Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  The mother weeps. But the descriptive name of the hexagram was not to be taken literally, An-Chaq had taught her that.

  You’re letting your mind wander. Again. Why can you never pay attention? She could almost hear An-Chaq’s voice, feel the rap of a fan on her knuckles. She pulled her wandering thoughts back to the marks on the stone.

  So, “Daughter” was the first hexagram of the moon set, but she cast for knowledge of the goddess and the future, not of herself and the past. Attalissa was no one’s daughter. “Daughter” could less literally mean loss to the house, as a dowry paid out was loss. Perhaps a sacrifice required or a setback to Tamghat’s plans, which were once again dependent on the patterned dance of the sky. The Maiden-Warrior and the Bear would join again this year in the house of the Seven Daughters, three weeks before the autumn equinox, and it would be, by most estimates, the fifteenth of this incarnation’s life, which was one possibility Ivah’s divination with the human shoulder blade had indicated, the day they took Lissavakail. But only one. If it was fifteen years after, then…a problem, since the configuration of the stars would not be right. This might warn of such delay.

  The fifth hexagram was “meeting” again.

  And the last, The wren turns on the falcon: change, upheaval, reversal of some right order.

  Ivah found the moon set more difficult to interpret to her satisfaction. A warning of loss, of disruptive change arising from some meeting? A warning of the rebellion of a daughter caused by some meeting? She would never betray her father; she disowned her mother’s treachery. And she had lost nothing that could be restored. Besides, she must discount any personal reading. The set spoke of her father and of Attalissa, that was all.

  She threw one last set of three hexagrams, independent of sun and moon in threefold singularity, since she did not want indications of benefit or warning. The sheaf is bound. That meant some coming together, gathering. The gates are opened. An imminent arrival. And that was repeated as the third. Ivah felt almost sick. Soon. And she needed to plan what she should do. Sun or moon. Action or receptivity.

  Her father called the Nabbani philosophy which broke everything into sun and moon, active and passive, good and bad, male and female, a hobble to the expression of power. And yet it was what An-Chaq had taught her, it had beauty, order…easy answers, she could hear Tamghat’s voice.

  Ivah rolled up and wrapped the book again in its square of protective leather and tied it, stowed it in her pocket, and swept the coins back into their small silk purse. That she hung again around her neck, inside her silk shirt, and refastened the ugly, shapeless cameleer’s coat that was sensible garb, Shaiveh insisted, for an unremarkable wanderer, a humble diviner.

  She stretched, flexing her shoulders, and blew out the candle.

  “Any luck?” Shaiveh sounded bored. The noekar-woman trudged up the sheep track from where she had been keeping watch. She had seen Ivah do this too many times over the past year to expect results, despite any promises of Tamghat’s.

  “Yes…” Ivah found her throat dry, voice croaking. She swallowed. “Oh, yes.” Though there was one test, to be certain. That, no bribed mercenary could do.

  She stuck the stub of candle into her coat pocket and took Shaiveh’s offered hand to pull herself up, legs stiff.

  “So where do we go now?”

  “We wait here.”

  “What for?”

  Ivah smiled in the darkness. “For Attalissa. As my father saw.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’ll see.”

  Ivah led the way back down the narrow path, fingering a symbol carved splinter of human bone deep in her pocket. It was cool to the touch, as it always had been, repulsive, though that was her squeamish mind. Shaiveh followed, more sure-footed, and fell in beside her, hand finding hers as they headed for the broad river track, towards the houses and warehouses of the town.

  There was a god on this hill, a wary, elusive presence, hardly known to the folk of the Landing. Only the shepherds came to honour him, when the lambing was over, and to leave a new cheese or a hank of fleece by the rough cairn on the summit. It was rare to find a god close along the Kinsai’aa’s course, at least on the eastern bank, and the goddesses of the tributary streams that struggled through the dry hills of the east were less than the least of demons, all force and will lost in great Kinsai. The land to the west was different, stronger, and the goddess of the Bakan’aa that rolled down from Varrdal on the forest eaves had a will to match Kinsai.

  Busli, the hill-god’s name was. He watched, nothing more than a faint, cold touch of attention in the night.

  Moth knelt by the boulder, ignoring him, but the black-and-silver-hilted sword in its sheath was tucked under her arm, cold as an iron doorlatch in the Baisirbska winter. It sucked heat from her body even through the scabbard.

  The black marks the young Nabbani wizard had made were just visible in the faint light that preceded the dawn, though she could have read them in utter darkness, if she’d had to, by the differing natures of charcoal and stone.

  Mikki loomed behind her, his axe over his shoulder. “A spell? I can’t smell it.”

  “Just soothsaying. That character means a goddess, I think, and that a joining. The one that’s there twice together means something about to happen.”

  “That could mean any number of things.”

  “Nabbani soothsaying usually does.”

  “And yours doesn’t, of course.” Mikki rubbed a thumb over the charcoal lines, stood up wiping the smudge on the front of his tunic. “Do you think she’s really found the goddess?”

  “The woman was certainly excited about something.”

  After she discovered that An-Chaq’s daughter had been sent by her father to find the hidden goddess of the lake, Moth had hunted Attalissa in her dreams herself, and always ended up in the Western Grass, on an empty hilltop with stormclouds gathering. She knew that for illusion. The hand of some god sheltered Attalissa. There seemed little point trying to divine his name; she would only draw attention to herself, and she did not want that. It did not matter where Attalissa was; the dreaming memories of An-Chaq’s daughter assured her Attalissa was not yet taken by Tamghiz. Ivah thought she nearly had the girl; Moth trod on Ivah’s shadow. She knew her from her dreams and had found her in the flesh, and saw in her no child wishing for rescue, only Tamghiz Ghatai’s sword, his agent, here to lure the goddess back to her lake in time for the conjunction of Vrehna and Tihz. She had promised the ghost nothing. Ivah was no more likely to listen to warnings against her father’s use of her than another wizard-daughter had been, used and used until her death was more useful than her living.

  Moth didn’t know if even in dying Maerhild had known herself betrayed by her father. She didn’t know if it was cruelty or love, to hope she had.

  “So the daughter does her father’s work?” Mikki asked diffidently. “We should head to Lissavakail before there’s any chance of him getting some hold on the goddess through her.”

  “We should,” she agreed.

  Moth watched him watching her, a giant of a man, seven foot tall and broad-shouldered to go with it, a craggy face, palest of Northron skins, untanned, a face marked with fine silvery scars, old wounds, most got in her company. His hair and beard, shaggy and uncombed, were the yellow-gold of barley straw, but his eyes were black as sea coal, and still, she thought, so young. He tilted his head to the side, an inhuman gesture, patient, waiting, knowing she was going to make what was probably yet another wrong choice and not arguing, because he understood why she made it.

  “We should, but we’ll wait a little, watch Ivah and see if Attalissa really does come here.”

  “And what if she does?”

  “That depends on what Ivah does and what Attalissa’s become, so far from her home.” And maybe lingering was mere cowardice, delay, and evasion. Mikki said nothing to that, only rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Dawn’s coming,” he observed.

>   Birds were already singing in the greying light, hidden in the thorny scrub and climbing in the clear air. High enough and they might feel the first light of the sun. Ewes bleated after their lambs in some fold of the hills and the shepherd whistled for his dogs.

  Grasses whispered in the wind, and a swirl of dust rose. Moth spun on her heel to face the loose cairn that was the focus for what worship Busli still drew, and Mikki stepped ahead of her, keeping to the side, axe balanced lightly in his hands. The god’s presence was sharp in the air, a column of white light, to her eye, though he took no form in the physical world. Perhaps he could not, anymore.

  “You speak of the goddess of the Lissavakail,” the god said. The voice wavered, like that of an old man, long disused, and it rasped with undertones of wind and dry grass. “So does the little wizard you stalked here, mumbling over her magic. Attalissa is under the protection of my sister Kinsai, and we won’t allow harm to come to her within our reach.”

  “Neither will we,” Mikki answered, before Moth could speak. “We mean her no harm.”

  “Demon.” The god’s voice was doubtful. “You have human blood, and no place in the land here. Do you serve…that, willingly?”

  “That,” said Mikki lightly, “is mine, and a servant of the Old Great Gods. And I know who my father was, thank you.”

  “So you know of Attalissa here, so far from the Lissavaten?” Moth asked. “It must be by Kinsai’s grace that Attalissa hides in these lands. By yours as well, Busli, or does Kinsai rule all your will?”

  “Attalissa doesn’t come here,” Busli said. “You won’t find her here with me, and Kinsai’s great enough to protect her, even from…whatever it is you are. You’re no demon.”

  “No,” Moth agreed. He had not denied he was Kinsai’s. Small chance of him being anything else, since he still survived on the weak eastern bank. Most of the gods and goddesses of that shore were killed in the old wars, ones the folk of the river and the desert had likely forgotten even in their songs. Those who survived, Kinsai had dominated and drained away, until they were little more than her thralls, or even mere ciphers, extensions of her will and thought and nothing more. The very devils had dealt more honestly with those they took.

  “And you’re no wizard,” Busli said flatly, but his words tasted of fear, to Moth. He did not know, for sure, what she was, what it was he saw.

  “Wizard I am still. Does Attalissa come to the Landing soon, as the wizard told her noekar?”

  “Noekar? The little girl’s no Great Grass warlord, to command noekar. You mean her lover, the Grasslander? How should I know if what either says is true? She believes her divination, that’s all I can say.”

  “You’re Kinsai’s creature,” Moth said bluntly. “And Kinsai will know of it, if Attalissa is within her reach.”

  “You should go whence you came and not meddle with Kinsai.”

  Moth dropped the scabbarded sword tucked under her arm into her left hand, shifted her weight impatiently, other hand on its hilt. “Don’t make threats on another’s behalf. She may not thank you for it.”

  She felt the god’s attention centre on the sword, then.

  “What is that?”

  Moth drew it clear. The glassy black blade drank the light.

  “A sword.”

  “It’s a work of the Old Great Gods.” Busli’s voice rose with a column of whirling dust, and the pillar of light flared and sank down, like a guttering candle. “What right do you have to bear it, wizard?”

  “The demon told you,” Moth said. “I serve them. For now. You recognize it for what it is. So. Trust me, then. Is Attalissa truly coming to the Landing?”

  “Liar! You’re no wizard. I don’t know what you are, halfbreed god or outcast spirit or a demon perverted by some foul magic, but you’re no human wizard.” Busli’s voice dropped to a hissing whisper, grass and insects. “And only a servant of her enemy would be hunting Attalissa here.” The wind abruptly died and the grasses hung still a moment, but the cairn trembled, stones grating, powers building in the earth.

  Mikki took another step away from her.

  “Spare me fools!” With the obsidian blade, Moth cut a sign into the earth as it shivered and cracked. The lines, a twofold rune of binding and silence, glittered with frost a moment before melting to carry the rune into the god’s hill. It was not one of the wizards’ runes of the north. A greater, older power ran in it, a pattern shaped by the first gods, the Old Great Gods—or so wizards believed. Few wizards could wield such a rune, and fewer still survive the wielding of it.

  The god howled in outrage, shattering a moment into sparks and lines of light, and the stones of the cairn tumbled and fell, the force gathered against her dispersed.

  “Busli of the Buslibeorg, I bind you to silence on me and my doings, bind you against harming me or mine, bind you to keep this silence even with Kinsai who rules you, in the name of the Old Great Gods above us both.”

  The wind took up its fitful gusting again, and a few pebbles rattled.

  “That sword,” Busli hissed. “That blade that you’ve no right to—it might be powerful against the gods of the earth, but whatever you are, it could kill you, drink your soul.”

  “I know,” Moth said. “But not yet.” She sheathed it, turned away. “Guard Attalissa. Her enemies are near, tell your mistress that much.”

  “Vile liar.” Busli’s presence faded into the hill again.

  Mikki laid aside his axe to replace a few of the larger stones, building the cairn up to something like a marker again.

  “It’s all he has left,” he said with a shrug, when he saw her watching. “Your brother never sent you on embassies as anything but a bodyguard for his envoys, did he, my wolf? No diplomat. You think you can do any better winning Attalissa’s trust?”

  Moth handed him some of the smaller stones to wedge into the gaps, shook her head. “What would be the point? She’s proven she can’t stand up to Ghatai. She’ll be no help to us.”

  “Arrogant, Moth.”

  “Oh, you think?”

  “So if she’s no use as an ally, are we really waiting here for her?”

  “Which her?” She gathered up his axe and whistled for Storm, left wandering in the eastern valley below the hill. Mikki hauled his brown tunic off over his head and strode past, tossing it back at her with a grin as she followed him down another rambling sheep track. He was wearing nothing else, oblivious to stones and thistles under his bare feet.

  “Both. Either.”

  “If you like,” she offered.

  “If I like…I think we should come to Lissavaten, Lissavakail, as swiftly as we can.”

  “No,” she said soberly. “We wait. We should know what Attalissa is, before we come between her and Ghatai.” Know what she had become, hidden by a god of the strong and free Western Grass and yet taken into night-hag Kinsai’s embrace.

  The birds sang more loudly in the scattered thorns, the clear, carrying songs of the sunrise. Mikki whistled at them, turned back to catch Moth around the waist and kiss her. For a moment, through the touch, the taste of him, she felt the sun in his blood as he did, the coming edge of day like liquid fire. The first burning crescent slipped over the horizon.

  Mikki shook himself, the dust thrown up by Busli flying from his sun-gilded fur, and dropped to all fours. He shambled on down to Storm, waiting with ears pricked, and thumped a massive shoulder companionably into the blue roan bone-horse.

  “Race you to the camp?” he suggested, and loped off.

  She found herself smiling, watching him. He took life with a light heart still, after all the long years and the dark years, made her remember, proved and forced her to believe in some sort of dawn. Moth strapped axe and sword to Storm’s harness again and stuffed Mikki’s tunic into a saddlebag. The sun, a yellow-white edge, shone into her eyes, stretching the long shadows of the hills towards her. Mikki was already some ways down the track, veering off to the north to avoid the grazing flock and its shepherd and wary do
gs.

  No bear could outrun a horse over distance, even with a long head start. Mikki chortled as Moth overtook him.

  “There’s nothing but porridge for breakfast, wolf. We should have left the hill sooner, before the shepherd was up. We could have had mutton.”

  The dark slate floor of this lower room, once a training hall for the sisters, was chalked with signs and arcs and columns of symbols, some smudged and redrawn and smudged away again, some untouched in the seven years since he had first drawn them. It was not a sky-chart for divining, had no sketches of human and animal figures, no gates and solemn gods. It was a map of the heavens, and tables of dates and planetary cycles. An almanac in mineral. The wandering stars Vrehna and Tihz moved on their fated courses, Vrehna lapping her slower mate, and soon enough they would join, setting a knot in the patterns of the world, drawing threads together, inclining, making possible, a certain shape of the world, a melding of powers.

  Tamghiz walked through it, barefoot, setting butter-fuelled lamps at points of significance.

  So. He changed one figure in a column of numbers, considered, and changed it back.

  —I don’t make mistakes.

  —Stop doubting.

  —If the ritual fails…

  —It can’t.

  Soon, soon, soon. He would stretch, reach out into the world, hold fates in his hand, sweep the divinities of mountain and desert into a comet’s tail behind him, spin their threads into his own as well. Climb to the Great Gods, and face them.

  —And then?

  —Then, then. Finally. Strong enough, this time.

  Tamghiz sat down cross-legged amid the chalked marks, folded his hands, closed his eyes.

  So. He found the Grasslander caravaneer easily by the amulet, a dog’s collar marking her his, and now, by the familiar tang of her soul. She slept, one muddy, churning little human mind among many. It was the early hours of the morning. She did not dream, but he turned her mind to memory of the day past. Glimpses of the goddess, solemn, grubby, earnest young caravaneer. Would he had such a daughter. Each glimpse in the day an anxious pain for Tusa. The woman nursed the pain, the guilt, and was making herself ill with it, blood in her stomach, devouring herself. They were on the road; it looked like, felt like, they were north of the Five Cataracts. Nearly to At-Landi. Ivah was there now, waiting. Tamghiz slid into her mind without waking her awareness. She stirred, shrugged off the bodyguard’s arm. In her sleep, she was a little child again, yearning for her mother’s embrace. Tamghiz shook his head and left her. She would know the goddess arrived soon enough. It did her no good to expect him to provide all the answers.