The Lady

by K V Johansen

  Then there was no hold for his groping hind paw. Dislodged stone rattled and hit a floor, but what and how far—not water. He would have preferred water.

  Moth! he called silently. Damn you, where are you?

  Nothing.

  Ulf? Vartu!

  But the sword grew cold in his teeth. He wasn’t a man, to hang by his fingers and feel about and pull himself up again if he found nothing. It was drop or stay. So he dropped.

  He seemed altogether too long falling.

  Demon of the forest. . . . A whisper of the mind, and he was in water. He had not fallen into water; he was under water, water lit by moonlight, and he struck out for the surface, grabbing with a human hand as it sank away from him the sword he couldn’t carry now in his teeth, flipping wet hair out of his eyes.

  A river, a warm summer night, and the cliff rising over him was, maybe, the edge of the ravine, but neither wall nor houses marched along it. The stars were streaked with scarves of cloud, and the moon was full, burning through.

  “Lady of Marakand?”

  Mist on the shore, gathering, until there was a dark woman standing under the lea of the cliff, naked and wet. He was naked himself, and not entirely comfortable to be so, swimming about in a goddess’s river while she watched in a human form. One of them really ought to have some clothes on. Not much he could do about it, though. He waded ashore, slinging Lakkariss over a shoulder.

  “Marakanat,” she said. “My name is Marakanat. You . . . fell. I remember. You should not have fallen here.”

  Lakkariss was very—present, that was the word, cold against his side. Lakkariss was awake.

  “Marakanat, then. Where’s the devil?” he asked. He did not feel the full and holy weight of the presence of a goddess. She was only mist and memory, diffuse and all about him.

  She frowned, held up her hands to the moon, watching the light pass through them. “Did I dream of a devil?”

  “You’re dreaming now,” he said gently. “Lady . . .”

  “The Lady,” she said, as if remembering. The moon, emerging from cloud, poured through her hands, which were only mist. “The Lady, dying, dreaming, imprisoned within a devil, imprisoning a devil within a dream, within memory. I never dreamed a bear of the north. Demon of the Hardenvald. The devil dreams of you. But she is peaceful enough. Leave her to dream. Leave her to die with me, and so she will be gone from this world where she should never have been.”

  “No. I want her back. And what about the other, who’s destroying your city?”

  “Other? Yes, there is the other. I thought I had trapped her, but I was wrong. They were two, and she escaped. But at least I hold one. She showed me how herself. Your devil showed me the dream I dreamed, the strength of the river in the days of my strength. The other I can’t stop. I tried. We tried. I remember the dancer, the foolish, brave child, but she gave herself to the devil of her own will, and the devil holds me still, a little of me, though she has let most of what I was pass away into the dream, fading . . . there will be no waking. Even the well fails, the last water draining to the deep earth. It’s better so. Even the gods die, you know, as the slow ages turn. The river has been gone a long, long time. I would have gone with it, but the folk called to me so, and the well endured. Better I had gone . . .”

  Moth! He could feel himself drifting, caught by the river’s murmur along its banks.

  “Go back to the north. Go away, demon, and take your hungry sword. There is nothing here for it.”

  The sword, yes. It knew Moth was here, more surely than he. Mikki drew it. Tiny crystals of frost edged the blade. The goddess, mist strengthening, backed away.

  “Don’t,” she said. “That has no place here. No place in this world.”

  “I know it. The devil you hold is named Vartu. Let her go. She’s needed.”

  “She will sleep, unwaking, and sleep in my dreams when I am gone. She welcomes it. She embraces it. She wants to sleep and to never wake. See? I haven’t harmed her. I’m no killer, as the devils are.”

  Fog rose from the water. In it he saw stone. Then there was a tree, a ghost of a tree, a ledge, a cavern, a river high in flood, washing above him, and the cavern again, filled with dark water. He saw Moth, turned on her side, head on her arm, eyes half-closed, unmoving, as the shape of the Lady’s dream shifted and flowed about her, water, stone, night, day. She faded into the stone, might have been stone. Water seeped down the wall she lay against, carrying a skin of stone.

  “Moth!” he shouted.

  “She hears only in her dreams. They’re pleasant dreams,” the goddess said. “She ought not to dream so. She ought to carry her sins and suffer for them, but she dreams of you instead. She might wake, otherwise. Besides, I do not want to overhear what nightmares she might have.”

  “That, you do not,” Mikki growled. “But maybe you should. It’s happening here, in your city.”

  “Not here. Not now.”

  “Because this is a dream. You’re there, in your city, whatever is left of you, possessed by a devil who is oppressing your folk, killing in your name, attacking the very gods in your name, making you a nightmare and a terror.”

  “Yes. This dream is all I have left, and it will fade soon, too. The river died long ago.”

  “Why?” he asked. Not so long ago, as a goddess marked time, surely. There had been a city here then. And so long as she kept talking, she did not remember to draw the vision of Moth away.

  Lakkariss had found a way here, even sheathed and sleeping. He had only followed where it took him.

  “The mountains shifted and fell. The Marakanat flows south now, beneath stone, under ice. She whom I once was loses herself in rivers of the south, and the lakes, and the waters Over-Malagru have forgotten her. Forgotten me. I almost forget myself.”

  So the Lady even before the devil came to Marakand had been not a ghost, exactly, but the cast-off remnant of a goddess, enduring in a reservoir of her waters because she had folk who needed her, dwindling, fading, while her true full self had her focus elsewhere. That explained, perhaps, her weakness, and perhaps how she had so easily found the way to ensnare Moth, living herself in past longings.

  Lakkariss had brought him here, ya, and Lakkariss wanted Moth’s hand to be hunting the devil. Or to hunt her souls. Moth talked to it, sometimes, saying, Not yet. She thought he didn’t hear. Lakkariss breathed tendrils of cold fog, and they crawled towards the dim dreaming sleeper, reaching through the vision into that other place, other time, into a natural cistern of the Lady’s waters. The sword’s ice-exhalation was pale over the water, fog-fingers touching Moth where she lay.

  The Lady of Marakand put a hand on his arm. “Let her sleep,” the goddess said.

  Mikki jerked away. “The devil Tu’usha still feeds on you. I smell her breath in your words.”

  The night river shivered, rose, lapping his ankles, first harbinger of the spring freshet from the mountains, thundering down. The goddess reached to hold him, and he hurled the sword, cutting the air, roaring, “Wolf, catch!” Flung himself after it, into a cavern of darkness and fog.

  All light vanished, but daytime had taken him again. He surfaced in a cold and stagnant pool, and his frantic paddling forepaws struck a rim of crackling cat-ice. It was dark as a mine; blind, he could find no shore, and the sword’s empty sheath looped about his leg tangled him.

  “Mikki? Over here.” A hand caught a fistful of his ruff and tugged. His paws found solid stone beyond the ice. He heaved himself up, sneezing, shoved hard against Moth, warm and living woman pressed against him in turn, with an arm around his neck.

  Sometimes he thought he must have been born a fool, or mad, perverse at least, to have fallen in love with what even he could admit was a youth’s imagined woman spun of songs and sagas and old bones in a cave. But then he smelt her, touched her, tasted her, or she could look at him with laughter chasing the weight of old sins from her sea-grey eyes, or the fires of her soul turning her half to light and flame, and he could not d
oubt himself. She and no other: earth of his moon, sun of his day, and the half of his soul.

  Tongue found her face, her seeking mouth. Eventually she let him go, fended him off to cut a rune into the rock with Lakkariss, which was excessive, but that was Moth, and Fire glowed like an ember, rose in firefly sparks to the roof, reflected, a dancing swarm, on water still rippling from his fall. The ice that fringed the pool was melting.

  Moth grinned at him, tipping water out of the scabbard and sheathing Lakkariss. “I don’t suppose it’ll rust. Where did you come from, cub?” A frown. “Where did I come to?”

  “You’ve been lost not quite a month.”

  “So little? Where kept changing, though it was always here, I think. The river, sometimes. And then, hah, then . . .” She looked away, which was evasion, and he wondered what had truly held her here. She shrugged. “I feel asleep. But I thought it was years.”

  “Old Great Gods prevent, I hope not. What’s left of the Lady claims she trapped you in—she says a dream. Memories of her past, maybe. Are we still there? There was no water in the well when I climbed down.”

  “Climbed down. In daylight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gods, cub, that was—what if you’d gotten stuck?”

  “I took the sword myself because I thought it could find you. Wanting you as it does. Nothing else could. The devil’s fighting the Blackdog.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not there, my wolf,” he said tartly, “and someone has to, and Holla-Sayan is a fool who thinks he has to carry the world. He doesn’t walk away from anything. Tell him he’s needed—he’s got a wife and a child on the way, but tell him he’s needed and he’s fighting—who, Yeh-Lin?—with his teeth and a Grasslands sabre, because there’s nobody else and this morning she tried to kill the gods.”

  “If Yeh-Lin decided to rule a city again she wouldn’t make such a mess of it. The Lady is Tu’usha, but the body isn’t Sien-Mor’s. Kill the gods how?”

  “By burning the life of the land away, like that horror along the Kinsai’aa.” He hesitated. “Or the valley above Hrossfjord of the Geirlingas.” Which had been Moth’s doing. “Ivah had been working on a spell to free them for the loyalists—there’s been an uprising against the Lady’s rule—something as many-layered and complex as that thing of her father’s we found on the Grass, that he used to transport his horde into the mountains, and she must have had some part of it right, because the devil tried to kill her too, or maybe capture her, to make a new Red Mask. She survived. But her work’s destroyed.”

  “Ivah won’t do it on her own. She doesn’t have all the words and couldn’t speak them if she did, being human. But she might weaken it, if she stops hobbling herself with hearing her father’s voice.” Moth let him go to pace the length of the ledge. “Doesn’t matter. Alive or sleeping or annihilated from the world, we can’t help them now and they can’t help us here.” Mikki watched her, feeling oddly at ease. Pacing, the growth of anger, hot or cold, was reassuring. Moth was all too capable of leaving others to fall to their own damnation, as she would say, when action of hers might save them. Anger set her in motion.

  And which would Gaguush prefer from Holla-Sayan, who was only a young man, not yet weary of the world, and yet left her to spend blood and risk life for causes not his own, because some stranger, some enemy even, cried for help? Would she really have him turn his back on the falling, the failing, if it meant he remained hers and safe?

  “The deep well,” Moth said at last. “We’re still in the deep well.”

  “There’s nothing overhead. No crack.” Though since he’d ended up in a river ages past, what did that matter?

  “No stairs, you mean. This is the cave of the well, or it will be, not the cavern of water below. We may have a very long wait. At least until the next earthquake. Could be centuries. And who knows if the city even exists above us yet?”

  “I’ve told you before, you have a knack for annoying gods. You’re supposed to leave talking to them to me.” And this trap was half Moth’s own shaping, he was sure; she was always seduced by passive withdrawal, by the choice of inaction. Safer for the world, maybe, than the restless King’s Sword who had united all the north in her brother’s name and led them south. . . . “Find us a way back, then. I trusted you could when I came for you. I left Holla-Sayan fighting that alone.”

  “Don’t natter, cub. The sword brought you into the Lady’s dream. We’re still there. It’s left a, a weakness in the fabric, say. A trail I can follow.” With Lakkariss, she cut runes along the ledge, shoving him back when he trod closer to see. “And don’t drip.”

  “How,” he asked, “do you expect me not to drip?”

  Water, was obvious, and Need, and Journey, in a line, and Devil, above and below. Then Sword, cutting through them all. He did drip, and the water froze to ice in the lines. She sheathed Lakkariss, drew her own sword Keeper and cut her arm, matter-of-fact, tracing every line with blood. The ice smoked away at the touch of it, and the cut dried swiftly.

  A hand dug into the deep fur of his shoulder again. She spoke a word, soft, but his mind couldn’t hold it. It echoed like the whisper of harpstrings catching some stir of air, no hand laid on them, ran around the cavern and riffled the still water. Stone shifted and tilted beneath them, and the light became dim daylight. There were the stairs rising from the chamber, the ashy, moist earth, the damp stone and the crack of the empty well between. There were his own tracks, crossing the muddy patches, going to the well.

  “Hah,” Moth said, with some satisfaction. He didn’t snarl that she could have done that any time. Even the leaf falling from the tree in autumn takes some final push of air to set it free. Light in the doorway above them flared white. They ran. She was first to the stairs.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Sword.

  Ice. It whispered of ice.

  She had dreamed it, and the Voice of the Lady had warned.

  White sky, copper moons.

  Fire within the ice.

  Here.

  No.

  Zora blinked, dazzled by dreams, by seeing.

  This dog was no one of the seven, but he came to kill her. He was sent. He must have been. Jochiz had opened the hells without her, Sien-Shava needed her no longer. Her brother sent the dog-man to kill her.

  Sien-Shava Jochiz had already killed her. She forgot. Silly girl.

  She could kill his servant the dog. She could take the sword.

  The dog-man hid the ice. She couldn’t see. She felt its weight taken from her and drew breath again.

  But such a sword could kill her brother. Such a sword could . . . what veil between worlds could it not cut, with a great enough will and need behind it, and a hand strong enough to hold steady in the face of what must follow?

  She swayed, eyes shut. She could be so strong. Yes.

  And she could kill her brother. Ulfhild had murdered hers; it was easily done.

  The bear ran for the deep well. Let him go. A demon was a little thing, and he would not find the Lady there. The Lady slid beyond reach, and soon even her dreams would end. She was the Lady.

  The dog charged her. She did not see his sword. If he burned, she could take it from him. No fire of hers could harm it. So she flung fire at him, but she forgot—he was her brother’s so he could not be weak she was her brother’s she could not be weak he despised her weakness. The dog flung the fire aside. Fangs tore her and threw her and the foolish girl was afraid but she was Tu’usha and this thing was hers to kill yes it was hers and she would take the sword.

  But there was only a sabre in his human hand and she had dreamed the sword.

  She had not. Her own sword she called to her hand, and the fire lit his eyes and coursed through his marrow and danced on the sabre’s edge. He backed away, fearing her, as well he should. Silent.

  In silence, then, she struck.

  He bled most satisfyingly like a human man.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Sien-Mo
r without Sien-Shava. She was always his shadow and his echo. Moth could see him letting his sister run on a leash, to be his puppet and mask before the world, but not to such folly, such failure as this. Architect of her own ruin. If he were here, he would have put her aside long before now and made an empire, and be scheming still against the unreachable heavens. Sien-Mor, for all her undoubted skill in wizardry, had always been strange, child in a woman’s body. Grown crooked, leaning on her brother, hidden under his shadow, unable to stand on her own. They had not known, then, how a human soul shaped a devil’s, once two became one. If they had—would they have dared that loss of self, that merging, even for the world?

  They would certainly have rejected Sien-Mor, found some other to seduce. Tu’usha had been secretly inclined to Jochiz even before. Vartu had not wanted Jochiz with them; he had followed after as the rift of the hells closed. She would not have brought him willingly, no, nor turned him loose in a world for which she had a use, she and Jasberek. But Tu’usha had called him with them, and he had been willing, had seemed willing, to accept that in this venture, his was not the captaincy. But then Jochiz had chosen Sien-Shava, the two drawn to one another, and Sien-Mor had been given to Tu’usha, the weak to the weak, the latter Vartu’s decision. Ruthless. Not so ruthless as Jasberek, who had said, between the two of them, that they should destroy Jochiz rather than let him take a wizard’s soul. The wizard Anganurth had tempered the devil Jasberek, in the end, taught him patience and stillness, but . . . but he had been right. Or maybe it was that they should have slain Sien-Shava and found another man to bear Jochiz, saner and weaker.

  Could one of the seven take a new host? She would have said no, the Blackdog notwithstanding. That had been possession, slavery, however willingly the dedicated warriors of the mountains had gone to it, at least until Holla-Sayan. He was a single being united now; he could no more become another than she, killing the self, not merely the body, but ripping soul from soul, destroying the self that had been born of the union to become . . . someone else.