by K V Johansen
“Tomorrow we hunt,” he told them, doling out a dollop to each dog.
“Won’t be much in these stones,” Ahjvar said, which meant, much that he could stalk and that the heavy war-bolt of the crossbow wouldn’t tear through, to shatter itself on a rock. Days since they’d seen an antelope or wild sheep.
“There was that hawk, and I heard an owl as I was coming down the cliff. There’s something about for those, at least.” Ghu sliced an onion, their last, over the mound of thick porridge. “Here, eat, before Jui gets his nose into the plate.”
They shared the food between them, eating lumps of congealed pease porridge and onions with their fingers, washing it down with the smoky tea, which warmed them. Afterwards, while Ghu stirred up the peas, which would soak through the night once they let the fire die and be faster to finish cooking in the morning (if it all didn’t freeze solid instead), Ahjvar fetched a handful of the weeds cut for bedding and sorted through them, frowning.
“I was never much of a soothsayer,” he confessed.
No, he would not have been, Ghu thought, sitting back, arms around his knees. Ahjvar’s edge was the sword’s, hard and certain, not the poet’s dreaming borderland where the tides of fate and chance might brush the world, like waves on a shingled shore, rushing up, flowing back, leaving streaks of foam and drifts of flotsam. Ahj walled himself too strongly against the darkness between breath and breath, though when pushed, when he let go and fell—he didn’t walk, in that place. He soared. Maybe it was always so, for the truest depths of poetry, of wizardry, that there must be walls not easily breached, because you could not live day to day in such a fire.
“What do you need?”
“Trees,” Ahjvar said. “Twigs of trees, mostly, and a few lesser plants. This is hay.”
“Someone, somewhere, must divine with hay.”
“It’s not even good hay.” Ahjvar held a stalk of something in the fire until it flared and was gone, leaving a spicy scent. “The thing about Praitannec divination is that it’s a very formal ritual, a performance. Three wizards. One plays a drum.” He smiled at some memory, a rare and beautiful sight. It took the years from him. “Usually me, because I am—was—notoriously unlikely to achieve anything resembling a trance, which is expected of the speaker. But a divination in the hall—I was my father’s champion, his bodyguard—the wizardry was wasted in me. What use would I be lost half in a dream? I should have been two sons. My first duty was always the sword.”
“First love?”
“That, too.” He considered. “I was possibly young and stupid. Or lazy. Probably lazy.”
Ghu doubted one became the foremost swordsman of a duina of Praitan while still a very young man through laziness. Long, long sweating, aching hours with something to prove, he rather suspected. And a song the little bard had once managed to sing all through, when Ahj was not listening to interrupt, called the doomed prince Catairlau one of the great wizards of all Praitan in those days, too. The golden hope and ruin of the Duina Catairna. The goddess Catairanach, wilful-blind though she had been, had had the sense to seal Ahjvar’s wizardry away when she made him the vessel to preserve her mad daughter’s soul, lest she loose an even worse monster on the world than she had.
“So pretend. You did before. You said it’s all symbolism, anyway.”
“I was inspired. Or mad. Or desperate.” Ahjvar fed another withered stalk to the fire. This one smelt bitter. It had been growing too dark for Ghu to be certain what he cut. Nothing poisonous to camels, he hoped. “What do you want to ask, anyway?”
Ahjvar was watching the fire, not him.
Ahjvar was not making the idle conversation it might have seemed. The next stalk was tossed aside onto the gritty floor of the cave. His gaze never left the fire.
“Something in the west . . .” Ghu said slowly. “The hermit said so. Something in Nabban as well? We may have to do with the watcher in the west, but not . . . not yet, I think. Not for a long time yet.” His own soul was drifting, dreaming. Shadow, and fire in its heart. He shook his head. “No. There is waiting in Nabban something we do have to face. Something has woken. Powers. One. Two. I don’t know. Or maybe I only see them, feel them, now, as though . . . the hermit stirred something, reminded me, an echo—and now I’m listening for it. A storm. A wave that gathers force unseen. Your question was the true one. What do we ride to in Nabban?”
“That’s two. There should be three. There are always three.” Ahjvar’s eyes were more than half-closed now, but he still spoke as if they argued the merits of some plan over the tea. His long fingers sorted stalks, burning some, tossing some aside, and the smoke wrapped them. It was pungent, heavy, and slowed the thoughts. If there was pattern in what Ahjvar laid aside, Ghu didn’t see it yet.
Two questions. He hadn’t meant to make the west one, but apparently he had after all.
“A third . . .” What do I do? But he knew that answer, or the beginning of that answer, and so it did not need asking. The third came unsought, words spoken unconsidered, rising out of the thickening smoke and the true question that troubled his heart, the one that mattered. “If I go back, what follows for Nabban?”
Ahjvar nodded and burnt the last of his handful of straws. He held up a hand when Ghu would have spoken, raked ash back from the edge of the fire with a knife, and gathered that ash into his hand, flinging it over the cave floor where he had been tossing the plant stalks. Jiot sneezed and sat up. Ahjvar, too, sat up on his knees now.
“We don’t write books in Praitan,” he said, his voice low. “We never wrote much at all, till Nabban’s colonists took the coast and built their cities. But the wizards and the bards had their own writing, long before. Not for books, not for letters between the kings. For words of power, for memorial stones, for secrets too precious to be left to breath and memory alone. The characters were named for the sacred trees and the herbs of wizardry and divination. They could carry the sounds of the tongue, but they didn’t need to.”
The straws had fallen in a random scatter, one by one, withered leaves and seedheads touching, overlying, crossing. The ash bound and also separated them. The eye could make patterns. A stick-horse such as a child might draw in the dust. Almost a circle, like the moon a little eaten away. Ahjvar’s finger traced other shapes, though, strokes like the scratching of hens in the dirt.
“Here, together. Yew, which is death, most often, but it can mean deceit, illusion, even treachery, the attributes of the devils. Or simple fear. Darkness. And with it pine, which is the sign of the Old Great Gods, the formless fire of the soul, the hope that survives even death. That, crossing it—” His finger traced other lines. “—that is the berried holly, which is battle. The sword. Which may be an edge. Or a boundary, a borderland. A decision. You can see why this is not useful.” His voice rose.
“Shh, yes. It is.”
“I don’t know how to read this for you.” Ahjvar hugged his arms close, shivering, distressed. He feared dreams, feared losing himself, and this drew too close to that loss of control; Ghu should not have asked it of him, not yet.
“I do. Almost. I see it. A little. Enough,” he said, soothing, as he might have spoken to a frightened horse. It was not enough. A shape he could not quite grasp. Ahjvar drew a breath.
“The third, here . . .” The ash made a swirl, cutting off a complex arc of straws, no more meaningful than any other to Ghu’s eye. “Here—elder, which is rebirth, renewal. Willow, which is water. Movement. Change. This, elm, which is peace. Except, the forms can be read either way. There is no left and right with it between us so, and this form, this circle, from here—” His hand touched, halfway between the two of them. “—from here they all make flowering ash, which is grief and sorrow, and prickly ash, which is undoing, and reversal, and the negating of all that comes under its influence. Balanced. And between them, the berried holly again.”
“The sword’s edge. Balance.”
“Yes.”
“You said the third. Are the two read
ings in the second group two questions?”
Ahjvar’s hand passed over the ashes, touched a twisting bit of dry vetch, moved on. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing else. That—” He spread his fingers, covering the first muddle of signs he had found. “—is your first and your second, the same answer to both, the questions intertwined. Here, in the second gathering—one question but two answers. The sword’s edge, you said. Balance. You see it more clearly than I do.” He swept them all into a heap, back towards the dying fire, and looked Ghu in the face at last. “What in the west? The—She feared the west. It was why she wanted to make Marakand her own. A fortress, and an empire behind it.”
She. “The Lady?”
A jerky nod. Better they had not spoken of the Lady so close to time for sleeping.
“She is dead, Ahj. And the west—I don’t know. I don’t think it’s something we need to fear, not yet, not for many long years. We go east.” A devil. You are the quarry. A fallen star and a lie. Devil and Old Great Gods and war, grief and sorrow perhaps undone. All balanced. On choice, of course. On himself.
Ahjvar only rubbed his face, leaving ashy streaks, and asked wearily. “Did that make any sense to you?”
“Yes.” Maybe. He didn’t know, except yes, to know he rode not to peace, but to the turmoil of a land dying with its gods. And a devil . . . There was more there than Ahjvar understood. More there than Ghu did himself. “Thank you.”
Ahjvar still shivered. “We’re going to need that fire all night.”
Ghu climbed down to check on the camels once more before sleeping. They seemed undisturbed, nosing at him for more scratching. It would take more than this cold to bother them.
He and Ahjvar rolled themselves into the blankets under their sheepskin coats, with the dogs curled up against them, one to either side. Ghu didn’t sleep, much, but lay listening to the wind. Owls, maybe. Ghosts. The ghost of a sea. The night was starless with thickening cloud, very black beyond the low glow of the fire, which he crawled out to feed whenever it threatened to die away. Ahjvar twitched and muttered. Snow, hard, small stinging flakes, whipped past the mouth of the cave and swirled in to sizzle on the flames. Ahjvar whimpered like a dreaming dog and struck out at his ghosts. Ghu caught his arm before he could hit Jui, tucked it against his own chest.
“Hush. Sleep.” The nightmare faded; Ahj didn’t struggle further, didn’t wake, though his breathing still came too fast and his hand clenched painfully on Ghu’s like that of a drowning man.
Could he refuse to go on? Turn his back, chase the sun west again, as he had once set out to do with the god’s and goddess’s good grace and blessing, to see the greater world, to learn, to find new ways?
Nabban pulled him, stone and water, almost a physical pain, hooks set in his heart. He could not turn away now.
Change and rebirth, or destruction, and he balanced between. The wrong choice, the wrong moment . . . the wrong man. He might yet be that. His gods had shaped him, set him on the road, and he had started in innocence, in service, wholehearted, but did he set his will over theirs? He was no god; he had borrowed against his inheritance, one could say, to free Ahjvar. No. He could not claim that had been his end, because Ahjvar was not free. Ghu had taken on, that night, a borrowed godhead, only to steal the web of a curse worked by a desperate and unbalanced goddess in hatred and love, and could he do so in any greater virtue or any less sin than she, whatever his intention? Ahjvar was a perversion of nature, a knot of powers that twisted the world to keep itself in life. Ghu had sworn he would release him, if he asked, when he asked, and—Ahjvar had no wish in himself to live. He only endured because he saw no more peace in death than in this unnatural life, only a long and terrible road to the Old Great Gods beneath the burden of the evil worked with his hands. Did Ghu prolong the curse of the goddess Catairanach to give Ahjvar time to heal, so that death would not seem mere release to continued torment, or to keep him by his own side, tied to him, for his own selfish desires?
Both?
He had killed, not even in defending himself or defending others, but in battle in a cause that was not his or Nabban’s, only because a man stood between himself and Ahjvar. Who, yes, was killing others, who would have slain the kings of Praitan if Ghu had not been able to free him from the Lady. . . . Justified, then? Who was there to judge, but the gods? And the little bard would have died.
What else? He had set himself in judgement and lured the guilty to death, and waited without compunction to kill them. They might yet have found their way to some atonement. He gave Ahj that chance but took it from those brigands in the eastern Over-Malagru. But they chose to attack a sick man in the night.
He had done worse, far worse. He had destroyed a human soul. Evil as Hyllau had been, no god of the earth could have that right.
He must come to his gods and lay that before their feet with all the rest. If they judged him unworthy, corrupted, too weak . . . that was his doom and his failure. It might also be Nabban’s. They poured their wish and will into him—their blessing, their child, their heir. The gods might yet make another child between them, choose another discarded infant and begin again, but another child would be another lifetime lost as Nabban died about them and they died with it.
There were godless lands in the west.
He waited, unsleeping, for the morning, as the wind rose to a howl and lashed the rocks with snow. Still Ahjvar gripped him, an anchor against whatever storm he battled in his sleep.
It is groping into a fog, shaping, at great remove, a dream, a will to action, out of repressed anger and half-formed thought. She is a mind born keen and hungry but left to stagnate, to fester.
Obstinate. She hears, and yet she does not listen. “Let him come. Draw him to you,” he says. “My daughter, you do not need to fear.” But she is the Daughter of the Old Great Gods. He has said so. She will not allow this challenge, these prophets who should speak of her, and her alone. She, she only, is salvation. He has said so. The land and the folk will know it.
So let her send her assassins. If they succeed, the heir of the gods is not what he should be, and he is no loss.
Yeh-Lin held the inscribed mirror flat across both palms, a little darkened moon. It clouded with her breath, caught the light of her campfire, flickered with flowing shadows. Or a pattern of frost, growing, flowing. There had been a black sword, edged in ice. She breathed on the mirror again, banishing ice, willing to look beyond, but there was only night sky, stars. Frost. No. Snow, white beneath bright sun, and young saplings, stark and dark and dead, not winter-bare but blasted of branches, and the wreckage of a cabin and outbuildings, built of upright logs in the Northron style: only the burnt ruin of them, almost buried in the snow.
A bear, a giant of the forest, tawny gold, not brown. She had never hunted one so large in the days when such sports had amused her. A bear, and not denned in winter sleep?
It stood in the clearing of the dead saplings, with dark forest, spruce and white birch, ringing it, heavy with snow, unmarred by the fire that had swept the yard about the cabin, and it seemed to observe, with more than animal interest, the ruin of the cabin. Trod forward, ploughing through snow halfway up its flanks, and went in between the stumps of the doorpost, though there was little wall left to make a barrier and the drifts climbed over. It circled through, as if seeking something. Looked up. Snarled, at the sky, at the empty forest—at her? Eyes found hers, like a blow, and she lost the vision, felt as though she staggered, a heavy paw slamming past to dash the mirror from her hands.
No, she held it still, clutched in her left-hand fingers, but the arm she had flung up to ward off the blow was numb and then tingling.
“What,” Yeh-Lin asked, “in the cold hells, was that?” The stars, cold and high over the hills of the desert borderlands, gave her no answer.
CHAPTER XI
“So what news?” Kharduin called, as soon as Wolan and Guthrun were within earshot. Ahead of them, low mountains clawed the horizon, and the road climbe
d to the pass and the Nabbani border. Nearer, though, was the smoky smudge of an encampment almost the size of a town, straggling across the road.
“What we’ve been hearing since we left the desert,” Guthrun said in disgust. “War. The emperor was assassinated, the imperial family’s at war with itself, the clans are taking sides. Dernang’s been attacked and captured twice since the autumn.”
“That,” Wolan said, with a jerk of his head back towards the camp, “is a mess of caravan-folk who were wintering in Dernang and were able to run for it before their camels could be confiscated, and deserters from at least two armies, and slaves who’ve taken the chance to bolt, begging and stealing and selling whatever they’ve got to sell, which is mostly themselves, for a mouthful of food.” His face was grim. “There’s a handful of gang-bosses and merchants calling themselves camp guild-masters. You want to go into that?”
“No,” said Nour firmly, with a look at Kharduin.
“No.” Kharduin scratched his beard. “Me and a bunch of merchants calling themselves guild-masters? There’d be blood on the snow before the week was out. Any word of Daro Korat?”
“Besieged in the castle. He’s at war with his son, the one who declared for Prince Dan, but an imperial army crossed from Numiya while the river was still low. The general’s retaken most of Choa Province from the young lord. He’s retreating to Dernang, they’re saying—the young lord, that is, not the empress’s general.”
