by K V Johansen
“Ahjvar—Gods be merciful, he’s stopped breathing.” Hands on him. Very far away.
“Leave him,” the priest whispered. “Let him go.”
He fell, as if into dark water.
CHAPTER XL
Cross the river and hold Choa.
Was she his dog?
The damned dogs trailed her, wolf-shadows, looking accusing, as if Yeh-Lin were the cause of their banishment. The clouds that had threatened in the evening had rolled in overnight as they marched, and fog had followed and overtaken them out of the river valley. Not the god’s fog, but her own, drawn about them, cold and chilly. The air was heavy, though. Past the dawn, but hardly lighter than the twilight. Storm coming. The clouds were black and churning, somewhere above the fog, and she could only hope that Sien-Shava could not pierce it, to know for certain more than that she moved. It was not only fog she shrouded them in.
They were near, she thought. Near, very near. Her folk—Nabban’s—sat or lay and rested, even slept, in their ranks, and had water and what food there was so, as well. Waiting. Few lanterns, kept low and shrouded, just enough to help them keep their place.
Her children were tight-lipped and shadow-eyed with their fear. They had not gone when she ordered them, with the wounded and the exhausted over the river under Prince Dan’s command. Could she argue? Jang had said, “You’re going after him. We’ll come after you.”
This was not the proper behaviour of a page. She would have to point that out, if they all survived.
A frenzied night. A weary march. She had not been able to pull together the force she wanted in an hour, which fear screamed at her to do. The Grasslander had gone ahead. The priest Awan had gone with her, and Yuro, and a company of mixed rebels and archers of Alwu. Yeh-Lin supposed she was fortunate Dan had remained in command of the companies left to hold the crossing, though she would rather have had Yuro’s good sense than Dan’s utterly irrational faith in his fool god’s wisdom. There was an apprehension among the soldiery, conscripts and converts and rebels alike. The holy one of the gods had ridden alone against the empress and her army. They followed, awaiting some sign . . . They might already be doomed and damned and godless.
Not godless. The empress had wanted him alive. The assassin the dead king questioned had said so. Alive and captive, and he counted on that, her mad, beautiful, innocent god.
Half-witted fool. He didn’t even wait to ask what she might do, what they could do, she, he, a devil’s daughter, and his half-mad champion. Just went and left her bound in the weight of an army and his word, his trust, his thrice-damned eyes.
Yesterday’s rumour had run like fire through the companies, the numbers coming against them, ten thousand, twenty, fifty, a hundred, all the armies of all the provinces of the south. Tell them the south is fully engaged fighting the Wild Girls, she told the officers. Tell them there is not enough grain in all the provinces north of the Gentle Sister to feed the numbers they fear.
But there had not been panic, and she had not after all withdrawn from the east, only sent what she must, to secure the west, which confidence must, she hoped, spread downward. She did not like retreat. If she had done as Ghu had seemed to order, they might march and countermarch up and down the Wild Sister for weeks and gain nothing. No. He said one thing and willed that she listen. All in your hands, do you hear me? And so she left Dan to pull together what he could from the wreckage of her own ruin, if it came that.
If it came to that, they were all lost, godless together.
“My lady?”
Zhung Ario, leading his horse into the lantern-light she made. A lantern carried by Kufu, but wizardry lit it.
“What?” she snapped—too angry, tired, hopeless, she did not know. All courtesies fled.
“My lady, the scouts have brought in two you should see.”
“Imperial spies? Wind in the Reeds? All scouts from the empress’s army are to be killed.” She was not feeling forgiving, and she did not want assassins getting loose at her back.
All too clear Ghu did not trust even to the Praitannec tongue to keep secrets within the camp, or they would have been able to make some more co-ordinated plan.
Or perhaps he really had that much faith in her.
“I don’t know, my lady. They say not.”
“And you believed them, of course.”
Zhung Ario rubbed mud from his cheek. “I wasn’t sure, my lady. One says, well, she says she’s an ambassador of the Wild Girls, come to speak with the heir of the gods of Nabban. She says the other is a servant of Prince Dan. Wiser to let you see them than to obey mindless and kill an ambassador, I thought.”
Give the man greater command than he had, for that. When she had time and leisure to think of such things. “Yes. Take me to them, then.”
The captives sat under a tree, guarded. She could not see them till she was almost on top of them. That they had been taken at all in this fog argued that they had wanted to be found. A man with a crooked nose and a face cross-hatched with fine scars, a sharp-boned woman, both young, both road-ragged and dirty. Their quilted gowns might have been decent ones, once.
They had been disarmed of swords. Not the beggars they looked. There was an air to the woman, something to her, a presence. Not wizardry.
And her eyes, the clear brown of hazelnuts, went wide, seeing Yeh-Lin. She rose to her feet, her hand pressing her comrade down when he too would have risen. Their guards stirred warily.
They faced one another in silence.
“The heir of the gods of Nabban,” the woman said at last. “What have you done with him?”
Truth in her. Yeh-Lin gave truth back. “My lord rode yesterday to meet the empress.”
“Your lord.”
“Yes. He is.”
“Alone?”
“He ordered—”
“You let him go alone? Do you know what whispers in the empress’s ear?”
“Sien-Bloody-Shava,” Yeh-Lin snapped. “Yes, I do, and I see you do too. And what are you?”
“Anlau, a queen of Darru and Lathi. Call me Rat.”
“Queen is hardly all, is it? But I’ll let it pass for now. And who is he?”
“Dwei Kaeo? My friend. A singer and actor. A prophet of the gods of Nabban, maybe. A spy of Prince Dan’s in the Golden City, till they took him. He came to keep me company on the way.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she muttered.
“Queen?” Ario was asking. “One of the Wild Girls, she means? Here? Her?”
“You left him to go alone?” the rat-girl persisted.
“He—Why in the cold hells do you think we are here?” Almost on top of the enemy, not even a mile between, and the fog smothering all.
“The empress is nothing. Why the god of Nabban there and you here?”
Because he arranged it so. To give Buri-Nai what she wanted, her rival, the heir of the gods in her hands. To distract her, let her think she’d won, while Yeh-Lin . . . did what she could. Or just as likely, for all they denied it, to put Buri-Nai within his assassin’s reach.
The fool who had taken a castle with two swords and a forage-knife.
Had he even believed the empress to be the enemy he must face?
Did he see—
To the east, and high, the fog glowed, showing itself smoky and restless, pearly. Ivah’s signal loosing the archers. Time to go, and now she saw, now—
“Cold hells damn him for a half-witted fool!”
And herself, blind, blind—blinded, known and blinded from the moment Jochiz smelt her hovering to spy on the empress in her mirror.
She spun on her heel, hair flying, loosing all hold on her form. To the cold hells with all of it. She was through with playing games.
Now.
All in her hands. He put Nabban again in her hands.
She did not want it. She would not be his heir. It was not the empress he had gone to distract and draw out but the devil and he did not know, he did not understand, he could not, what that migh
t mean.
“Jang, Kufu, Ti! Go tell the commanders to follow the plan. I go to our lord, and they must follow on.” And die, and all Nabban was lost. “You understand? Go now. Run!”
Kufu nodded, backing away before he ran. Ti and Jang both stared a moment. Then they, too, ran, Jang calling some instruction to the boys, sending them different ways.
And so she broke her pages’ hearts.
Zhung Ario backed a step or two. “My lady—”
“Go, go, if you love our blasted young god,” she said. “Our god. Mine. Yes, I am Yeh-Lin Dotemon. Did you think I lied in my challenge to Hani Gahur? My god, he is. I have given myself to Nabban, to his Nabban and what he will make of it, and he is gone to face not the empress but a devil, a tyrant to make Bloody Yao look a kindly grandfather. Trust me, there are powers we never yet unleashed on the world, even in the end, but our enemy is one who would break the very heavens if the power to do so came into his hands and I see, I did not understand and now I see. And there’s another damned goddess half-formed wandering out into the land. Turn these two loose. They are what they say and the Wild Girls and the Little Sister may yet be your best hope, if all else fails.”
“My lady,” Zhung Ario said. He bowed to her and mounted, a curt gesture sending the prisoners’ guard running ahead. One delayed only to offer them back their swords.
Yeh-Lin drew her own sword and turned through the circle, the steps, weaving a pattern to call the wind. And the wind, pulling storm in its wake, shredding fog, came to take her.
CHAPTER XLI
Two corpses and they could not just leave them, not knowing. Ahjvar sounded mad, but a man so torn through could not live and move and speak, and keep speaking. The splinter of crystal in Ivah’s hand was chilling her palm, not warming to it. She wiped frozen blood from it and wrapped it in a length of red yarn, knotting it as if might escape the cocoon, and the knots were ones of sealing and holding. She added a hair from her own head, winding it, making the same knots, and put it in the purse with her oracle-coins.
“Is Ahjvar mad, are they dead, or do we have any hope?” she demanded of Awan.
“Hope,” he said. “I don’t know. I have faith.”
She had thought she did. Tried to remember the warmth that had filled her, the safety, the sense of being home. The rider of the white horse, the sky breaking into blue banners. She had known, then. She remembered. It was very far from the stench of congealing blood and the fear that made her hands shake. Old Great Gods, she had ridden a demon into battle against the Lady of Marakand; she was the daughter of Tamghiz Ghatai, of An-Chaq who had escaped the palace and all the Wind in the Reeds sent after her; she could not be so weak now.
“He came back to the castle,” Yuro said. “Everything changed. And Yeh-Lin calls him her lord. Yes, I know what she is. I do notice things. If Ghu’s man says he is a hundred years old and immortal, I believe him. A man doesn’t move and speak, doesn’t breathe, with wounds like that. Not this long. And if he says Ghu is not dead, I believe that too.”
They had to, because otherwise what was the point in anything? They were defeated and lost and could only go on twitching, like a hooked fish tossed up on the riverbank, until the empress made an end of them.
“We still have work to do,” Ivah said. “The three of us can’t carry them away through all this camp to any place safer, even if we took them one at a time, and I don’t think I would want to separate them.”
The empress had said she was going to rest; she had threatened any who disturbed her. That might mean a certain reluctance on the part of Buri-Nai’s people to report any minor strangeness. Ivah found colours, red, white, black, began a cat’s-cradle that grew long, a net that caught the stars of winter morning in its pattern, the wounded hero Khumbok asleep, cradled like a child in the lap of the lake-goddess Aiakayl, while his enemies searched blind along the shore.
“Out,” she whispered to Yuro. “Not you,” to Awan. “You stay with them.”
He nodded, settling down cross-legged on one of the cushioned benches that ran along the sides, where he could watch over the dead. Holding the pattern taut in her hands, she spread it out on the floor.
“I can’t leave the light. Don’t disarray this or it won’t hold. If someone comes in—it won’t matter anyway. Do you have a weapon?”
The priest shook his head. “I came to be by my god, that only. I’m an old man, a priest of the Mother. I eat no meat. I’ve never so much as killed a fowl.”
“Pray Ahjvar wakes up then, if someone comes.”
She let her light go out and followed Yuro into fog that wrapped and clung, so that almost at once she felt as damp as if it drizzled. Thick fog should help. The air had the heavy feel of coming storm, pressing down.
She was holding too many threads in mind. To recast the spell that made her difficult to see would be too much. Trust to the night and the fog.
A little moonlight would have been nice.
She and Yuro caught hands, not to lose one another, and walked with the careful, soft steps needed when one had no idea if the ground might rise or fall in a sudden rut. Her shoulder hit something. Another wagon. That dark. Too close, a woman’s voice whispered, “I can’t pray. I wish I could,” which was so much her own thought . . .
They had counted on a glimpse of moonlight, a faint lightening beyond the cloud in the east, to let them know it rose, days into its last quarter, and that the dawn was coming. Already she had lost all sense of direction. Yuro tripped and in his falling something caught her across the thighs and they both went down, a heavy thump.
“Who’s that?” a man called.
Guy-rope. In their silence, picking themselves up, they heard someone move near. Sudden murky lantern-light, almost on top of them. But the guy-rope found him. Grunt. Thump.
“Devils damn this fog.”
“Maka?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
A snort. “Tell me and I’ll let you know. Just stay put. No point trying to walk the rounds in this. Go stumbling into the wall of the Exalted’s tent and your head will be right up there with tomorrow’s haul of deserters.”
Yuro tugged her sleeve. On hands and knees, they moved away. They needed to be feeling their way with a stick, like Dan. No sticks to hand and she had left her bow with her horse.
They weren’t crawling in circles after all. Bamboo stakes. Her knotting of the wards still worked, whispering reassuring lies into whatever mind had set this. It was a fence put up and taken down with every camp, a barrier for privacy and the setting apart of their divine empress, not true defence. The pales were not planted all that deeply, and the split canes that wove through them, helping to hold them aligned, were growing brittle. Yuro’s forage-knife sliced through those with little sound, and they rocked enough stakes loose to squeeze through, setting them back in the loose earth. Not straight, but who would notice? They should mark the point somehow, but in the fog how would they find it again anyhow?
She really wished she knew what direction she faced.
Faint wind. The fog was nearly drizzle, and her left cheek was colder. Whatever direction that was. The clouds had been gathering in the north. Perhaps they crept east, now.
The archers were waiting behind them, then. Couldn’t be helped.
The plan was that they would find Ghu and his champion, to extract them if they could, before signalling the raiding party. Holding off on that until as near dawn as possible, to give Yeh-Lin’s rapid night march most time. Failing that . . .
Strong scent on that faint breeze. Cattle.
“Yuro?” Murmur against his ear. “Ever work with oxen?”
“I was my lord’s stable-master, not a ploughman.”
Damn. Daughter of the warlord she might be, but no daughter of the Grass grew up a pampered princess—her father’s bellow at her mother, some argument yet again. There were tasks for bondfolk, but if she could not do them herself, how could she know well from ill done, and how could the folk she might
one day lead respect her? But it was she who needed to do what they had come for; she could not be teaching Yuro to wrestle with yokes and accidentally-goring horns in the dark.
On the other hand . . . the ox-drivers would sleep near their charges.
“Yuro, you’re a captain of the Wind in the Reeds. You need two yoke of oxen and their drivers.”
No protest. He simply took a deep breath. “You coming with me?”
“I need to set the signals. Just be a lord. Arrogant. Certain. Walk over them. You were a slave in Dernang. They’re slaves. You know the sort of captain and lord you need to be to stop them questioning.”
“No slaves, he says.”
“Not if she comes back and kills him while he lies—” Not dead. They were pretending they had faith. “—lies helpless in some shaman’s trance.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Tell them—the gate-guards can’t be trusted. That’s why you’re taking them through the fence. You’ll have to widen the gap or make a new one. Gods be with you.” Which god or gods or Gods? She left him.
It was easier moving on her own, and if she shut her eyes against the blindness and merely felt, in the soles of her boots, in the damp breath of the north on her face, in the air she breathed—smoke, dung, animals, human sweat, crushed greenery, mud—she found her way. A way. A straight lane, mucky and rutted, the central avenue of the camp, and there was occasional light, a fire, a lantern, suddenly emerging and quickly passed. There were others who moved likewise, most often in pairs, muttering for their own encouragement, grumbling against the dark and the night and cursing the weather.
Distant thunder.
She began to lay the knotted spells that she had made as she rode, setting each with a breathed word over it.
A section of a spiral, working inward, back to the empress’s compound. She had meant to lay most of them along the main avenue, but she did not after all want to end up on the edge of the camp, where she and Yuro and Awan were meant to be with the holy one, to reclaim their horses.
Now, before whatever uproar was going to follow when Yuro began trying to steal a wagon.
