Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  “Elsinna—good. Come stir the curds.”

  “Elsinna, did you find me any bluewort?”

  “Elsinna, you’re home at last. The boys have run back to their father in the village and Tsuzas won’t go and get them. You can persuade them, they listen to you.”

  “Tell that one—” Oh good, Grandfather wasn’t speaking to her again. “Tell her, her duty lies here, and after she gets my heirs home she can stop chasing after the pervert priestesses of Attalissa and do some honest work for a change, if she hasn’t forgotten what a loom is for…”

  Elsinna ignored them all, headed deeper into the dark, and pushed through the curtain into Tsuzas’s private chamber. Two cats sprawled on the bed, but no Tsu sleeping off a headache, or pretending to. Someone must be out with the yaks. Maybe she should have looked for him in the far pastures first. She hadn’t counted sisters on her way in to see who was missing. She flung herself on the bed. “Elsinna?” her youngest sister carolled in the passageway. She wrapped her arms over her head. It was a rule. No one violated Tsuzas’s private chamber. They wouldn’t look for her here.

  She should have taken Tsuzas’s urging and Attavaia’s offer, and made her vows as a sister of Attalissa. But it had been too late, even when Attavaia first came to them. She was too old, a wild pony of the mountains and she could not bring herself to bend her head to a bridle, to vow service and obedience. To give up her freedom to wander where she chose, when she chose.

  If only she could choose never to come back.

  Her fist hit the quilt, and offended cats scattered. The Tamghati were demanding ever more of the Narvabarkashi miners. Two more men were dead in rockfalls, and children were being used to carry out the baskets of rubble. Slaves. Narvabarkash village was under the lordship of a noekar-lord, its people her bondfolk, and that was to say no more than slaves, owing her all the profits of their labour. And Narva did nothing. There had been more earth tremors in the past years than Elsinna remembered as a child, but what did that do? Crack the mud and dung plaster of the village houses, tumble loose stones in the mines, wake babies howling and frighten the dogs. Tsuzas couldn’t even say if it was Narva’s doing or not. Or wouldn’t. Poor Tsutsu, so haunted, not by Narva himself, but by fear of going mad as their father had, or being burnt away to an empty shell like their uncle, dead last year, mercifully, though poor Great-grandmama had gone too, in a round of winter coughs.

  The passage sounded empty of sisters. Elsinna peered out, to be certain, before she set off down the tunnel that women were not supposed to take, looking for Tsuzas, a lamp purloined from a wall-niche to light her way. There was a new widow in Narvabarkash village who was being thrown out of her cottage and garden-plot by her father-in-law, with a little girl and a new baby on the way to feed, and no one seemed willing to do anything to help her. The noekar-lord never bothered sitting in judgement on such disputes, as should be her duty if she was going to call herself their mistress. Elsinna had taken the woman to their sister’s estranged husband, the bronze-caster. Now that the boys were living with him—thank you, dear sister, she had known all about that and made sure the boys had sense to take their clean shirts and drawers with them—they could call her a housekeeper and say the presence of the boys kept all chaste and decent. If it did not, more joy to both the widow and her brother-in-law. It was amazing he hadn’t taken another wife before now.

  But she wanted Tsu to tell her she had done right, Tsu to go wrathfully, as she dared not, to that young widow’s father-in-law, and tell him he offended his god in his lack of charity and family love, and put the fear of Narva’s curses in him. Tsu could do that and not have the man run whining to the Tamghati. They feared him, feared Narva’s madness, too much.

  The cavern of the heart of the god was cold and echoing. Water dripped, a slow, spine-crawling music, as Elsinna followed the worn path through the fangs of stone. No sign of Tsuzas.

  The chunk of red sandstone sitting in the water’s edge wore a crust of greenish-white mineral. Narva trying to claim what wasn’t his, as ever. They talked about Tamghat plotting to devour Attalissa’s life and not even Tsuzas would admit that Narva was no better, consuming the souls of his priests. She drew her knife to scrape the crust away. Not even Tsu knew she came here and did that; she had, though, ever since Attavaia told her how the goddess of Serakallash had hidden her soul in the lump of desert rock.

  “In case something happens to Tsuzas and me both,” the young Old Lady of the free temple had said. “Someone else needs to know. Imagine being trapped in a stone forever, with no way out…”

  The blade slipped against the ball of her thumb. “Pox,” Elsinna muttered, the most cursing she dared in a place so holy. She held her hand near the lamp, sitting on the floor at the pool’s edge. A drop of blood plinked into the water, spreading and swirling. She’d left a smear on Sera’s rock, too.

  “Sacrilege,” she said, sucking her thumb. “Profaning the place with my female presence.” Though Attavaia slunk down here whenever she came to the mines of Narva, checking, Elsinna supposed, that the goddess hadn’t dissolved away or been used by Grandfather to repair a corral—not that Grandfather ever defiled his priestly hands with grubby labour.

  She felt dizzy. It certainly wasn’t that deep a cut. She’d had worse from brambles. Her ears thrummed, as if her head had been plunged under water. She put a hand out to steady herself, suddenly uncertain of the ground beneath her. It seemed too far distant. It had become a wall, leaning over her. Water rose up and poured down her nose, her throat. The mountain dissolved in fire, white and red melting, twining, running together. Her mouth tasted of copper and slime, and words shaped themselves in her own voice, thick and slurring, and underneath—such a morass of anger and heart-pounding fear, such a howling tumult, as of a winter’s storm-wind trapped in endless caverns. Stone walls, a stone burial cist such as they laid the shattered bones of their dead in after the lammergeiers and the lesser scavengers had done their cleansing, and there was no way out, no way out, sealed beyond reach of the world, only he dreamed, he dreamed, as they walked over the hills, and he woke to rage and claw and break the stones beyond which he was sealed, and slept to dream again, rags and tattered streamers, vision painted on water, flowing, time was, time would be…Attalissa is drawn back to her lake and Ghatai’s death or the end of all hope comes in the stone sword. Sera must return to her spring. The time for waiting is past. The dreams are over and the devil in the west will destroy us all. Wake! Wake! Wake!

  Elsinna lay on her side in the shallow water. She coughed suddenly, water in her mouth, in her ear, pushing herself upright. Her face stung and her head pounded; her tongue felt stiff and foreign against her teeth. Had she fallen, taken a wrong turn, had there been another tremor?

  Oh. No, no. Not her. It couldn’t happen to her, he couldn’t take her. It was Tsuzas’s curse, the one benefit to being born female under her grandfather’s contemptuous rule. Their brother was their sacrifice, their safety, set aside and apart from his birth.

  The rage, the sickening anxious fear, lingered in her blood. Somewhere in the back of her mind the god still clawed and pounded at the walls of his madness, the suffocating grave, before sinking away again. She could yet taste him.

  On hands and knees, she dragged herself away from the pool, joints loose, staggering and weak. She pulled herself to her feet, using a stalagmite for support, and gulped down an urge to be sick. Simply moving made her head pound worse, which should not have been possible.

  Sera to her spring. That seemed simple fact, lodged in her mind as solid and undeniable as the need—Great Gods—to change her clothes. She stank.

  Sera to her spring. She went back to the water’s edge and found the floor jarringly uneven, though she had never noticed it so before. The stone—she had dropped it in the water, and her knife. She got the knife back into its sheath on the third try, clutched the stone under her arm, and found the trembling of her hand shook the lamp so that the shadows jittered and darted
around her like some monstrous swarm of insects.

  Elsinna made it to the tunnel before she threw up, damn, Great Gods damn him, and she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Her shirt was torn, wet from the pool and bloody from a grazed arm, and her trousers were better not thought of. She’d wet herself. Not that it would show, she was soaked to the skin, but she knew, and she smelt it still, and she couldn’t have said if it was shame or rage at the indignity of such loss of control that made tears prick at her eyes, or just the sick thudding of her head. Worst the first time, Tsuzas had told her once, a confession of things he ought not to have been telling her at all. Bad enough after, but the first time, it takes your whole body…he’d been sick for a week with fear of the next. Until it came, and the next.

  She could have drowned, falling into the water like that in a seizure.

  Damn Narva, but there wasn’t going to be a next time. Sera must return to her spring. Well, the wretched lump of rock wasn’t about to sprout legs and walk.

  But she needed food for the journey, and she needed to recall all Attavaia had ever said of her allies in Serakallash, and most of all she needed clean clothes, and not her own from the chamber where a flock of sisters could not help but notice as she staggered among their shared beds and clothes-chests, sodden and battered and soiled.

  “Elsinna, is that you in there?”

  Her stumbling search through Tsuzas’s belongings for clean garments had betrayed her. The lid of the clothes-chest had fallen with a bang. Her eldest sister pushed past the curtain. “You shouldn’t—what are you doing?”

  “Changing my clothes.” She’d found a bottle of some sort of lowland strong spirits, sweet and spicy, and a swallow of that seemed to help settle both her stomach and her head. Tsu’s idea of medicine, maybe.

  “In a man’s room.” Teral wrinkled her face in prudish disapproval. “For the god’s sake, those are Tsu’s drawers! Don’t you have any sense of decency?”

  “No. But since you’re here, you can do something for me.”

  “What? Elsinna, what have you done to your face? And your arm—and your hip! You’re all scraped up. Did you fall on the rocks?”

  “Something like that. Listen, I need you to give Tsuzas a message.” Elsinna pulled a shirt over her head, tied the neck, and rolled up the overlong sleeves, hauled on trousers that fit better than she had expected, once she pulled the string of the waist tight.

  “He’s up the mountain somewhere. Tell him yourself when he gets back.”

  “Teral…” Elsinna crossed the room and took her sister’s hands. “Listen. It’s very, very important. Narva told me I—”

  “Narva! Don’t be silly. Narva doesn’t come to anyone but Tsuzas. Or Grandfather, sometimes. He certainly doesn’t come to women.”

  “Well, he did,” Elsinna said. “Maybe he’s finally getting over his snit at Attalissa. Take it from me, that’s nothing to be glad about.”

  “It’s not because of Attalissa that he doesn’t trust women. It was a daughter of the priests betraying the mines to the sisters of Attalissa that set him against women,” said Teral, more tartly than Elsinna would have expected. “We were holy once too, you know. There are priestesses in some of the wall paintings, as you’d know if you ever took any interest in your inheritance at all.”

  “Damn my inheritance. You say that after you’ve had damned Narva shoving all his poisonous nightmares into your body!”

  “You were sick,” Teral said suddenly, wrinkling her nose. She scowled at the heap of clothing Elsinna had flung into a corner for Tsuzas to find, lucky him. “Elsinna, what happened?”

  “Bloody Narva happened, I told you.”

  “What? You mean—like Tsuzas? Oh, Elsinna, how horrible.”

  “Funny no one ever says that about poor Tsu. Just listen. I’m leaving.” She grinned crookedly. “At last, as I’ve always threatened. Tell Tsuzas—or Attavaia, whichever you see first, tell them Narva says it’s time and I’ve taken Sera home.”

  “You’ve taken Sera home,” Teral repeated obediently. “Who’s Sera?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Great Gods, don’t be such a fool.” She picked up the lump of sandstone, wrapped in a tattered shawl. What business had a mountain woman on the road to Serakallash? A man, maybe? Some Tamghati loved her and left her and she was looking for him in Serakallash? Or maybe she should say she had dyestuffs to trade? That was what Attavaia often used as her excuse on the road—a trader in mountain dyeworts.

  “I’ll need every bit of dye-herb you’ve collected, Teral,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “We’re out of bluewort,” Teral said, which wasn’t actually an argument. “That wife of Tsuzas’s took all I had when she was here last week. You were supposed to bring some.”

  She could feel Narva like the pressure of a headache behind her eyes, pushing. “I have to go. Now.”

  But Elsinna paused and hugged Teral in the doorway, kissed her mother and Auntie without a word in the main room. Odds were she wouldn’t be coming back.

  The wind muttered around the braided dunes, rattling grasses and the dry leaves of the pistachios.

  Bad weather coming. There was a yellowish cast to the sky. To the south, the great serried towers of the Pillars of the Sky faded in and out of view, their blue and white heights swimming behind the haze. To the east there were curdled clouds. Dust and the setting sun tinged them red. Late summer, and not the season for storms in the Red Desert.

  “Storm coming,” Mikki said, as if Moth might not have noticed. He sniffed the air, sneezed. “You doing this, wolf?”

  “No.” She considered, feeling the wind herself, with other senses. The bone-horse pranced, foot to foot. She thumped his shoulder with her fist. “Stand. You’re not afraid of storms, you’re centuries dead, you foolish great beast. No, it’s no natural weather. It’s his.”

  And it might be aimed at her, she could not say. Tamghiz had come tearing into his unfortunate daughter’s dreams as she drifted there, delicately fishing for some hint as to what the young wizard meant to do to the avatar she had worked herself so close to, and Moth had flung him violently away before he could know her. She hoped. Hurt him. She hoped. She at least had the grace to creep gently, knowing herself a thief and a trespasser. Tamghiz pushed in and took over as though the child’s—woman’s—mind was his own bedchamber, leaving the scars of his tracks through all her thoughts, so that she carried the weight of him everywhere and cringed in her own mind, knowing herself dominated and broken to a master without ever being aware she knew.

  Mikki made a noise that was all bear, a grumbling growl deep in his throat. “And the lake-goddess and the little wizard are gone into Serakelda.”

  There was no native goddess in the spring at Serakelda—Serakallash, to give it its proper desert name. It was a hollow skull of a place, the living spirit gone. They had heard as much at the Landing, but it was strange to feel it. Nothing to defend the town against…whatever came. Including herself.

  “Come.” She set foot in stirrup, swung herself to Storm’s back. “There’s little time.”

  “For what?”

  “To get as close to Serakallash as we can while you can still run fast enough to keep up.”

  “Whose idea was it to travel so deep in the desert?”

  “That would be us trying to stay out of reach of the Blackdog sniffing after us, remember?”

  “Ah, was that it? And this morning was the last of the water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any chance they brew ale in Serakelda?”

  “Probably not.”

  “And she expects me to gallop all the way there before sunset,” he remarked to the world in general. “Run, in all this fur.”

  “I could shear you, like a sheep.”

  “Great Gods, princess, just you try.” He was already loping away. “Anyhow,” he called back, “thought you were in a hurry.”

  Moth gave Storm a dig of her
heels.

  Pakdhala curled sleeping like a child under a heap of coats and blankets in one of the many empty rooms of Master Mooshka’s caravanserai, though it was early in the evening and Thekla had not yet called them to supper. Most of the gang had dispersed, anyway, to what gossip and good cheer were to be found in the anxious eating-houses of Serakallash. The merchants had seen their goods put under lock and key and had gone off with fellow Northrons who had taken a house, setting up as goldsmiths under the patronage of Ketsim, the Lake-Lord’s governor of Serakallash. Ivah and Shaiveh were among those who had gone out, which was some comfort, because Holla-Sayan did not think he was going to be able to sleep quietly in the caravanserai. The dog paced at the back of his mind. Something was coming, running before the storm.

  Let me sleep, ‘Dhala told him, when he tried to shake her awake, to take her to Thekla, who would at least see the girl got some broth and sops down, if she could stomach nothing else. I need rest, nothing else. Tomorrow…tomorrow we go to the mountains.

  Tomorrow? You’re not ready. He sat back on his heels. You can’t do anything yet. We should wait another year.

  Wait and wait and wait. I can’t wait. He’s hunting me, dog. He’s coming closer and closer. He’ll find me soon, and I can’t wait for that and doom the gang. I have to face him, defeat him now or die trying, die forever and stop him taking the lake.

  How? Tell me how you think we have any chance of defeating him.

  Trust me. That was all she would ever say. “I’m sorry,” she said aloud, opening her eyes. “I’m sorry, Holla-Sayan. You have to trust what I see.” Not Father. Not dog. “Go away, let me sleep.” She tried on a weak smile. “You know what it’s like here. My bones have turned to stone and my muscles to porridge.”

  She raised barriers between them even as she slid again into sleep, walling herself off from any effort the Blackdog might make to reach her mind. In all the long years, she had never cut herself off so, never shut the dog away as she had this spring and summer.