horizon of the world and a light sky: yellow, blue, scattered streaks of clouds dark. The winds she had leashed released and gone, the river gleamed like a burnished mirror.

  Yeh-Lin drew a deep breath, bowed to the east. The morning was already well advanced in Marakand, and the day winding towards evening in Nabban. Did he watch, in the valley of the holy mountain’s peak? Did he look west from the mouth of the cave, past peaks and forest and desert, to where the afternoon sun slid down the sky? Or did he walk among the pines by the cold rising springs and dream of his dead king, or lie in the river’s depths?

  Yeh-Lin went down to her knees, surprising herself. Hands spread on the stones. She bowed till her forehead touched the ground. Stone of nearby quarries. Stone that was rooted deep. The bones of the land, of the world, running, rising to hills, deep under valleys, under waters, rising to mountains, sinking again, windswept, grass-grown, and desert and mountain and…

  “You can’t hear me, Nabban. I don’t pray. I don’t. But hold your hands over me. I am—I find I am a little…apprehensive.”

  Yeh-Lin sat back on her heels, feeling foolish. Foolish, and comforted. For a moment, she imagined she could smell snow, and pines. Remembered kneeling on the brink of another, steeper hillside. Blood offered, words spoken. No power in them to bind her but what she gave them. She got to her feet, dusted off her knees. At least neither the dead king nor Ulfhild were here to be sarcastic.

  She rather wished Ahjvar were, to tell the truth.

  Or Nabban himself, she decided, halfway down the hill, and his forage-knife, to hack her a path, because clambering through the tangled undergrowth grew rapidly wearisome. The reverence with which the folk of the cult spoke of their holy island had led her to believe it some tended garden. She had never ventured into Tiypur itself in all her years in the west, not wanting to risk going near Sien-Shava, and certainly not with a child in tow. The All-Holy obviously reserved this place for himself.

  The walls of the ancient temple stood higher than she had realized, hidden in what had become forest, though once it had been reverently tended groves of cypress and bay and flowering myrtle, if the old songs of the rhapsodists were true. And white paths between. She did find one such path, hint of gravel underfoot, a narrow white line, little trodden, but—definitely someone had trimmed the branches back, and kept the vines cleared away. Hardly wider than a sheep-track though, and she came on it only when the entrance of the temple was before her, a tall pillar carrying nothing, its mate fallen across her way, the drum-round sections separated like so many tipped stumps. Those that blocked the path were thickly shrouded with moss, but a little wear suggested that someone did climb over, occasionally. She followed, alert for anything—human guardian, wizard’s trap, a simple deer-snare…Nothing prevented her, and within the walls, still high as her head in some places, and the lines of broken pillars, the trees thinned. Here once the priestesses of Tiy had sung and danced, and the dead had been blessed.

  The sacred pool was dry now, a shattered curb of stone, broken chips of coloured rock visible here and there through moss and the rot of years of plant-life. Mosaic, maybe. She climbed shallow steps that ran the width of the temple, their slabs tilted and cracked. Earthquakes were not uncommon in this land. No cataclysm out of the ordinary had laid the temple low, not that any song told, only neglect and the centuries.

  The songs did tell of the catacombs. Here, the dais, where the choir had sung. There, perhaps, the carved screens had stood, gilded, gleaming in lamplight, hiding the sacred mystery, the descent to the underworld.

  They had believed the Old Great Gods guarded the souls of the world, the soul of all life, in an underworld of peaceful night and sleep, yes. No road to the distant heavens beyond the stars. A journey on a cleansing river, an embracing darkness, a rebirth into light, new life…

  She had nearly forgotten.

  So long ago.

  Underworld of night. Heavens of purest light. They were only a little aside from the living world, a turning sideways, a veil laid over…

  A state of being that was not…scratched cheek and sap-sticky hair and sweaty skin.

  That was all. And everything.

  She was most morbid in her thoughts this morning.

  The descent was easy to find, though it had probably once been grander, a pair of circling stairways. Now a pit, a heap of rubble in which blackberries grew, canes stretching up to the light. And again, hint of pruning, a path. Not cleared in the past year, though, she guessed. The All-Holy left what he hid here to tend itself. Yeh-Lin jumped down, scrambled on unsteady stones. Down, and into night-cool air, and dimming light, to where a small hole like an animal’s burrow showed the top of an arch.

  Ah.

  It occurred to her that she, the twice-empress Yeh-Lin, who had been a girl called Nang Lin once upon a very long time ago, did not much care for small, dark, tight spaces. A childhood nightmare, that she was buried alive. Her siblings had buried her once amid the new-planted taro, when she was very small. Dug a little pit and sat her in it and covered her up to her neck. She forgot why. Some game, no doubt they had claimed. No doubt it had been. She had begun to believe they would not stop at her neck, when already her little arms were helpless beneath the packed-down soil. She had screamed, and screamed. How they had pinched her, later, for being such a baby, getting all their backsides tanned, though the punishment had probably been as much for the destruction of the precious planting as for terrorizing her.

  Oh, Ulfhild would laugh now.

  “Sien-Shava,” she said aloud, “is far from the fine figure of a man that the dead king presents, yet even so he is rather broader across the shoulders than you, my dear girl. If he hasn’t stuck fast, neither will you. In you go.”

  She went head-first, like a marmot into its hole, worming on belly and elbows, and found herself slithering down a dry and leaf-drifted slope into a wider place of higher, vaulted roof—a stone-walled passageway, in fact, broad enough for four and high enough that even Ahjvar, though perhaps not Ulfhild’s demon, would have headroom. A little dim light reached so far; beyond, all was blackness, to human eyes. Which fortunately troubled her not a whit.

  Yeh-Lin drew her sword, sent ribbons of pale light floating and flowing ahead and beside her, like small cloud-swimming dragons, and walked on.

  She might find her way by other senses, walk as surely with her eyes shut as open, but humanity would have its due. She wanted to see.

  The walls had been plastered and painted once, but water had risen high enough to destroy the frescoes. Most was flaked away, leaving only patches of colour, images unidentifiable. A leaf. An eye. A splash of faded red. Arched openings showed chambers lined with niches, bones jumbled in corners, water-stirred, or where stone sarcophagi were still arrayed in ranks, with more bones about them. Like and unlike her vision. Gritty underfoot, dry river silt, and then not so dry. The walls sweated. Other corridors branched off, but many were impassible, roofs fallen, walls heaved in. This twisted and turned; she thought it might be spiralling. Walls of stone and brick gave way to tunnelling. She rather thought she must be below the level of the river. Best not to begin to wonder what kept the water out.

  Here. That narrow crack she had seen from the other side. She could feel…not precisely an air, breathing out of it. Not warmth. The sense, though, that there was not an emptiness beyond.

  A waiting.

  Even she had to turn sideways to pass through, light flowing ahead of her.

  The splash of her boot in water sounded loud, echoes rustling, whispering, lingering longer than they should, returning to her from all sides. And then a silence that seemed listening, and aware.

  So. Yeh-Lin stood, feet apart, sword easy in her hand. The footing was uneven, dropping away beneath dark water. Her lights were caught and flung, like the sound, from facet to facet, made sharp and harsh by the crystals that lined the cavern. The pool that stretched before her was like ink, a black mirror, re
flecting the light, opaque. It shivered and broke at the slight stirring of a foot, turned to a dazzling, dizzying confusion, roof and walls and floor all in motion.

  Altar, she thought. The point of stillness, the black stone in the black water. It was not quite as in the vision. Smaller. Rougher in form. The hollow in its upper surface was as she had seen, though, and still it held—she could smell it—blood. Thick, old, nearly black, but still liquid, neither dried nor spoiled.

  Now she let go of human vision. The cave remained, the pool, the stone…The blood pulsed, a faint tide. A beating heart. The dark water moved with it, which the eye alone had not seen. The crust that covered the walls, the roof, and continued under the water should have been a thing of beauty and wonder, sparkling pale white, tinged with the colours of dawn and dusk, a treasure, a wonder for pilgrimage, the holy heart of the goddess Tiy. It was not.

  Not shaded quartz or amethyst, laid down in ancient fires, nor salt of ancient seas. Soul made stone. Not souls. She did not feel there were any selves that endured here, of the thousands he had harvested, bound with his blood. Only a single note of pain, of yearning, desperate: the salmon penned that would fight upstream, the shoot that should thrust to the light crushed beneath the stone, the infant life throttled in its moment of birth.

  No good could come of this.

  Whatever he planned—to swallow a reservoir of the souls of the earth as he had swallowed gods—however he thought he might achieve this…his blood was the heart of it.

  Perhaps literally.

  She did not suppose the cavern was without defences, but to wait, and stalk, and sniff the air, and hesitate…Nothing revealed itself to any sense as she stood, still, waiting, barely breathing. Assess the situation. Then strike. Think, but do not over-think, they had told the Wind in the Reeds in her day.

  Yeh-Lin stepped out into the pool. Two strides, splashing, and she was up to mid-thigh in water that was disconcertingly warm, skin-temperature, like a cooling bath. She waded, hampered by boots overtopped and filling. Beneath her feet, the bottom of the pool was rough. She trod upon the stuff of souls. She was enclosed in it. Encysted. She could feel it now, feel him, all about her. An awareness on his part, not even fully conscious. Like the vague discomfort that foretold some killing inward growth.

  She might hope to be so. He was vast, grown vast already. Sien-Shava—could not contain him. This was Jochiz, gestating towards some new state of being in a womb of stone.

  She reached with her free hand, calling not fire from the air, but ice. Ice to swell and burst, to crack stone—

  Ripples crossed the water that were not from her passage. She leapt, landed crouching by the black stone. The floor rose to shallows there, a submerged islet. Water streamed from her, leaving her leggings stained. Water tinged with blood. What lay in the black stone, thick and murky, was not the whole of it after all.

  A…shape. Long, swimming just beneath the surface. Long, eight feet and two broad. Jochiz had woken some memory of ancient creatures before, shaped and used them to attack. But they had died as mortal creatures died. She struck down even as it came thrusting up into the shallows, not wriggling like a snake but pulsing forward like a worm, scaleless, glistening, pale, a fringe of tentacles tasting the air. The milky blue eyes looked blind, but it twisted aside and she only wounded it, opening a dark seam. It thrashed silently, snapping this way and that, flinging itself back to deeper water. Almost she followed, but the surface of the pool had broken into a fluttering disturbance, as if a squall of rain swept over it. Alive. Seething. A hundred, more, smaller versions of the creature. They swarmed to her and she slashed almost as if she reaped millet, cutting through pale bodies, leaving them sliced in half, sinking, but more followed, as if they bred from the water.

  Eating their way out from the mother worm, which floated now, still, in a slick of darker blood. Ragged black holes, teeth like chisels, gnawing—a hideous birth, each small creature creating its own passage into the world. And they came in waves, one rolling over the last even as her blade broke its charge.

  “Nabban damn you.” Ridiculous, to be attacked by—by grubs. By worms. By—damned legless newts, was what they were, in their hundreds, and she gathered fire to her free hand and flung it over the surface of the water, blinding them, maybe, if they were not already blind, and blasting those uppermost to charred lumps. The pool hissed and steamed in sudden violence. And they came from beneath the surface, from all directions, till the shallows about the black stone were roiling with them, dense and slippery as the contents of a fisher’s net.

  Yeh-Lin formed the characters in her mind, set them carefully at the four cardinal points. A barrier—but more piled through as if it were not there. Interesting. Also annoying. She swept them away with fire again. This time, only a few were scorched.

  Ah, cold hells then. If he wanted to play by those rules…there was nothing living here of the earth anyhow, to be stripped of life, not anything that belonged here. She opened herself to the life that did burn, the warmth, the fire that was in beast and plant and cold worm, in every gnat, every speck that lived its brief blind witless existence in the mud. Did not need even to reach for it, at first, felt it rushing into her, as water into a deep well, flowing. They died, crumbling, falling to ash that floated pale on the water and the blood that was still somehow Sien-Shava’s living self, that she reached for, drawing the strength of it, the fire—

  Jochiz flared into a denial, the soul-stuff of the cavern burning bright, waking towards—something. And the worms came again over the black stone, over one another, over her, piling up her legs, slithering into her water-filled boots, under the skirt of her armour, nosing under the scales, thrusting up between collar and helmet and where they touched skin— those chisel-teeth scraped cloth away, scraped and devoured leather and steel, the only sound they had made, that quiet terrible high squeaking of teeth on metal—where they touched skin they burned as if some alchemical poison burned her. She yelled and made herself fire, a robe, a skin of it, struck them from her, but her armour was shredding as if it were only a construct of lacquered paper for the theatre, its lacings destroyed, plates fallen away, worm-gnawed scales and bands shed like rotten leaves—her short gown and leggings beneath tattered as a beggar’s rags and she a beggar’s rotten corpse seething with maggots.

  She bled. Yeh-Lin shut the pain away, which was only the human body crying out for attention and yes, she could see she was in trouble, thank you. She bled, everywhere they touched her, not their teeth, which were bad enough, but their slime breaking down the skin, so that blood oozed from every pore and they were at her ears, her nostrils, nuzzling at her eyelids, eyes squeezed shut. She could not heal herself, as if the poison of their slime that dissolved her skin were some substance antithetical to her very nature, human and devil both. It burned the body. It ate at the soul, damped fires, smothered all that she was. She reached again to feel the shape of them, their life, their creation, what thing had given them birth. Some small, innocuous creature of the catacombs, eater of slugs and worms, perverted by Sien-Shava, and he had—ah, it was not only that he made them monstrous and ever-multiplying, breeding out of the debris of a thousand years—he made them a form for himself. They were, not Sien-Shava, but Jochiz, a portion of Jochiz’s will and being, a shaping of his fire and she could see it now, recognize it in them, the lines, the flow of it, cold light.

  A great light. A vast and heavy strength, closing on her, without ever needing to draw on what he made here, the glowing cavern still only incubating what would be born in its ripeness into him—

  A fist of stone, crushing her, Dotemon, while Yeh-Lin, skin oozing blood, fell to her knees, propping herself on her sword which alone seemed proof against the scraping teeth.

  She gathered herself into herself. She was Dotemon. She was light of the stars, she was ice of the cold hells, she was fire of the heart of the earth. And he was greater, and engulfed her, and she was bound in a net she had helped to make, limited,
squeezed small, as if laced tightly into some too-small armour, unable to draw breath.

  It was not that the Old Great Gods could not have destroyed the seven, when they came to save the folk of the earth from the tyranny and destruction the devils had brought. It was that they would not. The Gods did not destroy the Gods. Even those they called devils.

  They had held to that, in those days, even the seven, even when they flung all other law of their kind aside.

  Until Vartu came by that cursed sword, to tear soul from soul and— would she had never let it from her hand.

  Jochiz was watching her. Not speaking. Not even the grace to say her name, to acknowledge her as an enemy fought and defeated. Dotemon was become only a thing, an intrusion the demise of which he watched with satisfaction as Yeh-Lin collapsed, failing around her, body, self, soul…she had liked Yeh-Lin. She had enjoyed Yeh-Lin. She had lived in Yeh-Lin, angrily, enthusiastically, joyously.

  She made herself an arrow, a spark, a leaping thought of light. She was the Dreamshaper, and the dead king lived half in dreams.

  Ahjvar. Now would be very good. If not too late. Fool old woman.

  Too late. She felt the first of them forcing itself, burning, past her teeth, down her throat.

  Jochiz, with Sien-Shava’s lips, smiled a moment, wherever he was. He made sure she knew his satisfaction. Corrupted, Dotemon was. Revelling in her animal humanity.

  Yeh-Lin felt the worm press into her eye, and the other. Felt its slimed passage over bone, pressure growing within, burning, pain this body had never known and she was twice a mother. The world flared to white agony, and she screamed.

  PART TWO