by K. Johansen
“Go to Marakand. Speak to the god there. They are the strong point, the fortress that holds the road,” Ghu said. “The Lady was right in that. By the time you come there, we’ll know—we and Marakand alike—far more of what he intends. Go west and find Dotemon, Ahj, if you can. She may hide from me, but not from us, not from you hunting her. Or maybe it is only Jochiz she hides from, or the storyteller, and is hidden from us only by that, not intent.”
“Yes.” He wore heavy golden bracelets, the terminals leopards’ heads, on both scarred wrists, warm and hardly noticed at all, but cool against the skin of his left, a braided circlet of black as well. An uncomfortable thing, a binding, even if it was not of himself. He would have given it up to Ghu, but Ghu would not take it.
“Find her. Remind her what she has sworn. Hold her to it, hold her to me, to Nabban. Whatever we can do. Whatever we can be, together, against this.” And fierce, “You have to go. I have to send you. You’re all I have against him. I said, you don’t kill for me. Not my assassin, I said. But—”
“I am your champion, the Rihswera of Nabban. Your sword to send where you will. I gave myself to you to be whatever you would.”
“Not for this.” Not to die for me. Ghu had not spoken those words. They were only in thought, like a memory. His, Ghu’s—he didn’t know.
“Yes, idiot boy. Even for this.” Even for that.
Ghu was shivering. Not cold, he who walked barefoot in the mountain winter. Shivering like that boy who had huddled forlorn on his garden wall in the rain, following—gods knew what he thought he had found. You drew me like a fire, Ghu had said. Ahjvar wrapped himself around him, man and god, heart of his heart, bore him down and pulled his blanket over the both of them.
“Shh,” he said.
Ghu! she cries, glad. A friend, seeing a familiar figure at a far distance, and he looks for her, in this dream-place that is more hers than his, the wind-waved grass, the bowl of the sky, but his eye cannot find her.
Ivah…
She is dead, of course. She died long ago. He misses her. Remembers her. Horses, racing. Earnest frown over a tangle of knotted cords, a Grasslander cat’s-cradle wizardry. Commander of armies in the years of trouble, the rebellions, the attempts to deny, to resist the new Nabban they would make. Mother, in the first years of peace, to son, to daughter. He had held her so only the two times, in joy, in celebration, they took it so, of what they were, of friendship and what might be born of that love, which took nothing from any other. Well, Ahj had said so. Had found, maybe, he did not like it, not deep down, but he let Ghu go to her when they asked it. Which he would not have done, Ahjvar denying. Better a friend than a courtier who’ll always be looking to gain from an imperial child, she had said, and Nour won’t.
Have you asked?
Yes. He said Kharduin would beat him.
Would he?
I doubt it.
So I’m only your second choice?
She had shrugged, grinned, knowing he teased.
It was a wonder, to be a father.
He had thought he understood. He held the land in his heart; he was god. But that understanding was not complete, it woke to something more, hot and urgent. To hold a child, a tiny thing, and know it part of oneself—what would one then not do, to keep it safe?
But that was an animal’s thought, right and natural, but such a need must grow and change as the young outgrew it. Eggs hatched, nestlings fledged and flew. Children, humans, souls grew, and one did not cage them.
He did understand, though, in that moment, Catairanach, who made a hell of horrors for Ahjvar in the need that had burned in her to keep her lost daughter’s soul in life, and he had felt a pity he had never been able to find, pity even for her, whom he hated still with a hatred wholly human, in that perversion of her love.
But still it had been perversion, and crime, and a sin against the soul of the man and against the daughter too, made, by the goddess’s desire to save her, into a worse monster than the murderer she had been in life.
But why this dream, now? It is not Ivah, truly, who calls to him, from the distant heavens. The dead do not return from the realm of the Old Great Gods. It is a world separate from the world, oil and water, which do not mix.
There is something there, that thought…
Holding tight what is meant to fly free…to return…
No, it is not Ahjvar’s soul he dreams warning for. It is not. It is…He is not stolen; he is given. And that is all the difference.
But they are taken.
What is sundered must be whole. Yearns, reaching…
A cold wind, but it smelt of green, of singing waters, of life. The small garrison of the border fort had taken themselves back to their watch and their daily tasks, blessed by their god, and wondering, maybe, what took the Rihswera of Nabban—Praitannec word that had entered into Nabbani meaning not its original king’s champion but Ahjvar and Ahjvar alone— away to Denanbak. Only the captain had lingered, to offer with her own hands the parting cup of herb-pungent white-spirit, Denanbaki custom, and now she had gone too, leaving them alone, standing face to face a few yards within the natural border, which was a little beyond the ridge where the fortress sat. A difference in the stone that Ghu felt, real and vital as the skin of his own body.
Ghu took Ahjvar’s hands in his own. Long, strong hands, a soft brown that darkened with the summer sun. Calloused and seamed with pale old scars. Fingers wove through his.
“Hey.”
He couldn’t, for a moment, look up.
“Ghu.”
He did. Ahjvar’s eyes were the uncanny colour of a clear winter sky. What did one say? Travel safe, be well, come back to me?
What did one need to say?
Nothing. Ghu touched Ahjvar’s face: the shape of him, the warmth, the strong bones. Let vision fade to what he was, flesh and bone, yes, made and remade living in the world, not the shadow of charred bone and ash, no, never that, but the fire and the light of him that was Ahjvar’s own, bright and fierce and glorious against the night and the cold of the world. The old, old tangle of the curse Ghu had stolen from the goddess of the Duina Catairna and made his own, to hold Ahj to him undying in the world against all nature and the pull of the Great Gods’ road, a snarled mess spun stronger than steel and adamant, binding them.
Necromancy. Of a sort.
Ahjvar pulled him close and he held tight, raised his face to lips that found eyes and cheeks and wordless mouth.
Let him go, last hand loosing its hold, trailing down his arm, fingers’ last touch, parting, warmth of skin and skin to hold in memory. Ahjvar mounted the brown camel, which had no name, because that was Ahjvar, and it grumbled, because that was a camel, and the red one grunted. Tall, shaggy beasts, beginning already to shed their weight of winter wool, to look rather patchwork and moth-eaten. They had little to complain of, more lightly burdened than they had ever been in their previous lives in a caravan. Two, a gift from the high lady of Choa Province for the god’s asking, because it was folly to cross the northern deserts between Denanbak and the lands Over-Malagru with only one mount, even for a man proven somewhat immortal, since the camel was not. And Ahj meant to go by the badlands, through the striped and twisted stone sculpted by wind and sand and ancient waters, which was the road he knew, or at least, had travelled once before. Doubtful how much of it he remembered. It had not been a good time.
At least it was not winter.
“Ahjvar.” Ghu found words after all. A word. The only one that mattered. Took from his belt at the small of his back the sheathed forage-knife. He had armed himself that morning without thinking. Instinct—Ahjvar, the road…of course he would go armed. The heavy crooked blade was tool as much as weapon, and since that battle in which they took the empire he had cut fodder and bedding and trimmed saplings for this use or that, but never human throats. He offered it.
Ahjvar, after a long moment, nodded. He leaned, dropped half down the camel’s side to take the knife, and a last kis
s in passing. A tap with the quoit to wake the camel out of the sudden doze into which it had affected to sink. A grumbling grunt and a long stride forward, a tug on the pack-beast’s leading rein.
Tug on the reins binding them. The border, crossed. A piece of himself, gone from Nabban, which was himself.
The dogs stood and barked—because they might have grown up into dragons and spirits of the river serving the god, but underneath it all they were still dogs—until the camels and the rider were tiny figures indistinct against the rutted road. That was the only time Ahjvar looked back. The bay stallion whinnied after him, and then the white. Ghu raised a hand in farewell. Ahjvar returned the gesture, faced north. Did not look back again. Ghu watched nonetheless, until man and camels were out of sight, the road lost in the sinking of the land. Mounted Snow, turned him with a touch of his heel and whistled to Evening Cloud, still staring after his master, to follow.
“Shall we go to Swajui?” he asked the dogs.
Ahjvar liked it there; a place where he had long ago first begun to find the road to his peace, among the pines above the sacred springs. It was to the hotsprings that the folk came now for the healing of the soul, not the body. The pines above where the cold brook rose were quiet. Few found a way there, and chance was not what brought them. Ahjvar’s place.
Ghu needed a bit of that peace himself, right now.
There is a terrible yearning, a pain. Hands, heart reaching to enfold, to hold self to self, to make whole what is sundered.
It is the dream yet again, the severed self that seeks its restoration.
Yes, he says, and, But how?
No words, only the pain. Loss, need. The urgency. There are no demons in Nabban, no life returning in new forms, where once they lived, and fought, and died fighting a devil. No gods reborn in the far west.
A thing known in all the world, but why, he wonders, do we accept that that should be so?
CHAPTER XVII
…summer, and the All-Holy has come into the lands of the caravan road
Song. Light that moves like slow flames. A pulling, a yearning…shed what holds him here, fall into it. Take it into himself…
A voice, whispering. Can he even hear? My brother, my captain…is it you…?
Calling. Sorrow. Desperation. Fear?
It is another voice entirely, and the first is lost, memory discarded, in its urgency.
The light shatters. The loss is pain and he wakes, crying out a denial…
The echo still resounds in his mind. Not his own voice, that cry. No, not the whisper that haunts his dreams, either.
Known. Beloved.
Father, long, long years dead.
No. Not his father.
His god, crying out to him.
Holla-Sayan…
Night would soon burn away into dawn, a clear sky in the east already thinning toward day, but clouds piled in the west, dark and starless, and the wind threatened rain. Long waves of wind rolled before it, combing the grass, colourless in the night, pewter and black like a lake. A herd of blue cattle grazed somewhere near, he smelt them, but there was no rider tending them. Abandoned. The folk had fled the land. Only scattered bands remained, harrying an advance they could not hinder. Gesture. Futile.
As, maybe, was his coming here.
He had grown used to the idea of immortality.
Time to remember he could die?
“Blackdog.”
Holla-Sayan turned, turning, flowing from dog to man in the drawing of a breath. It was like breathing, now, he and the dog, one thing and not two. Mostly. Not the bone-cracking pain the change had once been. They were one, and that one remade itself, man, dog, swifter than thought. Not natural, no, he carried clothing and weapons and what he bore through the change, and the dog itself changed its form to answer need. He was only, perhaps, a thing of malleable flesh and bone, bound in memory and two souls that melted and flowed into one another like copper and tin in the smelter, making something new. Which was a monster, perhaps. A devil, certainly, and not one of the seven of whom the storytellers told.
“Sayan.” The god had been all about him since he came down the last valley, a presence like a scent, here in his own land, but now Sayan was beside him. A man, like him. Or not. Sayan wore flesh as one might put on a coat, clothing himself for human eyes. He was not a god who had ever been incarnate. To Holla-Sayan he recalled, in many points, his father’s face, calm and patient, always, no matter how he was tried. Wild colts and wilder boys. What others might see when Sayan spoke with them he had never asked.
A black lark took to the air, singing as it rose to greet the dawn, leaving the mottled-grey female sitting unafraid on her nest. A small owl, grasshopper in its beak, watched from the mouth of its burrow, eyes golden like twin suns.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Sayan said. “I don’t think it will be much longer. But Holla-Sayan, why have you come?”
“You called me.”
Sayan’s frown was almost humanly startled.
“I…” he said, and shook his head. “I did. But I did not think you would hear.”
He had abandoned the gang that he travelled with, a caravan-mercenary of Marakand on the desert road. Taken no leave, not even acknowledging the cry of the woman on watch. Bolted and gone, a wolf-shadow in the night. That dream, that cry.
Running, running, and coming with the dawn to the river, well below the Fifth Cataract, where ferry-folk of Kinsai’s Lower Castle would have taken him across and charged him not even a song. They knew him, at the castles. Blackdog of Lissavakail. Blackdog of the Sayanbarkash. Devil whom their goddess called friend.
No need to swim.
“Go,” Kinsai had said, and there had been a narrow fowler’s boat but no woman or man of the ferry castle to row it. Only the goddess herself, full-figured, naked, leaning hard-muscled to the oars and not, as she ever was, laughing at him. No games, no teasing, no price to be paid for his crossing, old joke between them.
Kinsai’s hair was streaked like river-water, brown and sunlit gold and her eyes, which usually shifted colour through all the shades of human and river, were the dull pewter of water under heavy cloud. She had kissed him, on the western shore, standing ankle deep in the water still, the abandoned boat drifting south. Kissed him long and slow and hard, with everything that was between them. Years and lifetimes, a child. “Run, Blackdog. Go to your god. There are shadows in the stream, nothing more. Changing every moment. A current that might be turned. Run, don’t delay.”
He had run, day and night with only the briefest of rests, jog-trot that had carried him across the world, into lands the young man who had left his family’s holding in the Sayanbarkash for the restless road had never dreamed to see, if even he had heard their names. Run into the All-Holy’s path, which was aimed, like a river’s flood, at the Sayanbarkash. This last day and night he had pushed hard, no rest at all under a growing urgency, a terror. Storm about to strike. As if he raced avalanche downhill. He had cried the god’s name aloud as he crossed into the valley.
But now he was here, and all was quiet. The black larks sang in the air and a killdeer cried in the distance. The Western Grass, waking. They were only ordinary thunderheads that piled on the far western horizon. Breath slowed.
Home.
“They’re coming,” he said. “What can I do?”
“If you don’t know…” The god shrugged, all too human. “I don’t know, Holla-Sayan. The All-Holy—I don’t even know what he is. Devil?”
“His name is Sien-Shava,” Holla-Sayan said. “Jochiz.” A certainty. It was Sien-Shava who had lain in the west, working against Marakand, reaching even into Nabban. He had had that warning from an empress, when he was still a husband and a caravan-master out of Marakand.
“You can’t fight him.” Sayan did not make it a question.
“Oh, I can fight him.” Hopeless. Inevitable. “And I can die. Even Moth—Vartu, fears him.” And if she were here…would it make any difference?
&nbs
p; Lakkariss would. Perhaps. In the right hands. Wielded by a swordsman to match Sien-Shava, yes, the sword of the cold hells would end this. But it had nearly taken him the only time he had borne it.
“We may be a devil, the Blackdog and I, but we aren’t—I’m not— what the seven were.”
Broken, weak—the faint shadow and last remnant of a devil’s soul.
I. We.
He. It.
That he thought of himself the man and the dog the devil was, perhaps, only a trick of the mind, a way of pretending to himself that he was still human, that he did not know what he knew, had not done what he had done, did not remember…what he had not done, and had, in the years before Holla-Sayan was ever born not so very many miles from here.
He was not what he had been, caravan mercenary, camel-driver, master of his wife’s caravan gang in the years she stayed behind to run the caravanserai. He had been captain, commanded armies in small wars along the mountains, just and unjust. He had held the long thoughts, once. Or the men who had been ridden by the Blackdog before him, parasite soul riding soul, not the welding of two into one, had. Yet their memories gave him no way through this.
“They are gone,” Sayan said. Distress. A child’s pain, facing the unthinkable. Made small and helpless. “Brother of the hills, sisters of the rivers, Retlavon, Jayala, Yalla of the north. Just…gone.”
Holla-Sayan took his hands, as he would a friend, breaking. He had sat by too many deathbeds. No easy lies, here. Not between them. No hope in himself, none he could pretend to.
He had counted years. Counted births, lives. Deaths. Some of them. Scratched a mark for the turning of the year in his sabre’s scabbard every spring. Because he wanted it to matter. Small mark: a year that meant nothing, beyond another winter past. A bold, taller one for the years that mattered. The years where there was joy. Or hurt. Gultage’s birth—his son, his wife’s son, the child of Marakand. Every granddaughter: Gult-age’s family. His wife’s death.
