by K V Johansen
Those were not a human language or human runes, Mikki said, and told her she could not and would not translate them. But if she could decipher the rest . . .
Gurhan’s Hill was wormholed with tunnels, the long wearing of water or ancient mining, who could say, but Mikki, who had explored them, said none led to Gurhan’s cave or hid the god himself.
Ivah wrote in charcoal where the inscription differed from that on Ilbialla’s tomb. She could find that way the syllables of the god’s and the goddess’s names, word-endings that might show masculine and feminine, maybe, trace from the probable names sounds that occurred elsewhere, but that was nothing other furtive scholars had not already done. Nothing the men and women consulted by Nour had not already done. It was not what Hadidu hoped or what Jugurthos and the loyalist senate expected from her, their great saviour wizard, defier of the Lady. She had taken it further, though. She felt as if she might understand, almost, the shape of the thing. It was a song half-heard, a shape obscured in fog. If she trusted, reached . . . maybe it would come clear. Maybe. Hope was all they had.
Ivah turned back to the semicircle of ground chalk she had poured out, arching to enclose the mouth of the cave and all the poplar-grown landslip that half hid it. With charcoal, she copied the names that must be those of the gods onto flat rocks set at certain points within. She wished she had the matching third, which would be the Lady, she was certain. Unless that goddess had been truly killed, when the devil came to take her place, it would be well to free her with the rest. Other characters, Nabbani, and Grasslander star-symbols, she had written in sulphur and cinnabar, the latter not easy to come by in this city where wizardry was banned.
Salt, too, she had used to draw at certain points, and she rolled and braided strips of the inner bark of the poplars over the hill, making knotted patterns, swaying and singing, sinking herself into a trance where the patterns would rise to her fingers and eye, without the conscious mind labouring. Some days she did nothing but sit, and listen, and wait.
Her father had taught her so. She had never been an apt pupil, her mind never still when he told her sit, be silent, listen to your own pulse and hear the stars, but his drugs had set her mind dizzy and jittering and made her sick. It was better to sing, softly, as he had sometimes sung to her when she was a little child and still more delight than disappointment, or as her mother had sung, lullabies, mostly. And as they faded she could hear the stars.
Or something.
She rather thought it was the poet’s mind, the prophet’s, the well in the marrow from which the words rose, and nothing to do with the Grasslander myths of the constellations. But it didn’t matter. What mattered, now, was that she could find this place that had always eluded her under her father’s eye, and out of it the knotted cat’s cradles rose, to shape channels of will and power that would, maybe, take even the necromancer devil by surprise. A hairsbreadth crack, that was all she wanted. The clawhold of a fingernail in the granite-flawless prison of the devil’s entombment of the gods. Give her that, and she would give Marakand its gods again.
Arrogant, oh, arrogant, and foolish, but it was not pride that drove her. Urgency, need, the righting of a wrongness in the world and maybe even more than that, the thing made because it could be made well, she saw it, felt it . . .
Sometimes she heard a whisper. It might have been the voice of a god. Nour came sometimes to watch her, still careful in his movements, but already getting back some of the flesh the long fever had eaten from him. He rode a courier pony, generally, with Guthrun, his gang’s camel-leech, or Kharduin himself, a fussing mother hen of a guardian to harry him back to the Sunset Gate fort. Senators came to pray, to their god, for their god, for her, and Mikki would emerge from the sun-dappled shadows of the trees then to watch, to make sure no fool crossed her lines of chalk or harassed her with stupid questions or stupider demands. Other wizards came, caravaneers or travellers, and looked, and offered tentative suggestions, to all of which she nodded, looking thoughtful, waiting for them to leave. She would have taken any suggestion that actually settled aptly into her own mind, but they all jarred, and she only wanted the helpful strangers to be silent and go away. Sometimes she felt poised to fly and felt it would all fail and crash about her, wings, feathers, wind, tearing to shreds, a fancy, dream-born, a construct that had no waking strength or integrity.
Sometimes she thought she had been fettered all her life by her own fear of not being good enough, her own knowledge she could never be good enough, and to break those chains had taken the intent to sacrifice herself. She felt . . . larger. And very small and prone to fail.
She wished Ulfhild would return.
Ivah finished the last pattern she would set that day and ate with Mikki, spiced mutton and cabbage rolled in bread brought by a young street guard, a great platter of such fare, with apologies that Hadidu could not join them. He was meeting with Jugurthos and the senior guildsmen of the Fleshmarket Ward at the Barraya mansion. She could have gone to the camp amid the palace ruins, or the library, or to so many senatorial houses that would have been open to her, but she couldn’t stand the noise, the talk, the questions, and the tension of hope. And retreating, with the rest of the—whatever they were, the leaders of the rebellion, the lords of the city, Hadidu and Captain, now Warden and Senator Jugurthos Barraya, and Nour, to the apothecary’s house or the Sunset Ward Gate was not an option. Varro had been shaken—literally, she suspected—into a promise to leave her alone. That was all Holla-Sayan had wrung out of him. They kept clear of one another. It was enough, though it distressed Hadidu for her to be so hated, and he seemed to find it hard to believe Holla’s gang might have cause to do so, though she told him so herself. She didn’t care, so long as the gang did leave her to herself; that was grace sufficient. But she didn’t want to be among the folk who saw her as their saviour, either, their champion and beloved of their gods. She wanted, needed, only silence and peace. She felt as though the wrong word, the wrong voice, the yammering of the uneducated, the ignorant, even the well-intentioned and scholarly, would jar everything loose and she would never find the threads again, the words . . .
Mikki understood silence. The moon, well into its third quarter, had risen, and as blue twilight fell it was silver already high among the branches overhead. Bats cut across it. Messengers to the Palace of the Moon, in Nabbani symbolism. It was said they carried prayers and wishes to Mother Nabban, but she dwelt in the great river of the land, so where the moon came into it. . . . That’s the sort of question your father asks, her mother would have said, or maybe had, some time long ago.But only of other folks’ gods, not his own precious stars.
“Do demons pray?” she asked Mikki. She would not go back to look at her work. That was her rule. Let it sit, let it wait. Evening was a time of second-guessing, of failing confidence and faltering will. Evening was the time to rest.
Street guard, the most trusted men from Jugurthos’s Sunset Gate garrison, came up the trampled path, three patrols of them, fifteen men and woman with lanthorns on poles and spear and sword, who would watch until dawn, to forestall any furtive destruction. The entire Palace Hill was guarded and patrolled along all the streets that bounded it, but they took no chances with this spell. The senior patrol-first bowed to her. She gave the woman, Belmyn, a shallower bow in return and a grateful smile that she didn’t chatter, that her guards were so careful, setting lights to mark a perimeter about the half—no, now it was a two-thirds-finished spell, so that no careless foot would mar it.
Let the morning bring renewed nerve.
“Pray?” Mikki repeated. “No. Not really. Good evening, Belmyn.”
The guardswoman saluted Mikki less formally, with a nod and a crooked-toothed smile, one of the few able to take him as a man and not something bordering on godhead. He rose and padded away, not far, just out of sight, for modesty’s sake. The line between day and night was crossed, somewhere beyond the hill’s crest. He came back tying the sash of a caftan that strained across
his shoulders, the hem barely halfway down his calf. Why did Mikki have to bother about taking his clothes off, she had dared ask him once. Holla-Sayan didn’t, and didn’t have to wander about muttering to himself as to where he’d left his axe, either.
Mikki had retorted, as he had when she had first remarked on his speaking, that Holla-Sayan was a monster who defied the world, whereas he was a natural beast, and where had he left his axe?
His moon-skinned pallor looked more unhealthy, less natural than it had, with his un-Northron black eyes hollow and shadowed. Marakand was nothing to him. She should be nothing to him. The demon wanted to be away searching for Moth, tearing the temple apart stone by stone, if need be, if only he could get through the fire.
“I’d call her back to you if I could,” she said awkwardly, abruptly, as she followed him away, up the ridge and down its other slope, to the ruins where the priests of Gurhan had once lived, where she had a bed in a mostly-roofed goatshed, watched over by a horse’s skull. He slept in a lean-to of brush under a tree, or, more often, sat or walked along the dyke of fern-grown stones, looking at the sky and murmuring Northron that had a different sound to it than what she had heard in At-Landi where the ships came down the river from the kingdoms of the north. So he didn’t pray. Maybe he talked to his absent mistress. Maybe he recited poetry, to keep despair at bay.
She did not think she had been sleeping long when someone came shouting from the path to the menagerie, scrambling heavily up the dyke, breaking and trampling and gasping. Ivah was on her feet with her borrowed sabre in hand and a silver light like a second moon rising over the compound to light up her enemies before she recognized the voice as that of Varro.
The recognition did not set her at ease.
“Ivah!” he shouted. “Is Holla-Sayan here? Red Masks in the Fleshmarket again.”
“I haven’t seen him since this morning.” He’d probably dropped senseless in a gutter from exhaustion. They wouldn’t leave him alone, and most of the fools flinching at imagined red-veiled shadows, night and day, had never actually met a Red Mask. If they had—she could sympathize with the flinching. The memory of the terror settled into her gut, and she sweated, sick and cold, with fear of them breaking out of Fleshmarket, coming here, for her, to drag her before the Lady again. And she had faced them twice and survived. Knowing that the cowering terror they brought was a spell and was destroyed did not help. They were still invulnerable to all but Mikki and the Blackdog.
Varro bent over, gasping for breath. He must have run all the way from his wife’s house in Clothmarket Ward. “The captain of the gate sent a runner to say she saw them coming, but there’s been no word since and nobody knows where Holla’s gone. Hadidu sent him away to rest, he says. Jugurthos sent to our house searching for him. Is the demon here, then?”
Mikki was beside him, light on his feet and little more noisy than a cat. “How many?”
“Great Gods alone know. Nobody seems to want to wait around to count. If we had some way of stopping them, some spell—”
“You all decided that since she hasn’t shown any inclination to send them out against us in numbers, maybe setting these gods free was a bit more important,” Ivah snapped “Remember?”
“Maybe it would be, if you ever actually managed to do it, but—”
Mikki growled, human shape notwithstanding. “Enough. And put out the light.”
Ivah let it die and set a spark to the wick of a candle-lantern instead, a smaller, tamer light and one that, sitting on a stone at the shed door, would not be a beacon over this valley.
“I’ll go,” Mikki said. “Heading for the other wall and the drovers’ gate?”
“Don’t know.” Varro still gasped. “Can you fight, like that? At night?”
Mikki gave him a somewhat sardonic look, axe over his shoulder. “I’m also a Selarskerry sea-raider, remember, valley man? Depends how many there are. Want to come help?”
“Talfan . . .” Varro straightened up, rolled his shoulders, and caught his breath at last. “Talfan said you’d go, if Holla wasn’t here. I’ll guard the wizard.” He shrugged, tapped the hilt of his sword, which was old in style and ornate, still showing traces of gilt, not a caravan guard’s weapon. “Unless the Red Masks come. Then she’ll be on her own and you won’t see the dust of me. She’s not worth dying for.” A sour smile at Ivah, who swallowed her reply and only nodded.
“Jugurthos is sending the militia of three wards in. If you can just clear the Red Masks out, they can hold it. The Red Masks will probably run when they see you coming, anyway,” Varro added hopefully.
Mikki growled again, more disconcerting when he looked human than by daylight.
“Mikki, what if she’s sent something after Holla-Sayan—if she’s captured him—can you call him?” Ivah asked. The Blackdog had spoken to her mind, after all. Mikki might be able to do the same.
“He’s not close by and I don’t know him all that well. You’ll be all right with Varro.” In bear’s form, he might have given her a reassuring nudge with his nose. Now he just grinned, showing those over-long eye-teeth.
“It isn’t that . . .” Did even Mikki forget Holla-Sayan was a man, monster or not? It was Gaguush’s right to worry about him, not Ivah’s, but Gaguush wasn’t here. Ifshe were the Lady, it would be the Blackdog she struck against, not the human rebels whose shield he had become. But the Lady didn’t seem so rational. Ivah let go a long breath. “Take care. The Old Great Gods go with you.”
Mikki squeezed her shoulder as he passed, barefoot, unarmoured . . . Great Gods forgive, maybe Varro was right and she should be fighting Red Masks.
No. Mikki could fight a few Red Masks, if they did not come at him in a mass. What Ivah did, here, no one else could do. They needed their gods, and they needed them before the Lady could work some attack against the Blackdog, before a Red Mask finally got past Holla to assassinate Hadidu, who, well-meaning fool, had sent him away. But if the Lady had taken Holla-Sayan, if Mikki failed to come back . . . that was the bleak mind of the night talking.
Mikki vanished before she could talk herself into going with him. He would head into the city by the narrow path of steep stairs that ran east down the hill, buried in leaf-mould and overgrown, under a broken ceremonial arch and into Silvergate Ward. Varro, after a long look at her, said grudgingly, “You’d better go back to sleep.”
“I couldn’t.” Not with Varro, who wanted nothing better than to cut her throat, looming over her on the dyke. After a moment she asked, “Tea?”
“All right.” He didn’t sound very gracious, but she didn’t ask that of him. She made a small fire, sheltered in the hut where it would not blind his watch, pared away shavings from the brick of smoky tea into the kettle as it came to a boil. Sugar, butter, salt, camel’s milk, flour, rice, stale shredded bread—caravaneers would drink, or eat, their tea with almost anything in it. He was going to have to drink his black and bitter.
Varro did thank her, gruffly, when she brought him the bowl, so she took her own a bit farther along the dyke, rather than retreating all the way back to the stuffiness of the shed. Once or twice he stirred, as if he would speak, but each time settled again into watching silence.
She heard the man coming up the path as soon as Varro did, a clumsy trampling, puffing, sandals slapping, and yet obviously trying for stealth. Not one of the street guard, who would have hailed them. Varro drew his sword and sank down with soundless care, so that he was kneeling on the ridge of tumbled wall. Ivah crawled a little higher up, sabre naked in hand. Not one man but two, the other silent. They both slowed, and the man in the lead whispered, “It’s along here, I think. It’s been a long time since I visited the priests of Gurhan, after all. Is—” He raised his voice. “Is anyone there? In the name of the three gods, is anyone there?”
Varro, she thought, waved at her. He was right, they shouldn’t both betray their positions, but why did she have to be the one to speak?
Because no one came creeping here in the n
ight looking for Varro, right.
“Stay where you are,” she ordered. “Who are you?”
“Ashir,” the man in the lead said. “The Right Hand of the Lady. Is that, um, Lady Ivah, the wizard?”
“Mistress Ivah,” she said tartly, but her heart sounded loud in her ears. “Have you come to feed more Red Masks to the demon?” He wouldn’t be chatting if there were Red Masks with him, unless he was meant to be a distraction. Where in the cold hells had Holla-Sayan gotten to?
“I came to—to talk.”
“You lie. I said to stay where you are!”
He had begun to sidle towards her voice. She sketched a hasty character and sent light to hover over him. A pouchy, lined face flinched from the glare, though it was not so bright. The second man was younger and stood like a fighting man. A caravaneer? Not too likely, despite his coat.
“I did! I was sent to capture you, I admit, but I’ve ordered the rest of the men to wait down below the hill while I scout the way, and you can—if you’ll hear me out, you can send your own guards to take them.”
“I can do that anyway,” she said, half an eye on Varro’s stealthy creeping along the dyke to get behind them. “What did you say you were, the Right Hand? The first of her priests then, aren’t you? Who’s the other one?”
“No one. Only my guard.”
“So what does a priest of the Lady want to talk about?” And how had he known to look for her here, and by name?
“They say you’re working to free the gods.”
“Who says?”
“We have our informants,” he said haughtily. “Is it true? Can you do it?” And then in a rush, “Mistress, this false Lady is mad and growing madder. None of us are safe. She murdered my wife, she murdered the Mistress of the Dance with her own hand, when she first possessed the girl, for all I know it was she who had the Voice murdered too. We’re not safe in the temple! She’s shut herself up in the Hall of the Dome to dance, and she hardly does anything else, day and night, but dance and mutter to herself, and tell us to wait, when the dead king comes from Praitan we’ll take back the city and she’ll be empress Over-Malagru. If you can bring back the old gods, the true Lady, then there are those of us in the temple willing to acknowledge your senate as the true one.”
