The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  She was fed up with them, dearly as she loved them all—most of them—some of them—seeing not her, but the baby, and not the real baby, her baby and Rose’s, but some idea, some—hope.

  Which was all of theirs, yes, but—it was also Rose, Little Rose. Who kicked her in the bladder just then.

  Attalissa’s mouth twitched at her grunt, the hand to her belly.

  “If you can’t keep me safe—what use hiding back at Lissavakail?”

  “A head start, running for the Narvabarkash?”

  “And where then? I’ll be waddling, not running, before too many more weeks pass.”

  She wore armour, a shirt of scales made for some rather stouter man.

  “Hold till my word,” the grey-haired Spear-Lady, commander of the sisters, said quietly, and the word was passed from one six-woman dormitory, as they called their patrols, to the next.

  In the watchtower on the north side of the lake where the road plunged under the ice they did not hold, but they were not asked to. They shot, picking off officers where they could. Arrows, lead bullets of the slings. A mere handful. The commander of the Serakallashi garrison did not command from the van, but midway back in the column, easy to spot. Only he and a score of knights were mounted. Before they came within range of the tower there were Westron soldiers smashing its one door, pouring up the ladders within, no doubt, pushed from behind, those in the lead reluctant, wary, if they had any sense.

  The half-dozen sisters who had shot from the roof were meanwhile descending by ropes down the further side, scrambling away into the cliffs, leaving the tower deserted.

  Cowards. Iarka took a grim pleasure imagining the Westrons’ first thoughts. Cowards, and then, perhaps, a growing apprehension. Though these were all of the Army of the South, they would have heard the tale of the destruction of the Upper Castle. Yes, there they came, in haste, not lingering to hold the empty tower. One running back down the road to report to the commander, but the vanguard was already on the ice.

  The tower failed to collapse or offer any other threat. No ambush broke from the mountainsides. A pair of rash Westrons tried to follow up the cliffs.

  They fell, dark figures dropping like a lammergeier launching from its nest, limbs spread, failing to unfurl into winds and rise. Perhaps a thrown stone or two had helped.

  The edges of the lake thawed where they were sun-gnawed, fringed with dark shallows, but the ice beyond was still thick and clear, where wind had swept the snow away, pale where it lay packed into a rough crust. Balba had left it almost too late. They had begun to fear he would await a later season and attempt the destruction of the dam, though he had few wizards and fewer engineers, by what the Serakallashi reported. The former had been quietly hunted by Iarka’s kin and the latter taken on to Marakand by Prince Dimas. Though Attalissa’s folk could likely have defended that narrow, precipitous place better than this broad expanse of ice. To merely hold a line was not their intent.

  Nerves wound tighter and tighter, as if someone turned the crank of a windlass. All up and down this steep side. Would the ice hold? Balba was known a fool, but not all his under-officers were so. The van had spread out, and men walked cautiously. Not mountain folk, not winter folk. Iarka saw not one having the sense to carry his spear crossways so as to catch himself should the ice give way beneath him. But once they passed the halfway point without disaster they signalled back, a waving banner, and the rest came on in closer order. Good, that was good.

  “Not yet,” Spear-Lady murmured to some young woman who let out her breath, drawing her bow.

  The goddess at Iarka’s side watched with the intensity of a cat at a mousehole. Snow-leopard, maybe, eyes fixed on the shepherd’s flock in the valley below. Grim. No smile, no pleasure in what she anticipated. Well, no. And no god should take pleasure in death, even that of enemies. Iarka rubbed her hand over her belly. Cold bronze plates. No comfort.

  You hear, Little Rose?

  Closer. And closer. Too close, surely. Balba himself was well out, halfway over.

  A crack that echoed between the mountainsides. Even Attalissa looked startled. Horses shied. They rode too close, too great a weight. They were fools. They hesitated, which was further folly, before they spread themselves. Nothing happened and Balba stood in the stirrups, waving them on.

  The rearmost company was starting onto the lake, but the van was almost to where water lapped over the ice again.

  “Now,” Spear-Lady cried, roared to the echoing heights, and Iarka with the rest drew aiming and loosed, and laid the second arrow she held and loosed again, and with each she made thought a curse, a second strike. Die, in Kinsai’s name.

  Some few of the vanguard made it to the shore, but none up the cliffs. Caught without shelter, they shot blind at movement guessed at behind the parapet, threw spears meant for thrusting.

  Attalissa bowed her head. She wavered, no longer a woman, breathing, sweating, scuffed and wind-tousled. A shadow, a reflection as if seen on lake water, a girl, a woman, layered faces, young, white-haired, indigo-gowned, bronze-armoured, wearing a striped caravaneer’s coat, hair cropped short, veiled in blue, in a net fringed with golden coins, long hair in a caravaneer’s braids…A thing that was not woman at all, not a shape but snow and wind, green valleys and dark deep water…

  The ice shivered, and—did not crack. Spring took the lake. A fog rose, billowing, and the ice went opaque and rotten in a breath, the work of days of warming air.

  The cries were terrible. They did not last long.

  Two of the horses made it to the shore.

  Some of the men, too, of the rear company. They milled in confusion on the far shore, until arrows and sling-shot began to hammer on them from above. Rather more than the single dormitory that had held the tower was there. The Westrons began a fighting retreat, but there were sisters with spears and swords on the road behind them. Iarka did not see the end of it, as they made a rush for the north, but none came again to Serakallash.

  The near shore was cleared before long, spearwomen descending. The soldiers of the All-Holy did not accept any offer to take their surrender.

  Iarka waited it out at the goddess’s side. That much sense, at least. Felt herself remote, floating distant, above the death. Felt the deaths as she never had, saw them. Saw the lives, burning bright, flicker out in pain and confusion and, among the Westrons, growing terror. As they were snatched away.

  This is what we fight. This, even more than invasion, than conquest, than slavery and death of the body. This theft of the soul.

  Iarka wasn’t sure it was her thought. She wasn’t sure it was Attalissa’s, who stood at her side again, a human woman to all seeming, but for the light that burned through her, the sense that she was water and stone and shimmering reflection of the high peaks.

  “We must open the sluices with care, once we hear from Serakallash and know that it’s safe to clear our road again,” Attalissa said. “We don’t want to send all this down in a flood.”

  Iarka nodded. She would have liked to feel some joy in this. Satisfaction, even. She had thought she might.

  A victory, but not her own.

  Serakallash, Lissavakail—so they pushed the weight of the All-Holy aside a little. Broke his supply line of the road. That did not free the Western Grass, and did not free the shores of the Kinsai’av.

  Lightning strikes, and strikes again, and again, and in the end the forest blazes. The voice was one she had heard in her dreams through the winter. A voice, sometimes near, sometimes remote. A woman’s voice, speaking as if to itself, conversational.

  Go back to your river, child of Kinsai, mother of Kinsai. That wounded land will be a long time healing. It will need all the care you can give it.

  And what of Jochiz, who had devoured its gods? This was no victory. This was only a small yapping at the heels of a great beast, which would turn and strike them down, hurl them broken aside, once it had dealt with the larger prey before it. And when he had Marakand under his heel, and had
swallowed Gurhan, would he turn back, for the gods of the deserts and mountains, or roll onwards, growing and growing, and draw all the world in to him?

  She dreamed it so, sometimes.

  In her vision, there was a shape against stars, though the sky had been blue afternoon. A sword, and it was—absence of light. Frost edged it.

  Iarka blinked it away. The Blackdog was lost to Jochiz and so was the Northron devil’s sword, and she did not know who spoke in her dreams.

  Crisis passed, the baby resumed pummelling her in the vitals.

  She most urgently needed to find a discreet corner to squat in, before the brat burst her bladder.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  …a few days past the full moon following the spring equinox; Serakallash is rising, the Western Wall of Marakand is besieged, and Yeh-Lin, riding the winds, descends on the Western Grass

  From the Chronicle of Nikeh gen’Emras

  The Upper Castle of the folk of the goddess of Kinsai was destroyed by its own defenders, and it seems likely that many of the All-Holy’s high officers who had overseen the conquest of the Western Grass died there, though the All-Holy himself and those closest to him survived its collapse. When Jochiz led the greater part of the Army of the North on to the Great Grass, the occupation force that remained worked, it was said, night and day, to bridge the Kinsai, quarrying the hills of the eastern shore. Many West-grasslander conscripts died in that labour, and many eager Westron believers as well. The Lower Castle below the Fifth Cataract, occupied by a smaller garrison, for the lands west of it over the Kinsai were marshy in winter and less useful a road to the east, was gutted by fire some time after the ferry-folk abandoned it. Whether that fire had been mischance, or the work of some spell laid before the evacuation, or even the hand of a daring and desperate West-grasslander, I have not heard. No attempt to bridge the river was made there in the south. The governor of the land, the prince of Rigo, ordered instead a wooden watchtower to be built on the western shore of the river below the Fifth Cataract, and made his own headquarters at the fortified bridge to the north of the First.

  It was a winter of hard frosts and deep snows on the Western Grass, such as had never been known in living memory. Many folk and many herds knew hunger, and occupier and occupied alike suffered and died of lung-fever, not only children and the old, but adults in the strength of life.

  Yet still the governor plundered the stores of the land, and conveyed even much of the seed-grain east in the army’s wake, to supply the intended siege of Markand.

  The Kinsai’av was below her, and the Western Grass stretched out beyond, a sea of rolling, grassy swells. The dead king would be sarcastic, should she take up assassination. Better to leave such matters to the professionals, yet it was a long way from Marakand to the west, if you could not ride the winds. And she thought the city had greater need of him.

  Nabban had always wanted to reach the western ocean, though. Following the sun, he had said of himself. He would have liked this land, too, she thought. A place of sky and grass and small stony waters. He might have been glad, had Yeh-Lin brought Ahjvar with her.

  To see through his eyes.

  It did not seem right, to use the dead king as his god used him. She, Dotemon, would never think it right, no matter how much she, Yeh-Lin, found herself…envying that love, that gave and held and trusted and did not betray. A wistful sort of envying. But perhaps conviction of wrong-ness was born of her nature, something deep, too deep ever to change. A knowing that a soul of the earth should not be bound so; it should die out of its humanity, and yet carry that, too, and flow onwards…

  Which was what brought her west, yes, but this small matter first. And if it turned the attention of Jochiz from Marakand a little, and yet from his heartland as well, all the better.

  The river swirled over the ruined foundations of the Upper Castle. A strangely desperate act, the self-sacrifice of its last defenders, who might have fled with their kin days, even weeks earlier. They had delayed Jochiz’s plans not one whit. She had never thought the ferry-folk fools. She did not believe she should think so now. The great destruction, the great sacrifice—there had been purpose, there, beyond a gesture of futile defiance worthy of a fool Northron. She hoped some day she might learn what it had been.

  The new six-arched bridge over the Kinsai’av was a fort in itself, the roadbed passing through a fortified tower at either end, with another pierced tower over a pier in the deepest part of the channel. The artery between west and east, pumping the heart’s-blood of his own land away and draining the Western Grass to keep his armies fed and clothed and otherwise supplied. Built in stone quarried from the eastern hills—not a good or lasting stone, she did note. Not something she would have had her masons and engineers use for anything but rubble fill, if that. Interesting, for what such work said about Jochiz and his intentions. He did not, as the builders of the castles had, plan for the centuries.

  He never had taken pride in the elegance and good of a thing for its own sake.

  The western tower was well within a larger curtain-wall. Stonework in places, earth and palisades in others, all rough and hasty, already frost-heaved and crumbling, with another gate-tower and lesser ones as well, anchored on the river.

  Given command over an offensive strike against the Westrons here, she would find some of those Northrons who brought their river-ships to the Bakanav by the portage from the Varr’aa, and have them sail down from At-Landi to attack from the river while her engines struck at the gates of east and west…but she would not have let Sien-Shava Jochiz down out of the Karas in the first place, she would not have let her people remain a folk of little scattered clans who could not rise and act as one, she would…

  Well, yes.

  Jochiz had slain gods, in this land. He did not play by the rules of humanity any longer.

  It was not General Nang Yeh-Lin who looked over the bridge from on high, dropping lower, the winds that wrapped and carried her a roar in her ears, a raging torrent of air.

  Dotemon came down on the roof of the central tower, arms spread, sword already in hand, trailing scarves of cloud. The river below rose in a confused fury of whitecaps and settled again. No one to greet her. No watch kept here, but from the western tower there was a cry. She gave the sentries there a cheerful wave.

  The setting sun hung low over the horizon. If she were the lord of this keep…Humming to herself, Yeh-Lin started down the stairs, and not with the grave, grim caution the dead king would no doubt advise. Not quite skipping. She had always favoured the swift strike.

  Her mirror had told her that her quarry favoured this tower. Further from the noise, the dust, the soldiery of the garrison. A most beautifully appointed hall, where he and his lady held court as princes. And surely this was the hour to dine…

  A glance out an arrowslot to the west warned of soldiers running, five of them on the bridge, halfway to the tower. She thrust open the nearest door. A plainly dressed woman within the antechamber was folding linens, and the bedchamber beyond empty.

  “Were I you, I should head for the shore,” Yeh-Lin told her, speaking Tiypurian. She continued on her way. Shouts below. She leapt the last few steps to the next landing, kicked back a wide door. Ah, the dining chamber, as she had seen. A white-draped table, polished bronze mutton-fat lamps in the Westgrasslander style, plentiful meats…a woman in a priest’s gown stood at a lectern, reading aloud from some heavy tome. The wisdom or the prophecies of the All-Holy, no doubt. She looked up, mouth open on a word half-formed. Footsteps pounding the stairs. Yeh-Lin shoved the door to behind her and set a word on the latch, which would hold it as well as the bar it did not have. Guards to either side— she swung left, then whirled to the right, three strides into the room as they fell behind her and she leapt to the table, danced down it avoiding every dish and lamp—let us not put our feet in the butter—sweeping, slashing, left and right, faster than mortal woman might move. A seer of the sixth circle leapt away, overturning his chair—all the h
igh officers of the fort were here, it seemed, a piece of good fortune for which she would not thank the Old Great Gods nor yet Nabban, whose disapproval of this dance she suspected—she wrapped the wizard-priest’s rising words in her hand, a twist and they were taken from him. He gabbled silent, pop-eyed, and fell clutching his heart, which was not actually her doing but his own terror. The reader flung her book and seized up the heavy lectern, whirling it. Quick-witted, at least. Yeh-Lin dropped her with a word that turned to a dart of fire and left a black scorched hole in the breast of her gown.

  Smashing wood. Axe to the door.

  The governor of the Western Grass was said to be styled the prince of Rigo, one of the lesser towns on the Tiy, several generations old in the worship of the All-Holy. A fortunate man in that he had clearly not been foremost among those who had seized the Upper Castle. On his feet and a knife in his hand, his wife thrust behind him, but likewise ready with her knife, teeth bared and panting with her fear. Not, today, so fortunate, either of them.

  She swept the head from his neck as the crossbow’s string slapped behind her, burnt the unseen bolt in the air with a word spat out that human tongue could not have uttered, felt the air edged in cold. The lady of the fort lunged over her husband’s body, fallen half on the table, flooding it dark, and Yeh-Lin split her skull. The soldiers who had forced the door were running as she turned, fleeing swifter than they had come, and a puddle of melting fat was burning, blue-edged, where a lamp had been overturned.

  Yeh-Lin snatched up the prince of Rigo’s head by its short forelock and walked back the way she had come, letting her trophy drain. One or two still lived. She left them. They did not matter.

  They mattered. Nabban would surely say they mattered. Even these.

  She had forgotten how messy a thing the head would be. Leapt down to tug off the cope from the man whose heart had failed, to bundle it in.

  Ahjvar would no doubt criticize the lack of elegance.