Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  “Cold hells,” Ahjvar said. “Souls. Left for her.”

  No words.

  There might be visions painted in the fire. Ghu could not see them. He looked up when Ahjvar pressed the cup into his hands. “You’re shaking,” Ahj said quietly. “Drink.” He wrapped his hands around the cup obediently, Ahj’s for a moment over his. Rough warmth.

  “Ghu, let me go on ahead of you. Yeh-Lin’s right. Make an end of her and he has no foothold here.”

  Ghu shook his head, found words at last. “Not by murder.”

  “Challenge her, then.”

  “I . . . don’t know. Perhaps. We’ll see. Just—stay with me. Besides, last time you went to kill someone touched by a devil, it didn’t go so well. I don’t want to lose you that way again.”

  “Heir of the gods, you say?” The old woman gave Ghu another long look. “Huh. I’m through with the gods, too. Through with everything and waiting for my call to the road. But are you sure? Because he’s a pleasure to an old woman’s eyes, no doubt, but if he only speaks some heathen tongue, how does he know what the gods say?”

  That broke something. Ghu laughed and leaned to the old woman and kissed her on the lips. “What makes you think the gods are through with you? You’re not ready for the road yet. Go find your folk and this lost boy of Uro, Dwei Dolan. He needs a grandmother.”

  They set the old woman a mile on her way, a foresters’ track into crumpled hills so steep it seemed only a squirrel or monkey might climb them. They were come into where the land changed, dropping down out of the spaciousness of Choa and Alwu. Soon there would be no wide fields or deserted lands, no wilderness but the occasional outcroppings of these steep, worn hills, water-gnawed stone to which bamboo and forest clung like a woodpecker against the side of a tree. If the empress had cleared her path with the deaths of villages all the way from the Old Capital . . . how could he not have heard the stone and the waters cry out against her?

  He was overmatched. Dotemon was. They always had been.

  Lai Sula had been a net to gather any fleeing to the northwest with rumours of Buri-Nai’s great army.

  At some point they crossed into Numiya. The provincial borders meant nothing, though he could feel, sometimes, where what had once been the land of one small god or goddess faded into another. He brought them cross-country, not following the muddy tracks. They missed the villages of Uro and Uro-Over-Hill, riding southeasterly, though there was smoke away to their right.

  All the folk were fled. Some rumour had come.

  Ahjvar gave him silence and watched all ways, the crossbow loaded.

  The green narrowed, hills humping up above the fields. A village in the lee of one, empty of life but not of the dead, and the ghosts, and the miserable and terrified dogs who had survived their masters. Already he felt the weight of those souls, drawn to him but trapped, bound to their bodies, lives and seething life ripped away from the land. And beyond, within the narrowing land, the empress.

  There was no time.

  “Be blessed,” he told the ghosts, but he needed to be among them, to know them, to touch. There was no time, and they pulled at him, as if they begged, clawed. He might begin to unravel.

  Ahjvar was anchor. Stone. They must have the hunter’s focus on what they stalked, the leopard’s unblinking gaze. The dead would have to be abandoned, and hope the empress might be so delayed in whatever she intended for them that someone might send them free to their road, if he could not.

  “We’re seen,” he said. A lone rider. Ahjvar moved up to his side.

  Two more. Mounted scouts, by the village. They turned away, receded.

  “Are you sure about this?” Ahjvar asked.

  “Yes.” No.

  “Wait or follow?”

  It made no difference. He let Snow walk on.

  It was a troop of twenty banner-lords rode against them, and ten more who were armed like horse-archers of Alwu but were probably Wind in the Reeds, six of them women.

  He drew rein as the imperial riders swept up, spears lowered, and made a half-circle about them, with their archers swung out and behind.

  “The empress,” he said. Request or command, they could take it how they would.

  Their officer, or at least the man who now urged his horse a few steps ahead, raised his visor. Ahjvar had gone too still, but they were all living folk behind the masked helmets. He held the crossbow ready to bring up to the level.

  “You are to come before the Daughter of the Gods,” the banner-lord said. A Gar-Clan man of Nan-Ya province and he had little fear of them, only contempt for the traitors and the enemies who would learn to fear his goddess. A tattooed man, Ghu was certain.

  “Yes,” he agreed, but the word was heavy.

  “Your weapons.” The man spurred forward, another at his side, a hand out imperiously to Ahjvar. There would be a dead banner-lord, in very short order, and it would take a breath, just one word, to let Ahjvar do as he would and try to ride through, for he himself to think the Father’s hand over them in some impossible miracle . . .

  “Let it go, Ahjvar.”

  “Ghu, no.”

  “Yes, Ahj.”

  Ahjvar, with slow deliberation, disarmed the bow, though he dropped it rather than handing it to the man.

  “And your sword and dagger, Northron.”

  “Not a Northron.”

  “Sword!”

  “Ahj . . .”

  “No.”

  “Great Gods, Ahjvar, do you think I want to see you cut to pieces here? Just do it, it would make no difference in the end if you killed the half of them before they cut you down—” His voice cracked. “Just let them have what they want,” he said. “If it gets us before the empress, let them.”

  Ahjvar’s sword and the obvious dagger, Ghu’s forage-knife. But they did not search Ahjvar, and they did not see the small knife in his own boot. A pointless comfort. He did not see destroying the empress’s devil with a little knife. Nor with Ahjvar’s long Northron sword, if it came to that.

  The path was only ever at his feet, a few steps. Falling into darkness now, drowned and lost, and pulling Ahj after him.

  They rode amid their escort, hemmed close. Archers at their backs. The press of the ghosts faded.

  The track they had followed climbed a bank and came onto the paved highway. In poor repair. Stones were missing, the land to either side trampled, rutted, puddled. Lai Sula had passed this way. They came to outliers, the suburbs of the camp, cavalry lines. Pickets afoot came to meet them. Banners. A fresh-dug ditch, a palisade of sharpened bamboo flung half across the valley. Tents going up along the avenues, and soldiers about the business of settling in, though it was not yet evening. But down the valley they still trudged, and wagons, endless wagons, laboured. They would be half the night coming in, and in the morning it would all be harried into motion again, and the men staggering weary, half-starved, not even a little dried fish or mutton to their rice and barley, though she had come from the sea and the flocks of Choa had been stolen away.

  The pretender of the gods is defeated, is taken, is brought prisoner before the Daughter of the Gods . . .

  But there was another thought running too . . .

  The holy one, the heir of the gods, is come . . .

  Ghu shivered. There were clouds piling on the horizon, spilling down from the north and west, from Choa, from the mountains. The wind was out of that quarter, and cold. Less than a month till the solstice and the midsummer festivals, but suddenly the air remembered snow. The horses snuffed and tossed their heads.

  Another bamboo fence, this one a complete circle. Banners, imperial purply-red and cloth of gold, flew at its gates. They were ordered to dismount, and the horses taken. Snow snapped, and they dragged merciless at his bit. Evening Cloud followed mule-sullen, ears back. The guards of the inner compound had gilded armour, and checked them again for weapons. Took another knife off Ahjvar. Only the one.

  Inside there were wagons and carriages, a tent of red roof and
golden-brown walls central, others about it. Guards stood at each corner of that one. Two at the looped-back doors were the tallest men he had ever seen, overtopping Ahj by more than a foot, and broad to match their height. Two carried halberds, the others broad-headed spears.

  Long shadows reached from the west and the roof of the tent suddenly glowed. He looked back. The sun was edged in fire. That meant fair weather, in Praitan. He did not think so tonight.

  The giants took them in charge, dismissed the riders who had brought them, though two of the archers followed when they were gestured, not shoved, within. That much dignity, at least.

  The tent was divided by screens, and this first room was carpeted, thick and soft as moss underfoot. The empress had prepared to receive them. It ought, he supposed, to be a compliment of sorts. At least they were no minor irritation. She sat in a carved and gilded folding chair, a travelling throne. Her court robes were a dozen layers, black through all the richest shades of red to palest pink, and a coat of gilded scale overtop. Her hair cascaded down about her and was held back from her face by a sun-rayed headdress set with pearls, white and pink and golden-hued. Her face was painted, red lips very small, blue about her eyes, drawing them up, cheekbones dusted with gold. The tent was lit with lamps burning scented oils. She flicked a slatted fan in her gloved hand, open, closed, open, the only sound. Restless. She touched her other hand to her chest, between her collarbones.

  Someone might wear an amulet there. A caravaneer might, a token of their god. Ahjvar noted it. Of course he did. Ahjvar had marked every man and woman visible in that tent, even the attendant slaves in their court robes who meekly knelt aside and back of the throne, and who watched from beneath their downcast eyelids, marking targets as Ahjvar did.

  Two more giants, one in each furthest corner, standing like guardian statues. Four about the empress.

  “Your messenger from the Old Great Gods is a devil, Buri-Nai,” Ghu said. Speak now, or he would lose all words forever, he felt, and sheer terror drive him back into the child who cringed from the cook’s iron ladle. “Nothing has chosen you but to be the destruction of this land. His name is Jochiz Stonebreaker. He will make Nabban a wasteland, empty of life. How many deaths have you given him? You’ve killed your father and your brother and your brother’s children and his wives and the crew of the ship that carried them. You’ve killed the priests of the land. You’ve killed folk in their hundreds, ever since you crossed into Numiya.” He saw it now, felt it in the land. She had not flung slaughter out before her in her march through Solan. A small thing. She would say that proved she did not murder; she killed only by necessity as she drew nearer to Choa.

  The Old Great Gods would weigh the lives.

  The fan flicked, and flicked, catching the light.

  “Don’t you see what you do? Don’t you fear him? What kind of god asks for the deaths of the folk? The Old Great Gods receive the dead, they don’t seek death.”

  Flick. The fan closed, pointed to Ahjvar. “That,” Buri-Nai said, “is a dead man. The mark of the Old Great Gods is on him. You have stolen his soul from the road.”

  “So?” Ahjvar growled.

  What did she need to feel against her skin, under her hand? There must be some doubt in her, that nervous fidgeting fan, that search for reassurance.

  “He lies to you, Buri-Nai,” Ghu said. “I think you begin to know it. You’re only a tool, convenient to his hand, and he’ll throw you aside once he has what he wants from this land.” Whatever that might be. “No god, no goddess, would do as you have. If you’d be holy, if you’d be even the empress this land needs, look, now. See what you do and change it.”

  “Your lies are empty. I have seen you in my dreams and I know you for what you are. A slave from Dernang, a runaway to the caravan road. A simpleton, when the devil is not putting words in your mouth. There is a devil in this land, yes, and she stands behind you. Yeh-Lin’s puppet, that is all you are, you and the necromancer’s swordsman, the Red Mask you stole from the Lady of Marakand.”

  A thick rage was building up in Ahjvar beside him, a storm gathering and no release for it, no way out . . .

  Ghu had hoped she would hear, that she would be able to hear. He had thought she must doubt, somewhere, in some last corner of her soul, her own certainties. Simple, yes. Because he kept hoping. Because sometimes, out of all despair and all horror, hope did find something to save. Ahj.

  He had killed where he ought not to have, taken away chances that he ought to have given. She was less worthy than some he had given no chance at all, he knew it, but—all those who followed him would pay the price if this came to battle.

  He wanted the fighting ended, yet he would not have Ahjvar do murder for him. Challenge her, then? Throw Ahjvar against her or her champion, with the devil capable of reaching through her into the land, to do as he did on the river?

  Let the folk at least know what led them.

  “How can you not see what you do?” Ghu asked. “Where’s this messenger you say the Old Great Gods have sent you? Let me see him, let him show himself and say why any true servant of the Gods would want this land in such terror of its goddess, if that’s what you are.”

  “Souls,” Ahjvar said. His voice was hoarse, a dog’s snarl. “The souls of your servants, the souls of your slaves. The tattooed ones. Do you feed him on them? Do all these here know how your servants die?”

  The empress pushed herself to her feet.

  “Kill them,” she said.

  “Hells!” The knife left Ahjvar’s hand as he flung himself on Ghu, both of them crashing to the carpeted earth, which was hard as stone and he felt Ahj’s body buck as the spear took him, the empress a creature shrouded in pale and milky flame, her hand glowing against her breast and the half of her face washed dark, a knife’s hilt standing out of her eye. Warmth. They fell into the springs of Swajui, but no, it was blood flooding over him, Ahjvar’s blood, his own. Voices shouted distantly. A man towering against the red sky, the roof, another spear’s broad and spell-edged blade and all a giant’s weight behind the thrust, punching through, tearing metal, leather, tearing flesh and shattering bone, to be sure of them.

  Cold, for all Ahj was so very heavy over him.

  It hurt, being torn apart.

  The empress was on her knees, drowned in light.

  He drowned, in the pain, in the darkness, in the cold. In Ahjvar’s blood.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  Ivah made braids as she rode, following the track, not the highway, and then village paths. Two horses, long-striding Denanbakis. Not so difficult to track, and the archers of Alwu were mostly hunters off the grassy hills, half Denanbaki themselves, like their horses. She left them to it, knotting the braids up into shapes like some unopened bud. In a deserted village they found signs the men had made a fire and rested. Reassuring to know she and hers had not gone astray. She used her teeth as well as fingers to work the final knot, as the sun set.

  Difficult to find their way in the dark. No wizard’s light. A scout in the lead carried a lantern on a pole, held low. Just the one. It would be taken for fox-light, maybe. They kept their ears open for any sound of an alerted watcher. Tendrils of fog began to creep out of ditches, pool in hollows. It had the smell of wizardry. Yeh-Lin’s, not hers. Clouds rolled over them, shutting out the stars and the rising of the moon. After midnight, for certain. She smelt the smoke before she saw the fires, and the man in the lead put out his lantern.

  “Fire,” she said. “Like fireworks, it will be. You’ll see it even in fog. Ride then.”

  They carried smouldering pitch in jars swinging from yokes. Even the clay grew hot. Yeh-Lin’s wizardry, not hers. It was not only tar meant for ropes and rafts. Other things had gone into it. A foul weapon, the devil had said. Ask Kozing Port why they forbade building in wood and thatch. Her smile had been—unpleasant.

  They left the archers under the eaves of a forested hill. Ivah did not really expect ever to see them again. She traced, in spit, with apologi
es, characters on each forehead, each wrist, of the three of them. Grasslander and Nabbani, woven together.

  “We’re invisible?” Awan asked, curiously.

  “Not yet. And no, we won’t be invisible. Difficult to notice. Don’t walk into anyone. Don’t go near wizards.”

  A final character.

  “Now,” she said. “Keep quiet, as well. They’ll notice sound.”

  Yuro and the old priest followed her, walking softly, unhurried. Awan stubbed a sandalled foot on something and grunted, stumbling, but Yuro caught him before he fell. Past sentries keeping watch, huddled close together. They seemed to peer inwards as much as out.

  Stench of smoke and dirt, after the green lands. She had no idea what they sought. Prisoners? Some late council, some debate? Ghu should not have gone alone. She had completed that hexagram she had begun to throw weeks ago. It had been, The open arms of the Old Great Gods. Some commentaries had it empty arms. It was generally read as an unequivocal foretelling of death, regardless. It had not been a foretelling she had meant to throw, only a question she sought to answer for herself, regarding the god’s champion and the unease he gave her. What is he? she had asked.

  His, Ahjvar said of himself.