by K V Johansen
Changing tongues: “Ahj, you wish we were home?”
“Where’s home?”
Ghu shrugged. “Stone and water,” he said. “Sand Cove. I miss the sea, you know. I think—I’ll always miss the sea. Come with me to the river, now.” He pulled his helmet off, shook flattened hair free. He looked exhausted, drained of life. Godhead burned him up like he was only fuel for a fire, the oil, not the lamp. Find the river, yes. Ghu seemed to need it as much as food or sleep.
They didn’t make it, of course. The blue banner betrayed them. Yuro needed the holy one. Yeh-Lin needed the holy one. The surrendered and captive banner-lords of the Lai needed the holy one, and most of all the dying, their own and the empress’s, needed their god, to see him and hear him and touch him, to take his blessing to their road. It was past the middle night, well past and there was a greying in the east, their far-too-mortal god stumbling, his voice faint, gone to single words like a child, before Ahjvar was able to persuade him away, pull him down just anywhere, lee of some unburnt hut, to sleep still armoured as he was, with his head pillowed in Ahjvar’s lap.
He didn’t mean to sleep himself. Woke to sudden assault and seized—only the page Kufu, shaking frantically at his ankle, afraid to touch the holy one even in his urgency. Strong sunlight in his face, back against a clay-plastered wall, Ghu rolling sleep-dazzled to his feet and the dogs racing up, bristling.
Ahjvar rocked upright, snatching up his sword and dropping the boy, who had yelped in terror and was still trying to stammer out words regardless.
“What?”
Kufu repeated himself, “Captain Lin says, the empress. An army. Here, already.”
CHAPTER XXXVI
Yeh-Lin had taken over the courier station as her headquarters. They found her in the dining hall with the commanders. Surviving commanders. Ti-So’aro’s was not the only face missing. He did not see Gar Sisu, the prince’s wizard. Yuro was there, though, and Prince Dan, armoured but still keeping to his oath to carry no weapons, with Lady Dwei Baya at his side; Ivah, a number of imperial commanders and Daro retainers . . . one tall, bald old man dressed for rough labour in hemp trousers and smock, but Ghu, for all the gravity of the summons, broke into a sudden smile.
“Awan!”
The man squinted and thrust his head forward shortsightedly, but Ghu was crossing to him, a hand raised to silence Yeh-Lin a moment. He took the old man’s hands.
“Shouja Awan! You fed me, when I was travelling south. Years ago.”
The old man tilted his head, frowned. “Holy one . . . ?” And laughed. “You! I do remember. Fed you? I caught you thieving from the offering-box of the shrine.”
Ghu shrugged. “You were the only one who ever did. And you cuffed my ear and fed me.”
“That boy.” The priest shook his head. “Like a lost fawn, my poor blessed wife said. All eyes and bones and silences. She wanted to keep you and fatten you up a bit before we let you go, but you were gone the next night. I wouldn’t have known you, but . . . your eyes haven’t changed. My lord.”
“I think I was far from the only runaway you sheltered.”
Awan shrugged. “I did what seemed necessary.”
“Nabban!”
“Yes.” And Ghu wheeled on Yeh-Lin. “Buri-Nai.” Among those grim men and women, in dirt-dulled black armour, he did not look anything that had ever been fugitive and thief. He was wolf, not fawn, and even Yeh-Lin gave him space. Only the old priest, Awan, seemed not to feel the tension. He picked up a bowl he had set aside at their entry and, squatting with his back against the wall, returned to eating soup.
“I was blinded to her. Nabban, I swear I—”
“Don’t swear. I believe you. I didn’t—call it see, I didn’t see her either. I didn’t feel them moving over the land.” Very softly: “I should have. We knew they were coming. I was . . . listening, for her.”
“I searched for her. I sent scouts so soon as we had Lai Sula out of the way and they are taken and dead, all of them, Nabban, every man and woman. And this morning at last I saw. I couldn’t count. Twenty thousand, thirty, three rivers of men. Numbers hardly matter—ten, twenty, thirty.” Praitannec, then. “It is Jochiz Stonebreaker, as Ivah says. Sien-Shava. He holds his hand over them like a god, greater than a god. Greater than I, at any rate. Nabban, what will you do?” Nabbani once more. “If we move now, abandon the dead unburied, we might with the rafts take some—maybe all, this folk over the river. Though the current is stronger, here. Cross, and then raise the river against her? Hold till what strength is in Shihpan can come to us? She must have gathered all the imperial soldiery of the central provinces, and how she moved them so—”
“Does it matter? We did not see.”
He stood head bowed. No one spoke, till at last Yuro stirred. “Two-thirds of Lai Sula’s people are wanting to swear their oaths to the holy one. Do we take them, or leave them to reinforce her, or—” He shrugged.
“My folk,” Ghu said. Looked up, looked around them all. “You are all my folk. All the folk of Nabban. We never did come here to fight her. We came to hold the north safe against Buri-Nai while I went on to meet her and what governs her. I go on, as I meant to.”
“She’s not going to forswear her delusions for your sake,” Yeh-Lin said.
“You’ll get yourself killed,” Yuro said flatly. “You’ll never persuade her to acknowledge you, or to change how she rules.”
Ghu shrugged. “We’ll see. Get over the river. All who will, all you trust. Hold there. I leave them in your hands, Captain Lin.”
“Great Gods, Nabban, you are mad, I did say so. Ahjvar, tell him.”
Ahjvar just shook his head.
“You are not going without—”
“I need you here, Lin. I leave all in your hands. Do you hear me? All.”
“I’ll ride with you, my lord,” Prince Dan said. “I’m not much use here—”
“No,” Ghu said. “Thank you, Dan. But no. I don’t think there is—is anything anyone else can do.”
Ghu bowed to them all, turned and walked out from the rising voices. Ahjvar strode after him, spun to glower at Yeh-Lin when she would have followed.
“No.”
She grabbed at his arm, but he caught her wrist before she could and they stood so, blocking the door. She didn’t try to twist away.
“Break whatever link Jochiz has with the empress.” She spoke Praitannec, low and intense. “He can’t reach into the land without her, he surely can’t. Kill Buri-Nai and whatever of her command you must to stop that army and put Dan on the throne.”
“If Ghu asks it.”
“Cold hells, Ahjvar, what use is a damned assassin if you leave him to walk into her hands?”
“Nabban’s champion,” he said. “Nabban’s sword. Nabban’s damned priest, a dead woman called me. I am not anyone’s assassin. Do as he bids you.” He turned her loose and she swung round on the watching commanders.
“As our young god says, then, and Old Great Gods be with him and us all. We cross the river and hold Choa. Get the wounded over first and mix what we can of Lai Sula’s supplies in with them. Zhung Ario, if you would look to that . . .”
He left her driving them, her words riding over argument, and they were anyway too overridden to rally much of one. No one else had any action to offer. Flight or surrender . . . no one voiced it.
He overtook Ghu halfway to the horse lines, caught him and turned him face to face. He knew that look, fey and dark and vision-drowned.
“Why?” he demanded. “Yeh-Lin’s right. The empress isn’t going to listen. She’s not Daro Korat or Ti-So’aro, looking for her god. She thinks she is that. You’re not even a rival for the empire, in her mind. You’re someone who’s stolen what should be hers alone—the worship of her folk. She’ll simply kill you.”
“If I don’t try, she kills all these who’ve followed me. That, I see. Inevitable.”
“They could scatter and run . . .”
Ghu shook his head. “All these dead
here, still unburied. Do you hear them?”
“No. See them, yes. If I try. I’d rather not.”
“Mine, all of them. I should have just gone from Dernang, but—I thought to come from some strength, to meet with her with the northwest provinces behind me—it’s not only Buri-Nai. It’s her court, her lords, her generals I need to hear me.” The night-drowned look was fading from his eyes; he was . . . wolf again. But a weary one, and his face was bruised. “To remember their gods. They wouldn’t hear Daro Korat’s horseboy. I thought we could give her pause, make them doubt her, if we had the northwest, if there were time so the folk could see—change was possible, a free land was possible. I don’t know. I didn’t think she could move so many, so quickly.” Half a smile. “Under a month from the Golden City to the Old Capital is quickly, even if she’s been at a cart’s pace since then. But for being so well hidden . . . I shouldn’t have trusted I could see all the river’s length. Maybe knowing Yeh-Lin has made me view the devils as too—human. A devil took Nabban from the gods before, after all.”
“Ghu . . .”
“I can’t see, Ahj. I only . . . Beyond the empress, there’s only darkness. The darkness at the end of all dreams, all my life. I’m sorry. If I could—”
“Don’t. My soul’s in your hands. I’d have it nowhere else.”
“Then trust. And stay with me. Just—stay with me. Remember my name, Ahj. Don’t let me drown with them and be lost. Find me, hold on to me, no matter what.”
“Sh,” Ahjvar said, catching him close a moment. “Don’t. What are you seeing? It’s all right, I have you.”
A handful of Yuro’s people came up. Ruckus down the line. Snow, scenting his rider and impatient. They were riding to meet the empress, Ghu said, as he might have said they would take a little exercise, all that fey moment shrugged away.
“Will you take another horse, lord rihswera?” a girl asked at Ahjvar’s elbow. “Evening Cloud’s shoulder . . .”
“Is he lame?”
“No, lord. Tender. A little stiff.”
“We’re not going to be fighting,” Ahjvar said. “Or going—how far are we going?”
“We’ll come to them by late afternoon, going gently,” Ghu said. “Sooner if we want to. He’s no longer hiding them. They would be here by tomorrow’s dusk. So.” He shrugged. “Maybe we delay them, a little, and Yeh-Lin can hold the river. Yes, bring him his Gorthuerniaul. But you two—” He dropped to a knee and the dogs crowded in to him, tails wagging. “Jui, Jiot. Go with Yeh-Lin.”
Tails drooped. Ears went back, as when he had refused to take them in the skin boat. Jiot whined, pawed at him. Ghu kissed each between the eyes, which chilled Ahjvar when nothing else had. “Go on, dogs. Remind the devil she’s watched. I’ll call if I need you.”
The horses, in their full barding, as if for battle again. Niaul seemed to move easily enough.
Word of their riding had spread like fire. There was a silence that ran before and trailed behind, a widening wake. Ghu was a weight that drew all eyes after him.
The heir of the gods rode to confront the empress, who called herself Daughter of the Old Great Gods. To challenge her, delay her . . . fold her into his following and bring on this new age of Nabban that the prophets had foretold. Did they think so? Could they?
They couldn’t know what whispered in her mind.
Ghu’s gods had been nothing, ever, but what they were now. Ghosts drowning or drowned in their own desperation. A last flicker of light lost in darkness, failing.
A godless land—Nabban had been falling to that before Ghu was ever born, and the Mother and Father had taken their child and cast him into the world too late, left him to make himself a man in the shadow of murder and horrors, where it should have been priests and captains had the making of him, holiness and true kingship. And their dying land had drawn a devil’s eye.
We will never be his again . . . A fortress against what gathers in the west . . . my champion. An empire Over-Malagru, because he will come . . . The whisper of Ahjvar’s nightmares.
He held himself still, made himself remember, and not react. It was not her voice in his ears, not the Lady, not her hands on him, her breath. Memory. Only memory. Something that had so terrified the devil Tu’usha in her madness.
Her enemy, her brother, the devil Jochiz. He leapt over what she would have made, the fortress-empire she would have held against him astride the caravan road. Planted seeds, a fence of thorns to surround her. What gathers in the west. While something flung down roots in the east, in a deceived and usurping princess. How long had that false faith in her destiny been germinating in the darkness of the princess’s mind? How long had the gods of Nabban known? Both ends of the caravan road to be held for a devil that even the devils feared. And a despairing captive drowned the child of rape, drowned herself—gave herself and the infant to the river—and the gods took him to be their own, gave him their land, gave him to their land, and turned him loose to wander.
Was it Ahjvar who knew these things? It was there. A knowing in his memory.
West. Ghu had always been going west, even when he went east and south to the sea, when he ran from the high lord of Choa. West, following the sun, he said, till following the sun brought him to the Leopard, and the Leopard’s garden wall in the rain.
Ghu looked around, found him watching. Said nothing.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Ghu remembered his first journey south more as vivid bright flashes of fear and wonder amid the long weariness of being hunted than as any clear story. Then, there had been an urgency almost animal, unthinking, unreasoning, driving him to seek the sea and a way to the west, and there had been no particular foe but sometimes, it seemed, all the folk of the land who prowled ready to raise a hand against him. Branded, paperless, far from his proper place in Dernang.
There had been kindnesses, too. Servants of the gods like Shouja Awan, a young couple of serfs on a manor in eastern Numiya, a pilgrim here, a merchant’s guard there, a slave message-runner in the Old Capital, a gap-toothed woman of the river and her brood of loud and cheerful fatherless children, who did not ask questions of a furtive flitting thief and beggar, too obviously a runaway. They had all shared food or offered some shelter; even a kind word had been precious in those days. With the boatwoman and her children, he had had a few days and many miles of the river, and taken away words of the ships and the sea that unfolded a greater world to him.
This was the same. The urgency, unreasoning. The fear.
If he had had to go alone . . . but he could feel Ahjvar, keeping Evening Cloud a little behind and to the side, as if he had some other sense to know him by, like the eyeless fish that hunted in the lightless caves under the eastern mountains where the Gentle Sister had her source. Not sight, sound, smell, not the warmth of him, but as he knew where his own hand was, certainty without thought.
They were still in Alwu Province, and all was peaceful, green and growing, except that there were herds untended, and they came to a village that was emptied, all folk, he judged, fled, rather than driven out by Lai Sula. They did not follow quite that army’s route. It seemed a forlorn place to halt, but yesterday had been hard and it was time to rest the horses. And some blessed person of the horselines had slung kettle and tea on them as well as a little grain.
Not entirely deserted. An old woman stumped up, leaning on a stick, as they brewed tea beneath the village meeting-tree.
“The gods be with you,” Ahjvar said, sitting up. He had been lying on his back by the well, staring at the sky. But he didn’t take up his sword.
“The gods are gone,” she said. “Who are you, then?” She measured them with a keen, if watery, eye. “Mercenaries out of the north? I’m through with fear of masters and steel. Kill me now, kill me later when the empress comes, it makes no difference. I buried my last grandchild three days since. They said, come, come to the hills, the lord’s gone to the wars on the river and they’ll kill us if we stay, and I said, I’m not running, I
’m done.”
“Sit down and have some tea, grandmother.” Ahjvar waved a hand at Ghu. “This is the heir of the gods, the holy one, riding against the empress.”
The old woman studied him, and sniffed as though he left something to be desired. Ghu poured tea and offered it. It was strong and smoky, caravan-tea shaved from a brick, and there were plain dumplings wrapped in leaves, as well.
He should want to speak to her, to ask her about the folk of this village, but he knew the answers anyway. They were Dwei-Clan, serfs of a minor banner-lord of the Dwei who had ridden to join with Lai Sula in the empress’s service, and who was dead and still unburied at the ferry. His wife had taken her children and the folk of the manor that lay just beyond the coppiced woodland north of them and gone with the serfs into the hills, for fear of the empress’s coming.
He could not find words. Ahj would have to speak for him. The old woman had fallen silent, watching him over the rim of her cup.
“Why has the village run away?” Ahjvar asked. “What have you heard?”
“Everybody knows. Don’t you? There was a boy come from Uro away down in Numiya, and that’s a day’s journey. I’ve never been. My husband went once, when he was young. The lord sent him. But this boy, he was half-crazed with terror. He said he’d been in Uro-Over-Hill on an errand for his master the wainwright—that’s I don’t know where, far and far away—and soldiers came, and wizards, and called all the folk of Uro-Over-Hill to the village well, out of the fields and all, and the steward from the hall and her family—and they lined them up kneeling, said they were to make their prayers to the Daughter of the Old Great Gods, but it wasn’t for prayer at all they called them out. They made a great ring around them, and they went with swords and axes and forage-knives and killed them all, all up and down the rows, and they ran and screamed and the children cried, and the wizards tangled and held any who broke away out of the ring until the soldiers could kill them. And they left them lying, unburied, he says, and a captain on a horse said, the empress will give them their blessing, and he laughed. And the boy was lying up under the eaves of the great barn with a girl, up in the beams, which sounds a good way to break your neck, getting up to that sort of thing on the beams, and he saw through a chink in the wall, and the wizards searched, and the girl, poor child but it was her own folk dying, she went screaming down to kill them with nothing but her bare hands, and they killed her too. But the wizards thought she was the living thing they’d sought, I suppose, and they didn’t look any further. So the boy lay there till nightfall and crept away, and he found his donkey straying and rode for Uro and his master beat him for being truant and lying and blaspheming, and so he stole the donkey and ran again. And our lady believed him, and the headman did, and they’ve all gone.”
