Blackdog (66 page)

Attalissa willing.

W
hen it all began, Holla-Sayan had killed a man stealing his horse. Now he had killed a man to steal this horse he rode. The Grasslander had been riding at a good clip, heading away from Lissavakail with some urgency, and when Holla-Sayan stepped into the road and called to him, he shouted, “Way for the Lake-Lord's messenger!” and did not even turn his mount's head aside—to be fair, he might not have seen Holla until too late, given it was thick night, but Holla was at war with all Tamghati. He drew his sabre and took his head, and the horse. He ought to have felt some regret for that; he had intended to leave the man unconscious by the roadside, but he was too far away from himself to care, lying down with the Blackdog, holding it calm.

The messenger carried some sealed scroll in a leather satchel. Holla-Sayan threw the scroll into the lake. He couldn't read. He drank the man's flask of millet beer and ate his bread and cheese and turned the horse's head back to Lissavakail. He had no idea where Moth had gone, and he wasn't about to let the Blackdog back into the world, not yet, but neither was he going to wait in hiding while Pakdhala was in danger, trusting her fate to another. He was not certain how long he had slept. Too long. The mountains were warm with golden afternoon, the sun heading down into the west. He must have lost a day. Pakdhala was not taken last night, but the night before last.

The edge of the high snows gleamed with copper sunset when he came to a place he recognized, a collapsed ruin, thin grass sprouting between its stones, where a girl and a dog had once sheltered. He took off the horse's saddle and bridle and turned it loose to graze along the shore. Mist hung over the lake, hiding the temple, except for the highest roofs, which floated like some demon-built palace in a tale.

Pakdhala was on the temple islet. The Blackdog strained towards her like a hound pulling at the leash. All his concentration was needed to keep it in check; he did not try to call to her. The last thing he needed was to attract Tamghat's notice.

He did not want to do this. Holla-Sayan scrambled down over the jagged slabs of shale, through nettles, and waded into the lake. If he paused to think…Waist-deep, he went under in a shallow dive. He held his breath as long as he could. Knowing he would not drown made no difference. But the lake, when he had to exhale, flowed into him and felt like rest and new strength.

Holla surfaced, muffling a cough in his sleeve, and studied the shore of the holy islet. Cliffs rose here, and the dark crack of the tunnel, not so secret now. Tamghat should be guarding it. He could see no one, smell no one human, no metal-and-stone reek of wizardry, either. The guard would be in the Old Chapel, probably, but if he could come on them unexpected, before they could raise the alarm, he would be in the temple and, perhaps, no one the wiser. If a trap were laid there…he would deal with that when he came to it. Storming the gates, the dog's impulse, was not clever.

And that's why I'm staying in charge
, he told it, wading forward. He shook water out of his braids and staggered a bit, heavy with waterlogged clothing. Anyone who decided to take a walk on the shore was going to see the dark trail he left behind him, but there was nothing to do about that.

The tunnel was as he…remembered, hah: a narrow fissure, lit by overgrown cracks above, which became true tunnel and dipped down into a water-filled blackness like a well. That was worse than the lake, but whatever Pakdhala was facing had to be even worse than this suffocating, drowning grave-pit. Knowing it could not kill him, no more than the lake could, still didn't help. He went into it sweating and with his eyes shut, as if that could make a difference, came out where he could breathe air again shivering and cold with simple fear and stood waist-deep in water, feet on the first of the steps. The water was higher than it had been.

Now…

He ducked under again, feeling around, recoiled almost in disgust when he touched the rough surface of the stone bowl. No slime, no mussels had rooted on it. The bowl was just as it had been when Otokas set it there, feeling the same revulsion at its touch. Holla-Sayan picked it up, strangely heavy, even underwater. Water sheeted away from it, leaving it as it had been, not full, a dark mirror rolling under a rim like a half-opened peony-bloom, a surface that cast its own pewter-dim light upwards.

No.
It wasn't a word; it was the dog's whole being that howled it, but underneath, underneath something flared with grim satisfaction.

I think so.
That one silver thread the dog had lodged in his heart, the burnt scars on his fingertips from when he touched that shimmering, shifting barrier…when he followed that path, it led here, to this.
Moth—Vartu—will find the goddess. She said so. She'll find Pakdhala. You know we can't fight Tamghat and hope to survive, and he wants to make you part of himself. What will that do to Attalissa? Otokas feared that; that's part of why he wanted me to take her to the desert road. We're putting you out of his reach, so you at least don't go flitting to him like a mindless butterfly without a fight when I'm dead, right? If we're going to die today, don't you want to die your own master?

That wasn't an argument the dog understood. The drive to serve Attalissa, to protect Attalissa, ruled. It surged up, shredding a way through him as he fought to hold it down. Holla-Sayan pitched forward on the stairs, screaming, every bone, it felt, dissolving in fire, but as he fell he hurled the bowl into the blackness ahead.

It struck stone and shattered like glass, shards flying, the grey, nacreous liquid it had held rising like a lily, a fountain, limning stone edges, sending strange oily lights running over the surface of the water as he fell beneath it.

Sayan…please…not yet…

He was dying. The dog had torn into the world through his physical body, ripped him open. He lay on the steps where he had fallen, half-in and half-out of the water, and blood soaked him, sticky and hot. A twisting tree of fire swayed before him, murky reddish light, liquid pewter veins. It rose suddenly to the low roof, flaring bright, and vanished, leaving Holla-Sayan in blackness his eyes could not pierce. Everything was muted, sound and scent dim, even his gasping breath, even the blood.

The dog was gone.

There was still Pakdhala to find.

He crawled, one step higher, another. Fell with his arm beneath him and felt it grow warmer, wetter. Ragged rent in his coat and everything beneath. Farther up. Farther, through the square hole in the roof, in the chapel's floor. His fingers touched wood greasy with rot. The sides of the altar. Dragged and lay against it, but even with his shoulder he could not move it, just lay there, leaning slightly, sinking under cold waves of pain.

The Sayanbarkash again. Home. The farm, all the low, green, turf-roofed buildings. The god's hill swelling in the distance, long ridge dominating the skyline. He wanted to be there.

Die unburied beneath the altar and rot here, be bound a ghost until someone found his bones, found his stinking corpse and shoved him back into the lake, to free his soul.

Not that. Not that. He wanted to be home. Try it all again, make better choices…could not wish himself never curious about the mountains, Pakdhala unfound. Could wish her a lost child, only that. Should have married Gaguush. Coughing shook him back into the present and grim pain, and then his chest forgot how to inhale and his throat caught on nothing. After a moment his body remembered the way to breathe again. This time. Cold.

Light hung before him, dim, drifting silver. It clung to him by a thread, one thread that had not been broken, an umbilical to feed its crippled fire by connection to the realm of the humans’ and gods’ and demons’ earth, where its nature did not belong. It ate his pain, it drank what grasp on the world he had left, clinging to life itself. It grew, flecked with red, retreating from wherever it had gone, regrouping in this coffin of an altar. The red was muddier than before, the colour of old scabs, the silver darkened to pewter, streaked tarnish-black.

So long a road, to die together trapped here, neither able to find their way home.

You didn't have to take me with you.
He was alone in his head, couldn't speak. For a long time, it seemed a long time, he just looked at his hand by the light that was the devil. Finally the hand moved, stretched towards the thing.

“Need,” he managed, “save…‘Dhala.”

The devil…did not care. The devil was satisfied Attalissa would die.

“Not die. Ghatai's stronger. Eats her.”

Ghatai would be stronger. Ghatai would storm the heavens and open the hells and the Old Great Gods would be afraid.

“No. Vartu. Sword. We saw.” The obsidian blade that carried a gateway to the hells, that was itself a shard of the cold hells. “Ghatai…won't free th'ells. Wants. Torule. You. All worlds. You don’ trus’ him. You know.”

So cold he could not feel the stone he lay on, could not feel the hand that lay dead-grey in a pool of glowing pewter.

“Pakdhala,” he said at last, forcing open eyes that had closed he did not know when. “You remember. All av'tars. Know her. Growing. Why you come back here?”

The devil wanted to die, did not want to die alone. Wanted a companion as it waited. Beyond death, there was no self. Not for…Holla did not understand the shape of that thought. God and devil. What it was. Creature of the remote heavens.

Great Gods and devils were the same. One side lost in a war so long ago…

“Don’ care. ‘Dhala. You…
want…
to die?”

It would not be a slave again.

“Me. Neither. Want. Mygirl. Safe. Whatever price.”

The devil had no face, no form but that dwindling swirl of light, but he thought it turned its full attention to him.

The devil was afraid.

“Me. Too.”

The devil was afraid of him. Of being used.

“Trust. Both.”

Better to die free. Both of them.

“Both. Free. Better live.”

He felt that silver thread linking them heart to heart, as though it lay between his fingers. Break it and they would both die at once. Together they held one another in life a little longer, fading in strength.

“Come,” he invited, a whisper, and the devil came in a rush, pouring over him, sinking into him, filling veins and heart and marrow, convulsing his body, blinding him, white sky burning, burning him away, flesh and blood and bone.

The priestesses called this the Dawn Dancing Hall, although Tamghiz found it difficult to imagine Old Lady Luli dancing at dawn or any other time. The great rectangular pavement was a mosaic tiled in three shades of blue, while the gilded beams of the roof were supported on pillars carved into spirals like narwhal horns and painted brilliant red, with gilded flowers around their bases and capitals. On three sides it was open to the wind, a platform thrust out towards the southeastern edge of the holy islet, looking down on the edge of town and away into a vista of rising peaks. A notch in the horizon spilled out the rising sun at the spring equinox, though they hadn't managed to align their dancing hall with it. Still, unless he climbed to one of the ice fields, he wouldn't be likely to find a better place to welcome the rising conjunction. If the Dancing Hall hadn't been here, he would have torn out the walls of the adjacent novices’ hall and built something similar.

Vrehna and Tihz already drew near one another in their celestial dance, mounting the heavens in the northeast. The long side of the Dancing Hall faced them almost square on. He aligned his great circle to where they would appear over the mountains, turn burning into one, six nights from now.

He didn't trust to chalk and powder for this working, but mixed pigments and oil and painted the hundreds of symbols and paths of power, forming the patterns stroke by delicate stroke. Chiefs among his
noekar
stood guard, three to a corner, day and night, and others patrolled the perimeter of it. He wanted no second An-Chaq interfering. He had warded it, too, against the one great threat he feared, though he had little strength to spare for anything but the great working to come.

Painting the spell this way tied him to Lissavakail, though. He had refined it since the time he had planned to draw it all out in one intense casting, to take the goddess on the same day he took Lissavakail. As bad as Ulfhild and her wretched poetry, always realizing perfection lay still out of reach and pulling what was done apart to build it again. But he was right to do so. This was stronger, surer, more elegant. Providence. Had all gone as he intended, the goddess might have been able to fight the spell as he had originally shaped it. This, though, this would hold her. Further providence that she was so weak, still disconnected from her powers, and holding her captive was so simple a matter. He would bring her here, reunite her with her lake just as he drew the final runes to close the circle and as the planets rose above the mountains.

Meanwhile he had to build the spell, so that it all hung ready, lacking only the final elements. He worked at it day by day, as Vrehna and Tihz pulled to one another. He had no strength, no concentration, to spare for any more great workings, nor had he the time to ride to Serakallash to investigate the great stir and turmoil he had felt.