Gods of Nabban (68 page)

“No. See them, yes. If I try. I'd rather not.”

“Mine, all of them. I should have just gone from Dernang, but—I thought to come from some strength, to meet with her with the northwest provinces behind me—it's not only Buri-Nai. It's her court, her lords, her generals I need to hear me.” The night-drowned look was fading from his eyes; he was . . . wolf again. But a weary one, and his face was bruised. “To remember their gods. They wouldn't hear Daro Korat's horseboy. I thought we could give her pause, make them doubt her, if we had the northwest, if there were time so the folk could see—change was possible, a free land was possible. I don't know. I didn't think she could move so many, so quickly.” Half a smile. “Under a month from the Golden City to the Old Capital is quickly, even if she's been at a cart's pace since then. But for being so well hidden . . . I shouldn't have trusted I could see all the river's length. Maybe knowing Yeh-Lin has made me view the devils as too—human. A devil took Nabban from the gods before, after all.”

“Ghu . . .”

“I can't see, Ahj. I only . . . Beyond the empress, there's only darkness. The darkness at the end of all dreams, all my life. I'm sorry. If I could—”

“Don't. My soul's in your hands. I'd have it nowhere else.”

“Then trust. And stay with me. Just—stay with me. Remember my name, Ahj. Don't let me drown with them and be lost. Find me, hold on to me, no matter what.”

“Sh,” Ahjvar said, catching him close a moment. “Don't. What are you seeing? It's all right, I have you.”

A handful of Yuro's people came up. Ruckus down the line. Snow, scenting his rider and impatient. They were riding to meet the empress, Ghu said, as he might have said they would take a little exercise, all that fey moment shrugged away.

“Will you take another horse, lord
rihswera
?” a girl asked at Ahjvar's elbow. “Evening Cloud's shoulder . . .”

“Is he lame?”

“No, lord. Tender. A little stiff.”

“We're not going to be fighting,” Ahjvar said. “Or going—how far are we going?”

“We'll come to them by late afternoon, going gently,” Ghu said. “Sooner if we want to. He's no longer hiding them. They would be here by tomorrow's dusk. So.” He shrugged. “Maybe we delay them, a little, and Yeh-Lin can hold the river. Yes, bring him his Gorthuerniaul. But you two—” He dropped to a knee and the dogs crowded in to him, tails wagging. “Jui, Jiot. Go with Yeh-Lin.”

Tails drooped. Ears went back, as when he had refused to take them in the skin boat. Jiot whined, pawed at him. Ghu kissed each between the eyes, which chilled Ahjvar when nothing else had. “Go on, dogs. Remind the devil she's watched. I'll call if I need you.”

The horses, in their full barding, as if for battle again. Niaul seemed to move easily enough.

Word of their riding had spread like fire. There was a silence that ran before and trailed behind, a widening wake. Ghu was a weight that drew all eyes after him.

The heir of the gods rode to confront the empress, who called herself Daughter of the Old Great Gods. To challenge her, delay her . . . fold her into his following and bring on this new age of Nabban that the prophets had foretold. Did they think so? Could they?

They couldn't know what whispered in her mind.

Ghu's gods had been nothing, ever, but what they were now. Ghosts drowning or drowned in their own desperation. A last flicker of light lost in darkness, failing.

A godless land—Nabban had been falling to that before Ghu was ever born, and the Mother and Father had taken their child and cast him into the world too late, left him to make himself a man in the shadow of murder and horrors, where it should have been priests and captains had the making of him, holiness and true kingship. And their dying land had drawn a devil's eye.

We will never be his again . . . A fortress against what gathers in the west . . . my champion. An empire Over-Malagru, because he will come . . . 
The whisper of Ahjvar's nightmares.

He held himself still, made himself remember, and not react. It was not her voice in his ears, not the Lady, not her hands on him, her breath. Memory. Only memory. Something that had so terrified the devil Tu'usha in her madness.

Her enemy, her brother, the devil Jochiz. He leapt over what she would have made, the fortress-empire she would have held against him astride the caravan road. Planted seeds, a fence of thorns to surround her.
What gathers in the west.
While something flung down roots in the east, in a deceived and usurping princess. How long had that false faith in her destiny been germinating in the darkness of the princess's mind? How long had the gods of Nabban known? Both ends of the caravan road to be held for a devil that even the devils feared. And a despairing captive drowned the child of rape, drowned herself—gave herself and the infant to the river—and the gods took him to be their own, gave him their land, gave him to their land, and turned him loose to wander.

Was it Ahjvar who knew these things? It was there. A knowing in his memory.

West. Ghu had always been going west, even when he went east and south to the sea, when he ran from the high lord of Choa. West, following the sun, he said, till following the sun brought him to the Leopard, and the Leopard's garden wall in the rain.

Ghu looked around, found him watching. Said nothing.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Ghu remembered his first journey south more as vivid bright flashes of fear and wonder amid the long weariness of being hunted than as any clear story. Then, there had been an urgency almost animal, unthinking, unreasoning, driving him to seek the sea and a way to the west, and there had been no particular foe but sometimes, it seemed, all the folk of the land who prowled ready to raise a hand against him. Branded, paperless, far from his proper place in Dernang.

There had been kindnesses, too. Servants of the gods like Shouja Awan, a young couple of serfs on a manor in eastern Numiya, a pilgrim here, a merchant's guard there, a slave message-runner in the Old Capital, a gap-toothed woman of the river and her brood of loud and cheerful fatherless children, who did not ask questions of a furtive flitting thief and beggar, too obviously a runaway. They had all shared food or offered some shelter; even a kind word had been precious in those days. With the boatwoman and her children, he had had a few days and many miles of the river, and taken away words of the ships and the sea that unfolded a greater world to him.

This was the same. The urgency, unreasoning. The fear.

If he had had to go alone . . . but he could feel Ahjvar, keeping Evening Cloud a little behind and to the side, as if he had some other sense to know him by, like the eyeless fish that hunted in the lightless caves under the eastern mountains where the Gentle Sister had her source. Not sight, sound, smell, not the warmth of him, but as he knew where his own hand was, certainty without thought.

They were still in Alwu Province, and all was peaceful, green and growing, except that there were herds untended, and they came to a village that was emptied, all folk, he judged, fled, rather than driven out by Lai Sula. They did not follow quite that army's route. It seemed a forlorn place to halt, but yesterday had been hard and it was time to rest the horses. And some blessed person of the horselines had slung kettle and tea on them as well as a little grain.

Not entirely deserted. An old woman stumped up, leaning on a stick, as they brewed tea beneath the village meeting-tree.

“The gods be with you,” Ahjvar said, sitting up. He had been lying on his back by the well, staring at the sky. But he didn't take up his sword.

“The gods are gone,” she said. “Who are you, then?” She measured them with a keen, if watery, eye. “Mercenaries out of the north? I'm through with fear of masters and steel. Kill me now, kill me later when the empress comes, it makes no difference. I buried my last grandchild three days since. They said, come, come to the hills, the lord's gone to the wars on the river and they'll kill us if we stay, and I said, I'm not running, I'm done.”

“Sit down and have some tea, grandmother.” Ahjvar waved a hand at Ghu. “This is the heir of the gods, the holy one, riding against the empress.”

The old woman studied him, and sniffed as though he left something to be desired. Ghu poured tea and offered it. It was strong and smoky, caravan-tea shaved from a brick, and there were plain dumplings wrapped in leaves, as well.

He should want to speak to her, to ask her about the folk of this village, but he knew the answers anyway. They were Dwei-Clan, serfs of a minor banner-lord of the Dwei who had ridden to join with Lai Sula in the empress's service, and who was dead and still unburied at the ferry. His wife had taken her children and the folk of the manor that lay just beyond the coppiced woodland north of them and gone with the serfs into the hills, for fear of the empress's coming.

He could not find words. Ahj would have to speak for him. The old woman had fallen silent, watching him over the rim of her cup.

“Why has the village run away?” Ahjvar asked. “What have you heard?”

“Everybody knows. Don't you? There was a boy come from Uro away down in Numiya, and that's a day's journey. I've never been. My husband went once, when he was young. The lord sent him. But this boy, he was half-crazed with terror. He said he'd been in Uro-Over-Hill on an errand for his master the wainwright—that's I don't know where, far and far away—and soldiers came, and wizards, and called all the folk of Uro-Over-Hill to the village well, out of the fields and all, and the steward from the hall and her family—and they lined them up kneeling, said they were to make their prayers to the Daughter of the Old Great Gods, but it wasn't for prayer at all they called them out. They made a great ring around them, and they went with swords and axes and forage-knives and killed them all, all up and down the rows, and they ran and screamed and the children cried, and the wizards tangled and held any who broke away out of the ring until the soldiers could kill them. And they left them lying, unburied, he says, and a captain on a horse said, the empress will give them their blessing, and he laughed. And the boy was lying up under the eaves of the great barn with a girl, up in the beams, which sounds a good way to break your neck, getting up to that sort of thing on the beams, and he saw through a chink in the wall, and the wizards searched, and the girl, poor child but it was her own folk dying, she went screaming down to kill them with nothing but her bare hands, and they killed her too. But the wizards thought she was the living thing they'd sought, I suppose, and they didn't look any further. So the boy lay there till nightfall and crept away, and he found his donkey straying and rode for Uro and his master beat him for being truant and lying and blaspheming, and so he stole the donkey and ran again. And our lady believed him, and the headman did, and they've all gone.”

“Cold hells,” Ahjvar said. “Souls. Left for her.”

No words.

There might be visions painted in the fire. Ghu could not see them. He looked up when Ahjvar pressed the cup into his hands. “You're shaking,” Ahj said quietly. “Drink.” He wrapped his hands around the cup obediently, Ahj's for a moment over his. Rough warmth.

“Ghu, let me go on ahead of you. Yeh-Lin's right. Make an end of her and he has no foothold here.”

Ghu shook his head, found words at last. “Not by murder.”

“Challenge her, then.”

“I . . . don't know. Perhaps. We'll see. Just—stay with me. Besides, last time you went to kill someone touched by a devil, it didn't go so well. I don't want to lose you that way again.”

“Heir of the gods, you say?” The old woman gave Ghu another long look. “Huh. I'm through with the gods, too. Through with everything and waiting for my call to the road. But are you sure? Because he's a pleasure to an old woman's eyes, no doubt, but if he only speaks some heathen tongue, how does he know what the gods say?”

That broke something. Ghu laughed and leaned to the old woman and kissed her on the lips. “What makes you think the gods are through with you? You're not ready for the road yet. Go find your folk and this lost boy of Uro, Dwei Dolan. He needs a grandmother.”

They set the old woman a mile on her way, a foresters' track into crumpled hills so steep it seemed only a squirrel or monkey might climb them. They were come into where the land changed, dropping down out of the spaciousness of Choa and Alwu. Soon there would be no wide fields or deserted lands, no wilderness but the occasional outcroppings of these steep, worn hills, water-gnawed stone to which bamboo and forest clung like a woodpecker against the side of a tree. If the empress had cleared her path with the deaths of villages all the way from the Old Capital . . . how could he not have heard the stone and the waters cry out against her?

He was overmatched. Dotemon was. They always had been.

Lai Sula had been a net to gather any fleeing to the northwest with rumours of Buri-Nai's great army.

At some point they crossed into Numiya. The provincial borders meant nothing, though he could feel, sometimes, where what had once been the land of one small god or goddess faded into another. He brought them cross-country, not following the muddy tracks. They missed the villages of Uro and Uro-Over-Hill, riding southeasterly, though there was smoke away to their right.

All the folk were fled. Some rumour had come.

Ahjvar gave him silence and watched all ways, the crossbow loaded.

The green narrowed, hills humping up above the fields. A village in the lee of one, empty of life but not of the dead, and the ghosts, and the miserable and terrified dogs who had survived their masters. Already he felt the weight of those souls, drawn to him but trapped, bound to their bodies, lives and seething life ripped away from the land. And beyond, within the narrowing land, the empress.