Blackdog (2 page)

“The road,” Old Lady said. “Sweet Attalissa save us! Look at the road!”

Otokas passed Attalissa to the arms of Kayugh, who was Spear Lady, captain of the warriors, and joined Old Lady at the parapet.

A black, shifting swarm covered the road on the southern shore of the lake, approaching the bridge to the town.

“Sound the bells,” he shouted back to the armed pair by the stairs. “Raiders!”

The dog snarled in his soul, roused by the threat, and dangerous. Nothing the Blackdog could do here to defend the goddess.

Old Lady's hands shook as she gripped his arm.

“They weren't there,” she said, and her voice shook as well. “Otokas, they weren't there, even a few moments ago.”

“Wizardry,” whispered the plump Mistress of Novices. “Or divinity.” She looked at him, making it a question.

“Wizardry,” Otokas confirmed. “I smell it. And—something else. But not a god. Not a goddess.”

A scent to the spirit like old ashes on stone and the hot tang of metal and fire. Not familiar and yet…no, that strange hot smell of ash and metal was nothing the Blackdog could ever have smelt before, but it raised the dog's hackles, roared of danger and death and the need to defend, deafening Otokas to all else for a moment.

It was not the time or the place. He forced the Blackdog quiet, calming it, calming himself.

Whatever the threat was, it could not be mere wizardry. No lone wizard, no group of wizards he had ever heard of except in the oldest tales, could hide an army, certainly not so close to a deity's holy place—if they had been hidden, and not dropped from some other location. He had felt the air shatter.

He called them raiders; that was what the mind expected. This was an army that poured down towards the island town's one bridge. They were not even coming from the east, the way around the lake and down to the Red Desert in the north, but from the narrow trail that meandered higher into the southern mountains of the Pillars of the Sky, branching and branching, connecting Lissavakail with its fields and high summer pastures, and the scatter of remote tributary villages. No way for them to have assembled there without passing Lissavakail.

Some few of the men and women were mounted on stocky Grassland horses; most were afoot. A hundred, two, three…more came into sight in the narrow gap where a path scrambled up to the temple's own terraced fields. Nothing beyond that, no way they could have gained that height without climbing the very path they descended. The last of the red light picked out spearheads and helmets, sword-edges and armour. The temple bells rang out, a discordant jangling settling to a clashing peal that shook the floor beneath his feet. The town's bell-tower picked it up, and the few people who had gathered for prayers at the temple bridge hurried away into the spilling confusion of the town.

“The bridge,” said Kayugh, and thrust the limp goddess back at Otokas. “We have to get it down!” She snapped orders; sisters followed her, the temple rousing to arms.

The temple was Kayugh's to defend, as the goddess was his and the town was the goddess's.

The goddess was in no state to defend anyone or anything, not even herself. The humanity that was Attalissa's virtue was also her weakness. The goddess grew into her powers slowly, came into full strength and understanding of herself only with womanhood. There was little she could do as she was now. The militia, and what sisters Kayugh would spare from defence of the temple, were all Lissavakail had.

“He comes for me,” the goddess said, stirring suddenly. She pushed away from Otokas to find her feet, wild-eyed. “Otokas, he's coming for me. He'll take me and swallow me like a snake, devour me, Otokas, dog, I'm scared, don't let him, the lake will die…” Her face was grey and her teeth chattered. As he bent to pick her up, her eyes rolled back white in her head and she collapsed again, limp as a dead rat. Old Lady stood with hands upraised, facing the lake with her back to Attalissa.

Prayer was no use now. If ever it had been.

“Down,” Otokas ordered the sisters. “Arm, join your dormitories. No, two of you, keep watch, and you—” singling out a fleet-footed young sister, his own niece “—Attavaia, you be runner for the watchers. Bring word to Kayugh and me of the raiders’ advance, if we're not back here when they reach the town bridge.”

Torches flared in the town, men already arming, running to bar the stone bridge that was Lissavakail's only fixed link to the shore.

Otokas swung the goddess to his shoulder, started down the stairs, the two spearwomen hurrying to keep up. The bells were deafening; the tower shook with them.

“Where to?” the younger of the pair, Meeray, asked. Old Lady left her prayers and came puffing behind them.

“The chapel,” Old Lady said. “We must assemble and pray for guidance.”

“The Old Chapel,” Otokas countered. It was the most defensible part of the fortress-like temple; the islet was nothing more than an upheaval of rock from the lake, cracked and seamed. The widest crack had been quarried, carved into a chapel in the earliest days when the priestesses first came. The temple had grown over the hill, obscuring stone and crevices and human-made cave, consuming much of the original hill for its masonry, but enough remained at the core to make the temple a warren of dead ends and sudden stairs. A few could hold off a horde in the passages around the Old Chapel. But a few could die there, trapped and starving.

There was a second, secret way out, though none but he and the goddess could take it.

Kayugh met them again on the way. She had changed to trousers and armour, had her helmet under her arm and a dozen armed sisters behind her, two dormitories, as they called the six-woman squads which slept and trained together.

“Our bridge?” he asked.

“They're cutting the beams away at the nearest posts, and taking up the planking,” she reported, falling in beside him. “I sent Lilmass and a dozen archers across first, to help hold the town bridge. They asked to go.”

Fear crawled under Kayugh's voice. Sent them to die in the town, she clearly thought.

“Can Attalissa help?” Kayugh asked. “Break the town's bridge, even? That would buy time. We could send someone across the lake and down to Serakallash, beg help from their militia, even hire mercenaries from the caravan-gangs.”

“No,” Otokas said, more harshly than he meant to, but the dog was fighting to break free, distracting him, and there was absolutely nothing the Blackdog could do, here.

“What do we do, then—wait behind our walls, hope they get bored and go home?” Kayugh snapped. “You saw them, Oto. Those aren't raiders. It's an invasion!”

“Faith,” panted Old Lady. “Have faith. We will be guided. I will go out to speak to the strangers, after I've prayed. I dreamed—the goddess told me change was coming, a time of great change, a renewal of our glory and our might, by the will of the Old Great Gods. Faith will prevail.”

“Faith in what?” Kayugh demanded, but under her breath.

Old Lady talked too often of glory and power as something quite separate from the child they served. They mostly stopped listening, except to head her off, if she seemed likely to start preaching it at the novices. Time she stepped down, they both thought, but that was supposed to be Attalissa's decision, and Old Lady claimed dreams approving her that the goddess could neither confirm nor deny, merely looking a puzzled, nervous child, when asked to do so.

“Oto, if we don't send for help now, before we're besieged—”

Otokas stopped, forced himself to listen, to look Kayugh in the eyes and see her, to shut out the dog's drowning urge to fight, which deafened him to all else. “I'm sorry. I meant, no, ‘Lissa can do nothing about the stone bridge. But yes, you're right, send to Serakallash. Beg help, buy it, offer whatever they ask.”

Old Lady squawked in protest. “You can't sell Attalissa's treasury to foreigners.”

“Neighbours, surely,” Kayugh murmured. “With respect, Old Lady, the treasury is worth nothing to dead women. To a dead incarnation. To the dead of Lissavakail, and if they are not already dying in the town, they will be before long. Your kinsfolk and mine. All of our kin.”

Old Lady huffed and blew out her cheeks. “The senior sisters must vote on any such decision. We can convene them tomorrow, after dawn prayers. We're safe behind our walls here and defended by the goddess's lake. As I said, I'll pray for guidance, and then meet the leader of these raiders. I dreamed…one would come whose service to Attalissa would raise her above all other gods. Wise words may turn enmity to fellowship. We can afford to take proper counsel and not let ourselves be panicked into rash acts. And any decision so important as spending the treasury
must
go to the senior sisters.”

“The goddess can make such a decision herself,” Kayugh said, with a worried look at the still unconscious girl. “And in her default, a tribunal, which is the three of us—the Old Lady, the Spear Lady, and the Blackdog. And with respect, Old Lady, you've said nothing about such a dream before. Neither has she.”

“The child is but a shadow of the goddess's will,” Old Lady said, with undue complacency. “A symbol.”

Kayugh hissed. “Attalissa is Attalissa—”

“Offer the Serakallashi whatever you need to,” Otokas said again. “I say so.”

Old Lady squeaked and ducked away from his glare.

“Blackdog.” Kayugh gave him a hasty bow, more for Old Lady's benefit than his own, he hoped. Followed it with a widening of the eyes, an almost imperceptible nod away from the women who flanked them both, waiting and worried at heated words and open discord.

He transferred Attalissa to Meeray's arms reluctantly, stroked the goddess's cool forehead. Shock, he thought. The goddess's fear was more than the child's experience could comprehend, rebounding on her.

“Take Attalissa and Old Lady to the Old Chapel and make them comfortable. Try to warm the place up. ‘Lissa should be all right, she's only fainted. When she wakes, tell her I'll come to her soon, but I need to see what's happening in the town. Tell her, don't expect her to know. Remember she's only a child.”

Attalissa's ability to reach his mind was still limited. She might find him, if he was out of sight, but she might not, and either way, she would still be more than half a panicked little girl, reaching for the only father she had ever known.

Old Lady began a protest about the damp Old Chapel, but fell silent at no more than a glance, took the arm Meeray's partner offered, and hobbled off. Otokas watched Attalissa out of sight and did not know his hands were clenched till Kayugh touched his fist, gently.

“A word?” she said, and to the dormitories with her, “You know your posts. Go. I'll be on the bell-tower.”

Kayugh's hair coiled like the tendrils of pea-vines, and Otokas, shoving down the dog's need to follow ‘Lissa, folded his arms and ignored the urge he had never once gratified, to comb it back from her face, wind fingers in it. The priestesses were sworn to celibacy, to honour their ever-maiden goddess. The Blackdog was not, but there had been no woman for him since he had realized he wanted only Kayugh.

“How long can we hold out here?” Kayugh asked bluntly. “It's at least two days to Serakallash, and they'll hardly set out the moment a messenger arrives—it'll take them a day or more just to summon their sept-chiefs. We have walls, but the town doesn't. I was thinking…if we can get Old Lady to agree, we can let the townsfolk in, as many as we can take.”

“She won't allow it.”

“Will you?”

Otokas frowned at the challenge in Kayugh's voice. “We don't have the supplies to support ourselves for long, let alone many others. But if they come, yes.”

It was so engrained that no one but the vowed women set foot on the island, he doubted many townsfolk would think of it. The holy islet was a place of reverence and awe, not a refuge. And he was not sure it would be a refuge, not from this attack. The edge of the goddess's terror gnawed at him.

“They might be safer in the town.”

“Safer! How?”

He shook his head. “There are wizards out there, or a wizard, more powerful than any I've ever heard of—probably just one, since Attalissa said
he.
She believes he's coming here for her. To destroy her.”

“To kill the girl?” More puzzlement in Kayugh's voice than anything. It seemed too unlikely a thing to evoke anger.

“No. To destroy
Attalissa
, not just her avatar. Devour her, she said.”

That shocked her. “Why?
How?”

“I don't know. The dog doesn't know. But it—I—we, if you like, we believe it. The dog…understands things it can't seem to express. Remembers things. You know the stories say that there were gods who died in the west in a wizards’ war, long ago before ever there were kings in the north? I remember things, like…shadows seen out of the corner of the eye. Nothing to seize hold of, but enough to be afraid. Gods can die, and not only by their own will.”

Kayugh drew a deep breath. “Well then. What do we do?”

Otokas didn't know. Run. Hide. Kill the source of the threat. The Blackdog's solutions were few, and not necessarily the best. He did not think the Blackdog could overcome unaided whatever had the power to summon an army unseen out of the temple's own millet fields. And Attalissa was not going to be able to help.

“Send out the novices and lay-sisters, and the old sisters too, not just your messengers to Serakallash. Fill whatever boats we have and get them away. Tell them to scatter to the villages in the high valleys, tell them to hide.”

“Otokas—”

“Do it now, while there's time. It's dark enough the boats won't be seen.”

Her hand on his again, and she had no idea how distracting that was. He hoped she didn't.

“Are you all right, Oto? Your eyes—”

He laughed. “Aside from being ready to go howling over to town to get myself killed, looking for whatever she thinks is coming for her? Oh yes.”

“Go to her.”

“I'm going back to the tower, now she's safe for the moment. I want to see what's out there.”

“I'll send someone to tell you.”

“I can see more in the dark than you could in broad daylight. I'll be all right. We've—I and all the men before me—we've been arguing down our single-minded mongrel for a very long time now. We're getting good at it.”