Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “I don’t want to.”

  “No. But I think Ivah speaks a little Northron, if we ever get curious.”

  Ghu stripped, regardless that one of the pages laying out towels was a girl a bit too old to be stripping in front of, and slid into the water, sinking beneath it.

  “Out,” Ahjvar told the three of them, and the tallest, the girl, with the littlest half-hiding behind her, bowed, and said, “Yes, my lord, we’re to go bathe Jui and Jiot now, but Lady Lin says we have to tell you to wash your hair. And the holy one’s, too. And there is a comb. And a razor.”

  “You’ve told me,” he said levelly. The smallest boy was afraid, though the elder two were old enough to sense they were being used, and they seemed to trust it was not to their harm. Yeh-Lin was cruel to use any of them to carry her jokes, regardless. “Now go tell her you’ve said so.”

  He waited for their retreat and wedged the door with a knife, since there seemed no other way to hold it against casual entry—it was mostly Yeh-Lin he expected to stroll in, truth be told. But he laid his sword unsheathed on the pool’s edge before he ever took of his boots. Ghu had resurfaced and watched him undress, eyes solemn.

  “Are you going to wash my hair?”

  There was soap, good Five Cities soap smelling strongly of lavender, left pointedly by the pages. Ahjvar threw it at him.

  Better to think of Yeh-Lin as playing auntie again than as quietly appointing herself overseer and master of the god, as though he were some favoured pet being groomed to perform well and prettily for guests. The children had left clean clothing for them, and all the outer garments, trousers and smock-like shirt and quilted knee-length coat, low boots, were black. The style of north Nabban, not the light gowns of the south. Wool and cotton, not lordly silk. She risked no arguments from Ghu on that point. Ahjvar might have objected, but even he had to admit their old rags were better burnt. These were not redyed cast-offs but hasty work by some seamstresses, he suspected. Everything fit his height and length of limb. The work of slaves, again. Praitannec blanket and headscarf he kept, and found she had been into their belongings. Ghu turned from shaking out a coat to hold up the leopard-headed bracelets that had tumbled from it.

  Ahjvar, strapping on knives, shook his head.

  “Wear them,” Ghu said, and brought the gold to him. “Yes.”

  So he did not argue, but let Ghu put the royal bracelets of the Duina Catairna on him, turn him and tie back his hair.

  “Respectable?” he did ask.

  “No.” A slow curl of smile. “But something.”

  The last of the sunset had faded from the west and fog was crawling over the castle’s curtain wall, rising from the flooded lands that had made them an island; rising, too, from the ornamental pond, flowing up the narrow alleys between the walled gardens and courtyards. No pages waited like herd-dogs to chivvy them, only Jui and Jiot, fluffy and chastened and smelling of rosemary against fleas, not that they had had any. No lurking devil. The castle appeared to sleep. The moon rode, a waxing crescent, high overhead, a narrow boat hidden and revealed in a churning sea of black cloud. The wind gusted uncertainly.

  “Is she waiting to corner us again?” Ahjvar asked, and found it easy to stand with his arm around Ghu, there in the dark, taking his leaning weight.

  “Probably.” A yawn. “Can you sleep, if we go in? Under a roof?”

  “No.” The old panic edged nearer at the thought, the closeness of people, of lives, breathing. His grip tightened on Ghu, whose head turned against his shoulder in response.

  “We neither of us belong within walls anymore,” Ghu said, muffled against him. “Not these walls. Come.”

  They found a walled garden, a small place all moss and stone, dead feathery grass bleached white by winter, new shoots rising from the heart of the clumps, sculpted junipers scenting the air. Art making an echo of the wild.

  “I never knew this was here,” Ghu said. It was a shrine to the Father, of course. There was an altar of sorts, an unshaped slab of stone, half wrapped in junipers and tall grass.

  Again, Ahjvar jammed the gate with a broad knife. Ghu pulled him in under the layered trees with the altar at their backs, out of the drizzle that was beginning again, breathless suddenly, urgent, not yawning now, stripping sword and knives and coat from him and not worried where they fell.

  The soap may have been scented with lavender; Ghu’s skin and hair smelt of moss and water-splashed stone and crushed ferns, like the springs above Swajui. Ahjvar breathed him in, tasted him, lips, fingertips, gave himself up to the hands and mouth that travelled the shape of him in the dark, teeth, tongue, till they were wound together skin to skin and he was lost in darkness, dissolved in the chill of rain and drowned in the deep moss under him, and the man was a river, and starlit snow, and stone. If he cried out, it wasn’t in protest at his dreams. Slept, holding Ghu curled half over him, head on his shoulder, and woke only once clenching his fingers in Ghu’s hair, the sparse flesh of his ribs, the bone beneath. Ghu made some faint moan, caught at his hand without waking, fingers coiling to ease the grip. Ahjvar was shivering but silent. No. Only dream. No fire, no burning flesh. He forced his breath to slow, turned his face in Ghu’s hair.

  Warm. Held. Safe.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  A sea coast, somewhere. Jagged grey stone slick with bladderwrack, conifers Yeh-Lin did not recognize tilting over and tumbling down a seamed cliff, clinging with roots like snakes. Towering things, the ones more firmly-rooted, marching inland, bigger around than the house in which she had been born. Tree like a mountain, to hold up the sky. A small shape, bird-tiny, moved among the broken stones where the low cliff crumbled, climbing, but the size was illusion cast by the trees. A human shape, a tall woman all in grey and earthen-brown, her hair a long, pale braid. Hardly to be seen when she stood still. She did move with the surety of a bird over the stones, swift and balanced, never hesitating over a foothold, hardly needing to use a hand to steady herself, even where the tumbled rocks were steepest. She reached the top and stood looking into the trees.

  Yeh-Lin knew her. Surely.

  Two swords. A Northron sword belted at her hip, gilded hilt, a flash of garnets. Slung on her back, another. Black scabbard. Silver hilt. There was . . . a heaviness to it. Something that drew, not the eye, but the centred heart of her, as if deep in Yeh-Lin’s chest a lump of iron were pulled to a lodestone. Where? She had never seen such trees.

  The woman turned, met her watching awareness. Knew her presence, as Yeh-Lin knew that pale, harsh-boned Northron face. Smiled, not in welcome. Yeh-Lin would have spoken regardless, called to her, but the waves rolled and curled, foaming white as they flung themselves up the rocks in a sudden gale that whistled through the needles, moved branches like scudding clouds, like rafts against the sky, tore leaves from the heavy green undergrowth. And she was gone. Lost in that wild movement, slipped away into the forest, or flown like a leaf ripped free.

  Yeh-Lin reached into the vision after her, but there was nothing to grasp, no trail to follow. The Northron might never have been.

  “Vartu!” she shouted anyway, breaking the silence of the night.

  No answer. Of course not. Only the children in the outer room stirring, mumbling.

  “Go back to sleep,” she whispered, and felt them sink away again, into quiet dreams. She put her mirror aside and rose from the pallet that was her bed to cross to the window in this upper apartment of the old north keep. The shutter was lifted, letting the night air in. The scent of the river was strong, the fields to the north pale with moonlight. Bats, owls, foxes out there . . . all the creatures proper to the night. Nothing more.

  Yeh-Lin padded back to the bed and lay down, hands folded over the mirror against her heart, not looking into it. Cold. It did not warm to her flesh.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Ghu and the assassin who was his shadow drifted about the castle and the town, rarely seen, once the lords had been set to make their own way on the path the gods approved. The
holy one was among them often enough that they appeared to feel him a presence in all their counsels. The castle folk took it for granted the heir of their gods might come and go like a bird, a ghost about the town and the White River Dragon, with no regard for walls. Ivah thought they actually lived in the gardens and the loft of one of the stables and simply avoided the folk because they were as shy as thieves. They had the look of wild things, the wary watchfulness, as well as the calm assurance of a wolf in its own land, and they carried the scent of the river and the forest. And horses, and hay, which was why she suspected the stables, and possibly the collusion of Castellan Yuro and his people in their avoidance of Yeh-Lin’s civilizing intentions.

  It didn’t matter if Ghu were some physical avatar or incorporeal god who chose to take so ordinary a man’s form. Those who had come to the holy one in a fervour of faith did not waver; others, who followed where the Kho’anzi led or because they did not approve a faith that slew the priests, kept perhaps their doubts, but found nothing to denounce. He was there when he was needed; the folk of the town and the countryside said that. They came to him cautious, shy, carrying troubles too great. So many lost ones, so many slipping away into despair. He rarely said much, but the folk, and the land itself, seemed to take new heart as the floods receded and the earth greened, walls, roofs rising, the oxen put to the plough, the little fishing boats on the river again.

  A week, she had been working on this binding. No divination. She thought she already knew where the lost prince might be found. She had her father’s eyes. Her uncle had his sister’s. And the set of her mouth in a jaw that was hers made masculine, and . . . she did not know, she only suspected from the nagging familiarity there had been in his face when first she saw it, and what the coins gave her confirmed what she thought. Which made this a matter for the god, not for Dwei Ontari.

  Better to leave him lost. There were heirs enough to the Peony Throne without him.

  No. She pushed the thought away. Nagging. Scratching at her.

  She did not want the damned empire. Why did her thoughts keep whispering that she should? As if her father’s ghost lingered and reproved her lack of ambition, her hiding, as she had used to hide her face, eyes downcast, behind the curtain of her hair.

  Meet me, she had asked, this morning at the shrine of the Father in the town. She had given the message to Yeh-Lin’s pages, with no idea where the god might be. If he could be found, they would find them. Meanwhile she waited, tried to meditate, finding her way, warily, into yet another of her father’s practices that she had once rejected.

  To clear her mind of the chatter of the world, the stir and hurry of it, was no easy thing here at the gate of the shrine, though it was habitable again, and inhabited. She had claimed the bench in the porch, new and yellow as the unpainted doors, with bark still clinging to the edges of the raw planks. There was even a priest again, a worried little man who had arrived only the day before, saying his dreams had called him to serve in Aoda’s place. He had come up through Vanai and Shihpan from Taihu away down the western mountains, a free tailor’s youngest who, for all his hard-won education, had never before left the town of his birth. His first act had been to borrow a mule, to go up to the forest of the holy mountain; he intended to bring back a sapling pine to replace the sacred tree. In his absence, the handful of homeless folk set by the new governor of Dernang to rebuild the shrine and to round up and care for the lost and homeless and orphaned children there carried on. Ghu seemed to approve both the priest and the gathering of orphans.

  The children were playing some noisy game in the courtyard, shrieking and laughing. Cross-legged on the bench, Ivah dropped her mother’s divining coins into the circle of the four-strand braid that was only one part of the larger binding, drawn in ink up and down both arms. Nabbani characters, not Northron runes, and ink, not blood, but the working had more the feel of the north than Nabban, she thought. Her father had worked much Northron wizardry into his Grasslander practices. She, too, could make a thing of her own.

  For all her mother had claimed otherwise, it was not wrong to break and overturn and remake the patterns of one’s traditions. Ahjvar worked so. She had watched him in the castle gardens, and perhaps others who did thought it only a sword-drill, but she saw the meditation it wove, and the way it worked, like Yeh-Lin’s nightly circling of the castle walls, to brush away some attention that reached and drifted and sought to see them. She knew Praitannec magic used no such dance.

  They talked in their councils of the empress as an usurper, the murderer of Emperor Otono and possibly Emperor Yao—small loss from what she heard—and many lords of the city. They did not call her Daughter of the Old Great Gods or debate why she took such a title. But that was there, she suspected, when Ghu and Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin talked alone. That was behind the devil’s nightly patrols and Ahjvar’s sword-patterns and restless fidgeting with broken twigs and sprigs of greenery. They did not include her yet. It didn’t matter. She would bring to them what she could, when the time was right.

  Would they come? And if they did not, should she go ahead? She was not sure.

  “Ivah?”

  Ivah looked up, startled. Ghu and Ahjvar, trailed by their dogs. No Yeh-Lin—good. Her inattention, their footsteps lost in the noise of the market and the shrieking of the children. Something about the assassin still prickled warning on her skin, and not only, she thought, the sense he always gave of being a predator only lightly leashed.

  “You already know where he is,” Ghu said. Not bothering to ask why she had wanted him.

  “I . . . think I do. A divination I made. It spoke—it wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone else. And—” Honesty, before her god. “I suspected anyway. There was a man I wondered about, before ever you came to Dernang. But Ghu, now I—I’m not sure, what I should do. I know Lord Ontari doubts me. His people have searched every cellar, every place a prisoner might be hidden and forgotten.” She shrugged. “But Dan isn’t hidden. He’s lost. Wounded and lost, and if he’s so hurt, if he is no longer able to be himself, should we bring him back at all?” From her satchel she pulled out the bound codex and the scroll both. “You read Nabbani, don’t you, Ahjvar? And you’re a wizard. What do you make of it?”

  She threw rapidly the remaining five falls of the hexagram, dropping and gathering, dropping and gathering the coins, forgetting that he wouldn’t likely be able to hold the unfamiliar patterns in memory.

  Ahjvar shrugged, squatting down beside her, watching the coins unblinking. Disturbing, the way he would stare like a cat, too singly focussed. Shook his head.

  She showed him the text in the bound book. “The gates stand closed without the key.” He took it, frowning over the official interpretations and commentaries, which were not entirely helpful, she considered, not in this case. Advice on further reflection and patience. She found, by long practice, the place in the scroll, and her mother’s tutor’s notes. That which was locked might be unlocked, if its truth could be recognized, said that commentary, but to recognize the truth, one must unlock the gate. . . .

  Ahjvar read that too, shrugged and pushed it back at her. “Means nothing to me, but my training’s a completely different tradition. I’m good at locks.” A narrow grin. “Find me one, and I’ll teach you.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’s a prisoner.”

  “No.” He sat back on his heels, peeling off a strip of soft, almost ropey bark from the fresh-split wood of the bench, shaving that into slivers with a narrow knife, rust-red and fragrant. A pattern, fallen half over her coins and the circlet of braid. But he lifted the braid clear with the point of this knife, delicately, disrupting his pattern, or reforming it. “There’s hair in this. Yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m his sister’s daughter.” At his raised eyebrows, she added hastily, “Not the empress. The younger sister. She was wizard-talented, which meant they allowed her to be only the lowest rank of diviner for all her ability to be more, beca
use of Min-Jan’s law against imperial women holding power. But she studied in secret; she fled to the Five Cities and Marakand, went to the Grass with my father.” A touch of pride. “Escaped all the Wind in the Reeds they sent after her. I never believed her stories, when I was young.”

  She gathered her coins up, warming them in her clasped hands. A trading of answers? Worth a try.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  A glance up at Ghu. “His.”

  “I know that.”

  “A murderer,” he said levelly.

  “Ahjvar.” Not exactly reproof. Just something Ghu would rather were not said.

  Ahjvar ignored him. “Mad. An assassin of the Five Cities.”

  “Ahj, don’t.”

  “The folk say you’re a king.”

  “Not really. And that was a long time ago, anyhow.”

  She snorted. “You’re hardly that much older than me, Ahjvar.”

  He shrugged, looked at the pattern his bark parings now made, met her eyes again. “Lost within himself,” he said.

  She wasn’t sure why she had pressed him. Why Ghu had let her. But it . . . mattered. Ahjvar was not lost, but—she thought he might understand why she asked. “Yes. I think so. So tell me. You, not Ghu. Lost within himself. Hidden within himself? Maybe we should leave him there.”

  His look was . . . considering.

  But, “No,” he said flatly. “Ghu wants him. Dwei Ontari isn’t Daro Korat, blind with faith and trust. Ontari will be gone and over the rivers again himself before long; he’ll sit quiet in Alwu and let Choa fall to ruin on its own, if we don’t have his prince to hold him.”

  She dropped the coins, holding his eyes, but his hand flashed out and caught them before they hit the wood.

  “No,” he said, very soft, and if she’d been a dog all her hackles would have risen and she’d have been backing and licking her lips and crouching. “Don’t.”