The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  No souls. There were no souls left in the room, save the two still living, cowering into a corner, clutching one another. Serving folk.

  She paused. Looked back. “The bridge is doomed,” she said. “Your god is a lying devil and the Old Great Gods have cursed him. Run, now.” And she nudged them, found the shape of fear. No need to kindle what already burned high; she only set the drive in them: flee, flee this place.

  They squeaked. They fled.

  She could not, reaching further, tell servant from soldier. But every soldier who died was one less to stand against the Westgrasslanders, yes?

  She retraced her steps to the tower roof. The sun was lurid in the west, touching the horizon now, staining the sky, smeared cloud.

  She had not enjoyed that as she had thought to. Justified, surely. But—helpless as a basket of kittens, and their souls torn away from the road that would have taken them.

  What would you have me do? Fight them one by one, and pretend to humanity so that they might have the illusion of a chance of survival? They are justly condemned. They stood by while he sacrificed children to shape the deaths of gods. If I brought them in chains to Nabban, they would kneel for the executioner’s axe and you would bow your head and say, yes.

  Nothing answered. Nothing argued.

  Would she have had Nikeh see that?

  Enough. She stamped a foot on the tower’s roof, then sprang up to the crenellated parapet.

  “This is the untamed Kinsai’av,” she said. “And what the Warden Kinsai’s son decreed for his castle, I for this bridge, which constrains what should not be constrained, and binds what should not be bound, and exists only to feed death. Let it fall.” Whispered the last, not wizardry but devil’s will. She felt the force of the world in the words, the inevitability.

  Fed her own life into it, just a little, rather than let it sear the world, even in small things. Enough. Because…because…What would you have me do? A small weakening. It hardly mattered.

  She turned into the dance, cutting the air with her sword, binding it in ribbons and hair, knotting the swift-flowing winds to serve, and leapt up and away.

  A stone slipped away beneath her foot. Another followed. Splash. And splash.

  And a roar, and the water churning white.

  The camp of the Westgrasslander warlord was on a hill within a meander of the Bakanav, defended on the north by a ditch and bank. Sod-built halls alternated with corrals in curving ranks. Scattered north, east, west were similar camps, or perhaps the seeds of villages, settlements of those who had fled over the rivers, with what herds and flocks they had managed to drive with them, cattle, horses, camels, sheep. It was marshy land, not choice pasturage, outright swamp in places, and the camps were all on small hillocks above the spring flooding. Lands the guild-masters of At-Landi and the elders of the villages around and about it had agreed to spare them. Yeh-Lin doubted whether the Westgrasslanders knew themselves if they intended to stay.

  She let herself down softly. The wind gusted wild, dogs barked, but the sentries on the rough wooden tower only snatched at their scarves, looking outward. Fog coiled off the river and the standing water in the fields. She combed fingers through hair, shook her coat of armour straight, and took up the stained bundle she had set at her feet again.

  “Gods bless the hall,” she sang out in the language of the western road. Her Westgrasslander was rather out of practice, to put it mildly. “A messenger from Marakand.”

  The door—a cowhide curtain—was already being pulled aside as she approached. Firelight within silhouetted those who barred the way, squinting uncertainly into the night. Armed, both of them.

  She held up her free hand, cupping pale light.

  “How—?” the man of the pair demanded, looking beyond her for escort.

  “Arpath!” the woman called back into the hall. “A wizard—get over here!” And to Yeh-Lin, “We’ll have your name and business, mistress.”

  That was fair enough. Yeh-Lin bowed. “Yeh-Lin Dotemon. Servant of Nabban—the god and his land. I’ve come to bring your warlord a gift.”

  The man’s eyes now were on the once-white cloth, his sabre in his hand. “What sort of a gift?”

  The woman was repeating, “Dotemon?” under her breath.

  More figures coming to the door, and there were people behind her now, drawn by the voices. She did not look around.

  “The prince of Rigo,” she said to the man. She smiled over his shoulder. That, she thought, was Reyka herself. A tall, grey-haired woman, with a lean man very like in face at her shoulder. “At least, such as is left of him. A mere token. The greater part of the gift is down the Kinsai’av. Or perhaps I ought better to say, under it. Jochiz’s bridge is broken and the commanders of the fortress have gone down with it. Though I did not stay to break down the gates of the fort. Perhaps, looking back, I should have done so. Still, if you can find boats and water-folk of some sort in At-Landi, you may come at them from both sides while they remain in some…disarray. Headless, in fact.”

  “Arpath?” Reyka asked, of the young man at her other side. Wizard. A handsome-enough lad, but Yeh-Lin had never found the way some folk tattooed themselves for their gods particularly decorative, herself.

  She had felt the wizard’s tasting of her words. Smiled at him, let him see her, fully, just a moment. He took a step back.

  “Devil,” he said. Licked his lips. “She’s—who she says, chief, but—”

  “An honest devil,” Yeh-Lin said. Her eyes found another man, not a tattooed Westgrasslander. He looked Nabbani, and not Taren. He bowed, when he saw her eyes on him, and his fingers flicked a sign. Ah. Awe in his eyes, when he straightened up, but no distrust. Near worship, which should be reserved for his god.

  “Yeh-Lin Dotemon is said to serve my god,” he told the warlord. “She’s been long away from the land, but I’ve never heard she was unfaithful.”

  “I serve him now,” Yeh-Lin said, and added, in Imperial, “Wind in the Reeds? You’d be one of the agents sent to observe the Western Grass a year ago? Your reports to the ambassador have been very sparse of late. I believe he thinks you lost to the Westron advance.”

  “Hani Kahren.” A wary look flicked to an untattooed caravaneer who stood by him. Possibly she spoke some Imperial, or enough Marakander or Taren Nabbani to catch more than a shadow-servant of the empress’s might wish. The woman did frown, as if puzzling over her understanding. “There weren’t many travelling east over the winter, my lady. Or at all, with the Westron army between us and Marakand. And the autumn was—hectic.”

  “Indeed it was. I am heading west myself, or I would offer to take a letter. What of your partner?”

  “She left with a caravan before the Westrons reached the Sayan-barkash. I stayed because—they’re valiant riders and fighters, these tribesmen, but they needed a few who know real cavalry.” A hesitation. “Did Hani Jin never come to Marakand?”

  “No.”

  A brief silence. Then, only, “She was my cousin,” he said.

  No apology for freely interpreting his orders, though he was naturally apprehensive. And that was a very great difference between the horse-boy’s empire and hers.

  She found it rather refreshing, really.

  “I don’t question your choices. It’s not me you answer to. Nor, ultimately, the ambassador. If you can aid this folk in heaving Sien-Shava Jochiz off their backs, you’ll be serving the empress and our god and I think the gods of all this world more than risking your life to tell the ambassador what all Marakand already knows. It’s not as though we didn’t watch him coming. The city was besieged when I left. And I’m sorry for your cousin.”

  He bowed again, shook his head at the other caravaneer, who had begun to shape some question.

  “Will someone,” Yeh-Lin asked, switching languages once more, “please take this wretched head? I brought it lest you doubt my word.”

  The door-ward, if that was the nearest man’s role, took the cloth from her, gingerly. S
he wiped her fingers on her thigh.

  “So,” she said. “I demand nothing, only suggest, Warlord Reyka. Were I you, I would not wait for a new commander to find his feet and decide that the Western Grass is a kingdom for the taking in his false god’s absence, nor yet for a cabal of priests to do the same. I would muster what aid I could from At-Landi, send word to those allies you may have among the folk of the Great Grass, and ride to liberate your folk, camp by camp, tower by tower. Your strength is no greater than it was yesterday, and theirs, for all they have lost their governor and some of his officers, little less, but make the fall of the bridge a sign. Let the wizards and the bards speak of it so—they are still out there among your folk, the brave and the reckless, are they not? Even within the walls of the Westron camps? Say, a wind of hope blows from the east. Say, Sien-Shava Jochiz has ridden to his doom at Marakand. Say, the god Nabban sends west the devil who serves him, to strike at the heart of the All-Holy’s power, and all the lands and their gods shall be free.” Half she chanted it, shaped a poet’s prophecy. It was not, but let it give them hope. She would not linger to do much more. To draw the attention of Jochiz to herself, rather than to what she hoped might be the beginning fractures of his too-attenuated lines—he could not live off the Great Grass, nor yet the Stone Desert—was not what she intended.

  “Too many of our gods and goddesses are dead,” the lean man by Reyka said.

  “Yes,” she answered, and heard herself say, “And yet, a god may come again.” Blinked, distracted.

  Not intending prophecy, no. But the mirror—

  —was clouded, when she considered it, shaping in mind the shadow of what she carried, close within her clothing. And she would have it clear, there was only…

  Grass blowing in waves, and the wind, and the grass was the river, and the waves ran endless and dark.

  “The Old Great Gods be with you,” she said, for what confidence that might give in her good faith, if the severed head and Hani Kahren’s word were not enough. She bowed, and turned to find a crowd behind, men, women, boys and girls surely too young to be riding to battle, but their faces said they were not any longer those boys and girls they first seemed.

  Gods lost, a land lost…She turned back. “And if no one has yet told you, there is a great and foul devil’s magic in the initiation tattoos of the cult, worked in the ink itself as well as the pattern. It steals the soul of any so marked. They will never come to the Old Great Gods, never travel the road to their far heavens. Obliterate it. Blot it out, remake the pattern, scar it if you must. Deny him your own folk, and any of his you take living as well. And now—give me room. I call the winds.”

  CHAPTER XXX

  …the last quarter of the waning moon, and the Western Wall is falling

  A shape has been set. It has lain quiet, but not quiescent. Growing. Threading a way. Not a binding. An unloosing. A becoming…a map, Ahjvar would say, unrolling. A delicate thing, liable to destruction if discovered.

  This is a pattern woven from a dance, the shaping of a sword’s edge, the binding of the sacred twigs of wizardry. No matter that the dance was never danced, the sword never drawn, the twigs only small grasses, knotted, blessed with the shaping of Ahjvar’s lean, strong fingers, swallowed, taken in, carrying what they wove. Growing. Thread by thread, weaving a way. Subtle. It must be subtle, slow, to unfold beneath the devil’s gaze.

  To lay a trail, to map a way—grass. Let the way be made in grass. It is magic, human magic, and that is how human magic works.

  Ghu thinks so, anyway. He has never really understood. But there are many things he has never really understood.

  A god might not move beyond his land, but a god, they have proven, may be carried. A little. In a dream. A touch, and now…he, they, Ahjvar who holds to him, is held by him in the bonds of an ancient curse turned to promise, have hold too of this pattern they have made, this promise, this path…and the walls that surround and blind and the chains that bind and the weight that crushes…are grown thin. Are stretched, too far, nearly too far, forcing through walls and wards, combed away, peeled back—image tumbles image, a poet’s drunkenness.

  They matter, even as a poet’s elusive truth. They are all truth, and nothing but words for what has no shape of words.

  In a dream, he might reach. Then. Now. Though Ahjvar isn’t here, where the Blackdog hunts. Not now. Not yet. But the shape is set, and already he walks it (they walk it?) this lost soul—these lost souls.

  Only let him (let them?) see, let the way he has made, they have made, he and Ahj between them, be understood. Let it draw the lost one home.

  God might strain to reach to god—to reach to drowning man, fingers stretched, a reach too far, unbridgeable.

  But he has a bridge beyond his borders. Heart within heart. The shape, the dance, the writing of the sword’s edge…most tenuous bridge, finger-touch. Warmth. Not fire. Sun’s warmth. Home warmth. Hearth warmth, embracing.

  Let this be its time, the grass, the calling sky, the shape of a way.

  Yes, now, with binding chains far-stretched, with that grim hold pared away by what the devil Vartu shapes as shield, god may reach to god, through god to man, to devil. May touch that threefold knot of souls and call.

  In hope. Hawthorn. Cornel. Elder.

  His brother’s enemy. Long hatred, which Sarzahn did not feel. He never had—this enmity was his brother’s affair and he did not understand, nor need to understand, its roots—but he had lost the warmth, the close embrace of his brother, as he crossed down out of the mountains, over the road. As if he moved into some thick and heavy place. With the waking noise of the Suburb about him, a stray dog, slinking in the last of the night’s shadows, he had felt his brother’s touch grow yet lighter, yet more remote. As if the seeping grey of morning might burn it off like mist on the spring grass.

  It was bad that it should be fading, his awareness of his brother’s touch. It was a shield, a shelter. His brother’s arm about him, always. There was wizardry worked in Marakand, great wizardry, and woven through it ran other powers. A devil. A god.

  It was a thicket of thorns, to bar the way to his brother, and he might yet slip through but they pricked and tore and shredded him, shredded the safety of his brother’s embracing arm,

  Rope, fraying. Chains, rusting. Wire, stretched and overstretched…

  Some…thing…stirring, stretching. Dangerous.

  Crossing the city walls—that had been pain. Like being born, he had thought, and wondered at it, because women surely bore the pain of birth, but did not babies howl? Scored, clawed, struggling, where once he had swarmed up walls and leapt down them. But he had made it through, as his brother wished, and once within the city walls he had breathed again, and rested, and snapped at flies and at something like flies, buzzing, nagging, whispering within him, which irritated ears that did not hear it.

  His brother would soothe such voices away, but his brother was out of reach, or he was, strange to think so. A faint and distant presence. Alarming. Almost panic. Almost he had turned, to run back to him, to be sure he was not dead, lost to this world, his brother, his—

  …my god and my brother, you are a part of me…

  It was for him to lead the way. It always had been.

  He would do what he had come to do, and return. He would be in his brother’s sight again, safe under his hand, and all would be well.

  No.

  The woman was limp in his grip and the demon bear motionless, teeth bared, crouched to spring, which he would not. Sarzahn had only to bite—

  And would she die? He thought not. Not so easily. His brother—had been waiting. His brother had thought he might follow, this time, where Sarzahn led, through what rents he made in devil’s working, the unseen shielding thorns that walled this city. Jochiz had meant to join him in this death—

  To ride you, possessing—

  —to savour this taste of blood in the mouth. Together they could have unmade the weaving of her souls, devoured—
r />   No.

  Been devoured? He, too?

  Where did that thought come from? It felt like his own.

  He was lost. He reached, frantic, heart racing, a lost child though frozen statue-still, and found it, faint, but true, his brother’s touch.

  Sarzahn seized him, held fast to Jochiz. His safety. His rock to cling to, storm-battered shelter. He gathered himself to call, he would summon his brother, as he had when he had fought the dead man and been so inexplicably weak and failing, as if poisoned, as if his own bone and blood and nerve denied him—as if—

  No. Turn away. Hear me.

  Hear—

  Not the devil. She did not move, did not speak, quiet and still as a puppy carried in its mother’s mouth. As if that might lull him, turn him from his intent.

  Hear—

  Sarzahn, he heard, so distant, so weakened, it might have been memory, but it was his brother’s voice, his touch, reaching for him. My brother.

  And he snarled, with no words in it, but the word in his mind was, Lie. Jochiz, that is a lie.

  His own paw, clawed on the earth, splayed wide, black-haired, black nails worn short from his running, from mountain stone, from—paw, hand, snake’s head tattooed, it twined with the cheetah up his arm, needle’s prick remembered, long, long work, building, building, smarting, aching, to something worse, to be endured…the ritual, the passage made, to be an adult and not a child, to be marked, declared for his god—Illusion. Dog’s paw.

  His god. Sayan. His name was Sayan.

  Do you hear, at last?

  The air smelt of frost.

  There was nothing to hear, but the devil Vartu…listened. As if she heard a song he could not. Her blood was in his mouth.

  There was…not a song. A taste of bitterness, and he choked, he felt it, flooding through him, what he had swallowed, it burned in lines, in hooks and thorns such as fenced the city; it wrote in him; it raced deep; it seared—

  Not him, but what was in him. Hooks and thorns? Chains.

  It burnt them all away.