Gods of Nabban (30 page)

“No.”

“Yes, you do. I could lose the baby; it wouldn't be a bother to your master, tell him. Osion gave me something, I just haven't . . . not yet. It's so far along. She said I might bleed too much. But I will. I'll show you which huts are ours. You can kill Toi and Osion too. It'll be easy when they're asleep.”

“No,” Ahjvar said, and, “Not his master. You don't listen, do you?” while Ghu was saying, “He's not Northron.”

Ghu settled down on his heels again, looking up at Ahjvar. No words. Troubled.

“No,” Ahjvar said in Praitannec. “She's stupid and treacherous. Too dangerous to trust her.”

“Pity her, though.”

“I don't.”

“Well, try. But no, there's nothing to trust in her, as she is now, and too much danger in doing so. She'll sell us wherever she sees a passing advantage.”

He was going to have to kill her. Ghu would ask him, as quietly as he said, pity her. And he himself would care no more than he would wringing a hen's neck for supper. There was something wrong with him.

She watched Ghu, trying again to smile. “I did like you. I thought you had pretty eyes. I had to come when all the house-children went looking for you. They'd have thought I was demon-touched too if I didn't. But it was just in fun. Nobody meant anything. You know that. You know what children are like. You can't blame me for that now. We were just playing.”

“Oh, yes.” Ghu sighed. “Meli, there's no truth or trust in you. You know this. I'm not putting my friends in your hands. You're not coming with us, but you shouldn't go back to the camp.”

Her face twisted to a sneer. “Like you can stop me going where I want.”

Too stupid to live, Ahjvar thought.

“We could stop you, but we won't. Don't go back to the camp. The village folk are going to realize that what makes you masters over them is habit, nothing more. They're going to realize they have far more weapons than the three of you do. You can't say that you're all the same before the gods, and then make yourselves lords over a village of slaves through fear of an axe. If he keeps on as he is, Toi will die in the night, and soon, as you said, but not at our hands. Go to Waterfield or go west, take the road to Bitha. You're a silk-weaver; you have work you can do.”

“And end up some man's whore again? That's all the likes of you and me ever will be, horseboy, if we're not in some safe place with a master to hold his hand over us, and I can go whoring here, get taken and be burnt on the face for a runaway here too, just as easy as trying to get to Bitha. All foreigners there anyway. Better than what'll come to you, coming back speaking words the Northron puts in your mouth.”

Ahjvar felt the devil before he saw her, behind him, coming around the tree. A prickling on the back of his neck, like a wind risen up.

“Put her to sleep for a while,” Ghu said. “Give us time to get away.”

“Leave her for the leopard,” Ahjvar muttered and caught the woman by the hair to prevent her, when she would have looked around.

“I can do better than sleep.” Yeh-Lin pushed Ahjvar aside, kneeling down to take Meli's head between her hands. The woman stiffened and then sagged, not in sleep, but relaxing to the verge of it. Yeh-Lin leaned close. “Dreams,” she murmured. “Hush, be still. You were checking the snares. You wandered from the stream. You were lost. Do you see it? Do you remember? You were afraid. A noise. An animal. You didn't see it, but you heard it snarl. You smelt it. You ran. A branch scratched you. Your wrist hurts. There were thorns. You're out of breath now. You've sat down to catch your breath. You're not quite sure where you are, all alone in the forest.”

Meli put her wrist to her mouth, chest heaving. Her head turned and Yeh-Lin let her move, looking this way, that. She didn't seem to see Ghu, still standing before her.

Yeh-Lin looked up at him, touched the woman again. “It's getting dark now. Night's almost on us. You hate this hiding in the forest, don't you, Meli? You're going to leave it. You're going to run away from them, tomorrow, when they go hunting, yes, you'll stay behind and then you'll leave them, because you hate the trees and the wild animals, the cold and the wet, you hate it all. You're going to go away, far from here. But now you're going to try to find your way back. You remember now, you crossed the stream, you're all turned around. Your legs are all wet from wading. You need to cross the stream again and get back to your camp before all the light goes.”

Ahjvar could feel it himself, a haze of memory, running, cold wet skin, trees and shadows and fear not to be admitted aloud to the others—fear was the core of it, her fear of him shifted aside to the forest, to threats unseen, and her anger, her contempt for Ghu slid over to lodge with thoughts of her comrades, the emotions still there, but turned away, leaving nothing but shadows where he and Ghu had been. Ahjvar shook his head and stepped out of Meli's line of sight as she surged up and floundered off, heading, in a dodging, uncertain way, for the brook. Ghu dropped her blade at the foot of the tree.

“Tidy,” Yeh-Lin said, and rubbed her hands in the moss as if to clean them. “Well, now, it is getting dark, but I don't think we want to camp here, do we?”

“No. The highway.” Ghu slung Ahjvar's pack to him. “We go towards the town, for now.”

They came out of the forest into a landscape of more tended woods, open and barrenly rocky between coppiced stands of charcoal works and the high lord's timber lands, and then the land dropped away from the plateau in a crumbling escarpment, down into terraced fields and orchards standing leafless, limbless. Ahjvar had thought at first it was only spring pruning, trees pollarded for some farmer's purpose he didn't know, until the wind brought the lingering scent of old burning that even rain could not dispel. Skeletons of hacked and fire-ravaged fruit-trees, acre after acre. Wanton destruction. Malice. The moon, just waning from its third quarter, was rising, and the stone-paved highway gleamed like pale water. The roadside clay was churned to muck by the passage of feet and hooves, bridges thrown down and replaced with rough work of newly felled timbers. The winter-flattened weeds of the ditches were trampled and torn to a morass. Beyond the road, easterly and south, the land was flat, flooded fields reflecting moonlight. A stretch of the river lay in that distance, marked by a line of trees rising from the water, a darkness against the gleam and the stars. Walking up the road they passed one village of a couple of dozen close-huddled huts on the edge of the river's broad interval just above the flooding, sleeping and lightless, another that was nothing but scattered stone and burnt posts, and on a small hill like an island east of it, the raw remains of a wooden stockade and the buildings it had enclosed, a fortified manor house, some vassal of the Daro lord. Taza, Ghu said, where the runaway serfs in the forest had come from. There had been graves, as well, hasty and too shallow, not single graves but pits and trenches of them, wet earth clumped and hummocked, and the furtive scurryings of scavenging rats that the dogs took off chasing, until Ghu called them back.

The smell of rotting flesh. Creatures larger than rats had been unearthing the dead. More than once they came on a disarticulated long bone dragged away and gnawed not quite clean enough. The empress's general may have taken Dernang, but there had been hard fighting before he ever came to its walls.

Deep night when they saw the walls of Dernang looming before them, with the mountains dark beyond to the north. With those walls a blackness like the mountains against the night sky, the faint tang of death grew heavy and foul. Not ruined trees, these rising poles that flanked the highway on either side. Stakes. Heads.

“We need to get off the road,” Ahjvar pointed out, but he didn't much like the open fields either. “You said we weren't going into the town. What are we doing here?”

“Looking,” Ghu said, his voice faint.

“Why?” Yeh-Lin demanded.

He didn't answer.

They were all inhuman in the night, set just high enough to look down on even a rider. Shapes only, and stench, mostly from the scatter of leavings dropped by crows about the skulls, rotting and half bared. Ghu found one worth looking at. Featureless, not just because of the night. Hair lifted and stirred in a rising wind.

“You know him?” He didn't see how anyone could.

“Her,” Ghu said distantly. “Sujin. From the stables. Why Meli and not her, to survive? But I thought she'd be here, if Lord Sia was.” It was that soft, distant, soul-wandering voice that always chilled Ahjvar.

“A friend?”

Ghu only shrugged.

“There are torches burning at the gate,” Yeh-Lin observed. “Pre­sumably there are guards. Shall we perhaps not stand here talking?”

“I need to see Lord Sia.”

“Why?”

“To know he's here.”

“Does it matter?” Yeh-Lin asked.

“To know what Meli said is truth—yes, it matters,” Ghu said wearily. “We need them.”

“Who?” Ahjvar demanded, as Ghu, both dogs sticking close and subdued, tails low, walked on.

“Choa. We need Choa Province. We need this rebel prince, maybe, if he's still alive and free, if he will serve the gods. We need the Daros.”

With Daro Clan burned into his shoulder, as one might notch a sheep's ear?

“
No
,” Ahjvar said.

“If Sia is dead, we need the Kho'anzi.”

“I'll kill him for you. Both of them, if the young one isn't dead already.”

“No, Ahj.”

“We were going to the mountain to find your gods.”

“This, first.”

“What,” Yeh-Lin asked, “do we need Choa Province
for?
It's hardly a good base, and poor besides. Barely grows enough grain to feed itself.”

Better to ask, who is
we
? was Ahjvar's thought. Ghu had found another head worth standing before.

This one . . . the soul was gone, though they may not have intended that. He had heard of chaining a ghost into the world as some ancient punishment long ago, in Nabban or Pirakul, he didn't remember which. A necromancer's blasphemy made perverted justice. He hadn't thought it was literal, but this was a higher post with a crossbar below the smashed skull—even in the night the misshaping of some great blow was plain—and body parts wrapped in chains swinging from it. Yeh-Lin gagged and wrapped her scarf over her face.

“This one, they hated,” she observed. “Prince Dan? Lord Daro Sia?”

“Could be anyone,” Ahjvar muttered, but he didn't believe it.

“Sia,” Ghu said. He knelt down with a hand splayed against the mud of the roadside, head bowed. Not grief. Thinking. Or listening.

Abruptly, Ghu surged to his feet again. “The castle, Ahj. Come.”

“
Why?
”

“Need to talk to someone,” Ghu said.

“It's held by the general who did this. You can't—”

“Now, while we still have the dark.”

A mist was rising from the chill ditches, tendrils of fog snaking over the terraces, wrapping their legs, clasping like white arms across the road.

“We are three—” But Ghu, the dogs at his heels, was already lost in the dark fields and the rising blindness of the fog.

“Well,” said Yeh-Lin.

Ahjvar's hands were fisted. Nothing to hit.

“If we don't follow, will he turn back?” Yeh-Lin asked.

He spun on her, didn't raise his hand, but she froze where she was. “Do I put faith in him, or not?”

“The boy is hardly infallible.”

Ahjvar turned away again and leapt the ditch, catching up with Ghu in a few long strides.

The fog rose to engulf them like an incoming tide.

CHAPTER XIX

The storm had been brewing for three days; first a heavy, wet wind from the south, then growing stronger, setting in from the east, summer-hot, and the high clouds streaked in a way that made men and women of the coastal tribes uneasy.

The folk of the Golden City, too, had a hard time keeping their minds to what they did. They were not comfortable in the new-built Council House anyway, though most of them hid it well. These were not courtiers, but great merchants and masters of merchant fleets, which meant they knew to bend with the wind, and if that meant they must walk past the polished skulls of the lords of their land and sit on woven grass mats on the earth to drink tea with women they thought cannibals, they would.

It was that or face the fact that though the Wild Girls had no fleet, they did have the coast. The Golden City might bring its rice from Nan-Ya, but a city could not live on rice alone, and the Imperial Demesne, smallest of the provinces of the empire, had been its market-garden.

And with Taiji under the rule of the queens and the Kho'anzi of Lower Lat having sworn oaths as their vassal and taken the title of prince under them . . . the city must feel very much besieged, ships or no ships.

Further . . . there were ships in the small ports of Taiji. There were crews who were as much Lathan and Darrian as Nabbani.

All in all, better to avert one's eyes from the skulls and drink the Wild Girls' tea.

Kaeo sat at Rat's left hand. He felt a stranger to himself, wearing a coat stitched with plates of hardened leather, sword at his shoulder, jade bead pendant at his throat. Some honour, that meant. Rat's gift, setting him apart from the ambassador from the Kho'anzi of Lower Lat and his retinue. Making it clear, to them and to her sisters, that he was not to be counted among the Nabbani, whatever language he spoke or did not speak. His face was not painted as those of the Dar-Lathans were, but he was marked in a fashion neither Nabbani nor Lathan, as though he were some barbarian come with the caravans from the west. At least the representatives of the Golden City couldn't see it. Toba and Rat had done it in the first days he had been among them, pricking out what would be a tiger in red and black. It crouched snarling and spread defiant, defensive claws on his left breast. The sign the empress's woman had put there was completely obscured, worked into it and remade, lost in stripes and bunched tiger-muscle and fang.