Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  Storm rose into being again, clinging to his skull, smoke and fire and earth, ash rising, ghost drawing matter from the world to house itself. He nuzzled against Moth’s chest, tried to wheel away, but she caught him by his mane, bridle in the other hand.

  “Not a place we should spend the night?” Mikki asked, taking her intent from that and heaving the saddle over the stallion’s back.

  “No. Sihkoteh is not best pleased at my existence.”

  “Going to tell me what you learned?”

  “Ghatai is no longer bound there.”

  “Should we be surprised? Someone’s revived that damned bear cult on the Great Grass.”

  “Ghatai tried to possess Sihkoteh. He fought the god and fled, sixty years ago.”

  “To possess a god? And Ghatai survived?”

  “Apparently. He fled westerly.”

  Mikki sighed and rubbed the side of his nose. “So, back to the Great Grass, where we knew he probably was anyway.”

  “Yes. But now—now I have a trail to follow.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Dark fire rose behind her eyes. “How do you find a scent in the air, cub?”

  “With my nose, thank you very much.”

  “It’s there, now, to follow. The taste of him in the air.”

  “So we sniff our way along sixty years of wandering?”

  “Not so much. He has been…” Her eyes grew distant, searching. “…here, there, all over. We’ve crossed his trail so many times. To Marakand, he has been to Marakand and back, twice? Maybe…But now I have him, the runes will know him—we pick up his more recent trail. The south of the Great Grass, towards the Four Deserts, I think…I can see where he left the Grass for the last time.” She swayed, focused on Mikki again. “He’s no longer on the Grass and I can’t see where he’s gone. But we’ll find that trail, and it will tell us. He’s been tangling us, not even knowing who sought him, but there will be no more delaying.”

  “No more sleeping alone in the brush?”

  “No more of that either. If you can manage to stay awake. Winter’s coming.”

  “Hah. Such as it is on the southern Grass—winters don’t catch me here, as you’d know if you hadn’t been sitting so cosy in the tents playing fortune-teller. And anyway, I do wake up, even in the far north, if I have something to stay awake for…” Tremors in the earth set the trees further down the mountainside swaying. “Moth, my queen, we need to get out from under this annoyed volcano. I still wish you’d leave talking to gods to me. They don’t like you. For some reason.”

  “For some reason. Sihkoteh’s in no temper to listen to anyone. He’d have hurt you, Mikki, to prove he still could.”

  Moth fastened the last buckle, mounted and turned Storm, trampling nettles. Mikki fell in behind the horse, axe over his shoulder, breathing the scent of bruised greenery, fresh and clean. The earth shuddered again.

  She was still reluctant. She resisted the Old Great Gods’ pushing of her. What he did not understand was why she had ever accepted the sword in the first place, what she saw that he didn’t, that tore her so between the sword’s duty and her own will.

  “Why?” he had asked her long ago, after Ogada was dead and she still kept the sword, and she had turned on him, Vartu’s eyes, fierce, burning, and said, “Don’t. Don’t ask, ever. It’s not yours to know, Mikki Sammison.” And there had been power in her words, though they had sounded as much a plea as an injunction. He never had asked again, and when he wondered, he never could bring himself to ask. He would have been angry at such power turned against himself, but he did not think his wolf knew she had set such a binding on him. And if her need was so great, her fear so great…if the sword held such doom…he would not push it. But he did not forget, either, and he watched the sword.

  Perhaps the deaths of the other devils had been the price of the blade needed to kill Ogada, her brother’s secret murderer, his mother’s slayer? He wondered. He did not think Vartu would have been so easily bought.

  He would never be so glad, though, as when that damned—literally so, he was certain—obsidian blade was broken and cast aside, and Moth free of it.

  You’ll come home soon, Attalissa. We both know it. I’m waiting for you.

  Even in sleep, in unconsciousness, or wide awake in the midst of utter confusion, when his mind came seeking her in last week’s winter storm—the tent whipping free of its stakes, ropes snapping—she was protected. The hand of Sayan sheltered her, and the rush of Kinsai’s fervent blood. There was nothing for the wizard to see of Pakdhala, nothing for him to grasp or recognize as his searching brushed by and went on, lost in hills and river.

  But the wizard had never spoken before in all the times that he had sought her.

  Pakdhala woke to the grip of a hand on her shoulder and blinked up to see Bikkim crouched beside her. The first yellow light slanted through the narrow slit of a window to gild his skin, throwing the interwoven blue and red horses of his tattoos into sharp contrast.

  “Am I late? Sorry.” She didn’t think she was, not by the light, but she felt a heavy lethargy on her, as though all her bones were granite. Waking came difficult here in Serakallash, and Tamghat’s words still stuck cloying to her mind. Come home soon.

  “No, it’s early,” Bikkim whispered, and Pakdhala rubbed her eyes, to see Immerose and Tihmrose still soundly sleeping. Immerose, for once, was not snoring.

  “The boss isn’t up yet. I was going to pray, and…” Bikkim shrugged, as though trying to make the words of no account. “I wondered if you’d want to come with me.”

  “To the spring?”

  “Yes,” he said soberly. Bikkim’s dark eyes were sunken, shadowed as though he had not slept. Perhaps he did not, these nights before he went to pray to Sera. Pakdhala did not know. She missed a lot when they were in Serakallash.

  “Of course.”

  Neither Tihmrose nor Immerose stirred as she finished dressing, taking a scarf to wrap over her face once they were out in the street, as Bikkim did to hide his Serakallashi tattoos. There was always an excuse, dust or, now, the cold, to make a covered face not so very odd. It was the tail end of winter, the wind still biting, carrying cold from the north. Some mornings there would be hoarfrost around the wells, and a fog rising from the water, frost on the outside of their water-gourds and the big goatskins, the shaggy camels puffing clouds. It was the season when clouds could cover the desert skies, and snow would fall, which Pakdhala never realized she missed until it was there, touching her skin, hushing the world, covering the hills and the dunes with glittering white until, in a day or a week, it sank away into the waiting earth, feeding the wells and the holy springs with water to last until the next year. Snowfall had set this year’s three leggy calves frisking, gleefully mad with the strangeness of it. She felt the same each time it snowed, as though the world might be made new.

  But today there would be sun for their departure. And soon the rains would start, and the desert would bloom, though they might be in the valley of the Kinsai-av by then.

  The Blackdog did not bother to caution her against the dangers of Serakallash, but her father nevertheless woke, lying several rooms along with Gaguush. Lots of space for them to spread out, scattering two or three to the small, arched rooms that surrounded the central yard and the pens. There were rooms and to spare these days; caravans were fewer, and Master Mooshka had no other in when they arrived. She remembered the days when there might be two caravans or even three in one caravanserai in Serakallash, the camels penned in behind strong hurdles, the bulls restive and roaring in their herd rivalries, the mercenaries little better, sometimes.

  “Here, you should eat something.” Bikkim pressed a round cake, dry and oily with pistachios, sticky with raisins, into her hand as he closed the door behind them. Pakdhala was delicate, and the air or the water or something, no one questioned it any more, did not agree with her, here in Serakallash and in Marakand, where it was s
aid the goddess of the holy well had withdrawn in anger from her folk. They all babied her. Only Zavel twitted her for it, which was by now more habit than lingering boyish malice, she hoped.

  Mooshka’s dogs woke, stretching, and trotted over from their bed in one of the gated, open-fronted arches where fodder was stored. Pakdhala broke off a piece of the cake for each. The corner of Bikkim’s mouth twitched in a resigned way. Probably he had asked Thekla to get it for him at the market, specially for her. It was the sort of thing he did. Bikkim had bought Pakdhala the scarf she wore, plum-coloured silk, in Marakand, and she avoided thinking about what it must have cost, because that gave her a little nervous flutter in her stomach that she wasn’t sure she wanted to face yet. It wasn’t a gift you gave the brat who tagged at your heels. But Bikkim was more a sort of honorary brother than anything else.

  Sort of like a brother, anyway. Watching her father and his brothers, or her cousins with one another, on rare visits home to the Sayanbarkash, she thought brothers were supposed to be rougher, loving but not so nice. But maybe it was different with girls, maybe they were gentle with sisters, and bought them pretty things. It was not something she was going to ask her father about.

  With Bikkim’s eyes on her, Pakdhala carefully ate the rest of the cake and licked her fingers, though her stomach was tight and churning at the thought of Sera’s spring. Last time she had been very sick.

  Bikkim raised a pail of water at the well so they could both drink and wash, tipping out the rest into the trough that served the beasts when they came in off the desert. The camels grunted and stirred, seeing activity. Her white Flower heaved with heavy grace to her feet—hers, because when she was a little girl, she had announced that red Sihdy’s calf would be white, and Gaguush had laughed at her and said there was little chance, but if it was, she could have it for her own. So Gaguush had been out a camel, and her father thought she had done it on purpose. Bikkim sighed when she crossed the yard to the penned beasts to give Flower the scratching she expected and endure the warm, sour-sweet breath huffing on her neck.

  “Coming,” she said, but it was already too late. The door of the room Bikkim and Zavel had shared swung open and Zavel, grinning broadly at them, hurried out.

  “And where are you sneaking off to? I thought ‘Dhala was too sick to do any work.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Pakdhala answered, as Bikkim’s fine straight brows lowered. “We’re going to pray at the spring.”

  “Ah.” Zavel gave a shrug, which was probably all the apology they’d get for the slur. “I’ll come along, too.”

  He didn’t bother to wash, so there was no way to accidentally leave him behind. She could not walk that quickly anyway. Even crossing the yard to the small door set in the heavy gate left her heart beating too fast, forced her to breathe through her mouth.

  Zavel had as much right to pray at Sera’s spring as Bikkim, far more than she had. Zavel was Serakallashi-born and raised, though his parents, Tusa and Asmin-Luya, had not had him tattooed, keeping to their Great Grass heritage. He did claim the name Battu’um, having been fostered with his younger brothers and sister by a herder family of the Battu’um sept, of which Bikkim’s father had been one of the chiefs. There was no word of what had become of Tusa and Asmin-Luya’s three younger children when Serakallash fell to Tamghat. The family who fostered them were said to have been burned in their cottage. Tusa never did give up hope. She rode away whenever they came to Serakallash, asking among the folk of the Battu’um, now scattered far and wide in new-founded villages as bondfolk of Tamghat’s noekar, for the Grasslander children, two boys and a girl, who had been fostered with herders of the east foothills.

  Bikkim and Zavel aligned themselves one on each side of her. Pakdhala said nothing to either of them, bracing herself for what they would find.

  A third visit to Sera’s spring. The first when her father brought her down from the mountains, a brat badly in need of a spanking. The second, driven by guilt and horror, a little more than two years later, after Serakallash had fallen. She had been very sick, had fainted, and Holla-Sayan had carried her back to the caravanserai. The skulls, still reeking carrion, untouched by buzzard or hyena or humble beetle, had been far less terrible than the emptiness of a holy place which had lost its goddess.

  Northron Varro claimed three was a number of great power, and read signs into any occurrence that fell into sets of three. A third time might be for good or ill, but the third time was always fate, and change.

  So Varro said.

  Whenever the gang stopped in Serakallash now, Bikkim kept grimly within the caravanserai walls except for one visit to the spring just as the caravan prepared to leave. They hoped, if anyone noticed, it would be forgotten before they returned. It would do none of them any good if the Lake-Lord’s noekar heard there was a Battu’um chief’s heir living, even though the old sept system had been broken up, the names forbidden. Families had been moved to new lands; noekar of Tamghat’s ruled all the scattered folk that called themselves Serakallashi, and the Serakallashi were assigned to them all as bondfolk. Slaves, save in that they could not be sold away. Slaves, and perhaps even godless.

  More and more wells failed, and streams dried, and Tamghat’s noekar seized goods from the caravans and called it tribute, while in Serakallash’s market, flour and oil and fodder were dear and growing dearer every journey, the toll for passing into the town greater. There was talk among the caravan-masters of finding a new road to the north, seeking new wells and bypassing Serakallash, but so far only one or two had tried it. There was the Undrin Rift to pass doing so, and that was no safe matter, either.

  Third time at Sera’s spring: Pakdhala held herself braced for it. Not so much horror as sorrow. The dead were dead, and a stranger, coming for the first time on what had been Sera’s sacred place, would never know it was a spring. A mound of skulls, still wearing rags of skin like the fine brown membrane that flakes off a dried date, hair bleaching from black and brown to a pale tan colour, like Westron Thekla’s. Sand. Everywhere sand, and snow in the deep shadows. Not a stalk of winter-dead grass to show there had once been green. Through the dry seasons the dust had risen from the Red Desert and wrapped around the heads, holding them, enfolding them. Now, damp with winter flurries or rain, it clung, taking them into the land. The saxauls at the bottom of the ridge were skeleton trees.

  Zavel scowled, and scuffed his boot in the mud. He dropped his head in a perfunctory bow, and twiddled his braids, avoided looking.

  Bikkim, ignoring the boy, settled down cross-legged, pulling the scarf from his face. He leaned forward to pour out a gourdful of water.

  “Water for water,” he said firmly, the old prayer, but there was none to take away.

  She should have thought to bring some herself. Pakdhala sat down beside Bikkim, not too close, not to intrude, and because she had, Zavel of course did too, drawing his legs up, chin on his knees. Bikkim’s lips moved in silent prayer.

  Pakdhala shaped words with her lips, too. I’m sorry. It was not her fault Tamghat had come down from Lissavakail, and yet it was. If the wizard-warlord had not come for her, he would not have come for Sera. Can you hear me, Sera? Are you still there, drowned in the sands? I swear, someday, somehow, I will see Tamghat destroyed, and your folk and mine will be free again.

  “That’s my sister Laicha,” Bikkim said conversationally, pointing. “You’d have liked her, ‘Dhala.”

  Zavel’s mouth twisted and he gave Bikkim a sickened look. The skull Bikkim pointed out had no flesh left to it, but he had come many times. He knew the geography of them, Pakdhala supposed.

  “And my father, there. The sand will take him in another year. I’m glad. I’ve never seen my mother and my younger sister Davim, but they were executed here, too. I always meant to take you to see them, when we passed through, and you were always so sick I never did. I wish you had met them, even just once.”

  “The earth will take them all, in the end,” she said softly.

 
She remembered that she had been accustomed, once, to folk offering her these fragments of their lives, telling her what they could only tell the darkness, opening the way to the places in their heart too deep to let others into. But it was like something in a song, long ago and far away, and from Bikkim it felt like something else.

  “You’d think Tamghat would want to bury them, cover them up,” Zavel said, too loudly. He flashed a quick look over his shoulder to see who might be listening, the way local people seemed to, even Mooshka secure within the thick walls of his caravanserai. It was a catching mannerism. “You’d think he’d want folk to forget.”

  “Fear is a weapon,” Pakdhala said, and added, “A tyrant’s weapon.” Thinking of Holla-Sayan, and the Blackdog Laykas who had planned that other massacre of Serakallashi. I’m not that person anymore, Sera. I will not be that person again. Forgive me.

  “Do you think Sera’s still here, somewhere?” Bikkim asked, looking at Pakdhala. But it was no question heavy with meaning, expecting her to know, just wondering. Asking her rather than both of them just to snub Zavel, who had not been invited. Maybe. Maybe it meant nothing at all, empty talk to fill the moment.

  “I…don’t know,” she said at last, which was the truth. There was nothing of Sera present that she could touch, and Sera had forbidden her to come here; Sera should have been drawn out in fury that she had, if the goddess of the spring were still aware at all of her world.