by K V Johansen
“Who would Attalissa draw with her, though?” she asked. “Not the Blackdog, we—” daring, saying we, “—we know he’ll be with her, no matter what. Who else could be important enough to matter to you, Father, for good or ill?”
“My past,” Tamghat said, and his eyes narrowed, though he still smiled. “I think, some old comrade from my past. And then, we shall see what happens.” He thrust himself to his feet, stretched. “Well, well. Let us have a quiet life, for a few years. And then see what comes. Join me for dinner in an hour or so. You’re pale. You don’t eat enough.” He strode away, collecting Ova and Siglinda at the door. “We’ll turn their chapel to a banqueting hall, I think, Eaglet. Wear something pretty for Ova!”
Shaiveh came in and closed the door behind her, snickered at Ivah’s blushing face.
“Fathers,” she said. “All the same, always throwing you at men. Now you know why I left my clan. Do you want the sky-blue silk coat, maybe? It sets off your hair well. And yellow ribbons?”
“Yes.” Shaiveh, Ivah was beginning to suspect, would be just as happy if Ova’s interest in her never was rekindled. “You can comb my hair.”
She picked up the oracle bone from the floor. The cracks were darker now, as though they continued to deepen.
“It shouldn’t do that.”
“What?” Shaiveh’s voice was muffled as she opened up another chest.
The bone shattered in Ivah’s hand. She yelped and dropped it. Shaiveh sprang up, drawing her sabre, and the lid slammed with a bang. They both stood, looking at the broken bone in an echoing silence.
“Vehna avert,” Shaiveh said firmly, calling on her own clan’s goddess. She prodded the bone with the tip of her sabre. “That’s human! Should we burn it?”
“Not in here.” Ivah picked up the shards of bone, half-expecting them to be hot, but they were cool and smooth in her hand. She crossed to the balcony and flung them out towards the lake, did not listen to hear if they splashed or rattled on rocks.
The Great Gods save her from having to breathe the smoke of a burned incarnation, along with the smoke of all those burned sisters. She already felt she was carrying something of them inside her, crawling in her lungs, hot and angry.
It would be nice to have a god of her own to call on for protection and aid, and a name to curse by when things went wrong, as Shaiveh did. Tamghat boasted he had no god, and Ivah herself had been born on the barren northern border of the Salt Desert, far from any god of hill or goddess of even the least spring.
Maybe that was what drove Tamghat’s desire to unite himself with Attalissa. He was godless, and needed some close connection with divinity to satisfy that emptiness in his soul.
Maybe if Ivah was a cult of one, wearing her bright-eyed mask, Tamghat was her god. She would be godless and empty-hearted forever, else.
Shaiveh, holding a fistful of yellow ribbons, pushed her down to sit on the floor again and knelt behind her. The noekar-woman was humming as she drew the Nabbani-princess sheets of hair back from Ivah’s face, spilling them over her lap.
It would be easier to love the child if she didn’t look so utterly, blankly sly whenever Tamghiz set eyes on her. That was her mother’s doing. Nabbani manners: grovel and shiver and flatter and lie, and poison the one whose feet they kissed. The girl had potential, if he could ever drag her to her feet, make a warrior of her. Shaiveh might do it, coax and bully her out of her shell, take her to bed, if that was what she needed, though that would no doubt put Ova’s nose out of joint, and Ova was a good man, a true man, he’d marked him for a son-in-law, a father of grandchildren. Ova’s mother was a soothsayer up in Kraaso; he might breed wizard children. But if the girl didn’t fancy him, she didn’t fancy him, and Tamghiz was not about to come the heavy father over her and dictate such choices; he was no Nabbani, to make slaves of his womenfolk. He should have sent An-Chaq away years ago, before she had time to turn the girl against him. But the years went, and suddenly the shy toddler was a young woman watching him, eyes hidden behind her hair. Calculating. An-Chaq’s look.
Tamghiz pulled his mind back to the here and now, to Tamghat, bounded down the stairs two at a time. Eaglet. More a partridge, scuttling low in the grass. His noekar hurried to keep up. Siglinda stumbled. He looked back, flashed a grin. “Getting old?”
“My lord!” Siglinda was indignant, but there were dark circles under her eyes. Maybe it was a day since any of the tent-guard had had a chance to sleep, maybe two. Three? They did their best to keep up with him, prided themselves on it, the most honoured of his noekar. Siglinda, the past few weeks, to her own rather touching astonishment, more honoured than most.
Tamghat paused on the foot of the stair, let Siglinda and Ova come up beside him, put an arm around Siglinda and pulled her close, nuzzling her faded-copper hair.
“So what about that bath?” he asked. “You look dead on your feet.”
“You think a bath’s the cure for that, my lord?” Siglinda’s blushes amused him still. Like those of a maiden girl, they rose up her white skin like a fiery dawn, till they were lost in the sunburn of her cheeks. Lost now, under leather and armour, but he could imagine the parchment-pale perfection beneath. She was no beauty in her square, freckled face, but he loved the shape of her lean, long-boned Northron body under his hands, smooth and unscarred, which bordered on miraculous, given she’d been twenty years a mercenary. Her lips crooked in a hint of a smile, blue eyes bright. She was no An-Chaq, plotting and manoeuvring, only an honest warrior who took what was offered and rested content. He smiled himself, guessing, from a sigh behind, at her nephew’s martyred look. Ova was still young enough to think passion ought to die decently at twenty-four.
It quickly became a cough, and Tamghat dropped his arm as Siglinda strode a purposeful step ahead of him, sword rasping clear. Ova stepped a little aside, keeping the height of the stairs, drawing. They trusted no priestesses, since one of the last of those pleading to give oath to him had stabbed him, or tried to. He’d broken her arm with one hand, left her to the noekar to kill.
Old Lady Luli looked almost comically offended, ignored Siglinda and Ova, and drew herself up, a puffing little bantam hen with her feathers all disarrayed. She was grey-faced and shadowed dark under the eyes, sagging and lined around the mouth, looking in far worse need of the soothing effects of warm water than Siglinda, but he wasn’t about to invite her to join him. Twenty years ago, when she had been plump and ripely pretty, she had been pleasing enough for a few weeks’ diversion; amusing to watch her arguing herself into seduction, as she carried out some goddess-approved studies at the library in Marakand. She’d been a rare specimen of the mountain folk, driven by a spark of intellectual curiosity. Pity it had taken her only to the empty, priest-empowering faith of the godless western kingdoms, but perhaps that was all the ambition her imagination could compass. He had no patience for politicians. If she hoped now…She was surely not fool enough.
She curtsied, pointedly demonstrating herself his. “Lord Tamghat, you’re needed. There’s a problem at the Old Chapel.”
“What’s that?” Siglinda demanded.
Luli ignored her, again pointedly. “Some of your folk are trying to break down the door, my lord, but they’re not succeeding and even if they do, there’ll be fighting.”
“So?” asked Ova. The noekar bodyguards had both sheathed their swords again. They knew Old Lady’s type, if not what prior claim she thought she had on their lord, and they knew the way to handle such climbers. Tamghiz kept silent and allowed them to work, as a sensible man lets his dogs handle the herd.
“Another outbreak of fighting might stir up any doubts among those who surrendered, but I’m sure you understand that, Lord Tamghat. The sisters accept now that it’s the will of Attalissa they serve you, until she can be rescued and brought home, but this sort of romantic last stand—it heats the blood of the young, makes them willing to die fools rather than live to serve the goddess. We don’t need that. The temple’s yours, by Attalissa’
s will. I’ve said so. I’ve said it was never her will to oppose your coming, it was Spear Lady and the Blackdog and those who wanted to continue ruling themselves by controlling the child. But, if you want my opinion…” and the banty hen crouched, dropping her tail, inviting the rooster, “…you need to show them, my lord. Not let this last handful holding out make themselves into heroes for opposing you.”
The dead, the women who’d died at the gate-tower and the watergate and in all the corridors and stairways between, were the temper he wanted among his noekar, and more loss than a thousand self-prostituting courtiers, but he could hardly tell Luli that at the moment.
“Did my lord send for your advice?” Siglinda asked ominously.
Luli had the wit to curtsy again, and to actually address her comments to Siglinda. “It’s just that I know these people, I want them to understand it’s their goddess’s will, and the fewer who seem heroes for opposing that, the better it will be for my lord, the easier it will be for the folk to understand that he’s here by Attalissa’s desire.”
“Where’s the Old Chapel, Luli?” Tamghat asked. She had a point, and he had thought the fighting all over.
She smiled, too pleased with herself. He shouldn’t have addressed her with such familiarity. “This way, lord.”
She led them to a dank, lightless corridor, more fit entrance to a cellar than a place of worship, and neither axes nor fire were making much impact on the door as yet. Strength soaked its wood, centuries of divinity. This was the temple’s heart, and the fools did not seem to know it. Few wizards were born among the mountain folk, and the ones that were mostly had the sense to leave for lands where they’d win more honour.
Ghatai felt the souls beyond the door, six of them. They smelt of fear and anger. Women who would die before they ever bent the knee to him. He could taste, too, lingering in the air, an odd power, something twisted, knotted on itself.
“This is where the Blackdog fled from,” he said. “This is where he stole the goddess from.”
“Yes. But there’s no way out but by this door, for we mere humans.” There was even faint reproof in Luli’s voice, that he had somehow failed her, by failing, despite her long-ago warning of the tunnel, to prevent the Blackdog’s escape.
“Out,” Tamghat ordered, and his folk scattered, pressing back up the passageway. He motioned Luli and his bodyguards after them. “Give me room.”
They expected him to blast the door inwards, as he had done with the gate. He was out of patience. If the women wanted to hold the chapel against him, let them. There was something still there, though the dog was gone. It smelt of the dog, tasted of it, some tangled skein of souls, wizardly and divine power spun together. It made his skin crawl. Whatever went on in there, it was nothing he wanted to touch.
Tamghat pulled cords from about his neck, wound them over his hands, eyes on the ceiling, feeling for the shape of the stone. Thread crossed, shaped patterns he had never named, reflecting the stone, telling it of faults, of stress and weight and the earth’s burning heart.
He tossed the cat’s cradle loose and ran, laughing, as the roof fell, leapt at the end and caught Siglinda’s reaching arm.
“Let them wait there, for their goddess to return,” he said. And shivered then, feeling the cold weight of prophecy, of the fit shape of things. “Let them wait,” he whispered.
Old Lady stared at the rubble-choked corridor, hand over her mouth. Jagged blocks of stone piled floor to ceiling, burying the door.
“Get out,” he snarled at her. Something set in motion, in deaths still to come, and she had the gall to look horrified, terrified, meeting his eyes. As though all the other deaths weren’t on her head as much as his own. She should have prophesied his coming, urged surrender; they had agreed long ago that would be her part in this. And twenty years was not long enough for even a human to forget.
He jerked his head at Siglinda and Ova. “With me. I’m going to bathe in the lake.”
Ghatai’s soul suddenly wanted out of this cage, this temple, this grave he made for himself. Bind himself to the goddess and he might be bound to these bloody mountains, trapped, chained into the earth again—it would not happen. He was stronger, he would take Attalissa and break her and she would serve him. And he would lie with Siglinda, who was clean and straightforward and honest human in her heart, in Attalissa’s lake, claim it for his own.
And Ova could suffer embarrassment, waiting on them, since the boy hadn’t the will to win his way to Ivah’s bed.
Later, after swimming and lovemaking and dinner with a silent and nervous daughter too pretty to be wasted on homely Shaiveh, more’s the pity, and he’d get no grandchildren that way, either, Tamghiz left Siglinda and Ova sprawled sleeping in the antechamber, two other of his bodyguards retrieved from assessment duties at the town guildhall to stand watch over his door. He paced the long balcony, watching the lake. The waters were calmer now, and the sunset gilded the surface, recalled molten rock.
Fire, under the dominance of the Palace of the Moon. He could tell the girl otherwise, but he felt fire in his bones again. Destruction and death, and a return. Put with his own forecasting, old friends and old betrayals, a husband betrayed, the brotherhood that ended in death, and Ar-Lin, the constellation Ar-Lin, in past, present, future. The mythological Ar-Lin, murderous wife, faithful and betrayed lover, was a Nabbani tale set on those stars, but it felt like the right one. That was the secret to the star-chart, trusting, when the heart chose one story over another. Those shamans and wizards of the Great Grass, who knew only their own tales, worked groping in the dark.
The wandering stars of war and love and judgement had all fallen into the future when he cast for them, which only confirmed what the constellations said, and the fixed gate that predominated was for divinity, but running counter, which could mean broken, or it could mean active, pushing against the current of the world. That, that alone he was not confident of. For the rest, the stars spoke too clearly of love turned to treachery and death, and he did not think the streams of fate carried him intimations of An-Chaq’s return, or those other wives so long forgotten it was an effort to dredge up their names.
So, he had an idea now which of his fellows might be loose in the world. Ulfhild was not, perhaps, the company he would have chosen for a reunion. He’d trust her no farther than he could see her, but in the end—he knew the shapes of her treachery, and the keys to it, and that meant he could predict when and where to trust her, and when to guard his back. Which was love, in a way. She’d fight him, of course. Vartu Kingsbane would not stand by and see him find his way to godhead in the world, leaving her behind. But once he had Attalissa’s soul within him, once they were one, Tamghiz and Ghatai and divine Attalissa, he would feel the shape of the world, he would reach into its soul, draw on its vast strength—shake the distant thrones of the Old Great Gods and demand for all his damned and forgotten and outcast fellows, Why did you betray us? And he would share that knowledge with Ulfhild Vartu, offer it, win her with it.
Win her again, and free them all, call them all to him…take them all into his heart, Vartu first of all. They would be one, and the Old Great Gods would know what it was to be afraid.
But not yet. Tamghiz Ghatai drew three of the looped cords off his shoulders, wound patterns through his fingers, complex as the calligraphy of Nabban. Not yet. Let her not come to him until he was ready, let her wander, always finding other trails, finding arguments in her own mind to turn aside for a time—she was ever good at that. Fix her coming to the stars, to the joining of Vrehna and Tihz, fit signifier of their reunion. He would divert her, so that he would be one with Attalissa before he faced her.
And to be doubly sure of her, he would send…Ova—yes, Ova, since Ivah didn’t want him—on the long journey to the northwest, to the kingdom of the Hravningas, to the royal mounds at Ulvsness, the Ravnsbergoz. Grave-robbing would offend the man, but a loyal noekar, a loyal thegn, Ova would say, would overcome that scruple in his lord’s servi
ce, at his lord’s need, and to earn his village. So long as Ova found the right grave…Tamghiz had been at the burial, of course, but landscapes changed over time and it was not so easy to say this mound or that, when more had been raised since, and others reopened. Still, he could divine for it. The stars favoured him that it had not been a royal ship-burning as her mother wanted; they laid her in her grave dressed in silk, his silk, and sable skins. And gold and amber. If the mounds were unrobbed, as they should be, lying in the shadow of a god’s mountain, there was jewellery to know her by. All he needed was one bone.
Now the devils, having no place, have no bodies, but are like smoke, or like a flame. And these seven devils, who were called Honeytongued Ogada, Vartu Kingsbane, Jasberek Fireborn, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, Tu’usha the Restless, and Jochiz Stonebreaker, hungered to be of the stuff of the world, like the gods and the goddesses and the demons of the earth at will, and as men and women are whether they will or no, and having a body, to have a place in the world, and make themselves of the world. They rebelled against the just punishment of the Old Great Gods, and escaped from the cold hells. They made a bargain with the seven wizards, that they would join their souls to the wizards’ souls, and share the wizards’ bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power. But the devils deceived the wizards, and betrayed them.
Sera’s spring welled into a jagged-edged pool in the red rocks of the caravanserai ridge, which thrust out north from the town into the desert. The clear water swirled and eddied there, and wound away down through the stone, murmuring in a narrow channel a child could step across, chiming like bells over little ledges and falls. It reached the desert sands in a mat of ever-green sedges, spreading in braided threads through a thicket of saxaul before it seeped away, lost under the red sands.
“Water for water,” the caravaneers said, when they spilled out the last warm dregs from their gourds and goatskins onto the worn and pitted rocks and the sand around the spring. And they knelt to fill at least one token gourd from the goddess’s own waters, before returning to their caravanserais and the town’s deep wells.
