Blackdog

by K V Johansen

  Perhaps she was a fool. She was a wizard. She had been born a wizard, the first time she had been born. That had rather been the point. And she had been wizard-born a time or two since, and what was a wizard but a human touched with a distant echo of the earth’s strength? Which was all she had, a human body without the blessing of any sister-goddess, without any bond with her own waters.

  Ah.

  She let herself sink into a deep, dark calm. Drift through memory. She had studied Nabbani divination, yes, though Ivah had taught her no spell-working, but long, long ago…Westron forms rose in memory, and Nabbani symbols. For what she needed to do, there were no traditional words shaped by the mages of Tiypur, no series of signs passed down by the masters of Nabban. But Westron wizardry did not depend on tradition like that of the east, not in its deepest and oldest form, the one her lover Hareh had taught her so, so long ago, when this all began. Indeed, there was one school of thought that said each spell must be new-made, used once and never again.

  Pakdhala found the barrier that encased her.

  On the wall, shadow.

  In the empty room, echo.

  In the deep pool, reflection.

  She lay so still, within her mind. Echo and shadow and reflection lay over her.

  The doe steps from the mist.

  The grebe rises from the lake.

  The sun is born from darkness.

  Like a breath slowly released, she slid through the barrier, slowly, so slowly, leaving not a ripple, not a tear, not an eddy to tug at Tamghat’s attention. Behind her, something still slept, an illusion of sleep.

  Nothing happened. No taunting, no touch or taste of the Lake Lord in her mind. She reached first for the Blackdog and it was as though she stared into a deep well. She recoiled, heart pounding. That was not Holla-Sayan, that was…She stretched to him again. Dog? Holla-Sayan? Father? Even that did not draw him to her. Great Gods, he was lost, mad, devoured—but that deep well had none of the maelstrom of madness which, festering, had burst from the dog a time or two in the past, when the host was unfit and fell to it. Holla-Sayan!

  The Blackdog raised walls against her, not as the dogs had always done, to keep some parts of their minds and lives private, curtains she could have breached with hardly a thought had she ever had need. These—she could not even find a way to come to grips with these. Alien. Ice that burned.

  Pakdhala stared into the shadows of the ceiling. That was…that could not be Holla-Sayan.

  Dead. And the Blackdog in some new host, some damned mercenary of Tamghat’s, some—not Tamghat himself, not that. She would have known. He would have made certain she knew, not ignored her, shut her out.

  The walls had felt like nothing human.

  But…it had been Holla, she knew it as she knew his voice. Some lingering scent, some shape of mind.

  And just for a moment, before she realized that, the back of her mind had thought, if her father was dead, she could take the Blackdog into herself as Kinsai had advised…She was appalled.

  Wherever and whatever the dog was, she could not lie here waiting for it, for him, to get himself killed assaulting the temple.

  She could not tell where he was. That was not right either; she always knew, even weak and ill in Marakand.

  She could not do wizardry in such a turmoil of mind.

  Don’t think of him now.

  Stillness. Quiet. The enduring heart of her soul, the lake, deep and waiting strength.

  Nabbani wizardry was what she needed this time. She dragged, so slowly, an arm. It moved from her shoulder, like a dead thing. Dragged at the other. Got one hand from her side to her thigh, a start, and the two guards did not notice the movement. The light was fading fast. So long as she made no sound, they would not look. The quilt was such a weight, like ropes tying her down. The Grasslander woman walked close by the bed, going out to the head of the stairs. A murmur of voices—there must be guards out there as well. She came back carrying a lighted lamp, which she set in a niche by the door. No light for the one outside, but that made sense; she would see better, watching the roofs, in darkness. The Grasslander closed the door and turned the chair so she could sit with her back to the wall, staring at the bed, but the curtains framing the head of the bed caught enough of the lamplight to leave Pakdhala in deep shadow. After a while Pakdhala dared begin on the other hand. It would not move. She dragged at her hands till tears of frustration prickled behind her eyelids, rested, started again. Then, finally, hand touched hand.

  There was sudden movement on the balcony, a soft sound, like the wind in grass. A groan.

  Sayan save, the pressure of the air, power like a thunderstorm, the reek of burning stone…Tamghat was here.

  The Grasslander twitched and raised her head, caught sleeping.

  “You say something?” she called softly.

  Something flashed through the open shutter, pale blur and a stir of air over Pakdhala’s face, and the Grasslander, half-out of her chair, simply kept moving forward, folding over to the floor, her fall silenced by the woman who caught her and twisted her over onto her back, so she could tug a long Northron blade free of the body. Pakdhala’s wits caught up with her eyes and she tried to roll aside, to at least fall and have the bed between her and this thing, this woman wearing feathers and mail who was not after all Tamghat, but who reeked of the same wrongness, the same perversion of nature.

  “Lie easy, I’m not your enemy,” the woman told her, barely above a whisper. “For the moment.” A fleeting smile. “Friend of your father’s.”

  Tongue wouldn’t answer. Liar. You’re no friend of my father’s.

  But I am.

  Pakdhala felt the woman skittering over the surface of her mind, cat-light, a hasty survey that found Tamghat’s prison and the illusion within.

  That was nicely done. Even clever. You might make a half-decent wizard, in time, godling.

  What have you done to Holla-Sayan? Where is he?

  Asleep, last time I saw him. I hope he’ll come on with more caution when he wakes. The woman’s presence jumped away from her, and she frowned, as if hearing things she did not approve. Pakdhala—it is Pakdhala, ya? ‘Dhala, I won’t touch you. You’re still covered in his workings, snares for the Blackdog, or for me. Deeper spells yet. He’d know. Can you get yourself out of here?

  Yes. She hoped. But it was some trickery, this wizard who killed without compunction, this creature that was another Tamghat.

  His name is Tamghiz Ghatai, Attalissa of the Lake. Know that and think why he wants you.

  Ghatai… she knew that name. In the days of the first kings in the north there were seven devils…No, no, no. And there were seven wizards…He could not, he could not, he could not possess her as the devils had the wizards, he could not make himself a god.

  The wizards weren’t possessed. But what he intends for you is worse. And he will make himself a god, ya, or close enough.

  Pakdhala fought to flatten out the panic that thrummed in her chest. Tamghat—Ghatai—might feel it. Stay calm, stay quiet, battle-focused. Deal with the necessary now.

  Where’s the Blackdog?

  The woman straightened up from cleaning her blade, head cocked as if listening. He knows I’m near again. Don’t let Tamghiz take you, godling. I’d have to kill you and I don’t want to have to fight your slave over it.

  The Blackdog isn’t—

  But she was gone, a pale blur and a kiss of air. An owl?

  Pakdhala took deep breaths. The night stank of blood now. A devil was coming for her. Don’t think of that. Don’t. Concentrate on breath, breath on breath. A trout lying in shadow. Let the memories rise, still and dark as fish. There, stillness.

  Hand lay against hand. Palace of the Sun, the active principle, inverted. Negation of spinning. Opening, unbinding. She traced the signs against her left palm with one slow, clumsy, right-hand finger. Great Gods, strength in her left hand and arm, mastery of her left hand.

  That hand found her throat, found the knot, the
final knot that bound Ivah’s working there. She picked at it. The cord was braided of hair, as she had thought when she glimpsed it in the mirror, but most of the hair was old and brittle. She could imagine where it came from. Whatever had possessed her to allow that Old Lady, generations back, to persuade her that a tomb would be more fitting than giving the bodies of dead incarnations back to the lake, or taking them to the cairns in the Valley of the Dead where the bones of generation upon generation of Lissavakaili were interred?

  Finally the knot gave, and she felt, oh, as if her lungs expanded with air, some great weight gone from her. Pakdhala sat up, crumpling the knotted braid in her hand.

  She slid from the bed and stretched, loosening painful muscles. Her legs felt wobbly and she still fought the weakness that always took her on this stretch of the desert road, on top of having had nothing at all to eat for two—three?—days.

  Pakdhala was dressed only in a sleeveless cotton shift. She did not waste time searching for something darker. The guard might be due to change any time; he might probe deeper and discover she was awake; he might come seeking the owl-woman. She took a long dagger from the dead Grasslander—sword and spear too cumbersome for the path she was taking—and knotted an embroidered table-runner around her waist as a belt to hold it.

  She had no plan any longer. If there were faithful sisters, she could not find them and was not going to seek. She wanted her father, wanted the Blackdog between her and the devil, wanted to run, and run, and run until she was safe on the caravan road again, and Lissavakail could go to ruin without her.

  She had to step over the body of the Salt Desert woman. Her head lay on the other side of the balcony. Pakdhala looked only to make sure she didn’t tread in the blood and leave betraying footprints. Then she climbed to the railing.

  Heavy fog hung over the lake, bringing horizons close, the next roof, no more, but the scent of the unseen water cleared her head. She drew strength from the very air. For a long moment she stood, poised on the stone balustrade. Below were roofs and courts and somewhere, the outer wall of the temple. Beyond that was the moving darkness that was the lake. Her lake. She could feel it, pulling her.

  Her self.

  Then she climbed over the rail at the southern edge of the balcony and dropped to a lower roof. Old Lady Luli had never let her play with even the youngest novices, but in other lifetimes, she had grown up among them. Even in blind fog, she knew these roofs as well as she knew the streets of At-Landi or Serakallash.

  She saw none of the priestesses who should have been posted on the rooftops, though she felt a human presence here and there as she flitted past.

  When she came to the court of the water-gate, it seemed long-deserted. Weeds grew in cracks between the paving stones, and even a small pine tree had taken root. Pakdhala hung from the edge of the last roof and dropped, hissing and hopping a moment on one foot when she landed on a shard of broken tile.

  She had seen decay all over the temple from above. Paint and gilding were peeling from the eaves and the carved gable-ends, tiles were cracked or missing or held sodden cushions of moss. Nesting starlings squawked within holes and pigeons had colonized whole rooftops. It all confirmed the owl-wizard’s words: Tamghat was no tyrant who planned to rule here. Lissavakail was only a means to take Attalissa, no value in itself. Better for her people to be abandoned and godless than ruled by a devil-god.

  Gods, Great Gods, Sayan, Kinsai—someone, help. She wanted to be back on the desert road, Flower pacing lightfoot beneath her. But the road was not there for her: Bikkim dead, her father—Great Gods help him, if he was still within their reach—gone. Her whole body seemed strange, dissolving in liquid waves of cold and bowel-loosening heat.

  She should never have come back. The devil had lured her back; she knew that now.

  The water-gate itself was gone, the gateway closed with rough masonry, but the tower still stood over it. Pakdhala climbed the steps to the bell-chamber and scrambled from there down onto the wall. This wasn’t a city wall like that of Marakand, or one of the great fortresses that guarded the pass through the Malagru. The drop wasn’t something she would have undertaken except in desperation, but she went past the place where the old path wound down to the landing-stage, chose a spot thick with juniper to break her fall, hung from the parapet by her fingers, and let herself go.

  Hissed again, at bare feet, bare legs, bare thighs beneath the calf-length shift, and spiny junipers, but stopped short of cursing the bush, which had probably spared her a twisted ankle at the very least. The ground fell away a few paces from the base of the wall here, a cliff into the deep bay where the old trout lurked. She stood on the edge.

  The world had shrunk to a patch of black water, a globe of dark fog. Lissavakail. Attalissavakail, the lake of Attalissa. The lake that was Attalissa. If not now, then never.

  Pakdhala took a breath and dove.

  Water. She touched the shores, beaches of shale, beaches of rounded pebble, cliffs where the mountains fell into her. She tasted the high stones and the slow drip of the ice fields, the springs whose hearts were hidden beneath stone. She tasted the narrow meadows, the tended channels through the sweet brown fields, hard-won from rock and wild. She stretched over the lake bottom, the soft silt, the heavy wood, tree and boat undergoing slow metamorphosis, the bone and bronze of other days, other battles, all held within her embrace, souls long gone in peace to the road no god of the earth would ever tread. Weed in banners, stretching from mud to light, streamers trailing in the circling currents. Trout, perch, loach, grayling…she felt them pass through her heart, quicksilver. The gnarled roots of the lilies, the slender ropes of their stalks rising to the surface of the shallow bays where leaf and blossom made a carpet for the nesting crake. She lay below the reach of even noon’s sunlight, where the fish were few and eyeless, where delicate, pale shrimp danced. She filled the stillest waters, the great crevice born of the mountains’ birth. She felt memory of the sun gliding over her surface, like a warm hand over skin. She felt the lives in the town and the temple, on the lakeshore and in the high valleys.

  Attalissa pulled awareness back to herself and floated, open-eyed beneath the waters, watching the eddying fog on the moving surface. Her hand opened and the knotted braid of dead hair floated away, its spells dissolved. The illusory wall of the devil’s wizardry began to dissolve too, like fog in sunlight; it had only been meant to constrain a human will. She built it up again around her own illusion of a sleeping mind. His prison became her shield, bought her time, so long as he believed it still intact and her mind dull and dreaming behind it.

  But it was surely wrong to feel this…regret, that something had been lost. She rolled in the water, rubbed rough brown hands over naked forearms, where the spotted cats that were Westgrasslands cheetahs—legendary animals, long gone if they had ever existed—and the elusive white leopards of her high peaks twined with the snakes. Hands clenched to fists, as if she held something. Not lost. Never lost. She was all that she had ever been, but she had grown, also; she was larger inside, she was more human than she had ever been. If Pakdhala ever became a game she had played, a dress she had worn, then Holla-Sayan was betrayed worse than…than what, she did not want to think of.

  She could not flee.

  She surfaced, gazing up into the starless fog. She still wanted, with all her human heart, to steal a horse in the town and ride hard as horseflesh could bear for Serakallash. She wanted to turn her back on all those fearful, unhappy human souls she could feel, a background murmur on the edge of her awareness.

  Her father’s daughter could not do that. Holla-Sayan’s daughter could not run, not from a child that cried alone. And these people in need were her folk. She owed them at least her honourable death facing the danger she had brought down on them by her very existence—Sayan, but she had soaked up more from Varro’s long recitations than she knew, such a Northron way to think. But it was right.

  Kinsai was right, as well: at the last, she must fight hi
m from within. By all the tales, the seven devils had not utterly consumed the seven wizards whose human bodies and souls they had taken. Their actions in the wars had seemed tangled all through with human urges, human connections, and those wizards had wanted to give themselves to the devils. If she was, in the end, taken fighting, goddess and wizard—he would not find her easy to digest.

  And in the end, at least the songs would say, Attalissa had died fighting.

  She really had listened to too many Northron tales.

  “Attalissa be with us now.”

  The whisper floated on the water.

  “Which way?”

  “You stay by the boat. I’ll go over the wall and scout.”

  “And if you’re caught, what, I just wait here? No, we should both go in. If we go over the roofs, in this fog, I’m no more likely to be seen than you.”

  “Tsu, no.”

  “And what if the goddess is drugged, or bespelled? Can you carry her away alone? She won’t be a little girl any longer, remember.”

  Pakdhala glided for the shore and waded silently over the rocks, feet sure, never slipping, water sheeting down her. She knew the woman’s voice.

  “Attavaia?” she asked, setting a hand on the upper strake of the boat they had pulled in under an overhang of scrubby willows.

  She forgot how night-blind they would be. Steel hissed. Attavaia, dressed like a peasant in a coarse dark gown, drew a sax from under her shawl, the man whipping out a long hunting knife. Her own stolen blade was in her hand without thought. And without thought, for their sakes, she called a dim light into the fog, a faint moonglow haloing all around the boat.

  The man’s presence shivered with a shadow of godhead, not quite a glow, but something that lay over him, suffusing him with some awareness not his own. He stared at her, seeing her, she thought, truly. Ah. She knew that shape, that shadow. Pakdhala gave him a brief grave bow.

  “Who are you?” Attavaia demanded, staring as if she were seeing a ghost. And almost soundless, “Enni?”

  The voice speaking out of the blind night was enough to make Attavaia’s heart lurch and falter and her blade tremble in her hand, and when the fog began to glow softly as though the moon was rising from the lake, she saw, swimming in fog, a face so familiar…“Enni?” But Enneas would not be walking, Enneas was decently buried, far from home, in the yard of Master Mooshka’s caravanserai. But it was only a trick of resemblance in the bones. The speaker was a lowland girl wearing nothing but a skimpy, clinging shift, her waist-long hair in dripping rat’s-tails. Some mercenary’s brat, or young mercenary in her own right, given the almost absentminded competence with which her dagger fended them off. That wasn’t shadow marring her face: black birds were tattooed curving from temples to cheekbones, sinuous leopards and snakes in blue and black twined around her forearms. However, she wore small gold hoops in her ears and, looking past the shock of the foreign tribal markings, she was actually pretty, lacking the coarse and lumbering bones of the desert folk. She did have a strong family resemblance to Enneas.