The Last Road

by K. Johansen

  You did what you could. But Dotemon, I think there’s a core of truth in his lie.

  No. We never barred the road to human souls.

  Dotemon—go to the road. To the heavens. Serve me, one last time? Be my scout. Find the truth. I know it’s a hard road, a damaging one—you did it yourselves.

  Yes. They had.

  So make it your road of penance and atonement, as every human soul that travels it must do. Go, and find the truth, and return—find a way. Walk my dreams. Tell me what truth you find, and why the soul of the world cries out for lost children. He stroked the dead woman’s hair, faded to iron grey, the truth of her. Old woman when she joined with Dotemon. Maybe you can overtake her on the way. Share your burdens. You made your sins together.

  Not all of them,Dotemon said primly, Yeh-Lin’s very intonation. Yeh-Lin might have laughed. Dotemon did not.

  A wake. A remembering. Dotemon was not what it had been. Never would be. Something of Yeh-Lin within, always. Value that.

  “Go,” Ghu said. “I’ll look to her as she would want. No imperial tomb. The clean earth. Go. Leave Jochiz to the storyteller.”

  A fey boy, dream-dazzled with truths half-seen before ever he was a god.

  The heavens were within the Gods, and the hells too, and the Gods themselves…a mirror turned on itself, containing itself, light lit of itself. The devils—Dotemon, and Jochiz, and Vartu, and Tu’usha, and Ghatai, and Anganurth, and Ogada together, united at the last in anger, in vengeful defiance, had broken the way between the reality of the world and the Old Great Gods. Dotemon might seek the heavens. There was no certainty that it would find its way, or come unscathed to the Gods in the end.

  And certainly no welcome, when it did.

  But it was the only open road. It did not believe he could be right, that they had made it a trap and a barrier for human souls as well.

  The god of mountain and river sat with the dead woman still held resting on his lap, but now he was an emptiness, a waiting.

  Gone within himself so very far away. Seeking his other self.

  Dotemon wished him well and sought the heavens.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  …the Western Wall has fallen

  Nikeh saw Sulloso Dur stumble, fall several stairs, struggle her way to her feet, leaving blood smeared on the wall, and vacant-eyed, fall again. No rising. She gasped, no fury left to yell, and stabbed upwards into a man’s belly. He came down onto her as she yanked her blade free, ripping the wound wider, spilling blood and the muck of his entrails over her, a heavy weight driving her backwards. She fell, flailing for balance, into a mass of her own comrades. Someone propped her steady and she found footing again; a Westron spear came thrusting at her but he was awkward in that close spiral and it struck her shoulder, armour turned it; someone seized it and jerked. That man slipped and they killed him, two or three of them, crowding close.

  They were growing thin, those who set the pace of the retreat down the stairs, the rearguard. Draw lots, the captain had said, Marakander to the end, but there had been no need, enough had said they would hold it with her. Four patrols, all street-guard, a handful of others. Enough. Give the others a chance, give the wounded a little hope, that they might limp away, find some hiding place to await the dark or have time to…choose what they might, alone or with a friend. The message-riders would have gone when they saw the rockets; they had their orders, too.

  A fury with an axe, a lone man well-armoured, had ridden a scaling ladder as it was raised and they had not managed to dislodge it before he had cut a space about him, holding it for long enough that others followed, and in that frantic time another slapped up and another, and first the wall-walk and then the tower platform grew slick and bloody and the fallen of both sides tripped friend and foe and were climbed over, on, trampled, and what did it matter, when the towers of the gate had fallen…

  At least Sulloso had not hesitated, the moment they all picked themselves up again, things cracking and tumbling, tiles and coping-stones dislodged, the ruin of the trebuchet fallen. She had given the order and Lia had lit the fuses. Thank Gurhan’s grace or Teacher’s wizardry, the enemy assaults of burning missiles had not fired the rockets earlier. The signal had shrieked skyward and they knew now, up the pass, that all was lost at the gate.

  There should have been more time.

  There were no doors they could shut and bar against descent save with weak and makeshift barricades that didn’t seem worth the time they would buy; the tower was meant to be defended against entry, not a gaol to hold against those within. A woman dropped away from beside her, and when she gave up yet another step Nikeh felt the soldier’s hand crack beneath her boot. But the woman didn’t move, cry out. Too far gone already.

  No time to give those who died any blessing to free them to the road, even with the simplest gift of earth or salt. Their ghosts must endure, helpless witness, and hope the enemy at least buried or burned their bodies. Hope the enemy had no way to steal their lingering souls, as he did those of his own.

  The Marakanders were thinning out behind her. Slipping away. Not cowardice. Orders. They reached the storeroom and moved with frantic haste, some of those who had faded away on the stairs ready, the door pulled to, a great table overturned in the doorway, hammers thudding, big spikes driving through age-hardened planks to nail it to the doorframe. Jars, crates—they threw whatever they could there, oil-jars shattered to foul the floor and wood and then someone broke a jar of flour and they threw the lamps and ran, the last of them, for the yard between tower and stable and barracks, as the air behind turned briefly to a fireball, as effective as any wizardry.

  There was little hope, no hope, was there, that the wounded might escape, though the shadow of the wall did stretch to the north-east, now, and the day declined. Not swiftly enough. Maybe no hope for any of them.

  “We have orders,” Lia Dur said. Her voice was harsh, rasping and cracked. “It’s not cowardice. Don’t wait. Scatter, run. For your very souls’ sakes. To the hills.”

  But they kept together anyway, at first, a straggling pack. Perhaps the Westrons had no orders to pursue, only to take the wall—but then looking back Nikeh saw them coming, archers, a man in armour with a sword, gesturing.

  “Arrows!” she shouted. “Scatter, get to cover!” and that finally broke them. They ran, then, like rabbits, all of them, dodging towards what they could find, some goatherd’s shed, a copse of hazels, the ragged edges of the rising cliffs, where fig and lilac and juniper grew in the cracks of the stone. Maybe half of them made it, maybe more. Some crawled wounded, crying out.

  Nikeh did not look back again. She kept by Lia, waited when she could have outrun, grabbed her hand and tugged her on. Her eye was set on one certain seam of lilacs, where she knew it was possible to climb, keeping out of sight from the valley, high to a plummeting stream that sank into stones and vanished underground before ever it reached the pass. That would give them a route higher yet, and water, which they would be ready to bless by that time. Few of them carried any rations at all. They hadn’t believed the gate could be forced, hadn’t believed…

  Jochiz was a tale. The devil Tu’usha had impersonated their goddess and ruled their city and they still did not believe another devil could come; it was so long ago, the kind of thing that happened when their grandfathers’ grandmothers’ grandfathers were children, not real.

  Lia was gasping for breath, but they were in under cover now, and alone. Climbing, already high above the road. A glimpse of it, swarming with movement. The Westron army. They weren’t going to pause, consolidate their hold on the wall? Not even any rest. Pushing on. Ants. Hornets. A mindless swarm.

  Nikeh had no idea where everyone else had gone, if anyone at all had survived. She didn’t think the Warden of the Wall had really expected anyone to. Make for the heights if the gate is taken, each as best you can. Report to the captain of whatever city gate you can best come to, and hold yourselves under the orders of the Warden of the City.


  Words. Meant give to purpose. To give hope, because you did not say to the people you commanded, We will die here, and we trade our deaths for theirs to come.

  She should have been at the Shiprock, in the squat whitewashed tower of the windmill. Teacher was meant to be there. But it was hardly a fortress of safety, not with the Westrons advancing like the tide.

  She and Lia were running, sometimes, even now, crossing open ground on the hillside. Creeping through undergrowth, crawling, ever climbing, Nikeh choosing the way, keeping hold of Lia’s hand whenever she could. Not even certain why, when it occurred to her she was doing so. A kiss on a rainy night, and warm arms she could wrap herself in, that was where it had started, and a shared bed, now and then. A shoulder to lean against. Never more, never anything said, the sorts of things you said to a lover. Not on her part, and Lia had stopped, when Nikeh never gave her words for words.

  But she wanted, she needed to hold that hand. She needed not to let go.

  Slow. So slow. Hours? Hours. The sun fell remorseless. Lia was slow, clumsy. Infuriating. Demanding of patience. Lia was no agile climber, no squirrel-lithe scaler of trees, but she was fit and strong and should be no more out of breath than Nikeh, and yet she dragged, and dragged. Up and down and over and looking back to see yards, not miles gained, and the ruin of the wall, and the Westron army below…

  Lia slipped, a heavy tug on Nikeh’s arm. She tightened her grip, knelt down.

  Lia’s face had taken on a grey tinge about the eyes, lips tight on pain.

  “What?” Nikeh demanded. “Where, Lia?” Whimpering like a child somewhere deep inside her chest. Not slow, not clumsy, not exhaustion. Wounded and too fool proud to speak. Wounded—

  Not Lia, no, not Lia Dur; she could not lose her friend here. Lia’s arm was clamped across her ribs. No broken arrow, no blood, no great damage to her armoured vest. They were sheltered in this place, crouched among mountain boulders and juniper where the little stream spread and faded, one strand gurgling like a drain feeding a cistern in the winter rains. The sun was low in the west. They couldn’t go on in the night.

  “Got walked on, on the stairs,” Lia said. “Hurts. Breathing. Sorry. ‘S’alright. Getting worse, is all. Sorry. I can keep going. Don’t do that. Just let me catch my breath.”

  Nikeh was unbuckling her, checking, feeling for anything swelling, feeling, watching, for the breath to be rising where it should not, but she seemed intact, ribs and breastbone, only her quilted vest under the armour torn by the rivets, and the skin under—Nikeh slid a hand up under her belt and Lia pulled a face and said her hand was cold, trying to make a joke—a little broken, sticky. Nothing to speak of. Rivets. A soft swelling that made Lia wince and flinch, but it was only battered flesh, not anything pushing from inside, nothing bad.

  “Nothing broken,” was Nikeh’s verdict. “But you’re going to be black and blue, if you’re not already.” Hated the words before she said them, but—“You have to just shut it out and keep going.”

  “Was,” Lia protested. A gasp.

  “Yes, I know.” Nikeh started fastening Lia’s buckles again. Kissed her, since her face was there close and she had thought for a moment— anyway, it was close. Lia laughed, the sort of laughter that was far too close to howling, and leaned cheek to cheek a moment before moving herself stiffly to hands and knees, to kneel on the water’s edge and cup it up.

  She went flat into it, face down, a boot on her back.

  That the All-Holy had not seen fit to honour him with the lordship of Emrastepse was not something he must regret. The All-Holy knew how best he might serve. If he was not yet worthy, that was the way of it. Primate Ambert had spoken for him, but the All-Holy’s wisdom was greater. Ambert had given him another opportunity to serve. A captive scout taken on the hills had spoken, eventually, of a Nabbani wizard of great scholarship overseeing some secret work further up the pass. The All-Holy had spoken of the god of Nabban as his enemy, an evil different from the small gods of the hills and goddesses of the rivers who in their ignorance opposed him, whom they ought to revere as they did the Old Great Gods. A great service to the All-Holy, to take this wizard, to seize or kill her and disrupt her scheme, whatever it might be.

  And so rather than taking part in the assault on the wall Philon had taken a seer of the sixth circle, the only one who could be spared, and a handful of soldiers of Dimas’s former household, and set out by the mountain tracks.

  It went badly from the start. They were slow in working their way up the cliffside, missed their way and could not pick up a track heading east. Found themselves having to slowly and perilously descend a cliff where hand and footholds crumbled, when they found no way forward but one below. They weren’t hill-folk, none of them but him. Folk of the plains along the Tiy, dizzy with heights, no understanding of stone. One man fell, bouncing and screaming, and then only thudding, rattling stone loose. Even back on safer ground, a goat-track Philon thought he remembered from earlier scouting, the soldiers were fearful, whispering that there were devils in Marakand, commanding its wizards, and thus the wizard chosen to command any great work would have a devil at her shoulder. They whispered, too, that Blessed Philon had lost the All-Holy’s favour through his failure to defend Prince Dimas from the heathen assassins.

  They whispered they would die on this mountainside and if they lived, be denied the glory of having taken part in the storming of the wall. And so the day passed with little forward progress. Philon heard the bells, and much later, bells again, and the shrieking of some fire-signal launched skyward, though what it meant he did not know, only that if it was their own, he had not been told of it. But he had lost the All-Holy’s favour, so perhaps he would not have been. Or perhaps the Wall cried for help.

  On the mountainside, nothing changed.

  They could not travel this treacherous terrain by night; not long before they must lie up and wait for light, and pray that the All-Holy kept them safe from hill-folk and demons and whatever else might prowl such wildernesses.

  When the seer grunted and dropped, an arrow in his back, they scattered, all discipline lost, though Philon shouted that they must stay close, make a wall of their shields against their enemies above on the mountainside…

  He could not see them. A flicker through the leaves, there, where wild olives tangled. More arrows. Cries. Philon went like a crab sidelong, down over scree, into junipers. Two of his own followed him, clumsy, but they made it, and he scowled them to silence and led them downwards again, into a gully where a tiny stream made noise enough to cover their clatter and gasping breath. It would also mask the sound of anyone following, but he saw nothing of pursuit. Distracted, hunting the others higher up.

  Then sound, but ahead of them. He waved to the two soldiers to be silent and still, went ahead himself, down the twisting course between the stony walls.

  Two Marakander soldiers, women, at the water’s edge. Kissing, distracted. Young fools. The teachings said that women were so, easily distracted, more tied to their bodies, but he had never himself noticed much difference. Sometimes he wondered if the old prophets of the nameless god had had some personal grudge against the sex. Certainly the All-Holy, though he did not speak against the edicts that said women ought not to take up the sword nor hold high office, did permit a chosen few to serve so. Primate Clio, most notably.

  Youth, though, that was folly.

  Philon moved slowly, nearer. One of the women crawled to the water to drink. Wounded, he thought. She moved so. He sprang, knocking her down, into the stream, turned with sword in hand to deal with the other.

  Small and slight and fast, a fine-boned, olive-skinned Westron face set in a mask of fury, bush of black hair curling from under her conical helmet. She struck while he still stared.

  Hecta. In his last light of the sun he saw lost Hecta, whose ghost had faded trapped on the broken road, denied the gods by her unbelief, by his failure to break his silence, to do what he had been forbidden and speak of his truth, to con
vince…Impossible, that she should be here in his dying, to welcome him to the embrace of the Old Great Gods. Yet she looked on him. But she did not smile, and the pain, the pain, something dragged, and his arm, his heart burned, and he could see, could hear and taste and smell—home, the direction of home and he had only to turn and set his foot to the road and he would find his way but he could not, he was grappled with a thousand burning hooks and hauled, struggling, thrashing like a fish, into—into—

  There was light, like the sun through eyelids. A pulse, a slow breathing that was not his own. It grew and grew until there was nothing else.

  Nikeh yelled, sweeping her sword free, up as she rose on a knee and thrust herself to her feet, blade into him with all her weight and rising force behind it, the angle of his jaw under his helmet, armoured knight of Tiypur, and he fell back, overborne, though he was much the taller, a burly man, jaw grey-stubbled, brown eyes wide as his chest flooded crimson. She used a foot to hold him down, wrenching her sword free, and he did not thrash or squirm or react at all, only lay there bleeding a flood. No time to check on Lia. Splashing and cursing; she wasn’t dead, and two more Westron soldiers were scrambling down the slope above them, neither with a bow or she and Lia would have been dead already.

  Nikeh sprang to meet the nearest, dodging aside and tripping the man as he passed, wheeling back to slash across his calves, low, severing tendons. While he yelled and shrieked and tried to rise she flung herself after the other, a woman her own height, slashed and hit a horn plate protecting her back, but it was enough to make her stumble and by then Lia was there, her sword striking hard, and they had the soldier down, cutting, brutal and swift. Nikeh turned back to finish the wounded man. Such a relief, the silence. Watched the heights above, the scrub that promised concealment and might hide too many others. Movement.

  “Lia…”