by K V Johansen
Mikki kept to the wilds and fringes of the encampments by day. Unlike the Northrons, the Grasslanders were not easy with demons.
From the start, there were rumours of a warlord, his tribe and god unknown, who had raided in the northeast, the west, the south. He drew to him, the stories said, rash younger sons and unmarriageable daughters, enticing them to abandon their folk and their gods to follow him, and raided herds and abducted bondfolk, a warlord whose raiding parties loomed from the grass unheralded, hidden by wizardry till they were among the herds and the chief’s vassals had no time to assemble. Clan-chiefs who raised their noekar to hunt him died, in illness or accident, curse-stricken. He killed captive warriors and free-folk rather than ransoming them. It was said his wizard was a Nabbani woman, an imperial princess, and the warlord a follower of the old bear cult that had nearly died away after the devils’ wars, but season after season they never found any who could give them a firsthand report of the warlord. Tamghat was the name the stories gave him. The tales were always at third- or fourth-hand remove, and when they followed rumours into territories on which he was said to have preyed, the trail faded away, or they were turned aside by some such more urgent matter. Once it was a clan-chief with a dying child, eaten by some inner disease that Moth was long months battling by the usual wizards’ means. She had learned long since that to reveal herself as anything more won only hatred and fear for the patient as well as the healer, even the risk of such a recovered child being outcast by its god. More often the delay and diversion was a hostile god, not knowing what Moth was, thinking her god-born or demon-blooded or some other strange halfling creature, but distrusting her regardless, or a clan-chief who would not have a lordless vagabond crossing his territory, or fresher word of the warlord that then in turn faded.
Six years, they had hunted so, and had found nothing. Moth seemed content in that. Mikki was not, and not only because they were so often apart, she among the Grasslanders and he roaming the wild places, seeking what he could learn among the gods and the goddesses and the demons who hid from Moth.
But one night when she had come out of the camp, where she cast fortunes for a wedding, to be with him, she woke shouting a language even he did not know, clinging to him, a white fire that did not burn sheeting over the grass like waves about them. She would not say what terror had stalked her sleep, but she held tight to him the rest of the night, and did not go back to the encampment in the morning. Did not speak of it again, either, and snapped at his questioning, though her hand hardly let go its grip in his fur all that day as she walked beside him, the blue-roan horse she had ridden from Swanesby trailing them. When night fell she still led them on, hand in his, until half the night was gone. Finally she sighed, as if only then leaving nightmare behind, and let him go. Mikki flung himself down in the grass.
“Don’t leave me, Mikki.”
“I wouldn’t. I won’t.” He gave a smile, trying to tease but too anxious to sound anything but forced. “It’s you spending months at a stretch away among your own kind. How many proposals of marriage was it, four, this autumn alone? Not to mention all the other proposals.”
“I don’t mention them.”
“Ah, but I lie awake worrying about them anyway.”
“Mikki. Don’t. I can’t lose you.”
“You won’t. It would take the Gods themselves to pry me from you.”
She moaned and leaned her head on his shoulder.
“What?”
“Fate above the Gods avert it. And damn them as they deserve.” She sat back, rubbed her face with her hands like a woman waking. “Ah, well. You’re right. We need to do more than chase rumour. He knows he’s stalked.” And Mikki noted that she still named no names, though they both had one in mind. “I need the start of the trail; then I can follow and not all his workings can shake me.”
“Then let’s find it.”
“Where?” she asked.
Mikki considered, leaning back on his elbows in the whispering grass, which the wind stirred to waves, moon-touched pale and black. Moth began braiding grass-stems.
“Tell me,” he said.
Moth looked up. “Tell you what?”
“Which way we should go. Or shall we wander circles in this maze of grass till it’s too late? There were never any devils bound in the grass.”
She flung the braided stems away and they made for a moment a sparkling web of firefly light as they fell. A trick Grassland wizards knew, a petty magic to please children. She felt for the purse of runes. “Everything I do points awry.”
“No runes. No flames. Just tell me—Vartu. Which direction do we go?” Moth closed her eyes. “East. The Malagru. The burning mountains.”
“So.”
It was nearly seven years since the fall of Lissavakail.
So the kings of the north and the tribes of the grass and those wizards whom the devils had not yet slain pretended submission, and plotted in secret, and they rose up against the tyranny of the devils, and overthrew them. But the devils were devils, even in human bodies, and not easily slain. And there are many tales of the wars against the devils, and of the kings and the heroes and the wizards, and the terrible deeds done. And these can all be told, if there be golden rings, or silver cups, or wine and flesh and bread by the fire.
Only with the help of the Old Great Gods were they bound, one by one, and imprisoned—Honeytongued Ogada in stone, Vartu Kingsbane in earth, Jas-berek Fireborn in water, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai in the breath of a burning mountain, Dotemon Dreamshaper in the oldest of trees, Tu’usha the Restless in the heart of a flame, Jochiz Stonebreaker in the youngest of rivers. And they were guarded by demons, and goddesses, and gods. And the Old Great Gods withdrew from the world, and await the souls of human folk in the heavens beyond the stars, which we call the Land of the Old Great Gods.
The earth shivered beneath his paws, and the air was choking, thick with foul humours that burned and the stink of rotten eggs, and warm. Mikki sneezed. This was the edge, Sihkoteh’s current reach. The ground was ashy, cinder-strewn, and only the fast-growing ground-covers ran over it, thin pelts of greens and yellows, between meandering rivers of black stone, still now, and cold, but there might be others which were not. The Sihkotehbarkash had slept amid the often-restless peaks and craters of the Malagru Range, which reached from Baisirbska in the north, setting the eastern limits of the Great Grass, to run against the Pillars of the Sky south of the deserts. It had begun to stir again, in smokes and quakes, a century before, or so the tale ran in his village, one of the hunters who ventured into the fire-mountains told them. And when his grandfather had been young, that restless volcano had erupted in violence, raining ash and fire over the slopes and the folded valleys around it.
Behind them the land looked kinder, deceptively. The hunter’s histories were truth; Sihkoteh had reached so far, not so long ago. For twenty miles behind, the forest was young, as Mikki judged forests. There silver firs stretched tall, but there were few great enough in girth a man’s arms could not circle them. None older than sixty years or so, Mikki thought, and he knew trees, felt their life in a way Moth never could. Charred stumps rose among them still, like the great pillars of some overthrown city, said Moth, who had seen such things. Travelling beneath them, one struggled through a jungle of luxuriant growth, ferns, giant nettles, and something like lacy meadowsweet that towered above the horse Storm’s ears. Even reared on his hind legs, Mikki could not peer over the nettles. Beneath, there was always stone, ridged and folded, and the rich black soil was thin. The small streams that ran and twisted through the tangle were sometimes sweet, and sometimes sulphurous and warm.
“Wait for me here,” Moth ordered, slinging the black sword over her shoulder. “I’m not taking you or Storm into that.”
Mikki sneezed again, and the blue roan stallion snorted.
“I’d feel better, watching your back.”
“I’d feel better if you went on breathing. Who knows what it’s like at the crown, and
what Sihkoteh might decide to do? Suffocate you. Incinerate the both of you.”
“You could try not to anger him. I think it would be better if I went to talk to him instead, Moth. Alone.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“He’s a god, a wild god with no folk, and dangerous. You will stay here, Mikki, and wait for me. Promise me you’ll not follow.”
“Wolf—”
“Your word you’ll wait here, Mikki Sammison.”
Mikki sighed. “I’ll wait. Go on, then. Don’t get yourself killed.” Because if she feared for him this much, perhaps she did see something to fear, vague shadows of possibility, up on the volcano’s rim.
Moth left him without looking back, picking a way through the ash and stone, towards the summit. She was soon lost to sight amid the earth-hued landscape, reappeared briefly, a figure already frail with distance, and then lost again, into some fold of the mountainside.
Mikki settled down to wait.
Late in the evening, oily grey clouds boiled over the mountaintop and Storm, swishing his tail and browsing, or pretending to, fell away to nothing but a skull amid the nettles. Mikki tensed, lying head on paws, watching the horizon far above. All was still again. The clouds diffused, turning the lowering sun red.
The god Sihkoteh was aware of her from the time she stepped onto the ashy wastelands that surrounded the peak. He might have been watching even earlier, as she and Mikki forced their way through the tangle beneath the trees in the valleys below, but she did not think so. Gods of Sihkoteh’s sort were not wide-ranging in their awareness, lacked the human-worshipped god’s need to protect or simply to be aware of all the lives around them. They were also less concentrated, less…a person, than the gods of human-settled places. Human minds and souls and attention gave gods…what? Pattern, she decided. Call it pattern. Personality. A focus. The wild gods were more dangerous, and less so; no cool calculation but only reactive passions, but no human society to possess and protect. And this one felt…damaged. Anger and some hurt festering beneath a half-healed surface. Lava beneath the black crust of rock. The two were not unconnected, no poet’s shaping but truth, here. Demon or not, Mikki could be hurt, killed, by this god, and she was not risking any target for Sihkoteh’s anger but herself.
She could see Sihkoteh with little effort. Not any body, but lines of force and fire in the earth, will and heart spread through the rock, through the veins of liquid rock, too. She climbed the side of a ridge, not liking the feeling of being beneath Sihkoteh’s stone, as though the sky were some protection. The god would hear, if she called him, but she went on, turning upwards when she came to a place like a scab on the mountain, where black crust oozed molten scarlet and crawled slowly towards her.
Moth drew the obsidian-bladed sword, then, and went on with it in her hand, ignoring how the liquid rock edged after her, the scab tearing uphill, new crust seeping, rolling at her heels.
Trying what she would do. Playing.
It was partly damnable curiosity. She had not seen a volcano since they fled the western isles, and never this close to. And Vartu had not, not with human eyes.
The crawl of molten rock gave up, or was left behind. The air smelt of burning stone, stung the eyes and throat, and there was no other living thing about. Some might argue the living. She grinned. She climbed the last steep rise, stood atop a ridge of blackened rock, looking down. Lazy ropes and banners of steam drifted over the crater below, curtaining black rock and dark fissures. The sun was setting, the long shadows running together. The ground moved, falling and rising, so that she was reminded, suddenly and intensely, with what was almost pain, of the heave of a ship, that relaxed and leg-braced swaying as the long keel danced.
She reached out into the fissures, followed them down. Hot darkness, fumes that could corrode the flesh. The white glow of iron in the furnace. A tomb in the rock, a womb that had cradled bones and burning soul. Its basalt walls were cracked, shattered with violence like an exploded egg, but the explosion had followed the slow, slow creeping of hair-fine cracks, the first weakening of the binding.
So. Ghatai was free. And so, in the end, would they all be, thanks to Ogada, who had first found the flaw into which to insert his will.
The god struck, fist of fire closing around her, and Moth hurtled back to her body. Scalding steam fountained and dark smoke, noxious and cutting with particles of stone, boiled up and folded down, reaching for her.
Devil.
It was not even a word, only furious recognition, a snarl of passion.
The ground dropped and she leapt back, the edge of rock breaking, falling. She swept the Great Gods’ sword around, and the smoke rolled together, sinking into itself, growing blacker and thicker as it folded into the crater.
“No,” she said. “I’m not him, Sihkoteh. How long since Ghatai escaped your watch?”
The Gods. Recognition again, and uncertainty. Moth stretched out into that, warily, touching the god, as if with fingertips. He recoiled, fearing the edge of the sword’s blade as much as she did.
How long? She felt his awareness of the answer, the cycles of the seasons.
Just over sixty years ago, as she had suspected. The volcano’s last great eruption had been part of no natural cycle of events, but violent reaction come too late. Like the reaction of the Old Great Gods, who could have set her on Ghatai when he first escaped, not waiting till he had had decades to make plans, establish himself in the world.
She doubted that they waited out of benevolence to test him, to see if he could live at peace in the world. More likely they simply waited until his crimes were too terrible to ignore and one of them had to make the sacrifice, and cross to the world to summon her again.
Where did he go? she asked.
Sihkoteh’s impression was of presence fading westward, down from the mountains into the Great Grass. Nothing she did not already know.
There was a sort of hunger in the god’s awareness of her. Moth felt it stirring, wiped blood and ash from her face, frowning into the smoke. He had been charged to hold a devil. He had failed of his charge. He had…Ghatai had grappled with him, they had risen, burning, into the sky, claws of fire tearing into the god’s heart, the devil like some parasite, burrowing into his soul. Sihkoteh had torn him out and flung him away and sunk into his mountain, poisoned, that was the way to describe it. It would take years yet to burn and slough away the devil’s hunger that gnawed him and fought to change his being. The devil had drawn flesh to his bones and fled. And now a devil came tormenting him again, hungry to dive into his soul.
Moth backed away.
No. “No.” And felt panic rise with the pounding of her heart, felt the grave close in about her again, the binding of earth and the Great Gods’ own runes, the webs of power sealing eyes and ears, closing mouth and nostrils, the last breath gone and the utter stillness where even thought died…
The edge of the sword burned whitely, but the god was there, all around her, enfolding her in fire.
With shaking hand she traced a rune on her own forehead, leaving it marked in blood that still seeped from burns. Not a human symbol, but the sign of the Old Great Gods. It burned the skin, burned the fiery heart of her, but they had marked her and it was always there, a faint and distant pain, if she reached for it.
“I am not yours to take, Sihkoteh. Never yours.” She held the obsidian sword at guard, hands steady now. The god, like some great beast pricked by unexpected spines on its prey, withdrew a little, warily. “I hunt him for the Great Gods. Truth. I swear it in my blood.” She hesitated. “Can you still feel him, do you still have any hold?”
Sihkoteh did not, and anger seethed, shame at his failure, at how long Ghatai had worked subtle spells against him, undetected.
“Hardly for me to judge you.” She turned, no need to face the volcano; Sihkoteh was all about her.
The land around was splintered and broken. Moth picked her way down in the dark, leaping new fissures, climbing uptilted
slabs, walking rock that was warm under the feet, searing in places, but she willed her boots not to burn; she left the stone cracked and cold where she trod. Dried blood and ash flaked away from her spattered face. Sihkoteh flowed after her, spread lines of molten rock under the crust, shifting it, not daring more.
She ignored him. The moon rose, red in the east through the hanging vapours, and eventually the god let her go, watching, but nothing more.
Mikki had made a fire for the comfort of it, on the edge of the ashy ground, and sat by it honing his axe. Storm’s saddle and bridle were stacked neatly with the packs, and the horse’s skull sat on the saddle, its empty eye sockets little comfort or company.
Moth stirred the ashy ground, walking back to them, and he rose, stood waiting. He could smell blood on her, burns already healing, spatter of scars on her face and one hand, holes singed in tunic, mail blackened.
The wonder was not that she had lost her hold on the spell that gave the bone-horse form, but that she came back so little injured. He had been expecting worse and very close to breaking his word to go in search of her.
“Fool,” he said indistinctly into her hair. She smelt of sulphur and hot metal.
“I’m all right, cub.” She held him at arm’s length in the moonlight, pulled him close and kissed him. “You worry too much.” Moth let him go and picked up the skull. “He distracted me, is all.”
“Sure.” They traded edged smiles. She shrugged, squatted down on the earth with the skull and a knife, cut the ball of her thumb and traced runes on the bone in blood, Gift, Water, and Sun conjoined, for life, Horse, Aaurochs, and Boar, for strength and protection. Other signs: Aurochs again, the letter for her birthname, Sun again, for the name the living warhorse had borne. Her will behind it, and strength of soul no wizard had ever held. A bone-horse was a temporary creation, not something that should endure day after day once called. But Storm had been ghost long before she bound him to his skull, and no animal’s soul should have persisted wilful so long in the world. It might be Storm’s will as much as Moth’s that gave the horse strength and form.