by K V Johansen
“A man,” he added, and touched her hand. She was frightened again, and she had been so bold. But she had been working wizardry in the Voice’s city, and the Red Masks would kill her for simply being what she was, and where. “But you’re not a man, and you’re . . .” silk and horses and that bundle pretending it was a pillow had a sword’s length to it. A sabre’s length. That was what he saw. “Are you of the western deserts, or the Grass? You don’t belong to this city.”
She looked startled. “My father was of the Great Grass. I was born on the Grass. My mother was from the empire, a—she was from the empire, yes.”
“Still not a man. They shouldn’t look for you.”
“But what did you do?”
“I don’t know.”
People usually believed him. She didn’t. He saw the disbelief in her eyes. “I’m going back down to my desk in the front room before someone steals my brushes. The street guard should be thinking you’ve lost them in the market.”
“Thank you.”
Her face closed up, and she backed away, rose to her feet. “If they do find you, I’m going to scream and hide behind Master Hadidu and say you must have got in from the balcony.
“Yes,” he agreed, without asking who Master Hadidu was, and watched her leave.
His right boot came off only with difficulty, and his foot-wrapping hid an ugly, livid swelling. In his time he’d had a broken arm, cracked ribs . . . he didn’t think this was in the bones. Nothing—when he clenched his teeth and moved it gingerly—grated. Ghu began bandaging his ankle.
And since he could do nothing for Ahjvar at the present moment, with the guards no doubt still keeping an eye out on the nearby streets, when he was finished he piled his own bundle atop the scribe’s and lay down with his feet up, hands folded on his chest and forage knife laid by his side. He shut his eyes and let himself slide into that place between sleep and waking, where there was rest and the slow rhythm of the world’s tides carrying him. The river waited. The mountain watched. They were always there, a breath away.
Ivah wrote one letter for a neighbour of the coffeeshop, an application to a magistrate in Silvermarket Ward to adopt a cousin’s son from there, and worked her way through the stack of blank copies of various contracts one of the ward magistrate’s overworked clerks had brought her, with the names and details to be filled in later. She was fortunate to get the work, being both a newcomer to the guild, licensed only about nine months and lacking the web of connections the relationship between master and apprentice brought, as well as an outlander, a barbarian Grasslander. All her life she’d been called Nabbani, and when her father was angry with his mistress, or his daughter, it had been an insult. Nabbani whore. Now, in a city where half the folk seemed to have Nabbani ancestry—one of the founding Twenty Families had been Nabbani adventurers, long before the colonies of the Five Cities were ever planted, back in the days of legend—they looked at her tawny eyes and heard her accent when she used the tongue of the western road or bastard Nabbani, and called her a Grasslander.
When she spoke the Imperial Nabbani she’d learned at her mother’s knee, they affected not to understand her at all. She’d begun to think . . . she didn’t know what. To doubt every tale her mother had ever told her, till the storyteller addressed her in that same speech, and the young caravaneer, and she’d felt for a moment as if the landscape had suddenly shifted about her and she was home. Moreover, the young man made her heart run too fast, as if he were some deep, swift current about to pull her off her feet and sweep her away. She wasn’t sure she even liked men, beautiful or otherwise. At least she could admire a beautiful man; he wouldn’t be the first. But that didn’t mean she had to want . . . And why was she even thinking about such things?
Ivah wiped the brush carefully and switched to a finer one for a new page, with two extra clauses to be added. It was dull work but demanding of meticulous care. Master Hadidu, unasked, brought her a tiny cup of coffee. She smiled wary thanks as he set it on her desk. All the regulars at the Doves thought he was courting her, in his shy way, seeking a stepmother for his little boy.
She certainly hoped he wasn’t, but she couldn’t tell, so she pretended not to notice. Ivah wasn’t good at things like that. And he wasn’t a beautiful man, just a thin, worried, gentle one, with a beard that was beginning to grey at the corners of his mouth, though he wasn’t so old as all that.
Ivah worked the afternoon away, until the shadows were too slanting through the high slit of a window in the front parlour and she would have to pay for lamp-oil or make mistakes. She put her cleaned brushes, her inkstone and papers away inside the desk, with the finished contracts carefully wrapped in a square of old cotton. Beneath the hinged lid, the desk was a tidy tray of compartments: brushes, inkstones, inksticks, a corked jar of liquid ink, reed pens, a knife, a jar of sand for drying, paper in various sizes, a wax tablet and bronze stylus for notes, a couple of candle stubs, several codices on calligraphy and its history, copies of obscure and dull treatises, purchased from the booksellers who set up every day in the great porch of the palace library . . . All innocent possessions of a conscientious new member of the guild of scribes and letter-writers. Under the sheet of stiff waxed cotton that lay beneath the dividers were other papers, some with a careful copy of the inscription on Gurhan’s tomb, the walled-up cave near-forgotten, hidden in the forested folds of the senate palace hill, and a less confident copying, from memory, of the frieze around Ilbialla’s tomb, some with her attempt to translate. Since few of the characters showed up in even the most ancient Pirakuli alphabet that she could find, and that was her best guess as to what writing it might be, she was not making much progress. If even the so-called storyteller could not read it all . . . The Northron’s name was Ulfhild, and she was the devil Vartu. If the stories of the Northrons were true, she had been Ivah’s father’s wife, once upon a time.
And whatever the stories of the road might say about the Blackdog, she knew Ulfhild Vartu had been her father’s killer. She didn’t know how she felt about that.
Ivah locked the desk, though a child could turn the lock with a broken knife, and on one memorably inky occasion had, and borrowed a bowl from Hadidu’s kitchen. She walked down the street to the nearest hot food shop, where she bought a heaping dish of spiced chick-peas with eggplant and a couple of rounds of fried unleavened bread. Back at the Doves, balancing the food atop her desk, she carried both away up to her room with a nod to Nour, lounging unsmiling in the doorway to watch her. He was Hadidu’s brother-in-law, a native Marakander despite the scorpions tattooed on the backs of his hands, and a caravan mercenary with a gang that worked the eastern road; his caravan had come in a few days earlier. He seemed to mistrust her. Afraid, maybe, that she aimed to marry Hadidu and take his dead sister’s place.
Nour watched her all the way up the stairs.
Ghu was gone.
“Great Gods and damned devils . . .” Ivah dropped to her knees by her bundle, but the knots sealing it were still intact. It would take a wizard to untie them. She did and checked over, carefully, like one mistrusting a treasure’s safety, all the things rolled in her coat, her other self: boots, sabre, short horseman’s bow and quiver, her mother’s purse of three silver oracle-coins and the scroll of The Balance of the Sun and the Moon. Since she had the coins in her hand anyway, she threw them, twice, four times, six, thinking all the while of Ghu, but “What is he?” and “Where did he go?” ran together, and the hexagram, when she checked it in the book, doubting her memory, told her that The Mountain and the River hold the Land, which ran to three hand-spans of commentaries, none seeming to be of any immediate use.
Lame or not, there was no point to her chasing him through the streets. He had hardly run off to betray her to the Red Masks. She lit a candle stub with a quick sketch of the character of fire, took a blank page and set down, in small, neat clerk’s characters the words Ghu had spoken when the devil asked him what the tomb was. Tears. Fire. Binding. Fire—that resonated with something el
se. She lifted the ink from its compartment, slid some older papers out from beneath, and laid the book on the history of writing in Pirakul before her, chasing meaning through the night.
It kept the darkness at bay, while the night grew hotter and thunder growled, promising rain. Eventually, when she realized she had been staring unseeing at the page for far too long, ink drying on her brush, all inspiration fled, she cleaned up, undressed, put on a thin shift, and lay down to sleep.
It did not seem so very much later, but perhaps she had slept deeper and longer than she thought, that the sound of smashing wood, muffled by distance, awakened her.
Time passed, and Ivah did not return. As the room began to grow evening-dim Ghu stirred into life again. There were questions he wanted to ask her about the storyteller, but there were questions she wanted to ask him, too, no doubt, and he did not think that he wanted to answer them yet. There were questions he should have asked the storyteller, but perhaps . . . perhaps she had already answered them.
He did not think Ahjvar could kill a devil.
Ghu gave up on getting his boot back on; he had gone barefoot most of his life anyway. He added the boots to his bundle, tied it firmly across his back again, and considered the passageway outside. Sounds of laughter floated up from the kitchen, and a small boy, about waist-high to him, came suddenly hurtling up the stairs, waving a carved wooden camel and shouting for someone called Sayyid to come see what Uncle had made for him. Ghu slipped back and shut Ivah’s door firmly.
“Sayyid’s gone out to the market!” a distant voice called, and footsteps galloped past again, down the stairs.
He followed, warily, down to the floor below, where the rooms seemed more in use. In the second one he ventured into he discovered what he wanted, a balcony screened by curtains of reed. He pushed the screen aside and found he was above a narrow alley. He could drop to the ground quite safely, if he hung from the edge and landed only on his left foot. The little boy came tumbling into the room just as he did so. He didn’t think he was seen. Maybe. No one shouted after him, anyway.
From Sunset Ward he had to find a gate into Riverbend, and thence, remembering Ahjvar’s descriptions, to Greenmarket and Templefoot. He wrapped his scarf to hide his Nabbani-black hair and walked, halt and slow and hobbling, mostly using a hand on whatever house-walls edged the street, towards the north, as straight as any narrow street would let him go. Eventually found the ward-wall, a low, crumbling thing visible only because of the lanes that ran dead against it. Weeds climbed it. Cats basked in the last of the sun. He could climb it too, but not, perhaps, at the moment. There were people about, sitting on doorsteps, gossiping with their neighbours as the day drew to its close. They watched him suspiciously. He gave them his most inoffensive and innocent smile. Just a poor bewildered caravaneer. Eventually he found a gateway through to the next ward. He was barely into Riverbend when bells began to ring out and most people disappeared indoors. On the broad street on which he found himself, sweepers were hastening about their work, filling donkey-carts and hand-barrows with dung and other trampled detritus, chasing off the poor thin dogs that nosed through the garbage. He might as well be crawling on his hands and knees; he would get there faster. He sat down on the doorstep of a ruined house, deep in shadows, to watch and wait until the sweepers passed. His ankle throbbed wearyingly. It would be easy to slide into sleep, so as to leave it behind. He used to do that, just fade away, when the world hurt too much. It wasn’t a good idea, now. Sometimes you had to run away, and sometimes you had to bend your neck and endure, and sometime, someday, you would have to fight. Perhaps not yet. Anyway, he’d had worse. This was merely troublesome.
When the sweepers were gone and night had fallen, Ghu went on, still hugging the walls, a shadow within shadows. It was a dark-striped coat, a dark scarf. Ahj thought of such things, and the shadows had always been kind. In Greenmarket Ward he took a wrong turning, down a lane that ended not at city wall but a broken cliff, with a rubbish dump below it in the ravine. He nearly stumbled over the edge in the dark. It had begun to rain, quietly and steadily, and the air was growing swelteringly hot. Bells rang again. That would be the second curfew; some professions were allowed the first hours of the night, Ahj had said. The city was dark and mostly silent. A brief chorus of dogs down in the ravine set off barking in the streets around him, which rose and died. He shivered despite the heat. Turning away, his ankle betrayed him and he fell. He groped his way up another doorstep to sit a long moment, too long. The longer he sat, the more terribly getting up and going on loomed. He shook out the bandage and wrapped his ankle again, trying to ensure it would not fail him if he had to run. The swelling was far worse, now; his foot bloated like a frightened toad. He needed a crutch, but crawling down the cliff into the ravine in search of a bush wasn’t something he wanted to try by feel in the dark. He would end up at the bottom with a broken leg or neck.
What was he going to do, anyway? Ahjvar didn’t want him around when there was killing to be done, and he could hardly persuade him to simply abandon Marakand and what little hope Catairanach’s doubtful promise had held out. He wanted to keep the man safe, safe and his, in the ruin on the cliff’s edge by the sea, and that was hardly his right, or right at all, when it damned Ahjvar to possession, to the cycle of madness and murder. He made Ahjvar into an excuse to stay as he was, where he was, made him a refuge from . . . the vastness of what might come. He used him, that was the truth of it. And did not Ahj deserve better, out of love, out of common humanity?
Distant and deep under the temple, he could feel the presence of the thing that was not a god, though he might have taken it for godhead had he not twice in this day met a similar shape of power, and had a name that might belong to it given to him in a story. Finding Ahjvar, trying to persuade him this Voice was something beyond his ability to kill, beyond the reach of any single small goddess of the earth such as Catairanach, would simply suggest to Ahj that maybe death was within his reach at last.
Maybe that would be so, and if it were, did Ghu have any right to stand between him and an end, however it came? Right, no. Need, yes. He needed Ahjvar. He did. He couldn’t let him go.
Which was what mad Hyllau had thought, yes? Mine, mine, mine.
He sighed and turned back to find a street heading more towards the temple. Though how he was to get over the temple wall with a foot so swollen and blindingly painful when he put any weight on it, he didn’t know. Knock at the gate with an urgent need for prayer? That, at least, would bring him swiftly to the Voice, if it did not send him straight to the deep well. Perhaps there would be some easy stretch of wall. The ward-walls seemed half-abandoned; perhaps the temple wall would be in no better repair, or one of the patches of old ruin that crowded cheek by jowl with inhabited houses would provide some easier way to scramble up.
And then?
He shoved that thought away angrily and felt himself sliding down into childhood again. Child’s thought. Slave’s thought. Child’s words, slave’s words. Simple words for simple thoughts. Later didn’t matter. Later wasn’t his. Nothing was his but here. Now. Here and now, he wanted Ahjvar safe and away.
He’d learnt harder words and harder thoughts, and values harder to hold, maybe, and had anyone asked him, would you, will you, before they took him and said, be ours? Well, the ones who had claimed him had asked, he couldn’t pretend they hadn’t, and he’d said, yes, not understanding, maybe, what he took and what he gave. Was it fair, what they’d done? A child’s question. Most things weren’t fair, though they should be. Was it right? Was it needful, for what was right? Ghu who had been a horseboy in the stables of the high lord of all Choa, Ghu who had been Mother Nabban only knew what poor girl’s secret and sorrow, thrown into the river to drown before he’d hardly drawn breath, to be caught in the reeds and fished out wailing by a horseboy watering his charges, couldn’t say. He’d been, if not utterly a simpleton as they called him, simple enough, till he’d gotten benighted on the high slopes seeking a foa
ling mare in a spring snowstorm. He had come down with mare safe, and foal, and a fever the head groom had thought he’d die of. Maybe he had. The world had been broken, melted down and reforged for him, in those few fevered days when the river and the mountain’s snows had flowed together into light.
The bout of fever, the head groom said resignedly, had done simple Ghu’s wits no good at all.
He couldn’t go back to that place. Wear it as a cloak, yes, carry it as a shield upon his road, yes, but he couldn’t crawl back inside that boy. And that meant he could not go on staggering blind and thoughtless in pursuit of Ahjvar this night without thinking why he did and what he meant to do, and what greater harm he might bring to what was already set in motion, drawing the eye of the Lady, the attention of the Red Masks, upon Ahj.
He passed from Greenmarket into Templefoot Ward through a gateway with houses built over it and had to fold himself into a doorway as a patrol of five street guard came by, led by a man with a lantern on a pole. They clattered along, hobnailed sandals loud on the street’s stones, hoods pulled up against the rain, grumbling, never glancing his way. But when he went on, because he did not know what to do if he stopped now, there was a sound behind that wasn’t the noise of the guardsmen. A scuff without the ring of nails, a grunt, hastily stifled. Someone had walked into something in the dark. A moment’s hesitation. The house alongside was another old earthquake ruin; even in the night apparent as a jagged shell, barely rising above its first storey, its windows black pits and the plaster mostly flaked away, so that it hulked darkly between its paler neighbours. Door, somewhere, but he couldn’t see the shadow of it.
Thunder broke over Palace Hill to the south, streaking the street with white and black, shadows running too swiftly for the eye to catch before the night took everything again and left him blinded by the glare.
It wasn’t a knife or club that came at him out of that moment of blindness, which he’d been expecting, but a fist. He trapped it between his hands as much by luck as anything, and hopped sideways from the kick that was probably following, jerked his attacker towards himself and punched hard. He missed the face in the dark, hit solid, bony shoulder and was flung back into a wall. Playing the innocent fool didn’t work on people who attacked without warning out of the night, but he dropped to the ground anyway, not cowering but not where he was expected to move. His attacker lurched off-balance as his following punch met air and then, with a suppressed hiss, the wall. The man crashed down, his legs hooked out from under him, but before Ghu could get him pinned he rolled away, striking out as he went. He hit the swollen ankle. Ghu gasped and curled up small, for a moment unable to think. He’d been ignoring it, floating on the pain, all night; he didn’t need it brought to his attention now. He hit out in anger, then, wanting, just for a moment, to hurt, and the man, back on his feet, doubled over. Ghu swept his legs out from under him again and dug fingers into his throat. He had his forage knife out. Picking up bad habits from Ahj.