Blackdog (44 page)

“There's no talent in our family. Stop talking about it.” Her voice shook. Dangerous to have them, foolish and enthusiastic, telling all up and down the road that their little ‘Dhala was in any way remarkable. Even if all the gangs, whatever rivalries and feuds lay between them, did keep one unified silence in magic-fearing Marakand regarding the few wizards among them.

Judeh squeezed her hand. “They will. Don't get in a state about it. No one's going to send you off to an apprenticeship if you don't want to go. Look, I think we might as well take those stitches out now?”

Pakdhala swallowed, steadied her voice. “Yes. It looks that way.” But Tusa still sat, watching her, her eyes agonized. She'd never have thought the Grasslander one to fear magic.

Bikkim muttered in his drugged sleep. Pakdhala left the stitches for Judeh to deal with, walked away from them all, most of all from Tusa, and found herself at Doha's grave. She squatted down there, staring at the stones, blinking tears that took her by surprise. She had known so many deaths, Blackdogs and priestesses, her own. When had she stopped feeling them? The child she had been had wept for fear and the changing of the world. For herself. Selfish brat, who held the temple around her like a shell, building it thicker and thicker. She felt death so much more, had, ever since her great-grandmother Pakdhala had died a year after she came from the mountains, and she had seen Holla-Sayan weep and
understood
it was loss, irreparable. Ever since, she had felt Bikkim's pain, that hollow that was never filled, where his parents and sisters and cousins had been. The lost children of Tusa and Asmin-Luya, Zavel's brothers and sister, whom he mostly pretended did not exist. Attalissa in her temple had ceased to be hurt by anything, long ago, she thought.

It was Doha she wept for now, her friend, her cousin, her kin, the lie made truth in the heart. She wept for the sweet wailing fiddle in the evenings and the cracked voice that had once, Kinsai said, charmed almost every woman the length of the river into his bed. Kinsai was prone to exaggeration. Pakdhala smiled through her tears, thinking what Doha would have said, if he'd known a goddess boasted of him. Given a sly smile and taken it as his due, probably.

From the corner of her eye she saw Zavel heading for her, and Asmin-Luya catching him back with a shake of his head. Zavel scowled. After a while Thekla came over carrying a bowl of fish with onions and raisins, thickened with boiled millet. The cook squatted down beside her, wordless, to share it, and Pakdhala did eat, scooping up mouthfuls she didn't really taste with small pieces torn from the flat, stone-baked sheet of last night's bread. Thekla left, and Gaguush brought her a blanket, sat with her a while in turn.

“He'll be all right,” the gang-boss said, meaning Doha, not Holla-Sayan, as Pakdhala realized after a moment. “He'll come safe to the Old Great Gods, a short journey.”

“Yes.”

“He was a good man, your cousin. I'll miss him.”

“I do already.”

“Yes. ‘Dhala?”

Pakdhala grunted. “Hm?”

“You're sure about Holla?”

“Yes. He'll be back soon.”

“Right, then.” Gaguush patted her on the head and left her.

They might say Gaguush didn't feel. They were wrong. She was hurt too much by long-ago betrayals to let on she did, and then she erupted like the fire-mountains of the Malagru, and meant nothing by it. That was all. Her father almost understood that, but Pakdhala could wish they would stop hurting one another, with their tempers and brooding silences. Kinsai's claims on Holla-Sayan, and a sweet little boy with Holla's hazel eyes among the brood at the ferrymen's lower castle, did not help that.

Her father was near, within her reach now, no longer hiding. She felt him like a solid mass at her shoulder, a warm body between her and the night. But he was up on the hill somewhere, slow to come down, and she wanted him physically close, to comfort her.

Dog, Kinsai says I should have known they were coming if I'd been paying attention. Did I feel them coming? I don't think I did. Did Doha die because I was too late giving warning? Is it my fault?

Doha?

Cold hells, the shock in his thought. He hadn't known, hadn't remembered.
Yes. I'm sorry, Holla-Sayan. I told you but maybe you didn't…understand.
He seemed to have a much harder time of it than Otokas or any of the last many Blackdog hosts had, in keeping consciousness in the fully freed dog. Or perhaps it was that he fell deeper into the beast's soul. If some day he could not find his way back…Pakdhala did not want to think about that.

I knew. I remember now.
He felt, to her mind, exhausted.
How can I say it's your fault or isn't? I smelt them, just before you shouted, no sooner than that. If you didn't feel them near earlier, you didn't.

Where have you been all this time? Gaguush is worried. Everyone is.

I don't know. Running. Thinking. I turned their horses loose.

Those who had fled the attack on the camp had not made it back to their horses, and the one left to guard them had not lived to flee. Holla-Sayan tried to keep her from knowing that, and failed. He had stalked them, coldly let them draw out of earshot of the camp. Pakdhala heard men and women screaming, run down by what demon or monster they could not imagine, the echo of breaking bone felt in the jaw, the taste of salt blood, saw the torn bodies left to the sky, ghosts damned to wander till time and the elements freed them to the gods, unless their kin came searching.

That tribe would learn, maybe, not to prey on the folk of the road.

Pakdhala saw him then, a limping shadow slinking over the skyline, wolf-sized hound almost lost in the night. The restive camels stirred, ready to panic again and more earnestly, as the Blackdog's scent drifted to them.

People settling to eat or sleep bolted up, hands on weapons, at that stir among the beasts.

“It's just Father,” Pakdhala called, before someone shot at him, with horrors following on that which she could imagine only too clearly.

As a man, Holla still limped, heading for her by the new shadow of the cairn, shielding his eyes from the flaring branch of thorn

Gaguush had caught up. His clothes were torn, dark-stained in places, and he was soaking wet. On his way back he had plunged into one of the Kinsai-av's tributary streams to wash.

Pakdhala flung her arms around him, felt him tense, resisting, weary and sick at heart with himself, until he bent his head to her hair and sighed. She was selfish as a child, a spoilt brat as Zavel called her, to be thinking only of her own hurt and loss.

I know, Holla-Sayan. The dog can't help being what it is. Sometimes.

“Where in the cold hells were you?” Gaguush screamed as she joined them. “What were you thinking, heading off alone like that? Great Gods!”

She threw a punch at him with the hand not shaking the blazing branch, dangerously close to her own long braids, and Holla grabbed her by both arms, faster than thought, Pakdhala thrust aside.

“Damn
you, Holla, I thought you were dead in the rocks somewhere.”

“Don't yell at him,” Pakdhala said, very quietly. “He followed them to make sure…they're long gone now. They won't be back.”
It's all right, Holla-Sayan. Don't think about it.

Gaguush stared at them both, and then wrenched herself free and stalked away, hurling her branch back into the fire.

Django thumped Holla on the shoulder.

“Either you go after her, or we all get screamed at for the next three days.” Django backed up a step as Holla turned his head. “Hells. I'm sorry. That was cruel…we're all sorry, Holla-Sayan. I mean, we'll all miss him, you know that. I forgot he was your kin.”

Pakdhala took Django's arm and led him away, leaving her father to his prayers. After a while Gaguush stomped back to join Holla sitting by the cairn, saying nothing, but Pakdhala thought the gang-boss leaned with her head on his shoulder. The Over-Malagru men began to sing, a high-pitched wavering dirge for their own dead fellow. Zavel sat down where Pakdhala sat by Bikkim and tried to hold her hand, took it with better grace than usual when she shook her head and tucked her hands deep in her pockets. He gave her a cautious smile, rose again, and went away. Eventually she lay down there, close enough to touch Bikkim in the night. The drug had worn off and his sleep was natural now, his dreams only of wind in the grass and running horses: quiet, sad dreams of lost home, dead parents, dead sisters, not the fevered haze of battle and poppies.

Pakdhala did not seek to pry into her friends’ minds, but sometimes she could not help seeing. She could never tell her father how much it worried Gaguush when he clung to her in the night with no words, like a drowning man chanced on a flood-borne branch.

Having slept most of the day, she had no real desire for more sleep. She lay listening to the quiet night noises, a muttering and a sigh from where Thekla and Kapuzeh stirred together, open night all the privacy any caravan mercenary ever waited for. A little more discretion when they were all in the two round tents. Asmin-Luya paced restlessly on the first watch; the merchants, who had put their tent up as though it might offer shelter from another attack, sat talking in their own language, which she could understand, if she but concentrated. She didn't want to. It was nothing to her, what they said, complaint at the delay or a wake for their slain man. Camels drowsed, still nervous and excitable. Kinsai kept her distance, the river fretted below the cliff, the stars slid down the west below it, and Tusa relieved her husband on watch. Nothing stirred to the east, nothing breasted the horizon. She was not lying wakeful fearing bandit revenge, Pakdhala told herself. Only, she did not want to sleep.

Bikkim woke, asked vaguely, “Am I dead?” and when she almost laughed and whispered, “No,” leaning close over him, he reached a hand and brushed fingertips over her face.

She could feel the warmth of his skin on her lips, had only to lean a little closer…“Go back to sleep,” she whispered, not quite touching him. “Rest.” Could almost taste him, the scent of his skin flavouring the air, animal, as all humans were.

Pakdhala scrambled to her feet, feeling the blood rushing through her. Wrong of her, very wrong.

She tucked her hands in her pockets and made a circuit of the camp herself. She had no watch tonight; she might as well relieve Tusa, or at least keep her company. The Grasslander should have noted her when she started wandering, but Tusa had not stirred from where she sat by the fire; Gaguush would have her head if she'd fallen asleep on watch, with raiders in the area and the dead hardly cold in their graves.

“Tired?” Pakdhala asked, drawing near enough to see that Tusa was awake, sitting huddled, rocking a little. The woman flinched at the sound of her low voice, stared up, eyes pits of shadow and her face sickly pallid, even by ruddy firelight. “Tusa, are you all right?”

Tusa, after a moment, shook her head. “It's been a bad day,” she said, dropping her gaze to the fire again.

“Yes.” Pakdhala rested a hand on her shoulder, felt her shrink from the touch, felt some strong emotion roiling in her, and withdrew it quickly. Fear? It might have been. Was it this conviction that Pakdhala was a wizard? Tusa had never shown any aversion to magic users before; she'd gone seeking soothsayers in At-Landi more than once, trying to learn the fate of her lost children. “Look, Tusa, I can't sleep, and you're in no state to be on guard. I'll finish your watch. It's a double shift, isn't it? Who's after you?”

After a moment Tusa mumbled, “Gaguush. Better not.”

“She won't mind,” Pakdhala said firmly. “Go to bed.” Was the woman actually ill? She didn't sense any illness in her, any imbalance of the body. It was her mind was troubled.

Tusa nodded, and after another long moment, shuffled off, lying down by her husband, bedding pulled tight around her. Not touching him. It was none of Pakdhala's business. The fire was dying. She drew her knife, meaning to use the blade to push the embers of driftwood and camel-dung closer together and bank them with the ashes, but observed, amid those ashes and charred ends, an odd pattern: fine lines, a spiderweb in white ash.

What?
Holla-Sayan asked, waking, when she was not even aware she had reached for him. A shock of fear had jumped through her. But it was nothing. Chance pattern in dim light, or discarded yarn too knotted to be saved, one of Tusa's cat's cradles. Maybe she'd tried to distract her thoughts with a game. She didn't look as though she had succeeded.

Nothing
, she said.
I didn't mean to wake you. Just jumpy.

She heard the rustling rasp of blankets as he rolled away from Gaguush, looked to see him silhouetted on one foot, pulling on his drawers and trousers. She stirred the ashes with her knife, raked them over the coals, to keep the embers live till dawn, and had moved away from what little light now escaped by the time her father came to her side. Perilously foolish of Tusa to sit with her back to that eastern ridge and the fire before her. Criminally foolish, endangering all their lives. Someone had to talk to her tomorrow.

Holla-Sayan put an arm around her and Pakdhala leaned into his side, feeling a need, for a moment, to be small enough to be picked up again.

It isn't your fault. You know that. And we nearly lost more than Doha and Moopung.

I'll miss him.

Of course you will.

You'll miss him.

Holla-Sayan said nothing, but she felt that pain in him. It wasn't something that happened once. Each death mattered, each time. It seemed terribly urgent to remember that, forever. She tightened the grip of her hand on his shirt, feeling the muscles over his ribs, alive, breathing. So many dogs.

He was a second father, after I left home.
After a moment he asked,
How's Bikkim?

He woke up. I sent him back to sleep. He…Am I a wizard, Father? Could I be? Tusa says I am. She's afraid of me. Or…of something. Upset.