The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  “Why what?” Ahjvar is half waking regardless. The breath of his words tickles his chest.

  “Why is it the proper place of human souls, to go to the Old Great Gods, when all others return again to the great world from which they are born?”

  “It’s the way it is,” Ahjvar says, and does wake, and sits up, breaking the dream. “What’s worrying you?”

  “I was dreaming.”

  “You’re always dreaming. Dreaming what?”

  “That I asked you this.”

  Ahjvar shakes his head and laughs. Covers a yawn with the back of his hand. He’s been out to Bitha, newly ridden home. A long last day of travel behind him. Takes Ghu, a hand behind his neck, pulls him down to lie head in his lap, pulls coats over him. “Go back to sleep, idiot boy.”

  But he doesn’t sleep, warmth of a thigh under his cheek notwithstanding, and Ahjvar does not lie down to sleep, fingers playing in his hair.

  “The bards,” Ahjvar says at last, “have an old, old song. It’s only scraps, within another tale. An old woman, a wanderer, comes to the king’s dinaz claiming to be—the name is gone. It means nothing within the tale, but you’re supposed to know that once it did, that when it was first sung, it was important, who she was, and that she was ancient, and important, in older tales. The king’s own bard questions her. It’s a ritual— that’s what my tutor believed. Something wizards once knew, and bards, but no one remembers and it’s only a strange old song that hardly anyone sings, because it doesn’t make sense. She should have been a scholar, my tutor. Gone to Marakand. She was always more interested in digging into the broken ruins than in building new.”

  “Sing it?”

  “I don’t remember. I’m sorry. But there are questions about the names of trees, and stories in the stars, and one is about the journey of the dead. And it says, they walk along the river and the river flows both ways, and my tutor said, she thought, from something else she’d heard up among the forest-kingdoms, that the pieces of older songs in the song we had, told that the Old Great Gods did not hold the souls of the dead, but only—took them in. Like, like they were travellers. The dead, I mean, not the Gods. Travellers come a long and weary journey, come from long battles within themselves. Come for rest, and healing. And then they go their way.”

  “Where?”

  “Elsewhere?”

  Something wanted him to dream himself here. To this.

  Ahjvar, he thinks, had never wanted that rest the Old Great Gods promised. Ahjvar had only wanted oblivion, to shed himself and be done.

  Did even a good life lived happy and content, and ended in peace, did even that want to simply…endure? To end, but never to end, to wait, held by the Gods—for nothing, an eternity of existing without…living?

  That pain. It has his attention now. That yearning, that desperate need. He sits up again, leaning against Ahjvar.

  “Ghu—” Ahj begins to say and Ghu silences him, two fingers on his lips. Leaves them there, and smiles a little when Ahvar opens his mouth and takes them in, a tongue touching, tasting. But he is listening.

  Heart reaching for what is severed from it. Open, to engulf, not to destroy, but to take back, to make whole what has been sundered, what is one life with unnumbered expressions, which cries, self to self, to be complete, an ocean living, a tide that rises and falls, a cycle, yes, of water, cloud, rain, river, sea, and the mist rises to cloud and lives again in rain and pool, in spring and stream and the great rivers and the lakes, and the ocean’s pulse endures…and it flows life to life, gods, demons, beasts, trees, moss beneath them…

  The Old Great Gods cannot easily touch the world, because though the souls of the dead may still pass to them, the road is broken against their returning, save with great suffering and pain. The songs of the north say this, and call it the work of the seven, as they went down to defeat and their imprisoning graves.

  The souls of the dead may still pass to them. So it is said. They go to their road. He knows that much. He has felt its pull, its reaching to take Ahjvar from him, the desire of the souls of the dead to fly to it…

  But what lies at the end of the road?

  The dead are taken in by the Gods. And the songs—are they born from the dreams of the seers and shamans, or from where does this knowledge seep, rising like water through sand—changed to say, they went and did not return. But the world yearns for their return…

  They go, and there is no return, soul into soul.

  “Oh,” he says, a long sigh, and gives his attention to what Ahjvar is doing.

  Autumn, and the storm winds blew up from the south, warm and thunderous. Swift was upturned, mast removed, the hull a roof bound to the earth with walrus-hide ropes, over curving walls that were broken blocks of the raw black stone, caulked with eelgrass. A bed inside, only the folded sail for mattress and an oily woollen cloak for covering. A door of sorts, made of the bottom-boards, which could be propped in place against storm. A hearth outside, walled on three sides against the prevailing winds. There was driftwood to burn, sometimes, when she could roast fish or fish-rank bird and make porridge or bannock. Sometimes she only soaked oatmeal and the smoked fish in water till they were fit to chew. Quahogs she ate raw, and fresh fish in a pinch, with dulse and greens. She did not like to cook on the hot stones, though there were places she could have done so. She tried it for bannock. It gave the bread a foul taste and left grit in the crust.

  Mikki would have joked about the food, foul and fowl and the flavour of gulls however cooked.

  There was water. She had deepened one high rain-pool, hacked rivulets to fill it more swiftly. The sea for bathing, though, the warm strange water of the cove. It mattered, the bathing. She came to each morning’s work clean, new with the dawn, whether that work was sweating half-naked over the heating and beating of the anvil and hammer themselves or the singing, the words building, syllable by slow syllable, what she would have be, transforming these small piece of the world, this iron of some Northron forest forge, into something adamantine.

  Long weeks in the singing, the reforging. By the autumn, the fledglings of the cliffs flying away, that was done. It had been only the making of the tools.

  CHAPTER XV

  …autumn, with winter drawing near, and Moth remains at her forge on Holy Ulvskerrig

  A grey goose, low over the sea. Lost, for a moment, in the molten glare of the rising sun. A goose, out of season. They should have been long on their way to southern marshes, and geese, besides, did not often fly solitary. Moth stood by her hut, eyes narrowed against the light.

  So.

  He came to light on the stones before her, a hissing of wings shearing the air, a swirl of feathers and silk.

  “Anganurth.” She greeted him with a slight inclination of the head, no more.

  “Ulfhild.” Human name for human name. A quirk of humour at the corner of his mouth. Familiar. Missed? Perhaps. But missed so long she had all but forgotten it. The wind whipped hair across his face. He pushed it back and she smiled. He never would tie it back. Some taboo of his people, he had once confessed, that he found he could not bring himself to contravene: a wizard must not cut or bind their hair.

  “I’m sent,” he said.

  “By whom? Anganurth, Sien-Shava has—”

  “Let me take the black sword. What you intend—no.”

  “What do I intend?” she asked, folding her arms, but her pulse quickened. “Even I do not quite know. Listen. Did you know Sien-Shava is calling himself a god and stealing the souls of his folk?”

  “Sien-Shava can be dealt with. Should have been dealt with. Weren’t you charged with that very task?”

  She shrugged.

  “This is wrong, Vartu. What you intend—the shadows run ahead of you. The shadows of act, of consequence, are seen.”

  “Then you know what must follow.”

  “It will not be allowed. We will prevent it. We must.”

  “We. You speak for more than yourself, Jasberek. Who joins you in
‘we’? Dotemon? Or have you allied with Jochiz in the end?”

  “No. Never. Never Sien-Shava Jochiz over you. And I know nothing of Dotemon. I thought perhaps you had betrayed her and slain her as the others and still I did nothing—you know I did nothing and I could have found you any of these long years. But Vartu, what is in your mind, I cannot accept.”

  “You can’t? Or you choose not to? Their touch is on you. The heavens—the air of them still wraps you. You are sent, you say. Are these even your own words, your own belief? What have they offered you?”

  He was silent.

  What? she demanded, and she was furious of a sudden. What price your treachery?

  A thing little enough, he said. Not even a life. I’m tired, Vartu. I’m tired, and perhaps we were right, and perhaps we were wrong. I don’t even remember any more. I only want to go home. Give me the sword, to do what you will not, and then I will be allowed to return.

  They bought you with that? You?

  Yes, he said. I suppose they did. Vartu—

  No. And that was stone-hard and allowed no argument further.

  He flung off the feather cloak, drawing his sword, a sweeping cut, but she was leaping back. Shieldless, unarmoured, barefoot. Unarmed; Kepra and Lakkariss both lay sheathed in the hut, and the doorway in the stones was only waist-high, like the entrance to a dog’s kennel. He charged her and she leapt to the roof, stood on the keel turned ridgepole like a weathercock, wrote runes of shadows and smoke and in the moment where he blinked, summoning in mind the steps of the dance, the brief pattern with which he would have dispelled it, came down on him like a pouncing cat, to kick once and again. Anganurth Jasberek fell and rolled and never lost his sword, but she was diving through the doorway, fox to its lair, and came out with naked steel in her right and Lakkariss sheathed, held crossways in her left, catching his descending blow on its battered scabbard.

  He was taller than she, his blade long, single-edged, and a slight curve to it. Wielded two-handed.

  Old friends, old comrades, older in that than the human names they bore, older too in friendship than the devils they had become, Vartu and Jasberek, Ulfhild and Anganurth, doubly bound.

  Doubly betrayed.

  And long familiarity in their swordplay together.

  Not playing now.

  No wizardry now. That held between them, as if they duelled beneath the ashtree before the king’s hall, and perhaps the bench-companions of Hravnmod laid bets and cried encouragement to one or the other or to both.

  “Nice,” he even said once, and laughed. She had laid his left arm open to the bone. But then he fought one-handed, and did not smile again. Tip caught her face, missed her eye but crossed her cheek. She was in close and Keeper thrust, and she turned aside, came back swinging for his neck and he was leading her down, and down the ridges towards the shore, where the footing was furrowed and broken and slick with bladderwrack. Lunged in suddenly and she sprang away but he kicked out and knocked her, so that she fell on her shoulder, rolling up to strike him down, kicking where she could have cut, and he landed badly, something cracking, came up again with his weight on one leg only.

  “Help me,” she said. “For all we ever believed, for our old alliance, help me. Don’t do this, Anganurth, Jasberek—please. Don’t make me do this.”

  He shook his head, hair falling over his face, blowing in his eyes. Red stained his shirt, a cut she had hardly noticed had touched. An underlying grey muddied the warm brown of his face, and his lips were faded. Lost his balance, that leg barely set to the ground, something grave, there.

  “No. I’m done, Vartu. And Anganurth is, we’re tired. They’ll take me back, free me of him, free him of me.”

  “If I’m dead, and Jochiz, and Dotemon.”

  “Give the sword and I’ll bargain for you.”

  He could hardly stand. But disarm him, make tea, remember old days, old campaigns, old warmth between them…he would heal; they did, and he would try again, and Mikki—

  And Mikki.

  She shook her head.

  While they spoke he had been setting the patterns in his mind, behind his eyes, the dance that wove the wizardry of his folk, and the green of his eyes was washed in his fires, flame and starlight, the burning essence of him. The broken bones were knitting themselves while the spell reached into her, to pull her down to earth, to bind and hold her, rabbit-snared, choking, helpless—she felt it seizing on her, the weakening of her knees, the cord tightening about her throat.

  Flung Kepra aside, drawing Lakkariss. Hilt still wrapped in old leather, dry now, brittle, hiding the silver and niello pattern. Slender blade, black. Ice. Obsidian. Its edged smoked in the air, growing a fringe of frost.

  Jasberek dropped his sword, hands raised, dropped wizardry, too, gathering himself against her. Even to human eye he seemed for a moment a hollow thing, a lantern filled with flowing, liquid light, and lightning edged his hands, his speaking mouth.

  Moth did not wait to hear. She thrust, following close on her blade, putting herself within his arms’ grasp. His fires enfolded her. Lakkariss drank them.

  She let him down to the earth, and watched the dying light, the tangled souls thinning, drawn away. Consumed, and the cold, the ice, blooming on him, frost-flowers filling his mouth, his eyes, spilling from the lips of the wound in his breast as she withdrew the sword. Frost climbing the blade, the cold’s hunger reaching for her, hoarfrost over her hand.

  “No,” she said, and shook it away, sheathed the sword, and knelt down by him.

  The body was very cold, and the little grasses, the weary end-of-autumn flowering things were crumbling to ash about him. Waves pounded the shore, the tide incoming, the weed rising to float and sway with the pulse of the waves.

  Gulls cried. Only gulls, no wizard’s shaping. No interest in what passed below.

  He had been her friend. Her brother, her sister, before ever Ulfhild and Anganurth were born in the world. She wrapped his empty body in the feather-cloak she had taught him to make long years before and gave him to the sea where the current would take him far out, hold him for good. The ancient, razor-edged sword she threw after him.

  Three days, she sat on the rocks above the tideline, where she might watch the waves run out of the east. Sat without working, without singing. Grief. Mourning. Perhaps. Perhaps only a need to be still, to let the world settle.

  On the fourth day Moth rose again, took her swords and went back up to the hut, to eat and drink, and to resume what she had begun. But the first working was finished.

  Now Moth changed the song to a different spell: greater, heavier, deeper. Harder to hold, and harder yet with every dawn that broke over her. The true making she had come to this place of silence and solitude to work.

  The midwinter solstice came with a storm out of the north-east, and she had been singing since the equinox. Not ceaselessly, as a storyteller would no doubt have it, were a skald other than herself ever to spin this tale for the world. Only the words she needed, in the morning, bathed and fast unbroken. She sang on the shore, on the crest of the black ridge, or in the shelter of Shrike’s upturned keel, if the weather outside were not fit for the harp. Notes held, layered, spinning to power, a music that wound itself through and under the words, a thing of the earth, perhaps its greatest beauty. The words were not. The words were nothing of this world. They seared the air, left the scent of lightning.

  One sentence, this morning. Slow. Long. Heavy. Notes scattered, a fluttering of wings. Gathered. One chord, like a great wall falling.

  Strings snapped, silver—she had strung it with silver in place of the brass before she sailed—coiling wild, smoking away like hoarfrost in the rising sun.

  Done.

  Moth drank the last of an open jar of mead and went out into the storm, up to the height, and stood there, with Lakkariss hugged to her chest as though it were a child in need of comforting. Stood all through the day’s fury, and the night’s deadly cold. The sword’s frost sheathed her, and the
snow.

  When the slow dawn came with a dying wind and a blue-torn sky, the new year’s birth, she went down to the cove. No bathing. No hesitation. Nothing, now, between her and the sword and the skirling, singing shape of the power she had set.

  The white fog rose to wrap her. Thick. Hot. Acrid. Water hissed.

  The artery of fire had moved. It did. Sometimes it thickened, set in black scabs. It made ridges like scars, spilled over them, found a new course. The cove had changed shape noticeably since she had arrived in the summer. It might be filled and a tongue thrust out towards Ertholey before another year had passed—or there might, always that possibility, be another breaking of the earth here.

  She knew it now for the deep molten heart rising. Only a weakness in the stone skin of the world, which they should never have pastured their sheep upon. Vartu’s understanding, not Ulfhild’s.

  Vartu’s vision, also, that saw the song around her, still shaped in the air, colours of deep cold and fire of the earth’s heart. Fires of the stars, threads of colours that had no name, only a song.

  Now the course of the molten stone crawled nearer the anvil, which stood cold, glass-glossy even in its roughness, stone risen to hold it firm, called by a song in the last of the autumn. The remade hammer lay on it, waiting. Dark, dull, eating light.

  No words, now. No music. No wizardry of this earth.

  Keeper was left under Shrike.

  Moth set aside the scabbard of Lakkariss, plain and battered black leather over wood much knocked about, and with a small knife cut away the leather wrapping of the hilt’s handgrip. The slender blade was black. Steel, in some lights. Obsidian. Cold. It might have been ice. The hilt was silvered, patterned all over in black niello, a scrolling design that flowed like water and was jagged like thorns. A script.

  A command.

  A song.

  That, she could not unmake. It told the sword its nature. It made sword, from a shard of the cold hells, a thing that was not a thing, not here in this world, but a thought.