Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  That should have brought her, since she was so present in even the daylit world, and so evidently drawn to their living presence. A chance for self-justification, revenge, a chance to plead for rest…those were the desires of the ghostly dead, more often than not.

  A ripple in the grass, a chill like clouds over the sun, the cold, damp scent of her tinged with the blood-borne panic of prey. Mikki rumbled deep in his chest, thrust his awareness a little further through the walls of the physical world. He saw the ghost, dark and shaking as a reflection on restless water, a very small woman dressed like a Grasslander in full-skirted coat and wide trousers, with an incongruous golden headdress like a rayed sun, which must have some great significance, that she shaped herself wearing it. Moth would know.

  The ghost wailed, hands and a great curtain of black hair pulled over her face, screamed like a woman tortured and fell to her knees, waves circling her in the grass.

  “I think,” Moth said dispassionately, “we can assume it was Tamghiz killed her, and that she saw him truly when he did, or at least as much as a human can see, living or dead, wizard or no.”

  Mikki doubted that the ghost saw the double image he did, the coiling, twisting heart of flame that moved with Moth, stretched tendrils through her like vein and sinew even when she seemed a quiet, mortal woman, all power subdued, but it was plain that eye to eye she saw enough. Mikki pulled his sight back to a more restful place, where Moth was only a woman haloed in fire and shadow again, the flame that writhed within unseen save for the red glint in her eyes.

  “Hush, woman,” Mikki said, trying to be soothing, reassuring. A name would have helped, but the Grasslands clans had spoken only of Tamghat’s wizard, Tamghat’s Nabbani princess. “Wizard, hush. We mean you no harm. Tell us about the one called Tamghat, and we’ll bury your bones, send you to the gods.”

  She would not answer, or did not hear, walled within her terror. The wind took on a high, keening noise, rose into human wailing. Storm squealed and stamped and Mikki flattened his ears.

  “If you leave, she might speak to me,” he suggested.

  Moth was less tolerant. “A tantrum,” she said. “You try to talk to her and she’ll drag it out for weeks, teasing you along to have the attention. Tamghiz always sought that childish type for his mistresses.” She hefted the skull in one hand, drew her dagger.

  Mikki sat back on his haunches, head tilted, watching. Yes, the ghost was aware of what Moth did, not utterly lost in her fear, real though it undoubtedly was. The wailing fell abruptly silent. The scent of ghost faded, sinking into grass and dry earth, as she attempted to hide.

  Moth scratched a single rune into the surface of the skull: ice, for binding, holding in place. It was enough, with her will behind it.

  “Come,” she ordered. “Speak with us, Nabbani.”

  The ghost stood amid her bones before them, visible in the world, still trying to hide her face behind her hair.

  “Give me your name.”

  “Anch—” The ghost’s voice was a whisper, a breath, and she gulped and fought, her form tearing to shreds of shadow, re-forming, with her struggle. “No. Monster!”

  “I may be.” Moth reached out, parting hair like black mist, and traced a second rune with a finger on the ghost’s translucent forehead. Water. The liquid flow of speech. It left a line like pallid embers, which faded only slowly. The ghost whimpered and clawed her face. “Your lover certainly is. You will speak to me. Give me your name.”

  “Min-Jan An-Chaq, Daughter of the Third Rank.”

  Moth raised a pale eyebrow. “Third Rank? What does that mean, in today’s Nabban?”

  “My mother was one of the emperor’s wives, but neither the First Wife nor of royal birth.”

  “So you really were a Nabbani princess. And you were a wizard?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you come to join Tamghiz?”

  The delicate plucked ghostly brows lowered in a frown.

  “Tamghat, then.”

  “Tamghiz. I’ve heard that name—”

  “Never mind. Tell me how you came to him. How you came to be here, slain and unburied. Tell me what he was trying to do here.”

  It took many questions, much cold direction on Moth’s part, to pull the story from An-Chaq of the imperial Nabbani house of Min-Jan. She tended to return, over and over, to Tamghat’s betrayal of her. “He never loved us. I thought he did. He’s empty inside. He was going to marry her, but he wouldn’t marry me, me, an imperial daughter of Nabban, and no matter how great a wizard he was, he was only a barbarian Grasslander warlord, not even a clan-chief. But he was mine, the father of my daughter. And he was going to put me aside.”

  Slowly, they pieced it all together, from the runaway wizard princess’s first meeting with the warlord in Marakand, perhaps twenty-five years before—“He was so handsome, so alive, and when he looked at me I was the only woman in the world”—to An-Chaq’s sabotage, writing a curse against him into the great spell that would transport his army into a small valley in the Pillars of the Sky six springs before, and the moment of horror as she realized she had killed some of his noekar and very nearly her own daughter, but not Tamghat himself.

  “I saw him,” she wailed, her form dissolving, shivering, unable to fade utterly from Moth’s binding. “A monster. A thing, some thing burning behind his eyes. He was never a man at all, a thing, and I’d loved him, I’d borne him a child.”

  “Why Lissavakail and Attalissa?” Moth asked, relentless. “Why that place, why that goddess? Why not ensnare the Voice of the Lady of Marakand, if he meant to usurp rule? Lissavakail can’t be more than a minor market town, no rival to Marakand in wealth or influence. What did he think to gain there?”

  “Power,” An-Chaq said, growing still and momentarily whole again, her face gone sharp and shrewish. “Lissavakail’s ruled by the goddess as a human avatar. Attalissa is incarnate in mortal form, a human woman endlessly reincarnated. He was going to wed her when the stars were right, some fat mountain virgin. He said he could assume her powers, but I never believed that. Some of them, maybe. Seduce them from her, wheedle the girl into passing something on to him. He talked like he would become a god. That was when I realized he was mad. And he thought he could just throw me away, treat me like a concubine grown old and ugly, make my daughter nothing but a bastard, get other children to follow him in ruling Lissavakail…”

  Mikki had stopped listening. Moth stood straight and unheeding, head tilted back as if she could see the stars lost behind the daylight blue of the sky, and the fire within her flared.

  “It’s no good, I need to draw the charts,” she said. Throwing the skull at the ghost’s feet, she strode off to Storm. Mikki lumbered after her.

  “Could he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Moth, tell me. Could Ghatai kill a god?”

  “Kill? Quite possibly,” Moth snarled. “Ogada certainly did. You mean, could he possess the soul of one. And I don’t know! Yes! Maybe, a vulnerable god like this mortal goddess might be. Did we bring an almanac?”

  “No.” His voice was a calm rumble again. “The only almanac you had was a Pirakuli one two centuries old, and I traded it at Swanesby for seed and smithy-work forty years ago.”

  “I’ll have to calculate a new chart tonight, work it out…He would need…” She shook her head. “I’ll know it when I see it. But it’s probably too late. He’s had six years.” She leaned against Storm, face on her arms, her intent to search the packs abandoned. “Mikki, what do I do if he’s made himself a god, with the strength of the land behind him? A lake’s no small power.”

  “Hey, my wolf.” He pressed his shoulder against her in turn, warm weight of reassurance surely better than Storm’s cold ghost-flesh. “That might make it a fair fight. He never was your match strength for strength, you said.”

  “Not Ghatai and a god of the earth in one. Not as we both a
re now.” But she laughed, a bit unsteadily. “Did I tell you that?”

  “You did.”

  “It might have been true once. I don’t know. Maybe you should go north, Mikki. Go home, get safe out of this.”

  He growled.

  The ghost began to scream. “Don’t leave me, let me go, I told you what you wanted, let me go, let me go!”

  “Tantrums,” Moth muttered, and shouted, “Be quiet!” Storm put his ears back and skipped away.

  She went back to the skull, scratched the rune off it, traced journey burning on the ghost’s forehead. “Go,” she said. “Where you will, save to the one you call Tamghat.” She scraped up a handful of dry earth and torn grass, threw it over the bones, the skull, token-enough of burial. “Go to the wretched Great Gods.”

  The ghost shuddered and whirled away. But she did not dissolve as she could have. Instead An-Chaq stood again, taking clearer form yet, only a little hazy to the physical eye, a figure that cast no shadow in the bright sun.

  “Who are you?” she asked, fists clenched.

  Moth turned away, whistled at the horse.

  “Please.” The ghost reappeared in front of her, keeping just out of arm’s reach, instinct that was not misplaced. Her voice shook. She shivered uncontrollably, but still she stood. “You called him Tamghiz. I remember that name. It’s in old tales. I saw him, when he killed me. What are you? What is he?”

  Moth laughed. “What is he? Do you want to know? My husband, once.”

  The ghost looked stricken. “His wife? No—”

  “Not the answer you want?”

  “Wolf…” Mikki bumped his heavy head against her arm.

  “A very long time ago,” Moth conceded. “One of the many very bad choices I’ve made in my life. And Tamghiz does run through wives at a great rate, I was at least his fifth. If you stuck with him for twenty years, you’ve outlasted any he actually wed.”

  “The Grasslanders tell stories about Tamghiz the wizard. He was a clan-chief, he was a chief of chiefs, a great wizard, a shaman. His heart broke when his wife betrayed him with his son, her stepson. He went to serve a king in the north. One of the three first kings in the north.” An-Chaq was waiting to be interrupted, dropping out one short phrase after another, waiting for denial. “The kings in the stories of the seven devils. And Tamghiz is in those stories, one of the wizards who woke them.” She twisted her hands together in her hair. “You said…you called him Ghatai, too, I heard you.” The ghost’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Ghatai was one of the seven devils the wizards woke.”

  “Yes,” Moth said at last. “What of it? You’re free of him. Go to the Gods.”

  “He’s a devil?” An-Chaq wailed. “Father Nabban, Great Gods forgive me, I’ve slept with a devil!”

  “And which of us here hasn’t?” Mikki murmured. “Do stop shrieking, Min-Jan An-Chaq. You’re out of Father Nabban’s reach and once you’ve walked the long road to them, the Old Great Gods won’t care who you’ve taken to your bed in this world. They know your innocence.”

  An-Chaq whimpered, a hand over her mouth. “Lady, why are you looking for him?”

  “That’s no concern of yours.”

  “We’re no friends of his,” Mikki offered. “That’s enough for you to know, isn’t it?”

  An-Chaq dropped to her knees, then fell on her face on the ground, arms outstretched in the Nabbani posture of supplication before the emperor. “Lady, whatever you are now, you were human, once. Did you have children, then?”

  Moth was suddenly very still. But, “Yes,” she said finally, almost mildly.

  “His?”

  “Does it matter? They’re long dead.”

  “No,” the ghost whispered, and she shivered, losing form, becoming a shadow in the grass, fear sapping her will to be there. “It doesn’t matter. But Lady, if you were a mother, save my daughter, don’t condemn her with her father. Set Ivah free of him. I beg you—I lay it on you, as you were a mother, as you loved your own children, save my daughter.”

  Moth sketched runes in the air. Journey again, and the sign of the Old Great Gods. “Go now,” she ordered. Her eyes burned, and the air around her.

  “Please…” The word faded. An-Chaq was gone, banished to begin her soul’s last journey.

  “Was that meant to be a binding on you?” Mikki asked, with mild interest.

  “I think so. More fool she.”

  “It was good of you not to hurt her.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, cub. The point is, I didn’t.”

  “We could try to save the child, if chance allows.”

  “I’m rather less inclined than I might have been. She should have stuck with begging.”

  “But what about the daughter, this Ivah? Tell me you won’t not try to save her, just to spite an imprudent ghost.”

  Moth smiled, the narrow smile Mikki distrusted as much as he loved; Great Gods forgive him that he did love that vein of venom in her, too. She held up a hand, with the thin black threads of An-Chaq’s hair still wound into a ring on the little finger.

  “An-Chaq’s and Ghatai’s daughter should be easy to find. And her blood may be a hold on him, a way to see into Lissavakail better than creeping around its walls, in spirit or flesh. Particularly if he has possessed Attalissa.”

  “You won’t harm the girl.”

  “If there’s any other way.”

  Mikki sighed. “No, Moth. That wasn’t a suggestion.”

  She looked back at him, setting a foot in the stirrup, and grinned, a glint of mischief that stirred his heart. His wolf, beautiful as a winter birch by moonlight.

  “I know, cub.” She added, more seriously, “She’ll hardly be a child after all this time, and she may not want saving. I won’t risk anything for her. But if there’s a way, I will give her a chance.”

  There never were any promises. In the end, there was only Lakkariss, and the Old Great Gods’ own doom, however she had been brought to serve it. He nuzzled her calf, falling in beside Storm. She bent to scratch around his ear.

  “Tonight, once I’ve done the star-charts, I’ll find the daughter. Her memories of the past six years might be useful—I’ll see what she’s dreaming and what I can steer her dreams into telling us.”

  Mikki sighed again and nipped at her hand. “Are you planning to take all night?”

  Moth made her calculations of the movements of the stars and checked them again, and found they still had time. Not a great deal, but enough, now they knew where to find Tamghiz Ghatai.

  She set out the runes along the edge of their fire.

  Journey. Need. Sword.

  God. Water. Inheritance.

  Water. God. Need.

  And Vartu’s soul said, not south across the deserts to the Pillars of the Sky and Lissavakail, not yet, but, West.

  Cold wind from an empty sky. The breath of fate. Maybe.

  Or was she merely being diverted again? The dreaming mind of the daughter might tell her if Tamghiz had any concern in the west.

  She sat, hands locked around the hilt of her sword—not Lakkariss but her own demon-forged Kepra, which she had carried from the drowned islands when she was only Ulfhild the king’s sister, the King’s Sword. She leaned her head against her knuckles, watching Mikki pretend to sleep.

  Hunting the dreams of An-Chaq’s daughter could wait another night.

  The kings and the wizards believed their war with the devils was over, and that their sons and daughters could lead their folk in peace. But time weakens all bonds, and men and women and even wizards forget, and only we storytellers remember.

  Pakdhala woke out of a muddled dream, her mind blurry. Not a nightmare of Tamghat, this time. Bikkim was in it somewhere, grinning at her in the old, carefree way, as he had so rarely since Serakallash fell. In the dream, Bikkim was shirtless, which was distracting, and the waters of the Kinsai-av roared past, drowning out whatever it was she tried to say to him. She had been frustrated because she could not hear her own words, and then she re
alized she was wearing only a thin cotton shift, and it was soaking wet, clinging and nearly transparent, which was why Bikkim was grinning. The note of the river changed from roar to chortle as she woke.

  Immerose and Tihmrose, sleeping one on either side of her, had not stirred, though Immerose was lying on her back, mouth open and snoring. Pakdhala jabbed her in the ribs and the Marakander rolled over without waking. It was warm enough they had not pitched the tents, but the dawns were still chilly, now they had turned north, and her breath made smoke in the air, like the mist that rose over the cliffs from the river’s breath. The fire was down to smouldering coals. A camel blew through its nose at something, and slow footsteps crunched past, down the line of picketed beasts. Django or Kapuzeh, she could tell, and she guessed, from the position of the stars and the greying night, that it was the last watch. Dawn was creeping up on them. Perhaps not much point trying to slide back into sleep. She might just as well get up and find a precarious path down the basalt cliff to the river to bathe and pray, as she did whenever chance allowed, in whatever water they passed by. But it was always on this north-south run, along the Kinsai-av, that she felt most whole and strong. Sister Kinsai, lend me your strength…

  Whole and strong was relative. She was no more than she had been as a child, though she was a grown woman, no doubting that; her body told her so.

  Last autumn Gaguush had hauled her off for a long and red-faced discussion of men and babies. It was particularly hard for Gaguush to discuss such things, Pakdhala understood that. It stirred in the gang-boss’s mind all the old pain that she did not have to worry about such things, having been married and divorced for barrenness when she was not much older than Pakdhala, before she ever quarrelled with her brother and left her tribe. But she grimly did her duty by Pakdhala, and then Tusa, Immerose, Tihmrose, and even Thekla had each in turn done so, Tihmrose with lots of rather startling and…interesting…advice on enjoying men without babies, which Pakdhala hoped her father hadn’t picked up on, because she didn’t think she could have looked him in the eye afterwards, if he had. And then Holla-Sayan had taken her home to the Sayanbarkash again, to have the tattoos of adulthood done, the snakes that coiled and knotted, blue and black, around her arms and cheeks. No touch of Sayan that time. The pricking of the needles had built and built in waves until it hurt more than she could have imagined, but she bit on the rag and said nothing, and the bard doing it had given her a great many odd looks, because, her grandmother said afterwards, she did not cry. And everyone did, a little. Her father ought to have told her she was supposed to.