by K. Johansen
No particular notch to note Gultage’s death. He had gone away for good, left Marakand and the caravanserai the family ran there when those granddaughters were young women. He had not wanted to see his son, Gaguush’s son, become an old man.
And so he had not. Regret. Nothing learnt.
No comfort to offer. No wisdom.
“I’m nothing but a weapon in the end, no different from when the dog first took me. A beast. I was made to be, out of the wreck of this devil. I’m no wizard; I don’t have the blood. I’m no true devil. I can’t raise the powers of the land. I can’t shape—whatever it is they do—out of my will and soul. Flesh and steel I could face for you, but I don’t even understand what he is doing.”
Called or not, he had had to be here. To die, at last, defending his god, or trying to avenge him.
Death stalked closer. The fading stars overhead felt black and purple as the horizon, smothering. For a moment, Holla-Sayan could scarcely breathe.
“Blackdog, I called—I don’t know why. I don’t want you here to die with me. I did not think you would hear.”
“Maybe Kinsai carried your call over her waters, through her valley. I was with a gang on the road, coming up west. I was on my way home anyway. Listening for you, maybe. We were hearing bad things in Marakand.”
“They’re true.”
“ I know.”
“I only—I wanted to see you one last time, Holla-Sayan. That’s all. Strange, isn’t it? You’ve become something strange, as well, strange to me, something I’ve never known. Close and dear. You know what it is to see the lives come and go. I have known you longer than any man or woman of my folk. Do you ever think of that? You are…” Sayan seemed to consider words, frowning, choosing carefully as a man might select a piece of wood for carving, turning each this way and that. “Brother? Yes. Become more a brother than one of my folk, a thing akin to me as no one of humankind has ever been. And so—I know I will die and leave the barkash godless. My folk are fleeing. Most are already gone over the rivers. But my thoughts went to you. My brother. I am sorry that I called, though. It was—the cry of my heart. I did not mean to bring you here to die. They are within the lands of the barkash. Very near to where you grew up. Very near to here. I think—I fear he prepares— whatever weapon it is, that can kill a god. I should not have brought you here. You should not have come. Go east, Holla-Sayan. Remember me and this land. It’s all we have left. Remember my name, that I was, in this land.”
He would have the throat out of the devil or die trying. Shatter what spell, what weapon, Jochiz would make.
And Sien-Shava Jochiz would weave it again, once Holla-Sayan was dead. The dog within him snarled. The dog—resisted his rage, and mostly the dog was rage, and reaction, and did not shape coherent thought, only emotion and that painted stark in black and the red of fire and blood.
But in all the miles beneath his paws he had found no plan, only a shadow of an idea, something he could hardly frame, could only feel in fragments—the shape of it, the way.
He, or the dog?
They. It was they. It was always they.
Yes, the dog said, and the dog had no words left in its damaged soul. Or so even gods and devils believed.
“We have now, this moment, nothing more, and only ourselves. Sayan, listen. I took Attalissa out of Lissavakail, and she lived. And once Sera of the holy spring of Serakallash put herself into a stone and was sheltered in the Narvabarkash.”
“Attalissa was incarnate as a human child and she lived only because you found goddess-sisters to lend her their…life, I suppose you could call it. But I’ve thought on your story of Sera.”
“Can you?”
“I…cannot feel the way. I am earth, stone. Not water, to pour myself into another way of being. Not a thing of water, to find a sleep like death through drought and winter.” The god stooped and dug fingers into the turf. “I am—this.”
“You are a soul of the earth.”
“How can I be anything else?” The god’s voice went soft and slow, a man puzzling over something. Fumbling. Like a person drunk or stunned. Holla-Sayan felt the fine hairs of his skin prickling, the dog’s unseen hackles rising. “I can’t…feel my way to it. It is not my nature…I think. I think…Holla—?”
Now he was a thing of haze, of shadows half-formed, not flesh or seeming-flesh at all, and he held out a hand to Holla-Sayan.
What he had never thought to feel from his god, that soul of deep earth and stone. Terror.
Blackdog…
His own terror was like ice in the heart.
The god was briefly in the world again. He clenched his teeth, an arm braced against the earth, hand splayed, eyes shut, head flung back, human form echoing human agony, and Holla-Sayan seized that other reaching hand, which was there and not-there, cold and solid as stone in his. Went down on his knees to pull the god to him, himself to the god. It was the grass, the birds hopping near, which were things of smoke half-seen.
“They are…” Sayan seemed almost to waver within his arms, hot and cold, near and distant. They clung like brothers washed ashore from shipwreck, and the waves still savage to wrench them apart. “They sing against me. Blackdog, hold…”
The dog wrenched at him. Tore through him. Here. Now. This way. See. Command without words. Ripped open a path for vision, and he saw. A thing of fire, of light, red and sullen dark silver, a flame bound in flesh and bone, made by that flesh and bone a thing of the earth, where it could not otherwise endure. Sien-Shava Jochiz stood by the broken ruins of a stone barn, his head raised, singing. Words in a speech Holla-Sayan did not know. Equally alien to the Blackdog; it was a tongue of the earth, but belonging to some distant land, weaving pattern as a wizard of the Great Grass would weave spells in yarn, cat’s-cradles of power. Children stood in a circle about him, hands clasped as if they might dance, but they did not. They sang, high and clear, every note true, as the sun edged up out of the night. The mists in the valleys were set alight, the colour of wild roses. So earnest. So single and simple, their minds, their hearts becoming one greater thing, a unity, a vastness…a well to draw down a light and a mass they could never individually have contained. The dog felt this in the shape of what they made. The words were nothing to them, syllables learned in fear and awe and service of their god, in the evenings and in the wagons. He understood that, found a vision held in them, as if each were a diviner’s shell and their life lay within to be seen. They knew themselves special. The blessed. The chosen. All willing, all wholehearted, and once they had promised themselves to this, all emptied of doubt and fear, of yearning for parents, for their old life, for their homes. Westron and Westgrasslander together—there were many who had come over the mountains parentless, following the army as if it made a pilgrimage, or hoping for glory in service to the All-Holy. A beautiful innocence. They offered their souls in song to their god, and their god of his grace accepted them.
No! he cried at them. Lies. Don’t. Don’t sing.
The dog quashed the urge. They would be seen, known. The children were doomed. The children were already—
Souls would fuse to one vessel, one heartbeat’s space, no more, to contain even a god. Creatures of the earth and a soul of the earth made one, and made the devil’s, the soul that held the centre, the hungry and devouring heart of fire, the man who sang…They were within him, not gods but their godhead, their potentiality, but…oh, the fire, the weight of them, the dark heart of stone and the roiling of waters. The earth. He, dog, man, devil began to feel its pulse beneath his own in every stillness, as if he stood there, as if he sang, as if he held himself open, to drink the god—
His own voice, smooth, weaving through them.
Not that way.
The children in his vision shivered like reflection on water, barely to be seen; it was their souls stood sharp and clear, the flame of life within, but that flame spun out in thin threads into the heart of the devil, and flowed like blood. In Sien-Shava’s upraised hands, before
his face, he held—only a stone.
A piece of the barkash, stone of the hills. Holla-Sayan wore a stone, a white pebble, in a soft leather amulet bag hung about his neck. Caravaneers, bards, such wanderers did so, to remind themselves they were not godless in the world. A token of his god, of his land, a stone he had taken from the crest of the barkash and the god’s holiest place before he went, a young man not yet twenty, to the caravan road. It was a little magic, a small thing. A symbol only, perhaps.
Perhaps more than a symbol. Some wizardry worked so.
There were other words wound within the foreign singing, harsh, clear, shouted almost, by the devil alone. The children could not have shaped them. They were not heard but felt, a pain, a cry of longing in the marrow. A shape almost grasped, a meaning—he should have understood. Sayan cried out at his own name.
Sayan was shredding, threads of smoke pulled into a hungry wind, a burning heart. Flowing into the fire, to be consumed.
Holla-Sayan pulled himself away from the vision, felt earth, felt grass, smelt earth and grass and rain in the wind, his god.
He had no song to sing against this, no words. No wizardry. He was only a monster, a plain man made a broken devil.
No. The dog. Under the temple, dying, he called it. Dying, it came. Remember? It needed him to remember now. Flowing into him, consuming him in fire, in pain, in…flood of living light, filling him.
In this place he was fire—scarlet, peridot green, molten silver—two souls spun together.
Wizardry had always a shape, he knew that. Something to hold it. All he had was words, and this was not wizardry as he understood it. This was only truth, what they were, he and the dog, he and the god. This was—what was. Words made a shape. The truth did, forcing itself acknowledged.
Words made a shape. So speak them. Force their truth into the world.
“We are kin, Sayan.” His voice cracked. Weak, as if every word fought through smoke and blood to shape itself. “We make ourselves kin, we do, as deep a truth as that I am my parents’ son, as deep a truth as that I am my brothers’ brother.” He had not been. Foundling, abandoned baby, claimed and loved. Truth. “We share a name, Sayan. My mother gave me your name and you blessed it. You’ve let me hide in you from my enemies. Held your hands over me so many times. Hold on to me now.” Words clearer now. Stronger. More certain. Feeling…truth, making a shape in the world. “I’m not a god, but what is a devil, Sayan? We warred against the Old Great Gods. We are powers to destroy gods of the earth. I’m not strong enough, whole enough, to stand against Jochiz. I’ve lost my own name. But I can be—” He hardly had words. Friend. Love. Brother. Where it mattered. In the heart, the soul. “You are my brother, I name you so, as you name me yours.” Tightened his grip on the god, illusion though that might be. Wrapped him, pulled him close, drowning brother, kin to kin, heart to heart, soul to soul. “Hold to me. Hide in me. Let me carry you.”
Shaped what he did not need to speak aloud, then. Sure and certain. A blessing: no matter what I am, what I’ve become or may yet be, you are my god and my brother, you are a part of me as I am a part of you. My bones are grown from your earth. I’m stone and water of the Sayanbarkash but I am fire and ice of the stars and the hells. I can hold you, I will hold you, if you can give yourself up to me.
The stone in the hands of Jochiz shattered. A cry of fury, of pain. Something ripped away from him. Falling to his knees, hands reaching. The singing children were silent, dead husks folding to the ground, burnt away within, as once Holla-Sayan had seen priestesses die, their life consumed by Ghatai in the working of a spell of protection as the Grasslander devil strove to possess the goddess Attalissa of the mountain lake.
Holla’s arms were empty and he knelt on the dead earth. Frost edged seam and rivet of his brigandine, melted from cold-stung hands.
CHAPTER XVIII
“Down!” the blood-slick haft of his axe. She hit the Westron, sabre slashing across the back of his neck and if it didn’t cut more than the leather collar of his armour below his helmet’s brim, he was still driven down, beginning to fall. Lark seized and dragged, battle-roused. The man went under the stallion’s hooves and his horse swung away from Lark’s lunge after it. Tibor wheeled back to her.
“Go!” she shouted. That was a knight, she’d killed a knight of the fifth circle. Lark had. “Good boy!” she sang, as if she praised a dog. “Ride, ride!”
Lazlan’s horn had sounded the signal to break away and already the grey light that ran before the dawn was making them all too visible. No fog gathered to hide them. It would not. The god of this land was gone, they knew it. The young soothsayer Arpath, the closest thing they had to a wizard, had cried out, feeling that loss like physical wound, it seemed, and fallen in a dead faint the previous morning. He had not woken by the time Lazlan led his skirmishers away to make this last strike.
To show the All-Holy that even the death of their god would not break them.
Sayan had not been her god, nor Tibor’s, but it didn’t matter; they were all of the Western Grass.
She kneed Lark half around to meet the last pursuing rider. Tibor drew his bow to his ear and let fly. She’d thought him out of arrows, but he had one. It was enough and the pursuer fell before he closed with her. Sixteen years on the caravan road, her mother’s cousin. Tibor didn’t miss.
Cries from her left. Foreign. Hate-filled. It meant something like “godless,” that word, and it should not be cried there; they had driven in like the thrust of a spear to throw terror into this encampment, well within the pickets before they were noticed, and she’d seized the torch that burned before an officer’s tent to set it and five more alight before they’d swung away, with fires blooming all through the camp. Cries and screams as they rode down soldiers stumbling hazy from their sleep.
They’d lost contact with one another in their scattering flight. It was often so. Sometimes you never knew till days later who had gotten clear, who had fallen at the last. Deadly folly at the best of times, to ride reckless in the dark. She and Tibor hadn’t shaken that last pair of knights, elite warrior-priests riding good Westgrass horses, pursuing even as night faded.
Out of the north—these must have passed close in the night, a mounted patrol, and devils damn them, that they had eluded Lazlan’s company—six riding towards them on the light Westron ponies. She and Tibor could outrun the ponies, except the Westrons were close, close enough for a thrown spear—
—to miss.
Tibor had his sabre in hand now, and she saw the whites of his eyes, his bared teeth. Light spreading. Too long in disengaging, too slow, too late.
She went one way, Tibor another.
So she and Tibor would be among the lost when next they counted heads.
Jolanan had expected it every time she rode.
Something came up from the gulley, the dry watercourse they’d followed down towards the camp, a man who knew this land—it had been the grazing of his own herds—guiding them. Dog, she thought, one that must have followed Lazlan’s raiders from the main band of Reyka’s company that had kept pressing north.
Then she thought, wolf?
Bear?
Dog, but the size of it—not one of theirs. Did dogs grow so big? Did wolves?
It flung itself into the midst of the Westron riders with no warning. Ponies panicked, squealed, reared—riders fell. It pulled down a man and shook him, snapped his neck and flung him, bit through the arm of another as he slashed with a knife, slid aside from a spear and tore that soldier’s throat—the ponies were bolting, with or without riders, and Lark was trying to turn away. She could feel the fear growing herself, something wild and howling pulsing in her belly, a cold sweat. Tibor was fighting his bay, but when the second patrol crashed upon him man and horse found their nerve again and she rode to help him. The wolf-dog came snarling among them, blood-soaked jaws closing on a Westron man’s throat so close the spray arced across her face.
And then it was gone and they were free and r
iding hard, alone. No pursuit.
“Old Great Gods, Old Great Gods and damned devils, what in the cold hells was that?” Tibor’s voice was breaking, almost a howl himself, and he clutched the amulet-bag that hung about his neck. A stone from the Jayala’s bed, he had shown her once. Token of goddess and home, carried all the way to Marakand so many times. But Jayala their goddess was dead and their homeland laid waste by the All-Holy and everyone they knew…dead, enslaved, sworn to a foreign lie of a god to buy life. She didn’t know what to hope.
It was only a stone he held now. Empty of hope.
“Wolf?” she hazarded. Her throat was croaking dry and her mouth tasted of blood. Not her own.
“You, the cow-herd, say so?”
“I don’t know, then. I saw a bear come down off the mountains once. It wasn’t a bear, either.”
“Cross between them. Wolf and bear.”
“They can’t.”
“Bear-mule.”
“Tibor—”
He made a face. “Great Gods, look at you. What would your mother say?”
“Well done?” She hardly remembered her mother, dead when she was small.
“Probably.” They didn’t mention her father, wit-wandered after a bull flung him into a tree. Better he had died. When she could no longer cope with caring for him and managing their small holding, Tibor’s mother had taken them on. Papa she took for charity—at least he was content to scare birds from the wheatfields, if someone kept half an eye out to be sure he didn’t wander away looking for mama—Jolanan herself to ride herd. The drought years had been at their worst then, wells and water-holes drying, cattle, sheep having to range far in search of water or dying outright, and the river of the goddess herself shrivelled to pools between the stones. They’d thought better years must be coming, when the winter snows finally came heavy again, to nourish the land. But winter had opened into a black spring.
