by K V Johansen
Bikkim and Sister Pollan clutched one another, holding themselves upright. The corpses at their feet were black husks, charred beyond any hope of recognition. Even armour and blades were twisted and melted, jewellery gone to bubbled slag.
Bikkim let the former priestess go and she sank to her knees, sat there while he went on, haltingly.
Ghatai screamed curses at the sky and flung Pakdhala’s body away. It landed between the pillars on the edge of the raised platform, sprawled and empty, bone-broken doll. “Great Gods curse your name, drought and plague and loss of all hope…” Power rode his words and she trapped and held them, dissolved them, purified the syllables of hatred and let the mists go harmless.
Bikkim cried out hoarsely and ran to gather up Pakdhala’s body. Gaguush and Varro came staggering after him, and a straggle of Lissavakaili, who spread out along the pillars in the pools of torchlight like sentries themselves.
Ghatai caught up his sabre. His heart was a seething pillar of fires, cold silver-white and the scarlet of molten rock, and fires lay just below the human frame that contained them, was spun of them, blood and bone and flesh and flame, black cold to shatter ice and heat to burn granite, and she was afraid.
You are only one and you cannot take me now. We are no longer any kin in our nature. I’m out of your reach.
Little goddess of water, do you not remember why the Westrons have no gods?
I’m not Sera. Do you really think you can defeat me? You bastard, she added. Try it. Just try. But fury did not lessen the fear. He might be strong enough to destroy her. But his mind was muddy, swirling, tangled in human thoughts, failure and betrayal looming, Vartu had done this, somehow, she had turned his daughter against him and it all began to unravel there. His rage was human, distracting him.
I will not leave one stone of your temple standing. I’ll sink your town to the bottom of the lake and scatter the bones of your folk to the winds. Your very name will be forgotten.
You are still just one, Ghatai, she taunted, probing, seeking some way to come to grips with him. All alone in the world. Your poor human subjects are slaughtered or in flight in all the high valleys. They are laying down their arms at the bridge but the townsfolk are offering no quarter. Women you cursed and left to die unburied have led my priestesses to retake the temple. Serakallash has fallen… There were messengers on the road, her road, bringing him that news, a handful of survivors on horseback, but they were set to overtake the homeward-marching band of Lissavakaili boys who had served in Serakallash, and none of those Tamghati refugees would come to Lissavakail.
Bind him. That was all she could do. His nature was nothing she could unmake or destroy, but she could try to bind him as Gods and wizards had once bound him, in dreamless sleep. She had nothing like the power of the Old Great Gods, but she knew human wizardry as her kind did not, and she had allies, maybe, if the owl-wizard were near, if the Blackdog could lend her a strength more akin to Ghatai’s nature. She began weaving words together, Westron-fashion, but Ghatai caught up loops of yarn and ribbon. He knotted cat’s cradles that shattered her spells, and he spoke words she could not hear, that brushed awareness and vanished, too alien to grasp, and her thoughts faltered, stumbled, ran broken.
Fog rolled from the lake and blotted out the stars, hid Vrehna and Tihz as they circled towards the west, wrapped the Dawn Dancing Hall in damp air and pitchy smoke and muffled the cries from the bridge, where Attavaia and Tsuzas came too late to stop the first battlefield executions.
Narva! Attalissa called. Help me!
The mountain-god came in his own being, shadow and smoke, and stood by her, mingling their powers. It helped. Her thoughts held together.
Bikkim wept over her body, and Varro did. That did not help.
Gaguush stood grimly fingering the notched edge of her sabre, eyeing Ghatai, not quite daring. Even her own folk were silent, looking for their goddess in the corpse, thinking themselves bereft again, awaiting another avatar’s birth.
There came sudden pain, attack, burning dissolution of a nature that she did not recall had ever felt pain. She flinched from it as from the slash of a sabre’s blade, then forced herself to endure, to stand her ground. Narva hissed and whirled away, came back a moment later, grim, but resolute. The first weaves of her bindings failed again and Ghatai was upon them, though his body knelt unmoving. They were a maelstrom, unravelling, spinning together, the powers of each a wounding agony to the others, leaving scars that might be centuries healing. If any of them survived.
Ghatai had no intention of surviving. He was lost, lost, lost, home was lost, he could never return, his last effort had failed, the stars betrayed him, he would not be bound again, and he would take them with him…
He tore into her heart, and Attalissa felt herself shredding, burning away. Narva howled. Down by the lakeshore, Tsuzas crashed over in convulsions.
Blackdog! she cried, old habit.
Wherever he was, and whatever, he was not here.
Dead end, a bricked-up doorway cutting off one of the many small courtyards. Holla-Sayan snarled and took another route. There had been too many of these sealed doors, stairways that ended in a blank face, rooms divided by new walls that Otokas would not have known. Possibly that was why Tamghat had done it; any attack by whatever sisters had escaped would be confused by the new maze the place had become. A pair of Northron mercenaries fled his approach, leaving behind their companion, a Stone Desert woman they had been trying to carry, to finish dying. The blind sister, Darshin, lay dead there, a long butchering knife by her hand. The passageways carried the scent of battle now. There was fighting all over the temple, it seemed.
He skidded to a halt at the top of a flight of stairs. They led down to a passage past a range of cellars, out to a sunken courtyard, and, Sayan please, at last, across a stretch of gardens and up to the spur of the Dawn Dancing Hall where Pakdhala was. Moth was below him, and he felt a surge of relief to see her there.
Moth, he called, but she did not turn. She stood with her back to him, facing one lone woman who barred the way.
Not a living woman. The door behind her stood open, and firelit fog rolled in the doorway, with the scent of burning wood and plaster and roasted meat. Some building aflame beyond. Against that light, edges showed transparent, blurring into background. She felt like no ghost, either. She reeked of old bone and fresh blood, of the body of Tamghiz. She lifted her gaze and looked at him, expressionless, lowered her eyes to Moth again as though she found him meaningless. She was dressed and armed in an archaic Northron style, brown hair in a single long plait, but he would have called her a Grasslander for her colouring of skin and eyes.
“Let me by,” Moth said in a Northron that was not what they spoke in At-Landi, her voice barely audible even to his dog’s ears. “Maerhild, let me by. Daughter, don’t do this.”
“Will you fight me?” the one she called Maerhild asked in the same language. “Will you make yourself a kinslayer again?”
Moth traced runes in the air with the blade of her sword, and Holla-Sayan felt the force in them, which should have brought the other woman to her knees, but Maerhild did not react. Her eyes narrowed. Moth turned and ran for the stairs but Maerhild was before her, a flicker of movement, lightning-swift.
“No,” she said. “Ulfhild doesn’t go around. Ulfhild doesn’t flee.”
In moving, she had flung some strand of power over Moth, something like a loop of yarn, and had Vartu not felt it? Moth turned again, and the strand formed a knot. Maerhild sketched some rune with her own blade as Moth began to walk for the door, head down, looking as if she would, maybe could, walk right through anything in her path, ghost or door or half an army. He recognized the rune, almost. Not Northron. A binding flower, formed of ice…More strands of power flowed, unnoticed, knotted. In an eyeblink Maerhild was before Moth again, and again, she stopped. “Don’t,” she said, pleading.
“Then fight me, if you would pass,” Maerhild sang, and charged her. Steel clash
ed on steel and it was Moth who gave ground, trying to break away, fighting only to defend. And all the time those threads knotted about her.
Moth! Holla-Sayan called again, more urgently. Vartu!
He could not make her aware of him. She saw nothing, heard nothing, but Maerhild.
“Now you have a heart, Mother?” Maerhild asked. “Now, when it is all too late?”
Maerhild was like the bone-horse Styrma, but less so. Styrma seemed his own self, a will that had refused to take the road into death, the necromancy that created a bone-horse merely giving him anchor and form in the world. This woman, though, was more like a true bone-horse, a form and anchor for a tool of wizardry containing no true will, no true soul. Though he could smell—wrong sense, but close enough—no threads of power running off to any puppet-master. When Holla probed closer, testing the mind there, not sure how he did what he did any longer, Maerhild felt like a living mind, or a fragment of one.
A memory in the bone, woken and set free with all its emotion and impulse. Not the soul, long gone, but some echo, some footprint of a shard of mind, all unbalanced.
Was that what he was in his devil’s soul?
Maybe. At this moment, it did not matter. This thing before him was a foul necromancy. Hareh’s memory told him: it was a perversion of wizardry, to seize on the fossil imprint of bitterness, rage, lust, devotion—whatever the whole thinking being might reject or check—and set it free.
She isn’t Maerhild. Surely Vartu could tell that. She isn’t truly your daughter—she is something made by Ghatai. Vartu, you’re being attacked!
But the wizardry was the thing’s own, just as the bitter hatred was, only the power borrowed, not the knowing, not the will to use it. This had lived in Maerhild, though whether it had ever been let loose…He rather thought that whatever lay between them, Moth expected this from her daughter, or she would not fall so willingly to it, so accepting, as if it were due, as if it were justice…
She laid down her sword. She had never reached for the power she commanded, never even drawn the threat of the obsidian blade. Maerhild’s sword—was it even real, or was it some shaping they all agreed to believe in?—touched her throat.
“Why did you listen?” Moth asked. “Year after year after year of lies even a child should have seen through, and you always went back to him, even when you were a woman grown.”
“Did you ever even see me? Did you ever look away from my brother? Oern wasn’t even a wizard, he was a coward afraid of battle, a farmer’s soul who thought himself a poet but couldn’t sing of anything but gods and weather. Father loved me! You, Mertyn damn you, the very stones of the Mertynsbeorg damn you, there was never any truth in your heart. You say I never listened—when did you ever give me a chance? You could have taught me, but I was never good enough! You decided I belonged to my father, and you walked away.”
“You made yourself his slave. When did you ever question him? Look what you went to do at his bidding, all willing. You could have refused him, even then you could have refused him!”
“He would have made me queen!”
“He would have made you a kinslayer! A murderer of children!”
“Why not, when all the land says I take after you? You killed me! Don’t just stand there! Take up Keeper! Fight me, damn you!”
Blackdog! The despairing cry cut through everything. Holla-Sayan reached for Pakdhala and found storm, Attalissa fighting for her life, some god of stone, Ghatai…
“No.”
“Fight me! I’ll kill you in open battle, I don’t need to wait for my father!”
“I can’t. Not again.” Moth whispered that. “Maerhild, look at what you do.”
Holla-Sayan went down the stairs in a rush, tearing through the wizardry binding the two of them. Fangs snapped and he had the heart of the spell in his jaws. Moth, without a word, flared into something like a pillar of lightning and caught up her sword again.
He dropped the bone clattering, staggered upright, sabre in hand, parried a blow that sent him reeling into the wall. “Vartu!”
She stood, staring, pale and shadow-eyed, blinking.
“Fool,” he added.
Moth bent to the bone, an upper armbone, and he put a boot on it.
“She’s dead, she’s gone, leave her. Is a tactic like that enough to distract you, King’s Sword?”
She shook her head, still wordless.
“Ulfhild…” He almost dared put a hand on her arm, but Mikki found their stairs, then, came leaping barefoot down, bloody axe in hand.
“I couldn’t,” she said to Holla-Sayan, her voice still quiet, shocked, he thought. “Not her. Not again.”
“Great Gods, wolf, what are you doing waiting around here?” Mikki barrelled into her, arm around her shoulders, dragged her on. “What have you done to the dog?” he added, as she turned to run with him. “Smells like he’s all in one piece now, anyway.”
“He’s sorted himself,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“Lost,” he answered cheerfully. “This place is a bloody maze. Kept finding walls, trying to get to you. Gave up and started going through them. Is the little goddess out of Ghatai’s reach?”
“She’s thwarted him somehow but he’s trying to kill her now,” Holla said. He caught up, in dog’s form again.
Tamghiz Ghatai knelt on the pavement of a great roofed plaza, motionless, a statue. They ran through corpses, lake-folk and foreign, some burned so badly only the heaviest bones survived. Souls stretched towards the Gods’ road, still bound to earth. Holla-Sayan smelt death, and burning, and Pakdhala, dead. Then he saw her, a thing of mist and reflection. That she was a formless goddess twined round and through with Ghatai’s fire and with the being of another god made no difference. His girl still lay dead. Red fury took him and he went for the kneeling man.
Vartu was before him, the sword Kepra, Keeper, switched to her left hand, the black blade Lakkariss in her right.
Holla-Sayan felt the burning cold of it, hungry, reaching for him. He never checked in his rush, though. It could eat his souls, he didn’t care, so long as Pakdhala’s slayer died.
Tamghiz Ghatai saw them coming and abandoned Attalissa and the other god. Fool, Holla-Sayan could think later. Vartu probably—probably—would not have attacked while he held the two gods so close. Lakkariss was not a discriminating blade. But the Lake-Lord abandoned them and his body leapt to his feet, sabre in hand, fingers clawing some snarl of knotted yarn hanging about his neck. Moth dropped Kepra, swung Lakkariss two-handed and took Tamghiz’s head.
He screamed, and the screaming went on. Even the humans felt it, not through their ears but burning on the surface of their minds. The fires of Ghatai’s soul shrivelled and tore themselves to shreds, and Lakkariss drank them. Tamghiz simply died, ripped from Ghatai and from the world, and whether Lakkariss took him or not Holla did not know. He tried to check his charge but the black blade reached for him with tendrils of cold, wrapped him in it, pulled him. White sky, black ice.
Mikki leapt on him, arms about his neck, and they both went rolling almost to Moth. She had fallen to her knees, leaning on the sword, and the slick of frost that spread crackling where it bit the paving stones clawed at her, spun feathers of ice over Holla’s paw, burning. He took human shape and rolled away. The frost followed him, touching his boots as he climbed to his feet. Mikki seemed oblivious to it. The demon picked himself up and put a hand over Moth’s on the sword’s hilt.
“Time to go, princess?” he suggested, and when she didn’t move, more gently, “Hey, my wolf. He’s gone. Going to freeze the lake?”
She looked up at him. He brushed loose hair away from her eyes and she turned to hide her face in his palm a moment. Then she sheathed the sword and took his hand, pulling herself up, and went to take up Kepra again.
After that she simply walked away, lost to sight in the fog. Mikki followed.
“Holla-Sayan.” Gaguush hesitated, just out of reach. She smelt of blood and burning; they a
ll did, of sweat and fear and bone-deep weariness. “Holla. Is it…is it you?”
“I think so.” That hesitation was growing, building awkward walls. Fear. He crossed the looming space to her and wrapped her in his arms. For a moment she stood rigid, but then her head was on his shoulder and she was weeping, Gaguush, who never let any weakness past her anger. “Hey. It’s all right.”
It wasn’t. But he held her and stroked her hair, and maybe in some place within her something was eased, because she sobbed herself to silence and pushed him away to glower around, checking to see if anyone had noticed. Her fingers never let go their grip on his sleeve, though.
“Pakdhala’s dead,” she said. “Immerose was killed. I don’t know where the others are.” Her voice rose, unsteady. She coughed and wiped her face on the sleeve of her filthy coat.
Holla-Sayan found them, scents on the wind, or the taste of their minds. Some of them. “Asmin-Luya’s dead,” he said sombrely. “I can’t find Tusa. Everyone else is alive, at least. Down by the bridge.”
“Don’t turn wizard on me,” Gaguush said.
“Sorry. It isn’t wizardry. I just know.”
“I haven’t died, Bikkim. Bikkim, I’m here.” And the goddess was there, flesh and blood, matter spun out of being. Attalissa in Pakdhala’s familiar shape. Older, maybe, a woman just past girlhood, dressed in the indigo trousers and coat of a priestess, unarmoured, shortsword at her side. Her hair was long and loose, her face unmarked, but her wrists showed glimpses of the spotted cat tattoos she had always said were snow-leopards. And the sun was rising, turning the mist to a pearly glow.
“Lady!” The nearest Lissavakaili knelt. Bikkim stared from the goddess to the dead girl in his arms, and back to the goddess again, wonder growing. Attalissa squatted down beside him, touched his scarred throat.
“I thought you were dead.”
Bikkim shook his head. She took his arms, gently, made him lay the body down. Varro gave her a look and scrambled away, half-fear, half-courtesy, giving them some space.