The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  “If we don’t get back before he takes the Suburb, we’ll have a battlefield to cross,” Ahjvar said. “The Western Wall has fallen.”

  Yew. Hermit’s pepper.

  Myrtle sets free.

  And in the crystal cave beneath the ruins of the ancient temple of Grandmother Tiy, Yeh-Lin reached. She stretched, as if she stood straight at last after years stooped under a ceiling too low. Unfurled, self into burning, screaming, rotting self—

  —and it was not enough.

  There was poison in the scraping, gnawing bite of the legless newts, poison in their slime, their skin, their blood—poison that was of Sien-Shava Jochiz, the venom of his words, of his intent, a song sung and set against her and it flowed deep in her blood now, turning her marrow to ash and rot and—

  She could not hold it. She could not remake herself; flesh and blood and bone, he corroded, he devoured. He tasted her soul, would drink her light, swallow fire—

  Fire was what she might be, and cold light, and she flung wide wings of it, swept the creatures from her, crumbling into ash, hissing as hot ash fell into cold water, clouding it.

  This time, they were not reborn.

  For a while she only breathed, leaning on her sword. Fast, shallow, deliberate: a rhythm, a chant of it, counting. One. Two. One. And out. Control. Shaped what she could. Vision. The grip of her hands. The strength of her limbs, yes. She stood. She saw. She breathed.

  She hurt, damnit, and her mouth was full of blood. She spat. Black blood and bright scarlet and there was a light that was not of her making, a fire, rose-tinged, growing, the crystals encrusting the walls brightening to something like daylight, nearly, or at least a dawn, and light rising on the water, the hollow in the black altar-stone, filled with blood.

  He moved. Wherever Jochiz was, before Marakand’s gate, whatever he faced there, his need turned this way.

  She…dying?

  She had not thought a human body could endure such pain, and her daughter’s had been a birth that neither of them would have survived had not the foremost wizard-surgeons of the empire been at the emperor’s command.

  A part of Jochiz moved here. She…could feel the echo of his presence, like a scent, a whisper. Could hear nothing. The ringing of her own ears. Smell nothing but her own blood.

  His blood.

  It stirred, and the light, too, stirred, slow and sluggish. Waves, heat shimmer, patterns of currents in the depths.

  He will make himself a god,Vartu had said. In the end, when he has gathered enough souls—when they are such a weight and power in the world—he will take them into himself and become a god of this world.

  And now Dotemon had come threatening into this place, this womb pregnant with a fusing of stolen souls, and Jochiz was at the gates of Marakand, where Vartu waited, and she might have lost the soul-hungry sword that the Old Great Gods had forged from a shard of the cold hells to destroy the seven in the world, but Vartu was still, for all Jochiz might tell himself otherwise, something to fear. Even with Lakkariss in his own hand. Something, at least, to require his full attention, and—

  He gathered himself here, a soul divided, an entwined and doubled being spread, reaching, across half the road of the world. He meant to destroy Dotemon, to not leave her even broken, failing, a ruined body that could no longer contain what it bore, dying at last out of this fascinating, wonder-filled, delightful world, at his back, in the heart of his…unborn godhead.

  Everything must end sometime, somewhere.

  She was on her knees. She had not realized she had fallen. Yeh-Lin pushed herself up with her sword. It was a good sword. An emperor’s sword. They said she had not loved him, a young mistress risen to wife and widow, regent and usurper and tyrant by wiles and wizardry.

  A lie. Partly a lie. She had…been fond of her emperor, her ageing husband.

  Strange to think of him now, a man so long dead.

  His sword in her hand.

  She felt a coldness forcing its way into her. Like a hand, reaching for her heart, to crush, to seize and tear.

  Tendrils of rose light spreading over her, wrapping her. It was not the failing body imagined it was cold, imagined new pain of ice. The tendrils pierced her, they grew into her through the wounds of the creatures Jochiz had created in the perversion of some small meek thing of the dark caves.

  He savoured this like wine.

  “You always were a sick bastard,” she remarked to the cavern at large. “Hravnmod should have told Ulfhild to take your head when first you came to his hall, guest-rights be damned.”

  All that she was, Yeh-Lin and Dotemon, will and body made one, flaring into the fires of her soul, spilling out, so she became a thing of light and shadow, stretching wings and tongues of flame, and the sword she had sworn to Nabban sweeping down, as if her enemy knelt bound before her, executioner, which she had never been, for all the heads she had taken.

  One last time. And Nabban strengthen her arm.

  She poured herself out, the blade a channel. The blow resounded, not steel striking stone but the sound of breaking glass, and the black stone did not so much split as shatter, spilling the blood into the water.

  Not only the black altar. A rain of quartz-dust, of grit, came sifting down the walls, falling from above.

  The light that crawled the water like mist flared wildly, breaking apart into a thousand, an uncountable flock of lights, flung like birds, like sparks roaring from a bonfire from wall to wall to wall amid the pattering rain of falling flakes of stone.

  She heard his howl of outrage, his scream. She felt it, reverberating in her bones, going weak and flawed as the quartz that had imprisoned the souls, threatening the same dissolution, and what were Yeh-Lin’s bones but a vessel that had carried Dotemon all these years, to reach so many shores…

  He was fallen, wherever it was he stood. Weak. Mortally weak, Sien-Shava drained of his life’s blood, fed into this place, bleeding after bleeding, a sacrifice of self in the Northron manner but taken to madness—

  Larger fragments of stone, beating on her, the sound of rain. Hail, plunking into the water. No longer the quartz but the stone roof of the cavern, and she was losing her way, her dust to be drowned here, in this pollution of poison, this venom of malice that ate still her steel’s edge and her flesh, but the souls, the stuff of them—there was nothing of selves left in them, what ought to be the slow healing and flowing of the river, of the road, to peace, denied them in an abrupt theft, an ending in pain. But at the least they should not be lost to the world and the life of it, drawn away, flickering, the river—in this place, where once Tiy had been their guardian, their last conductress to the peace of the Old Great Gods, it was still river that felt the right word—to join the great soul, the great life, of which they had been born, from which all came and to which all returned—

  But there was light in the darkness, the blood-black water rising, reaching, the seething, flowing light of Old Great Gods—

  Nothing with any right to call itself God rose here.

  Jochiz was here, in Sien-Shava’s long-drained blood, and he reached, he opened himself wide to what he had bound here—

  She felt the pull. The water, the freeing gate through which she might pass—but it was not the road to the heavens, the river to the underworld, the long and healing west of the soul. It was the fire roaring, drawing in all the air and every dancing mote that rode it; it was the maelstrom, swirling, swallowing, pulling down to drown and no strength to swim free, masts, oars snapped, doomed—

  Yeh-Lin might, Dotemon might, pull herself free. Cling to the anchor of her bones, cling to pain, embrace it as a lover, a mother, a saviour. Cry out wordless, Nabban, hold me fast, root herself in stone and earth.

  But he drank the thing the he had made here, Sien-Shava Jochiz did; he took the souls, the generations immured here, lost even to themselves, he devoured them—

  The world in him. A piece of it, the stuff of the world’s great soul, the stuff of godhead, the earth’s ow
n truth—

  It flooded him. She saw him drown, in what he would drown, and she dared almost to hope, to see the life of the world take him, dissolve him into itself, to swallow in turn what was soul of the heavens and did not in the end belong in this place—

  She was ignored, briefly forgotten. A small thing, in his drowning. Fires wild, raging. A heartbeat stuttering.

  An anchor, dragging loose. Hers. His, as well. His, that faltering heart, that unravelling web. Sien-Shava, abandoned, weak. Dying.

  Jochiz felt it. And was gone, back to the vessel that held him, back to Sien-Shava, filling him, overfilling, bloated, unsated, with all the souls he had swallowed…

  She was left to silence. Darkness. Stillness.

  Not silence. Yeh-Lin could hear her own breathing. It sounded— rather dreadful.

  Her life a long road and it would not end here, she would not let it. A long road. Good, bad…if she might weigh her deeds, good against evil, virtue against sin…There was no atoning but in the life lived, and that—must end.

  Nabban was a free land now.

  Nabban was…

  She wanted to go home.

  Nothing more she could do.

  She did not want to leave herself in this place.

  She hurt. There was little left but hurting, and Dotemon was…fraying. Pulling away, from what could not be endured. From what could no longer hold her.

  She was Yeh-Lin. She was Dotemon. For a little, just a little, hold together. She was the Dreamshaper. She needed, now a dream.

  Mirror. Still with her. And strength, to grope for it. To make a little light, a faint memory of the moon. The silver was mottled, patchy with black corrosion. Her blood stained it when she took it in her hand. Was it her hand, that twisted thing, pitted, red, raw?

  It shook, and the mirror trembled.

  It was fifty miles from the Western Wall to the city walls of Marakand; the gates of the pass had fallen that very day, Ahjvar said, after a little. Maybe he could see things, have visions, even while they scrambled down rocks, into yet another narrow cleft of the sort Ahjvar too often treated as plain and easy roadway. But it seemed they were in no real danger of coming to a battlefield. Abruptly the Suburb was there, west of them, quiet and ordinary, or as ordinary as Ailan had ever known it, and the city walls rising high, the buildings of the city climbing behind them, plastered white, gold, pale pink, bright blue, washing strung on people’s roofs in the sun, just an ordinary afternoon. The gates in their towers still stood open.

  Battle would come to them. He and Ahjvar were hurrying towards it.

  Why? They could go east, go back into Taren lands. Go down to the coast, find a ship, sail far and far away, back to Nabban and the god who did the cooking for his servant, and what would Ailan do there, anyhow?

  He might leave on his own. Run away. He could, now. He thought he might. Might survive, that is, on the streets of Star River Crossing or Two Hills. He wasn’t a body waiting for someone, some night, to batter it senseless, to die and be thrown in the river. He could survive, now. Do something. Be something. Some knife hanging about on the fringes of a gang, some use as a thief, maybe, small and slight as he was and climbing a wall, creeping over a roof, seemed not so difficult a thing to contemplate. Killing…The ones that hung around the north gate, they’d give him some space, some respect, now. They’d let him in, what he’d become. They’d be afraid.

  He liked that idea.

  No, not really. He didn’t like that person he was making in his head. It wasn’t him.

  You didn’t run off and abandon your brother.

  He was going to die, wasn’t he?

  At least he’d die like a good man. The sort of person his mother had used to sing about.

  The city was probably not ordinary. In times of peace, there would be more children running about in the green forest-garden of the Ravine, which coiled halfway around it. They had begun felling the trees there months ago; it was a wasteland of stumps, a wound. In times of peace, there would be caravans come from the west as well as the east, and the markets busy and loud and happy. Not riders on tired ponies coming from the west, bearing, by their faces, no good news. Ahjvar hailed one, showed some token of the ambassador’s house.

  The Western Wall had fallen and the army of the All-Holy was surging on. The All-Holy had destroyed the gates with some great wizardry. The girl—and she was a girl, almost a child—was grey with exhaustion. Maybe they would hold at the Shiprock, she said.

  “Maybe,” Ahjvar said, and in his distraction sent her on with the blessing of his god. “Nabban be with you.”

  “Yeh-Lin’s not at the Shiprock, though,” Ailan said. It wasn’t meant to be held, whatever those not in the secret might think.

  “Wizards are. Come on. Last bit of hiking for the day.” A crooked smile. Ailan had sunk down on his heels. He used Ahjvar’s arm to pull himself up, not thinking. But Ahjvar didn’t pull away, just gave him a pat that was more of a thump on his shoulder. “Good lad.”

  Did he know what Ailan had been thinking? But he hadn’t meant it, even to himself. He was here. He was this person, who was here.

  They continued through a corner of the Suburb. Caravans there. Not just caravans. People. Families, children. Camels, ponies, asses, carts. People on foot, with bundles and baskets. Word came faster than the couriers on their ponies. All it would take was one diviner in a neighbourhood…it wasn’t cowardice, to get your children away, but if those who could fight or help those who did all fled…

  He wondered which he was. How long he would really last in the press of battle with a sword in his hand.

  Through the Riverbend Gate. Ahjvar didn’t linger to talk to the street-guard on watch there, or ask for the captain of the gate to get more official news. He strode on as if he hadn’t been climbing and hiding and walking for days on little or no food, and Ailan had to push himself to keep up. People got out of their way. He remembered how Ahjvar had looked, riding in to Star River Crossing. A caravan mercenary without a caravan, carrying some whiff of the desert with him, barren places and harsh winds, and menace. Like he was a hawk and they were all mice scurrying about beneath him, and maybe he wasn’t hungry just now but later, he might notice them…

  They were looking at Ailan that way too, the people in the streets, plain ordinary Marakanders. Giving way, as if he were something dangerous.

  He liked it, and then he didn’t think he did. Gave a pretty girl with her hand through an old man’s arm, tugging him away, a reassuring smile. He hoped it was reassuring. She didn’t smile back at him.

  He thought he could probably eat any number of mice right now.

  He walked into Ahjvar again, or would have, except that an arm was there to catch him.

  “Sit,” Ahjvar said, and pushed him down on a bench outside a teahouse. He went away, not into the shop. Ah. They were by the little Riverbend market. Had Ahjvar spotted someone, some agent of the ambassador’s…but he was coming back, and he had—the man was a god—a stack of flaky pastries wrapped in grape-leaves. He dropped them on Ailan’s lap, lifting off the top one himself.

  “Eat,” he said tersely, and went into the teahouse. He was back before Ailan had wolfed down more than two of the pastries—egg and dried mushroom, salt sheep’s cheese, spiced olives and spring greens—as if there wasn’t a war on at all, as if they might never be huddled starving behind their walls, but of course they had all the Taren Confederacy behind them, if only the clan-mothers and -fathers resisted being bought by Jochiz…why did he have to think of such things?

  Because Ahjvar did. Because he wanted to be the kind of person who thought about things and understood them himself. Someday.

  Ahjvar sat beside him, sword propped against his thigh, long legs outstretched. Handed him not the dainty cup favoured by the houses that served Nabbani-style teas, delicate and perfumed, but a hearty mug that smelt of smoke and cardamom and cream. Caravan tea, or a city version of it. Ahjvar took a long drink from his own mug, and
another pastry.

  They split the last, returned the mugs. The briefest of rests. Ahjvar led on as if it had been hours, with a good sleep thrown in too. Ailan was feeling more and more that the day was a dream that would never end, but at least he wasn’t sick with hunger, or staggering, or wanting to whimper like a baby.

  He had thought they must be going to the ambassador’s house in the Silvergate Ward, but Ahjvar led the way into Palace Ward instead, so it was to Gurhan’s hill they were going, which meant climbing all those broad stairs up the hill beyond the palace plaza to the library and senate palace, and up the paths in the forest beyond.

  His knees might possibly turn to some sort of floppy leather hinge, like a puppet with someone who didn’t know what they were doing managing the strings.

  Now that he was fed, he just wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep for a week.

  The plaza was a great open square, a place of public gathering and political debate and festivals, paved in slabs of white marble. Mosaics of stone and glittering glass told stories in panels all along the walls that surrounded it: the two goddesses and the god of the city, the deaths of the goddesses, the heroes who had led in the war against the devil who had once ruled the city and sacrificed its wizards to a lie, ordinary folk of all walks of life, heroes just as much as the men and women every child could name…a great black dog with green eyes that glowed, catching sun.

  All the wood of the clear-cut ravine was stacked there now, firewood and timbers for the siege they knew must come.

  To the south, broad, shallow steps rose to the complex of buildings that was the great library, and the senate palace by it. All white columns and domes gilded or copper-green, broad arcades and galleries. But tracks led beyond, plain forest tracks, winding softly into the green dim holiness of the god’s hill. Ahjvar was walking faster; Ailan had to make little jogging dashes to keep up. It was not nearly so crowded as any of the markets they had walked through, but still people hurried by, heading to or from the library or the palace, or they sauntered in chattering gaggles. A puppet-theatre had been set up by one of the woodpiles, drawing the more leisured. Ahjvar didn’t bother going around even that. Strode his shortest way, like an arrow shot from the gateway where they’d entered across to the great steps. Worse rudeness than his usual assumption of space. A woman weaving wreaths from baskets of spring flowers had to snatch at her goods and scuttle back on her knees. Ahjvar went as if blind.