The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  “Sorry,” Ailan gasped, and gave her a little bobbing bow, scurrying after him, skipping over a scatter of cherry twigs white with bloom. “Gods bless, mistress, sorry.” Another dash to catch up. “Ahjvar!”

  He didn’t look around. The skin-crawling menace of him was strong, now. Ailan had thought he had just gotten used to it, the threat that Ahjvar carried in his tension, his watchfulness that never relaxed, but this was something more.

  He’d been in the presence of a god. He’d spoken with Gurhan, shared tea—brewed by the bear-demon—with him. This was—like that and not, it was the opposite, it was not calm and quiet and the feeling that the world was right, deeply and beautifully, it was some jarring wrongness in the world, it was—

  —every play told it so. Black and gold mask, black for a ghost, the dusting of gold for his holiness, the touch of the god on him. The Rihswera of Nabban was a dead man, a soul captured from the road and bound to a body that should long ago have gone to dust and—he had been some evil thing, before. That wasn’t in the plays, usually, except the hint of it. The god had taken him away from some evil, saved him—bound him, because love and wanting alone could not keep a dead soul from the road to the Old Great Gods—

  And then Ahjvar stopped, and fell to his knees. Head down, hands braced against the pavement. Muttering under his breath.

  “Ahjvar?”

  People looked around. Nobody came over to see what was amiss, which was the sort of thing Marakanders would do, he was certain. They were mostly a well-meaning and generous folk. But they were afraid, and they didn’t understand why, he saw that in their faces. They wanted space between themselves and whatever it was they felt that they did not understand.

  He wanted space himself. He wanted to back away, out of reach, out of sword’s reach, wanted not to suddenly feel it was a corpse that he had— wanted, yes, desperately, those first few weeks. When he hadn’t understood he could even have other ways of needing a person and being needed.

  “Ahjvar…” Ailan put a hand, carefully, on Ahjvar’s shoulder. It was shaking as badly as what he himself had tried to hide in the Heron. His hand. Ahjvar’s shoulder. Both of them shivering, as if they had come into a pocket of dank winter. Ahjvar didn’t lash around, seize his wrist, which he more than half expected. Didn’t move. But then he reached up and put his hand over Ailan’s. Warm. Hot, even. Not a corpse-hand.

  “Stay with me, Ailan,” he said. “Watch my back.”

  Against what was he watching? He wasn’t going to get an answer if he asked. Ahjvar was sitting up now, hands resting on his knees, head bowed, eyes closed as if he had just fallen asleep, or as if he prayed, maybe, in the quiet of his mind.

  But maybe it wasn’t a very quiet mind. Ahjvar breathed as if he were running.

  And he didn’t have his armour. He hadn’t worn it, going into the mountains. If something came, he had only a leather jerkin with a few steel plates to reinforce it, and no helmet and no shield either, and Ailan even less.

  Ailan took out his sword. He couldn’t see anything threatening at all in the people about, going around them the way respectable people in Star River Crossing would go around a beggar, a ragged whore. Or a muttering madman. Ahjvar was whispering something, under his breath. Praitannec, Nabbani, he thought he caught the cadences of both. Not Taren.

  And it was against the law to carry a sword within the city walls, unless you were an officer of the street-guard or a licensed guard of some very high official. Even the household guards of ordinary senators only carried cudgels.

  Ailan had a badge that said he was of the household of the Nabbani ambassador but he’d used it to close the neck of his gown; it wasn’t on his coat where it should be, visible. Well, they’d know Ahjvar, any who came to arrest him. There weren’t that many big blond men in the city who were Taren tan rather than Northron ruddy.

  Ailan turned slowly through a circle, sword held across his body. Nothing. No one even looking their way but with the sort of worried curiosity he’d expect. He tried to be calm, to have that self-assurance that Ahjvar wore like a scent. Breathed deeply. Slowly.

  Didn’t work. His heart was racing, hands sweating.

  He grew cold in the wind. Shadows raced over, little clouds out of the west. Nothing happened, except that Ahjvar lifted his head. Ailan didn’t think his eyes were seeing anything in this city. Certainly not Ailan. He moved aside again, circling, keeping always his back to Ahjvar, to see what might be coming at them.

  For what little use he might be.

  Moonlight, Yeh-Lin cast on the mirror in her shaking hand. Faint. Watery. On her knees in the water. Clouds marred the mirror. Marred the ruin of it. Beyond, might she reach, might she at the least touch, hear a voice, a kindness at the end—?

  He was stillness, calm water, ancient stone. He was deep current, a river that could not be stayed. He was—too alien a thing. A god of the earth. He was earth, and she was…what she was, and she was so very far away, in space, in the miles of the caravan road. Too far in nature. But the dead king was fire, and the dead king was flesh, and he was bone, and he was soul in a vessel made and remade to carry him held in the world he should have left, he was—

  Fire. Not death in fire, which he carried, scar in his soul he still could not shed. But the truth of him that Nabban saw, or had led him, perhaps, to become—he was warmth, was light, was passion and the dawn after the dark night and she could know him, reach him, kind reaching to kind, the denial of the road, the once and should-have-been dead in life. And she could taste in the air, have the scent of him, of what he was, the great singing chord struck loud and glorious, could reach and grasp as if she drowned, and flung a hand, and found her wrist seized, and drawn into a hold that she could know would never fail her.

  “Dead king—Ahjvar.”

  She walked in dreams. Always she had. Knelt now, not in corrosive water, in the taint of Sien-Shava’s curdled blood that floated in the water like vomit, reacting to the poison his own devilry had made. In a place of stone. White and cold, beneath her, and she was beyond shivering, numb, with that drugged numbness that said the body still felt, the nerves still shrieked, but the mind was severed from them, hearing only the faint echoes of what destroyed it. A mercy.

  He was warmth, and his arms were around her; she was pulled hard against him, safe as she could be.

  Incorrigible Yeh-Lin,Dotemon observed, even now. She could not say she had not dreamed this, in the ordinary way of ordinary woman’s dreams.

  “Ahjvar…”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  Necromancy, she had been willing to call it, once, and not so different from what his disturbed goddess had done to him. Not now. Maybe it never had been. She could see, now, what she had not. Perhaps as what was mortal frayed away, and what was human, and what was soul of earth, all unravelled from her, what was Dotemon saw, with the truth of vision that was askew from this world, this matter, this plane. They…flowed within one another, he and his god, soul and soul, lay heart in heart. Chains bound him, reins of light, shackles of adamant, a soul chained to a god’s hand—she had seen it so once for all he embraced it and for all the promises they claimed between them, but it was not…not chains but the flowing pulse of a life shared, an interwoven, entangling web of soul. He wore a collar that was spun of sky and sea, and it was no symbol of bondage but a pattern made, a symbol and a tool, a wizardry that partook of god’s will. A tracery that carried something of them both and what between them was one, that made a road to run the miles between them which a god could not, in the nature of the world, pass over. A sacred way between the god to what was of the god in the man? Nabban beyond Nabban?

  Oh, let it be a path at need.

  This place…not a marble pavement but a field of snow. White, cold beneath them. Then it was only a nothingness, the faint idea of white and cold and she was too far gone to see more, perceive more, make more in this dream to hold them.

  “I want to go home,” she said. �
�I want to see him. I want—not to leave my bones in this place.”

  The water was cold and foul. The white field was a place of dreams and she had lost it. Ahjvar knelt with her in the cavern, in the dirty water, and leaned over her, shielding her with his body from the falling rain of crumbling rock-dust.

  She was not here to cuddle with the dead king, though pity was it could not be so and Dotemon might feel that pity, might stand aside from pain, now, all their close-knit union uncoiling, dissolving.

  For a moment she lost that sense of herself, was only a child. Less: a small and broken animal, gathered close. Found herself again, Yeh-Lin, Dotemon—Yeh-Lin Dotemon.

  “Vartu,” she said. Her voice was very weak, not her own, slurred and stumbling. Maybe she only dreamed she spoke. Tell her, I failed. Jochiz has devoured the souls he has stolen and hoarded all these years and made himself a thing greater than the gods of the earth, and since he has devoured gods and goddesses on his way, too, I do not know—don’t let him take Nabban, Ahjvar, save him, somehow, not that end for him, not for Ghu, not him, please…

  Even Dotemon’s thought grew weak, unravelling from her.

  Ahjvar was warm, and clean, all honest dust and sweat.

  “Hush,” he said. “Yes.” And she was not certain now who spoke. The wind was cool, and clean, spring-fresh, sap stirring, snow’s retreat, and there were pines in it.

  A whiff of horse, drawing near.

  Even a splashing, and a horse could not walk the shard-spiked bottom of this pool, must not, warn him—

  No, she only dreamed.

  “It hurts,” she said aloud. It sounded like surprise she had not meant; only a little whimper, was she not allowed? And, “I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to rot in this place. I don’t want to leave my bones here in the filth he has made, in this darkness. I want the clean earth, I want the sky, Ahjvar—I want to go home, let me go home, Nabban—Ghu, please, let me come home—”

  Whisper, pathetic, child’s whine, and how she hurt; it deafened her, blinded her, and this was only dreaming. The winds would not carry her; she had not the strength to call them, or the life left to endure the riding. There was no road to the east.

  “Shh,” Ahjvar said and he kissed her, which drove the pain back a little, touch of his lips: forehead, failing eyes, what she had dragged back into being blurred again, bleeding, the worm’s work reasserting itself. Lips, that were raw and oozing blood and poisoned slime. Kissed her, slow and careful, a lover’s kiss, and it eased her, spread some clean quiet through her, a little.

  “I did sometimes wish I had found you first,” she said, and maybe that was her thoughts wandering death-drunken, delusion, into reckless truth. She thought he lifted her, and was walking. Through water, that splashed and echoed from a close stone roof, and still the crumbling empty crystals pattered down, and the stone to which they had clung. The roof would fall…

  If she had found him, cursed and despairing—she would only have killed him, to set him free. And never known what thing she sent from the world, the hope of the land, her land, because what would his horseboy have been without him? Running to the edge of the world, and denying the call of his dying gods.

  “But then, I do not think I could have done for you, what he has done. Better you’re his, in the end. For all of us.”

  Shadows. She could see nothing but shadows. Something moved, near.

  “Good,” he said, and she thought she caught a whisper, a mind’s fleeting touch. They spoke together, not quite overheard, and she could not clearly see, only murk and haze now, and the moving shadows. The pain washed back, with the absence of his touch, his—did they drink her pain, to take it from her? Or only bless her with their breath, pour life into her, a little, a staving off of what must be? She did not think that was the dead king now, who kissed her forehead, blessing, pouring into her the quiet of deep water. Did not think those were his arms, his heart, under her head.

  “I’m dreaming,” she said.

  Wind touched her face. Cold. Not the still, smothering wet air of the cavern. Sound…was wider.

  “Dreamshaper,” her god answered. “If you can hold this dream, we can ride it home.”

  “You cheat the rules, Nabban. How does a god ride over his borders?”

  “In him.”

  “I am not in him.”

  “Oh, we all are. He is my bridge, my voyaging vessel, and we are all three and this dream you make—held within him. And Snow and wind and road and all.”

  Of course there was a horse, and he held her, and the white stallion Snow stepped out, light, easy, and the snow crunched under his hooves in her dreaming, and then he leapt, and he ran, in a dream between snow and sky.

  He carried the fading of what was left of her home to Nabban, with the wind in the pines of the sanctuary of Swajui, where the cold springs flowed.

  Darkness, but it was only the darkness of the night, and the stars were bright overhead through gaps in the boughs of the pines, which shifted and swayed in the wind. A warm wind, carrying spring. Water tinkled and burbled somewhere near, and the wind hissed in the needles. Like incense, the air. The ground beneath her. Soft. Years of falling needles. Warmth. Heavy on her, pinning her down. Weight of a quilt, only a quilt, filled with down, and she lay propped up a little, her head in his lap, his hand another weight, a warmth, a livingness so strong she felt the shape of it, spread resting on her, thumb, a finger, touching her collarbones.

  Took a breath. It seared her. Decided not to do that again, but the body wanted it, took another, shallow. It didn’t seem to do much good. Wasn’t much left to breathe with. Tried to start there, to build again what once she had been. She had been bone, she had been a desiccated corpse sealed in a tree, she had been…many things. Nabban, when he was only Ghu, had scattered her to bone and put her into the earth, as another man might have slapped her face, and three days it had taken her to find her way back then. What Jochiz had done, the malice he had shaped by devilry into the gnawing, scraping, sliming amphibians—it ate at her still, and she could find no way through it. Dotemon was uncoiling from her, and even human eyes might see, she thought—because she saw, now, tendrils against the sky, between her and the stars. Moving like water-weed, swaying with current. Could feel, still herself, two in one, still rooted, still held in what they had made between them, but the inimical world began to tear at them.

  Soul of the heavens, of the hells, of the underworld that had once been the shape by which it was understood…none true, and all, but what was truth was that they had no place within this world, and they could not long sustain themselves here, naked, cut off from their own place, which was within them…

  It was all very confusing to Yeh-Lin’s mind. She remembered that it had not been so, when she was whole. When she was devil…

  Mystics, philosophers, even rhapsodists who should have contented themselves weaving tales, had driven themselves half-mad, meditating on the recursive truths of the cosmos and the nature of the Gods. Perhaps they should have put their minds to other things, or drunk less hydromel brewed from the bee-maddening rhododendrons of the coast.

  She hurt, and there was nothing but the hurt, no sight no sound no warmth no wind, and then she dragged another breath.

  “Let us go,” she said. “I can’t—” A moment of clear thought, of vision. Of urgency. “Let us go. He needs you. Go to him. Now! Take him, run, hide. Save yourselves. Jochiz—”

  “Hush. Yes. Don’t worry.”

  “Please, Ghu.”

  “Yes,” he said, and he bent over her, kissed her mouth one last time, touch she barely felt, drowned in her pain. “Safe journey on your road, Yeh-Lin.”

  The road was a river, the great Wild Sister, who was this man, a rushing current, and then a wind, sweeping down the mountainside and it called, and what had been Yeh-Lin shed her ruined body and her pain to leap to it.

  Dotemon twined into a column of fire that lit the grey trunks like the moon that was yet to rise, and s
pread wings of light. Hesitated. But she—it—could no more live long in this place than a fish on stone.

  “Stay,” Ghu said. “Do you understand what you’ve sent her to?”

  I? The dead go to the Gods. I did not send her. Your blessing on her.

  What else could I do? The road is broken, Dotemon. They go—do they even reach the Old Great Gods? They don’t return.

  They never did return,Dotemon said. The God did. It was an Old Great God filled the space between the trees, that lit the pines with the nacreous colours of the northern sky-dance. Not as you mean it. Not as…selves, into self renewed.

  No. I never thought so. He shrugged. I never thought on it much at all. Save to keep Ahj from it.

  You thought as most folk of the world think, the heavens a place, an ending. But we are the guardians. We welcome. We hold. We remember. We do not keep. In the end…soul fades to soul. Death to birth. The great mystery of mysteries. But we hold all in our hearts forever. It is what we are.

  Something holds them now, forever. Holds the souls from the great soul of the world that should take them back. They never return to the world. To us. To the life we all are. Lost children.

  That is a lie of the All-Holy’s cult, that we broke the road against human souls, to sever them from the Old Great Gods in the Heavens. Jochiz is the stealer of souls, the destroyer, who tears soul from the world itself and devours it. He will make himself the soul, the god, of the whole of the world, unchecked. My failure—