Gods of Nabban

by K V Johansen

  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.

  Slowly. Carefully.

  Light. Fierce and golden. It drives the cold of the snow from what presence he has here. It is a man, or like a man, all bright and burning and phoenix-heat, and it tears the threads from his grasp, from the stone’s white-burning heart, and for a moment its flames wrap the dying and unborn god. They merge to one creature, the god and the thing of necromancy, a shape not seen by eyes, golden light and dark, deep shadows, slow and flowing, and a wind sharp and silver-bright with the breath of snow and it is not a net he draws but the roots he has planted, and the fire rips them free and they burn, red, hot, angry.

  The golden flames roar up towards him, brighter, white, tinged with red rage and the shadows behind stir, the scent of river and pines and stone strong.

  The empress cries out, a voice to give breath to pain and rage. She falls to her knees in her tent, struggles to catch her breath, his breath. Composes herself, he does, as she would, sitting back on her heels. Her women fuss about her, guards with no enemy to fight, and the giants come to her.

  Dotemon’s heavens-damned necromancy?

  Flame, is he, the guardian of the god, in the secret language of the god’s heart? Jochiz will see that dead man burn.

  A rider came at them, drawn by Ivah’s light, whooped and raised his aim to shoot over her head. Someone cried out behind. He passed her and wheeled, returned, yodelling some call that didn’t sound Nabbani. They intermarried with Denanbak a lot in Alwu. More riders, forming an escort. Some carried torches of the devil’s fire, smoky and swirling wild. One tossed Yuro his mace. Ivah put her light out. Now they were only hurrying shadows, firelit, like all the rest. And a carriage, even a plain one like this, was clearly an imperial thing. Rumours of the empress’s wounding . . . perhaps they hurried her away. Soldiers parted for them and showed no inclination to argue their passage.

  Into the night, what was left of it. Find the forested hills, get them into some hidden place there . . . wait, trust, pray, and hope Yeh-Lin had made her night march. Terror, confusion—set the imperials to flight before they realized they had twenty men to the rebels’ one, or whatever it might be. Let the fog and the dark and the fire fight for them. Dawn was nearly come. There was a lightening to the fog on her right hand.

  A wind, wild and roaring. Fog rising, churning. It was as though the sea of her mother’s stories rushed over them. Tents tore and flew, flapping overhead. A tree snapped.

  The oxen bellowed, bolted, the carriage rocking wildly. Horses scattered. Inside, Awan yelped.

  Yeh-Lin plunged from the sky to the roof of the carriage and her upraised sword met the sheet of lightning that broke from the imperial compound upon them. It burned about her, painting in white and black and threads of scarlet—sw
ord’s edge, tassel, a fiery snake coiled in her chest. White sparks flew from her hair.

  Darkness blinded Ivah in the lightning’s passing; noise deafened, as if the sea truly had broken over her. Vision returned as streaks of green and red, then fog, and light enough to see there was fog. The first edges of the dawn. She had dropped to the ground, cowering with her hands over her head, a good way to get herself run over. Get up and moving. Legs gone shaky. One of the scattered bodies about her was Yuro. She seized him by the shoulder—alive, not trampled, and he climbed upright using her as a prop, more unsteady than she was. Others were stirring. Imperial soldiers and serving-folk, a couple of her own archers unhorsed. Some did not move. Struck by lightning, broken by the wheels or the oxen. Some tried and could not, and their cries were terrible. Had to leave them to what help or mercy their comrades could give. An unmoving darkness in the fog not so far ahead was probably the carriage. She let Yuro go and they ran for it.

  Stuck. Awan and Yeh-Lin—conqueror, empress, devil of legend—had set shoulders to it, heaving at a rear corner, wheel deep in a puddled rut. They were not doing much good; the oxen were standing, switching their tails; the immediate emergency, so far as they were concerned, was over and done. Ivah went ahead to shout and tug them into movement again, and the carriage broke free. Devil and priest went down in the mud together.

  They kept going. The fog seemed to be thinning, the wind gathering strength as the light grew. Yeh-Lin came to walk with Ivah. The leading ox rolled an eye at her. “Get on,” Ivah growled.

  “That was exciting,” Yeh-Lin remarked. She handed Ivah her sword, began braiding her hair, then begged yarn to tie it with before reclaiming her blade. She was mud from head to foot, her face streaked and spattered. Not an old woman. Not young, either. “Why are we stealing a carriage?”

  “The empress laid them there. They’re dead. But Ahjvar says he’s not. Ghu—he can’t be alive, but Ahjvar says—Ahjvar’s not breathing either and he can’t be, but he was.” Sudden incoherence. She felt about five, on the edge of tears, stammering out some tale of childish woe. Scowled at the ox.

  The devil walked in silence, her gaze inward.

  “The dead king is—complicated. Whatever love there is between them, it does not demand—Nabban does not want—that Ahjvar surrender himself so utterly. And yet he does, and did long before he ever could recognize what else was growing in his heart. Perhaps after so long possessed, he knows nothing else, or gives himself away so entirely in order to leave no space for something else to take him. Or because he is too exhausted of life to claim it for himself any longer, I don’t know. However it is, he has been growing so entangled with his god, ever since that young fool took his goddess’s curse—as I might lift a cat’s-cradle from your hands, Grasslander—that they might as well share one heart and blood between them. They are so bound now, if he says Nabban is not dead, I will believe him till I prove otherwise myself.”

  More silence. Still no one appeared to take an interest in the carriage. Ivah could not believe her spell held after being so flung about. There were drums, horns, distant sounds human and animal and metal, away to the west.

  “I think,” Yeh-Lin said at last, “that Ahjvar has gone to look for his god. We may make a shaman of him yet. Or a priest. Or a lesser avatar of Nabban; who can say what is possible? The gods of the earth are not my study. But wherever he has gone, he will need time for the journey. Pray it is not days. I’m not certain how long I can hold the attention of Jochiz away, though perhaps slaughtering our poor folk may distract him a little while. Under the trees, there, where the hill rises. Let’s take them out to the clean earth, at least. Leave them to finish dying, or not, as they must. And perhaps the carriage may make a useful false front to defend, when what pursuit will certainly come after us, does.”

  CHAPTER XLII

  Ahjvar had hoped he would find the boy gone when he returned, wandered off to some better shelter in the village or absent entirely, back to the city or gone to sea or down the coast, anywhere but the ruin he called his house. To have a breathing, fragile life sleeping so close, curled in the blanket he had flung him that first night, even with the hearth and the breadth of the old broch between them, was keeping him from sleep altogether, and that only made the hag more restless, the curse more hungry. She pressed on him, a fretting around the edges of mind. Headache. Someone had died in the city, and it had not been in the service of the clan-fathers. She was fed. He was safe for a few weeks, maybe.

  But when he had tended to the old chestnut mare and left her grazing by the shed, climbed over the stile in the thorn-hedge, the boy was sitting there on the garden wall, which was not right, because he always knew when Ahjvar was coming back and was always there to take the horses. Horse. Ahjvar had only the one horse. Horses, and they rode together. Always there, sleeping across the door of his room at the Seahorse in Gold Harbour come morning, no matter what he got up to with that red-haired boy of the stables in the evenings.

  No. Why would he think he had taken the boy to the city? He was there, waiting on the wall, and he needed to be gone, before Ahjvar woke to himself some night to find him dead under his hand.

  Ahjvar walked along the narrow neck of stone that connected the eroded headland to the cliffs, steep fall down either side to weed-slick rocks far below. The tide was out. Gulls cried, circling. Also far below. The wind pushed at him.

  The garden was gone to weeds, brown and seedy with autumn. Why think of it green, planted, tended? He never did bother. Why expect hens scratching for bugs and the plum tree pruned and blooming with spring?

  “My Father is gone,” the boy said, his eyes still on the sea, which was odd, because this starveling stray had never mentioned having a father to mourn.

  Ahjvar dropped down to sit, back against the sun-warmed stone wall, legs stretched out in the dry grass. Cliff’s edge not a pace from his boots and a long fall below, if you missed the clinging path down. He leaned back, face to the sun, eyes shut. The boy rested a hand on his head.

  He hated to be touched, couldn’t stand to have anyone within arm’s reach. It set him cold and angry, fighting a sweating panic that threatened violence. But there was safety, here, and the hand a comfort.

  There was no safety. He needed to send the boy away before he killed him.

  “Hush,” the boy said. “You won’t.”

  Not a boy. A man’s voice, and a man. Why had he lost his name?

  He tilted his head back, eyes open, looked up at Ghu, who still watched the sea.

  “We could stay here,” Ghu said.

  “No. We couldn’t.”

  “I was happy here.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “No? Where were you happy?”

  A strange question to consider.

  “Swajui. The pines.”

  A strange answer. Corner of the mouth lifted, half a smile.

  “Who are you?” Ghu asked.

  So many names. Catairlau was dead and the rest had only ever been masks, discarded when outworn. Only the one mattered, because it belonged to this life and this place and was what this man called him. “Ahjvar,” he said. “Not even the Leopard. Always Ahjvar.”

  “Who am I, then?”

  “Ghu,” he said. “Always.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You gave me your name to hold. You said, remember you. Hold you. Don’t let you drown.”

  “Did I? I thought I had drowned, already. But it might have been the snow.”

  Drowned in the goddess’s river, lost on the god’s mountain in spring storm. Sacrificed to godhead, to the land. Twice over. Three times. A Northron magic, and a Praitannec one. He felt again the first spear biting, even as they hit the ground. Blood soaking the empress’s carpets, blood soaking the earth beneath, Ghu’s, his own, flowing together. Ghu’s earth. He was standing, hands on Ghu’s shoulders, blocking his fixed gaze out to sea.

  “Ghu, yes. Look at me.”

  Nothing human had eyes so blac
k. Sky between the stars.

  “Ghu. See me.”

  Eyes found his, blinked, focussed.

  “Ahj.” That was pain, seeping back into the face. The hands that rose to his were shaking. “I didn’t think that anything could hurt so very much.”

  “Dying does.”

  “Yes. Ahjvar, the Father is dead. The devil killed him, in the end. He kept me from the devil, a little space, and died into me when he could do no more.” The gaze sharpened. “You kept the devil’s thorns from me. You came and—” he shook his head. “Ah, Ahj, what have I made of you? A thing of fire.”

  “I am not.”

  “You are. I’ve always seen you so. Hearth and sun and candle’s flame I circle.”

  “I am yours. You know that. Whatever you make of me. Even fire.”

  “Ahj, you shouldn’t say such things. You shouldn’t surrender yourself. Even to gods.”

  “But I have. I’m safer that way. So.”

  Ghu just shook his head, brought Ahjvar’s hands to his lips.

  “What am I without you? I don’t know that boy; I only remember him in pieces. He only ever lived in pieces. We make each other whole, I think.”

  Ahjvar wrapped his arms around him. Ghu leaned into him. They held so, a long moment, till Ghu sighed and pushed him back.

  “There’s a devil trying to root himself in my land, Ahj. Time to find out what we can do.” Ghu vaulted off the wall, but then pulled Ahjvar close again. Kissed him hard and fierce and there was blood in his mouth—

  They were falling, he thought, and the cliff was high, the rocks savage below, but the tide was rushing in, a storm off the deep ocean, waves climbing—

  Rain, and he lay half over Ghu, holding to him, and held by him, as if they might drag one another from drowning, but it was only rain and thunder, not waves and deep water, and a tree lashing back and forth overhead, churning grey clouds, a day so dark. Headache flaring white around the edges of his vision.

  Sounds of battle, far too close.

  He rolled away, retching. Dull ache within his chest, but a horse could have been kicking the back of his skull.