Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  Ghu shook his head, could not speak.

  The old man—the old man he knew, the old man had turned on his heel once, in the horsefair, eyes wide, and bowed to him, stable-grimed slave that he was, leading a pair of yearlings Lord Sia had purchased for racing, and hurried away . . .

  He knew all of them, even the child, who could not have been born when he fled. He knew them. They knew him.

  The family of the Swajui shrine.

  The shrine, burning. Soldiers. The shrine, burning. The general, a face of terror, a moustache, a helmet with a crest like antlers. Soldiers, and more soldiers.

  The gods were dead, they cried. The empress’s will would have no gods set before herself, no prophets crying of the wind from the desert, the wind from the northern mountain, the fall of the house of Min-Jan and the Peony Throne cast down.

  Soldiers hunted them through the forest. Soldiers dragged them away and beat them and kicked them, and the shrine burned and the house and they hacked at the holy tree.

  They were kept with the former Kho’anzi, to die with him for hiding his rebels, which they had not done, but two days past the priestess who kept the shrine of Father Nabban in the town had preached against the new goddess in the market of Dernang. The empress as goddess was a lie, she cried. The time of the Min-Jan emperors was ended. She was cut down by soldiers in the town, and then in his rage, because that was not punishment enough, the general hanged the family of priests of the Mother, the child last of all, grinning, laughing, as he put the rope around her neck. Hanged them from the window of the upper room, while the lame old lord in his chains tore his wrists raw to come at him.

  They fled to him, the ghosts, nothing to see, memory and soul, scent and light—they flung themselves into him, and the river was waking in him to set them free, to give that blessing and break those bonds, to end the pain and let them go.

  The corpses hung empty and he was on his knees, leaning his forehead on the cold and fog-damp stone, fingers clawed against it.

  He could break the stone, in this moment, this place. Shatter it, pull down every tower. He had but to call to Dotemon and turn her loose to do what she would. He hanged our priests, whose family vows forbade them weapons. His thought. Theirs, Mother and Father. Zhung Musan hanged a child. He made the child watch, till the end, the last of them, as they were thrown out the window. There were no words.

  He shivered as with deep cold. Ahjvar laid down the crossbow and crouched by him, hands on his shoulders.

  “Zhung Musan,” Ghu said. Words. There, he had found words. But too few. Found more. Enough, if they could ever be so. “Priests. The family. Because a priestess in the town spoke against the new lying empress, the false goddess. The child. It was not a swift death, hers, Ahj, she was so light. Ahj, they are all our folk, all Nabban, but I will not, we offer no quarter to Zhung Musan.”

  There was a weight of oppression lying on the gods, crushing them. Smothering. But their rage went deep as their sorrow, and he was their outlet. It flooded blood and bone.

  “Yes,” Ahjvar said, and caught up the crossbow to follow when he went over the edge and strode to the door, and the torches flared like bonfires and the fog roiled and spread like wings about them.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Rising ramp and shallow steps making two right-angled turns to the second-storey entrance hall. Soldiers in short, banded cuirasses, on their helmets a badge Ghu knew for the imperial peony, came out from the cover of the porch to bar the way, but they stood in a cloud of fear and they saw . . . he did not know what. The world was little more solid than the fog, and Ahj, to his sight, had gone like a ghost to something that vision could not quite truly grasp: hearthfire, the warmth of the sun and the shadows of the forest, and the harsh web of the curse that bound him in the world, spun steel and adamant, tied into Ghu himself.

  “Stand aside,” he said, and to his ears his voice sounded little more than a whisper. The soldiers scattered back as if some great wave of mountain snow bore down on them, and the dogs poured by, wolf, snake, dragon, smoke. They milled about, waiting. Ahjvar put his shoulder to the door and flung it wide.

  Beyond the axe-scarred entry-hall more guards, who fled like the first, and they found the stairs that climbed inside the outer wall. No time to stop and wonder what he did, would do. The river’s flood, the snowslip moving . . . He brought the dogs back to follow at his heels, to not run their fool heads into trouble. Two women on the landing, hard to see, one in bright-lacquered armour, one with the taste of wizardry in her, the one who had walked into a wall before she shed Ahjvar’s spell of blindness. Power gathered to her and she cried, “The depths of the river swallow all!” flinging out her arms, but the rushing darkness of her magic fled into the river’s depths in him with no harm, though the line of poetry was meant to choke and blind and drown them. In the spell’s loss, she gasped and fell fainting. Ahjvar took his hand from the trigger of the bow and pointed it ceilingward again when the banner-lady laid down her sword and went to her knees, and they pushed past, but the wizard recovered, crying out, “The curse of the Old Great Gods!” Ghu felt the air burn as she swept at him with some weapon that trailed fire. Ahjvar rounded on her to kick and she went off the stairs over the single rail of the banister. She died when she hit the floor, the burning flail smouldering in the air, then dying with her.

  Her soul, stunned and afraid and overwhelmed . . . a momentary coldness, a pull as inexorable as that of the road to the Old Great Gods and she slipped away. Gone, and not to the road. Taken.

  Wrong.

  Another landing, and footsteps. The warrior lady they had passed came racing up the stairs after them with two common soldiers sent on before her, angry, fearful, shouting incoherent threats. “Devil” was in their words, taken from her. Ahj shot the foremost and the bolt passed through the soldier’s chest and the left arm of the lady behind to thunk into the wall. The soldier pitched back dying into the lady but she yelled, staggered sideways, and shoved the body rolling down the stairs. Ahjvar flung the crossbow aside to draw his sword, gone cold and still in the flaming heart of him. “Go,” he said, so Ghu went on. He heard them fall behind him, felt their dying, near enough he could reach in pity to free them and let them answer the pull to their road. The coldness that had taken the wizard did not claim them. He felt rather than heard Ahj following him, even if it was no more than the touch of reins of cobweb binding them, broken soul to mountain’s heart, as he swung around the turn of the stairs.

  More banner-lords, the least of the nobles of the land, assembling, half-dressed, half-armed, shedding attendants and servants, when the stairs ended and he must cross through a lamplit hall with a dais and the scattered cushions of a court. One went to his knees, forehead to the floor, and whispered, “My lord,” in a voice like a dreamer, and some of them drew back, but they were many, and between him and the screened passage to the further stairs.

  Ahjvar was there again, sword blooded, shield notched. “Behind me, remember? Get back.”

  “We’re come for Lord Daro Korat,” Ghu told the warriors, ignoring him. “Best you stand aside, for love of the gods of Nabban.”

  One lord laughed, but most were afraid.

  “Zhung Musan,” he added. “Where is he?”

  “The general went up to the Kho’anzi,” a woman answered, and moved away from the far passage. Not the answer she should have made, being a Zhung banner-lady wearing the imperial badge.

  He gave her the slightest of acknowledging bows and walked forward, and the dogs went again before him. Ahjvar followed, and was not happy with that. There was fear in that audience-chamber, and confusion, and they were not sure what they saw, but some of the young attendants had bows. He felt very far away from it all, very heavy, as though the world, the very stone and flesh of it, was nothing but shadows and light on the water, and he alone a thing of weight and matter.

  “In the name of the Old Great Gods,” another woman cried out, and a man, “Daro traitor!” and with one mo
ve drew his sword and half severed the neck of the lady who had answered Ghu. That, after the ghosts of the priests—he was braced to endure, a rock in the stream, did not let himself falter, not drown in her flooding emotions, but stepped aside as Ahjvar went past him, and the dogs swept ahead, singing in their throats. He had his knife in his own hand for the first who came against him, and the Zhung lord who had knelt rose and went for those who would block the upper stairs.

  Then they were through, he with Ahjvar close ahead, with a following, and there was blood on his knife, his hand.

  Their own folk. His. The gods mourned.

  But some followed him. He could not wonder at that, in this place and time. Only take what they offered to whatever of their gods they perceived in him and use it worthily.

  “Up,” he said and they went up together.

  Shouting above, something about rebels and a prince, gates breached.

  A woman’s voice rose shrilly. “They can’t have crossed without word coming. It isn’t Prince Dan, it can’t be. The beacons—”

  From a window, a glimpse of distant fire, away towards the western gate. A man’s voice: “But the empress’s orders—”

  “Her orders were to bring Choa back to her, and if that means killing the Daro traitor now to keep him from the rebels—” A crashing, as of furniture overturned.

  The upper landing, glazed porcelain lamps like waterlilies, a choice of two doors, both double-leaved, both ornately painted in intricate figures. They hit the door of what would be the west-facing room together. Not barred; the latch shattered. Ahjvar swung in front of him and a knife had left his hand as a soldier with a crossbow turned to face them. That one pitched into the floor, hilt standing out from his eye, and the bolt hit the ceiling. Two more came on in a rush. Ghu left them to Ahjvar and went around, to where the old man had been half dragged from his couch, a table overturned. A woman he thought vaguely familiar sprawled weeping and cursing all in a tangle with him, her arms twisted awkwardly. There was a rope about Daro Korat’s neck. She had thrust her hands into the noose and struggled still to free him.

  Ghu slashed the rope first of all and the woman, never leaving off her sobbing or her invocation of all seven devils against the general, tugged frantically and got the noose free as the two tumbled the rest of the way onto the floor. The argument—he thought it had been that—of the Zhung commanders broke up, the woman and the younger man, great lady and lord by their gilded helms and fine armour, turning to Ahjvar. Soldiers and a pair of banner-lords scattered in confusion from those who had followed Ghu. Shouting, each group accusing the other of treachery, demanding surrender to the will of their gods. The soldiers attacked and the two banner-ranked went for Ahjvar.

  No place for Ghu in that fight. The general, with a roar like a thwarted animal, drew his sword—Ghu leapt over Daro Korat and the woman who shielded the old man with her body as the man came at him, leaving the dogs to defend the lord of the Daro and the woman from any Zhung soldier who might sidle around behind. He faced what the little priestess-child had seen. Snarling face, antlered helm—a lust to instil fear, to see submission, to know his enemies broken and debased before him—baffled simpleton’s rage that he should be opposed, his power not acknowledged . . .

  I see you. You think they will have you god of this land? No priest, no holy man, not even full-blooded Nabbani—

  Were the words even spoken? No, and that was not the general’s thought, either, though his strangely simple mind made an open road for it. Ghu ducked the sweeping blade, felt himself battered by the grinning hunger of the man wielding it. A joy in anticipated death. Monstrous, and the rage of the god and goddess was a deep, hot, and black-hearted thing, kindled for one child, in one moment. It thought nothing of the folk and the land and all the great injustice and the great suffering, but stood for it. And burnt all his own away.

  Those who found their pleasure in the torment of others went to the Old Great Gods unblessed, unforgiven. No pity for such from the gods of their birth, no pity for what they would find, on their long, long road.

  Good armour, no opening for the forage-knife to hook and bite. He retreated, a line away from the old lord, and the general followed, still grinning and yet spitting foulest insults, till the wall was at Ghu’s back. He was not where the general struck, and the sword caught in the panelling. Rolling off the floor, he slashed the tendons at the back of the knee, was up and out of the way as the general staggered down, still raging and obscene.

  The few of the general’s soldiers still living had fallen back to the furthest corner and knelt, weapons cast down. Ahjvar. Ghu stepped out of his way, and Ahj had no compunction at all about finishing Zhung Musan unseen from behind, the Northron blade thrust up under the brim of his helmet, kicking him aside as he crumpled like he was so much rubbish.

  Lord Korat was praying; he had struggled free of the old woman’s frantic hands and stood supporting himself on her shoulder. She was—who? A house-slave, a woman of the family chambers. Physician’s assistant. Liamin. Her name came to Ghu, but he did not think he had ever known it. It was an old rote prayer the Kho’anzi chanted, but all his soul was in it.

  “Hear us, lord of the mountains and the hills, hear us, lady of the rivers and the lakes, let the heights be our comfort, let the waters be our consolation, hold us and guard us, defend us and bless us for the road in the hour of our dying . . .”

  Other voices joined in. There was a white light in the room, a pearliness to the currents of flowing fog, as though they waded in the ghost of a river that had drowned the moon.

  But the gods fell away, leaving Ghu empty, a hollow ruin in the wind and the night, so he could not see or think. There was grey dawn seeping in, and the fog withdrawing. There was Ahjvar, hazed in light, darkness and starlight, snowlight and river of Ghu’s own will wrapping the flame of a human soul that was all scarlet and gold, holding him together. There was Ahj to drag him close, speaking into his hair Praitannec words he could not hear, not understand through the emptiness that was in him. His silence was frightening Ahj. Feeling as though he groped and gathered some scattered basket of yarn, Ghu pulled tangled strands of himself together. So weak and dizzy and strangely light, but that was the passage of the gods through him. So cold. He was shuddering with it.

  “All right,” he said, because Ahjvar was trying to get the coat off him. “All right, all right. It’s not my blood. I’m scratched, no more.”

  Ahj was a reassuringly solid bulk to lean his head on nonetheless.

  “That,” Ahjvar was saying, “is why you don’t fight swordsmen with a damned knife. He nearly had you.”

  “No,” he said vaguely. “I knew you would be there.”

  “I was on the other side of the room!”

  “Yes.”

  The chamber was a roiling confusion of the living and the dead, souls in confusion, souls drawn to him as if he were sun to warm them, for all his chill shivering. One soul was all fury and terror still. He tried to brush them from him but they clung like cobwebs till he whispered blessings, sent them to their road. Zhung Musan last of all.

  “Go,” he said. Only that, to cast him free, unforgiven, as the gods had declared. He would not leave him here to haunt this place. But—in that moment, he had already gone.

  Or been taken.

  Wrong.

  At least the general was dead. He felt warmer then, or maybe that was Ahjvar’s coat slung over his shoulders atop his own, but the warmth made little difference; he still could not sort out sense in the room. Voices, movement, colour, stench. Slid down to his knees, shut his eyes against it all, dropped away to where there was nothing but the whisper of water, and Ahj like a stone in the current to shield him. There, he could be still. Gather himself together again in quiet.

  “Ghu. Ghu, damn you, don’t. Don’t sleep.”

  He wasn’t, but he had to open his eyes to prove it. He had drifted only a few moments, he thought.

  “All right,” he said yet again,
and pulled himself up, using Ahjvar as a prop. “I’m all right, truly.” But Ahjvar did not look as though he believed him. “So many dead,” he said. “So heavy.”

  The dogs, anxious ears flattened, crowded close.

  Ahjvar waved off the woman Liamin, who approached clutching a basket of surgeon’s tools—yes, with Ahjvar’s coat about him Ghu looked like he ought to be on the floor and bleeding his last. She did not protest but bobbed a bow before going—fleeing—to where other folk clustered, near the door, about a man who groaned and writhed.

  His shoulder ached. He must have struck the wall harder than he thought. Or the floor.

  “I thought he had you,” Ahjvar was saying. “He was frothing mad, and I thought—what were you thinking?”

  “The gods,” he said wearily. “They were angry. But I can’t carry them for long like that.”

  “Damn all gods,” Ahjvar said, and meant it. He leant slumped, back to the wall, head bowed, speaking to his feet. “You should have gone west. You should have let me bloody well go and been free.”

  “Didn’t come back for your sake.”

  “Didn’t you? I don’t believe you when you say you don’t lie.” Ahjvar’s voice was rough with his anger and he looked up, glaring. Not shouting, no, but the quiet, careful words were worse. “You should have let me go, back at the Orsamoss, left me to go back to bone and ash. You should have run till you were free. Are they just going to take you so, whenever they have a mind? Is that what you’ve come back to?”

  Possession. All Ahjvar’s nightmares.

  “No. Ahjvar, no.” He took Ahjvar by the shoulders, the better to meet that—deep, deep rage, that fear. To stop him turning away, to stop the rage finding some other outlet, nightmare or the next and nearest soldier to look a threat . . . Blue eyes burned, and how to make him understand, to quell that fear, which was for Ghu’s own sake, that rage for him, and who had ever feared or been roused to anger for Ghu’s sake in all his life, but Ahj—“No. No. Not that. If I am their eyes and their voice, it is—they are so weak, Ahj. They have so little left in this world. They borrow from me, maybe, as I from them, I don’t know, but—no, not that. What they take I give of my own will.”