The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  But she had more to tell Lakkariss, and between fire and ice, she would make it listen.

  Stone, steel—both and neither. Frost was born on the blade’s edge and died in the breath of the slow-flowing stone. The blade drank the heat. Molten rock grew cold and still. But the icy soul of the blade was a little warmer.

  To plunge it into a smith’s furnace would have done nothing. Lakkariss bore a greater cold in its heart.

  No blacksmith’s tongs, no bull-hide gloves. She was—there and not-there, flesh and not-flesh, making a place between worlds. Almost. A breath away from it. She felt the heat. Hair, braided back and more strictly bound than was her wont, might crisp a little where it floated free in fine pale wisps along her brow.

  Or not.

  It might be she was only a thing of fire herself, of cold light that would never burn, a shaping of the air.

  Snow sizzled, melting as it fell.

  Held in the flow, the black of Lakkariss grew red, edged in white. Heat did not deform it. The molten stone did not cling to the blade. It might have been water, rolling clean away when she withdrew the blade, drops of stone falling, bouncing. Tears of lava become pebbles.

  On the anvil, the obsidian sword smoked. In her hand, a lenticular disc of clay, shaped as if pressed between two palms, scored with symbols that were just parallel lines, and angled ones. Some wizard’s writing she did not know. The Nabbani god’s man had made it. A spell: binding, sealing. The clay was crumbled a little at the edges. Moth held it between her two hands. Crushed. Blew dust away. A splinter of stone lay in her hand, like quartz, clear, but a milky, rose-tinged cloud in its heart, twisting, writhing…A fragment of a devil’s soul. She laid it on the blade with a word that made the air crack like thunder and called from the air the first of the music she had made, the ringing notes, the harp strings’ lark-clear cry. The words, harsh and singing. Drew one down.

  Lines of fire, silver, nacre, gold. Lines of ice, tinged with the copper green of dancing light, the red of the eyelid closed against the sun.

  She laid them against the blade about the shard of crystal, and they were silver on the red hot obsidian, the finest hair’s-breadth filigree, and the hammer drove hard, all her devil’s strength, and yet the stuff of Lakkariss and the crystal both resisted her, and the working she would make.

  Heat and hammer, hammer and heat, and by day’s end—a word. For those who might read it.

  One word, and the crystal taken up into the silver, into the word.

  Tomorrow’s dawn would come.

  Winter passed, and the birds returned to nest. She did not go hunting eggs, ate only in the evenings what she had brought, of which there was little now. Oatmeal soaked in water. She drank more mead than rainwater and did not fish. All was given to the work, save when she slept beneath Swift’s shelter or the turning stars, because the body still existed, and in this labour it grew tired as it had never been since Ulfhild became Vartu.

  If the stars watched, or what lay beyond them…she did not any longer care.

  Perhaps Mikki had been right all along and the threats of the Old Great Gods were empty. Perhaps it was only that they had lost her when she tried to put herself from the world and had not yet found her again.

  A sun was setting: red, copper, rose. Not quite midsummer day. Not quite. Moth laid down the hammer. The line of lava had parted to flow either side of her anvil some time in the past weeks. The air was hot, searing-dry, harsh. Silent. She had pulled the last of the words and the music from it, the last phrase complete and hammered home, and the obsidian that was only obsidian as she was flesh and bone still held its shape, though it glowed like red-hot steel.

  She carried it down to quench it in the sea.

  Black blade, a lace-work of silver filigree embedded both sides of it. An edge still keen to shear the air. She did not try it.

  Frost was called to its edge, and followed the silverwork, the song the made it what it would be, not a refuting of its first making, but…it changed. It grew in purpose. As did every living thing. Even a devil.

  Moth sheathed it most carefully in its old scabbard. She laid that on the anvil, stripped—her shirt and trousers were hardly better than rags, scorched and worn thin. Hands hard-calloused, hands, arms, face, breast, thighs, shins, feet, all burn-scar spattered, a silver dappling. Flesh and not-flesh, but flesh remembered itself. This was the healing, the protection of what she was, the step aside from the world. A human woman, even a wizard, as she was, had been, would be dead.

  Unbound her hair.

  A white streak, falling past her face. She did not have Yeh-Lin’s vanity—or perhaps not vanity, as such, but the driven necessity to shape herself exactly to what she had been, to reassure herself she was still…she. That, that was vanity, to care for that streak of old woman’s white. But she would not remake herself to be rid of it.

  Moth went into the warm water, dove and swam, out to where it was ocean-cold, and with handfuls of weed scrubbed the weariness and the heat and the feel of soot, even though there was none, from her body. Ashore, to braid wet hair again. It would dry salt-stiff. Took Lakkariss, and left her rags, and climbed over the ridge and down to Swift’s shelter one last time. She sat there, naked, drying, still weary, and strangely content, drinking the last of the last of the mead. Nothing else remained of the supplies she had brought. She had finished the oatmeal the previous evening.

  Long shadows pooled in the twilight.

  “Thank you,” she said, to the memory of the Wolf-Smith, as the Westrons prayed to their dead gods. And “Thank you” to Swift, which would lie here until wind and storm-wave climbed high and threw her down from her stone foundation, and she bleached and cracked and went slowly back to the land.

  Then Moth dressed, even to her byrnie again, and buckled on the swordbelt of Kepra, and hung Lakkariss on its baldric over her shoulder. Unfurled her feather-cloak and shook it out. That, too she had altered, over the winter, in the short evenings before she slept. A little work only, small repairs. Scavenged feathers, never prey she had taken for food. White, bright as the moon. Long-winged gull.

  She flung it to her shoulders, and flew.

  CHAPTER XVI

  …early spring of the year in which the All-Holy came east of the Karas

  Snow bound the mountain in sleep, and the pines bowed under the weight of it. Water still flowed. The springs of Swajui steamed; the brooks gurgled under ice. Lower down, the river too moved, hidden, the boundaries of land and water blurred, softened by snow. It sought the sea and the unending slow breath of the tides. Waves that washed the shores of Nabban, and of Darru and Lathi, his mother’s lands that he had never seen but through Ahjvar’s eyes, never would. Waves that swept the Gulf of Taren, that hurled themselves, high and breaking, wild, against the cliffs, where he and Ahjvar had sat on the drystone garden wall, warmed by sun or damp with fog and spray or chill with night, moonlight pouring silver over the water. Changeless, unchanging. Breath of night air, the downs behind grown with wild thyme, with lavender. The air tasted of thyme, and salt, and seaweed.

  A moment, held close. He could be there. A foggy day. Damp woollen cloth. The man’s knee, and he leaned his head against it as they sat in silence, the man on the wall, he at his feet. Tolerated. Maybe welcomed. In that time, he didn’t know. No deeper why, then, but that he needed to lean there, needed that rare touch, as some kitten escaped drowning might need, more than milk or mother, to press itself into that warmth, any warmth, whatever creature it might be that had plucked it from the depths.

  Ahj had taken Evening Cloud, the horse he called by the Praitannec name Gorthuernial, and ridden down the course of the river of the Wild Sister before the heavy mountain snows came. Restless. Something gnawing at him, which was never a good thing. Stories drifting in the wind, coming to them on the caravan road, like cloudy silt in clean river-water, like smoke from over the horizon, a faint stain on the sky. Rumours of war in the far west, of armies moving in the name of Old Tiypur and a n
ew god. An empire broken and gone over a thousand, almost two thousand, years before, and a god who had no name, no place. A god incarnate and not rooted in earth, crossing boundaries a god of the earth could not cross, leaving his place, moving into the places of others.

  A god who called for the deaths of the gods of the earth and waters.

  A story could change, crossing the half of the world. Could be born from nothing, twisted out of all recognition, and yet…and yet.

  So Ahjvar had gone to the City of the Empress, which had been called the Old Capital when the Golden City ruled, before typhoon and devil’s malice swept that all away. Ghu might have gone himself. He might go now, move and be there, as he might be where he would, in all the land, all its hills and rivers, mountains and waters—his. But he preferred to be here, and Iri—Suliasra Iri, the young priestess-empress, daughter of the son of the daughter of the son of the son of Suliasra Ivah who had been with them when they took Nabban, did not need him under her feet. He was in all the land, and he was here. It was…how he was. God, heir of gods and goddesses gone, containing them all within himself. When she needed him, he would be there, or she would come to him, because sometimes the journeying was the prayer, and the empress must know her land, and be in it and a part of it, a little in the way the god was. Better Ahj went, who did not have the heartbeat of the land so strongly in him, the breath and dream of all the folk flowing over him like a thousand thousand rivers of soul. Ahj, who could stand aside and more easily look from outside, at need.

  Ghu had always been confused by the noise—always, until there came a point, when need was that he was not, and all went clear and cold and clean as a blade’s edge. Maybe that was just him, and not godhead. So Ahj went in his place, to see and to hear for him. Ahjvar had read what he needed in the archives of the palace, letters and reports, talked to those who had been lately in Marakand and the cities of the Taren Confederacy, which in his day had been the Five Cities with their feuding clans, rule by wealth and assassination, and the tribes of that land still, in the north at least, the free kingdoms of Praitan.

  There had been little in the reports available to the palace that differed from the stories of the caravaneers. The folk of the road had their news from Marakand, after all, and Marakand was not a place for secrets. So all that they learned in the palace that the road did not say was that the senate of Marakand had decided to send agents to the west, across the Four Deserts and the Western Grass, over the Kara Mountains into the blighted lands of Old Tiypur, and that those agents had not yet returned when the most recent report from the Nabbani ambassador in Marakand had arrived. So Ahjvar had ridden down the river, the Wild Sister, and along the Empress’s Canal that Yeh-Lin had built long ago to join it to the Kozing, and down that valley to Kozing Port, to talk to captains and sailors and merchant folk. He was still there, going every day to the wharves and the warehouses and the markets, among the sailors’ taverns and tea- and coffeehouses, camped out by night in the rare peace of the temple garden, because Ahj did not really like to sleep under a roof, enclosed by walls.

  The folk of the ships spoke of the Empire of Tiypur unified again under the rule of a holy man, maybe even a god, called the All-Holy.

  They spoke of towns, Tiypurian towns burned, of crews of foreign ships seized and executed, of folk, Tiypurian folk, massacred for failing to give their allegiance to the All-Holy, for continuing to worship their dead gods with the rites of their old mysteries.

  They spoke of the folk of all those lands being gathered into companies, commanded as the companies of an army are commanded, in every aspect of their lives. Of demands made of those ships of south and north which, by some accommodation of their captains, were still permitted to trade, for Rostengan iron and tin from south over the sea, for timber and hides from the kingdoms of the North.

  Of agents of the priests of the All-Holy making the dangerous journey across a dead land and the high mountains of the Karas, onto the Western Grass. Buying horses of the tall, strong-boned Westgrasslander breed.

  Iron, bronze, timber. Horses.

  That was as much as to say, weapons.

  And wagons.

  And such news was already old, even the newest, whether it had travelled by the caravan road or by sea.

  Ghu could reach, could touch Ahjvar…be with him. Now. Here. Did not. Easy to hold Ahj too close. To wind himself through him so that they became thought and thought, breath and breath, here in Nabban, in this land, his land. It was different when Ahjvar went beyond, as sometimes he did, reluctant in the going, but he went because Ghu could not and it mattered, sometimes, to see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears what the priest-emperors could not. Or need not. Or what was no concern of the palace, but must be the god’s, for the sake of the land and the folk of the land. When Ahj went out of the land there was a hollowness, like a piece of himself missing. A second heart gone.

  A strange god Ghu might be, different in his birth and growth and being, but still he could not reach beyond Nabban’s natural borders, no more than any small god of hill or spring could stretch their awareness and will beyond their own natural reach, but Ahjvar could, and in that, he—he, Nabban—had resources a god did not. More than an agent, a priest, a witness, which any god might ask a man or woman of his folk to be in a foreign land. Ahjvar was what no servant could ever be: his own eyes, ears, mouth, heart…sword.

  He had not asked that of Ahj, ever. If Ahjvar had killed on his ventures abroad—and he had, because enemies came upon a traveller through no fault of his own, even the Leopard of Gold Harbour, who had to work very hard not to make enemies—it had been not the reason of his going.

  Ghu did not know why he thought that, now.

  Yes, he did. Only he did not want to. And that was the boy in him still, who wanted to make all safe and small and hidden, and shut the world out from himself, and from Ahjvar, who was so hurt by it.

  He could not lose Ahj. He could not bear it. He could not be, without Ahjvar. And a god had no business to let his heart be tied so into one man, one flawed and sometimes dangerous man, brittle in his scars, like a broken cup mended with lacquer. Dangerous man, dangerous to love so humanly intense what was not his to hold, what was long ago doomed to take the road to the Old Great Gods. That was the sin that had led to Ahjvar’s cursing so long ago: a goddess who could not bear to let her daughter go.

  He could not lose him. He would not use him.

  Ahjvar would say otherwise. To both. And Ghu had promised, he would let Ahjvar go, when Ahjvar would.

  But to choose the road was not to be ripped away to it by another. And he could not, he could not bear to be alone—

  What might come was only patterns on water, uneasy reflections, broken, uncertain.

  Eyes shut. Long, slow breath. What he must, not what he would. For both of them, maybe. Because Ahjvar surrendered self and choice and would not take them back.

  In his hands—squatted on his heels, his back to the sacred stone at the heart of Swajui, beneath evergreen oaks that had been acorns once, carried from that place of cliff and downs and the unceasing breakers— shells. Small things, carried long, like the acorns. Carried much longer, now. Opened his eyes and looked on them again. Names Ahjvar had given Ghu when he first brought them back up from the shore to the ruined broch on the headland, small fascinations of colour and form. Limpet, the shade of a mouse’s belly, with a contrasting ring of lavender. Already pierced. Topshell, tight-whorled snail flecked in repeating broken bands of pale blue and pink and green on lustrous white. Periwinkle, blue as final dusk. Tower shell, like the ivory-gold horn of an imagined beast in one of the palace library’s bestiaries. Cerith, another fantastical horn, its spirals marked with russet knobs.

  There were acorns, too, under the snow. Over-Malagru cork oak, which was not native to this place, this mountain, and lived maybe because the deepest frost was kept at bay by the hotsprings, or because he had willed it so when Ahjvar planted them. He found three by reachin
g for them, fingers burrowing barehanded beneath the snow. So.

  From the deep pocket of a ragged caravaneer’s coat, stripes faded to fawn and cream, he took a folded leather wallet carried almost as long as the shells, tools for mending. The needles were perhaps too fine, but the smallest awl would serve his purpose.

  The sun climbed over the trees, pines and evergreen oaks all carrying their snow-burdened branches like clouds. The drifts glittered like restless water, breaking and flinging sparks. Shadows of the trees made depths, dark pools, and the steam of the springs added another layer of hoarfrost to twig and lip of curling drift. Patiently, carefully, he drilled with the awl, piercing the shells, the acorns. If once he slipped and pricked a finger, and blood marked them…that was no wrong thing for what he would work.

  Rain began to patter on the road as the afternoon turned to evening. Most travellers had already sought their lodgings; only the few last home-going peasants hurried along now, returning to their villages from riverside fields. Spades and mattocks and muddy to the waist; they must have been working on some ditch or dyke, awaiting the blessing of the spring floods for the intervale land. Free folk, all, in this land they had made, he and Ghu and Ivah between them.

  Yeh-Lin, too, and others long dead, remembered, always. The great council had met at Dernang, to reshape the customs of the land. An annual autumn festival commemorated it now. Ahjvar avoided going down to Dernang, the town below the holy mountain, during the week-long holy days, though he would be welcome as their god himself, who wandered the festivals of the land—all of them, in that strange and dreamlike way he had.

  Ahjvar was not good at people. Maybe he never had been. He couldn’t really remember. Too long ago, too far away.

  Tired, deep in the bones. Too long among cities and folk and what he had gleaned had not led him to anything but a weight on the heart, chill and heavy.

  Rain on the road seemed only an echo of his mood.