Blackdog (38 page)

Moth drew the obsidian-bladed sword, then, and went on with it in her hand, ignoring how the liquid rock edged after her, the scab tearing uphill, new crust seeping, rolling at her heels.

Trying what she would do. Playing.

It was partly damnable curiosity. She had not seen a volcano since they fled the western isles, and never this close to. And Vartu had not, not with human eyes.

The crawl of molten rock gave up, or was left behind. The air smelt of burning stone, stung the eyes and throat, and there was no other living thing about. Some might argue the living. She grinned. She climbed the last steep rise, stood atop a ridge of blackened rock, looking down. Lazy ropes and banners of steam drifted over the crater below, curtaining black rock and dark fissures. The sun was setting, the long shadows running together. The ground moved, falling and rising, so that she was reminded, suddenly and intensely, with what was almost pain, of the heave of a ship, that relaxed and leg-braced swaying as the long keel danced.

She reached out into the fissures, followed them down. Hot darkness, fumes that could corrode the flesh. The white glow of iron in the furnace. A tomb in the rock, a womb that had cradled bones and burning soul. Its basalt walls were cracked, shattered with violence like an exploded egg, but the explosion had followed the slow, slow creeping of hair-fine cracks, the first weakening of the binding.

So. Ghatai was free. And so, in the end, would they all be, thanks to Ogada, who had first found the flaw into which to insert his will.

The god struck, fist of fire closing around her, and Moth hurtled back to her body. Scalding steam fountained and dark smoke, noxious and cutting with particles of stone, boiled up and folded down, reaching for her.

Devil.

It was not even a word, only furious recognition, a snarl of passion.

The ground dropped and she leapt back, the edge of rock breaking, falling. She swept the Great Gods’ sword around, and the smoke rolled together, sinking into itself, growing blacker and thicker as it folded into the crater.

“No,” she said. “I'm not him, Sihkoteh. How long since Ghatai escaped your watch?”

The Gods.
Recognition again, and uncertainty. Moth stretched out into that, warily, touching the god, as if with fingertips. He recoiled, fearing the edge of the sword's blade as much as she did.

How long?
She felt his awareness of the answer, the cycles of the seasons.

Just over sixty years ago, as she had suspected. The volcano's last great eruption had been part of no natural cycle of events, but violent reaction come too late. Like the reaction of the Old Great Gods, who could have set her on Ghatai when he first escaped, not waiting till he had had decades to make plans, establish himself in the world.

She doubted that they waited out of benevolence to test him, to see if he could live at peace in the world. More likely they simply waited until his crimes were too terrible to ignore and one of them had to make the sacrifice, and cross to the world to summon her again.

Where did he go?
she asked.

Sihkoteh's impression was of presence fading westward, down from the mountains into the Great Grass. Nothing she did not already know.

There was a sort of hunger in the god's awareness of her. Moth felt it stirring, wiped blood and ash from her face, frowning into the smoke. He had been charged to hold a devil. He had failed of his charge. He had…Ghatai had grappled with him, they had risen, burning, into the sky, claws of fire tearing into the god's heart, the devil like some parasite, burrowing into his soul. Sihkoteh had torn him out and flung him away and sunk into his mountain, poisoned, that was the way to describe it. It would take years yet to burn and slough away the devil's hunger that gnawed him and fought to change his being. The devil had drawn flesh to his bones and fled. And now a devil came tormenting him again, hungry to dive into his soul.

Moth backed away.

No.
“No.” And felt panic rise with the pounding of her heart, felt the grave close in about her again, the binding of earth and the Great Gods’ own runes, the webs of power sealing eyes and ears, closing mouth and nostrils, the last breath gone and the utter stillness where even thought died…

The edge of the sword burned whitely, but the god was there, all around her, enfolding her in fire.

With shaking hand she traced a rune on her own forehead, leaving it marked in blood that still seeped from burns. Not a human symbol, but the sign of the Old Great Gods. It burned the skin, burned the fiery heart of her, but they had marked her and it was always there, a faint and distant pain, if she reached for it.

“I am not yours to take, Sihkoteh. Never yours.” She held the obsidian sword at guard, hands steady now. The god, like some great beast pricked by unexpected spines on its prey, withdrew a little, warily. “I hunt him for the Great Gods. Truth. I swear it in my blood.” She hesitated. “Can you still feel him, do you still have any hold?”

Sihkoteh did not, and anger seethed, shame at his failure, at how long Ghatai had worked subtle spells against him, undetected.

“Hardly for me to judge you.” She turned, no need to face the volcano; Sihkoteh was all about her.

The land around was splintered and broken. Moth picked her way down in the dark, leaping new fissures, climbing uptilted slabs, walking rock that was warm under the feet, searing in places, but she willed her boots not to burn; she left the stone cracked and cold where she trod. Dried blood and ash flaked away from her spattered face. Sihkoteh flowed after her, spread lines of molten rock under the crust, shifting it, not daring more.

She ignored him. The moon rose, red in the east through the hanging vapours, and eventually the god let her go, watching, but nothing more.

Mikki had made a fire for the comfort of it, on the edge of the ashy ground, and sat by it honing his axe. Storm's saddle and bridle were stacked neatly with the packs, and the horse's skull sat on the saddle, its empty eye sockets little comfort or company.

Moth stirred the ashy ground, walking back to them, and he rose, stood waiting. He could smell blood on her, burns already healing, spatter of scars on her face and one hand, holes singed in tunic, mail blackened.

The wonder was not that she had lost her hold on the spell that gave the bone-horse form, but that she came back so little injured. He had been expecting worse and very close to breaking his word to go in search of her.

“Fool,” he said indistinctly into her hair. She smelt of sulphur and hot metal.

“I'm all right, cub.” She held him at arm's length in the moonlight, pulled him close and kissed him. “You worry too much.” Moth let him go and picked up the skull. “He distracted me, is all.”

“Sure.” They traded edged smiles. She shrugged, squatted down on the earth with the skull and a knife, cut the ball of her thumb and traced runes on the bone in blood,
Gift, Water
, and
Sun
conjoined, for life,
Horse, Aaurochs
, and
Boar
, for strength and protection. Other signs:
Aurochs
again, the letter for her birthname,
Sun
again, for the name the living warhorse had borne. Her will behind it, and strength of soul no wizard had ever held. A bone-horse was a temporary creation, not something that should endure day after day once called. But Storm had been ghost long before she bound him to his skull, and no animal's soul should have persisted wilful so long in the world. It might be Storm's will as much as Moth's that gave the horse strength and form.

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.

Y
ou'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.”