by K V Johansen
“Empress?”
“Buri-Nai, I suppose. The old emperor’s sisters are both dead long ago and so’s his younger daughter.”
Ivah flushed hot and cold.
“So was it old Yao or Otono who was assassinated?”
“Otono, like the Denanbaki told us. Someone got Yao last spring, or maybe he just died. That’s when the younger prince launched his rebellion. If it was him killed Otono in the autumn, he doesn’t seem to have been able to take much advantage of it.”
“But their law says a woman can’t rule. Her claim’s being contested?”
“There’s rebellion every which way, so far as I can make out.”
“This isn’t going to settle quickly. Damnation. And we owe the Kho’anzi money from last year, if Nour’s accounts are right.” Kharduin grinned, not happily. “Or not. Poor old soul. Best he cut his own throat, I suspect. Old Great Gods, now what? Dernang’s going to be a battleground, if it isn’t already. Nour?”
Nour brought his camel up alongside. “We need to resupply.”
“Can sort that out with some of the Denanbaki winter camps. They’ll trade for Tiypurian reds.”
“We can go a while longer if we get good feed, but the camels will need pasturage and rest to fatten up before we turn west for the long haul. We can’t just turn for home, even if we could find someone to deal with quickly here. Bitha . . .”
“The hill-road?” Kharduin considered. “It’ll be blocked with snow yet.”
“That or turn north, try to make a deal for pasturage with some of the tribes, see if things quiet down.”
“They’d know what advantage they had and rob us blind.”
“Bitha, then, Khar. Before this mob lose their hope that Dernang’ll settle and all get the same idea.”
Kharduin sighed. “Yeah. Might be thawing, or at least passable, by the time we get there.”
“What’s the hill road?” Ivah asked.
“Four hundred miles back west along the edge of the mountains and then a horrible track that skirts between the mountains and the great hills, down to Bitha,” said Nour. “A brigand’s road.”
Kharduin chuckled.
“We can still make a profit there, even if a small one,” Nour calculated. “Head to Noble Cedar Harbour on the southern road.”
“Guthrun?” Kharduin pointed at the Northron camel-leech. “Can they make it?”
She shrugged. “We might lose the old dark brown cow, maybe one or two others. The road will be bad, but, yes, we can make it.”
“Better than Choa Province.” Kharduin nodded. “Bitha, then. Nour?”
Nour nodded. “Bitha.” He turned his camel to head back to the caravan, which they had left waiting, wary for any threat from the unexpected encampment, a half mile to the north.
Ivah swallowed. “Kharduin, Nour . . .”
“No,” Nour said. “Not on your own.”
“I have to.”
“No!”
“Have to what?” Guthrun asked, as the five of them rode back, Wolan as rearguard casting a frequent eye behind.
“Go to Nabban.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, not sure what to say to convince them, but Guthrun formed her own conclusion.
“Family in that mess? You never did say what your clan was. It’s mostly Daro and Zhung fighting in Choa, from what we heard in the camp, Daros loyal to their lord the Kho’anzi and Zhung officers and banner-lords come with the imperial general.”
“No, neither of those.”
“Later,” Kharduin said firmly, for which she was thankful.
Later was more argument, the three of them lagging behind the caravan, and another caravan, one they’d been leapfrogging since they turned south of the badlands, veering to intercept them for the latest news. Mistress Salar, a fox-tattooed desert woman not, fortunately, holding any particular enmity against Kharduin. They retreated to the west, made camp, planned to journey to Bitha together, pool their resources for the winter hill-road crossing.
Ivah’s personal quest—and of course by then all the gang and the strangers as well knew she was determined to go to Nabban, was hashed out by them all, advice and warnings in equal measure. At least it was not anything mad as a god they believed she sought, but her mother’s kinsfolk.
There were embraces and tears and people slipping small gifts into her pockets, people giving advice serious and joking, good and bad. A shy and fleeting kiss from Nasutani, who had turned down an invitation for anything more months ago. Growling from Kharduin, advice on what caravan-masters to trust, should she decide to head west again; where—since it did not look like their wanderings would bring the gang to Nabban for a few years—to leave messages in Bitha or Porthduryan or Noble Cedar Harbour in hope he would get at least one; reminders, again and again, that in Marakand she had a home for the asking, she had only to find her way there, half a world away. . . .
Only Nour rode back with her the next day, taking a route through the lower hills to come within sight of the border crossing again, bypassing the camp of refugees, which seemed, seen at a distance and from a height, to have doubled in size overnight.
“You still think you saw a god?”
Ivah did. “I don’t know,” she said.
“There are five devils still free in the world.”
“Four,” she said, and added, to his look, “There’s a Northron skald’s story that Ogada was killed long ago. I believe it. And Sien-Mor—Tu’usha—we know is dead, and,” she swallowed, “Tamghiz Ghatai.” Father. “That leaves four. And Ulfhild Vartu—I know her. She doesn’t frighten me.”
Nour stared.
“Well, she does, but not in that way. She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t be claiming a false godhead and trying to use me. She’s—not a friend.” Family, by some odd reasoning. Mother of the only siblings Ivah had ever had, dead though they were generations before she was ever born. Ulfhild, strangely, seemed to look on her that way. Stepdaughter? “If she wanted me for something she’d just—tell me. She’d wear her own face. But she isn’t interested in conquest, in having people serve her and follow her, not anymore.” That, she was sure of. “Jochiz and Jasberek—I don’t know anything about them. But the Northrons call Dotemon the Dreamshaper, and Nabban was her land, so she’s most likely, and—but Old Great Gods, Nour, I can’t believe a lie could—could feel so true.”
“Just remember Marakand worshipped the Lady.”
“I know,” she said, low-voiced. “And my father’s folk saw him as a great wizard and a warlord. But they feared him and loved him as a man. He didn’t deceive them with a pretended godhead, for all he aspired to make himself a god.”
“Be careful.”
“Why would Dotemon call me with visions of a false god? How would she even know I exist? She never pretended to be anything she was not, in all the stories of her. If she wanted Nabban, I think she would come and conquer it as Yeh-Lin the Beautiful again, and not work plots in the shadows, hiding behind masks. And yet, Dreamshaper. When I think, I doubt, but when I remember the dream—I don’t. I’m going to find a priest of Father Nabban, first of all things. A true priest, who understands gods and faith, which I don’t. I’m not a fool. I am—wary. But Nour, I’ve been thinking, too—how do you judge the truth and the worth of a man or a woman?”
He shrugged. “Experience of them?”
“Yes. By their deeds. It has to be as true of gods as it is of humanfolk, doesn’t it? You never worshipped the Lady, even when you thought her a true goddess. You knew she was evil, whatever she was. There have been true gods no more worth following than—” Maybe not worse than the Lady. “—than my father. If I find this god, or this thing that I feel is a god, and it, he, is—is—not worth reverence, it doesn’t matter if he’s truly a god or not. I won’t give myself away again to serve someone who does evil in the world.”
But Nabban was an empire of tyranny, and evil, by all accounts, was rooted deep in its rule. Her grandfather, her uncle . . . If
she had taken, after her father’s defeat, his place, asserted herself as warlord over the broken and fleeing remnant of his followers who had gone as mercenaries to the lands Over-Malagru in Marakand’s service—she would still not have commanded the swords and riders a conqueror would need to take Nabban, to seize it and drag it to some new faith . . .
She shivered at the thought. She had never wanted a warlord’s place. Why consider it now?
They rode in silence for a long time.
“I ever tell you how I met Kharduin?” Nour asked abruptly.
“No.”
“When I first went to the road, my first job, in fact. I’d hired on with a caravan-mistress out of Two Hills, someone who took the Bitha road. And that was a bad road in those days; there was war between the southern tribes, wells going dry, all sorts of things unsettling the folk. The sort of thing that leads to brigandage and raiders, wild folk and desperate folk and those who just enjoy the chaos and take what they can from it. We were attacked by a band of raiders one evening about dusk, before we’d made camp. About three times our numbers. They cut out half the train, I think. My camel was killed, and I was wounded and left behind in the confusion and the dark.”
He stopped, as if that were all.
“And?”
“Well, Khar.”
“Came back for you?”
“No. But he did find me, rounding up his own strays.”
“One of the raiders? I thought Nasutani was just telling tales when she told me he’d been a bandit when he was young.”
“She was. She doesn’t know more than the gossip that’s around the caravanserais, and it’s all old rumour and half of that lies. They don’t know anything for certain, except Haliya, who knows full well who he is and who his kinsfolk are—old enemies of hers. And Wolan, who dealt with him in Bitha before he came to the road himself, after his wife died. Kharduin wasn’t just one of the raiders. Their damned captain.”
“Oh.”
“But . . . he was Khar. And it was like that, you know.” He shrugged. “For both of us.”
“Ah.” Ivah didn’t, not really. But like falling in love she had said, only half knowing what she meant, and perhaps sudden love was like seeing her god, in a more human and earthy way. As little to be resisted.
“And that was that. But after a year or so, I couldn’t, well, live with myself any longer. That life. My sister and Hadidu, they’d be thinking I was dead, and I started thinking, better I was, than to have them know how I was living, a desert brigand. I’ve a few deaths to my account I’ll carry to the road to the heavens, ones that weren’t any justified fight. Not that we ever set out to do murder, not against the caravans, anyway, but it happened, and Kharduin was deep in the tribal feuding, too, and carrying on this war of revenge against his sister. . . . We weren’t like those young fools we ran off this crossing, just trying to grab and run. The caravans feared us.”
“Oh.”
“So I said I was leaving him, and why, and after all the shouting and the throwing things I took his best two camels and I went. To Bitha, and he didn’t come after me. I was half afraid he would, half afraid he wouldn’t, and half expecting just to be shot down as I rode some hot noon. His temper’s mellowed some since those days.”
“That’s three halves.”
“I know. I lead a full life, right? But nothing. And then from Bitha across two provinces as a merchant’s guard to Dernang, and found hire there and home by the northern road, to be sure I didn’t get within his reach again. Or . . . put myself where I could change my mind, maybe.”
“Oh,” she said again.
“So a year after that, he shows up in Marakand, master of his own caravan, and he says, ‘Fine, you win. Come with me.”
“Ah.”
He shrugged again. “I’m not sure what my point was.”
“Don’t be like you and get swept out of all sense for some first overwhelming vision?”
“Maybe.” He grinned. “Though he was a pretty overwhelming first vision, even if I hadn’t been bleeding on the sand with a few broken ribs for good measure, and the jackals singing not so far off, and anyone willing to tie up my leg rather than cut my throat looking like my dearest friend at that point. No, actually, I was thinking, you’re a great wizard, a—a weapon if you let yourself be that. And you have this link with the devils through your father, and this, I don’t know, hollowness—you wouldn’t say so often that you’re godless if it didn’t matter to you, if you didn’t feel it a lack, an emptiness you want to fill.”
“Do I?”
“It’s there. I notice. If someone wanted to lure you—they’ve found the right bait, haven’t they? Not the seduction of love or wealth or power, but a god calling you, father and mother and beloved all in one. You think you’ve done things you have to atone for now. So’ve I. But like Hadidu told me at the time, when I trailed all broken-hearted and angry and hollow back to Marakand, you do it through the life you live. Do right with what’s before you, yes, but don’t go making yourself a—a damned offering to something you can’t really see, blinded by guilt and looking for some, some wholeness that you should be finding in yourself, not in a god.”
“Says the priest’s brother.”
“Well, he’s the priest, not me.”
“He’d give me different advice?”
“The first part would be the same. Not the last. Hadidu would end by telling you to go find your god,” Nour said glumly, but then added, “I’m sure he’d say, be damned sure your god’s a true one.”
“I’m not, I think. Blinded, I mean.” She considered Nour, going home again and again to Marakand, where they had killed wizards, and a lifetime spent at the heart of the loyalist conspiracy, Hadidu and he and Kharduin smuggling wizard-talented children out of the city and away to safety. Go on and remember and choose differently, the devil Ulfhild Vartu had told her.
“You don’t need to go to Nabban,” Nour said.
“I do, Nour.”
“Well, then. Nothing more to be said. Just remember you’ve got a home with us, and resources you can call on. You’re not meant for the road—your heart’s not in it. If you wanted to set up and live a scholar’s life or as a respectable wizard in Marakand or Two Hills or someplace, you just need to ask. We’ll be taking a big loss on this trip, but that’s not to say we haven’t got something laid by. And if you’re wondering, Kharduin said, tell the woman that.”
“Ah. I’ll remember.”
They rode on in silence.
Where the road began its snaking climb up the pass, they embraced, and kissed, and he left her.
CHAPTER XII
When they bring Kaeo to the empress, he is her prophet, the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods. They walk him through the palace from a high room under the eaves in a robe of white silk, two of the giants escorting him and a slave to open doors, whenever the empress is moved by the desire for prophecy. The wizards fear her. There is madness in the yellowroot and it poisons them for a vision of her enemy, the false heir of the gods, the deceit of the devils who is sent to bring Nabban to war and anarchy, as if it were not already there, and while she hunts for dreams of the prophets’ heir of the gods in the north, her generals mutiny and retreat, serve the provincial lords their cousins, and slaves and peasants seize manors and butcher the banner-lords who hold them. She executes other prophets who say only what Kaeo has said. She executes the priests who shelter them, and burns the shrines, and builds her own temples in the towns. Priests and priestesses are ordered to proclaim the holiness of the Daughter of the Gods. Some do. Some flee into the wilderness. Some die martyrs. And while she wars on the priests of the gods, the two armies that have flowed out of Dar-Lathi to cross the Little Sister into Lower Lat and into Taiji plunder and burn. The folk flee, or they join their Lathan kin and the wild jungle-folk of Darru.
He dreams this. He says it. He says, the empress of the folk must defend the folk. She strikes him. He is scarred from the edge of her fan.
She has sent Captain Diman from her, sent her north into the winter with a handful of her assassins to murder her enemy before ever he comes against her, and Kaeo dreams and speaks his dreams and says, there is death in the dead land, where the dead god sleeps. He laughs and laughs and laughs, because she is a fool, and if she kills him, still the heir of the gods will come.
She sends assassins to kill the Wild Girls, but they do not survive to come to the army of Dar-Lathi. The queens, too, have their guardians.
“You do not see, you do not see,” he cries.
She orders diviners of the imperial corps of wizards brought to her, and the tea poisons some, but some survive and dream as Kaeo dreams. Unjust. He is no wizard.
She likes their dreams no better. They see too little. He is the prophet, while they are merely diviners. The gods speak through him, while they only strive to see echoes of what pours through him, and they die for their failure. The youngest of the giants, most often made her executioner, has haunted eyes. One night he walks off the roof of the moon-viewing tower.
Kaeo wishes he could die, but he endures and keeps enduring.
The heir of the gods is coming. He tells her so, and laughs.
All the palace gossips how the prophet falls in the grip of his visions, how he injures himself in his violent seizures; the price of prophecy.
There are nightmares in the aftermath of her questioning, always nightmares, and the room they keep him in—where none come but the giants and a slave-attendant he knows for a trusted spy of the Wind in the Reeds, because he has felt the knives the young woman wears beneath her court gowns when once he fell against her half-fainting, though he has not yet figured out how to abstract one unseen—whirls about him as though he has drunk far too much.
The tattoo over his heart burns. It is black as fresh ink on the brush and he thinks the caged words that he cannot read writhe like the legs of a knot of insects, scorpions interwoven. He thinks it a chain, binding him, the iron collar of a runaway dragged back to be branded on the face. He cannot see, the gods do not know, to what he had been bound.
