by K V Johansen
Ghu stooped and pulled him up. What to say? This Kangju was hardly the only one to be silenced by fear. In all the empire, the thousands . . . He shook his head, wordless. The man stared, pupils dilated black, spilling tears, and clutched Ghu’s hands. Not blind, but blinded. The wizardry still clung about him, isolating him from—something else. Ahjvar’s doing. Scent of sap, torn bark. He pulled the man’s inner tunic back from his chest, scored and bleeding, slashed and slashed again, not deep but savage. The cloth itself was not cut.
“Who did this to you?” he asked gently. “Nang Kangju . . .”
“I couldn’t come to you with her mark on me,” the wizard said simply.
“Whose mark?”
“The goddess’s. The sign of our service to the empress.”
“All of the empress’s servants are marked?”
“No, holy one. Only the chosen.”
“The wizards?”
“No, holy one. Only a few of us. We aren’t to speak of it. We don’t know who, but—people talk. Or one sees. I don’t know why I was among them. Perhaps because I was always a true dreamer, I don’t know. I only know we are summoned, a few. And she has us marked by her own tattooist. It was a great honour.” His face twisted, tears spilling. “Forgive me, lord.”
Black, amidst the sticky red. Tattoo. Ghu covered it again. Better it did scar, maybe. Break the pattern, whatever it was. Whatever it did.
A dreamer, not a scholar after all. Souls drawn away, lost to the Old Great Gods. Would the wizard Ahjvar had thrown from the stairs have such a tattoo? Would Zhung Musan? He must have Yeh-Lin look before the bodies were buried. But Kangju’s sightless eyes were a more immediate matter.
“Ahjvar, can you—did you mean to blind him?”
Ahjvar stood back to him now, watching the room, sword still in hand. They were the focus of all eyes, but from a safe distance.
“What?” Weary confusion, not looking around. “I don’t know. What did I do?”
Ghu did not think it would be lasting. It was only a spell worked in haste, to stop him seeing . . . mirror, there had been a mirror or some reflecting surface, Kangju had watched as they crossed the mulberry orchard. He was only dazed, dazzled, not so much blind as unseeing, to prevent him being the eyes of another . . .
Eyes of another, bound in blood and ink. But for a soul to be snatched away—
Later.
The shape of Ahjvar’s spell—neat and precise, it was, for all its haste, which maybe should not have surprised him—was indescribable, not to be grasped by eyes or hands, but a shape none the less. Ghu simply unmade it, released the channelled power, borrowed of the earth’s life, to flow as it would again; the wizardry did not resist him.
The wizard blinked, more tears spilling, and tried again to kneel.
“Go to the Kho’anzi, to Lord Daro Korat,” Ghu said, and looked around, beckoned a young Daro soldier. That name, too, he could find, if he sought it, as if the Mother held them all, every breathing soul of the land, and her passage through him had left them here. And what else? “Take him to the Kho’anzi, Daro Nai. Tell your lord, here is an imperial wizard who wants to swear renewed service to the gods.”
The soldier bowed and took the wizard’s arm, not ungently, when Ghu handed him off. He gave Ahjvar a wide berth, though.
Ahj did not look well, grey and sweating, when he turned back from watching the soldier away.
“Ahj?”
He seemed to have to grope for words, swallowing, frowning. “Burning,” he said at last.
Ghu’s heart clenched. “No, Ahjvar, it’s not.” You’re not? Now he was afraid, as he had not been even with Zhung Musan’s blade swinging for his throat.
“Smoke.”
“That’s outside, remember?” He took Ahjvar’s arm, wanted to pry that sword from his hand but did not suppose Ahjvar was going to let it go. “Yeh-Lin will take care of it, whatever it is. Maybe only the kitchens. We’re going that way. Come. Walk.”
“I know it’s not real. I can see—I can see you. You’re all white light. I can—but there’s fire. That—who was he?”
“Wizard, Ahj. You didn’t hurt him. He meant no harm. I sent him to the Kho’anzi.”
“Wizard. I—he was—a thing, in the fire.” Barely audible. “He was her. Burning. Black and still moving. Don’t let me go. Don’t let me near anyone. I can hear the fire, Great Gods, Ghu, help me. I’m so tired now and I can’t trust what I see—”
“Look at me. Look at me, not the wall.” Ahjvar’s eyes were wide, blind as the wizard’s had been, and staring over Ghu’s shoulder. “See me. You’re—dreaming. Awake and dreaming. Come.”
“Too many people.” But the eyes found him, did see.
“Good. Yes. We’ll go outside. Come.”
He gripped hard, didn’t let Ahjvar break away from him. He spoke Praitannec, not allowing silence in which shadows could grow. Warning him of every encounter, as if he did guide a blind man through a perilous landscape.
Across the gravelled terrace again, bright now in new sunlight, down steps into another walled yard, where the buildings of the kitchens and kitchen-stores were. Ahjvar shrugged himself free from Ghu’s grasp, dragged the back of a hand across his face.
“I can’t stay here,” he said.
“I know.”
Stir and bustle and shouting, all the usual life within. People must eat, whoever ruled the keep, but here was a quiet corner behind the woodshed, shadowed and mossy and overlooked. Ghu led Ahjvar into it.
“Too many people.” Ahjvar shook his head as if to clear it. “Even silent, there’s too much noise, something like noise, I can’t—”
“It’s all right, Ahj. It’s all right.”
Eyes shut, Ahjvar sank down to his heels. He shivered, coatless, wet with others’ blood. His own, too.
Ahjvar couldn’t go on this way. Not among people. Ghu could not always hope to stop him when he saw some horror that wasn’t there and struck to kill enemies a year gone from the world. He squatted down on his heels as well and tilted his face to the sun.
There truly was a tang of smoke, harsh in the air. That could not help. None clouded the sky, though.
“Ghu . . .” Ahjvar’s hand groped and found his. Cold, as if there were no life left in him.
No peace. No healing in this world. He began to fear that was so, and he could not hold Ahjvar here in torment, he would not.
Not yet, not here, not like this. Not in blood and fear and weary defeat, with the unburied dead all around him. Let him at least die in some tranquil place, let there be beauty about him, not walls, not—
“You can’t have a madman at heel and call yourself the gods’ chosen heir. I’ll hurt someone.”
No answer to that. He rubbed the hand he gripped, trying to warm it.
“I can still hear fire,” Ahjvar said, very low.
“No. You can’t.”
“I know. I’m just telling you.”
“Ahjvar . . .”
“I can see you. I know you’re true. I’m not so sure of anything else now. Why? I’ve gone longer than this without sleep, and merciful Great Gods, that was an honest fight if ever there was one, no murder.”
Maybe. It was not the greatest weight that made a camel’s knees buckle, but the last. The last wave that drowned a man. And there was fire here, and death, many deaths, the pressure of too many unshriven ghosts, and wizardry. Ahjvar was lost, drowning, and every buffeting wave one closer to too many. No sleep, either.
Ahjvar flinched, a convulsive clenching of his fingers and a hard grip he did not relax, as if Ghu’s hand were the only certainty, an anchor in a raging sea. The movement that startled him had only been a sparrow dropping down to the woodshed eaves, lifting away again in alarm as great as Ahjvar’s.
Anchor. With his free hand, Ghu dug into his coat’s deep pocket, found his purse, worked its neck open. Shells, picked up along the shore below the cliff. No. Pretty, but they were dead things. He was not sure why it should matt
er, but it did. Acorns, a few long, smooth acorns, capless, from the cork-oak grove behind the village. Curiosities gathered and carried because they caught the eye or were smooth to the touch. Memories of Sand Cove, of a place that was anchor for something that mattered, a time that had made him, as another person might carry some token of their god’s holy place when they went wandering, to remind them. Unlike the shells, the acorns held life.
“Hand.” Ahjvar didn’t react, so Ghu uncurled the one he held, pressed three acorns into the palm, folded the fingers over them. “There.”
“What?”
“Hold those. Acorns, from Sand Cove.”
“Why?”
“They’re real. So you’ll know. The acorns are real. Remember that. I picked them up—I think it was the day before the grape festival, that last autumn. You were just back; you’d gone to Gold Harbour without me.”
“That was a bad one.”
“Don’t. It’s the oaks you should remember. You don’t dream of acorns.”
Ahjvar turned them in his hand. Bemused? Distracted, anyhow. Distracted was good. And, “No,” he did agree. “I don’t.”
“So hold on to them, and know the fire you hear isn’t real. All right?”
Ahjvar eyed him. Ghu waited on half-wit boy, hoped for it, really, but Ahj only carefully, deliberately, transferred them to his left fist instead, to leave his swordhand free. He rolled them in his fingers as a man might some amulet of his god or a hermit’s meditation-beads. Then back to leaning on the wall, eyes shut again.
“I don’t know why it’s worse under a roof,” he said at last.
“Nowhere to run?”
“Huh. Nowhere for them to run, maybe. You think, thinking that in the back of my mind makes it worse?”
“Maybe.”
“Head aches,” he said, and sighed. “No coffee in this whole damned land, is there?”
“Coffeehouses in the Golden City and Kozing Port. Lots of trade, lots of merchants and sailors from south over the sea. It’s not coffee you need. Breakfast. Stay here. It’s safe, no one will come near.”
Ghu raided the kitchens and met with no protest, only wide-eyed service, saw the dogs fed, sent dishes up to be taken in to the Kho’anzi and all with him, since Liamin had not yet sent for food herself. Eat first, deal with corpses after, would have been his concern. Back to Ahjvar, who was turning an acorn through his fingers, staring at the ground. Ghu wrapped his own coat over him and made him eat the better half of the dish of rice and eggs and vegetables he had carried off. The beer was that meant for the slaves of the outer offices, not the folk of the household, and no better than he remembered, but Ahj had a little better colour afterwards, though he then fell asleep where he sat.
Ghu took Ahjvar’s sword, laid at his feet, and threw it aside out of reach, with himself between. He didn’t dare leave him to go in search of Yeh-Lin.
A blackbird was singing, but all else in this corner seemed quiet. An island, smelling of river and green and growing things. Despite himself Ghu sank away, uncoiling into the river that lived now within him, wrapping all the land in its waters.
Few words were left to the Mother. Ghu had only ever had few of his own, before he found Ahjvar and learnt in his silences to speak and not to fear.
He feared for Ahj, but Mother Nabban spared no thought for him or for the sin that was Ghu’s in taking over the curse that had bound murdered Catairlau into the world. Too late, too spent, too weak for judgement. Nothing left but the deep yearning to gather and hold all the land and ease its pain. Nothing left, so worn away was she with the too-great weight she had borne too long, since the days when all the goddesses had drawn into her and become one, to oppose the devil Dotemon and bind her in her grave.
Ghu’s greater sin was not his dead man, his living ghost, but that he brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon back into Nabban, and deluded himself he could use her.
All laid on the Mother’s lap. Offering.
Taken, and returned, gift for gift, for the Wild Sister within the Mother had dared what could not be dared, had been the heart and the passion and the will of her in the days when they fought the devil, and the Wild Sister’s will would dare yet. The Wild Sister within the Mother saw a darkness and a fire within the land, and what was there to set against it, but a darkness and a fire sworn to serve? So he might dare, her will, their will—his will was to dare to think Dotemon honest. For this time, in this place. He saw no other way.
The river was all rivers, all waters, the lakes about him, quiet with lilies white and blue, secret, tree-lined, stirring with swan and duck and crane, fringed with villages rising on stilts, boats swift and darting, cutting the surface, dragging their nets. The cold secret forest wells where deer and bear, monkey and great cat came to drink. Streams swift and stony and ringing loud, calm and earthen between green and growing fields, subjugated in canals, in pounds and paddies, alive and flowing, always flowing, from the mountains to the sea.
She, he, was pregnant with them, rebirth awaiting, in all their names, in all their waters.
But not yet. Not this lifetime. New strength must grow, the land must take back its heart.
She, Mother Nabban, drowned herself in him. Nothing left but the deep heart of her, of him, in him. A spring, the small upwelling, to seep and spread and overflow, to flood him, drown him, dissolve him, make him river. It hurt, as drowning, as birth, ever did.
Then there was only the river.
The mountain, distant, waited.
“Nabban?”
He woke slow and groggy. “Nabban!” The whisper was repeated, breath tickling his ear. Yeh-Lin, crouched beside him. Ahjvar was slumped over against him, heavy head on his shoulder, the sore one, and it ached. He slid himself free and lowered the man to the ground, shoving a sleeve of the coat under his head. Ahjvar stirred, but only to clench his fingers into the turf. It was worrying that he had not woken before Ghu did at Yeh-Lin’s approach.
She seemed to think so too. “Is he wounded?”
Ghu moved a few yards away and she followed. “No. Not to speak of.”
“Is he all right?”
“No.”
She sighed. “Ah, Nabban, what will you do with him?”
He shrugged. Not her concern. “The castle?” Sunset painting stripes of copper and fire on the white walls. The gods forgive, he had slept the day away. He felt half-drowned in sleep yet. He had dreamed . . .
“I have the north tower, and that was the last holding out for Zhung Musan. I went in myself after their captain, since he would not come out. He will not trouble you further. A patrol led by an imperial officer came against the western gate demanding entry from the town, much surprised to find it shut against them. I suggested Ti-So’aro inform him there was an outbreak of the bloody pox. They came in greater numbers and with a banner-lord, demanding speech with Zhung Musan. She said he was ill. They have retreated from the bridge back into the town and closed the gate at the town’s end, and there is a company at the eastern gate as well. Not openly threatening yet, but . . . now what? They are not such fools as to believe that tale for long, when there is no outbreak in the town. We have, maybe, the night, before they assault the gates, I would guess. If we had any allies at all I would order the bridges destroyed, but as it is, if we do not break out of here and take the town, somehow, we are finished. For now, any I thought we could not trust are confined. I have walked the walls to ward them against the spying of wizards and—and anything else which might seek to know what we do here. Will you come? Whatever else we do, the Kho’anzi must take the oaths of the soldiers and the Zhung lords willing to renounce the emperor, which is most of them, and they are in such a fervour of faith . . . they must swear to you, before it ebbs. They have to swear to something, after all.”
Ghu hesitated. “They can make their oaths to the gods of Nabban. You don’t need me. You’ll know who lies.”
“You must—”
“No. No ‘must.’” Grimly. “Let them lay their hands on th
e bier of the daughter of the priests to make their oaths to the Father and Mother. I won’t be there.”
Ahjvar muttered in his sleep.
“Nabban, you—”
“They think they’ve seen the will of their gods. Good. They have. They don’t need to see a slave of the stables. I need to go to my gods. You, Yuro, Liamin, Ti-So’aro, Ario, the wizard Nang Kangju, the Kho’anzi’s faithful lords and captains—you can do what must be done here. Look at Kangju’s chest, a tattoo he’s tried to cut. Find out what it is. Look for tattoos on the soulless dead. Zhung Musan. The other wizard. Look on the living. They were marked by the empress herself, for this goddess that she claims she has become.”
“Ah? As on the assassins of the Wind in the Reeds in Denanbak? Very well. So. What of Dernang? Do we take it?”
“Yes,” Ghu said. Did it need saying? “Of course. What else can we do? But I’m going to the mountain. You do what you can, when you can.”
“You’re leaving? Just you and your madman?”
“And the dogs.”
“Oh, and the dogs. We have enemies at our gates, Nabban.”
“I go the way I came.”
“Just slipping out in the night? They will kill you on the roads.”
“No.”
“The town is garrisoned with half the army Zhung Musan brought north.”
“I know. Make them ours.”
“How?”
“You are Yeh-Lin. What would you do?”
“You want them as allies?” she hissed. “I would destroy the gates of their town and pull down the houses of their commanders, and set a fire upon the tents of the camp in the horsefair.”
“Did I say, Dotemon?”
“Ah.” She blinked at him. Smiled. “So you do trust me, heir of Nabban?”
“Was that a test of my intentions?”
She shrugged, still smiling. “Ti-So’aro and I have spoken—a young woman of energy and enthusiasm, that. Rash, perhaps. She reminds me of myself as a girl, a little. The Kho’anzi, too, has made suggestions. He has rested and woken with more of his wits about him. Ti-So’aro has kin among those of the lesser nobility of Zhung Clan who serve with this army, and though the lords have their household troops, most of the common soldiers are conscripts. They hardly know who or what they serve, and few are truly happy at being told their gods are dead and that they must worship a new god of the empress’s court. It will be easy enough to get into the camp, which is outside the town walls, and Ti-So’aro thinks getting within the town will not prove too difficult, either. Her elder brother commands at the southern gate. A ruin and a makeshift barricade is all it is, still. They put their rebuilding efforts to some temple rather than their walls. So she and hers will go, once darkness falls, and tell that the true heir of the gods is come to bring justice to the land. She says, some will listen. Thus I till the ground and sow my seeds. After that . . . I do what I can.”
