The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  She had not thought anyone, not even Vartu, had the power to wound him so.

  But alas, he still held to life, Sien-Shava, Jochiz, still himself, still live and in this world, anchored. Life flickered. His sycophantic folk swarmed about him, their cries like the peeping of a brood of chickens deprived of the hen’s warmth. Lost, shelterless…witless.

  Let them sort it out.

  Too soon, the one called Ambert asserted himself to do so. It was not entertaining. They bandaged Sien-Shava’s bleeding wounds, the gaping tear as if someone had tried to cut the heart out of him, which clove through the bone and should have killed any mortal man. But of course he was their god, and his heart beat still. Indeed, she had a glimpse of it, while a shivering surgeon and a frantic seer reaching far beyond his talent or knowledge tried to put Sien-Shava back together again. That, at least, was gruesomely fascinating.

  They put him in a horse-litter between two steady mules and Ambert—really, the man was devoted beyond all reason—refused all cries, all pleas for a halt.

  It was not the will of the All-Holy that they rest. They must take the defensible gap of the Shiprock, lest Marakand come to hold it against them. He shouted. He spoke with quiet menace. He denounced as cowards and apostates those who spoke against him. He claimed to utter the All-Holy’s own words.

  It was when he cried, vengeance, vengeance for the devil’s attack that had laid the All-Holy low, that the commanders, and perhaps more crucially the common soldiery who stood behind them, were stirred. They must push on. Marakand must fall. This was only the first march, the first great stride, and if it faltered, the whole might fail.

  It was not enough to have taken the Western Wall, which had never in human memory been taken.

  They were already so close to the camping-ground that the All-Holy in his wisdom and foresight had decreed for them. The Shiprock was in sight, and the scouts reported no sign of any Marakander defences. Sien-Mor whistled a little tune to herself. Cheerful. Lilting. A Northron thing. “My brother lies in the cold, cold ground…” One seer frowned, looking around blindly. She chuckled, drifted over, dropped a chill kiss on his cheek, a whisper in his ear.

  “You won’t live to see the dawn, poor boy.”

  The scouts sent through the gap of the Shiprock reported nothing. No hasty fortifications, no archers on the heights, no engines concealed behind the windmill. Deserted.

  The Marakanders were fools who had trusted entirely to their Western Wall, Ambert declared, but he did not believe it, and he ordered the tent of the All-Holy erected and a guard drawn up around it even as he sent the vanguard on beneath the cliffs, and dispatched parties with sixth-circle seers among them up the treacherous cliff-paths to investigate the windmill more closely.

  A low camp bed. The black sword was laid by the All-Holy’s side, and his own as well. They did not dare carry those elsewhere; their god was never without them. Sien-Mor drifted out again. Nothing had changed. The companies still marched. Ambert was determined to prove himself the All-Holy’s most obedient and faithful servant—and successor? They would seize the broader space beyond the Shiprock gap for their main camp, a bridgehead from which they might march on to Marakand. The sun at their backs pushed long shadows up the pass. It grew dark, down in the narrow place, but the white windmill gleamed.

  She began to be disappointed in the Marakanders. They should surely have seen the value of this place. Sien-Mor returned to her brother’s side, as a faithful and devoted sister ought.

  The All-Holy stirred and muttered, clutching his bandaged chest beneath the sodden bandages. His forearms, too, were bandaged, elbow to wrist, and those were soaked as well. He bled yet, not healing swiftly as he should, being what he was. Could not summon the will, or was there some thing that worked against him? Sien-Mor could not tell. So limited and limiting, humanity, even for a wizard. She reached—and Tu’usha was gone from her, even memory of what it had been, to be her, gone remote and dreaming. But perhaps that was her madness.

  She felt quite sane. The healing of the road, even if the journey were uncompleted?

  The physician was coming with more wrappings. They would swaddle him into a cocoon, and still he would bleed. He had, after all, a great reservoir of blood to shed. They prayed, priests and seers, stationed in ranks about him, voices raised in songs of pleading and praise. Praying to their god for their god’s restoration.

  “Poor fools,” she told them, unheard. Crouched at Sien-Shava’s side, considering him. Little she could do. Whisper into his mind. You should die. Give up, flee away. You aren’t anything greater than you ever were, for all your hunger. You might consume every god and goddess of this earth and every soul and still you will be nothing but a sick and bloated parasite, a tick feeding on what it cannot digest. Pregnant with sterility. The world will take back what you have stolen…what we have hidden… The thought distracted her a moment. When she focused on him again, his dark eyes were open, fixed on hers. Ah, he saw again. She smiled, sweetly, as he had liked her to smile.

  But no, he looked through her, beyond. His lips were still pale with the blood he had lost, and he shaped some word she could not decipher.

  Twitched and thrashed, struck away the physician who tried to take his arm, knocking the clean bandages from her hands. Sat up.

  It seemed to take a very long time. The world, slowed. A massive strength, gathering itself.

  There was a rumbling, as of thunder. The ground shook.

  “You.” He did not shriek. It was hardly more than a whisper, but it carried a rage she felt through to the bones that were so long ash. And what washed over her—she lost her hold on herself, scattered, dissolved almost to nothing, to shredded confusion of memory, of will—

  He saw her. He knew her, at last, to be no dream, no delusion, not even a ghost, but a soul stolen from the heavens, a soul flown willing on the path laid open to it into the dream-delusion Vartu had sought to create, back down the thread her brother had always held, refusing to give her up even to death—

  For a moment he was their father, a great silver seal rising from the curling waves, a great tall man striding up the white beach, and the air about him, the cloud building, the waves, the slow weight of a god’s anger…

  Lightning, white, burning. A roar, a crash that was more hammer-blow than thunder-growl. Blinding. Scent of scorched wood and cloth, flesh and hair. Chaos and wailing and a ring of dead, struck down as cattle crowded under a hilltop tree to shelter from the thunderstorm. The canopy of the tent flapped rags in a clear-sky gale.

  Sien-Mor was already fleeing as Sien-Shava—whatever was left of Sien-Shava in the thing that had risen from the litter—reached. She was running, flying, crying out on the Old Great Gods to see, to stretch out a hand to draw her home—

  No road before her, no deep well of safety into which she might plunge. No way back.

  He closed on her, in fire, in the white light of the heavens and the molten heart of the earth.

  She was only a small thing, in the end. A butterfly held in the hand, crushed to ash.

  Nabban… The necromancer god dared think himself something greater than he had any right to be, to walk beyond the bounds of his land, to do what no god of the earth might, what only the god of the earth, god of all the lands, Great God of the earth might do.

  Nabban stole the trophy of Jochiz’s victory from him, made of the corpse from which Dotemon had been driven some heroic fallen vassal, to be honoured, entombed—she was traitor to her kind, she was his,Jochiz’s own, her bones—she should rot and lie in the heart of his mystery and her soul be forever denied its road—

  And to steal her the false god of Nabban revealed what Jochiz had suspected, that he did ride the soul he had withheld from the Old Great Gods, the bones he had kept from their right and proper grave, he rode the soul of his dead lover even into Marakand, which was Jochiz’s, his sister’s city, a place belonging to him and all the souls within it his as well and Nabban dared defy that—


  There was only one god, one God, who might range the road, and it was not the slave-born mortal boy of Nabban, whatever trickery of necromancy he worked to free himself from the constraints of the godhead he had stolen. Base human mother, base human father, elevated beyond due by the senile desperation of a land’s dying gods…

  And Nabban had even taken Sarzahn his brother from him.

  Jochiz left the army of the All-Holy to look to itself. They were lost to him, useless, until he could shape a new sanctuary in which to gather them. There were caves enough beneath Gurhan’s hill, and the god—like would bind to like. He was become soul, the world contained within him, a creature who burned with its light. Very godhead lay now within him, he made it in himself through those he had carried, encysted, the gods of his army’s march, and now he might—he did, he swallowed them, felt himself spread, and deepen, felt he might stretch and reach the horizon, reach into the beating heart of the world and draw it fully into himself, contain it all.

  There was still a long road to the eastern sea, and there were still roads beyond, south, more easterly yet. But he could reach, he would, and with every land he crossed he would grow. Here he could dispense with the ritual, the sacrifice of the children made vessels, earth-soul to itself. He was god and he was God and he might take Gurhan so, and bring Gurhan’s land into himself, and its folk and all, and spill out along the roads east, by desert and by sea.

  And Vartu’s defences—

  They were nothing.

  She was nothing.

  But Nabban, he would deal with Nabban first. Since the false godling rushed so headlong to meet his doom and offered himself, in the body of his Praitannec king.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  Ahjvar staggered to his feet baffled and blinking at slanting afternoon light where had been darkness, unsteady on even ground, balance expecting soft and rolling forest mould. Still hearing voices.

  “Ahjvar,” Ailan said, fervent as prayer, and reached a steadying hand for him, which he allowed. Understood again where he was, found the world solid around him after all. It hurt, as waking from a dream. Close almost to touching, and now he was fallen away.

  And Yeh-Lin was dead. But taken, at least, from a grave in Jochiz’s unholy ground.

  “What happened?” Ailan was asking—repeating, he had asked more than once, his voice an echo, a confusion.

  “What?” Ahjvar asked. Shook his head against a growing pain, a headache blossoming, thunder brewing and he did not need this, not here, not tonight. “Yeh-Lin—” he began, and frowned at the blue sky, nothing but a few white tatters of cloud trailing from the southern peaks, while the storm-megrim pressed and edged his vision with streaks of murky colour—

  He lashed out and flung Ailan away as the sky split, or his head, white searing the eyes, slid aside from the descending blade, the man, the burning bolt of light that contained and was barely contained by the human shell, heard the thwack of the steel striking stone and the burning man in all his wrath and glory stumble off-balance.

  No shield, no armour, no helm. Sword in hand. Ahjvar drew the heavy dagger to guard, went in with a sweeping blow that Jochiz, turning, caught and slid off his blade. Backed from the edge whirling up, spilling flame, the man himself still burning, as if a shadow of pale fire followed him. A flurry of blows, then, and Jochiz defending with a hand raised, no shield, no buckler, but the spilling light of him hazed and dazzled and Ahjvar knew when he had connected, felt the blow in his shoulder, the brief jarring resistance as Jochiz dropped his warding arm and turned away and came back low, swinging up, but then the devil was moving freely again, no lame limb, no hesitation, no blood, teeth bared in a grin that was fury. Nothing human in his eyes at all: hollows in a skull, windows in a lantern.

  Fighting for his life at last, an enemy who did not need to match him with the sword but nearly did, and it would take only one strike, with the devil’s strength and will in it—the devil’s malice reaching into him, seeking a grip on what held him in life, to sever artery and muscle, sinew and bone, and the old, old weaving that Ghu had made his own.

  Jochiz was vast, to some sense that was not the eye. A weight. He pulled the stone of Marakand to him. He pulled the god of the hill.

  No rite, no song of binding and death. Only a reaching, the many waving tendrils, tentacles of some sea-creature, touching, clinging with a thousand barbs, pulling—and runes flared in light, and words rang hard, like silver strings and brass, in denial. But still the devil reached and the god of Marakand—frayed.

  Jochiz blazed. Higher. Deeper. As if he expanded, grew, in dimensions unseen.

  Laughed. Gathered himself, greater and vaster. Reached again to seize Gurhan, crushing the already failing runes, the priests and their prayers, the god’s own resistance—a hunger, pulling. With no faltering of attention for the work of his sword.

  Nothing Ahjvar could do. Jochiz might, but he could not, face two directions at once. He shut out Gurhan’s pain, the prayers and the wizardry of his defenders, the cold hard edge that raised again a wall, a last sanctuary, about the god, now that the bounds of the city were broken. Legacy, something set to wake and hold, no active working in it. He had no sense of Moth at all.

  Nothing he could do. Fight the battle before him, and endure, till—till something changed.

  Yet Ahjvar forced the devil to give up ground. No place to corner him, no rough footing to unbalance. Nothing but the flat white paving and the vast open space. The folk who had wandered it fled to the far reaches—only Ailan, spare a corner of thought—Ailan on his feet again with his damned short-sword in hand standing off, as if he watched for an opening and would rush in to stab the devil.

  “Get to Moth!” Ahjvar shouted, wherever she was, whatever she did—it gave the boy purpose and reason to run, to be saved from this—

  Ghu, he thought. To die for you, yes—and could he drag the soul of the human Sien-Shava with him when he died, when that devil’s sword took him as it must and ripped him from love and curse and life and all? Could he wind it into himself and pull it to the road and leave the devil broken, a damned and inhuman soul adrift in a world that could not sustain it, powerless, no more to threaten gods of the earth, no march on Nabban that empress and wizards and banner-lords and the army and fleets could not defend against, and the god safe in the land…

  Or—now—and he was in, striking aside the devil’s sword with the dagger and the heavy Northron sword had its opening, the whole of his body a prayer behind the edge, the whole of his body, his will, the dance, in yew, which was death, and he cut the head of Jochiz from its body, he did, he felt it, he saw, the startled moment, the brief searing pain, the terror—

  —the flaring screaming light, flame white and marble-streaked, red, gold, and the head did not fall, the blood did not spray, the man did not fold to the ground, only the blade came whistling around and Ahjvar struck with the left-hand dagger what was not flesh and took no harm, though his own blow wrenched and twisted and something in his shoulder gave, lance of pain down his side. The dagger dropped from numb fingers—his sword again to turn and slide the devil’s edge away as he moved back—but it struck hard and edge to edge. The blade of the leopard-headed sword shattered, shattered like glass to flying shards and the force sent Ahjvar stumbling to his knees.

  Arm did not answer, to catch himself, his left, and he was reaching with his right, the forage-knife sheathed at the small of his back, the broad curved blade, recovered balance on his knees and was up in a rush, a sweeping slash upwards that he followed with the whole of himself, into the fire.

  It wrapped him. It tore air from his lungs and burned the water from his eyes, stink of burning hair, the heat on the skin, and yielding firmness giving, the knife buried to the grip, the wet heat of it, the opened belly and the shriek that was human, the body he leaned into solid and its fires contained, staring, bloody neck-wound half-healed, and they were crashing down, with the god’s knife buried in the devil’s guts and the god’s hand on it,
the god in him, a clean cold certainty of stone and water and the green great breathing land, that would not lose him, lose Ahjvar, who was life and love and warmth and the only thing in the end that mattered to the man still in the heart of the god—life and love and his own beating heart. He ripped up and rolled away, the knife held hard, skin to leather-wrapped grip, blade and hand slimed with blood and filth to the wrist. To his feet and his left arm not answering and had he done it, broken that body past restoration, severed the devil from his anchor in the world—

  —Tu’usha, Sien-Mor dead, body destroyed, had taken refuge in a goddess, a welcomed fugitive who betrayed and devoured her host and seduced a new human partner to carry her—

  —Jochiz tried it. He reached for Ahjvar, hasty chains of wizardry, shapings of devil’s will, no seduction but the mindless possession of enslavement was his intention, a vessel he thought to seize and deny to Nabban.

  No,Ghu said.

  Flexed left-hand fingers. They hurt, but they answered. Ache, deep in the bone of the upper arm. Better than what had been before.

  Wizardry for the binding of a devil. It had taken the Old Great Gods themselves, aiding the wizards of the world, to bind the seven in their half-death, half-sleeping prisons. A wizard in godhead, a god in wizard’s understanding…

  They might try—

  The devil was a mass to him they could hardly come to grips with.

  Ailan had not obeyed Ahjvar. He moved behind Jochiz, slowly, sword held most correctly for a thrust to the devil’s kidneys and if in that moment’s distraction he, Ghu, they struck for that still-healing throat and carried in mind and blow the patterns of yew, and the male holly, and hermit’s pepper for binding, and the great knot of sealing that was a pattern of the Great Grass—