Gods of Nabban (15 page)

“That's three halves.”

“I know. I lead a full life, right? But nothing. And then from Bitha across two provinces as a merchant's guard to Dernang, and found hire there and home by the northern road, to be sure I didn't get within his reach again. Or . . . put myself where I could change my mind, maybe.”

“Oh,” she said again.

“So a year after that, he shows up in Marakand, master of his own caravan, and he says, ‘Fine, you win. Come with me.”

“Ah.”

He shrugged again. “I'm not sure what my point was.”

“Don't be like you and get swept out of all sense for some first overwhelming vision?”

“Maybe.” He grinned. “Though he was a pretty overwhelming first vision, even if I hadn't been bleeding on the sand with a few broken ribs for good measure, and the jackals singing not so far off, and anyone willing to tie up my leg rather than cut my throat looking like my dearest friend at that point. No, actually, I was thinking, you're a great wizard, a—a weapon if you let yourself be that. And you have this link with the devils through your father, and this, I don't know, hollowness—you wouldn't say so often that you're godless if it didn't matter to you, if you didn't feel it a lack, an emptiness you want to fill.”

“Do I?”

“It's there. I notice. If someone wanted to lure you—they've found the right bait, haven't they? Not the seduction of love or wealth or power, but a god calling you, father and mother and beloved all in one. You think you've done things you have to atone for now. So've I. But like Hadidu told me at the time, when I trailed all broken-hearted and angry and hollow back to Marakand, you do it through the life you live. Do right with what's before you, yes, but don't go making yourself a—a damned offering to something you can't really see, blinded by guilt and looking for some, some wholeness that you should be finding in yourself, not in a god.”

“Says the priest's brother.”

“Well, he's the priest, not me.”

“He'd give me different advice?”

“The first part would be the same. Not the last. Hadidu would end by telling you to go find your god,” Nour said glumly, but then added, “I'm sure he'd say, be damned sure your god's a true one.”

“I'm not, I think. Blinded, I mean.” She considered Nour, going home again and again to Marakand, where they had killed wizards, and a lifetime spent at the heart of the loyalist conspiracy, Hadidu and he and Kharduin smuggling wizard-talented children out of the city and away to safety.
Go on and remember and choose differently
, the devil Ulfhild Vartu had told her.

“You don't need to go to Nabban,” Nour said.

“I do, Nour.”

“Well, then. Nothing more to be said. Just remember you've got a home with us, and resources you can call on. You're not meant for the road—your heart's not in it. If you wanted to set up and live a scholar's life or as a respectable wizard in Marakand or Two Hills or someplace, you just need to ask. We'll be taking a big loss on this trip, but that's not to say we haven't got something laid by. And if you're wondering, Kharduin said, tell the woman that.”

“Ah. I'll remember.”

They rode on in silence.

Where the road began its snaking climb up the pass, they embraced, and kissed, and he left her.

CHAPTER XII

When they bring Kaeo to the empress, he is her prophet, the prophet of the Daughter of the Gods. They walk him through the palace from a high room under the eaves in a robe of white silk, two of the giants escorting him and a slave to open doors, whenever the empress is moved by the desire for prophecy. The wizards fear her. There is madness in the yellowroot and it poisons them for a vision of her enemy, the false heir of the gods, the deceit of the devils who is sent to bring Nabban to war and anarchy, as if it were not already there, and while she hunts for dreams of the prophets' heir of the gods in the north, her generals mutiny and retreat, serve the provincial lords their cousins, and slaves and peasants seize manors and butcher the banner-lords who hold them. She executes other prophets who say only what Kaeo has said. She executes the priests who shelter them, and burns the shrines, and builds her own temples in the towns. Priests and priestesses are ordered to proclaim the holiness of the Daughter of the Gods. Some do. Some flee into the wilderness. Some die martyrs. And while she wars on the priests of the gods, the two armies that have flowed out of Dar-Lathi to cross the Little Sister into Lower Lat and into Taiji plunder and burn. The folk flee, or they join their Lathan kin and the wild jungle-folk of Darru.

He dreams this. He says it. He says, the empress of the folk must defend the folk. She strikes him. He is scarred from the edge of her fan.

She has sent Captain Diman from her, sent her north into the winter with a handful of her assassins to murder her enemy before ever he comes against her, and Kaeo dreams and speaks his dreams and says, there is death in the dead land, where the dead god sleeps. He laughs and laughs and laughs, because she is a fool, and if she kills him, still the heir of the gods will come.

She sends assassins to kill the Wild Girls, but they do not survive to come to the army of Dar-Lathi. The queens, too, have their guardians.

“You do not see, you do not see,” he cries.

She orders diviners of the imperial corps of wizards brought to her, and the tea poisons some, but some survive and dream as Kaeo dreams. Unjust. He is no wizard.

She likes their dreams no better. They see too little. He is the prophet, while they are merely diviners. The gods speak through him, while they only strive to see echoes of what pours through him, and they die for their failure. The youngest of the giants, most often made her executioner, has haunted eyes. One night he walks off the roof of the moon-viewing tower.

Kaeo wishes he could die, but he endures and keeps enduring.

The heir of the gods is coming. He tells her so, and laughs.

All the palace gossips how the prophet falls in the grip of his visions, how he injures himself in his violent seizures; the price of prophecy.

There are nightmares in the aftermath of her questioning, always nightmares, and the room they keep him in—where none come but the giants and a slave-attendant he knows for a trusted spy of the Wind in the Reeds, because he has felt the knives the young woman wears beneath her court gowns when once he fell against her half-fainting, though he has not yet figured out how to abstract one unseen—whirls about him as though he has drunk far too much.

The tattoo over his heart burns. It is black as fresh ink on the brush and he thinks the caged words that he cannot read writhe like the legs of a knot of insects, scorpions interwoven. He thinks it a chain, binding him, the iron collar of a runaway dragged back to be branded on the face. He cannot see, the gods do not know, to what he had been bound.

Death, death, death. He screams the word after them as they leave him.

The hangover, when the delirium leaves him, will be worse. He has discovered, though, that if he can manage to vomit, it will not be so bad as it can be. Perhaps this is why the wizards so often die; they have not learned this secret.

He wishes he could give up and simply die, but there is something in him that is angry, too angry, the ghost of the man who carried messages in coded books for Prince Dan and his rebels, the man whose deep-buried anger remembers that he is Dwei Kaeo and a free man before the gods, a child of Nabban, a soul that cannot be owned.

He is Dwei Kaeo. He always has been. The gods know it.

And in the nightmares, sometimes, he can find a place of quiet. In the distance he will see a rider, a white horse, and banners, blue like the sky, black like the night.

He wakes from those dreams broken and sobbing, bruises burning, scabs cracked and bleeding again, and all the scars of his torture aching and pulling. He weeps because he is alone and his god is gone into dreams and he does not know when the empress will send for him again, to torment and poison him and open the way again for that briefest of glimpses of his god.

He hungers for the oily bitterness of the tea.

CHAPTER XIII

It seemed to Ghu that for Ahjvar, the days rapidly faded again into a haze of dreaming, a confusion of wind and snow, cold and stone. The divination had woken some sleeping fear, torn some half-scabbed scar of the soul, Ghu thought. He should never have asked it of him. Maybe what Ahjvar had foreseen walked too closely with what had been, or he had read it so and sent the underlayer of his mind down that path again. Maybe, Ahj said himself, on one of his good days—when he was speaking, when the words were not too great a weight to deliver and he was capable of seeing and reacting to the world around him—it was only that the tide of his madness turned to flood again, its ebbtime over.

“You aren't mad,” Ghu said, which only stopped him speaking again. He was as bad as when they had first set out for the east, or worse. Even Ghu found he began to have doubts Ahjvar could find his way back. When, after half a month more of blurring cold and wind and hunger, the land rose in a day to softer hills and there was turf beneath the thin skin of snow, Ahjvar did not at first seem to understand the desert passage was over. He did not react to the flock of brown and white ground-pigeons that went up in a great wing-clapping cloud from feeding among the grass-seeds—Ahj, who, like the leopard of his sword's hilt, wild and wary predator, had twitched to every movement and possibility of threat.

Ghu had his sling out and felled five of them in as many breaths.

Denanbak was the name of this country, a land of small gods and summer-nomad herders who pastured their herds on the hills, while related tribes tilled the green, better-watered valleys to the east. A folk he knew, not Nabbani, but kin, maybe, coarser-boned and lighter-skinned than Praitan-folk or most Nabbani, and free. Their own gods still lived and they owned no emperor, rarely even cast up a paramount warlord to unite them. Traders, familiar neighbours, enemies old in history, who sold their fleeces, horses, and camels, as well as mutton on the hoof, in the market of Dernang. Almost home. He felt it not with any gladness; Nabban was a weight pulling him down, his return an icy slope he could not climb again. They turned to the southeast. The camels' humps were going slack, the dogs ribby, and Ahj, Ahj was grey, sunken-eyed. His hands shook, and he stumbled like an old man at uneven ground. They should have gone seeking the winter settlements of the Denanbaki to buy provisions, but “Do we need to?” he had asked, low-voiced. “Just keep going. Go where you need to be. No people. I don't want people.” A mistake, maybe, to listen to Ahjvar then, to let his unreasoning fears grow, but Ghu suggested it again a few days later and was sworn at, which meant nothing, but there was fear in his eyes. . . .

Meat. There were the ground-feeding pigeons, hare and pheasants on the hills, and a gazelle would feed them for several days, sparing more peas and barley for the camels. He took the crossbow himself to bring down a gazelle, since when they crossed the trail of the herd Ahjvar was having one of his bad days and better left wrapped up by the fire, staring unseeing at nothing, with Jiot to watch him. The good meat revived him, for a little, and put flesh on the dogs' bones.

Here, the desert gnawed the edge of the land, and the wind blew bitter and biting out of the northwest, a constant whistle in the ears, stinging with desert dust and sometimes a fine, hard snow. In the kinder seasons, the chieftains of the land would no doubt watch the road more closely, to claim tolls of the caravan-masters and also to prevent their poaching the chieftain's game. He had never met a lord yet of any folk who did not think the deer of the hills his own. They wandered far from the braided ruts of the caravan road, taking a twisting way that kept them remote from the winter villages, whose sod-built houses were dug half into the hillsides, so that from a distance it seemed the earth was smoking.

A caravan passed them, keeping to the road, the one that had dogged their heels through the desert. He thought of trying to persuade Ahjvar of the wisdom of overtaking it, joining it for the last leg. It would be a way to get themselves past the border legitimate and accounted for, set down on paper as caravaneers of a gang. But he did not think any caravan-master was likely to be more pleased by Ahjvar now than they had been in Porthduryan, so he let them go. It would likely have meant an argument with Ahj, anyway. The border was going to be a problem. Wanderers did not just wander in without giving some good account of themselves. There were other ways, smugglers' ways, high and dangerous ways . . . they would have to abandon the camels. Well, it could be done, when the time came. He would find a way. Every ridge and fold and tree of the god's mountain seemed to be held in his mind, when he sat silent and listened for it.

In less than a fortnight's travelling, in which Ghu knew they were spotted twice, once by children driving cattle along a snowy ridge and once by a hunting party, they came, on the road itself rather than shadowing it, to where a great hogsback hill rose against the southern sky. The caravan road curled around it to the east, crossing an avenue of broken pillars. Ruined walls and snow-filled hollows spread out about the skirts of the hill and halfway up its terraced slopes, where the snow drifted against hard angles of stone. The crest of the hill was bare of any sign of human working, save for the stump of what must have been a tower, a broken ring of great stone blocks, with bushes growing from the joins and thick-girthed poplars inside.

“Letin,” Ghu said. It must be. There could not be so many ruined cities on the road, and that meant they were very near the border, two days, maybe, or three, at their current pace. But he had known as much by the way the land lifted and by the low mountains, which made a ragged wall to the south.

Ahjvar made an effort and looked around, flinched when he looked at Ghu, who had a split lip from last night's dreaming. It ached in the cold, and the scab broke and bled when he spoke, and how did he make that better for Ahjvar?