Blackdog (41 page)

“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 grass 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.”

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 are 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.