Gods of Nabban (46 page)

Death, and no lingering ghost. A moment's shock and fear and rage and she was gone. Ahjvar went back, scooping up his dagger, shaky, to finish the poor blessed horse. A beast-soul returned to the earth it belonged to; that, at least, was as it should be.

He had no desire to strip either victim of armour to look for the tattoo he was almost certain he would find, at least on the woman. Leave that mystery for Yeh-Lin. He did fish in the neck of her armour to pull out the ornate badge on its chain, just to confirm. Wind in the Reeds, though neither stealthy nor secret here, riding out as an officer of the army in all confidence. And the wizard—raging ghost.

He considered questioning him. Ghosts didn't lie. Couldn't be compelled, either. To draw anything useful from a reluctant and resisting ghost took patience and calm he currently lacked. This one was inchoate and might take days to draw himself together. Ahjvar gave him earth and checked for his badge. Not Wind in the Reeds, no, but a wizard of the imperial corps, Bamboo Badge Rank, the second highest, was it not? Conscripted from Zhung Musan's service before the castle fell by the assassin . . . or had she been set to serve with him in response to some alarm the wizard had taken, some foretelling of Ghu's coming? He should have asked Yeh-Lin for news of the town, but he forgot—that was only a dream.

Habit of the past year meant he considered for a moment what might be salvaged, but no, he didn't even want to check the saddlebags for food. And no point pulling the bodies off the road, since he couldn't hide the dead horse. Leave them for a warning. He cleaned his blades and scrubbed blood from his hands in dirt and old leaves before climbing back up the ridge of stone to hunt for quiver and crossbow, retraced his steps to check on the horse. Horses. The wizard's was out among the trees nearby, reins tangled in one of those evergreen bushes. He gave the bay a pat and praise for standing and went, circling carefully, talking soothing nonsense as he would have so long ago, before he'd stopped caring for anything, and was able to come up to the stray without panicking it, though the bay—Niaul—trailed after him, trampling through brush like an ox. He dumped the other horse's saddle, freed it of its bridle, and it bolted away. He caught Niaul, took him further down the trail to Swajui, and left him to stand again. He'd be a fool to trust there were only the two.

But drifting a mile back down the trail, concealed in the forest, watching, only found him the straying horse again, peacefully grazing the first shoots of new grass on a sunny edge, though he waited until well into the afternoon. Cast his own spell, too, weaving it of the old patterns and the sword's edge. Nothing followed, nothing stirred, either on the track or in the forest. He picked his way back up to his own horse, not wandered too far, and took the path to Swajui.

CHAPTER XXIV

The mountain of the god rose grey, banners of mist trailing west, fading into cloud. The air bit harsh and clean; breath began to smoke like the high winds. No trees, now, only low juniper spilling from cracks in the rocks and snow deep in the shadows, while the first brief flowers, pale yellow, vivid blue, splashed colour over the south and the eastern slopes.

There was a path, if you knew to find it. Holy folk, drawn to the god, might find it. A foal-heavy mare might, driven from the shelter of the lower forest by bear or wolf or leopard. A boy might, seeking that mare, with the warmth of the god burning like a hearthfire to draw him on, and the wind rising. Geese crying high overhead. It had been spring then, too, till the storm fell on him.

The standing stones were cold and dark, when he came to them. It was only that shadow fell on them, but they seemed a warning. Two on the ridge, and two more distant over it, only the tops visible, and the last yet out of sight where the shallow stream crossed the valley that was more a ravine.

There were ravens. They rose from the carcass of a dead musk deer, wandered up out of the forest to die in the winter. It was gone nearly to clean bones now, as a boy and a horse might have been. The ravens circled, croaking. One dropped to his wrist. Snow laid his ears back, shook his mane and stamped. The raven studied Ghu, obsidian eye—one side, the other. Beak like the point of a spear. Cried hoarsely and flew. Ghu rode on between the stones, reined in again, looking down. The valley was cast all in shadow and ice fringed the narrow meltwater stream. There were trees down there, pines that grew more as creeping bushes than great towers, bare, red-barked willow no higher than his head. And stones. Mostly stones. Clumps of wiry grass not yet greening held a little thin soil in place. No flowers yet at all among the stones, and snow at the head of the ravine and in all the shadowed places, feeding the stream, the great peak rising white over them. He dismounted and went afoot, leading Snow down the steep way that was barely a memory of a path, angling towards the second pair of standing stones, then made a sharp turn to the south and crossed the ravine-valley to the brook and the stepping stones. There he dismounted and unsaddled Snow, removed his bridle. Cleaned the horse's feet and groomed him as if at the end of an ordinary day and his stall waiting, while the shadows thickened colder and darker over them, and in the west the sky turned sullen orange. Grain—mostly with Ahjvar. He poured out a little of what there was, murmuring to the horse of the danger of the unseen cliff, where the brook fell away in a great plume that turned to mist before it ever reached a lower valley, and left him, crossing the stepping stones of the brook and up between the third pair of stones.

Another cliff towered beyond, fissured and broken, spilling scree and snow.

The seventh standing stone, alone, twice the height of the others, a roughly squared pillar, or a broken slab embedded where it had plummeted from above . . . who, now, remembered?

Ghu climbed the rising ground and stood before it. The wind hissed in the creeping pines below. Darkness thickened, the sun behind the clouds falling away into the west, over mountains, deserts. Sun on the hills of Praitan, maybe. Sunlight still sparking on the waves of the Gulf of Taren, the tiled roofs of Gold Harbour. The stones of the ruin on the headland they had called home warm in the sun, and the garden wall, and the garden he had dug and tended gone to weeds and wild things, but the gulls still floating on the wind and crying, and the sea still running away into the sky.

He sat down with his back against the stone, legs crossed, leaned his head back, looking into the west. The light was gone, starless, moonless, black cloud low and thick. The horse Snow was no more to be seen than the snow-heavy heights.

“I'm here,” he said.

Another night, not quite yet a year gone by since then. Summer air, and the damp smell of the mist still, and the swamp called the Orsamoss. Smoke clinging to clothes and hair, the reek of the burning tower. A bank overgrown with junipers sheltered them, spice-scented. Ahjvar had dragged himself that far, could do no more, and had lain down like an exhausted child with his head in Ghu's lap. He wanted to die. His goddess was silenced and put to undreaming sleep in the earth, but his curse still bound him to her and held him in the world, and the hungry ghost of Hyllau still possessed him, waiting to rise and hunt. He could die, at last. Ghu had promised it. He would not wake again with innocent blood on his hands. And the hag had taken him then, hungry to hunt, and Ghu had taken on himself the grace of the gods who would claim him and broken the binding curse, dragged her struggling from Ahjvar's soul, and when the savage will of hate that was all she had left of humanity would have burnt the man, again, he destroyed her. A human soul, not released to the road to the Old Great Gods but made nothing, ash and nothing, a piece of the universe unmade.

He had taken the other part of the curse of Ahjvar's goddess then, put himself in the goddess's place to anchor it. By doing so, he made himself a necromancer, some might judge. Wizards, priests . . . gods. An enslaver of the dead. And he had asked, come with me to Nabban. Because he was afraid, and lonely, and afraid to be alone. Selfish.

And Ahjvar had said he would try, and had held him for his own comfort when the nights were bad.

If he were no god, he could not hold this curse, and Ahjvar would be dead, as he should be, and go to his road.

If he were no god, he could return to the west.

If he were no god . . . what changed, for Nabban?

The land died soulless, unknown, unloved.

And Ahj died regardless. He could not hold him here.

He could. He would not.

The Mother had not denied Ahjvar, but she had had so little will, so little left of her being. The Father could still take that decision from him. Cast Ahjvar to his road, without a word, a farewell.
Do not let him burn again, do not let there be pain and fear, just let him go.
He prayed that, if his heart was prayer, beyond words.

He gives himself to you.
The Father's thought, deep, resonating, stone and marrow.
How do we deny that?

They had sent him to follow the sun, to find what he needed to become in a world they could not know, and Ahjvar had been what he had needed to find, the sun he had found to follow. Or the rock he had needed in that time, to brace his back against, to be able to find his stillness, to see. A man, who made the silences in which he found how to speak.

He gives himself to you, and not from fear of death. He gives himself to you—to you, through you to us, to the mountain and the river, in service of our children. How should we deny that?

He accepted that. It was forgiveness. It was his, the deed and what must follow. Father Nabban did not take Ahjvar from him.

He would let him go. That awaited, at Swajui. But there would be time for leave-taking, and so Ahjvar could go free and clean and at peace, without pain, between breath and breath, and lie among the roots of the pines with the wind and the sky over him.

You have come back
, the Father said,
with a devil at your side. You have brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon back to this land.

To say she would have come anyhow was a child's argument.

“
Yes,” he said aloud. “I don't know; I'm afraid of what I've done, allowing her. I don't know I've done right. But I see her, I . . . need her. Will need her. There is something among us that should not be. It was in the Golden City. It . . .” Eyes shut. Darkness to hold him. He shook his head. “It's a fish, too swift for snatching.”

You would set fire against fire? All may burn.

“Maybe. But maybe not. I would trust her, a little. We are Nabban. All Nabban. For a little—” And was it he or he and he-the-Mother who had been the Wild Sister, and a dragon in the dawn of the world, who spoke those words, held that thought? “—while we are that, while the gods and goddess are growing within us unborn, we may match her. She is not what she was.”

We made you. You are what we are.

You are what we are not.

Angry.

Alive.

Newborn in the world
.
Do what lies before you.

Find your own road. Ours has failed us.

Find your own road.

Or make it.

They reached to enfold him. Father, Mother, Sisters, Brothers, dragons, tigers, peaks unknown and waters unnamed, forgotten, rebirths awaiting. Snow, stone, deep brown water.

My mother, my father
, he told them, voiceless, and let himself fall.

CHAPTER XXV

The track plunged down a long hillside, then followed a valley upwards again, crossing and recrossing a brook. It ran swift and noisy in its rocky channel, bright with green mosses on its banks, new ferns uncoiling. One of the many sources of the Wild Sister. The path left it, though, where it poured in a plume like a white horse's tail down a sudden broken cliffside rising to the north. Now there was smoke on the wind, not fresh but damp old burning. Ahjvar rolled an acorn through his fingers and told the horse, “The soldiers will have fired the buildings.” Give the words voice. Maybe he would hear them himself. He rode alert for any movement in the barred light and shadow of the trees, largely maples of some sort, by the cushioning leaf-litter that muffled the slow beat of Niaul's hooves. Pale early flowers spread in carpets beneath. All very peaceful. If he had seen his shrine burnt and his family hauled captive off to their deaths, he would be greeting the next intruders with an arrow on the string from ambush, though he thought the priests of Mother and Father Nabban took vows not to kill and even ate no meat.

Under the circumstances, he thought they might be tempted to forswear such vows. At least he could not be mistaken for an imperial soldier.

But Ghu had said there would be no one here. No survivors.

A raven flapped heavily overhead, followed by a second. A third. Heading away to roost.

Late-slanting sun breaking through the clouds at last to shine in his eyes, and a gateway, of sorts, marking where the path entered the precinct of the bamboo-fenced shrine. Two trunks, pines, scaly and grey, rose like pillars to either side of a narrow gap in a high palisade. There had been a simple gate hung between the trees, but it had been torn down—gate and destruction alike symbolic, because it was little more than a screen of split and woven bamboo and its latch a loop of cord, no defensible barrier, nothing that would keep even a determined sheep in or out. The track passed between boles of the trees, over a web of roots like the bone and tendon of two elderly hands interlaced, and descended by three stone steps. The way was just broad enough to admit a rider. The steps were shallow, leading down to the lowest level of an enclosure of three terraces, much larger than he had expected, five acres, maybe, with stone paved yards and paths and the roofless, blackened ruins of a dozen sizeable wooden buildings. A broader road climbed up from the south; its wide-spaced gate-pillars had likewise been great pines, but they were scorched and scarred by fire. There were pools between the buildings, some with wooden pillars extending out into them as though they had been half roofed over. The water steamed in the cooling evening air. Charred wood and rubbish floated in the pools now. And rags. The horse blew and snorted and shifted his weight. Ahjvar wrapped his scarf over his face again, for what good that would do. Layering camel over corpse. The overflow of the pools ran in stone-lined drains to gather to a single channel, dropping over ledges, passing under flat bridges formed each of a single slab of stone. Iris blades and some yellow mounding flower and mats of sky blue forget-me-not thrust up from gravelled beds to border the flowing water. Greenery grew back over trampled patches, nearly hiding them. The stream ran out at what must be the main gate to the south; he heard it chiming down another fall, natural, that one, or so he expected. Not the waters he and horse had played leapfrog with.