by K V Johansen
“Sister Altira.”
“Are you going to Tamghat?”
“Yes.”
“The Blackdog is looking for you.”
“Something happened, though. Is he…you know the stories, when a host hasn’t been strong enough. Is he still my…is he still Holla-Sayan, a Westgrasslander?” She touched the tattoos on her face. “Is he mad?”
Altira frowned. “A Westgrasslander, yes, lady. But something fought him in the chapel. We couldn’t see it. I thought it won, but he seems…he is still yours, by his actions. He knows us. He freed us to fight.” She studied Pakdhala, and the smile of the living Altira lit her face. “Lady, you can’t go into battle dressed like that.”
“Always fussing about my clothes.”
“Always being dressed in inappropriate clothes,” Altira countered, and removed her own helmet, running fingers through her short curls. “I remember Otokas and Kayugh complaining to Meeray about the notion of putting a crawling baby in brocade. Lady, if you will? Take my gear and let me go my way. I’m only one spear, here, and Meeray is rousing the dormitories for you. You’ll not lack for spears. But to face Tamghat like a…a slave for his bed…for your pride, for ours. I know it doesn’t matter, honour is in the soul. But—”
“But,” Pakdhala agreed, and reached out for the helmet. It was at once nothing but a tingle on the skin, a coolness in the air, and heavy, firm metal. She ran fingers over the embossed images, leaping fish, on its four plates. “Thank you, Altira.”
The priestess held out her spear across her palms, then her sword, sheathed, with the belt wrapped around it. Attalissa remembered: this was the ritual whereby novices were made full sisters; given helmet, spear, and sword by the Old Lady, the Spear Lady, and the Blackdog, before the goddess blessed them and welcomed them into the sisterhood. Returning them was also how they resigned, those few who did, or how a woman was expelled.
With less formality, Altira stripped off her shirt of bronze scale, her quilted blue shirt and trousers, her very sandals, and handed over her shield. She helped Attalissa to dress and arm herself, her hands cool as mist off the lake, and then went down on one knee, dignity in baggy drawers and a tight-laced bodice.
Ghatai’s attention returned. Your folk are fools, he said. Send them home, if you don’t want to watch them die.
My folk are free folk. They act as they will.
She shaped hasty Westron spells, wrapped this little space of two souls in them. Lake reflects the clouds. Mist on the water. We swim as one in the flow of the world’s life.
“May I go, Great Attalissa?” Altira asked.
What are you trying to hide now, godling wizard? Have you met one of those silly hens your priestesses, who think I didn’t see their child-cunning lies when they made their heart-forsworn oaths to me? Don’t bother to hide her; they are no threat to me. They will all follow us, or die, when we are one. Come, now, or this one dies here. The pull on her heart grew stronger, a painful tension. She ignored it. She thought she could, safely, a moment longer.
“With my blessing,” Attalissa said. “And my thanks. May your road be short and peaceful; may you find the rest you seek.” She bent and kissed Altira’s forehead, but then took her hands, drew her to her feet, eye to eye. Altira’s face was younger, her dress bright cotton, red and yellow, a splash of embroidered flowers about the neck. “Give me your blessing, Sister,” Pakdhala said, and braced herself against the devil’s pulling. “Please.”
“My lady!”
“I need hope, Altira. I find it in your kindness. Please.”
Altira, who looked only about Pakdhala’s own age now, blinked sudden tears and simply embraced her. Blessing enough.
“Thank you,” Pakdhala…Attalissa…whispered, and kissed her again, on the lips. “Go to the Old Great Gods, Altira, and…and remember me.”
The ghost was gone, nothing left but a fading warmth on Pakdhala’s lips.
And the uniform of a sister of Attalissa, and the familiar—lifetimes ago, but familiar nonetheless—weight of the shield slung at her shoulder, the sword at her hip. A mountain shortsword, not a sabre, but in the end, she knew it better anyhow. She picked up the spear again, fastened the strap of the helmet, and resumed her course. Her strength set against Ghatai was unaltered, but now she said something, her whole body a banner, proclaiming resistance. He didn’t feel it. He was satisfied: she was obedient; she could not resist his strength.
But then her father found her. She thought it was him, the touch of the Blackdog on her mind, familiar as known voice, all the rage and wildness and power…hidden, it was only hidden, the familiarity of Holla-Sayan only a mask. He warned her of what she already knew, that Ghatai had found her, and she could have laughed, with the devil’s hands reeling in that net about her heart, but Ghatai’s awareness surged through her with keen attention.
Bring him to me, Attalissa. He shall serve us both.
Pakdhala, I’m coming to you.
Blackdog, Holla, no! Stay away! She flung him away from her, afraid Ghatai might get some clawhold on him through her. Devil-devoured or not, her human heart still loved her father. She turned her back on him, on the attempt he made to summon her attention, and broke into a run.
“There she is.”
“Your Holiness, Attalissa, you must come with us to the Lake-Lord.”
Two men, Grasslanders with bear-cult scars on their faces, loomed in the next arched doorway. Confusion—she was armed; she was hardly more than a girl; she was supposed to be docilely answering their Lake-Lord’s summons, wrapped in spells; it would be worth their lives to risk injuring her, their lord’s great prize.
But she was armed, and not stopping for them…Both made the wrong decision and drew their swords. She slid the shield to her arm and danced through them, one reeling back, the shield smashing him aside, the other grunting and falling with the spear through his chest.
She forgot her new inhuman strength. The shaft shattered, the point jarring on stone behind him. She left it and it melted like frost in the sun; she drew her sword, spinning on her heel as the other man rolled to his feet, deflected his desperate two-handed blow with her shield and thrust neatly through his cheek, shattering teeth, up into the brain. Pakdhala didn’t wait to see him fall, shook gore from her blade and went on, up another flight of stairs and out the heavy doors onto the tiled pavement of the Dawn Dancing Hall.
Ghatai looked up. He was on his knees, a mercenary like any other in wool and leather, the long braids of his hair caught back with a twisted scarf. No jewelled helmet, no gilded armour. His sabre was laid aside and he held nothing but a writing-brush and a pot of paint. His folk —noekar, she thought, his lords, tent-guard, body-guard, the most trusted—stood like sentries around the perimeter of the platform. There were sisters arriving breathless to take places among them, unarmed. Witnesses? Willing?
Not entirely willing, not all of them. Fearful, doubting, curious, angry…not necessarily hers, though. The leaders of the temple under Tamghat. Not necessarily his, either. Survivors, women trying to do the best they could for the others, women afraid to refuse, women who saw opportunity for power, women proud to partake of the least scraps of the fear and reverence Tamghat garnered. There was Luli, queasy with some great anticipation, and staring with revulsion at Pakdhala’s tattoos and long hair. These were turned out as honour guard to her, were they? Or to put a gloss of reverence to Attalissa upon whatever plan the devil wove now that she was free.
“There you are, my dear,” Ghatai said, mild as if she had wandered in to offer him tea. “Just wait where you are a moment.” Not another step, Attalissa. Stay!
She stumbled to a halt, all unwilling. Gritted her teeth and pulled herself straight, sword at the ready, not dropped to the floor as the force running through her arms, into her fingers, urged. Great Gods help her, even as a mere wizard he was powerful, and cunning. She had not noticed that she was bound in multiple layers of spell.
But here there were witnesses, a
nd she still had her voice.
“I’m here, Tamghiz Ghatai!” she shouted. “Where your wizardry brought me. Now what? Turn me loose and fight me sword to sword, human to human, coward devil that you are!”
She felt the shock of that run through them, Tamghati and sisters alike.
“He is a devil!” she yelled at them, fighting simply to force the words out now. “And through me he means to make himself your god!”
She was forced to her knees, sitting slumped on her heels.
Stupid earthbound creature, Ghatai snarled in her mind. Do you think these animals care? Do you think it matters now whether they do or not? Make myself a god—what do you know of the great world, all you feeble sparks of this earth’s soul?
Pakdhala dragged against his binding, which tried to pull her prostrate. She levered herself up with Altira’s sword, so that she was at least upright, though still kneeling. She bowed her head on clasped hands on the sword’s hilt, shut her eyes, shut everything out, the better to see within, to find the snares about her. The whispering pulse of the ghost-sword warmed her hands now. A gift of faith.
You can’t fight me, Attalissa. I am greater than you could ever dream to be, alone. When we are joined, then you will know what it is to be true god, born of the stars.
I thought you were waiting on some earthbound bit of astrology, she taunted, with effort, to distract him. No human wizardry now. She found pattern, threads and knots, and dissolved it, washed it away. She was water. Breathing came a little easier. She raised her head.
Ritual of the earth binds power of the earth, Ghatai said. Pompous. He had gone back to painting, was not even watching her. Where was the Blackdog? She didn’t dare reach for him. Look to the east, Great Attalissa. Do you see the gap in the horizon where your servants used to watch for the dawn? See where the wandering stars rise. White Vrehna, red Tihz. See how close they lie, as though they could reach out and join. Those are you and I. Do you feel how we are drawn together? Do you feel how already your heart beats with mine?
Sayan, Kinsai, Great Gods help her, she did. Pakdhala felt her own racing pulse slowing to march in step with his. She remembered riding, a little girl, leaning back, her cheek to her father’s chest, and the beat of his heart rocking her into sleep.
We will wait here, you and I, growing into one another as the stars do. Not quite the marriage ritual I had planned, but I am no human wizard who sees profanation in any change to his precious constructs. Vartu forgot that, when she came meddling. I am fire, you are water—we grow and flow around what lies in our way. She can throw up obstacles; we will change and roll over them as though they were not there. Arrogant Northron. She believes a Grasslander too ignorant to think on his feet, doesn’t she? You will sleep, Great Attalissa. Float in dreams with me, and we will merge as the stars merge, and wake six days hence a god of earth and fire and stars, and call the others to us, break the walls of the cold hells.
The Blackdog will come.
Your slave is nothing. A dead thing, a ghost that clings to an alien world. He will run away rather than face me, as he did before, or I will take the chained soul into myself, which it would welcome, if it were free and knew itself again.
No. She snuffed her burst of hope. The Blackdog was free, and if it had not run to Ghatai…it had spoken with Holla-Sayan’s mind…
Vartu is the worse danger. Ghatai’s thought was not spoken to her, but she felt it nonetheless. Panic welled. She was being drawn into him, he knew her thoughts, he would know what she did…but at least he was distracted and thought himself so much stronger that he could ignore her.
There was a distant uproar. She found and destroyed another knot. Now she felt the minds of her folk again—excited fear and eager bloodlust and over all, hope. They were fighting, here on the holy islet. Townsfolk, sisters. Whispers of individual thought.
Sister Meeray!
Rise, fight, the time is now.
Attalissa returns.
The free temple is making war.
The high valleys rise against their occupiers.
The town in arms.
Burn the barracks, burn them all.
No more.
The dead come back.
Attavaia. Meeray.
No more shame and lying.
Sister Vakail and the free temple say Tamghat is a devil, escaped from the cold hells.
Attalissa is here! The Blackdog will fight for us.
Attalissa is here!
She felt Ghatai’s emotions, too, anger building like a thunderhead. Nothing must interrupt him, not now, so many delays, so long waiting…For six days, the Dawn Dancing Hall must withstand whatever came from outside, whatever destruction and death spread through the lands of the Lissavakail, and whatever came against him.
He thrust himself into the souls of the human sentries. Pakdhala screamed, their blinding, animal agonies burning through her veins as through his. They died as one would die thrown alive on a pyre, not swiftly. Only Altira’s sword kept her from collapsing on the pavement. Ghatai shed their pain like water, shook himself, and went on with his painting, muttering aloud to himself in the Grasslander of centuries past. Pakdhala raised her head again, swallowing bile. Old Lady Luli turned to look at her, expressionless.
Fire burned behind Luli’s eyes.
Pakdhala clenched her teeth and swallowed, forgot about hunting Ghatai’s bindings on her until the ringing in her ears faded and she could control the nausea. Humanity betrayed her now. She must be as remote as him, as cold, to go on.
Shadows moved, two-score figures climbing the rising ground, coming to the edge of the torchlight beyond the pillars, and from among them a sudden cry, croaking and laboured but she knew him nonetheless.
“Pakdhala!”
She tried to fling herself to her feet, staggering against the threads woven round her, was pulled back to her knees, and cried against all rising hope, “Bikkim?”
Ghatai did not bother to look up, which warned her. “Bikkim, run, get away!” she shrieked, before her tongue was dragged into silence and she choked.
Women in peasant gowns and leather jerkins, women in scale armour like her own, men in boiled leather—all hers, folk of the Lissavakail, broken through the Tamghati defences by the bridge where battle still raged and come seeking her. Bikkim, Bikkim alive, and Gaguush and Immerose and Varro in the vanguard of them, running now, Varro shieldless but with a sword in either hand, his own sabre and some scavenged Northron sword. Archers, former sisters, one heavily pregnant, swung out to the sides and took aim. “Attalissa!” they cried, and arrows hissed, straight and low, rang on armour, pierced some, sank into flesh. She saw one of the sisters taken by Ghatai stagger back, dark shaft standing in her throat, and then a jerky hand closed around it and it fell away into ash. The sister strode forward, unarmoured and unarmed. Immerose reached her first, rocked back on her heel and then thrust her lance with her whole weight behind it. The lancehead stood out from the sister’s back, but she lurched forward and got her hands around the Marakander’s throat. Pakdhala felt her friend’s rising terror, saw with her the empty eyes, black pits with flame in their depths, and then the pain at her throat rose beyond enduring, beyond thought, and went on, until Immerose was gone and the body fell empty. The sister irritably brushed away the shaft of the lance, charred through, and turned towards a Lissavakaili man armed with an axe.
He could not stop her either.
She knew their names, every woman, every man, every sister already dead and a vessel for Ghatai’s deathly fires. The dead and possessed Tamghati were less terrible—unstoppable, but they killed with their weapons, not their touch. The little band was forced in on itself, a huddle, and though more and more of her folk were straggling up from the bridge in handfuls and dozens, few dared engage the fire-eyed defenders of the Dawn Dancing Hall. They began to retreat towards the main buildings of the temple, to seek enemies they could fight.
Bikkim was cut off from the main group of attackers, back
to back with pregnant Sister Pollan, who wept as she fought. She carried twins, all unknowing, and the father of her sons was dead at the burning hand of his own aunt. The two noekar who engaged them were pressing in, and the thing that had been Luli turned and ran, stiff, because Luli had not run in years, towards them.
The games of mortality, Attalissa. You don’t need such attachments. They only hobble such as us. See, if I say, stop fighting my bindings—did you think, I didn’t notice?—or he dies, you stop.
But he meant to kill Bikkim regardless, did not want or need a hostage, was spitefully angry that this earnest Serakallashi princeling would die for a mere cameleer, would die for a goddess the same, without worship, without anything but love for her, that this petty peasant godling was given as a human girl such unfaltering faith while he never found anything but faithlessness. Bikkim would fail and die and before dying he would suffer enough to hate the girl who had brought him to this, suffer enough for love to shrivel and die before he did, enough for his thoughts to reject and deny her.
Attalissa was the lake, the soul of the lake and its mountains, and flesh and blood were nothing, were matter spun of longing and she did not need them, they were not her self.
She had lost her way. Kinsai said it.
Flood, winter-rain-swollen, and the eastern stormwinds driving rising waters the length of the lake. Force to shake the earth, to break rock, to tower to the clouds. Between earth and sky she stood, waves lashed to flying cloud, waves heavy as granite, edged as steel, and tore the threads that fed the noekar and sisters with the devil’s will, the sinews that bound them, and they blazed and were consumed by what they carried. Ghatai was the one to scream, this time, and he ran to the body that fell, small and battered and clad only in a damp shift, forward on its face on the pavement in a tangle of dark hair. He ripped the thin cotton and, with a bear’s claw from the tangled necklaces and loops of yarn and ribbon about his neck, he cut runes into the skin, sliced his own palm and pressed blood against it, but he was too late for whatever he tried; the body bled only weakly, seeping, heart stilled.