The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  The Old Great Gods had damned him for the alliance he had made. He was demon, halfling demon. His father had been mortal human but it was his mother’s nature came uppermost in him, soul of the earth, the Gods’ ally if he chose—and he chose not—but either way his soul’s disposition was no concern of theirs in life or death. They damned him for where he had chosen to give his love, long ago; they had held that as a weapon, without his knowing, against the woman he had chosen, but she was gone. The Old Great Gods should not seek his destruction now. She had denied him.

  He had sent her away.

  He was no lever to move her, no spur to force her. Not any longer. She had made that clear to all who might watch her, to the Great Gods themselves.

  What hunted behind was not wolves, though it wore them, and not any will of the Old Great Gods of the distant heavens.

  Dusk ran over the land, shadows spreading beneath the trees like an incoming tide. Night, inexorable, must bring an ending. The wolves were closing in. He had thought to lose them, wrapped in the forest, lost in what was, in the end, himself—a great slow-breathing life, one shaggy giant golden bear nothing but a forest soul amidst forest soul, hazed and hidden. Forlorn hope. His blood was in their mouth—they, it, pack forged to singular will—and they followed as if harnessed to him and dragged behind.

  There would be no losing them. He understood that now.

  Cast it aside, Mikki had said. Defy the Old Great Gods. Deny them.

  She could not. They had bound her to this duty. Half she saw the need; half she defied it, and served it, and could not choose to walk away however she strove to avoid, to wait, to hope the need would, in the end, not come—she thought she would have served, to a point, and temporized in her service even had there not been that threat lying over him. But there was, and he had been the last thing that mattered, when all else in her heart crumbled to dust and blew away.

  She could not lay aside the weapon the Old Great Gods had charged her to wield.

  Then go, he had said. Go, and don’t come back. I will not walk beside that sword any longer.

  And she had gone. And if she had not resumed the hunting she had so long and so reluctantly pursued, neither had she walked away from Lakkariss, which was the chain that bound her, and the prison that held her, and the reward of her service. Most of all, it was the thing that must not, ever, be abandoned, to fall into hands that might find some other use for it than that for which the Gods had set it free.

  But at last she found she had come to a place within herself where she could let caring go, even caring for that—call it duty—for which she had sacrificed her last friendship. Sacrificed love. She would be bone again, and the earth would take her. What came then, if the heavens would open and reclaim the sword, if another find it and turn its edge to some worse task than what she had borne it for…she would not care. She would be bone, and dying embers, and dust. She willed to be no more than that. To cease.

  Here, in the heart of the Hardenwald, the hill of bones, the ancient mound where a forgotten human-folk had laid their dead and the wizards of the north had bound the dead-and-not-dead devil Ulfhild Vartu in God-forged chains of song for a demon’s keeping…here where his mother Moraig had died, the great bear-demon of the Hardenwald, slain not by Vartu but by Heuslar Ogada, the first of the seven devils to die in truth out of the world, after Mikki’s own long hunting at Ulfhild Vartu’s side…Here or nowhere, he would stand.

  Here.

  And too late.

  Sunset upon him, too soon, too soon. He felt it in his marrow.

  Halfling demon. No shapeshifter, he, not by his own will.

  And he had left all human things behind in his anger, in his hurt. His axe was abandoned in Marakand long ago.

  When they killed him, there would be no one even to lay his bones in the mound, as they had laid Moraig his mother.

  Those ancient folk—gone long before his Northron father Sammur ever laid aside his sword and came to carve out his small farmstead in the forest’s peace, to be wooed all unlikely by the song of a demon bear—had entombed their dead with their weapons by them.

  Demon, yes. The bear could hold the low entryway against the pack, where the tearing fangs might come only one or two together, but the sun, the sun failed him, and the man, a giant among human-folk, could not stand upright there. Within the winding passages and low chambers, no better.

  He left blood on the stones and the last light burned like dying coals scattered on the forest floor, touched the stones and faded, faded from blood and bone. The night took him, and he changed.

  Wood decayed. No spear, no axe survived usable, but there was a chieftain buried here, and a chieftain’s sister.

  When the wolves came, soft and flowing as if they swam the night, they numbered still nearly a score, and there was a pale fire behind their eyes. Threads of fire wove one to another, as if they were one creature, one will, one soul. It was a man met them on the threshold of the gravemound, naked and painted with his own blood, but a bronze sword in either hand.

  He was Northron ship-folk, or he had been, when he sailed with his cousins before ever the devil Vartu woke, and while he had strength to stand, he would fight.

  Clouds raced like colts over the stars, and the eye saw, but the mind did not, should not.

  Yet it did. She breathed, and breathed again, and in the stillness there was—

  —an apprehension.

  A waiting, a breath held, as if she caught, on the edge of the wind, some echo, so faint—

  A shadow behind the wolves. A man, maybe. The night crawled over it, thick, denying the stars, as if he wore the shadows, rags over a core of cold light, scarlet and pallid fires flickering, flowing, like the dance of the northern sky. The wolves moved away, cringing, slinking. Shadows, drawing in, growing solid. A man and a blade, Mikki saw, for a moment, and the man moved, surging up the rampart he had made of the slain wolves. Mikki’s thrust went home, grating on bone; he stepped back, dragging that blade free, slashing with the other at the neck, stabbed at eyes whose fire was no illusion, was the truth, and not the body—

  A sweeping blow Mikki was too slow in blocking, striking deep. One sword lost, arm dead weight. Mikki stabbed with the other, all the force remaining to him behind it and felt the blow jar up his arm and yet his enemy made no sound, only jerked back a little, laughed and struck again, a false blow, and as he twisted to avoid it his feet were hooked out from beneath him and he was down, and the wolves closing in. A searing pain, jaws about his throat not ripping, only holding, closing. Choking, his own breath gone.

  Mikki gasped and could breathe again, free, limp. But the wolves seized where they could, arms and legs, and dragged him out beneath the trees. The man of shadows watched.

  Released again. Each breath wheezed and he rolled weakly over. Could not lift himself even to his knees. Arm under his head. One eye open, face half masked in blood and torn flesh. One sword still left to him, one hand that had still some grip left in it and would not let go, and he would take at least one more, the next, and then the man could be the ending of him.

  Reek of his blood and sweat, the torn entrails of the wolves.

  Scent of a devil, even through that. Fire and ash, cold stone and hot metal.

  Humans, too. Rank in their terror. There, where moonlight caught among beech-trunks like pewter and the leafless oaks like ancient stones. Watching. Waiting. Hungry and afraid.

  The devil spoke, hard, commanding. One of the Westron tongues, the words slipped and changed from the distant days Mikki had known the common speech of that land. Mind couldn’t hold the words. Could barely hold thoughts, follow movement. The humans crossed to him, walking warily. A man and a woman. Armoured in short-sleeved scale shirts, carrying boar-spears. The woman also carried a hammer, the man chains swinging, looped over a broad shoulder. Mikki snarled as the wolves gave way, got a mangled hand on the ground, got a knee under himself, staggered up.

  He went for the devil, hopeless th
ough that was, and hopeless it was, slow and staggering in his lunge, and the humans did not stab, but used their spears like staves to strike him to the ground again. But he had not lost his grip on the bronze sword’s hilt.

  Last strength, last stroke, because he was the Hardenwald, because he was Northron. Because the woman he had named Moth was gone from him and there was no hope left in the world and one did not cease to hold to what mattered, just because hope was gone. He came to his knees and the sword’s point did not even prick the devil’s belly, caught in an uncaring hand that bled, he smelt that, and the blade was plucked from him and tossed aside. Maybe he called her, screamed her name.

  Wolf—!

  There was no thought, no consideration, no waking. Only the ice, the stillness, the drowned will—shattered in fire.

  She was on her feet, sword in hand, and the frost that crept from Lakkariss, even sheathed, burnt away in the wreathing flames, white and scarlet and pewter-cold. It was not the obsidian blade she had caught up but the steel. Kepra, Keeper of the Hall, sword of a king’s sword, till the king’s sword who carried it took another road, to end in ice and despair.

  —which was where this road had begun. And what did she do here, what did she wait for but a death that would not come and—

  —in the silence, there was no second cry.

  A boot pushed Mikki down. Feeble struggle. Could not find his feet. The wolves, his wolves, his cousins of the Hardenwald, stood and watched. It’s not your fault, he thought, but words meant nothing to them, nor his thought. They were dead already, or as good as. The humans, given curt orders, rolled him over to his belly, reluctance in their touch, and the devil—sang.

  There was sea in his voice, and stars high and cold, and fire. Human language, but alien, liquid and flowing. Words wrapped him like chains, words chained like fire, and he bucked against them and screamed, hooks of speech sinking into him, into the marrow of the soul, pulling, twisting, against all nature, and his body changed, answering not the sun that ruled his nature but the wizardry. He became bear by night and he could barely breathe, racked beyond enduring, gasping, fighting each breath. To breathe, not to breathe, to flee the pain.

  The devil was silent, considering his work. Rocked him with a foot, testing, and he had not the strength to swipe with a paw, to snarl. Falling, far, far away. Drowned in the pain, twisted against his nature.

  Cold, to his neck. Iron collar. Wizardry in it, and a chill that was devil’s work. The devil took the hammer while the man and woman, commanded, seized his ears in fearful hands and pulled and wrenched at his head, stretching out his neck. Stone for an anvil. The devil pounded rivets, alien word with each blow, searing in his blood.

  Chains.

  His body vomited, as though the wizardry, the devil’s working, was a poison it could rid him of. He only lay and let it do as it would.

  Orders. “Wagon,” he did recognize. More orders, to him. Good Northron, and not as it was spoken in this age. To get to his feet, to walk.

  He lay still crumpled on his belly, legs splayed, breathing as if still running for his life, and he could not have mastered his feet even had he wanted to. The devil prodded him with his sheathed sword, kicked him in the ribs when that won no response.

  He did not blink.

  High-wheeled wagon, awkward, snagging on roots, catching between trees, dragged and pushed by more human-folk.

  They beat him and pulled on the chains, four chains, welded to the collar, and they not could make him rise.

  In the end the devil shouted at them, and the woman who had carried the hammer, and they brought the wagon close and cut branches to make a ramp of poles. They dragged him up, by collar and chains and paws and gripping hanks of blood-slimed fur, and shoved and heaved, and crammed him in.

  Chained him there, and went to the pole and the wheels and the ropes again, and began to drag him away in the direction of the river.

  The devil spoke. He felt the death, the deaths, the wolves discarded, the last life burnt out of them.

  The night was very cold. Let cold take him, hold him deep in winter’s sleep. Mikki shut his eyes at last. Opened himself up to it. Falling. Fading.

  She was Ulfhild Vartu. She was Moth. She was Mikki’s damned princess, his wolf, and the executioner of her fellows for the Old Great Gods, and—

  Vartu raged at her. Laughed at her, at Ulfhild, at herself—she, they. Queen’s daughter, king’s sister, king’s sword of Ulvness, wizard and traitor and devil and homesteader’s wife and skald. Vartu told Ulfhild, told self, Look what you are, what you do. What do you reach for, in the end?

  Fool.

  There was never any hope of escape, in stillness.

  Maybe it had not been escape she sought. Ulfhild had learnt young to hide self even from self, to be what she must and not what she would, to serve and not to seek, and so had learnt to doubt every certainty of self. Had embraced a fire of defiance, and found that road disaster, and the unmaking of all she had valued. Had lost—all. Even self, for a time. Selves, both, but only, over slow years, to find themselves anew, made new.

  And yet still treading the old paths, the service owed to what she thought was duty, the safe road, the thing that she must do. Or breaking from it in rage, running from it, in stillness now, as fire and conquest then.

  Neither served. Both betrayed.

  The hidden heart. The truth of self.

  We are the sword we were made to be. We are the singer we would have been. We are Vartu, who warred on the Gods, and Ulfhild, who carried a sword for her brother.

  We are Moth.

  What is she, in the end?

  Let us find out.

  A spring night. The mountain air was cool, but the snows were gone save from the high peaks and the spring spate of the river was past. The stars were sharp and clear, but there was a tension in the air. A storm coming. Cattle and ponies bunched together. Dogs wanted to stay in and curl themselves small. Babies cried. Flocks of russet acorn-jays were restless, circling and screeching, long in coming to roost.

  Above the peak of the mountain, the blackness of the night sky was broken. Not suddenly. A seeping of light, of colour. Pale. It ebbed and flowed and eddied, greenish, blushing red. Sudden streak of fire: red, white, green. Swirling and lashing. Pouring like an avalanche down the mountainside, or so it seemed. Those folk still awake to see took in the props that held their window shutters up and fastened those shutters closed as if for winter storm, pulled their doors to and latched them tight. This did not seem a thing for human eyes.

  In the old temple, the hermit blinked and stirred. He walked out among the broken stones and the high-reaching trees of the temple ruin; he stood with his arms open and his face raised to the sky, like a priest in prayer or a singer greeting the dawn. The light washed over him, till he seemed, or would have, had there been any to see, a thing of light himself, and of fire.

  Mikki prayed—but his father’s folk of Selarskerry had been godless and he himself had turned his back on the Old Great Gods and they would not hear—that there might be no waking.

  On the day after the night of the fires in the sky, a hunter went to bring the hermit a pheasant she had taken and some herbs from her mother’s garden, and also to ask, as all the village wanted to ask, what his wisdom made of the strange night.

  He was not there. He was not there the next day, either, nor the next. When worry grew strong enough she was sent by her grandfather, the elder of the village, with her brother and her cousin, to venture cautiously into the still-roofed inner sanctum of the old temple, which daring childhood creeping to peep in at the door had told them was fitted out like a cabin with a little sparse furniture, nothing mysterious and godly at all, save that he slept, apparently, and they had whispered it around the village in wonder, beneath a coverlet made from the feathers of grey geese. They found the clay stove cold. The staff with which he had aided his climbing the steep mountainsides leaned in a corner, abandoned, but the coverlet of feathers was gone
.

  There was no doubt. Their hermit had left them.

  In five generations, they had never asked his name.

  CHAPTER XIV

  …the summer before the year in which the All-Holy marched east over the Karas

  The ship was hardly big enough to warrant the name, a little sprit-rigged coastal fisher that could have gotten by with a crew of two, barely, but which was a struggle for one person on her own, and out on the open sea.

  Moth could not have flown. She carried cargo. Oatmeal. Coarse flour. Cheeses. Sealed jars of mead and honey. Smoked herring. Line and hooks. Not to eat would not kill her. Not to eat kept her…half dreaming. Remote.

  She would no longer be so. She reclaimed the world.

  Anvil.

  Hammer.

  Axe. Not Mikki’s.

  Even a pickaxe.

  She did not even think the hammer and anvil, tools of mortal making, would serve, but yet they must, so she would see they did. But to remake them to what she would need would be a long reforging of its own.

  And a harp.

  Long, long years since her fingers had touched such strings.

  Strange, to be sailing west, alone. The circle of sea, the dome of sky cupped over her. Easier to keep her course at night, when the stars burned stark and cold above, wheeling slowly about the high polestar. Not so difficult by day. She had only a straight road to follow; she had gone up the coast, far up, till the singing sense of earth and sky thrummed with what had been, like a string of the harp calling out its sympathetic echo. And then to the west, with the polestar, the Owl-Daughter’s left eye, riding high over her shoulder. Sun, for her, was warm on the eyes even when the clouds grew thick and grey; no need for a sunstone to find it.

  Moth did not like this gathering of cloud. The air was warm. It smelt wet, thick with rain, and the waves began to roll into great peaks. The wind, which had for days been fair, blowing up from the south-east without any intervention of her own, was gusting again, hard and erratic, buffeting this way and that but tending over to the south-west, which she also did not like, and strengthening.