Gods of Nabban (75 page)

Nothing against a devil, but rather a dead woman unburied, who was an open door into Nabban.

The sword of the god.

The giant in his path shouldered his spear and leapt back. “We killed them yesterday, Exalted. We saw you killed, yesterday. I don't know what any of you are, but none of you are the Peony Throne I was sworn to serve.”

One of the ladies-in-waiting flicked a knife that took the giant in the cheek. He dropped, too swiftly for that wound.

“Poison!” Ahjvar shouted, and dodged the other giant, who was swinging his halberd around like a scythe. Yeh-Lin could deal with him. An arrow took the woman who had thrown the knife. One, at least, had kept a bowstring dry. The bodyguard closed up around the empress, who swore at them in some language he didn't know and swept a hand that trailed fine white threads of light. They dropped, the closest three. Souls ripped away. The remaining three gave her space.

The women had scattered. Not in flight. Bring her the god, she had said. Or his corpse.

And the mother of that splinter under his tongue to be bedded in his heart, Ahjvar saw it, vision, nightmare, her desire—the devil's—so strong.

The air was growing heavy again. Thunder gathering. Not, he thought, hers. The dragons were out over the field, driving flocks of men before them, bunching them like sheep.

She laughed at him, brought her blade up with much of Yeh-Lin's grace. One eye to spoil her judging of distance, and what strength in a body confined to the quiet life of a palace daughter? But she had had months of travel to make something other of herself, and the skill that handled that sword was old.

She grinned, teeth bared, as they closed together.

“What does Dotemon call you? The dead king? But you bleed, and dream, and weep. What your necromancer god should make of you, if he wants you obedient in his bed for long, is what my dead empress is.”

“A corpse and a puppet? Not his taste.”

She did not bleed. His point had scratched her face. She flinched, though. The devil felt it, and didn't like it.

“The sword of the ice is coming for you.” The Lady's words, almost, and he was sick to find them in his mouth.

“I expect it to.” She had him pushed away, turned. Deliberate, to make him face his embattled comrades. Couldn't afford distraction. Yeh-Lin by Ghu, defending him. Ghu with his head bowed, hands braced on Snow's shoulders, not wounded but fallen into some other place. Don't look. Buri-Nai pressed Ahjvar hard, and there could be nothing but her unwavering eye and the blade's edge. Not the light that reached for him, like cobweb on the skin, and reached—leave Ghu to do what he did. Ahjvar could feel him, as if he stood almost within the same space, the same skin, breath within his breath. It was not his own vision saw those tendrils. A blow that should have sent her reeling. Should have ripped through and laid half her arm bare to shattered bone. Had. She lost her left-hand knife and the hand hung strangely, but no blood and no weakening followed, only fury. Sword's point punched through already-torn armour into his ribs. She leapt back and a whirling blow came at his head. He went down avoiding it and she recovered, reversed her grip and stabbed. He was already rolling aside and came up to his knees, sword thrusting up over his shoulder.

That bit more than her cheek. He pulled away and found his feet again, and she still, with face ruined and eyeless, struck another blow that caught the edge of the damaged armour and opened scars. Strength beyond what that body could claim. He fell to his knees.

She had him then. Threads of light clung. He drew Ghu's knife, tucked into his belt at the back. He could feel her, crawling on him. Into him.
Not again not again not—

I have you, Ahj. And we have him. There.

“A mistake to discard you last night, dead man. This time I will hold onto you, I think, and bring him to me through you. Humanly weak, your little god, but his land is great.”

Ahjvar pushed her head back, hooked the knife and ripped, not flesh but steel scales fixed to leather, the silk beneath, and the golden chain and the amulet, a crystal of milky quartz the length of a man's thumb, bound in golden wire—

—caught it on both shaking and bloodied hands, and she shrieked—

And silence. She crumpled up half over his knees, cold, dead meat.

Stone cold in his hands, and the tendrils of white light writhed. They clung, and pulled, web spreading over him.

You are a fool, dead man. Your soul is not even your own.

“You think? I know all that I am. What I've been made, good and ill, by my road. What he made me.”

Every man's dream, a lover who surrenders self, who is nothing but a part of himself. It won't last. You'll run from him in the end, and he'll have to kill you. I know.

The threads burrowed deeper. Ice in his veins.

“His champion. His sword. His priest. His friend.”

His betrayer. You're an open road into his heart. Your soul winds through his, and through you, I reach into him and take you both. See? It's already too late. You, him, Nabban. A great land.

“He is deep water, you know. Darkness. Stillness. Peace. But he says I am a hearth. A fire. And maybe I am. I know fire. I have burned.”

It was in him, always. All his nightmares.

Fire might break even stone. Fire purified. Fire freed the dead.

A fire not of wood or oil or sea-coal. A fire fed on bone and soul, and what froze his hands was soul and stone. His fire had slept in his bones over ninety years. He held it in his mind, wove them together. For fire, alder. And alder, and alder threefold untempered by any other sign. He could feel Ghu's hands over his, though the white horse and the black-armoured rider were beset, and Ghu had Yuro's mace.

Distraction. There must be nothing but what he held in his hands.

His name was Ahjvar, not Catairlau. He burned regardless, as that self-damned prince had burned.

In his hands, stone hissed, and seared, and cracked. Gold wire softened, ran, seared him. Stone gone brittle crumbled to sharp-edged grit between his hands and he heard the devil shriek all the way from the western sea, some fragment of his soul broken and destroyed. He felt the souls fly free—Buri-Nai, Zhung Musan, assassins he had killed, wizards and banner-lords chosen her own, her faithful dead, her murdered lowly folk—felt the road opening out before them, drawing them, enticing, fearful, innocently short or penitentially long. And still they flew to it. He could not. He had known this would be and he could not, and neither could he after all endure—

The fire would not let him go till it was through with him. Skin bubbled, blackened, flaked, and flesh, and there was white bone beneath. The pain screamed through him but he had no breath to scream—
Not again, not like this, let me go, let me go, let me go—

CHAPTER XLIII

All that way, to have found—whatever it was he had found. If Kaeo were only a passing pleasure for the youngest of the queens of Darru and Lathi, even that was enough, though he would rather it were more. Kaeo thought it might be more. But all that way, to die at the hands of imperial soldiers at last, when he had found his god . . .

That was the shape of a poem, but it was not truth. He had found
the
god, the heir of Nabban, and the god had not, in the end, been his. He had come to understand that on the road north. His heart, his soul, had known it, even on the night he sang with Rat against the typhoon.

“Thank you,” the god had said. For what? For acting as the devil's messenger and carrying the yellow-haired man's weapons back to him.

Thank you. Like a dismissal. Releasing him. Not for fetching that sword along, but for all that went before. Not for what the dying gods had done to him, witting or unwitting. For what he had tried to do, for the Traditionalists, for Prince Dan. For trying, even if he had failed. Kaeo felt that. He understood it. Thank you, for being willing to die. Not for godhead, but for what mattered. For what was right.

He was not Nabban's. He was given to himself, to give himself where he would.

You're mine
, Rat had said, more than once, and whispered it with something like surprise the first time they lay together. He hoped there was not some man back in Darru and Lathi who thought he had an understanding with the youngest queen, and that her sisters did not decide his skull would look better on a royal doorpost.

Except . . .

Little Sister, Nabban named her.

He was not a fool. She had said she was not a wizard.

He leaned against her back, and she looked over her shoulder.

“Mine,” he said. “Even if you grow up to be a tigress.”

She snorted laughter. No denial.

“Someday,” she said. “Maybe. When I am old, I will go to the river. Until then, I am only your queen and a priestess of a goddess who was and may yet be.” Her Anlau voice, he called it in his mind. An accent of the south, a formality. Rat's grin. “And whatever else you think I might happen to be. The queens live celibate, you know, but I am—not counted quite in the traditional pattern.”

A kiss, awkward, she twisting far to meet him.

Not a fool, and wise enough to know he was a danger to her, clinging to her belt, spy, queen, goddess that might be . . . wife? He was liable to fall off this tall horse and take Rat with him.

“Let me down,” he said. “I'll only be a danger to you and fall off and get trampled. I'll stand by the priest.”

And what that old unarmed man was doing here, rather than left with the reserve at the river commanded by Prince Dan, he did not understand. Rat hesitated. Then she nodded, seized his arm to steady him as he slithered down. The old priest clapped him on the shoulder.

He looked up at her and found Rat still looking down, her eyes gone . . . remote, and wide, and glistening. Seeing . . . What he saw, reflected in her eyes. He swallowed, and blinked, their hands still caught together.

Thank you
, the god had said.

He let her go.

CHAPTER XLIV

“Kill them!” the empress shouted. “Bring me the body of the pretender!” And Ahjvar went for her through her giants as the court-dressed women of her bodyguard rushed for the blue banner.

Ahjvar shouted warning—“Poison!”—and someone shot one of them, but Yuro's horse crumpled down as if clubbed on the head, and the woman who had raked its nose with a blade like a fruit-knife fell herself, skull smashed by his mace.

Two were swarming Ivah, aiming for the banner she held set in her left stirrup. She cut down one and the good horse took the other, but two had gotten past and gone for Ghu, who sat motionless, lost in some trance, and weaponless besides, though Snow shifted his weight, preparing to strike. Naked of any armour. The Dar-Lathan man Kaeo flung himself on top of an assassin who dodged Yeh-Lin to come at Ghu. Kaeo knocked the imperial to the ground and was kneeling up to stab her with his sword when she pricked him in the thigh.

He brought his blow down anyway, even as the Wild Girl screamed his name and wheeled her horse about to come to her comrade. Kaeo pinned the assassin to the earth, fell over her, losing his grip on his sword, and did not move. He had only a scratch and hardly bled at all.

The rarest of poisons, Ivah's mother had said. The Wind in the Reeds had them, kept them secret even from the wizards, lest their workings become known. Venoms from jungles south-over-seas, from fish of the islands where the pearls were found. To be used only at the emperor's will.

One had cut her above her boot, but she felt nothing other than the pain she might expect. Clean blade, and as no other wounded dropped dead, the blades of the others were clean, and the Wind in the Reeds died in short order, in the wrath of the Wild Girl of Dar-Lathi and Yeh-Lin's guarding of the god, and Yuro's fury, and her own.

Yuro fell at the god's side, struck down by some imperial banner-lord who did not live long after, and Ghu, wherever he had been, seemed to wake then, and rolled down his horse's side and back, an arm wrapped in his long mane, with Yuro's mace. One of the archers dragged Yuro up across his own horse, weak but moving. The dragon-dogs were gone out over the field. Fear of them broke the companies there, made them bunch and cower or scatter to the woodlands, though Ivah didn't see them make any actual attack. Sheets of rain chased them, the wind gusting wild from every quarter.

Cold as winter, and they were being forced away from where Ahjvar fought the empress. He should make short work of her but Buri-Nai—or whatever used her body—seemed a swordswoman of skill to hold her own against him. Ivah unhorsed the banner-lord she fought and killed him as he struggled up, and Ahjvar was down—the empress falling, and he knelt over her.

Not lightning, but flame red and angry, cupped in his hands—born of them, flame springing up along his arms, flame a bonfire and he lost within it—

Roaring red, yellow-hot, bright and savage and nothing she could do, no time to weave a spell and it was already too late to save him, no matter what held him bound in the world. The empress was nothing but a dark lump, not even a human shape, and Ahjvar knelt still unmoving, not falling but—a black and hideous thing—hands, teeth, a cheek pale bone, burning into her memory. Ivah could not shut her eyes against it, never would in all her dreams, she thought, and slashed at the man whose halberd tried to tear her down from her horse. The white stallion plunged past her, trampling the last giant standing, and Ghu flung himself down and into the pyre that was his man or took it in his arms, body, fire, and all, and—was gone. Both of them. A clear space, a moment's calm, breathless.

The wind died to nothing.

“The empress is dead!” someone shouted, or wailed, and the dragons circled them. Some of the empress's people turned to run and thought better of it, as the paler dragon settled behind them, baring teeth, or grinning. A woman with long hair falling from her ornate combs fell to her knees, reversed her knife and drove it into her own belly.