by K V Johansen
“Fear has nothing to do with it. Why would I fight for what I have only to take? And why would I trust some wizard from the colonies, which you clearly are?”
“What you have only to take?” She glanced aside at the crossbows. “I hear that your army is on the edge of mutiny, Lord Gahur.”
“Then you have heard lies.”
“Word of the return of the heir of the gods passes among your soldiery. The overthrow of the tyranny of the line of Min-Jan is proclaimed. Neither the conscripts nor the banner-lords and -ladies have any faith in this lie of the empress as goddess. She has murdered her brother and her father. Priests are slain throughout the land by her word.” Young Ti-So’aro had provided much rumour that would be of service this day. “Buri-Nai and the emperors before her have shown no care for the folk of this land, and the folk of the land are turning against her. A sensible man would lay down his sword and surrender command of the town to its rightful lord under the gods, but if you will not, then at least settle this with honour.”
His lip curled.
“Or I will have you shot down, here, now, and proclaim that the will of the gods, and if you say, we have not the numbers to withstand you, I say, are you so devoted to the usurper that your ghost will find consolation in that? Count the crossbows, Lord Hani Gahur. All with you alone their target. Your company may ride over us, but your armour could be dragon-scale wrought by the true Yeh-Lin herself and still you personally would not survive it. Don’t!” she snapped, as he raised a hand to lower the mask of his helmet, and he froze.
“Good,” she said, as he dropped his hand again and sat back. She pushed at him, just that little, not to bend his will but to nudge it. Would her god approve? No. But it bought lives. Not excuse enough? She restrained herself. A nudge, no more. He was all nerves and fear, not of her but of the eyes of his own officers. That need to be admired and an arrogant temper made a seething soup.
“It’s you who should be appointing another champion for this fight,” Gahur said. “Grandmother. But since you’ve made the challenge I’ll take it, and let Dernang be the prize.”
“And should fate give you the victory, the Kho’anzi Daro Korat and all his folk, and all your folk who have given their oath to the holy one of the gods, will suffer no reprisal from you, but be allowed to depart over the border to Denanbak.” She must make such a condition; he would expect it. “We fight not only for Dernang, but for command of your army, and the oaths of your officers to turn their backs on the empress and her false god and serve the true heir of the gods.”
“Very well. But I can’t command their oaths to the gods.”
Yeh-Lin gave a brief bow to the truth of that, which she had not expected him to acknowledge even to present a face worthy of respect to his officers. It was plain as mud in water he meant to honour nothing of this agreement once she was dead.
“You will have to make do with their oath to surrender to your command,” Hani Gahur continued, “on condition that they be allowed free passage to the Old Capital and return to the empress’s service.” His turn to make conditions for the look of the thing, his lip curling in a sneer. But he was confident. Wary, a little, suspecting some trickery, but confident in himself against a woman old enough to be—surely not his grandmother? Yes.
She ought to have left more black in her hair.
They rode together to meet face-to-face under the shadow of the gatehouse, each with two witnesses to hear their bargain made again and formally, invoking the Old Great Gods. He ordered up the young Palm Badge wizard who had hung back among the ranks, to ensure no wizardly trickery. Yeh-Lin took Yuro and Lord Raku from the small company which had followed her. Her own wizard was busy with Lady Ti-So’aro, sowing mutiny throughout the town, and she feared no treachery any wizard of Hani Gahur’s could arrange, even were there another, hidden from her. But no, when she reached out briefly searching again . . . nothing. She shrugged off the nagging feeling that there should be.
The negotiations were tedious and exasperating, and she would concede to none of Lord Gahur’s fishing for greater delay. She would not have him sending the most faithful of his officers off to find the truth of rumours of mutiny; she wanted haste to keep his anger and contempt, his humouring of the rebel folly and their misplaced faith in their pretender divine heir, on the boil. Have this over and done with, and send Daro Korat’s head rather than his person to Buri-Nai, that was Hani Gahur’s thought. And the head of this arrogant mercenary captain, too. She pressed, encouraging that set of his mind. Glory, when the empress received the salt-packed boxes. His success, blazing over Zhung Musan’s failure.
Here, now, not noon, not tomorrow’s dawn, by which time the rational sense of Daro Raku would have overruled the fool old woman. Here in the market square of the town, and Hani Gahur agreed, yes, laughing behind his teeth at her folly, her willingness to bring her little band into town, but she would not have him within the castle gates where he—or more practical officers among his following—might yet overturn all.
A play. A game for children. But he demanded further solemn oaths from her, by the Old Great Gods, that she would use no wizardry. She gave her most pious word.
Nine witnesses. He argued, for form’s sake, that there could be no fairness in that, no even balance. Nine, she said. It was the tradition of Praitan. The circle was made of nine, who should be bards and wizards of the tribes, but of course Nabban had no equivalent of the bards of Praitan. The scholars, those who were not clerks of the imperial court, were all poor scrabbling things, holy folk of Father Nabban, and the priestess of the town was, they told her, a crow-picked corpse.
Three from the castle—Yuro and Raku and a commoner, a middle-aged Zhung archer of Ti-So’aro’s following whom Yeh-Lin chose for her grim face. Three from Hani Gahur’s corps of officers, including his young wizard. Three picked from the streets of the town, witness for the judgement of fate—Yeh-Lin pointed at random to a man in a caravaneer’s coat, his head wrapped in a loose turban. He was Nabbani, but he wore his hair long, hanging in the many braids of the road. The man gave her a slow look, as if he considered protest, but then bowed and stepped forward. He moved like a warrior, fluid as a cat, and his face did not have the pinched look of this town’s hard winter. Mercenary? Spy? She would think the worse of Prince Dan’s competence if he did not have folk in this town. The caravaneer would bear investigation, later. Hani Gahur pointed to another caravaneer. Random chance or did he think strangers were required? This one was a woman, maybe a Marakander, with the amber eyes of the Grass, though her features were more north-provinces Nabbani, delicate and rounded, and she was very pale for a Grasslander. Well, make sure the next was for Dernang, then. Yeh-Lin pointed to an old man, beckoned him forward. So. Done.
Nine witnesses to make the circle, under the Old Great Gods. Neither she nor Hani Gahur believed anything but skill of the blade would determine this meeting, but they made yet again, and publicly, their most pious oaths, and declared again the stakes, command of castle and town and army, for all to hear.
Raku was seething; only the Kho’anzi’s order that Captain Lin was to be obeyed as if she spoke with Daro Korat’s own voice had kept him denouncing her and seizing mastery of the situation himself. Even so, he had given final orders behind her back. The castle gate was closed again, his sergeant left behind to prepare for what he believed was inevitable assault, after the deaths of all dragged by Yeh-Lin’s folly into the town.
“They’ll slaughter us, even if you can defeat Gahur,” he hissed in her ear now. “For the gods’ sake, for my lord and all the castle, let me take this fight. For your god’s sake, if you believe that’s what the horseboy is, don’t throw away what we’ve already won. We can stand a siege, wait for Prince Dan—”
“Shh, shh. I begin to think Prince Dan and his various ever-defeated armies nothing but foxfire. Trust me, my lord. Yuro does.”
The castellan, close by and looking worried despite her claim of his trust, pursed his lips but said
nothing.
“A slave-born bastard—”
“Hardly fit words to give your lord’s son.” Yeh-Lin didn’t need to pretend to coldness. Daro Yuro stood close enough to have heard that, and she was deciding she rather liked the man. Pity she hadn’t shown up looking twenty years younger.
“No, I mean—my apologies, my lord Yuro—” That sounded stiff, but honest. “—I don’t doubt his—his honour, but what experience does he have to judge?”
“You think he rose to stable-master blindfold and stopping his ears with wax? A wiser man in judging men and women than a lord who sees only the bowing masks of servility. He trusts me—do you not, my lord castellan? And your lord the Kho’anzi does, and my young god does, and your word if not your faith is given there. Now go to your place, like a good boy.”
“He’s almost twice your weight, woman, and less than half your age!”
“Oh, please. He is neither. Well, perhaps the latter, I will grant you, but I intend neither to wrestle nor seduce him. Trust me.” She winked. “After all, I was ruling this empire when your great-great-greats were in their swaddling clothes, was I not?”
Raku blew out his breath in a groan. “And what was the purpose of that? Childish! It didn’t have a chance of intimidating him. It only lowered you to a fool in his eyes and gained you his contempt. He thinks you’re a joke, a symptom of our lord’s desperation and delusion.”
“It did indeed.” She shook her head. “Poor fool.”
Yuro gave her a long look as he stepped away to his place, and, in his narrowed eyes, a little uncertainty. Raku turned on his heel and stalked to the station she had appointed him, between the male caravaneer and the Palm Rank wizard. Brave man. He thought he would not live out the morning. Or perhaps foolish, when it was only honour and his lord’s command that held him here against all his better judgement.
Same thing in the end, the girl she had been might once have said. Dotemon . . . would now disagree.
“I serve the young god of Nabban,” she said, bowing to the imperial commander. “With my blade and my life, I will prove the truth of my words. He is heir of the dying gods, and this land and its folk are his, and your empress is a tyrant and a usurper and a false goddess, a deceit and an outright lie.”
He had been warned. She had given him her name. He ought to have doubted his own impulse to take this challenge and silence the mocking old woman. He need not have given in to it, embraced it, even, in anger at the insult of her existence, in the mingled fear and relief he felt at Zhung Musan’s death, in his desire to come to the notice of the empress. And he stood in the circle of witness before the Old Great Gods with deceit in his heart, faithless in his word. If she fell, Yuro and Raku and the handful of officers and their escort of crossbows would be butchered, and the castle taken, and Lord Daro Korat slain. He intended it.
A ritual of execution with a throw of the dice, a nod to reckless fate. Had Catairlau enjoyed this moment, in the days when he stood as his father’s rihswera, the king’s champion of the Duina Catairna? Savoured the heat that smouldered in the heart under the cold and observing eye?
Lord Hani Gahur bowed. She did. Visors lowered.
They met with formality, the careful sparring of training. Hani Gahur—nearly all the lords—favoured broad, single-edged blades, heavier than the sabres of the Great Grass style that were the preferred sword of the caravan road. Shorter than her double-edged antique of the old empire. She doubted his edge could match hers, though she would as soon lay her limbs under a meat cleaver as let him test it on her.
No one could say he had not been warned.
Ivah had more than half a mind to pull concealment around her and slip away, the moment they all began moving away from the bridge, up to the wider space of the market square, but she had to admit a fascination, too, in the outcome of this challenge. She recognized the form of the duel from her Praitannec gang-mate Buryan’s stories. It was a judgement of the gods, or an execution. But the woman was no warrior of Praitan. No one of her age who had lived by the sword would show so little sign of it. Leanly muscular, as a dancer was. Beautiful, before she hid herself with the helmet’s ornate mask. If she had been younger, Ivah thought she might have fallen in love with such a face, or at least been moved to contemplate it, and its no doubt complete disinterest in her, gloomily over a cup of wine if there was one to be had in Dernang. High cheekbones, long, slender hands, long-lashed eyes warm, dark brown. She had been unscarred. Unmarked by care, by sun, by wind; she might have spent a lifetime keeping carefully withindoors and cosseting her face with orangewater and milk baths. Her sword was not in the style of any other weapon Ivah had yet seen in Nabban, and yet the brocade-covered scabbard was without doubt Nabbani work. She had seen such long, straight blades, with the silk ribbons of the tassel flying from the hilt, in the illustrations of old Nabbani scrolls in the library of Marakand when she had been making her new copy of The Balance of the Sun and the Moon.
Yeh-Lin. The woman dropped the name either to rattle Hani Gahur’s nerves, or to have him think her a senile braggart. A game.
Old woman playing games, with a province at stake . . .
A grandmother dances at the funeral, the coins had told her that morning, which was one of the more cryptic hexagrams. Ivah was still not certain what she ought to make of that, as advice, and had decided ruefully that a hasty throw to determine the tenor of the day bordered on uneducated superstition and she ought not to do it.
She told herself so, every time she did.
Perhaps she ought not to have ventured out.
Yeh-Lin, after all, was her grandmother—rather a few generations removed.
Which made that brief moment of even hypothetical attraction—well, never mind.
The centre of the market was cleared. “You,” the captain-general said, pointing at Ivah. “Stand there. You are a witness for the Old Great Gods. And you . . .” She arrayed them all, while Lord Hani stretched and went through self-conscious exercises, nearly preening for the crowd. Ivah eyed sidelong the blank-faced rebel lord with a mace who was placed to one side of her and the nervous-looking young imperial wizard in her indigo-blue robe on the other. Neither took any interest in her. Her fellow caravaneer was not someone she had seen around town, or on the road. He looked very well-fed; he had not been in Dernang long. A handsome man a little younger than the captain seemed, fifty, perhaps, grey but still in his full strength.
Caravaneer. Huh. She had walked beside him. His coat did not reek of camels, and he too, watched everything, studying them all. His face showed nothing.
He would not have come from the winter desert or Denanbak in those horseman’s boots.
No more formality, no prayers. The captain saluted, touching her blade to her forehead.
“Are you quite ready, my lord?” She lunged at him, a mere warning.
At first they were careful, as if each knew what the other meant to do and only went through an exercise. They circled like two dogs sniffing, finding their place, a rhythm. A fight to the death. The tassel of the captain’s sword was red, but the ribbons of her helmet were blue, blue as the silk that unfurled from the top of the castle keep as the banners burned.
Blue as the sky, breaking to ribbons and banners around her god.
A grandmother dances at the funeral. Ivah was cold as if hit with a gust of wind off the winter desert. Hard to swallow. Here. She was blind. She had come where she ought to be. And in that dizzying moment she saw the woman truly, black hair long, not cut short, flying out from beneath her helmet, her armour, a style so different from what the other lords wore, not black but bright rose and deep blue, gleaming like a beetle in the sun. She knew the grin, the teeth bared, half concentration, half pure pleasure, even if she could not see it, and for a moment there was an echo dancing with her, the faintest hint of a trailing aurora, shimmering pearl-colours. Blinked and it was gone.
Devils shaping dreams. A part of her wanted to cry out for her god, as if he faded, vanish
ed, revealed as the devil’s lie.
She still could not doubt her vision. No. But he was not here.
Hani Gahur was no poser; she would not want to face him herself. They moved like dancers in silk. The devil did dance, a willow in the wind, a wind in the bamboo, a swallow in the air. Her ribbons, blue and scarlet, traced patterns in the air like the passage of dragons.
Now they were much closer to this side of the circle than they had been. The devil leapt the lord’s heavy blade as it swept low and sent him backwards, off balance the briefest of moments, with an elbow in the chest as she whirled past him, drawing him back towards the centre. Ivah heard the grunt of his breath then, and the devil kicked his blade aside as he came at her. Her stroke hissed over his armour. They became as leaves in a gale, the flash and the flicker and swirl of them. A long dagger bloomed in Yeh-Lin’s left hand. No wizardry; she had drawn it from her belt in the time it took to blink. Perhaps it was a technique of the old court sword. Scrape and thump as Hani Gahur’s sword struck and the devil went down to the dirty paving stones. Someone cried out, but Ivah had seen it coming; Yeh-Lin had already been moving that way. The blow had done nothing; it was the lord who staggered back graceless and was suddenly loud in his gasping for breath. Yeh-Lin’s long dagger was wet, two fingers’ breadth of it stained and all of one edge. No hesitation, no merciful pause to ask if Hani Gahur would yield as she rolled gracefully up to follow him. Her blade struck past his once and again and then she thrust with a grunt, the first sound she had made. With her dagger-hand she struck the lord’s forearm aside and he was on his knees, her sword slick and dark withdrawing.
