Gods of Nabban (59 page)

Green fields to either side. The river was safe and quiet, the god's own place.

But the fog Yeh-Lin could not see felt greasy on her skin.

She stood up, swaying atop the net-bound stack of their cargo, turned through a full circuit of the horizon. For what good that would do. The scouts were out of sight ahead, the main force behind, hidden by the river's twisting course. Nothing moved on the eastern shore. Alwu, like Choa, was a sparsely populated province, though between the rocky, forested hills its soil was deeper and its grazing fatter. Once into Numiya, the pastures and meadows that made a web around the crumpled hills would fade away into cropland and villages and manors each nearly within sight of the next. She was still not certain how best they might travel, Nabban and what she could not help thinking of as his hearthsworn, old phrase of the north. Disguise meant giving up their far-too-excellent horses for commonplace nags, and what to do about the dead king's hair and height . . .

They should have been secret on the river. She had the chill conviction they were not.

Yeh-Lin descended to the deck in a few hops.

“My lady?” The captain broke off her talk.

“Children, go to the stern with Ti. Get your backs to the cargo and stay away from the water.”

“Why?” Jang asked.

“Now!”

Too indulged. She was not their grandmother. But they ran without further word. The captain had bounded to her feet at Yeh-Lin's tone, taken up the long-hafted boathook of her authority. Blunt, maybe, but the bronze head was no weapon to be discounted.

“Danger, my lady?”

“I don't know.”

The gentle sway of the raft was changing. The river was narrow here, swifter, deeper than it had been. Dark. Tangled stands of willows lined the shore. Ambush? No, nothing living there but what one expected: birds, snakes, frogs, voles.

Silence. No song. The water was loud, slapping against them, under them. The captain breathed too loudly and Yeh-Lin almost snapped at her to hold her breath, as if that would help.

Small clouds above made patches of shadow.

Cold, cold, cold. Claws of ice, not fog, striking, freezing, ice in her veins, ice to hold her, stilling thought, paralysing—

Waves gathered. The motion of the raft changed, diving and bucking, a gathering of current like a bunching muscle, a snake coiling to strike. The captain shouted, turning, so slowly, too slowly, to stare at the darkening water, shadow coalescing into . . . life.

The shadow gathered itself, creature of old bone and mud and water, reared up high as a tree, struck. Fangs long as a hand splintered logs; the prow ducked low, flinging a wave over them all, but it surged up again as the fangs tore free. A child screamed and a woman cursed. The captain had fallen to her knees, but struggled up again, water sheeting from her hair, her boat-hook gripped like a spear.

“
Dragon!
” the woman shouted—warning, terror, disbelief in equal measure.

The great head, the size of a man's torso, had disappeared beneath the water again. River water, cold river water, soaked her.

Move!
Dotemon raged, burning in her veins.
Move!
But ice held her.

At the steering oar they were shrieking of dragons, repeating their captain's cry though they hadn't seen what hit them. Trying to summon the crossbows of the following raft. No good. The river carried them all.

Stench of old rot long buried, ancient death, forgotten, gone to slime and stone. The water heaved and churned, brown and frothing. Something dark beneath the surface, arrowing towards them.
No. No, no,
and
no
.

For a moment Yeh-Lin felt herself what she was not—
was not
, bone, gaunt skin, old wounds, and the fire beneath, the fire within her marrow, cold and hungry, the stuff of stars, of ice—

The raft-captain glanced her way, stared, mouth opening on some cry of horror.

Unravelling—

No. We are not.

Yeh-Lin tore herself away, pulled herself together.

“Behind!”

And as the captain spun back to the river it thrust from the water again and Yeh-Lin leapt to meet it, snarling, her sword a song in the air. Skylark, she had named it long before, that voice that only she-Dotemon heard clear as water, edged as glass, keen and piercing as the sun in the sky. But the ice still clutched at her to slow her, ice or memory of ice, and the creature struck the captain, seized and shook and tore shoulder and arm away, flung back its head to gulp and swallow even as what was left of the women fell away and the Skylark sang, carving the snake-neck to the spine. They were screaming at the stern, the raft tossed and flung, new shadows coiling under the water, darkness in the air. This head was the length of a tall man, maw snarling wide enough to engulf and bite a woman in two. It snatched and tossed the bulky green-brown body of the first aside, lashed away as Yeh-Lin swung for it, whipped around and struck. She stepped aside and brought her blade sweeping up, but the thing was fast as a striking snake, fast as her own thought. So was she, rolling away. Wood splintered from its missed strike.

Yelling. Another raft angling close, the crossbows shooting at the shadows, the dark thickening of air that was striving to become—something. Fools would hit the children. She screamed at them to hold,
hold
as another massive head reared itself over her, Skylark's edge opening a gouge in one great throat and at the same time she reached into the water, the air, reached for what shaped this forgotten monstrous life . . .

Something went into the waves from the other raft, smooth and silent as a diving bird. She knew him before her eyes had understood, felt him, the river suddenly a live thing, and it sucked down the smoke-shadows and the cold fire burned free through her veins, waking from its ice. Her second kill slid away, dissolving into river-muck and weed. The last head lashed back the neck's own length and plunged down after Nabban. The raft rolled over god and monster both, carried by the current, as Yeh-Lin leapt the mangled body of the raft-captain and raced to the stern and her children.

The water roiled. The creature thrashed half out of the water alongside them, a thing that should not have been, streaked now red and white, rolling, its belly opened like a gutted fish.

They had pushed little Ti up tight against the net-bound storage jars, Kufu and Jang shielding him, all clinging together. The steerswomen knelt, one with a knife, one with another boathook. The head began to rise again, wounded as the creature was, snaking across the surface of the water for them. Yeh-Lin stood with a foot braced on the frame of the steering oar, waiting, but steel flashed up its neck and ripped a gash a yard long before it reached her. It sank. Red curling and coiling in the water, darkening, water foaming pink along their sides, fading, shadow, dissolved into nothing, the river quiet, gone bright and dark and sparking in the sunlight. The god hooked his knife into a crack between logs and heaved himself onto the deck, black coat and trousers clinging, hair slicked flat. No expression, none, as he came to his feet. Cold eyes, black and deep as night's own ocean. But it had not been she who summoned the creatures from bone long gone and the memories of the ancient seas held in the stone, and his anger faded as the shadows had. He went around her with merely a nod of acknowledgement—going to the dead captain. She turned and the pages were staring, but Ti broke from the other two and rushed to her. She dropped her sword in time to catch him, hold him against her, and Jang and Kufu followed. Ti was sobbing. He was so very young. She tried to remember being so young, and went down to her knees to hold them all, three shaking young bodies pressing close.

“Captain Lin?” She looked up into the face of one of the women, grey, sweating, river-soaked. “That—was that a dragon?”

She had no name for it. “I don't know. But it was sent by the enemy of the heir of the gods. Look to your steering!” They were drifting out of the current, twisting sideways, and other crews were recovering from alarm to hail them, crying out for news.

Ghu came walking back down the deck, sombre, as if shadows still clung to him.

“Your sister died fighting the monster,” he told the two leaning on the steering oar again. “I gave her to the river.”

A fit funeral for a riverer, and better that they did not see her dismembered body, Yeh-Lin thought. Better that the children did not see.

Did she mean to take them beyond the fort of the Dragon's Gorge? Had she given it any thought at all? Better they stayed with Prince Dan, who had left his little Jula in the care of Lady Willow's governess at the White River Dragon. Better she had left them behind to attend on Lady Willow and chase after Jula.

The sisters of the raft wept, but they did not leave their steering.

“Take us in to shore,” Yeh-Lin said. “The danger is past . . .” Switched to Praitannec. “Is it, Nabban?”

He considered her. “I wasn't their quarry.”

She had not given that thought. “Ah. Take us to shore, if you would, sisters. The danger on the river is past and Prince Dan and the lords must be shown the heir of the gods is safe.”

“You knew,” the younger of the sisters said, and Yeh-Lin was about to deny any such thing, but it was Ghu who shook his head.

“You knew,” she insisted. “You knew the false goddess sent dragons against us and you came to the rafts with Lady Lin today to protect us.” And she loosed her hold on the oar and went to her knees. “My lord, I know you would have saved my eldest sister if you could, but she died honourably and is surely blessed on her road, to die fighting your enemy's creatures. My lord, is the river safe now?”

“They're gone,” Ghu said. “I don't think there will be any more.” But he looked worried, and too young, with it, until his gaze fixed on Yeh-Lin again. “At least, not of that kind. But we need to raise some guard against any further attacks by whatever it is the empress has made her ally. Lin.”

“Yes. I—will work on that. At once. Shall we find your
rihswera
and Lady Ivah?”

“Best we do, yes.”

“Take us in to shore, sisters. The river is safe for now.” She felt confident of that, at least. Nothing watched; no attention stroked over her skin, raising warning hairs. Not that its defeat had been any of her doing.

Humbling that.

Perhaps it was good, to remember fear.

But not at the cost of these children. What had she done, taking them to herself?

Ivah's eyes had snapped suddenly to the river, leaving some remark to Prince Dan unfinished. Ahjvar, riding aside, beyond the crowd of the commanders in a solitude no one was going to break, had felt it too, a silent thunderclap, a burst of light he could not see—something flooded the world and Ghu's attention fixed on it with the total focus of a striking falcon.
Felt
it, as if the light, the sound that was neither light nor sound coursed through some invisible channel between him and Ghu.

And then he was shut away, as if a door slammed to between them.

Ahjvar could have drawn a line straight to him nonetheless, ahead on the river, the rafts, late starting, slow in passing the march this day. He had already set Niaul to a gallop, swerving around the herald and banner-bearers who preceded the lords, startling the archers of the vanguard, even before he heard the hooves behind. Ivah's grey Denanbaki, gift of Daro Korat to the god's Grasslander. She wouldn't catch Gorthuerniaul and he didn't wait, though she caught up when he had to rein in, a cat-scramble over scrubby ground, down to the riverbank. The dogs, too, hurtled after him, barking, for what good that would do. He had his crossbow out, spanned and loaded, the moment Niaul was still. Could see the one raft beset, the water dark and churning, rising in storm-waves, something hidden there, flash of sleek greenish-brown, gone again, nothing to aim at. Shark, was his first illogical thought. Wrong colour, wrong water, but that slick hide and the twisting speed in the water—he couldn't see Ghu, only a slender figure shrouded in pale fire, and the creature fell away, was gone. Ghu heaved himself out of the river to the deck, forage-knife in hand. Ghu was the only real and solid thing, a stone, as the rest of the world went thin and blurred as ink on wet paper.

Ivah was swearing in a language he did not know and his skull was splitting with the sort of headache he used to get in the aftermath of the hag's hunting, vision gone half-blind and ragged. Then the world took slowly its proper solidity again. The burning figure of light was gone, become Yeh-Lin, down on her knees engulfed by children, and he had nearly squeezed the trigger.

Ivah knocked his aim down to the stones, snatched the bolt and shook it at him.

“Whatever that thing was, it's done for. What's wrong with you? You could have killed one of the pages. Bloody fool, can you not see?”

“No,” Ahjvar said through clenched teeth. “I can't. What in the cold hells was that?”

“I don't know. I don't know what lives in Nabbani rivers. Crocodiles? Horse-whales?”

“Burning.”

“What?”

“She was—” She was Dotemon, and
I do not think you would see the difference between us, naked of the body of this earth
. “Was she—did you see her all burning, turned to pale light?”

“No. Ahjvar, do you have seizures? You look—”

“No!” He tried to slow his breathing. Niaul was tossing his head, ears back, catching his—panic, was what it was. He slung the crossbow behind the cantle, quieted the horse, reassuring himself just as much as the stallion. “What in the cold hells is a horse-whale?”

“I don't know. Something in the sea. The Northrons hunt them for ivory and rope, though.”

“What?”

“It's what my father said.”

“Hunt them for rope?”

“Never mind.” She offered him the crossbow bolt back. He rammed it into the quiver as a party of the lords arrived, confused and questioning and noisy. Ivah turned her grey to deal with them, letting him escape down to the water's edge as the raft grounded its nose in the shallows. His vision was clearing, though every step the horse took jarred up his spine as if he'd leapt and misjudged the nearness of the ground.