Blackdog (55 page)

If whatever stalked them was Tamghat's ally, why had it not acted? If it was not, why did it follow? Why did it only follow, and fade away elusive as a dream, leaving him with nothing but animal scent and old bone, random on the wind? And why had damned Kinsai said nothing as it trailed them down the east bank?

Maybe they were mad, he and the dog together, and the thing they chased only an illusion, a twisted memory of Tamghat, a fever-dream, nothing more.

It was not slipping away this evening. It burned before them in the air, the twisted thing that had come against Lissavakail, fire and blood and stone, old bone, coming, pursuing Attalissa. A woman, a horse, something that seemed to fade in and out of vision.
Wait…
He was lost. The dog hurled itself against it and hit the ground, rolling under a blow that swept it from its feet, a weight great enough to hold it pinned.

The dog grew horse-sized, twisted, teeth clashing, taste of blood and then only fur as the great bear reared free and struck again, massive body crushing the dog and a paw pressing its head into the ground, so it snapped and snarled and choked on dusty earth.

“What in the cold hells is it?” someone asked.

A sword bit the earth, a yard from the dog's frenzy. A crack in the air, breathing cold. A road into a landscape of white sky, black stone, black ice, seams of molten red rock. The dog's shock froze it still and Holla dragged himself, not into the world, but at least out of the morass of rage and panic that surrounded the dog's core.

“Thought that might get his attention.” A woman squatted down before him, just out of reach, a long Northron sword across her knees. “Now…Hah. They said the goddess was guarded by a demon.”

“Or abducted by one.”

“Ya, but you tell me what this is.” They weren't speaking any language he knew. The dog heard, and understood.

“Bad-tempered?”

“That too.”

“I can't hold him much longer, wolf. Night's about on us and he weighs more than I will.”

The thing that looked like a woman and was not Tamghat considered him, reached a hand. The dog snapped and should have taken that hand off, but she was faster and her touch burned, resting between his eyes.

“Lie still. Let me see what you are. Both of you.”
I don't mean any harm to your goddess. I want the one who calls himself Tamghat.

It didn't occur to the dog to doubt. It sighed, a long and weary sigh, fell back to something approaching mortal dog-size, and lay still. Then it stretched its head back, lying prone on the earth, until it pressed its nose against the woman's wrist. It felt like…it felt it had all unexpected turned a foreign corner and found it was home. She ran her hand over its muzzle, let it lie. The dog whined.

“Great Gods be damned.” She whispered it, sat back away from him. “Mikki…let him go.”

“Are you sure?” The bear…was a man, shaking unkempt hair out of his eyes, a man naked and quite unselfconscious about it, who rolled from the dog and knelt by the woman, watchful, his shoulder welling blood.

The dog let Holla-Sayan go then. He dragged a rasping breath that he felt in every rib.

The man—the black-eyed Northron giant from At-Landi—offered a hand as he propped himself up, the world spinning, but it was the woman held him with her eyes. Another Northron, younger than him, old as his mother—he couldn't place her. Pale hair that could have been age or youth's silver-gilt beauty. Old eyes, though, with fire living behind them.

“Why does it believe you?” For a dizzy moment, that was his most pressing thought. “It never believes me. Why should
I
believe you? You're the same as Tamghat.”

The man snorted. “Caravan-man, you should try not to insult people who, you might notice, aren't cutting your fool head off.” He spoke Grasslander now, fluently, but with a thick accent, and clasped his hand over his bleeding shoulder. “You could have tried asking questions before biting, you know. You'll make more friends that way.”

“Believe me because my sibling does.” Her Grasslander might have been native.

“What?” He felt slow, stupid, exhausted from weeks of little sleep and too long fighting the dog. He had missed something.

“Sibling?” the bear-man said to the woman. “I thought the stories of the Blackdog put it back well before the war of the seven devils, before the kings in the north.”

“That wasn't the first war the Great Gods fought in this world. Long and long ago—forgotten long and long ago, and the defeated forced back into the cold hells for eternity.” The woman switched back to Grasslander. “But you—”

“Devils?” Holla asked, desperately, the dog still following the Northron speech. “What?”

“The soul possessing you is what the world calls a devil. It's little more than a ghost feeding off you, Holla-Sayan, and that ghost is bound in such spells…But that is what it was, once.”

“No.”

“Ask it, if you won't believe me.”

“I can't. It doesn't think that way. It doesn't…it doesn't have conversations. It doesn't have
words.”

“Perhaps not. Its name is gone, it's wounded beyond recovery, there's only a fragment of its heart remaining and that is lost to it, but it survives.”

Holla shook his head.

“Think of the wreck of a man returned from battle, a body that doesn't die but lingers, a soul that seems mostly to have fled to the Great Road to the heavens. Your dog is that. It was a terrible battle. Powers loose in your world that had no place or right to walk it.”

He felt empty, purged of some great weight. The relief was the dog's: this stalking power was no threat to the goddess. And Great Gods, Holla was so weary. That a devil soul lived parasite in him was too much; he had no energy to worry about it.

“Then I'm going back to town. If it's Tamghat you're after, come with me. Pakdhala says we're going up to Lissavakail tomorrow and she won't tell me what she means to do. She can't fight him.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's weak. She's a human girl. And I can't fight him. His warriors killed me, last time. Killed the man Otokas, I mean. He threatened to take the dog himself.”

“He won't,” the woman said grimly, and she stood, sheathing her sword, the steel one, before taking the stone sword from the earth. A web of frost crackled on the dry grass. “This is Lakkariss, Holla-Sayan, and it could destroy either of us, being what we are. One way or another, I will see Tamghiz Ghatai does not devour the Blackdog.” She sheathed the sword in a scabbard on the horse's shoulder. He saw night sky through the horse, night and bone. It snorted at him.

“Your mistress isn't going to like me.” For a hazy moment he thought she meant Gaguush. “But then, I don't think much of slavers, so we can all dislike one another equally.”

“What are you?” he asked desperately.

“Who
is the more courteous question. My name's Moth, these days. This is Mikki. Mikki, put on some clothes?”

The man laughed, shrugged into a tunic from the horse's baggage, and unstrapped a long-hafted axe, which he rested first on one shoulder, then, wincing, the other. The woman muttered under her breath and took him by his front, pulled down the shoulder of his tunic, and tied a pad of cloth over the bite. The man grinned sheepishly, winked at Holla.

“Who, then?” Holla frowned, climbed to his feet. He felt like he'd fallen off a mountain, or that one had fallen on him. “Tamghiz Ghatai—why do I know that name?”

“Fireside tales, caravan-man,” Mikki said. “In the days of the first kings in the north there were seven devils—”

“Sayan.
I thought they were imprisoned, those seven.”

“Some have escaped,” Moth said.

“You've
escaped. Which one are you and if you're planning to kill him, what do you mean to do after?” Are you a threat to the goddess, is the dog deluded? He did not ask that, but she saw it anyway.

Moth hesitated, then, Northron formality, touched a hand to her chest. “Ulfhild Vartu,” she said. “I've given up making emperors, Holla-Sayan. I make sagas, these days. Histories, when the damned Great Gods let me. And I will stop Ghatai making himself a god of the earth. If I can.”

“And if you can't?”

“Then he will consume both of us and your mistress as well, and raise the earth against the heavens. There may be no more left of either than that wasteland along the Kinsai'aa.” She considered. “Time was, I'd have welcomed that.”

“Not now?”

She grinned. “Westgrasslander—you're not the only one with a farm to go home to.”

“Not much of one,” the bear-man muttered. “I think we should move house, wolf, to someplace with a shorter winter. Take land in the Hravningasland.”

“Too many neighbours. Too many kinsmen.”

“You see?” Mikki asked him plaintively. “I'm condemned to a hermitage.”

“You're a demon,” Moth said. “You like wilderness.”

“I'm a carpenter, princess, and I like people.” They had fallen into Northron again. The dog found the banter incomprehensible and ceased to pay attention to the words. No threat here, and Pakdhala was alone. Holla-Sayan sighed and let the dog flow back into the world, turned to lope south. They could follow if they would. He didn't care. The dog did, though, very much, the only emotion it had ever had that was not centred on the goddess. But its thought ran on the goddess again, its goddess left alone with only a weak mortal man to defend her, the enemy whose shape it had known, all unaware, but known as the chick knows to cower from the broad-winged shadow in the sky, all too close. But under that, under that…some smouldering heat that was rage and hope and longing—it was oblivion it yearned after. The dog wanted to die and saw, at last, death within its reach.

Moth and the ghost stallion caught up with him. Mikki, warm demon heat in the dog's awareness, earth and root and a forest in his blood, jogged behind. The dog settled into a pace he could match.

The dog, for the first time in its existence, wanted company.

Come sunset, fast horses would be waiting for Ivah at Mooshka's gate with a warrior escort, Ketsim, the governor of Serakallash, had assured her. And still her father did not contact her. Waking or sleeping, he had not come to her mind since that night of nightmare. Ivah wished she could feel it was trust, confidence in her, but she more than half-expected it was the opposite, and that once she brought the goddess to Ketsim's house, the
noekar
would take Pakdhala, on Tamghat's orders, riding at messenger speed with relays of fast horses, to be the one to hand the goddess over and bask in her father's satisfaction.

Tamghat only needed Ivah to cast the spell. And if she failed that—better not to go back to him at all, better to take poison and die like a failed Nabbani assassin.

At times like this, she desperately needed a god to pray to. Any god.

Mother Nabban, Father Nabban…how could she pray to them, she who had never been closer than she was now to the great empire ruled by…who? Her grandfather, an uncle, a cousin?

Great Gods above, let this work.
One did not pray to the Old Great Gods for little things. They were life and death, salvation and damnation. So was this.

Great Gods, let me succeed.

Great Gods, let me survive.

Ivah closed her eyes and ran the thin braid, hard with many knots, between her fingers. She could feel the power in it that way, the faint sparking warmth of it. Each knot, square or twisted or spiralling, part of a larger pattern, corpse-hair and hair of the living incarnation woven together, words woven in, such power as she had never felt flow past her lips before.

She opened her eyes. Shaiveh was watching, crouched with her back against the door, sword across her knees and her eyes gleaming in the light of the mutton-fat lamp. She said nothing.

“I'm ready,” Ivah said hoarsely. Shai only nodded, reached out a hand. Ivah took it. They walked that way, hand in hand, along under the arcade beneath the gallery of the dark caravanserai. A brazier burned in one corner of the yard. The bells had rung curfew and most of the gang was gathered there now, Kapuzeh's voice raised over the others, some song out of the desert, Tihmrose's flute rising achingly sweet and plaintive over his deep voice. Ivah paused to trace symbols in the dust. Let them overlook the door in the gate opening and closing, let them overlook moving shadows at this end of the yard where the goddess slept.

At least Holla-Sayan had gone off roaming while she was meeting the governor, and he still had not returned.

Shadow stirred. Shaiveh hissed and pulled a knife from her belt, pushing Ivah away.

“Hah, Bikkim, you startled me,” she chortled the next instant. “Everyone else is having a good time. What are you doing skulking down here?”

“What are you?” he countered, rising to his feet, spear in hand.

“Well, you know…” Shaiveh let her voice trail off suggestively, as if they had not had all the caravanserai's many empty rooms to crawl into. Master Mooshka was not a popular man with Governor Ketsim, and caravans, except those led by bloody-minded masters and gang bosses, went to places more in favour, and suffering lower taxes and tolls, than Mooshka's.

“Pakdhala's asleep. Go away, don't wake her.”

“Hey, are we being noisy? We're not being noisy, are we, Ivah, love?”

“No,” Ivah said, fingers working on a loop of yarn pulled from her pocket. Damn and damn and damn him again. She did not have strength to squander; she would need all she had.

Bikkim's eyes narrowed. “Wizard—” he said, and found himself mute. She should have bound his limbs, sent him into sleep, something more practical, but her father was right, she never saw the longer road. Bikkim's face worked as if he were choking, mouthing empty words, and then he thrust the spear at her, jerking it up through the cat's cradle, slicing the strands that bound his voice. She yelped, her palm cut, but the laughter at the distant brazier hid the sound and as he drew breath to shout and lowered the spearpoint to her breast, holding her off, nothing more, Shaiveh swooped in beside him and slashed his throat.

She didn't scream. The sound that escaped her was more a frantic kitten's mewl, hardly louder than the rasping whistle of the Serakallashi's throat, facedown on the brick floor.