The Lady

by K V Johansen

  “So,” she asked again, opening her eyes, “Your assassin. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s cursed,” Ghu said warily.

  He might have been able to hurt her, but he would not take her by surprise a second time. She did not think he could defeat her, though a victory would not come easily . . . he was not her enemy and she should not think so.

  “Cursed how?” she asked instead.

  “He’s possessed by the ghost of his stepmother. His goddess has ensured he will never die, to be a vessel for that soul on the earth.” He gave her truth, at least, as simple and blunt as if he did not understand what he was saying. But he knew. Indeed.

  “Possessed by a heavens-damned vampire of some sort, I should say.” She frowned. Deyandara and the man were talking intently, and the girl was pressing food on him. “What does it feed on? Him?”

  “On him. On death. On dying.”

  Her anger boiled up again. With cause, this time. “And you let this go on?”

  He said nothing.

  “You, who managed to bind me, even for a short while, you let this go on?”

  “I couldn’t have done anything. Not then. Not when I found him. Now, since I found him again here—not without killing him.”

  Too much denial, there. She knew the sound of guilt. “Then you should have killed him. Does he actually want to live, like that?”

  “No. He wants to die. And I love him.”

  “If you love him, then you’ll let him die.”

  “He can’t die. I can kill him, but he can’t just . . . die. He won’t grow old, he won’t fall to some arrow, a swordsman won’t take his head. The arrow will miss or not strike deep, the blade will slip and glance aside. . . . There’s not a god in Praitan or the Tributary Lands can or will free him from these curses. He was made what he is with the full strength of this duina, in anger and hatred and death. I can’t take it away from him and let him go on as he should, to whatever fate comes. I can destroy him as I did the Red Masks. Or not.”

  “You aren’t some small god of Praitan and the Tributary Lands. Turn that thing in him out to die, at least.”

  “Catairanach won’t allow it. She’s bound them, till Hyllau can be born a new child, and now that he knows, he won’t, of course he won’t let that be. I can’t see a way to separate them. Catairanach pours herself into this binding, and this is her land. He was her king, born of this land. He is hers. I can’t change that or deny it, only tear both of them from the goddess together and hope Ahj will be free of his hag then, for the road to the Old Great Gods. Hyllau’s final death will be his as well, at my hand. And I promised him, if she wakes again . . . that I would. She will wake. It’s ‘when’, not ‘if.’”

  “Every life he’s taken since you—since you chose not to be other than what you are—”

  “I didn’t choose. I was sent. I am not. I become. Slowly.”

  “That’s dicing words, child of Nabban. Every death is on you.”

  “Some of them he would have killed anyway,” Ghu protested, and he heard the boy in his own voice again.

  The corner of Yeh-Lin’s mouth tucked up. “And some you killed yourself,” she said. “I see it in your eyes, and you are not easy in that. And some I would have killed and saved you the bother, yes. But you admit it, you know it. Those deaths are all yours, not his.”

  “Yes. Of course they are. I chose. He didn’t.”

  “You chose for him and god or not you had no right.”

  “I am no god.”

  She gave him a long, cool look. “And what do you call yourself, then?”

  He shook his head. “Ghu.”

  “And did they drop you on your head when you were born, Ghu? Are you the simpleton you played for Deyandara?”

  He almost smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes. And no. They threw me in the river.”

  “The evidence,” she snapped, “does nothing to deny me. They dropped you on your head first, then they threw you in the river. Idiot. Child of Nabban.”

  He opened a hand, not denying but letting the words fall away.

  “Oh, damn the both of you,” Yeh-Lin muttered. “You love him. If you have to kill him, it had better be for his own sake. Lend me a horse? You owe me that. No, you don’t, don’t say it, my folly left the girl to Ketsim and you owe me nothing, but I’m tired, too tired to bind the winds. I dislike very much being buried, you have no idea . . .”

  “Where are you going?” Ghu asked, as she started for the horses.

  She didn’t look back. “To take on a new sin of my own,” she said. “Or expiate some old ones.”

  He didn’t stop her. The horses were muscular Grasslanders, two bays and a dark chestnut. She took the first that came to her hand, with a narrow-eyed glance back at Ghu, still watching. See, they don’t run sweating and white-eyed over the horizon, hah. The curious chestnut filly did flinch back when she tried to stroke her but let her fasten the bridle again and tighten the girth. Leading the horse, she slipped away through the woods, out into the open land, without Deyandara and the assassin noticing. She didn’t want words and demands. She didn’t want to have to pass by Ghu. He hadn’t asked anything more. She would have answered, but he hadn’t asked.

  The hill-fort smoked against the sky, still and dead, stinking of death. No people stirred about it. Somewhere inside, a dog was whining, crying heartbroken. The hedged fields along the brook had a weedy, untended look, with pigs rooting among the peas and cabbages. Straying horses and a lone camel grazed a field of green grain. Hay meadows had been ridden across, and recently.

  The folk couldn’t all be dead. Fled, more like. She might be watched from the wooded seams of the folded hills. Yeh-Lin followed the brook, then the narrow stream that ran down to feed it, the goddess’s heart in the world. The water ran clear and stone-cold; she could smell it, and she was thirsty, but she didn’t drink, though she paused to let the horse do so. Mint and forget-me-not, creamy curds of waterleaf, touch-me-not and the broad swords of iris-leaves traced its course. White butterflies stirred up in clouds before her.

  The goddess did not rise to greet her. Yeh-Lin dismounted and left the horse, walked the last few yards to the spring itself. It was shadowed by three big mountain ash trees, heavy with hard green berries. A sparrow winged away in silence, frightened from the lush grasses about the water. The pool was deep and clean, the stones a golden brown in the leaf-scattered patterning of the afternoon sun.

  Catairanach was aware of her, no doubt of that. Yeh-Lin drew her sword and walked a circle, sunwise, about the spring and its guardian trees. This would not be human wizardry, but the forms might as well be, to settle her mind. Best not to go into this in anger, to scar the earth with devilry more than she had to. She began to trace words of binding and sleep in the Great Gods’ script at the cardinal points, standing within the circle. A white mist rose over the water.

  What are you doing? Lady of Marakand . . .

  “Oh, I’m not the Lady,” Yeh-Lin said cheerfully, letting her tongue do as it would, her mind mostly elsewhere. “Be glad. She would destroy you. Or he. She might be he, you know. I’m merely here as, hrm, a friend of the folk you’ve neglected and abused over the years.”

  I have neither neglected nor abused my folk! Any harm done them is laid at Marakand’s door. I couldn’t fight the Lady.

  “I didn’t mean that. Not that you put much effort into your defence,” she added critically. “You’ve crippled yourself. Bound too much of yourself into this curse on the vampire soul and the man you’ve tied her to, I should think.”

  “I never cursed my daughter!”

  “You think she’d say so, if she were whole and in her right mind? Or was she ever? I ask out of curiosity, mind you. I do not actually care. But you don’t deny cursing the man Ahjvar, I note. You meant to destroy his very soul, to make him watch himself decay to something unbearable, until in madness he became nothing but a howling in the night and there was nothing left for the Old Great Gods t
o claim and heal.”

  He betrayed her. He killed her.

  There was a figure now, half-seen in the corner of the eye, mist tinted with human colour.

  “Did he? It seems to me there is king’s law, in this land, before which even a goddess could bring such an accusation.”

  He was the king.

  “And then there is the high king over him and the court of the seven kings. And of course, outright vengeance and murder. What you have done, however, is obscene. It taints the very earth.”

  Tendrils of mist reached and touched her, twining about her ankles. Touched the script as she finished the last word and recoiled.

  A word of her own, and light like fire poured along the letters, white and golden and cold as ice. Yeh-Lin stepped down into the water. The goddess screamed outrage and boiled up into a column of fog. The spring convulsed in waves like a lake storm-beset.

  “What have you done? What are you doing?”

  The goddess stood amid the waters, naked, her arms raised as if denying the light, but it did not fail. The waves soaked Yeh-Lin to the waist.

  “I have no right to set myself up as a judge of gods—or of men, for that matter. But who else is there, who will call you to judgement for the harm you’ve done to your land and your folk? To your kings?”

  “My folk,” Catairanach said. “My land. My kings.”

  “Yes,” said Yeh-Lin. “And that is your only defence? That they are yours? Well, then. So be it.”

  She caught the goddess by the hand and almost laughed at Catairanach’s offended face, startled out of her rage. The goddess had not thought herself so material a form. But neither was Dotemon. Water hissed around her. Yeh-Lin dropped her sword and clutched with both arms, like an embrace, like a wrestler, pinning Catairanach close as water hissed and spat against fire, and she told herself, Ice, remember the ice and the long sleep of the tree, remember roots and the long dream. It was not the destruction of the goddess she was seeking. But there was no long dream here, no rooted wisdom she could share, to hope Catairanach could grow wise. And she was not here to inflict an eternity of torment, to drive the goddess to madness, just though that might be, if you weighed your justice in the scale of vengeance: misery for misery, despair for despair, pain for pain. Her tree would never approve of that. “You will sleep,” she said, gathering the words she had set. The roots of this, start with the roots, when one would understand. She could see.

  A man, charming, laughing, dabbling his hands in the water, a sweep of Northron copper hair, unbraided, a glint of slate-blue eye, calling, and the goddess rising to meet him, afraid and enticed. Yeh-Lin’s breath caught. Heuslar. Heuslar, in the days when he had been only the wizard of Red Geir’s hall, or was he Ogada? Wizard wandering or devil? Did it matter? There was fear in the goddess’s attraction and the spice of danger, and great daring, that she did not hide herself away. Ogada, then, the tang of something Catairanach did not recognize, yet which was more than human. And? And the waiting. The long years. Wait, he had said. He would come back to her. Years, generations, and the child hung between being and not being, because he would return and take her, show her the world her mother could never see, bound in her little waters, make his daughter a queen, he said, of empires in the north. Lives, steeping in the dreams of something greater than this little land of cattle and sheep on the hills and the smoky halls, though what was the north but more of the same? Long lives, and the mortal child soaked in that waiting, that anxiety, those dreams, and he never came.

  He was dead. Truly dead. And when he had been free, he had not come to Praitan seeking her again. The goddess had finally known it, and had given her child to the world, in love and in hatred she did not even see, for the pain the infant brought, the memory of betrayal.

  The mother held her now, still, with the strength of her land. Clung to her, in love and in hurt. She would see her born again, see her live a new life, clean and sweet. It would all be right, this time, all sins forgiven, all pain atoned for, when the child was reborn. If he defied her, refused the girl, the girl who could bear the child, who carried the form and the memory of her in blood and bones, he could be brought to it. Hyllau would hear her. Hyllau would—

  “You are obscene,” Dotemon breathed in Catairanach’s ear, as fire and water became bone and flesh again, and the waters shivered. “I take your Hyllau from you. The roots of this land that hold her, I rip from her. The cord that binds you, I sever, as should have been at her birth. I tear her from you, so that she may be given to the world when there is one resolute to take him from her and from you, for her to perish then on that day to come as she should have long ages before.”You cursed her, because you would not let her go. You made her what no god’s child should be, more than half a god, and she had not the wisdom to wear even a wizard’s powers wisely.

  She felt the tearing, as if fine rootlets snapped beneath her hand, veins weeping blood, the virtue of the land seeping away, the umbilical that fed the babe in the womb gushing free, draining the mother, washing her godhead from the duina. The goddess wept, without cries and wailing, without sound at all, tears streaming. Her hands fell away, and Dotemon caught her as she would have fallen into her waters, fleeing.

  “Look at me. Hear me. Know me. I am not wise, but I am trying to be so. I know what it is, to try to shape your child to be what you are not, to live what you could not, to live for you. And I know the cost of that, and the sin of it, now. I pity you, but—”

  The goddess rose in one last effort, water and earth, stone, pulling the devil down, but she was not startled and taken unawares. Catairanach was only the little goddess of a little land, and Dotemon was the fire of the stars. She enveloped the goddess and stood unfaltering.

  Sleep without dreams, sleep knowing nothing, sleep being nothing, till the end of this world. I say it. I, Yeh-Lin of Nabban say it. I, Dotemon called Dreamshaper of the North, say it. Let the Duina Catairna find itself a new god, and if Nabban has the will to do as he should, let the lost soul of your daughter meet its fate.

  The waters of the spring sank and were still, and the sky, where stars had shivered in the blue, grew again clear and hot. Crickets sang on the afternoon hills. The water burbled peacefully, grains of sand dancing in the upwelling between the rocks. But the leaves of the mountain ashes were brown and sere, crackling, falling, drifting on the surface of the water, swirling and settling on the winter-grey grass, and the green berries were withered, never to burn with scarlet ripeness in the rich autumn. The grains of dancing sand settled and were still. The spring still burbled and chimed, but slowly, it fed itself out through its overflow, into the stream, lined with dead and rattling stalks, and its voice was silenced. Water stood in the deepest places of the streambed, but where it had run over rocks, they dried in the sun. The spring was a pool, stagnant and sinking into the stones.

  Yeh-Lin groped for her sword, dried it on her sleeve, stretching bones that for a moment felt their age. She stepped out and paused, standing on one leg and then the other, to pour water from her boots, making a face.

  “But what,” she asked aloud of the sky, “happened to Heuslar Ogada?”

  She felt the touch of ice on the back of her neck and shivered.

  The chestnut mare had strayed far down the hill. Squelching, Yeh-Lin set out after her.

  Halfway down, she turned back. Scowled at the smoking dinaz, where that lone, lorn dog still mourned. Climbed the hill, straight to the stone wall east of the tower and drew her sword.

  A single stroke that never touched, and the drystone wall fell. She climbed down the ditch and over stone, marched through the trampled lanes, smelling death and roasted meat. Nothing stirred. The folk who had abandoned the place had taken everything living with them, save this one small faith. The dog was silent. It knew her, as beasts did, a thing out of place, a thing that did not belong wholly to this world. But then it whined again, afraid, and lost. It cowered under the broken remnant of a gooseberry bush, where once there had been
a garden, and it watched a heap that had been a tent, ash, now, and charred felt and bone, and all still warm. Its eyes shifted sideways to her, and back, and it whined, hackles bristling, and stirred at the same time a tail like a black plume.

  “There’s no hope here,” she told it, and when it cringed away from her, grabbed it up. “Even the goddess is gone. Can’t you tell?” It was not a terribly large dog, and fit under her arm.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The smashed door had never been repaired, but the bodies of the Red Masks were gone. The crack in the floor that had been a well of dark water held nothing now. Mikki sniffed, but there was nothing of Moth, nothing to smell but earth, and stone, and damp. The well was his way, nonetheless. If he could fit. He couldn’t sit here waiting for nightfall, while Holla-Sayan fought a devil in his stead. He had no idea how deep the well went or where it might open out before the bottom; it seemed to drop straight down. He was at home in caves but did not love such straight chimneys. Encumbered by a sword in his mouth, he started down backwards, finding clawholds and small ledges, bracing himself between the narrowing—Great Gods be kind, not narrowing any further—sides. When all light of the dome’s eye was lost he began to imagine the devil coming, Holla-Sayan’s burned and bloody corpse discarded behind her, to send a cascade of lightning down this shaft on his head.