Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  “I think she’s dead,” Zavel said. “Like those gods in the west that Thekla prays to.” He twitched, another look over his shoulder, a shrug. “She has to be dead, or she’d have done something.”

  “She did do something,” Bikkim said. “She fought. He defeated her. But he’s still only a wizard, no matter how powerful. He couldn’t have killed her. She must be here still. Somewhere.” With another look at Pakdhala, “’Dhala, you all right?”

  She swallowed hard, nodded. Something touched her. A hot, dry touch, nothing like a goddess of the waters. Sayan, she thought. Hold me. She lost herself in memory, the high sweep of hill and the wind shushing through the grass and the black larks climbing into the sky on towers of song. Racing two of her cousins, Holla-Sayan’s nephews, crouched low on a galloping horse. And winning. Though that breath and shadow of the Western Grass was always with her, she drew it more densely about her as a person hidden in the darkness might pull the folds of a black robe closer. She felt herself a tiny bird, a lark, gently cupped in Sayan’s great, rough-skinned hands.

  Twice in one day. Tamghat usually sought her once a month or so, as though it had become some habitual chore. Recently the touches had come more frequently, but never twice in one day. Her mouth felt dry, and the skin between her breasts prickled with sweat.

  “Maybe not dead, then,” Zavel said, still chewing over Bikkim’s words. “But Sera’s gone, and she didn’t do much when she was here. She didn’t save them,” with a nod at the spring. “She didn’t even save the little children they butchered.” His voice cracked and he scowled, defying them to notice. “Precious little to choose between her and that mortal goddess up in Lissavakail, neither of them any good to anyone.”

  Pakdhala put a hand on his shoulder a moment, took it away again when Zavel reached for it with his own.

  Tamghat’s blind, groping touch returned yet again. She could feel…something…brushing by, like the passage of a ghost, but hot as the shimmering air rising off the Salt Desert. Her tongue felt an alien thing, baked clay in her mouth, her body growing dull and distant, her ears humming like bees. She drowned herself in Kinsai’s dark waters, the shadows that only the sturgeon knew, she was deaf and blind in the Cataracts, which could beat bones to porridge, the fire in Kinsai’s blood.

  He lost her, as a man might touch a darting fish and never even see it, never close his hand. She hardly dared breathe. He could not know she was so near; there was no echo of Sera in her soul.

  Zavel was staring at her, scowling in concern.

  “Attalissa probably died,” Pakdhala said, hearing her own voice stretching thin, far away. “Probably she did. Father said they burned the temple. Probably she was killed.” She tried to get to her feet and stumbled. “I’m going back. They’ll all be up and wondering where we are.”

  “I heard a bard in Marakand singing she was imprisoned by a demon and she summoned Tamghat here to rescue her,” Zavel countered. “Except the demon carried her off, then, and the wizard’s still trying to save her. If that’s true, that she asked him here, she’s worse than useless. She deserves to be dead.”

  “I heard it. It was a stupid song,” Pakdhala muttered, pushing herself up with one hand gripping her amulet-bag and the flat lakeshore stone under her coat.

  Bikkim offered her a hand up she was glad to take, even if he did release it right away. Zavel put a supporting hand under her elbow, which she needed, dizzy with the effort of rising. Bikkim started along the path, turned back.

  “Should I carry you?”

  She shook her head, flushing with embarrassment. “No. I can walk.” She shook off Zavel’s arm, felt guilty at the look of annoyed hurt he gave his own feet, and made herself smile at them both. “Really, I can walk.”

  Two days to the next goddess-possessed spring, at Nivlankallash, but by evening she might be feeling better, able to reach out, a little, into her sister Nivlan’s small, unpeopled land, and borrow strength of her. Nivlan of the Nivlankallash always welcomed her.

  “Don’t fall over your own feet,” Bikkim said. “Holla’ll black my eye if I bring you back bruised.”

  “Poor delicate baby,” Zavel muttered, but it sounded half-hearted. “Are you sure you’re all right, ‘Dhala? You’ve gone sort of grey. That’s a bloody awful thing to take a kid to see, Bikkim. Even Varro’s got more sense.”

  “If you want to help, you can run on back and make sure Thekla’s got some tea on,” Bikkim suggested.

  Zavel shrugged, sneered, then nodded and ran off, up the narrow lane that wandered a zigzag way into the town between the high walls of the caravanserais.

  Pakdhala didn’t bother muttering a complaint about being called a kid by a boy only a couple of years older, saved her breath for walking and kept her eyes on the ground, not to see the mountains floating to the south and feel the sudden pang of loss and longing that was not Pakdhala at all.

  Bikkim hesitantly took her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you ill. I…it’s a holy place. No matter what Tamghat does to it, it’s my place, my people’s place. I can’t be with them at that…that pit…by the mountain road where the bodies were buried, only here.”

  “I know.” His hand was warm, rough, dirty beyond what any scrubbing could help. A mate for her own. A caravan-mercenary’s hand, a cameleer’s hand.

  Holla-Sayan was waiting for them, propped against Mooshka’s gate as though he had nothing better to do. He gave Pakdhala a crooked, apologetic smile for being there.

  You don’t need to hover, dog.

  I do till we leave this place. “Breakfast’s ready and Gaguush is cursing,” he said aloud. “To work, eh?”

  Sera is dead, isn’t she?

  I don’t know. If you can’t tell, ’Dhala…perhaps she isn’t. You know how empty the dead lands along the Five Cataracts feel.

  It’s empty here, too.

  Differently empty. Her father frowned. Empty like an empty house. Not a ruin.

  You really think so?

  He shrugged. He wasn’t sure, she could feel that, but he had no confidence in what he thought, doubted his own interpretation of the dog’s impressions. She trusted the dog in such things, though, and tried to feel some hope for Sera in that.

  Tamghat’s looking for me again, she said, and wished she hadn’t, as Holla came alert in a way that made Bikkim drop her hand, as the frown had not.

  “We need to get going,” Holla-Sayan said. “Eat quickly, both of you. I’ll look to loading your camels.”

  As though that would somehow stir the whole caravan to faster action, hasten the two Over-Malagru merchants who had hired them back in Marakand through their always-formal mealtime.

  Her father would be worried, the Blackdog would be dangerously angry, and all through, Holla-Sayan would be afraid, if she told him Tamghat had come back to brush against her more than once. As if he circled, a hawk closing in before the stoop.

  Three times the wizard had found her. Three, for fate and change.

  The feather-grass stretched in all directions, a sea without a shore, wave on silver-brown wave rising and falling with the rolling of the steppes. In a great sweep around the land was scarred, though the traces were hard to see now, looking with the eyes alone. To Mikki, the scarring was more a scent than any visible impression left in six summers of grass, a memory of power tainting the odour of the earth. Moth said it was a shadow in the air, a ghost of fire the soul’s eye could see when the body’s could not.

  And here was where Tamghat had most recently touched the Great Grass. From here he had vanished. Here his trail ended.

  “It’s amazing he could do this without every god and demon of the Grass feeling it,” Moth muttered, walking a great circle that she said was the line of the spell. “Strong in stealth, that one—”

  “What did he do?”

  “Carried them all away—man and beast.”

  “Where?” Mikki asked hopelessly. “Moth, we can’t wander aimlessly again. Let’s go to M
arakand. We’re bound to hear something on the caravan road, if he hasn’t fled to the other side of the world entirely.”

  “There’s another working like this one a few miles away. An early one.”

  “A test?”

  “A failure. It feels…twisted. Broken. He came from there straight to here. I might learn more from that.”

  “Has it occurred to you that every delay and digression is his doing? He’s playing games with us, Moth.”

  “I don’t play games.”

  “Then—”

  “There’s something walking there. I think he may have left someone behind.” She grinned. “Such effort to hide his trail, and he leaves someone I can ask for directions.”

  The ghost was aware of the traveller before the rider came over the distant horizon, a prickling edge of unease for which she could for a long time remember no name.

  Fear.

  There had been others. Bondfolk shepherds, who fled the damp chill in the air when she crawled close to their fire. A pair of some warlord’s vassals, his noekar, stopping to rest the night. They muttered and shivered; the woman called the place accursed, and they rode away again. A clan-chief sent more noekar and their warriors, but no wizard, no wise shaman of any understanding, and the noekar poked at bones and prayed to the god of some distant hill, before riding away, afraid of curses and the contagion of a ghost’s ill-luck. The Grasslanders were like that, she remembered. No mercy for the dead. They would not bury bones that were no kin to them, believing that a person left unburied had been damned to it by the stars of their birth and it was not for strangers to interfere. The wandering herdsmen began to give the area a wider space when they went by with the sheep and the horses, leaving her alone.

  This one—she would rather have been left alone with the wind and the grass and the heat of her anger, which she still nursed.

  This one—she forgot the rider, in the dim, fractured existence that was hers, while the figure was still in the distance, mounted human and some great beast ambling alongside that she thought, uncomfortably, was not a dog, before they faded from mind. Then they were there, approaching the grave. They spoke a thick, heavy language she did not understand.

  The bear—bear, not dog, bear like nothing she had ever seen living—spoke, deep and rumbling. He must be a demon. Her spirit’s erratic vision edged him in blue fire, and white, something she had never seen, being a wizard of no great strength in life, though she had read that was how the strong in power saw demons. Their very souls scratched sparks from the world, or perhaps it was something more akin to the foam at a ship’s prow. She had read treatises that argued so, long ago when she was young and a scholar in a life that seemed almost a distant tale. But this demon was far from his origins. No demon native to the steppes took the form of a great brown bear of the forests. This one was a giant even among those; she had seen such beasts, dead, measured their skulls with awe-stricken handspans and slept on their pelts. The demon was pale, more tawny-gold than brown. His claws were ivory, but his eyes were black.

  The rider did not belong to the grass, either, and a dark halo around her body burned the ghost’s senses. She shied away from it, tried to see with vision, or what passed as vision, alone. The woman was tall and lean, dressed in the style of the north, low boots, narrow-legged trousers, and a long tunic, its hem showing beneath a mail hauberk, with a knee-length deerskin cloak against the chill autumn wind or to keep the gleam of armour from catching a distant eye. She wore all ugly dull browns and greys like a hunter, a sneaking bandit, and carried a long, straight-bladed sword at her hip, its ancient-styled hilt gold and garnets, and another, silver-hilted, strapped to the saddle under her near-side knee. A Northron battle-axe and a bow-case and quiver were strapped to what little other gear the horse carried. The woman’s hair fell in a single plain braid to her waist, the silver-dun colour of the bleached autumn grass, and her eyes were grey. She looked towards where the ghost hesitated, looked into insubstantial eyes…

  There was a shadow over her, deep and rich as wine, red-black like the heart’s blood. Eyes, red, flame’s heat…like…the ghost cowered away, faded.

  They had moved, she had missed time again. Now the woman knelt a few yards from the grave where the others lay buried, their souls long gone on their journey to the Old Great Gods. The bear crouched beside her.

  The ghost remembered grey eyes, like steel and thunderclouds and deep brooding water. The woman was a great wizard; she reeked of power, that was all. A wizard and a misplaced demon, nothing worse than that…what else could she have thought? The horse was a black-legged blue roan stallion, a heavy horse of the north, strong but slow, no use on the dry steppe, too demanding of water, too weakened by heat. Only a fool would ride one here. It cropped the grass now, looked up at the ghost, saw her and flattened its ears. She saw through it, saw grass beyond, sky. It was a ghost as much as she was, a shadow of a horse, though its gold-trimmed bridle and saddle were solid enough. A memory of a horse—an ancient skull bound with magic such as the ghost had only dreamed of. She remembered tales told in the long, slow afternoons of her childhood, tales of wild fancy: a Northron magic of their great wizards, a bone-horse, ghost bound to a horse-skull, to be summoned by the wizard’s blood. But that was for children’s tales. No one knew such arts these days; had they ever existed in truth, such skills were lost now, with many others, in the old wars against the devils.

  She had dreamed of devils, just now…but she dreamed all the terrors of her childhood, in her unresting weariness, dreamed of devils all too often.

  The wizard rose and spoke, gesturing, inviting her. Seeing her.

  She covered her face with her hair and screamed. She saw through the wizard, through the grey eyes, to eyes of fire. She had seen their like before as she died.

  The early working was as Moth had said: uneven, twisted, a spell unravelled in the casting. And there was a chill in the air, a damp, cold breath rising from the earth, the skin-prickling presence of the walking dead.

  There was more to show, here, that something had occurred. At the later place there was only grass. Here there was a grave. Spears marked a central depression where the earth had settled over it. They had originally stood upright like the pales of a fence, but the winters of wind and frost-heaving, the summers of thunder and hail and always the unrelenting wind, had shifted and tilted them. Some lay broken, and their shafts had rotted.

  As carefully as if he handled fine porcelain, Mikki turned over a skull with a long-clawed paw that could fell an aurochs.

  “Human,” he noted. “And the same age as the grave.” He could smell that much, old death, but not ancient, rising from the earth. “Were they a sacrifice, do you think? I’d say this one was beheaded.”

  The cold, damp movement of the air brushed his shoulder, recoiled, retreated. Storm raised his head, flattened his ears. The ghost seeing the ghost? Mikki tracked it—her?—by the cold earth scent as she sank away, trying to hide.

  “I think there was sacrifice.” Moth frowned, looking out across the circle, turning slowly. “But no, these buried here weren’t it. There are four other deaths at the cardinal points, bled and then buried. The second working was the same. Those were the sacrifice, I think. Horses, not human.”

  “You shouldn’t say that as though it’s the worse sin.”

  “Did I?” Moth asked mildly.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m fond of horses. What if it had been bears?”

  Mikki growled. “It probably would have been, if he’d been within reach of the forest.” He raised his head, sniffing. “Are you sure it was horses? I can’t tell. I can always smell horse-bones, these days.”

  “Yes, it was horses. And Storm doesn’t smell, he’s been dead far too long.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  The blue roan left off staring after the ghost, looked at Mikki a moment with dark, knowing eyes, ears pricked. Then he went back to his needless grazing. He seemed to take pleasure in gras
s and sun and stretching into a run, as much as he might have while alive. It was necromancy, of which Mikki did not at all approve, but he believed Moth spoke truth when she said battle-slain Storm had lingered in the world, dog-loyal ghost, till she went back for his skull and gave him the semblance of flesh again, all those long years ago. Contrary enough to lay his ears back at death itself. Mikki turned his attention to the human skull again.

  “So why was this one left unburied?”

  Moth crouched by Mikki and took the skull from under his paw. The other bones were scattered around, some broken, gnawed by scavengers. Many of the smaller ones were missing, overgrown by grass or carried away.

  “A woman, you’re right.” Moth set the skull down again, dug fingers into the turf and drew up over her hand not only old grass, bleached pale as her own long braid, but wiry threads black as raven’s feathers. Mikki wrinkled his nose and backed away.

  Moth teased the hairs out; one strand was at least a yard and a half long. “A Nabbani woman.”

  “The Nabbani wizard, the princess.”

  Still kneeling amid the bones, Moth twisted the hairs into a ring and slipped it over the little finger of her left hand. If he asked why, she would say that it might come in useful, so he only gave her a disapproving curl of the lip.

  A faint smile was all Moth returned to that, looking around in the direction he could smell the ghost. “Let’s hope she can tell us what Tamghat was doing.”

  “Something unpleasant,” Mikki said gloomily. “Which is what you’re planning, isn’t it?”

  “Well, whatever he did, it wasn’t necromancy. He never had any skill with the dead.”

  It was a simple thing to call the ghost of an unburied body, if your will was in it, and strong. There were rituals among the wizards and shamans who did such things. Moth did not bother with them.

  “Nabbani! Come speak with us,” she called in the Grassland tongue, rising to her feet and even holding out a hand, as if she invited some newcomer to sit. “Tell us why he killed you.”