Gods of Nabban (11 page)

His tongue is thick and swollen again, and he chokes on blood and bile. The tea is yellow as bile, and he has given up resisting when they bring it to him. When the empress wants the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods to dream for her, they will pour it into him regardless, and he will choke and gag and dream the same in the end.

Prophet of the Daughter of the Old Great Gods. Prophet of the empress. Prophet of the gods she says are dead and gone but their dreams flow through him when drinks the tea, and she has killed five wizards, diviners who dreamed, since she brought him to the palace, trying to see if their dreams would show her the enemy she wants to see.

She strikes him. The guards throw him to the floor. It has happened, will happen. It is happening again. She cannot see. She is the mask and the mask wears her, the mask hides unseen and she strikes him, the guards throw him to the floor. He dreams, but he is only an actor, a singer of songs, his words have never been his own. He vomits at her feet, but that is the poison they steep for him, yellow as bile, bitter in the throat, in his nose, foul on the tongue, churning his stomach so he cannot eat. She is only a ghost, he says, a forgotten ghost, nameless.

The heir of the gods comes from the desert and the north and the snow and his shield is fire and ash and bone. The heir of the gods comes like a king and the sky is the banner over him and his horse is white as snow. He is the wind that blows off the mountains; he will sweep you all away.

CHAPTER IX

Her breath made clouds in the cold air, drawn into the smoke of the fire, rising with it to the stars. Ivah blew on her hands, fingers going numb and shrivelled, scooped up the three Gold Harbour silver gulls she kept for divination, and plunged her hands back into her sheepskin mittens. The coins were not telling her anything useful anyhow. She did far better when it wasn't her own meanings she sought. Too conscious, too much an observer of herself.

In the Palace of the Moon, the sleeping goddess turns her face away
. Death, abandonment, rejection, said
The Balance of the Sun and the Moon
. She didn't need to look up the hexagram. She hardly ever did, these days, having transcribed herself a new copy and bound it into a practical codex in the great library of Marakand, to replace the scroll she had inherited from her mother, lost when the Red Masks took her. The copying seemed to have fixed it in the mind better than all her childhood study, spurred on by An-Chaq's fan rapping knuckles or ear at Ivah's far-too-frequent faltering. The book was in the deep square pocket of her sheepskin coat, folded in soft antelope leather, but she didn't bother to dig it out, even to read the half page of further commentary.

She had begun to distrust the Nabbani manual of divination, with its strict division, like the questioning of the sheep's blade-bone, of all readings into sun and moon, positive and negative, male and female. It had never sat comfortably in her mind, and Nour said his tutor, a woman of Gold Harbour he had spent a year with when he was a young man, had told him that the wizards of the Emperor Min-Jan had burnt all the old books of commentaries and written others at his imperial order, in the days when the old gods of Nabban were recently dead or dissolved into the great new deities of the Mother and the Father. Min-Jan had been notorious both for his distrust of the female, a reaction against his usurping, devil-bonded mother, and for his tyranny, which came close to equalling or surpassing the Empress Yeh-Lin's own. The coin-diviners in the tradition of the Five Cities argued different interpretations of the hexagrams, but all their commentaries and alternates to
The Balance of the Sun and the Moon
were recreations from memory, or old books so muddled with later copying, intrusions, and outright inventions that Ivah found Nour's explanations worse than what she started with. But then, Nour admitted he was no scholar, and of no great note as a diviner, either.

Dreams. Perhaps what she ought instead to try was a divination in the Grasslander manner, with the coloured pebbles, red, black, yellow, thrown onto the painted calfskin that charted the constellations and their stories. That might have a greater truth for dreams, being more dreamlike itself. She had been working, since they left Porthduryan, on making herself such a sky chart, finding herself more and more drawn to her father's technique, though she had no intention of taking to some of his other methods, the Grasslander shaman's trance-inducing smoke and the like. Besides, she had the feeling it might be best to come to Nabban as a Grasslander, despite her more-Nabbani-than-not looks.

Her chart wasn't completed yet, though. There was little time to spare for such work when they made their evening camp.

Dreams. What she wanted, truly, was not a divination, but just to tell someone. It had been Nasutani and Haliya who had the watch before her and Wolan. Woken into the cold in the low tent she shared with those two, the dream heavy and frightening—and why it had been frightening she could not yet understand—she had almost caught at Nasu's sleeve to ask her to come out to the fire, to talk. But self-preservation had reined her tongue. “I had a dream about a man—” was going to have to struggle through a thicket of good-humoured teasing before it got to any common sense. And what could Nasutani tell her? A good friend, a most cheerful and indomitable heart, a fellow Grasslander who spoke the same native tongue and had the same song of the grass and sky in her blood, almost like the kinship of sharing a god, which they did not—but Nasutani was not a wizard or a shaman or one who wasted much time on deep thought.

Footsteps crunched on gravel, and Wolan, a greying, slightly-built man originally from Choa Province in Nabban, though he had gone to the free city of Bitha after his marriage and to the road with his son after his wife's death, came down the slope to the fire, squatting to warm his hands.

“Bit of dust to the south,” he said. “Nothing much. Bit of high haze, too, in the north. Might be snow coming in a day or two.”

“I'll take a look.” She was still learning the signs of the eastern deserts, the meanings of the colours of the horizon, the shapes of the clouds. Ivah picked up her spear and climbed to her feet to take a turn wandering the camp.

An odd sort of family, a caravan-gang. The caravan-master, Kharduin, was from some tribe of the deserts south of here—territory they would not be crossing. Nobody seemed to know details, but Nasutani hinted, with the air of one confessing forbidden secrets, of outlawry and a raider past. His partner Nour was from Marakand; Wolan and his son Koulang from Nabban or Bitha, depending on how you counted them; hawk-tattooed Haliya from the deserts, a different tribe from Kharduin, though; and Nasutani and Ivah from the Great Grass. Then there was Guthrun the camel-leech, a pale-skinned Northron; Seoyin, who was colony-Nabbani from Two Hills and his cousin Buryan, a Praitannecman from the Duina Noreia; Vardar, a man of the Malagru hillfolk; and Debira, a horse-tattooed woman of Serakallash—though one already gone to the eastern road in the days of that town's conquest by the warlord Tamghat, for which Tamghat's daughter was greatly relieved. Folk of so many lands and gods, drawn from across half the world. They were happy to enfold her into their family: Nour's friend, Nour's saviour, the great wizard and hero of Marakand.

Abandonment. Rejection.

Not they of her. Truth in the coins. She of them. This wasn't a life that could hold her. Oh, she could be a caravan-guard and she could do her work well; she knew camels, she was trained to sabre and spear and bow from her youth, and she was moreover a wizard such as few gang-masters could dream of hiring. With her along, Kharduin and Nour could have offered their protection to merchants carrying the most precious lures for brigands, northern amber, ambergris, the rarest dyestuffs and medicines of Tiypur . . . but the pair of them rarely took merchants in convoy, doing most of their trading on their own behalf or for their Nabbani-side patron, the high lord of Choa himself. Kharduin didn't need a great wizard, only a moderately competent one to set wards about the camp against hostile wizardry of raiding tribes or to warn of dangers unseen, storms that came suddenly without that warning haze on the horizon. And every one of them, even Seoyin the cook, was a competent camel-driver and a fighter at need. They didn't
need
her, and she needed something more. She felt . . . dulled, a blade rusting, already, and this was only one journey. What would a lifetime do to her? Out here there were no thoughts but the camels, the weather, the animal wariness of movement on the horizon, and the spark of hunter's eagerness that went with it.

They had fought a skirmish, with what Kharduin dismissed as a rabble of outcasts adrift, and driven them off with no injury or loss, only a few days into the desert crossing. It seemed almost a season ago now. More recently, they had found a dead hermit at his shrine, a regular stopping-place before the badlands, and had buried him with a prayer to the god of his distant folk. She divined for the safest road to take, the southern or the northern, at the forks where a caravan had to choose whether to venture the stone valleys of the badlands; her divination warned of a blizzard striking there, meaning they took the southern route, which would bring them into Denanbak at its westernmost edge. It was nothing Nour could not have done, and hardly a challenge. More truth to be faced: the reason she had not completed her star map was not the difficulty of working with ink and tanned hide in the cold; it was a creeping mental laziness, the body worked to exhaustion in the cold days but the mind growing soft with lack of exercise.

There was nothing for a scholar-wizard in Nabban, though, but to be taken into the imperial corps of wizards in the emperor's service.

Her father's daughter, her mother's daughter, would be no servant of any lord. That was not the arrogance of high birth, but simply that she had claimed her own soul from her father's overmastery; she had sworn she would make her own choices, think her own thoughts, find her own beliefs. She would not surrender that.

That need only mean Nabban was not her destination, as she had once thought it might be. She could stay with the gang, return westwards in the summer. Maybe go back to become a scholar of the library in Marakand after all. Maybe to the Five Cities, where there were also houses of scholarship, and patrons for wizards.

She could tell herself that, but Nabban had the weight in her thoughts of a mountain on her horizon from which she could not look away.

The dream had had much the same feeling.

Ivah checked the hobbled camels, studied the haze against the stars of the horizons to north and south, noting how they differed, the long fingers of cloud in the north, the subtlety of the blurring of the southern edge of the sky, which she might not have noticed at all had Wolan not made it something she should look for. She circled the camp, the several tents. What she wanted was to talk to Nour, but she was hardly going to go crawling in to drag him from Kharduin's side to babble of dreams. But if ever she had truly loved another person, and sometimes she wondered, it was he—though not in any way that wanted to take anything from Kharduin—and she wanted, achingly, to try to put this dream to words, to have someone hear her, before it all faded with the morning's light and the routine bustle of the day and left her lost, wondering if she even remembered truly what she had felt.

Friendship had its roots in their imprisonment beneath the temple of the Lady; there was a debt on either side for survival and a bond born of horrors no one else could understand. It need not have become anything more, but over the months in Marakand and on the road, it had. Her brother of the soul. She was not a child, though, to go clamouring for a comforting word because of a dream. If daylight burned it away, perhaps that was for the best. Ivah turned her back on the clustered tents and studied the rising constellation. It was named for the shaman Urumchiat, who had danced the winter down in the years of ice. Tomorrow she would work on her sky chart.

Footsteps crunching, sliding gravel and frosted grass. She turned. Not Wolan, too tall. Nour, climbing to the ridge with a quilt wrapped over his shoulders.

“You don't have a watch tonight,” she pointed out.

He shrugged. “Woke up thinking I heard you call me.”

“Oh.”

They both considered the horizon.

“Did you?”

“No.”

He yawned. “Too early to get up. Must have dreamed it. I'm going back, then, before Khar rolls himself and all the quilts into a cocoon?” He made it a question. Ivah had come to think Nour had a stronger natural talent than he knew, stunted by long suppression in Marakand in the years when to be known a wizard meant worse than death in the Lady's well, and by lack of proper teaching.

“Nour, I did—I was wishing you'd wake up.”

“What, you some sort of wizard or something?”

“Sorry.” Her father had walked unseen in her dreams when he sent her out to hunt the goddess Attalissa on the road. She did not want to think she could do such a thing and not even be aware of it.

“No, you're not.” He leaned to bump her with his shoulder, not sparing a hand outside the blanket. “You need me? I'm here. Twins. Blood-bound.”

She snorted. “Of course. My mother forgot to mention it.”

He yawned again. “Funny. So did mine. Why did you want me?”

“I was just thinking—I had a strange dream. I wanted to tell someone.” She shrugged. “I wanted to fix it in my own mind, I suppose. I don't know.”

“How strange?”

“Shaman-strange.” But that might not mean much to a city-bred Marakander. “It doesn't sound like much. I dreamed . . . in the dream I wasn't really there, you understand. I was just seeing. There was a man, very far away. A rider on a white horse. Desert-bred, I think.”

“Tell me about the man, not the horse, Grasslander.”

“You say that like it's an insult, shopkeeper.”