Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  And the other matter.

  His fingers twisted strings, let others fall, and he studied the dangling pattern of loops, blew on them and flung the cat’s cradle away.

  —There’s power in the lake yet.

  —She’s far away, she’s weak. There can’t be.

  —I know they’re out there, the sisters who fled. I can almost smell them. I know they’re brewing rebellion.

  —Seven years, and they haven’t acted.

  —Ishkul Valley.

  —If that was all they could organize, they’re no threat.

  —But there’s someone moving them. Them, the Serakallashi. There were mountain women in Serakallash when I took it, and I lost them.

  —I had more important concerns. What happened to that damned little godling of the spring? I couldn’t have killed her without knowing.

  —Could I?

  —Could I, Ghatai?

  He almost wished he had Ivah here, to throw the coins for him. He had no patience with them himself, and she had taken her mother’s book: he had no way to know the hexagrams. The sky-chart and pebbles only ever told him of secrets and travellers and the dark places of the earth, which led him to the mines, but the noekar were assiduous in their supervision of the mines, and there were no caches of weapons, no meetings of rebels, that they could ever sniff out.

  —Attalissa’s hand is on them.

  —She has no power here, now.

  —There are other gods in the mountains.

  —Petty things I could eat for breakfast.

  —Eat or be eaten. What about Narva?

  —Lost in his own mind, a maze I won’t dare. I’ve searched the mines of the Narvabarkash myself.

  —Haven’t I? Were those the true mines, the ancient mines? They were new workings. They were all the villagers knew of. They told the truth.

  —I might have missed something. His soul’s a maze, all leading into his heart, he can’t see out. And his madness cloaks the barkash. They say he has priests still, but I never found them.

  —Some mysteries are too dangerous to enter. Some are mere illusion and arrogance. One can invent a mystery where there is in truth nothing to see.

  —But is there?

  —I can find nothing. But I smell them, hear them, glimpse shadows, skirting behind me. They’re out there.

  —Are they worth fearing?

  —No. A nuisance, no worse, and once Attalissa is mine, they are nothing.

  —And Ulfhild?

  —If it even is Ulfhild. If it is, she’ll come to me. Whoever it is wanders the Great Grass. She touches the desert. She never comes, but she will, when the time is right. I’ve warded myself against her, is all. I’ll call her in, once Attalissa is mine.

  —She’s not hunting me at all. She’d see through any spell-cast confusion by now; she’d never delay and prowl and linger. She follows some other concern.

  Was he jealous?

  And if some other concern, what? One of the others? Heuslar always tried to make alliance with Ulfhild, Heuslar felt he had some claim of kinship on her, and sometimes she did align with him, on those grounds. Sien-Mor, Ulfhild and Sien-Mor might join forces, plausibly. Sien-Mor had found Ulfhild’s a strong shadow to shelter in. He knew there was more than one of them free. But Sien-Mor would never linger in the wilds, she hated the empty places. And Sien-Mor without Sien-Shava—Sien-Shava would never tolerate his little sister running at Ulfhild’s heel for long.

  He did not even know for certain it was she his divination had found, restless wanderer beyond the desert. He only guessed, because of what the pebbles had told him, and Ivah’s coins, on that one occasion. Whoever it was, divination only rarely pinned them down, and then briefly, almost as briefly as those fleeting touches of the goddess. He hoped his own spells kept him hidden from her so effectively. He did not want any others involved, conspiring to supplant him in the great transformation, or angling for a share of the power on their own terms. And it might not even be Ulfhild.

  —It doesn’t matter.

  Tamghiz told himself so, firmly. It would not matter, the past was past, and once Attalissa was within him, he would have no need to fear any of the others, even should they all league against him.

  Ghatai wondered why he felt he had to fear. Once he was lake-god and man and devil in one, he would draw the others to him as fish are drawn in a net, and make them his.

  Meanwhile, he could count the weeks, as Vrehna rose chasing after Tihz, and he could count the weeks, as the caravan should mark them, measure them off in camel-strides and camps, turning at the Landing, and his thoughts had slid into Northron, running on Ulfhild, following the Kinsai’aa down, and there was a goddess of power, great power he could vanquish and claim once Attalissa was his and his nature was changed to let him grasp a god, devour her as she had once devoured others…but he ran too far ahead. For now, count the weeks. There was time. He did not need to spur Ivah to act. Attalissa would deliver herself to Serakallash, all in good and fit time.

  Tamghiz blew out the nearest lamp, extinguished the others with will alone, and strode from the room, calling for Siglinda on the stairs.

  There were a number of diviners in At-Landi, soothsayers they called themselves, the influence of Northron Varrgash up the Bakanav, but as Ivah did not seek out clients, reading the coins only for those in the house where they lodged, she ruffled few feathers. She had money, though she spent it parsimoniously and made Shaiveh do stablework to help pay their way. It would not be credible for a poor diviner to have too much silver to spend, and might lead to talk, or trouble. Shai fretted as the days passed and no goddess appeared, but Ivah put on a mask of serenely confident patience and was rewarded. Attalissa arrived.

  The leading camels of the caravan were already passing through the gate when Ivah and Shaiveh climbed to the top of the easily scaled wall of packed earth and sandstone, and the dust they stirred up drifted over them. The girl rode somewhere in the middle, the only female near the right age.

  “You think that’s her?” Shaiveh asked.

  “That’s her.”

  Shaiveh frowned. She sat, arms wrapped around her knees, all lazy power and grace, and she knew it, too, as she stretched and cupped her hands to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “She looks like the deserts, with those braids,” Shaiveh pointed out. “Or a Westgrasslander.”

  “Look at her build, though, and her face. That’s the mountains.”

  “But surely no one would dare tattoo Attalissa? What are those markings, anyhow?”

  Ivah shrugged. “I don’t know them either. They look more like Westgrass than Four Deserts.”

  Maybe she had not been so far astray as all that, seeking beyond the Kinsai-av.

  The girl looked young, small for her age—if she was the goddess and around fifteen. No plausible mercenary, but you saw them as young as that, and as small. Atop a camel with a spear, perhaps it did not matter. Or maybe she was only the cook, or, Great Gods help the man or woman in question if so, kept someone’s bedroll warm.

  Not an attractive bride. Perhaps that was the intention. Young, small, scruffy, a dirty, sweat- and camel-reeking caravaneer who only saw hot water a couple times a year, unless you counted the foul, thick tea they practically lived on. She guided her white camel with a light hand, calling back over her shoulder to the man behind her string of pack-camels. The tall, heavy-browed Stone Desert man, his dark-skinned, narrow face striped with blue like a tiger’s markings, answered, and as she faced forward again the girl flashed a smile that made her plain face, with its small nose, small peaked mouth, and wide dark eyes, suddenly pretty despite the disfiguring tattoos and a fresh red scar like a knife-slash on her temple. She seemed alive and glowing as the first tulips, all light and dancing.

  “Heh,” said Shaiveh.

  “No.”

  “Just looking.”

  “You’d be a very long time dying, if you touched my father’s intended bride,” Ivah said softly.

&n
bsp; Shaiveh gave her a sidelong glance and held her tongue, but she looked more smug than rebuked, as though she thought she’d scored a point in some game.

  One of the men with the goddess must be the Blackdog’s host. Inconceivable that the demon was not near her. None of them looked like mountain men. Perhaps the ambush at the tunnel exit had succeeded after all. None of the noekar sent to carry it out had survived to say, though not all the bodies had been found. None of the men in the long, ambling chain of camels looked familiar, either, no presumed-dead noekar. That would have been a joke, the sort her father appreciated, if the Blackdog turned out to be one of Tamghat’s own.

  She picked out a Great Grass woman, plain-faced and weary. Probably the one in her father’s service. What had driven her to burn the spell-net and call him, betraying one of her own gang? Some jealousy, a quarrel? A price her father could not pay, he had said.

  The Stone Desert man behind the goddess was the best bet for the Blackdog. He looked a hard type; Stone Desert men were. She could imagine him slaughtering her father’s noekar like a weasel among ducklings.

  But despite the girl’s flash of smile, there was a sobriety to the caravan, a grimness. Ivah had learned to recognize it: a gang coming into a town with loss. The Nabbani-looking merchants and their men seemed sombre, too.

  Maybe they’d be hiring. No. She and Shaiveh had worked their way to At-Landi with a caravan when they first left Lissavakail, distancing themselves from association with wizardry and the lake before they crossed the river. Never again. Master Baruni had called her a useless doll to her face, and struck Shai with his whip when the noekar drew on him for the insult. She’d called the bodyguard off, but the gang had closed up against them. A miserable journey. They’d sold the camels in At-Landi for decent horses, and damned if she was trading the good beasts back now, to some Northron who wouldn’t know quality when he bestrode it. Besides, it was said Northrons ate horses at some winter feast.

  The ideogram-carved slip of bone hidden in her clenched fist grew almost too hot to touch, its edge pressing painfully, digging at her, as the girl with the Westgrassland tattoos approached the gateway to their right. She had sliced it from the thighbone of a dead incarnation in the hall of holy tombs.

  “Oh yes,” Ivah murmured. “That’s definitely her.”

  The bone fragment had been warm in her pocket that morning, enough to send her out to watch the south gate. She had a sudden lurch of fear, though, lest the bone, or what lay coiled at the bottom of her other pocket, the yet-incomplete snare, call out to the goddess’s soul.

  The girl looked up to the women on the wall, but her expression held no suggestion of danger to them, half open curiosity, half the envy of one who had a living to earn for those who could afford to lie about in the sun.

  “Who are you?” Ivah called down, as any idle watcher might, but it was the man behind who answered as the girl rode out of sight through the gate:

  “Gaguush’s gang, with the Singahs from Over-Malagru.”

  Ivah had heard her former gang-boss Baruni speak of Gaguush, she thought, but she could remember nothing of her, good or ill.

  She turned to watch in glimpses between Northron-style peaked rooftops as the caravan made its thudding, tin-bell-jangling way along the corduroy street, built of logs floated down the Bakanav from Varrgash. The Black Desert woman, presumably the caravan-mistress Gaguush, was in the lead, on a scarred bull camel. She turned off to the left, onto the log-paved lane that angled down to those caravanserais and warehouses on the river’s edge. Easy enough to find out where they put up.

  Two outriders came in at the tail, dust-covered. Ivah paid them little heed, picking her way along the crumbling wall to where it was possible to climb down. Shaiveh followed and almost ran into Ivah when she stopped, chilled. One of the outriders had turned his head sharply, staring at her over his shoulder, sabre in hand. She had not seen him draw.

  Westgrasslander. His camel spun around so he faced her, power and speed that should only belong to a horse, in Ivah’s mind, but she had already dropped down flat on top of the wall, Shaiveh a moment behind her.

  “What?” the noekar hissed.

  “Quiet!”

  Westgrasslander, of course, that explained the girl’s tattoos. The Blackdog. She saw nothing out of the ordinary about him, but the chill of his attention…the Blackdog was near enough a demon, for all she understood of it. A demon would recognize her for a wizard, of course it would, she should have realized that, her father should have warned her.

  But there were many wizards in the world and outside of Marakand it was nothing any sane person would hold against her. Though who knew if a Blackdog’s host were sane.

  She watched him through a dip between the stones and a gap between houses. Head raised, like a hound tracing a scent. A strong face, but expressionless, as if he had locked his thoughts away. Another person who lived behind a mask. After a moment he turned his rust-red camel again and followed his comrades.

  Shaiveh rose to her hands and knees and crawled over Ivah to watch the Westgrasslander go.

  “Him? Surely you’ve had enough of Westgrasslanders. Born with mud between their toes. If you really need to go making eyes at a man, at least pick a real one, a warrior, not a farmer.”

  “He’s the Blackdog.”

  “Could have fooled me. I’ve seen that look in your eye before, don’t think I don’t know. I suppose we have to kill him before we take the girl? I hope your lord father gave you a spell for that, because I saw what the Blackdog did to some of those poor bastards sent to stop him when we took the temple.”

  “I haven’t decided what to do about him.”

  “Oh good,” said Shaiveh. “Well, don’t expect me to go up against him for you, that’s all I can say. I’m too beautiful to die.”

  Ivah snorted. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  To actually travel with the caravan, or to follow secretly? Ivah hiked out of town—alone, after some argument with Shaiveh. She turned off the track and climbed the sheep path into the hills, until she reached the height with the abandoned cairn, remnant, maybe, of some forgotten god. It looked like it had tumbled further into ruin since she last came here for divining, and had been clumsily restored, by some shepherd, maybe, remembering old holiness. There seemed to be no priests to tend it, and no god’s presence that she could sense. Everyone said there were no other gods along the shores of the Kinsai-av, anyway. It was quiet, a place where she could sit in silence and think, without Benno’s-daughter the innkeeper thinking of yet another far-off relative whose fortune she wanted to know.

  Yes, no. The answer she sought eluded her; she could think of no single question. Too many crowded her mind, risking confusion and the failure of the reading, dangerous errors in interpretation.

  Chance, risk, change. Just flip a coin, call heads or tails, Shaiveh would mock. A simple yes or no, that was what she needed. She could read a bone, if she had one, but she had noticed no old scatters of wolf- or disease-downed sheep on the hillside. She might spend half the day searching before she found one.

  Ivah weighed a single gold coin on the palm of her hand, one of her mother’s set of three. Father Nabban, and she would approach the mistress as a traveller wanting to share the caravan’s protection on the road east—maybe she was returning to her home Over-Malagru after her travels in the west? Mother Nabban (some emperor in a wide hat, maybe even her own grandfather, sitting by the great River-Mother’s knee), and she would dare the dangers of travelling alone on the desert road, follow in secret, until the caravan neared Serakallash and the road up to Lissavakail.

  Ivah tossed the coin, caught it, and closed her eyes a moment before looking.

  Father Nabban. Her right course lay in action and openness, not in waiting and concealment. She seemed to feel the eyes of the Westgrasslander Blackdog on her again. That sent a twist of fear through her stomach. She thought it ought to be fear, at any rate.

  Shaiveh was sitting on a stone
at the roadside waiting for her return.

  “What did the bones say?”

  “Coins,” Ivah said briefly, a minor lie even in the correction. She wasn’t going to admit to mere coin-tossing. “We go with them.”

  “Sometimes it might be better to trust to common sense, you know.”

  “Did you follow them?”

  “Yes, my lady, as you commanded.” Shaiveh delivered her report in a mocking singsong. “They unloaded at the Oswyngas’ warehouse and I earned a couple of farthings for helping. Those Over-Malagru men are heading up into the north. The gang’s lodged at Attapamil’s caravanserai, they don’t have a contract south yet, and I heard the gang-boss, that Black Desert woman, talking about meeting some bard at Lizath’s teahouse tonight. Don’t know what the goddess is doing and I didn’t want to be noticed taking an interest. But they work her pretty hard—I don’t think they know who she is. Do you suppose she doesn’t know, is that possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like it, Ivah. We should just follow them.”

  “I said we’re going with them.”

  Shaiveh shrugged, scowling. “If you say so. And what happens when that possessed Westgrasslander sees you’re a wizard? He’ll be able to tell. Demons can.”

  “And there’s no reason I shouldn’t be a wizard; all At-Landi already knows I’m a coin-reader. There’s nothing in that to make anyone connect us with Lissavakail. I’m a diviner from Over-Malagru, you’re a mercenary, we met in Marakand three or four years ago, and don’t go elaborating that into anything fancy.”