Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  “How long can we hold out here?” Kayugh asked bluntly. “It’s at least two days to Serakallash, and they’ll hardly set out the moment a messenger arrives—it’ll take them a day or more just to summon their sept-chiefs. We have walls, but the town doesn’t. I was thinking…if we can get Old Lady to agree, we can let the townsfolk in, as many as we can take.”

  “She won’t allow it.”

  “Will you?”

  Otokas frowned at the challenge in Kayugh’s voice. “We don’t have the supplies to support ourselves for long, let alone many others. But if they come, yes.”

  It was so engrained that no one but the vowed women set foot on the island, he doubted many townsfolk would think of it. The holy islet was a place of reverence and awe, not a refuge. And he was not sure it would be a refuge, not from this attack. The edge of the goddess’s terror gnawed at him.

  “They might be safer in the town.”

  “Safer! How?”

  He shook his head. “There are wizards out there, or a wizard, more powerful than any I’ve ever heard of—probably just one, since Attalissa said he. She believes he’s coming here for her. To destroy her.”

  “To kill the girl?” More puzzlement in Kayugh’s voice than anything. It seemed too unlikely a thing to evoke anger.

  “No. To destroy Attalissa, not just her avatar. Devour her, she said.”

  That shocked her. “Why? How?”

  “I don’t know. The dog doesn’t know. But it—I—we, if you like, we believe it. The dog…understands things it can’t seem to express. Remembers things. You know the stories say that there were gods who died in the west in a wizards’ war, long ago before ever there were kings in the north? I remember things, like…shadows seen out of the corner of the eye. Nothing to seize hold of, but enough to be afraid. Gods can die, and not only by their own will.”

  Kayugh drew a deep breath. “Well then. What do we do?”

  Otokas didn’t know. Run. Hide. Kill the source of the threat. The Blackdog’s solutions were few, and not necessarily the best. He did not think the Blackdog could overcome unaided whatever had the power to summon an army unseen out of the temple’s own millet fields. And Attalissa was not going to be able to help.

  “Send out the novices and lay-sisters, and the old sisters too, not just your messengers to Serakallash. Fill whatever boats we have and get them away. Tell them to scatter to the villages in the high valleys, tell them to hide.”

  “Otokas—”

  “Do it now, while there’s time. It’s dark enough the boats won’t be seen.”

  Her hand on his again, and she had no idea how distracting that was. He hoped she didn’t.

  “Are you all right, Oto? Your eyes—”

  He laughed. “Aside from being ready to go howling over to town to get myself killed, looking for whatever she thinks is coming for her? Oh yes.”

  “Go to her.”

  “I’m going back to the tower, now she’s safe for the moment. I want to see what’s out there.”

  “I’ll send someone to tell you.”

  “I can see more in the dark than you could in broad daylight. I’ll be all right. We’ve—I and all the men before me—we’ve been arguing down our single-minded mongrel for a very long time now. We’re getting good at it.”

  “Then go put your armour on, first. Remind your single-minded mongrel she’s a little girl and it’s you she loves, not just the Blackdog.”

  Otokas gave Kayugh a mocking bow, fist over his heart. “As you command, Spear Lady.” But she had drawn him a little away from Attalissa’s panic, and that was a moment’s easing of the Blackdog’s own fears. “I’ll join you at the tower.”

  The shirt of scale armour was heavy on his shoulders, a weight familiar mostly from drilling with the women, practised and easy and not at all welcome. Otokas slung his sword over his shoulder again, found his helmet, with its wavelike crest and snarling dog facemask. There were dormitories hurrying to the defence of the walls and to guard the water-gate, which was no more than a single narrow door in the eastern wall. It let onto a narrow path and a drop of smooth, curving rock so precipitous he doubted any attack in force could come that way—which was why the water-gate was in so inconvenient and even dangerous a location. Most people going to or from the landing-stage preferred to take the broader path along the water’s edge, which circled to the front gates facing the red bridge in the west. The priestesses might be able to come at any besiegers that way, circle around to their rear while they attacked the front gates.

  Not a tactic to use against an army, though, not if there were twice the number of sisters to send against them.

  Otokas, where are you? I’m afraid. Attalissa’s mind’s voice, soul’s voice, was faint, coloured with her fear, wavering. But she was awake, and that lessened the dog’s anxiety a little more. Otokas stood where he was to answer, so she did not lose the contact with him. It felt to him like two people who stand at arms’ utter stretch, fingertip to fingertip, where the slightest movement might separate them. But it was not so long since the girl had to see him to find his mind.

  I know you’re afraid. It’s all right. Be strong, ‘Lissa, love.

  People are dying in the town. I can feel them. It hurts, dog.

  I know.

  I can’t help them. The waters can’t hear me yet.

  It’s all right, love. We’re here to look after you.

  But them…dog, dog, I should be helping them. They shouldn’t die for me. And it’s not the town he wants, it’s me, just me!

  They’re your people. They want to protect you. They ought to, at least. ’Lissa, who is he? Do you know him? Is he their leader? A wizard? A god?

  I don’t know. I don’t know what he is, dog. Something wrong. Evil. Strong. You felt it, what he did. Tearing the world like that.

  I felt something, he admitted.

  I want you here.

  I need to see what’s happening. I’ll come soon.

  Soon. You promise.

  I promise.

  Old Lady wouldn’t stay with me. She went to the New Chapel to pray.

  You said prayer is for them. If it helps her, let her pray, so long as she doesn’t take sisters from the walls to do it.

  It isn’t even the lake she prays to. It’s something she makes up in her own head, to fill the emptiness she won’t let me into. She wants me to be more than even the Old Great Gods ever were. Attalissa fell into the child again, her thoughts growing fainter. She doesn’t really like me very much. She doesn’t like children.

  Either she lost the strength to touch him, or she had said all she needed to. Either way, Otokas hoped Meeray or some of the others would find her something to do to distract her. He resumed his course through the labyrinthine interconnection of rooms and passages at a near run.

  His niece Attavaia, still in her blue gown, ran into him, pelting around a corner, and bounced off into the wall.

  “They’re on the town bridge, Uncle,” she gasped, wide-eyed, as he steadied her. “Spear Lady sent me to tell you. I heard it, when they met…I never thought…it was so loud. They just kept coming, arrows didn’t even slow them down, there were so many. The militia’s stopped them at the north end of the bridge but they’re fighting hand to hand there, and…there’s just so many. Rideen’s in the militia. He’ll be there. In that.”

  Rideen was her older brother.

  “Everyone’ll be there,” Otokas said. She was shaking in his grasp. Attavaia, just out of her novitiate, had not yet served a turn as a mercenary. “Go arm yourself and join your dormitory at your post, unless Spear Lady had any other orders after you found me?”

  “No.”

  Being with her friends would steady her, let her pull the discipline of the practice courts back.

  “Where are you supposed to be?”

  “We assemble in the lower east court. We’re to bring arrows from the armoury to the sisters in the tower by the water-gate, and act as a reserve.”

 
“Good.” He hugged her close and kissed her forehead. “Go on, then.”

  She gave him a fleeting, forced smile, turned, and ran again, her bare feet flashing beneath her skirt, showing an anklet of turquoise.

  “Attavaia!”

  She skidded to a stop. “Uncle?”

  He caught up with her, gripped her by the shoulders. “If things go badly—if the temple’s lost—”

  “Lost!”

  “If. At the end. Go into the mountains.”

  She gave him a wary look. “Why?”

  “She’ll need you again someday.”

  “I’m scared, but I’m no coward! I’m not breaking my vows and running away.”

  “I’m not telling you to, child. But if we have to run, we will. The temple is not the goddess. Remember that, ‘Vaia.”

  “Ah.” Attavaia swallowed. “I will. Uncle…” She stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you later, Uncle. Blackdog.”

  A self-conscious salute, fist over heart, and then she was gone again, feet slapping.

  He hoped he hadn’t just set a panic in her dormitory, hoped she would have the sense not to repeat his unconsidered advice until the moment came. The Blackdog’s fears unbalanced judgement, made it hard to understand the true shape of the threat. And she was his favourite sister’s only daughter.

  Night had come down on them. From the tower, Otokas watched, with the Blackdog’s owl-sharp vision in the darkness, the defenders of Lissavakail’s bridge fall, overwhelmed. Lilmass was dead, and her dozen with her, he thought. There were no indigo-trousered women among the townsmen who broke and bolted away, a handful, a knot unravelling into the alleys and steep twisting lanes, no order to them, every man running to his own household, to bar his own door.

  The raiders poured over the bridge, their own order breaking, becoming no more than that, raiders, every man and woman pursuing their own path. The discipline they had shown taking the bridge, where they had climbed over their own dead to take their places, was forgotten. They swarmed over bodies lying like barricades on the near end of the bridge, some pausing even there to loot and rummage among the dead. Horses snorted and finicked at the uncertain, death-reeking footing. Those mounted carried torches, trailing flames and bands of foot soldiers up amid the terraced houses of the steep-sided island.

  The dog stretched its awareness out, followed sound and scent of shattered spirits. The raiders stormed through the narrow alleys between the rubble-and-clay buildings of the town, hacking down doors, looting, killing those who resisted, setting fires that burned the furnishings and the beams of the flat-roofed houses. Roofs fell in and people died, trapped in their homes. Townsfolk and raiders alike ran mindless, shouting. Geese and hens screeched, goats bleated frantically, as some among the raiders butchered for the cookfires, making camp amid the madness. They settled in to enjoy themselves, quarrelling over the spoils of the town’s wine shop and the household jars of thin beer, while on higher terraces townsfolk still fought, and died.

  The sisters watched the fires. Some prayed.

  Not a single boat from the town had fled to the holy islet for shelter. Why corner themselves? Any who had chosen to flee, or had taken warning soon enough to do so, would have headed for shore and the chance to escape deeper into the mountains.

  There was order among the invaders, despite the looting. The Blackdog saw it in the concentration of torchlight, the tramp of feet not running, a snaking file that made straight along Lissavakail’s main road of packed shale from the town bridge to the ruins of the temple bridge. Otokas saw with his own eyes, then, not the dog’s: movement and bustle, duck and flare of torchlight, heard orders shouted in some alien tongue. These were the ones who had let the others die on the bridge to clear the way for them.

  “What are they doing?” Kayugh asked softly.

  “The town’s overrun. It looks as though most of them have broken off to loot, but a core of them are still under control. Those are coming for us.” After a moment he added, “They’re bringing boats along the shore.”

  Madness, to fight on into the night. He might have expected them to establish themselves in the town, confident in holding the only near approach to the temple islet. He might have expected a conquering warlord to attempt to come to terms with Old Lady, to offer Attalissa some degree of service and respect, seeking her good graces once the town was taken. He did not, and would rather have been wrong, in not expecting anything but this.

  “We stay here,” Kayugh ordered, in response to the rising murmur among the women as Otokas’s words spread. “We’re too few to keep them from landing. If we get scattered out along the shore, they’ll just push through us and find the walls unguarded.”

  Otokas watched their progress. The warriors at the bridgehead took little interest in the broken bridge, as though they in turn had expected it. They merely awaited the arrival of the town’s fishing boats, rowed from the nearby landing beach. If they meant to ferry attackers across the channel, they would need more than those to land in enough force to pose a threat.

  “What are they doing?” Kayugh asked, as the torchlight showed figures bending, scrambling over boats, figures milling on shore.

  They were lashing the boats together, broadside on, alongside the broken spans of the temple bridge.

  “Making a bridge,” Otokas said.

  “Why the hurry?” she muttered. “Why not wait until dawn, at least? I don’t like this, Oto. You should get back to Attalissa.”

  “Not till I know what he wants.”

  “If what you believe is true,” she said guardedly, “he must not want to give us time to send her away. Though where around the lake she’d be out of his reach, I don’t know…”

  He didn’t know either.

  Someone loosed an arrow at the warriors building the bridge. It fell harmlessly in the garden of artfully dwarfed pines and rhododendrons just breaking bud, which covered the sloping ground between the main gates and the channel. Kayugh turned on that sister, roaring.

  “Save your arrows, curse you. You think we have any to spare?”

  “Sorry, Spear Lady,” the young woman muttered, eyes downcast. “Sorry.”

  Kayugh turned back to watching the channel. “Young fools.”

  “Nerves,” Otokas said.

  “They can have nerves later.” Kayugh eyed him. “How are you?”

  He grinned, and saw her flinch away from his eyes, the Blackdog looking out, the world a moment hazed with its fury. “Holding on.”

  “Do. I don’t want you loose in here. You should be with her.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Spear Lady?” One of the women drew their attention back to the raiders’ makeshift bridge. Seen with human eyes, it was a copper shimmer of torchlight on water, an orange flare of torches catching the glint of armour, a helm, a spearpoint, a drawn sword. Shadows that ducked and leapt and rocked across the light. “There’s someone coming there, beyond, Spear Lady. Look. Their warlord?”

  Something. He came in the darkness, riding, flanked close by other riders, preceded by more torches.

  Otokas…snarled. Some of the women gave him wary looks.

  “Oto?”

  “The warlord’s a wizard,” he said hoarsely.

  Wizards, even the least, carried the scent of their magic with them: earthy, cool, damp, like water on stone, spiced with the tang of fire and frost. Wizards’ magic was neither good nor bad; it simply was, though it raised the dog’s hackles. But this was overlain, entwined with what he had first sensed when the army appeared: the reek of burning metal, a poisonous breath in the air, ashes on stone.

  “Something worse.” The words were hard to shape, coherent thought suddenly very far away.

  “What do you mean?” Kayugh peered into the night. “Where is he? There in the centre?”

  Otokas watched that tight formation of torchlight draw closer at an unhurried and dignified walk. He swayed, dizzy, feeling eyes on him. “Kill him.”

  “He’s out
of arrowshot yet.” Kayugh seized his elbow, steadied him. “Oto, what’s wrong? Get back to the goddess.”

  “No.” He forced the word out through clenched teeth.

  Ah. The Blackdog. The voice that spoke in his head was amused, satisfied. It was male, and carried the accents of the man’s speech, fluent in the desert tongue that was the common language of the trade road, but with a foreign overtone, syllables too precisely chopped. And where is your maiden goddess? Bring her out to me now, and you shall continue to serve her once she is my bride.

  The wizard lied. He smelt it. The dog fought him to break free into the world. Lies, lies. The wizard hungered for Attalissa like a snow-leopard with the taste of sheep’s blood on its tongue.

  Fight me and I will kill you, man, and take the Blackdog spirit into myself. And it will be I who sits in the saddle, never imagine otherwise, not that poor mad animal that rides you and has forgotten all it once was.

  He saw it, a moment, the shape of the wizard’s hunger, a shadow the dog’s fear made clear. The goddess bound in snares of flesh and blood and chains of power such as wizards only dreamed of, drawn into the soul of this…thing that sat its horse across the narrow channel.

  Go. Announce me to my bride, Blackdog. Before any more of her women have to die.

  Otokas snatched arrow and bow from the sister to his left, bent it near to breaking, and shot, unaimed. There was no hope of the shaft reaching the wizard. Amid the warriors building the bridge of boats, though, one shrieked and splashed, sank. There was an uneasy stir among those around the wizard, an edging back from the lakeshore.

  “I said, don’t waste arrows.” Kayugh’s voice was gentle and very, very far away. She prised the bow from his grip. “Blackdog: look at me. Stay sane, or go to Attalissa.”

  Otokas sighed and folded a hand around Kayugh’s shaking fingers. Bad, if he was frightening even her. He forced the dog to settle and found words again. “He’ll have to cross the bridge to get to her. We have to kill him then.”