Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “You knew,” the younger of the sisters said, and Yeh-Lin was about to deny any such thing, but it was Ghu who shook his head.

  “You knew,” she insisted. “You knew the false goddess sent dragons against us and you came to the rafts with Lady Lin today to protect us.” And she loosed her hold on the oar and went to her knees. “My lord, I know you would have saved my eldest sister if you could, but she died honourably and is surely blessed on her road, to die fighting your enemy’s creatures. My lord, is the river safe now?”

  “They’re gone,” Ghu said. “I don’t think there will be any more.” But he looked worried, and too young, with it, until his gaze fixed on Yeh-Lin again. “At least, not of that kind. But we need to raise some guard against any further attacks by whatever it is the empress has made her ally. Lin.”

  “Yes. I—will work on that. At once. Shall we find your rihswera and Lady Ivah?”

  “Best we do, yes.”

  “Take us in to shore, sisters. The river is safe for now.” She felt confident of that, at least. Nothing watched; no attention stroked over her skin, raising warning hairs. Not that its defeat had been any of her doing.

  Humbling that.

  Perhaps it was good, to remember fear.

  But not at the cost of these children. What had she done, taking them to herself?

  Ivah’s eyes had snapped suddenly to the river, leaving some remark to Prince Dan unfinished. Ahjvar, riding aside, beyond the crowd of the commanders in a solitude no one was going to break, had felt it too, a silent thunderclap, a burst of light he could not see—something flooded the world and Ghu’s attention fixed on it with the total focus of a striking falcon. Felt it, as if the light, the sound that was neither light nor sound coursed through some invisible channel between him and Ghu.

  And then he was shut away, as if a door slammed to between them.

  Ahjvar could have drawn a line straight to him nonetheless, ahead on the river, the rafts, late starting, slow in passing the march this day. He had already set Niaul to a gallop, swerving around the herald and banner-bearers who preceded the lords, startling the archers of the vanguard, even before he heard the hooves behind. Ivah’s grey Denanbaki, gift of Daro Korat to the god’s Grasslander. She wouldn’t catch Gorthuerniaul and he didn’t wait, though she caught up when he had to rein in, a cat-scramble over scrubby ground, down to the riverbank. The dogs, too, hurtled after him, barking, for what good that would do. He had his crossbow out, spanned and loaded, the moment Niaul was still. Could see the one raft beset, the water dark and churning, rising in storm-waves, something hidden there, flash of sleek greenish-brown, gone again, nothing to aim at. Shark, was his first illogical thought. Wrong colour, wrong water, but that slick hide and the twisting speed in the water—he couldn’t see Ghu, only a slender figure shrouded in pale fire, and the creature fell away, was gone. Ghu heaved himself out of the river to the deck, forage-knife in hand. Ghu was the only real and solid thing, a stone, as the rest of the world went thin and blurred as ink on wet paper.

  Ivah was swearing in a language he did not know and his skull was splitting with the sort of headache he used to get in the aftermath of the hag’s hunting, vision gone half-blind and ragged. Then the world took slowly its proper solidity again. The burning figure of light was gone, become Yeh-Lin, down on her knees engulfed by children, and he had nearly squeezed the trigger.

  Ivah knocked his aim down to the stones, snatched the bolt and shook it at him.

  “Whatever that thing was, it’s done for. What’s wrong with you? You could have killed one of the pages. Bloody fool, can you not see?”

  “No,” Ahjvar said through clenched teeth. “I can’t. What in the cold hells was that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what lives in Nabbani rivers. Crocodiles? Horse-whales?”

  “Burning.”

  “What?”

  “She was—” She was Dotemon, and I do not think you would see the difference between us, naked of the body of this earth. “Was she—did you see her all burning, turned to pale light?”

  “No. Ahjvar, do you have seizures? You look—”

  “No!” He tried to slow his breathing. Niaul was tossing his head, ears back, catching his—panic, was what it was. He slung the crossbow behind the cantle, quieted the horse, reassuring himself just as much as the stallion. “What in the cold hells is a horse-whale?”

  “I don’t know. Something in the sea. The Northrons hunt them for ivory and rope, though.”

  “What?”

  “It’s what my father said.”

  “Hunt them for rope?”

  “Never mind.” She offered him the crossbow bolt back. He rammed it into the quiver as a party of the lords arrived, confused and questioning and noisy. Ivah turned her grey to deal with them, letting him escape down to the water’s edge as the raft grounded its nose in the shallows. His vision was clearing, though every step the horse took jarred up his spine as if he’d leapt and misjudged the nearness of the ground.

  Ghu was giving Yeh-Lin’s two elder pages a hand to leap over to the shore. Yeh-Lin swung the youngest herself.

  “Lord Yuro!” she called. “Will you look to my pages? They’re unharmed, but I fear rather shaken. Gar Sisu, the danger is past for now but look to your lord—the empress’s reach is greater than we realized and the prince may be in danger.” The devil went back to the two rafters, standing arms about one another, and spoke to them softly, heads together. A second raft had followed them in. Yeh-Lin leapt over to it, was giving its captain orders. While she waded ashore, a party of a dozen soldiers with crossbows crossed to the first, helping to push it back out to deeper water, climbing aboard as it came to life again.

  Someone had died out there. Ahjvar knew that as if he had seen it. Ghu stood at his knee, apart from the flurry of questions, Yeh-Lin’s firm seizure of the moment holding all their attention: an attack against herself as the chief wizard of the heir of the gods, the holy one’s defence of her, the heroic death of the woman who had captained that raft.

  Ghu would fade away and leave them if he could, Ahjvar rather thought, but this was not the moment for their god to drift from their view and Ghu knew it. He leaned against Niaul’s shoulder, arms folded, looked up at Ahjvar. The dogs were silent at his feet.

  “All right?”

  “No,” Ahjvar said. Should it not have been he doing the asking? “What was that?”

  “Something sent by the devil behind the empress, I think. It wasn’t after me.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  Ghu nodded at Yeh-Lin.

  “Huh. And she failed to stop it.”

  “Yes.”

  He could let his hand rest on the wet hair a moment, reassurance.

  “Time to haul her off for a quiet talk?”

  “It might be. Bring Ivah.”

  Ahjvar gathered his reins, turned Niaul as Ghu went to the lords and their officers, reassuring them the danger to the rafts had, for the moment, passed. He caught Ivah’s eye, crooked a finger at her. She followed obediently. Some of Yuro’s folk were bringing up Snow, saddled and pulling ahead, scenting his master, with Yeh-Lin’s cranky piebald and the pages’ ponies. Ghu escaped, moving through the folk with an assurance that parted them like blowing leaves, a straight line to Snow, a nod to the young man who turned the bridle loose, and he was up, barefoot, still dripping.

  “Y—Lin. Ivah. Ahjvar. Come.” And Ghu was shaken, for all his apparent calm. Her name had almost escaped him.

  Yeh-Lin bowed. “Children, stay with Lord Yuro and the prince. It’s safe now.”

  Companies of foot had passed on the river road when the lords turned aside. They folded themselves back into the line, with the blue banners and their household warriors about them. Ghu set off inland, crossing a field, furrows crumbled and rounded by the winter’s frosts and tangled with weeds, but still uneven going for the horses. A ditch to jump and then a narrow cart-track angling up a low green ridge that had surely been an island i
n the spring floods.

  Deserted now. Stitchwort, pigweed, foxtail grass. Blackened timbers hidden beneath. Village straggling along the lower ground, manor house above? Nothing, now. No sign of any folk having returned to raise a shanty, plant taro and beans, round up straying swine. Zhung Musan’s handiwork on his march north.

  Clean wind, no scent but bruised green and horse. There was still a stone coping to the well in a hollow of the hillside; Ghu turned there, watching the last companies pass below. He might have only been seeking privacy, and a place they could speak without watching for ambush, but the folk below would see their god watching over them, the black-clad figure and the white horse standing like a blessing, and be reassured against whatever rumour might be passing up and down the line.

  “What was that?” Ghu asked.

  “I don’t know, Nabban. They were creatures made from the memories of the stone of the river.”

  “Don’t play games.”

  “My lord, I—do you want a name? I do not have one. You know what it was. The devil who serves or is served by the empress is not in Nabban, but he reached, from wherever he is, to strike at me.”

  “A woman died, Dotemon, and you stood by and watched. You didn’t even try to defend her.”

  “I could not. I could not—her death is my failure, and I am sorry for it. I was overmatched and held, for just that little. I told you, I am . . . restrained. The goddess-tree of the underground river still holds a part of me. If the captain had not attacked the monster herself, it might have taken me in that moment.”

  “A river monster could have killed you so easily?” Ivah voiced Ahjvar’s scepticism.

  “Oh, I’m sure I could have survived, and recovered, but taken me into the river, yes, left me wounded and useless to you for a time, yes. And forced me in doing so to reveal myself as something other than a hale old wizard-woman. Which may have been what was intended.”

  “Why?” Ghu asked, and Ahjvar demanded, “Why not attack Ghu directly? Assassins in Denanbak, on the mountain.”

  “I don’t know. But consider, dead king—” At least she used the Praitannec words and Ivah might think it title or insult or a byname as she chose. “—that it is the empress who sends the assassins. This was not the empress. This was not an attack on the convoy or on the army. A single raft’s worth of, what, barley and oil? What sort of a target is that? They could expect us to lose so much by mere everyday accident, the hazards of the river. It’s a miracle of your young god we have not.”

  “Why attack you and not Ghu?”

  “How should I know? Because our enemy does not believe we are anything other than what he himself is, a power holding a human mask before it.”

  “He thinks you’re his real enemy?” Ivah asked.

  “He thinks. Maybe. Am I not? Nabban, what, in the name of the Old Great Gods, do you think you can do against a devil? Against Jasberek or Jochiz or Vartu, what do you think you can possibly do, in the end, god of all Nabban though you may become? Yes,” to Ivah, “you deny Vartu is our enemy and I do admit this is not her—her style, but—”

  “Not my enemy,” Ivah said. “Not Ghu’s. She is yours. Yeh-Lin, she’s killing the devils. The rest of you. She’s hunting you all.”

  Yeh-Lin’s expressive face was masklike in its stillness then.

  “The black sword,” she said.

  What black sword? But there was the chill of deep water in Ahjvar’s marrow. It stirred beneath the surface of nightmare, the Lady’s mad dreams spilling from her lips. The sword of the ice is coming is death . . .

  Ghu, unspeaking, reached across the space between them, brushed the back of a hand against his cheek. He blinked and gasped and felt the sunlight again.

  “Why?” Yeh-Lin demanded. “And why does An-Chaq’s Grasslander daughter know this?”

  “I’m also my father’s daughter.”

  The devil considered her a long, cold moment. Ivah just raised her chin, but her horse shifted nervously under her.

  “Ahh,” Yeh-Lin breathed. “I see. You have his eyes. And his way of knotting your forms into the unexpected when you weave your strings. I should have known you sooner. So Tamghiz Ghatai has had another daughter. Well. We shall see what comes of that, when it comes. Ulfhild Vartu I will face if I must, but she is not here. Her, I have seen, and I think we have an ocean between us now. And I also think that you are correct and that it will not be she we find holding the mask of the empress before her, at however great a distance. So. Nabban. I ask you again, what do you think you can do against a devil, alone and without me?”

  “But it’s what he thinks that matters, whoever he is,” Ghu pointed out. “So that’s answered. The empress may believe me her rival and her enemy, and send her assassins because of whatever her wizards see, but the devil holds me of no account and attacks Yeh-Lin. Good.”

  “Good?”

  Ghu shrugged.

  “Not good if our devil is going draw the attention of our enemy to us all the way to the Golden City, whoever’s will was behind this attack,” Ahjvar asked. “How do we prevent him striking again?”

  “I was foolish. I thought of the empress as our enemy and whatever she served as too distant to be a threat till we came to her, unlikely to act except in her defence. He will not fix on me again.”

  “Are you so sure, old woman?”

  Yeh-Lin only looked at him. There was fire living in her, white, now, and cold. He could see it for the space of an eye’s blink.

  “Fine. Ghu?”

  “If she says so. But we should do more to be certain we have some warning, if she is wrong. Ivah, work with Yeh-Lin. We want to know—what? When we are watched. When something begins to reach for us. We want these companies on the road and the rafts on the river protected, so much as they may be, from this sort of attack out of nothing, this shaping of the stuff of the world against us. I can . . . maybe. On the river, now, I might know sooner what he began.”

  “Yes,” Yeh-Lin said. “I did feel it. Not soon enough. I was not certain what it was I felt until too late.”

  “If he does strike at you again and you’re warned, can you do anything?” Ahjvar wanted to know. “Or do you just stand by helpless a second time?”

  “That’s unfair, dead king. And yes.”

  Ivah had pulled leather cords from her pockets and was weaving cat’s-cradles, frowning, shaking her tangles free. She might as well have been muttering, thinking aloud. “Trying to shield against a devil’s attention, when he already knows where we are?”

  “He may not,” Yeh-Lin said. “We may be—I may be, only glimpses in the fog.” She shrugged. “Difficult to explain, if you do not see as I do.”

  “So show me,” Ivah said. “And guard yourself better in the meantime.”

  Ghu’s face, watching the devil, seemed less hard now. “Go with her, Ivah. Go now. Do what can be done, both of you, together. If she’s some bright spark among us to draw a devil’s eye, she puts all the folk in danger.”

  “And you, Nabban?”

  “I—am only the river, Dotemon. Do you see me, when you look?”

  “Not always.”

  “And you know where to look and what I am.”

  “The assassins have found you twice.”

  “Yes. And you weren’t much help on either occasion. No, sorry. I didn’t mean that. You saved Shui from the poison. I don’t expect you to guard me, Yeh-Lin. Leave my rihswera to do that and look to yourself, so that you don’t draw the lightning down on the march again. Go on ahead. We’ll follow.”

  “My lord.” No argument, and no snide remarks about the god wandering off alone with his dead king.

  They watched as the women rode away, down to find themselves in the dust of the rearguard.

  “You want to stay here, catch up tomorrow?” Ahjvar did. He felt as though the world had gone quiet, clean; as if he could breathe again, and it was not the absence of the noise or the smell or the dust, but of the people, that freed him.

  “Yes
. But better not. Better I’m seen in the camp tonight. Yeh-Lin would say so.”

  “Don’t let her decide what you should do.”

  “It’s common sense, Ahj. My folk, here because of me. I need to wander the fires, to be seen.”

  “Is that what you were doing out on the rafts?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And that was so very safe.”

  “Hah. You. Come here.” Ghu reached over to embrace him one-armed, cold and damp and smelling of the river, horses jostling together. Pulled his head down to kiss his forehead. “I’m all right. I am.”

  “Ghu?” His head still ached. Something he wanted said, because around all the fires tonight they would be saying it with awe but also with acceptance, because the holy one was their god and of course he had killed a dragon for them. It wasn’t awe Ahjvar felt. What? Pride? Something that made him want to laugh. His starveling stray cat, his half-wit boy. “You killed a damned dragon. With a forage-knife.”

  “Didn’t have anything else,” Ghu said, with that slow smile that was like the warmth of a hearth in the night.

  “I shouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

  “Those weren’t really dragons, anyway. Did you see? Something the devil made. Memory. Ancient, older than the river. Older than men.” He considered. “The dragons of the river—are mine.”

  “What dragons?”

  Ghu looked over, gathering his reins as the dogs plunged ahead down the hillside away from the river, barking at nothing more exciting than a hare. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re long gone. Maybe they never were. But I dreamed a dragon once, when I was small. I dreamed dragons again last night, Ahj. I think we may see dragons again, before we’re done.” He set a course after the dogs. “Let’s see what’s inland. Don’t need to catch up till evening.”

  Did they not?

  Good.

  The empress had given herself to a devil. No, there was a devil in the north, who set up a slave as a false god to deceive the folk. A necromancer led an army over the provinces of the north, leaving villages burned and empty behind her, and the holy empress, clothed in the radiance of the Old Great Gods, marched to oppose her. The Mother and Father were reborn in a champion who would end the tyranny of the Min-Jan and throw down the Peony Throne, and all the slaves of the land would be free.