Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

Sudden savage rage, like a mother’s defence of her infant. She was slammed away and without thought, without consideration of consequences, struck back. Was deflected. Light flared, white, and the wounded air roared. The carved roof of the carriage, curling and ornate as a keep’s eaves, cracked. Iron tyres smoked and the axles snapped. It sagged. Oxen bellowed, pulled to run from the smoke and dragged it swaying, capsizing, after them.

  And she was falling, tumbling back into herself. Her eyes burned and her head thudded and she lurched up graceless, an arm groping to find support on the wall, but it was the dead king who caught her.

  Nabban had caught the mirror she flung away. The Grasslander shaman stood like a statue where she had been the whole time, at the northern node of the cat’s-cradle pattern she had traced out in red and yellow and black yarns about them all, the ends of all the skeins wound through her fingers. Her eyes were wide and dark, amber-ringed. In the far corner, the prince, clean and tidy and decently dressed in a plain robe like a priest’s, but black rather than white or brown, his little girl prised away from him to the pages’ care, sat on a cushion. His head was flung back, one hand braced to rise, the other at his sash, where there was no weapon. He would carry none now, he swore. He was priest, priest of the god of Nabban, and when this war was over and the land restored to its true god he would keep a hermit’s shrine on the mountain.

  Nothing had come into the room. They could not have heard the thunder, the cracking of the axles. Yeh-Lin did not have too much pride to take the support Ahjvar gave. Her knees had gone weak.

  He looked as though he had caught the edge of—whatever it was, that look of headache tight around the eyes, and he let her down onto her bed with more haste than courtesy, reaching, as if he expected something to strike out of it, for the mirror, which Nabban was studying with childlike curiosity.

  “It can’t follow,” Yeh-Lin snapped. “Give me that.”

  “Lady Lin?” Little Ti in the doorway from the antechamber, eyes wide. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Go back to your lessons. Or go play.”

  “You yelled, my lady,” Kufu announced over Ti’s head. He had Jula on his hip. Her thumb, for once, was not in her mouth. Jang squeezed in beside them, and Lady Willow, clutching the sheet of the syllabics the pages had been studying under her supervision.

  “I did not.”

  “You did,” the god said. “It’s all right now, Ti. Her divination startled her.” He waved the children off as if shooing hens, with about as much effect. “Go on.”

  “Out,” Ahjvar said. Him, they obeyed, Ti last of all, shutting the door, his brow still wrinkled with doubt and concern.

  Yeh-Lin sighed and rubbed her temples. “I should at least have had a very good evening, if I’m going to feel this way in the morning.” Shut her eyes a moment against the jagged wash of light through the southern window, which was only a bright and pleasant noon. Ghu wandered over, in passing handing her the mirror he had failed to surrender to Ahjvar, and leaned out to lower the blue-painted shutter. He had crossed through the cat’s-cradle to do so, but Ivah had begun winding up her stands anyhow. It had all flown loose—not the physical pattern but the powers it shaped—in the fierce brief exchange. Like a flickering clash of blades, and now they fell back, she and her enemy, and caught their breath, each with gaze fixed on the other . . . except they did not. She had lost the feel of the shape of the thing, the taste, the humming chord . . . gone.

  “What was that?” Ahjvar demanded. He was fidgeting a knife through his fingers again, flicking it end for end, and she did not think he even realized he had it in his hand. Missed, and the blade plunged, skewering a tangle of black and red just as Ivah jerked it towards herself by the black strand.

  Not missed, no. Not him.

  “Pine, myrrh, yew,” he said in Praitannec. And then, “The west.”

  “What?”

  “The west,” he repeated, Nabbani this time. “Out of fire and ice. Don’t ask me. You explain it.” He scooped up the knife and made it vanish up his sleeve. Show-off. But now too late she saw, almost, the pattern steel had woven in the air, and what the yarn had written . . . almost. For all the antipathy the dead king had to wizardry, he seemed lately to be finding his way back to it. Not terribly usefully, except for the restless guard he sometimes flung about the pair of them, a strange and unsettling wizardry that was half drawing on the god’s own nature, rather than on the pulsing heart of the world at large. As if young Nabban’s person were the earth that had given him blood and bone and soul. The mortal lovers of the gods should not lose themselves so, even were they wizards. Too closely bound.

  “That,” she said, “was not helpful at all, even as cryptic Praitannec divination goes.”

  A blank look. Not incomprehension. He simply gave what he found and didn’t care what she did with it. Ghu touched his hand, as if to get his attention. Or bring him back. Ahjvar blinked at him and relaxed a little.

  “What was it?” he repeated. “Fire and ice?”

  Ivah had drifted closer, winding the last of her yarn up. Silent, watchful. Always. Dan said, “I smelt smoke.” She noted Ahjvar’s flinch. “I thought I heard thunder, far away.” And the prince waited. It was Nabban’s insistence that he was there. Buri-Nai was his sister. Dan had a right to know the truth of her. But no Nabbani ritual of vision carried the smell and sound into the room of the diviner.

  Her mirror should not have, either.

  “The devils, Ahjvar,” Ivah said. “Light, fire. Out of ice. So—since she is here, who is our enemy?” Glanced at Dan, bit her lip.

  The prince frowned.

  “Like you and your niece, Dwei Dan, I have found my god,” Yeh-Lin said. It was oddly difficult to say, though she had meant it as a joke. Half a joke. “I am Yeh-Lin Dotemon. I have given my oath to Nabban, to the heir of the gods of Nabban, to—Ghu.” Name him, pin herself so there was no squirming away, no trickery of language open to her. An oath to this damnable boy, who looked right through her into the stars and the hells.

  Ahjvar’s eyes mocked her. But the words felt heavy with truth on her tongue.

  “Ah,” Dan said.

  “Better the lords don’t know, old woman,” Ahjvar put in. “They may lack the prince’s faith. We don’t want this to look like a war of two deluded puppets.”

  Nabban snorted.

  “My lord . . .” Dan hesitated. “My lord, you—how does she come to serve you? My lord, she tried to destroy the gods.”

  Silently, she shook her head. Put the damned things in their place, maybe, in an empire she in her folly wanted to move at her word, not theirs, but destroy, no.

  Nabban seemed uncertain of that himself, if his silence meant anything.

  “He pulled me from the sky to fall at his feet,” she said, which was in fact the truth. Ragged young man on the road Over-Malagru. “He broke me to bone and buried me.” A quiet fury that rose against her with the strength of a typhoon, confined in the stillness of stone.

  “Ghu did?” Ivah’s astonishment suggested she did not yet understand her god, if she could not believe anger in him, or strength to face a devil—admittedly a restrained and weakened devil, but she did not need to share that with either of her descendants just now. But let his cursed king be threatened; then the child would see what the quiet depths might hide. It was a weakness, a very human fracture running through his godhead.

  “What could I do, when I recovered myself, but follow him? He was what the goddess south over sea—the tree who had held me in my long grave—what she had set me free to seek. I knew it. Not then, but in time I came to know it.”

  Dan sat considering. Finally he nodded. Just that, nothing more. It would have to do.

  “Not a devil in person, but there is certainly devil’s work in the land,” she said. “The empress is only a servant, but a knowing one or one deceived—whether she truly believes herself a goddess, I couldn’t be certain. At least we are warned. I think we must put the south from our minds
for now, whatever may be happening there between the Gentle Sister and the Little. At least the Dar-Lathans are a human enemy. They can wait. The empress, I think, is travelling. I do not know where she is, I could not tell. I don’t know her destination, but I can guess it. Unfortunately, I was seen. And Nabban, I’m sorry. Our enemy knows I’m here now, where before he only suspected. I don’t think he’ll let me come so close to her again.”

  “Who is it?” Ivah demanded.

  “Jochiz, Vartu, Jasberek.” Yeh-Lin considered. Jochiz, who had been Sien-Shava, a man of the southern islands. He knew Nabban. Vartu, Ulfhild, King’s Sword of the North, whom she had dreamed distant among unfamiliar trees. Jasberek, the wanderer Anganurth, the stranger, the wizard of no known land, no folk, no gods that he had ever named. She shrugged. “I say he. Convenience, two out of three? It was so brief a touch.”

  “Not Vartu,” Ivah said with certainty.

  “You think not?”

  “I know it.”

  To play games with another’s mind—was not Vartu. She admitted that. “He, then. But not in the city, Ivah.”

  “In the west,” Ahjvar said hoarsely. Ghu gave him a sharp look.

  “Buri-Nai.” Prince Dan sat with bowed head. “Can she be saved?”

  “I have no idea.” And Yeh-Lin didn’t much care. Neither, by his expression, did Ahjvar. Ghu, she thought, could be necessarily ruthless, if he saw the need. Did he mean to make himself emperor?

  “We don’t wait here for her to come against us,” Ghu said.

  “No.” That was Ahjvar, agreeing, not arguing, and watching her as if he expected hers to be the contrary voice.

  “Children, I’m all in favour of falling upon my enemies like lightning before they think I can even have a force in the field—I am known for it, if you would only read your histories—but we don’t know where she is.”

  “Find her.”

  “Kozing Port? The Old Capital? How will you raise an army great enough to take either of those? How will you raise an army to hold even Choa against her, if she gathers the armies of Solan and Numiya? She—and he—will know you’re coming.”

  Ahjvar asked, “Even Kozing—six weeks?”

  She blinked. “Are you mad? Don’t answer that, we both know the answer. We can hardly move like couriers. Even if we sent only you—”

  “No,” said Ghu flatly.

  “—you could hardly call on the courier stations for remounts.”

  “We should still move swift as we can, old woman. Not an army.”

  “You’ll need an army to cross those lands. Where we’ll find one that’s not barefoot and half-starved—”

  “A small company,” Ghu said. “A herald’s party, to treat with her.”

  “Do you mean to?” Yeh-Lin asked.

  “No. I mean to take the land from her. But we’ll talk, not fight, if we can.”

  Ahjvar snorted. Ghu just shrugged. “We wouldn’t win a war anyhow, even if we could march every soldier and rebel in Choa and Alwu and Shihpan east or south to wherever she is.”

  She wondered if he did mean to let his assassin loose in the end. She saw no other way.

  “Let me be your shield, my lord,” Dan said. “Who’ll dare hinder me, if I ride to offer submission to—”

  “Will we ride under a lie?” Yeh-Lin asked. “I have no objection, myself, to such policy, but it’s hardly what one wants of one’s god.” She didn’t bother with any honorific. Besides, even if Dan claimed to have laid down arms and to be willing to offer his submission to Buri-Nai, the odds were the first ambitious banner-lord they met would take his head in hope of the empress’s favour.

  “No,” Ghu said. “Dan, I need you in the north.”

  “What for?” Yeh-Lin wanted to know.

  “We need the shrines and the priests of the shrines,” Ghu said.

  “Hardly a force to conquer with.”

  “A web, a spread of streams through the land. Yes.”

  Yes, what? Yes, it was such a force? Yes, she was right, it was too weak? He had an absent, abstracted look and did not seem to hear when she demanded to know. He wandered to the eastern window, propped that shutter open, and vaulted up, sitting framed there like a cat, back against the stonework, one knee drawn up, one leg dangling out over far too great a height.

  One could see the river from that side, but he tilted his head back, eyes shut.

  After a moment, in which every one of them but blind Dan considered the drop beneath him, Ivah asked, “If we go as heralds of the gods, saying we want to meet with the Daughter of the Gods, then will they dare oppose us?”

  “She kills priests,” Ahjvar said.

  And there was the matter of the stolen souls of the tattooed dead. They had seven prisoners in the cells of the keep marked with the gate and the bridge in a language and script no human had ever used. Two, Zhung Musan’s chief clerk and a young banner-ranked, had declared themselves willing to make an oath to Daro Korat and the heir of the gods, but they lied. Nabban would not have approved if she had suggested she kill one, to observe first-hand that moment of death and loss. A pity, from the point of view of one seeking knowledge, but it was not an act worthy of his trust or that of the goddess in the tree and she had not seriously considered it. Not for more than a moment or two.

  “Ride fast and hard,” Ghu said, opening his eyes, breaking the silence that had followed Ahjvar’s grim reminder. What had he seen? Something, Yeh-Lin was certain. “Fast and hard and secret as we can be.” Ivah and Ahjvar exchanged identical looks.

  “Cattle-thieves,” Yeh-Lin said.

  Almost a smile, from the dead king. “Damned right, old woman.”

  “But first,” Ghu said, “we move in force to hold Choa and the crossing of the river from Numiya. Let them see that, let word of that go south, as it will, because if it’s known we’ve left Choa, it might begin to seem good to her lords bordering us to take it.”

  “And we want them to know the north is in arms behind you, waiting.” Dan nodded.

  “Waiting, united,” Ghu said. “Let them think we might fall on them across the river, whether we really have the strength to do so or not. Let them think Numiya and even Solan within our reach.”

  That, she hadn’t expected from him. It was the dead king’s thinking. Numiya might even be possible, depending on what provisions might come from the north or Dan’s provinces, and once they held Numiya, then the rich fields of Solan and its harvests . . .

  “We need to take this to the Kho’anzi and the lords,” Yeh-Lin said, and sighed. “Dwei Ontari will argue.”

  “Dwei Ontari will remember his oaths to me,” Dan said. “It’s time to gamble our last coins, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” Ghu seemed apologetic, now he had them all—where he had meant to have them, from the moment he and the dead king came to find her with the dawn.

  They dispersed, then, Dan collecting Willow and his child from the antechamber to go in search of the Kho’anzi and Lord Ontari, Yeh-Lin’s pages sent in search of Lords Raku and Yuro, Governor Zhung Huong, and Lady Ti-So’aro. Ivah went to summon the other wizards, dream-drowned Nang Kangju and timid Gar Sisu, the young woman of Hani Gahur’s staff who had witnessed the challenge and his death.

  Ghu flowed like a cat down from the windowsill, a hand on Ahjvar’s shoulder. The dead king had moved to be there. Did he feel how the god’s own being began to wind through him, like the finest roots of some great tree? Did either of them?

  It was wrong. Such surrender was wrong.

  Time was she would have destroyed him, destroyed the both of them if she could, and thought she saved the land from the horror of a god turned necromancer.

  Ambition. Power.

  Dotemon, here. In this land, his land. Dotemon’s hand on the wretched boy the gods think to make lord of their land. Dotemon’s hand, Dotemon’s games, mocking, seducing, twisting all to herself, even the dead, now. Playing the games of the Northrons, raising the dead from their bones? There is necromancy
about them. It must be she who has dragged the soul from its proper road and set it to walk in life again, with the scent of the stars and the well of night still upon it. Set it in play to seduce the godling, to make him her own, bound to her, though no doubt she would rather have done that herself, that being her way. No doubt a disappointment to her, to find the heir of the gods not amenable to her usual wiles.

  Clever, though. The dead and not-dead man is more than a Northron bone-horse, more than a usual necromancy, and very hard to kill.

  He will learn how it is done, before he unravels that binding and takes the soul for his own uses.

  The days were full and wearing. The nights were restful. In the darkness, there was—not silence, but a quiet that the daytime lacked. The many-layered noise, the weight, almost the battering, of the souls about wore at him. In the night, fewer were wakeful, and those that were, were—closer to themselves, for the most part. In the night, their burdens might seem even heavier, but they were more clearly seen, too. In the night, it was easier to come close to them without foundering in their noise. The night made a silence in the hearts of the folk, where a path, narrow, winding, not certain, not untroubled, but still, a path, might begin to be found, to some better way.

  And simply, there was quiet, and not folk hunting him to fill the place of general and king and priest, none of which he meant to be, for all he might use the authority some were so desperate to give him, to coax, to lead, to drive them where he needed them to go.

  He needed the river. More and more often Ghu found himself seeking her shore once darkness fell, rather than the garden of the Father. The guards at the castle gates rarely noticed or remembered that they had let him pass out or opened to his return. Waking or sleeping, he was a dream to them when he drifted by, once sunset came. Ahjvar trailed him, silent in his silence. An oak at his back, bedrock beneath his feet. Hearth in a cold night.

  The river was broad here at what had become his favourite place, upstream from the castle, deep and wide, though by late summer it would run shallow and fordable over a flat bed of stone. The banks were shelving stone with elms rooted in the cracks, not the willows down where the village boats put ashore, where Yeh-Lin’s company of riverers camped and worked, and where the log-built skid-road from the uplands came to its end.