Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  Tamghiz sat back on his heels and studied the pattern they made. Frowning, he rose and walked around the painted hide. It was not, entirely, what he had expected, and certain of the pebbles stirred something—chill, warmth, he could not even say which—in the blood. Anticipation.

  —What is it? he asked that half of himself that stirred.

  —Change.

  Well, of course it was bloody change, Tamghiz thought. He chased a goddess loose from her place in the world, and who before him had ever done that? Ghatai’s joy, that of a predator scenting its prey, went deeper. Change in the order of the world meant something that stirred even the devil’s soul.

  It was illusion that there was any separation between Ghatai and Tamghiz, between devil and wizard soul, or that there was any way to say self and other. There were only shades of self, the spread of thought and opinion and will any human being carried in his or her own mind. But still, they could argue, as they once had in truth, and sway now one way, now the other, on any matter that struck close to their, his, conjoined hearts.

  It was more apt to name that part of himself Ghatai, wilder, more far-sighted, less rooted in the careful moment, which felt an anticipatory thrill. But studying the constellations, running over the stories in his mind, it was Tamghiz, who was man, living, breathing, feeling body, who felt a catch in his breath. Speculation. He guessed, perhaps, too much, invented sure pattern where there was only a hint.

  But still—interesting. He almost forgot the missing goddess for a moment. But that was the crucial matter in hand, the pressing issue on which he needed to fix his wide-roving mind.

  His bodyguards watched patiently as he settled down on his heels again. They knew better than to interrupt or ask questions, had grown familiar with wizards’ ways over the years. Just as well. He wanted to think. To decide what should be done. Too much had changed too suddenly. He had come to Lissavakail expecting, by this morning past, to be…dead, quite possibly, which was something he barely understood. To have ceased existing. Or to be changed, terribly changed.

  He did not feel relieved that somehow that change had been delayed, he did not. He did not falter now, in that much he was all Ghatai: he knew no fear. But he was tired, as he had not been in years. Hollow. Cold. It had taken more than he expected to break those gates. Power lingered in this place even with its goddess gone, and the lake itself fought him, not actively, but as a hostile, draining presence. It still smouldered sullenly on the edges of his awareness, but it had weakened; it was a faint nagging pain, no more. Not worth whining about.

  His noekar, his retainers, expected some greater anger at the loss of his bride, and they all, even his bodyguards who knew him best, were walking warily around him. His bride—that was a joke. A pity An-Chaq had taken it literally, but her willingness to try murder proved he had been right not to trust her; he trusted no wizard with the secrets of his heart, and a scheming Nabbani princess least of all.

  The wedding was something the folk, Attalissa’s and his own, would understand, that was all. It had the shape of old tales, a hero winning a goddess’s hand. He had not wanted to kill so many of Attalissa’s folk; they fought better and longer than he had expected, and the temple held out long after it should have. He had been promised, years before, a quick surrender. Luli, who had grown old and bitter-mouthed, claimed she had been unable to persuade the others in the ruling threesome to negotiation. He thought she had not tried very hard; she had wanted to see the temple destroyed, wanted all cleared, so she could raise something new. She imagined she could use him, a man, a wizard, a conqueror, to reshape her goddess into what she wanted. Deceiving herself that she wanted that dream of a new god of snow-cold purity emptied of will, of caring, when all she truly yearned for was certainty in her own righteousness. Human folk were easy tools; they wanted to be used, and would serve till they shattered themselves, once aimed. And Luli, Old Lady, would continue to serve, though she was afraid now, afraid of the scale of the destruction, afraid of her own folk, afraid they would come to realize her betrayal. Afraid to find him unchanged from twenty years before. Wizards were long-lived for humans, but not so much so to pass for thirty still, after twenty years. At least fear would keep her from imagining she had any prior claim on his body, which could have been an embarrassment. It was always disgusting when mortal humans failed to accept age with grace.

  It was a pity so many true to Attalissa had died. He had wanted the goddess trusting, thinking she bought peace by conceding. He had been confident he could win her to think it no unpleasant concession, and he had had faith in Tamghiz’s body and charm to win a cloistered young woman, as he had won most women he set his mind to. Even if she did see he was something other than a mere wizard, he thought he could fascinate her, talk enough doubts away. There were always those oddities in the world, the halflings, semi-divine, semi-demonic, who fit uneasily in among the wizards or wandered rootless, discontent. She would know only too late what he intended, and once he had taken her, she would understand, as Tamghiz had once come to understand, his soul engulfed in Ghatai’s fire.

  But the child was, according to all he had ever heard, only a shadow of the goddess, and he was not going to be cheated, bind her into his own being and find the better part of her godhead lost. He would wait. He had learned patience humans could not imagine, and if that was the price demanded by her mortality, he would pay it. It was her mortality left her vulnerable to him, in the end, gave her a shape he could seize. It made them the same substance, their souls alike, humanity and divinity blended, like two dyes making a third colour. He had nearly destroyed himself, thinking he could possess Sihkoteh, his gaoler in the volcano’s heart. When he learned in Marakand from the so-willingly-seduced Luli of the lake goddess who was godly soul and mortal body, Ghatai had recognized, then, the path the stars set him. Attalissa might be a being of only one soul, but that soul nonetheless was more akin to the two-ply spinning of his own than any other divinity. He understood it, he could touch it, grasp it, as he had not been able to fiery Sihkoteh’s.

  Tamghiz swept up the coloured pebbles, left the patterned calfskin for his servants to put away, and strode out to the balcony. The lake still stirred restlessly, the wind uneasy. His captains had sent warriors after those sisters who had fled, with particular attention to the road to the desert. That was where any threat worth taking seriously would arise.

  “Shall I make you a lord of fifty tents, Ova?” he called back over his shoulder.

  “If you can find tents in these hills, my lord,” Ova said, with something like relief in his voice, that his lord was not about to curse them all or smash the walls. The Northron should be cheerful; it was an offer of rank, of bondfolk.

  “A village, then. Since we’re here to stay, my tent-guard needs the honour due a chief’s chosen men.”

  “You think there’s enough villages?” Siglinda asked, joining him, to look over the lake and into the towering range of grey and white, sharp planes like shattered tile, that hid the green hearts of the valleys. Like wise dogs, they took their mood from his, and he treasured that confidence, that trust. A warlord’s tent-guards were the chosen among the noekar, who were the chosen themselves, the trusted, the faithful. Family of the sword and the heart. He never stood on formality with his guards, not when they were alone. They needed to feel they were trusted, in order to love.

  “You don’t know mountains, not real mountains. There’s rich grazing out there, and mines, and rivers where the sands breed gold.”

  “Mines sound promising.”

  It would be amusing to rule these town folk for a time, play at kingship, remember past times when he had thought that enough to fill a dozen lives. It would keep the noekar happy, having small lordships over bondfolk families as noekar ought, enable him to keep the mercenaries well gifted and loyal. He could take a foothold on the desert road; the goddess in Serakallash was a feeble creature, hardly worth the name. It was a wealthy town, and its herds…those would be worth the ta
king. He remembered a desert-bred he’d owned once: was it when he rode to the north? Or after, when he’d ruled half the Hravnmodsland?

  It would fill the time until Attalissa returned.

  The sky-chart did not tell him when that might be. He could calculate, roughly, when the next conjunction of Vrehna and Tihz would come even without his star charts and almanacs, see the patterns in his head. He had always, even when he was mere mortal human wizard, had an affinity for the skies, an understanding of the heavenly dance.

  So. Long enough to shape a small kingdom, perhaps, but not long enough to grow weary with it. In such a crucial matter, though, and with the goddess momentarily out of his reach, it might be wise to have another wizard’s divination in confirmation. It might shed light on the other matter as well, the other that the sky-chart and pebbles said moved towards conjunction with himself.

  Not wise, perhaps, to ask anything too directly bearing on himself. Ivah had great power in divination, as though the streams of fate flowed more closely by her soul than that of most wizards. He’d known another like that, for whom the runes always fell true. But Ivah was perversely stupid in her interpretations, too knotted up in fear and desire to please, to see clearly what she could. Or simply stupid, but he did not believe that possible of any child of his getting. And he had sent her to inspect the room he allotted her, told her he would come to see her once he had dealt with other matters. Being Ivah, that meant she would do nothing else but wait until he came, as though daring otherwise would bring some punishment. He had never raised a hand to her in her life, never.

  Some dogs were born cringing. Probably the dam’s fault then, too.

  —Waste of time fretting over her. You never learn. Find another wizard-woman and breed another child. But don’t put any great expectations on that one, either. They’ll always fail you in the end.

  “My daughter, and then the baths,” he told the bodyguards, and saw their weary drift from alertness shaken away. Probably the guard should have changed hours since, but Rolf and Fenghat and Shannovai had all died when the Blackdog escaped, and nearly everyone else in the tent-guard he had set to other commands, overseeing all that needed to be done in a temple still filled with sullen, hostile warrior priestesses and a new-conquered town that he would rather the mercenaries did not completely turn against him.

  Ivah squatted on her heels on the slate-tiled floor, arms hugged tight around her knees. Waiting. She had learnt early in her life how to wait, patient as a toad for flies, on the sudden bright light of her father’s attention.

  Ivah had learnt it was best to go warily into the world, showing nothing of herself. This quiet, watching face was one she never uncovered when there were any to see. She sometimes thought they had been a cult of two, she and her mother. A society of secret knowledge, in which she wore a mask she had learned to make from An-Chaq’s example, as her father’s noekar, his sworn warriors, wore the bear-masks of the ancient Great Grass cult he had revived, when they danced naked at the winter solstice.

  Ivah was a cult of one, now, with even greater cause to wear her mask. She was bright and sparkling, adoring and attentive. She asked the right questions, the ones that showed her eager to learn and to please, but always, utterly and totally, a disciple at the feet of the master to whose lofty height she could never attain. And she never, ever, cried for loneliness or loss.

  She had cause to wonder, now, if her mother’s mask had been a mask at all. Perhaps that face had been real all along. Or had become real, until An-Chaq’s winsome charm and childlike volatility betrayed her into true passion.

  That was loss, if the great mystery Ivah thought she had observed in her mother, the secret teaching, were no such thing, but An-Chaq’s true face. A betrayal.

  Ivah rose to her feet and paced the room, now hers. It had been the sleeping-chamber of the chief priestess, who now lodged in one of the simple dormitories of the lesser sisters. In the desert language she was called the Old Woman, which sounded to Ivah like it ought to be an insult. She was too grovelling and simpering for the dignity of her elderly years, but Ivah’s father seemed to value her, and like most, she preened under his attention like a bird in the sun.

  It amused him, and how he could find anything in this ludicrous situation to amuse him, Ivah could not imagine. It must be the great joke on himself, that he had come ready to be wed and found his bride a child.

  Perhaps it did amuse him, at that. He always told her the stars would revolve to humble the mighty, unless the mighty remembered, every day, that they were humble before the stars.

  The Old Woman had been permitted to remove only a few of her furnishings: a basket of scrolls and a much-thumbed codex containing translations of writings on divinity from the godless ruined cities of the west, a box of toiletries, her clothing. Her bed, so high it was reached by a footstool, remained, with its soft quilts of red and indigo squares, as did a cushioned chair of queenly proportions and a bronze brazier with supports shaped like leaping fish. Ivah had kindled a fire of wood and dried dung-cakes in it, and thrown on incense from the sisters’ chapel, but the air still smelt like overdone meat.

  The room had a row of windows looking south over the Lissavakail’s waters to the ever-rising mountains. Each window reached from floor to ceiling, and had a set of heavy doors or shutters, to close against rain and wind and winter’s cold. They let onto a long balcony, where white, maroon-tipped tulips bloomed in stone pots. Ivah would have liked to close the shutters, but then she would have had to tell her father why, and she could think of no reason he would not mock, or worse, grow angry at.

  The air was greasy with smoke coiling over the temple roofs from the garden in the west. She was a warlord’s daughter; she shouldn’t mind such things. She would not be weak, unworthy of his blood and love.

  There were brisk footsteps on the stairs outside, which climbed only to this high room, and Ivah whirled back to the centre of the room, a smile lighting her eyes.

  Her bodyguard Shaiveh, sent out to wait, announced, “Lady Ivah—your lord father.”

  Tamghat pushed the door open. She caught a glimpse of his favoured bodyguards, the Northron nephew and aunt, Ova and Siglinda, taking up station on either side of the door, exchanging greetings with Shaiveh, before Tamghat slammed it closed. Despite the exhaustion that only those close to him would notice, he filled the room with life, energy, raw power like a Baisirbska bear or an enraged stallion. Despite their great failure, he seemed quite cheerful. He still wore his damaged armour and had not yet taken time to bathe, probably not even to rest or eat. He reeked of smoke and sweat and blood and power. Ivah felt guilty for having had the old chief priestess show her and Shaiveh to the sisters’ baths. No servants. Priestesses had heated the water for herself and her bodyguard, and combed their hair afterwards. Their faces had been closed. Watchful, like her own behind the mask.

  There were few enough priestesses left in the temple. Most had died defending it. The sworn warriors and mercenaries were burning their bodies in the garden, which was the roast-meat smell she choked on, even here in her high room.

  Some of the holy women had no doubt fled. Those neither dead nor fled were captive and would soon join the corpses being burned, except for the handful who had knelt to Tamghat, blubbering and shivering and calling him Attalissa’s bridegroom. It was only right they had submitted to her father, as the guild-masters of the town had done, but Ivah would have respected the sisters more if they had brought more dignity to it. They would be given work as servants of Tamghat’s household, as though they were the captured bondfolk of some rival chief, carried off in a raid. Folk of that class were not owned, as slaves were owned in her mother’s homeland; they were not bought and sold, but they were bound nonetheless to the service of their clan-chief, or such of his noekar or favoured warriors and higher servants as he chose to assign them to. All Tamghat’s servants were captured bondfolk, since he had no clan of his own.

  Ivah hoped there would be no former priestes
ses given to her as servants. She did not like the blank and watchful looks she saw in some of them, behind their submissive masks.

  “Daughter,” Tamghat said, catching her hands to draw her up from her bobbing bow and drop a kiss on the top of her head. “What do you think?” His spread hands swept the room.

  “It’s wonderful,” Ivah enthused. “So high, and light. I feel like an eaglet in its nest.”

  “It looks too bare and holy for pleasant dreams, but once I’ve settled things we’ll brighten it up. Pirakuli carpets, eh, that’s what you like. Nabbani screens. Those gold lamps from their chapel, for you to study by. Little eaglet.” He smiled, flinging himself into the thronelike chair. “I want you to read the oracles for me, daughter.”

  “Me, Father?”

  “Yes.”

  His flat tone warned her not to protest lack of skill, lack of knowledge, or his own vastly greater resources of both. He was not in a mood for coy delays.

  “The coins?”

  Shaiveh had drafted several of the heftier warriors to help carry up Ivah’s chests. She had brought them with her from the sheltered valley above the lake, leading the packhorses herself. The servants would not follow with the wagons until the town was more peaceful and the streets cleared, but there were some things Ivah did not want to be without, or did not trust to bondfolk.

  One of the chests had been An-Chaq’s. It still held, in addition to her tools and scrolls, her jewelled combs and fans, bottles of scent and pots of cosmetics. The containers alone were a small fortune in delicate porcelain and gold filigree, onyx, and alabaster. The combs and fans and a fantastical headdress of goldwork whose flaring rays, sprinkled with pink pearls and amber, evoked the rising sun, were almost enough to make Ivah believe An-Chaq’s story of being a Nabbani imperial daughter, who had studied wizardry in secret and fled her prisoned life. Certainly Tamghat had titled her princess, when he was pleased with her. Whore when he was not.