by K V Johansen
“Well, don’t annoy him. I won’t stop him hitting you. What do you want?”
“Your company.”
“We don’t want yours.”
“No? You might need it. What exactly do you plan to do in Nabban? They are at war, you know. Civil war, the surviving children of Emperor Yao, who died a year ago, fighting for the Peony Throne. Uprisings of slaves. Lord and generals seizing what they think they can hold, and revolt of the tribes in the highlands and jungles of Dar-Lathi. I’ve seen it in the mirror. I can show you.”
“No.”
“Will you retreat to the wilderness of the gods and fade to sleep? Nabban will break and die around you.”
“No.”
“What, then?”
Ghu shook his head. “I don’t know. Yet. I will know, when I see.”
She studied him. “You do know. You do see—”
“I don’t know what I will do,” he snapped. “I only know what needs to be done.”
“And that is?”
“None of your concern.”
“It is,” she said. “I sowed the seeds of it, did I not? This rot that you must mend?”
She spoke the truth in that.
“You do need me. What do you know of war? You may fight well in a corner and your dead king was a captain, yes, but the armies of the Praitannec tribes are rabble and their idea of a war is a hundred riders on a cattle raid.”
“Not entirely true.”
“Not entirely untrue. They’re a folk who esteem geldings as warhorses!”
“For raiding, yes. They find them quieter when they’re stealing their neighbours’ mares. So?”
“They didn’t defeat Marakand by any tactical skill or strategy of their own; it was the loss of the Red Masks and the Lady’s fall let the kings claim the day. It was you and your dead man gave them their victory. Catairlau—”
“—Ahjvar—”
“—has no more idea what to do with a real army than you have.”
“I’m sure he’s read a book on it.”
“A book! You—” Her brows lowered and she snorted. “Not a matter for joking, Nabban. I swear—”
“Don’t. You make oaths too lightly.”
“Deyandara sent me to you. Truly, she did. The damned Old Great Gods be my witness—”
“Don’t. Don’t swear.”
“By the tree that held me and released me, whom I do respect, I will not cross the border without your leave. I put myself at your service, Nabban.” She went down on her knees in the snow, like a Praitannec spearwoman exchanging vows with her lord, offered her hands. “If you won’t take my oath, how do I prove that? How do I give you some word you will believe?”
“No words. By your deeds, Dotemon. Day by day.”
And that, how could he lay that before his dying gods? That he brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon, whom they had sacrificed themselves to vanquish, back to Nabban?
But it felt . . . necessary.
“I want,” she said softly, “to come home.”
She was a devil, and one whom the songs said had ever worked subtly on men’s minds. Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, Dotemon Dreamshaper. He wanted simply to like her—he did like her, he enjoyed her company, which worried him. No enchantment there, surely, though danger none the less. It was with a more obvious form of seduction that the songs usually concerned themselves, though he did not think she needed either wizardry or devilry for that. The face she wore was her own, no glamour.
And it was for Ahjvar’s own sake she had been outraged, to find him still walking the world. That—he could forgive her much that he should not, for that care for Ahj.
“Get up,” he said, and offered his hand. “You can come with us. For now.”
Her grip felt real and human, warm, with a swordswoman’s hardness. But underneath, underneath flesh and bone, within it, she was fire and frozen light.
He wondered what she felt in him beneath the stiff and wind-chilled flesh and pulled his hand from hers, pocketing his sling, putting on his mittens.
“I’m hunting,” he said. “Make yourself useful and carry the game.”
“Ah,” she said. “Yes. I should have said at the start. There were a handful of riders to the northeast, heading for the ruins of Letin. They don’t look like a hunting party. They have no dogs. There is a wizard of minor power with them.”
“You should have—”
“You distracted me, talking of your dead king.”
“Who is alone in the ruins of Letin.”
“Well, if all you did was take over the goddess’s curse intact, they can’t kill him, can they?”
At Ghu’s look, Dotemon bowed again.
“I am,” she said, “possibly, too fond of the sound of my own voice.”
“Yes. Possibly, if you’re going to live in this world and do it no more harm, you should cease looking on it as all a game laid out for your amusement.”
Ghu turned back on his tracks and left the devil to follow.
Jiot sat up, sniffing the wind. Ahjvar was drawn out of his half-dreaming concentration to watch him. The dog settled once more but then lifted his head again, casting back and forth, nose high. Turned around to watch the other direction. Ahjvar, alert now, moved with him. Nothing stirred against the white and dun landscape. There must be something faint in the air, but not upwind, he thought. No unaccounted-for tracks marred the snow. Ghu, the dogs, the camels wandering along the watercourse . . . The camels browsed undisturbed; nothing prowled along the stream that they could sense, but the land was rippled and folded, more than he had realized. To come down from the north and around the rising ground of the ruined city unseen would be possible. Careful stalking might have gotten near and left no betraying tracks, using the lines of bushes rooted in drifts along the stone ridges and ditches, their own footprints, even. The hollows, the walls that still stood a course or two high—there was far too much cover, in fact, for a skilful hunter to use, and the shadows were stretching long and blue with the dying afternoon.
Now that he stood still, even for a few moments, the wind froze his shirt to hard folds and ridges against his skin. He might have frozen his hands. Surely should have. They ached, instead, merely red with cold. He forced his fingers to flex, considering. A moment’s dizziness, white spots in his eyes, ears ringing, a moment’s deep weariness. He shook it off. He wanted the crossbow, but, as he judged the lay of things, if he were stalking an inattentive sleepwalker out exercising on the hillside, and if he had worked around from the northeast in so doing, he would be down in that very hollow, or behind the further slumped ridge of stone.
It was possible, of course, that Jiot had only scented uncertainly some distant fox.
He left his coats lying and started purposefully down the slope towards the camp, not keeping to cover himself. If anyone were going to shoot him, they could already have done so. Watching, uncertain whether to approach, maybe. He didn’t break his loping stride when in the corner of his eye a patch of dirty white heaved over a broken wall to the north and raced towards him, but vaulted the ridge down into the hollow of the camp, striking the person who rose up there with his shield. She reeled back and fell, caught herself on one hand and was on her feet again, a hooked forage-knife slashing. It could have laid bare his ribs, but he turned out of her reach and struck her hand with the flat of his blade, knocking her arm wide, sending the knife spinning away. She had a bow at her back and a quiver on her belt, could have shot him any time.
“We’re no enemies of the lords of this land,” he said in the Nabbani of the road, and stepped back, giving her room. A breathing space, there, as the second—second and third—topped the wall. Time enough for her to call a truce, a word—time for all to hesitate and change the moment. The urge to kill them, to make a clean silent space with no one near to hurt him, was loud, but he did not have to listen, he did not; it was madness and the nightmares and not himself. He knew it, and so he made himself say it again, “Wait—”
She flung herself
after her knife and a man leapt down from the wall, swinging as he came. Ahjvar pivoted away and back, slashed up across his belly as he landed, took the other’s faltering blow on his shield and cut the cords of the woman’s neck and reeled, ears ringing and spots again, bile rising in his throat.
Wizardry, to break and hold him. Wizard, the fourth enemy, hidden in the shelter. The last warrior came after him wielding a two-handed sword, swift and sure for all the snow and blood-slick ground, which ran and shifted like water in Ahjvar’s vision, unbalancing him, never quite where his feet thought they were. He gritted his teeth on the burning in his throat and went down on one knee as the world whirled around him, but the man’s sword was a fixed and steady thing in his vision, and his splintering shield was there to take it as he rocked up again, Northron steel driving through his attacker’s guts and up, back ribs shattering, grating. The man fell, spewing blood as Ahjvar yanked his sword loose, choking and swiftly dead. The wizard knelt keening over her clasped hands, a chant rising and falling, what had been a whisper lost in the wind risen only now to audible song. She flung a scatter of pebbles at Ahjvar’s feet and bowed her head, hands open and empty. The fever-dizziness vanished with the dropping of the pebbles. No. Not his enemy. Maybe. Ahjvar put the bloody point of his sword to the woman’s throat and raised her chin.
She swallowed and licked dry lips, placing her hands carefully on her knees, sitting back on her heels. She was young, little older than Ghu, and tattooed with a mask of black braids about her brown eyes. Ahjvar did not remember seeing tattooing on any Denanbaki caravaneers. A sign of her calling, maybe. She wore feathers worked into the end of her long braid. He only now had time to think that the other three had been Nabbani, alien to this land.
“Jiot!” he called, and risked a glance around, but the shaman did not take even that slight chance and stayed as she was. The dog stood on the wall, hackles raised, but tail wagging gently.
“Much help you were. Any more?” Easier to talk to the dog than the woman.
Jiot sat.
“What kind of an answer is that? Out,” he told the shaman, switching languages again and making his point with the sword. He didn’t want to be down in this blind hollow, even if he trusted the dog to know this was the lot, which he did not.
The shaman crawled out of the shelter and stood in silence. She was dressed in a quilted grey coat and sheepskin boots, with a sheepskin over her shoulders, the legs tied about her neck, and a white headscarf over her hat. The dead all wore white headscarves and sheepskin coats with the fleece turned outermost.
So, they had come—from where?—prepared to stalk Ahjvar and Ghu, or someone, over the snow. That did not suggest a curious hunting party or a chieftain’s men out to claim a passage-toll, even leaving aside that the three dead were no natives of this place.
“Go on, up.”
He took the crossbow and hooked the quiver to his belt before he followed.
“Who were they?” he demanded, as the shaman, keeping a wary distance from Jiot, climbed the wall.
The Denanbaki glanced down at the nearest. “Nabbani,” she said briefly, and spat on the body. “Assassins.”
“Not friends of yours?” He prodded and pointed to steer the woman up what might once have been a street of the city, picking up his coats on the way. “Up. Right up to the top of the hill.” The words came more easily with each one he managed. Speak like she was a dog, an honest creature in the world, which she might, after all, be. “I want to see who else is crawling around here wearing a dead sheep.”
“No one is here. Only the dead. We don’t come here,” the woman said. “It is cursed.”
“Today, you did. And it isn’t cursed. I’m cursed,” he said, and suddenly laughed, as if he were on the bare edge of too much wine. “I cursed a whole folk, once. So trust me, I can tell. This hill is quite empty of curses and gods and anything at all, except maybe more of your friends.”
“Nabbani,” she said again. “Not my friends. There are no more, only you and I, alive. The hill is cursed, even its stones. The hill remembers the god who died and the devil who killed him.” But the shaman nevertheless trudged upward without demur, moving as Ahjvar directed, using her hands on the bare turf of the steep banks of the terraces.
“I kill people who work spells on me,” he said.
The shaman nodded, resigned, and did not point out that she was the only one still alive. Ahjvar found this irritating, but he still felt drunk with the aftermath of the fight, the fire in the blood dancing in the void of exhaustion, and perhaps he was not thinking clearly.
Up on the height, the wind sounded like rushing water in the crown of trees about the ruined tower. He pointed at the ground and she sat meekly with her back against a stone, hands withdrawn into her sleeves and folded on her knees. He knelt to clean his sword and shrug on his coats again. Shivering. So was she, but not with cold.
Lots of weeds growing here, dead stalks about the base of the stones and the narrow trees. He didn’t see exactly what he wanted, but, if he let his mind drift, didn’t watch his hands, it didn’t matter. Old grass would do. She watched as he knotted brittle stalks.
“You weren’t with those Nabbani of your own will, were you?”
The shaman hesitated. “You speak for a god?”
“I’m not speaking for anyone.”
The woman frowned, nodded at the grasses in his working hands. “Shaman. Wizard. God-touched.”
“Maybe.”
“You are an enemy of Nabban?”
“No.”
“The Nabbani said you were. Not you, but the one you serve. They said.”
“The Nabbani didn’t know me. Obviously. Or him. No, first, who are you? What were the Nabbani to you, if not your friends? You were working with them.”
“They have poisoned my brother’s daughter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They said they would cure her if we gave them aid. But I think it was a lie. We had to hope it was not a lie, of course we had to hope, but we thought they lied, my brother and I, and now they are dead and you will kill me, so I will not even be able to search them. She will die, too.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“Those who come to Letin hunting this enemy of Nabban will die. I saw it.”
“Seeing does not set the pattern. Deeds do. We’re not enemies of Nabban. And you’re not hunting me, are you?”
She shook her head.
“Not my enemy, not my friend’s enemy?”
“No.”
“Good. No reason to kill you, then. Stay here.”
He cast the knotted grasses to the wind and watched how they broke apart, falling, the scatter of them on the snow. They told of emptiness, not concealment. And, because he no longer trusted himself, he spanned and loaded the bow, left the shaman sitting and walked the circuit of the tower. No tracks crossed the snow to shelter in the brush there, no patches of bare grass were so placed as to let someone reach it without leaving a sign, and nothing stirred anywhere up the road to the north or on the empty hills. They had followed in his and Ghu’s own camel-tracks, of course, to reach the ruins.
The shaman sat resigned where he had left her. No place to run, no safety she could reach from a man with a crossbow in the time his circuit had taken him, but she should have tried. Either she trusted his word, or she believed her own foreseeing and counted herself already dead. Or possibly, with Jiot lying close by and watching her, she had not dared to move.
“They poisoned your niece. Why?” He stood with his back against a poplar trunk, watching the east along the watercourse where Ghu had gone.
“They came to us because we are close to the road, close to the border, too. They said they were servants of the empress in Nabban.”
“Empress?”
“The emperor is dead. The empress wars against her younger brother. These said only, they were servants. It’s said the new empress claims the title of Daughter of the Old Great Gods, tha
t a prophet has said she is chosen by the Mother and Father to take their place. They speak of her so in Dernang. We hear. These said, an enemy came, an enemy of Nabban, a false prophet who would bring war and the destruction of the empire.”
“From what I’ve heard, the Nabbani are doing that quite well on their own.”
“They said we were to give them aid in finding and killing him. They needed a wizard, because their own had stayed behind in Nabban to serve the lord of the empress’s army there. The lord of Dernang wars with the empress in the name of the Mother and Father, I think.” She looked up at him. “Thus they came to our winter settlement, to demand the service of shamans from the chieftain Ganzu, who is my brother. There is only the one, myself. I went to the spring of our goddess and sang the prayers and danced for her, and slept there and dreamed. I saw that those who sought to hunt this enemy of Nabban would die, but our goddess told me, aid Nabban and you may yet live, but be certain it is the truth of Nabban you aid. I rode back to the settlement and they had poisoned my brother’s daughter, Shui his heir. They thought to enforce our obedience to their will, as if we were slaves of their own. They demanded I track their enemy with the gifts of my goddess. I told my brother what I had seen, that those who went would die, and I asked him to send me. He would have killed them then and buried them at his daughter’s feet, knowing they lied when they said they could undo what they had done, but I thought I might yet find if they did have some means to save her, and I went back to the spring and begged our goddess Galicha of the spring to do all she could, to preserve the girl’s life a little longer. Her hand is on Shui, but she cannot drive the poison from the child’s blood. Shui’s feet are on the road to the Old Great Gods already, our goddess says. And yet I had to have hope. That, she said as well, our goddess did. I should have hope in our enemy. I thought she meant Nabban. Nabban has always been our enemy.
“Then I threw the stones and saw that the one they sought would be at Letin, so we rode here, and watched from a distance as the one walked away to the east. We came here first, thinking the servant hunted and the master waited, but we found only you. The Nabbani decided to wait while you made your prayers with the sword, thinking to take you unawares as you came back wearied to your camp to make a fire against your master’s return. They would question you before they killed you, they said, and learn more of your lord and what power had sent him against their new god. They did not tell me these things. They did not think I had the true Imperial tongue, but we sell horses and fleeces in Dernang, and I speak for my brother with the lord of Choa, so I heard and understood them, and I said nothing. I hoped they would speak of my niece, but they did not.”
