Gods of Nabban (72 page)

CHAPTER XLI

Two corpses and they could not just leave them, not knowing. Ahjvar sounded mad, but a man so torn through could not live and move and speak, and keep speaking. The splinter of crystal in Ivah's hand was chilling her palm, not warming to it. She wiped frozen blood from it and wrapped it in a length of red yarn, knotting it as if might escape the cocoon, and the knots were ones of sealing and holding. She added a hair from her own head, winding it, making the same knots, and put it in the purse with her oracle-coins.

“Is Ahjvar mad, are they dead, or do we have any hope?” she demanded of Awan.

“Hope,” he said. “I don't know. I have faith.”

She had thought she did. Tried to remember the warmth that had filled her, the safety, the sense of being home. The rider of the white horse, the sky breaking into blue banners. She had known, then. She remembered. It was very far from the stench of congealing blood and the fear that made her hands shake. Old Great Gods, she had ridden a demon into battle against the Lady of Marakand; she was the daughter of Tamghiz Ghatai, of An-Chaq who had escaped the palace and all the Wind in the Reeds sent after her; she could not be so weak now.

“He came back to the castle,” Yuro said. “Everything changed. And Yeh-Lin calls him her lord. Yes, I know what she is. I do notice things. If Ghu's man says he is a hundred years old and immortal, I believe him. A man doesn't move and speak, doesn't breathe, with wounds like that. Not this long. And if he says Ghu is not dead, I believe that too.”

They had to, because otherwise what was the point in anything? They were defeated and lost and could only go on twitching, like a hooked fish tossed up on the riverbank, until the empress made an end of them.

“We still have work to do,” Ivah said. “The three of us can't carry them away through all this camp to any place safer, even if we took them one at a time, and I don't think I would want to separate them.”

The empress had said she was going to rest; she had threatened any who disturbed her. That might mean a certain reluctance on the part of Buri-Nai's people to report any minor strangeness. Ivah found colours, red, white, black, began a cat's-cradle that grew long, a net that caught the stars of winter morning in its pattern, the wounded hero Khumbok asleep, cradled like a child in the lap of the lake-goddess Aiakayl, while his enemies searched blind along the shore.

“Out,” she whispered to Yuro. “Not you,” to Awan. “You stay with them.”

He nodded, settling down cross-legged on one of the cushioned benches that ran along the sides, where he could watch over the dead. Holding the pattern taut in her hands, she spread it out on the floor.

“I can't leave the light. Don't disarray this or it won't hold. If someone comes in—it won't matter anyway. Do you have a weapon?”

The priest shook his head. “I came to be by my god, that only. I'm an old man, a priest of the Mother. I eat no meat. I've never so much as killed a fowl.”

“Pray Ahjvar wakes up then, if someone comes.”

She let her light go out and followed Yuro into fog that wrapped and clung, so that almost at once she felt as damp as if it drizzled. Thick fog should help. The air had the heavy feel of coming storm, pressing down.

She was holding too many threads in mind. To recast the spell that made her difficult to see would be too much. Trust to the night and the fog.

A little moonlight would have been nice.

She and Yuro caught hands, not to lose one another, and walked with the careful, soft steps needed when one had no idea if the ground might rise or fall in a sudden rut. Her shoulder hit something. Another wagon. That dark. Too close, a woman's voice whispered, “I can't pray. I wish I could,” which was so much her own thought . . .

They had counted on a glimpse of moonlight, a faint lightening beyond the cloud in the east, to let them know it rose, days into its last quarter, and that the dawn was coming. Already she had lost all sense of direction. Yuro tripped and in his falling something caught her across the thighs and they both went down, a heavy thump.

“Who's that?” a man called.

Guy-rope. In their silence, picking themselves up, they heard someone move near. Sudden murky lantern-light, almost on top of them. But the guy-rope found him. Grunt. Thump.

“Devils damn this fog.”

“Maka?”

“Yeah. Where are you?”

A snort. “Tell me and I'll let you know. Just stay put. No point trying to walk the rounds in this. Go stumbling into the wall of the Exalted's tent and your head will be right up there with tomorrow's haul of deserters.”

Yuro tugged her sleeve. On hands and knees, they moved away. They needed to be feeling their way with a stick, like Dan. No sticks to hand and she had left her bow with her horse.

They weren't crawling in circles after all. Bamboo stakes. Her knotting of the wards still worked, whispering reassuring lies into whatever mind had set this. It was a fence put up and taken down with every camp, a barrier for privacy and the setting apart of their divine empress, not true defence. The pales were not planted all that deeply, and the split canes that wove through them, helping to hold them aligned, were growing brittle. Yuro's forage-knife sliced through those with little sound, and they rocked enough stakes loose to squeeze through, setting them back in the loose earth. Not straight, but who would notice? They should mark the point somehow, but in the fog how would they find it again anyhow?

She really wished she knew what direction she faced.

Faint wind. The fog was nearly drizzle, and her left cheek was colder. Whatever direction that was. The clouds had been gathering in the north. Perhaps they crept east, now.

The archers were waiting behind them, then. Couldn't be helped.

The plan was that they would find Ghu and his champion, to extract them if they could, before signalling the raiding party. Holding off on that until as near dawn as possible, to give Yeh-Lin's rapid night march most time. Failing that . . .

Strong scent on that faint breeze. Cattle.

“Yuro?” Murmur against his ear. “Ever work with oxen?”

“I was my lord's stable-master, not a ploughman.”

Damn. Daughter of the warlord she might be, but no daughter of the Grass grew up a pampered princess—her father's bellow at her mother, some argument yet again. There were tasks for bondfolk, but if she could not do them herself, how could she know well from ill done, and how could the folk she might one day lead respect her? But it was she who needed to do what they had come for; she could not be teaching Yuro to wrestle with yokes and accidentally-goring horns in the dark.

On the other hand . . . the ox-drivers would sleep near their charges.

“Yuro, you're a captain of the Wind in the Reeds. You need two yoke of oxen and their drivers.”

No protest. He simply took a deep breath. “You coming with me?”

“I need to set the signals. Just be a lord. Arrogant. Certain. Walk over them. You were a slave in Dernang. They're slaves. You know the sort of captain and lord you need to be to stop them questioning.”

“No slaves, he says.”

“Not if she comes back and kills him while he lies—” Not dead. They were pretending they had faith. “—lies helpless in some shaman's trance.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Tell them—the gate-guards can't be trusted. That's why you're taking them through the fence. You'll have to widen the gap or make a new one. Gods be with you.” Which god or gods or Gods? She left him.

It was easier moving on her own, and if she shut her eyes against the blindness and merely felt, in the soles of her boots, in the damp breath of the north on her face, in the air she breathed—smoke, dung, animals, human sweat, crushed greenery, mud—she found her way. A way. A straight lane, mucky and rutted, the central avenue of the camp, and there was occasional light, a fire, a lantern, suddenly emerging and quickly passed. There were others who moved likewise, most often in pairs, muttering for their own encouragement, grumbling against the dark and the night and cursing the weather.

Distant thunder.

She began to lay the knotted spells that she had made as she rode, setting each with a breathed word over it.

A section of a spiral, working inward, back to the empress's compound. She had meant to lay most of them along the main avenue, but she did not after all want to end up on the edge of the camp, where she and Yuro and Awan were meant to be with the holy one, to reclaim their horses.

Now, before whatever uproar was going to follow when Yuro began trying to steal a wagon.

She nicked her wrist. Northron wizardry, the sacrifice of her own blood, binding this. Brought the few welling droplets to her tongue, felt the words grow, strong, fierce.

In the Mother's night, the Father's fires bloom. The mountain is alight and the waters hold the fire of life.

Pillars of light, rising, breaking, and falling back like fountains. The fog glowed, showed itself not still but roiling, troubled with currents, as if unseen creatures warred within it like monsters in the depths of the sea. A stunned silence, then a shout. The usual human foolishness of one asking another just as ignorant, “What's that?” Watchmen rushing, then thinking better of it and advancing cautiously, to investigate.

The knots would burn and the light fade as they were consumed. They would find nothing, a pinch of ash, maybe. Ivah used the light to find her way back to the inner compound, began walking that fence into darkness again. One fountain died, another, another, burning down more quickly than she and Yeh-Lin had intended. Some other will quashing them. Horns blowing alarm.

Shouting, a disorder of weary, sleep-stupid men, and officers shouting with no idea what the alarm was and no enemy to see. Shouting within the compound as well, people calling out. She began to jog, one hand trailing along the fence.

Splintering. A gap not made wide enough. In the light of the last fountain, bamboo pales fell outwards, a woman scrambling through them, nearly trampled by the team she tugged along by a horn of the near ox, shouting encouragement or abuse, Ivah wasn't certain. The driver dodged away, flicked a red-roan rump with her whip. A man on the other side slapped a blue flank. Two were cattle, two looked like buffalo. Both pair leaned into their yokes and the carriage came swaying through, its high wheels making no difficulty of the ridge of broken stakes.

“Quietly, fools!” Yuro snarled, but there was such a noise everywhere . . .

Her last light-pillar died but a new light was born, red, hungry. Little flowers, devouring grass, canvas, leather. Every arrow planting a bloom of flame. Fires spread, difficult to smother. They clung and grew, creeping together. The riders were making a circuit of the camp.

“Go,” Ivah said. “Go, go!” She wrote a light and flung it ahead. The oxen, sensibly, had decided to stand still until they could see.

The nearest ox-driver looked at her, at Yuro, and turned and bolted into the night. The other had already disappeared. Ivah picked up the discarded whip, snapped it by an ear, shouted a command, but of course the oxen didn't understand Grasslander. A shove on a broad shoulder got her point across, and they swung to the right and lumbered off.

Couldn't tell if the rushing clusters of soldiers, half-dressed, were obeying some drilled procedure, rallying to some point, or just stampeding in panic. Whooping cries, horses whinnying, oxen bellowing. Her archers were into the camp now. Fire-arrows landing within the imperial compound, but there Yeh-Lin's clinging fire failed to take.

Riderless horses bolting. An ox, trailed by its yokemate, came swinging after them, seeing, she could only suppose, calm purpose and fellow bovines. Or perhaps they were part of the same team.

Pale light in the fog, a horse copper-lit and its dark shadow, two horses, and damned if it was not Ghu's white stallion and Ahjvar's dark bay following. Yuro made encouraging noises, held out a hand that was disdainfully ignored, but the pair seemed set on following anyway, like dogs that had caught their master's scent.

Perhaps they had.

And that, that was what started hope, like a tiny spark of Yeh-Lin's fire, blooming in her heart again.

“Go on, get on, get on!” she shouted, and set the oxen to a jolting trot.

Snow. Jochiz brushes the image from his mind. Sien-Shava has always hated the snow, the dark dead season of the north, and snow is no better, no kinder, lying deep and ancient on the mountain's peak, compressing slowly under its own weight, year after year, birthing ice.

Jochiz hates the ice.

The god, the Father, the god the heir, they are one, or very nearly. There is a shadow, a light, over and through the man, but now he is a boy, curled into a tight and huddled knot like a baby in the womb, and the snow wraps around him. It tries to be a shield, a wall, a fortress, but it cannot keep a devil's great will out; he is already here in this place and he can feel between his hands the threads, the roots, sinking deep, and then he feels them as the cords of a net and he begins, slowly, carefully, to draw them.

The wind rises against him, flings ice, needles, blades, and he reaches. The Mother is gone, and the Father—he sweeps a hand clawed with fire, to rip him from what he guards, but the ice melts into the boy, and the snow, and the Father is gone as if he had never been there—dead. His victory over the old mountain does not yet feel like one—and the boy is a man, lying still and cold on the river's shore. A god. Pinned and powerless against him, senseless.

Dying.

Roots spread through the god, roots bind them, and Jochiz begins again to draw the strange, multi-stranded soul, to drink it into the cold fire that lies like a splinter of starlight between the empress's breasts, over his heart. She stands with him, within him, eyes unseeing, ghostly, like a reflection in water. She is nothing but a vessel to carry him now, a great canoe, on this Nabbani sea.