by K V Johansen
Moth didn’t know this girl who had become Tu’usha. She didn’t know what this new conjoined being, younger in the world than even the Blackdog, might want. Perhaps Tu’usha didn’t, either. But it had been Sien-Mor, or memory of Sien-Mor, who had fought her when she first went into the deep well.
The morning was clear and bright as she emerged into the courtyard of the well-house. It was Sien-Mor who fought now, her style, her very sword, when there was a human body that fought at all. The girl coursed with fire, faded, and returned. No wizardry, though; she had only the sword and the devil’s will, the devil’s fluid reshaping of the world. But the Blackdog stumbled, fading into fire, silver and dark, and Tu’usha’s fires ate at him, weakening him. If unwounded and both reduced to humanity, he would probably be the abler swordsman and certainly the physically stronger of the two. Now, though, Sien-Mor’s sword was swifter than his tearing fangs, swifter than his sword, as he shifted from one shape to another, unconscious of it, Moth thought, running across the courtyard, vaulting the wall that divided it from the greater yard where the massive domed hall had stood. Mikki loped after her. Holla-Sayan crouched, torn and bleeding and burnt, blade a shield, catching Tu’usha’s; he had no shield, no armour, and when he ducked aside and struck for her the air burned bright and stopped his blow as if it had been the good linden wood. Tu’usha rocked back, too, as if that had been so and she had felt it, not firmly braced. A gaunt, bony wisp of a thing, starving, she looked, huge-eyed and desperate, hardly able to hold her blade up steady with her scrawny arms, but her mouth grinned.
“Holla, get out!” Moth called. They fought halfway down a slope of loose masonry, huge blocks precariously balanced, black, sharp-edged fissures between. She leapt stone to stone, and Holla-Sayan rolled away. Great Gods have mercy, which they would not, half his face was a mask of blood, a cut laid bare to the bone across forehead and cheek and eye. He slithered down to Mikki on four legs again, spun to crouch snarling. When his enemy did not follow, he sank down flat, unmoving, except for the heaving of his flanks. Mikki put a worried nose against him.
Tu’usha’s eyes found and followed Lakkariss.
“There,” she said. “You had it. I thought he. . . . But it was you, not Jochiz, you all along, you who sent enemies against me, you—That has no right to exist in this world. How did you dare shape such a thing?”
“I didn’t,” Moth said.
“Give it to me.” Childish, imperious, and spoken as though the demand were utterly reasonable, in a voice high and breathless.
“Why?” Moth asked, cautiously circling to find better footing. “What would you do with it?”
“What will you?”
“What I must. Tu’usha, what have you done with Sien-Mor? Who’s the girl?”
“Sien-Mor’s dead. She went mad when her brother burned her. She died. He killed the demon, and the fire ate her, blood and bone, all gone to ash. It’s better she died.”
“Maybe she didn’t,” Moth suggested.
“He burned me! Even the Old Great Gods have more mercy. He burned me because I wouldn’t go with him again. The goddess hid me—”
“And for that kindness you destroyed her.”
“She was weak. She was too weak. I had to hide. I had to be the Lady, to make Marakand strong.”
“You destroyed that too. And you’ve made this girl, this priestess, mad. Her heart’s not strong enough for this, Tu’usha. She can’t carry you.” Neither could Sien-Mor. They should have seen that. Sien-Mor had walked on an edge, always, a harpstring over-wound. Such must snap, sometime. Tu’usha had brought no tempering to that, had not been strong enough herself. Weak to the weak. Sien-Mor had made Tu’usha mad.
“I’m sorry,” Moth said. Because she had led Tu’usha to this. She had given Sien-Mor to this. But they had all lost their way, and there was no road back, no undoing of what was done. Only ending.
Lightning gathered about them, unborn. It piled higher, thicker, heavier, burning in Tu’usha’s heart, fed on rage and—and pain, and grief. Feeding, too, on the life of the world.
“Tu’usha, do you remember, there’s a reason we mostly work human wizardry in the world and are so cautious what else we do? Can you remember?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child and an idiot. I’m not mad. It was Sien-Mor, and she’s gone. The Voice was mad.”
“Do you want to destroy all Marakand? Do you remember the wars, before you were ever Sien-Mor?”
I am Zora! Sien-Mor is dead and burnt and you betrayed her, you left her, you shut your eyes to her misery and you left her to burn—
Vartu did not remember clearly, herself; it was dream, something that strayed into mind on the edge of waking. Even Hrossfjord she did not remember entirely, and that had been she, not that other Vartu, long ago. What she had she offered Tu’usha. A rent in sky and stone, and white light pouring through. The earth’s pain, the dying of its small gods of hill and water and they themselves, the ones who willed it, drowned in the gods’ agony and despair, even as their fires drank the life of land and gods and all. . . . Dead lands about Tiypur in the west, where all the gods had died.
“Don’t do this,” she said. “Already you’ve left scars on your city that will never live again. Zora, do you want to destroy all Marakand?”
The girl shrieked and loosed the lightnings, leaping down on her.
Lakkariss in her left hand, Kepra—Keeper, guardian of the hall—in her right. The demon-forged sword that had come with Ulfhild from the Drowned Isles was the leading edge of a fire, with no body behind it, only a dark flame, but the cold edge of Lakkariss she held behind. Fires broke from the air around them with the sound of thunder and the earth shook beneath them. Shards of stone flew, great white sheets of lightning wrapping the pair of them, and the mound of rubble burnt. She could devour the heart of this weakened devil as a forge-fire eats charcoal, as the devil had devoured the life of the land. But that was not the death the Old Great Gods demanded, and Tu’usha should be no such easy prey.
“Let me go!” the girl screamed. The lightning wrapped and held her but did not burn. “Let me go. Please.” She cowered, clutching herself, rocking on her knees. “Let me go let me go let me go it wasn’t me I didn’t mean I didn’t want the city I didn’t want the city I wanted it safe I didn’t know.”
Sien-Mor’s sword lay abandoned on the stones. Moth drew the burning air into herself, a dizzy exultation in it, and the girl didn’t resist, only raised a tearstained face spattered with blood that was probably Holla-Sayan’s. “I didn’t know. I was afraid.”
But the sword still lay there. It was no real artefact of the world as Keeper was, heirloom left behind and returned to Ulfhild after long years. Sien-Mor’s sword was a thing shaped of Tu’usha’s will and Sien-Mor’s memory. And what did a cowering little girl need with Sien-Mor’s sword, that it endured here in the world? It was will made it; it would not exist without active will to hold it real.
What did either of them need with swords, come to that?
Mail heavy on her shoulders, familiar and hardly felt, certainly not needed. Reminder of who Ulfhild was. They were not what they had been. But it was not her own self the Marakander remembered in Sien-Mor’s blade.
“Afraid of what?” Moth asked.
“She would have made me her Voice.” A whisper. “Enslaved me, possessed me, made me mad. But she promised that if I gave myself of my own will instead . . . but it was lies.”
“We lie,” said Moth. “So do you humanfolk, even to yourselves.”
“She was afraid.” And which did Zora, Tu’usha, mean had been afraid, the devil or the girl she had threatened to possess? Small wonder they were so badly joined, so disunited in will and infirm in mind, a bond forged under such a threat. “She was so afraid, to be made mad, to be a prisoner, to watch helpless. He is coming. He will make all the world his and destroy the road to the heavens. You know he will.”
“Jochiz?” Moth asked. “Do you know where Sien-Shava
Jochiz is?”
“He burned me. No. He burned her. I wasn’t even born then. But after, I was in the temple. I was, my father sent me to the temple to hide and to spy, but he was dead then. He was the last priest of Gurhan. I should have been a priestess, but I can’t hear my god. I don’t have a brother, but my brother is always in my thoughts. You should have killed him. You should have known what he was, how could you not know what he was, you should have killed him for me set me free you were my friend you left me—”
“Sien-Mor was no helpless child! She could have acted for herself. No one would have called it an unlawful killing. Or you could have brought an accusation in the hall and sought the King’s Sword for the king’s justice. But you came, the two of you, so very foreign from so very far away, and your ways were never ours, your sins not ours, for all we knew, and you never acted nor spoke to say it was not your will as much as his. You were no child.”
“I want to go home.”
“We all want to go home.”
“Let me go. Please.”
“Is it Zora asking?”
The sword on the ground dissolved at last like frost struck by the noon sun. The whisper was so faint she barely heard. “I don’t know anymore.”
The question was meaningless anyway. Two rivers flowed together, and maybe one carried the sediment of a different soil and hawk’s eye floating over might still see it flowing, braiding, blending, but she could not cut one from the other again.
“I kept her from burning the city,” Zora whispered. “I didn’t let her kill Nour and that other wizard. I didn’t let her kill Hadidu. I sent the captain of the Red Masks my champion her champion away from her, sent so many of her Red Masks away where the gods of Praitan might—might do what they could, what they did, something did, something took the Red Masks from her, set them free. I didn’t destroy the city, I didn’t call fire to the senate palace steps when the senate declared against me and they met there and they talked and they talked treason and they prayed for the freedom of the gods. I didn’t. I hated them, and I didn’t. I said, wait, the captain will come you I we sent him to take Praitan so the army from the east will come so we will be subtle be quiet win by force of arms and my brother will not see will not suspect I’m here but it wasn’t true, was it? They didn’t come, the mercenaries knew in their hearts she was weak and a god took him the captain the assassin from her and the Red Masks were released set free set me free even to perish my soul to perish to end. The Lady true Lady ghost of the Lady whispered inside me so I danced I danced and danced and caught her, trapped her in the temple waiting and never doing. I did, didn’t I? But then because the Red Masks were taken I no she wanted to destroy the gods. Please, let me go. Like the Red Masks, let me—”
Moth had come too close, with that poor sick helpless thing crouched there, at war with herself, having tried to destroy her own body, it seemed, all bones and staring, sunken eyes. The girl rose to her feet in fire, spreading wings of flame to engulf her, to devour, curling burning tongues over Moth’s hand on the hilt of Lakkariss. She was borne back, blind, for a moment, and burning, hand seared to the bone. Tu’usha reached into her as if to seize her beating heart—
Moth was a column of nacreous light, spreading to winglike white flame, towering high, and she flung Tu’usha from her and was Ulfhild again, still wrapped and shadowed by cold plumes of light. If it was white bone that gripped the black sword’s hilt, a skeleton’s hand, what did that matter? Flesh was necessary, and yet illusion, though the body might scream with the pain of it. Stumble and sway unsteady, trapped in it, weakened by it, fall fainting of it. Not here. Healing was hers. Flesh and sinew were hers, for her willing it.
The girl’s dark eyes stared up at her, with Tu’usha’s fire running through her veins, and she rocked and rocked her body.
Flesh, sinew, skin made whole, though streaked with scarring, because the body, also, had its memory. The leather wrapping that hid the inscriptions on Lakkariss’s black hilt was burnt away and it was cold in her hand. Moth clenched her teeth on pain and stilled her shivering.
“I heard them, you know,” the girl said. “Dying. The guards in Gurhan’s valley. The folk in Sunset Market. The priests. I hear them now. They scream. Am I going to hear them forever?”
“Tu’usha knows that answer.”
“I hear him, too, now. Do you?”
“Sien-Shava?”
“No. My god. I thought I’d killed him—” Words tumbled faster, slurring together, in haste to be spoken. “She’d killed him she wanted to burn Gurhan from the world I wanted him gone if he could not be mine as he should have been not served by a godless wizard freed by the godless wizard so he burned as I burned. But I failed I was too weak I was too merciful and I hear him. He says, the road is long, very long.” Tears began to streak her face. “There is no forgiveness only pity no mercy only sorrow no going back only the road. I shouldn’t have let her I shouldn’t I shouldn’t have given up I shouldn’t have but I did I did try I did we did the Lady whispered and I tried you know I tried. You know what she is what I am mad but not so mad you know what I could have done to this city these rebels to you this folk these gods you know I didn’t. I only wanted to save them, to fight Jochiz when he comes.”
“That, I know.”
The girl’s face hardened. “He won’t be so easy to kill as I, Vartu.”
“No.”
Light flickered behind Zora’s eyes. “The girl is too half-hearted, a broken little thing. She was a child, never tested. She never had a chance to grow strong in the world. My mistake. I saw her and I saw myself in her, but I didn’t truly know her. I should have waited. If I’d won that Grasslander wizard to be mine . . . she was one fit to bear a devil.”
“Ghatai’s daughter? She’d have been too strong for you.”
Fit to stand with them, yes . . . no. Don’t even think it.
“So arrogant. So certain. You and Jasberek both. Arrogant. Cold. We were only ever weapons you thought you could use, not comrades in the fight. Don’t pretend that isn’t so. But at least here in this world, now, it’s you who’ll pay for my failure. I was right, you know, Vartu. Jochiz will come, and he’ll kill you all, you and your demons and your gods and the folk of all the gods, and he’ll climb over them to the heavens, with your sword of the cold hells to cut his way. But . . .” She looked down at her hands, writhing together, looked up again. “If you weren’t alone, if you had allies against him, strong allies . . . what if I came with you? I could join your train, with your demon and your dog. We could find others, you could call others, like this dog, if you’ve found the way . . . I’d be better, you know, if I had someone, if I had you, to follow. I always was, I always needed that. Someone to help me but no one ever helped me no one ever asked ever spoke ever told me—” Her teeth snapped together, eyes blazing. “Sien-Mor is dead. I do not hear she doesn’t speak—no!” She gasped, clenched fingers on the stone, squatting splayed like a frog. “It is only that I remember, she isn’t in me any longer, she isn’t she burned he burnt her I watched her let her burn . . . Zora might learn strength from you.”
“No.”
The devil stared. “So kill me, then, if you must. My brother will avenge me. You were always afraid of him, King’s Sword.”
“Zora, he doesn’t even know you. Sien-Mor is dead, you say. Remember? You said he killed her, his sister. What’s Zora, to Sien-Shava?”
“My name is Tu’usha,” she screamed, pushing herself up as if to spring, and a dark fire flickered where her hand touched the stone. “Sien-Mor is nothing. Zora is nothing.” I am Tu’usha—and Vartu, you brought me to this.
I know. No forgiveness, only the road.
Abruptly calm, Zora dropped back, kneeling, arranging the torn skirt of her gown to modestly cover her bleeding thigh, folding her restless hands in her lap. She looked up with Sien-Mor’s closed and knowing smile.
“You will take me on that road, companion, ally, or bondwoman, because otherwise you wi
ll have to kill me kneeling before you. I am through with fighting. You will have to kill me so, unarmed, submissive and surrendered. Can you? Can Ulfhild?”
Sien-Mor should remember, Tu’usha. I suspect she does, if you do not. The King’s Sword was also the king’s executioner. But I’m very sorry for this priestess you’ve seduced and betrayed. At least she heard her god.
Moth brought Lakkariss around left-handed, and the girl’s eyes had time to widen in purely animal fear before the edge of the obsidian blade struck. Tu’usha howled, shrieked, torn to streaks of light—
—and a second voice echoed hers, a scream of rage, of fury and loss, and a will reached after. It found nothing to hold. There was nothing but the empty body, soul or souls all stripped from it. The watching, waiting thread fell away. His cry dwindled to the howling of the wind, but it was a wind that in that moment knew Vartu and cried her name—
—the sky burned white and the black cliffs of ice rose to meet it. Lakkariss was a rift in the veils of the worlds. The ice sang loud in Vartu’s ears, deafening her to the faint sounds behind, reaching to tear her soul from soul, hungry, to devour her, make her ice of ice, unknowing, unthinking, unfeeling, the death that is the void of the self, all fires quenched.
Don’t bloody listen to it! Mikki shouldered into her, a paw slamming down on her wrist. Moth drew a breath, and the air bit with the sunless winter cold of Baisirbska. She was on her knees amid blocks of stones run and fused glassy together, with the white frost creeping over it in lace-edged spears. The girl was dead, gone, and if Lakkariss left any human soul to take the road to the Old Great Gods it was a mercy beyond her knowing. She doubted. She let both swords fall and buried her face in Mikki’s deep fur, looked up only when Holla-Sayan’s hand gripped her shoulder. He sank down on his heels with a sigh.
Thunder again, a slow, long groan. The Dome of the Well collapsed inward, a half of its courtyard sliding down after it, and the barracks beside crumbling, and a house, out of which a score of priests and guards and serving-folk ran shrieking, to cower along the walls, staring at ruin, as the dust rose and silence fell.
