Gods of Nabban (51 page)

The god was coming. The devil had promised him to the folk of Dernang, and before he came there, she would see him, and she would know. True god, or devil's lie. She could not, being prepared, be deceived. Old Great Gods, please.

Hooves, and coming swiftly. Not couriers from the outpost at the border, not on this road. She abandoned the painted skin and the pebbles and her pack lying on the cold stones beneath the arch—caught up her sabre only by a lifetime's instinct—scrambled up the bank, at the border between dark and day, blinking the water-glare blindness from her vision.

Shredding cloud, black and thunderous, and the sun pouring like water. Wind rising with a spit of rain and the blue, the blue . . . She was still caught in the seeing dream, the shaman's trance, and her pulse was a drum in her ears . . . No caution. She was falling into the sky.

She stepped out onto the bridge just as they took it, flying.

Not flight, not rout, not courier's haste but a race, a grin changed to a warning shout and they swerved one to either side, whiff of horse, flash of colour—bright as a mountain peak, dark as oiled teak.

Ivah spun around—to call, to run madly after them—but they had wheeled in the road and the bay was on her again. Touch of steel, resting on her shoulder, but she didn't even see the rider.

The black-legged white horse circled the both of them and came to a stand before her, and the light and sky fell around the man, shimmering like water.

“You've cut your hair,” he said, in the Nabbani of the road, and—it was not even a jerk of the chin, just the slightest of movements, and other man turned his horse aside, the pressure of the blade leaving her shoulder, though he did not put up his sword. Some far-away last ember of common sense noted that.

“You've let yours grow—I thought you were
dead
,” she said. The words seemed to come out of dream, foolish and small.

Ghu laughed—
Ghu!
He was not that hunted boy from Marakand, who had been older than she thought him even then when she looked at him properly, and was older now, lean and with a weight of weariness on him, in the haze of her vision, but he had not laughed like that in Marakand. All dark eyes and gravity and worry, there, searching for his friend.

“Me? No, but you . . . what are doing here, Ivah?” And that was the boy, who spoke with a child's simplicity.

“Waiting,” she said. “Nour said—Nour survived, too. A friend found us—we were saved. Nour's gone to Bitha with his caravan but he said—I dreamed and he said . . .” She shook her head. “Was it you, all along? I was waiting for you?”

The man she had again forgotten spoke from behind her, deep voice and lilting words; she recognized the rhythm of her gang-mate Buryan's speech, the tongue of Praitan. Ghu said, “No, she's not.”

Not what? Drunk? Mad? She rubbed her temples with the back of a hand, blinking, and the vision of sun and a sky flying like banners faded. Only a slight young man, lean and shadowed on a white horse. She looked around, because something was cold and prickling warning of the uncanny on the back of her neck, but there was only the other, a yellow-haired man of her own years, maybe, but aged by illness, she thought, gaunt and grey about the burning blue of his eyes. He wore a bright headscarf pulled down about his neck and a blanket in a more muted plaid slung as a cloak and pinned with gold like a twisted flame, but his shirt was stained and scrubbed almost to rags. Beggar king of a ballad. His hands were torn and black, with scabs that seeped yet, dirt ground in, as if he had dug his way out of a grave, why such an image in her mind? He carried death like a shadow, a second skin, and he watched her utterly without expression, like a hunting cat. Ghu's lost friend, whom she had thought surely dead even while Ghu was searching. Ghu's assassin, she thought now, remembering what he was and why the pair of them had been in the city—this was the killer of the Voice of the Lady, the catalyst of all the catastrophe and rebirth of Marakand.

“No horse?” Ghu was asking.

She blinked again, broke away from the tribesman's unwavering stare. “Camel. The army took it in Dernang.” Inane.

And she had learnt on the road to alter her speech, the words her mother had used, especially the first person that had made Wolan and Koulang laugh at her, saying she had learnt her Nabbani from old puppet plays of the emperors in the Five Cities . . . and she forgot again, and used the “I” that none but the imperial family might claim. Ghu didn't appear to have noticed, but he had not, in Marakand, either.

“Better come up, then.” He offered a hand.

“Wait.” She dodged away, leaping and sliding down the bank to retrieve her belongings, hastily scooping the pebbles into her pocket, rolled the painted skin and bundled it into her pack, bow-case, quiver—slung the belt of her sabre over her shoulder. Low voices above, both of them speaking Praitannec. The tribesman, at odds with his chill study of her, sounded amused about something. Ghu laughed softly and answered in the same tone.

“Ivah,” Ghu said, introducing her to the Praitannecman as she climbed back to the road. “A scribe and wizard of Marakand?”

“Of the Great Grass, I think,” said the other, in good Imperial Nabbani, the accent of a scholar of the Five Cities, bizarrely clashing with his appearance, and he gave her a nod.

“This is Ahjvar.”

A name belonging to the eastern deserts, not to Praitan, but she returned the nod.

“And Snow, and Evening Cloud.”

“Gorthuerniaul,” Ahjvar said, but whether that was formal greeting, or what, she didn't know. It made Ghu laugh again. Ghu had seemed to be introducing the horses, which didn't surprise her somehow, that he would, and the white stallion had lowered his head to sniff her at his name.

“And Jui and Jiot have gone off hunting, I think.”

“Dogs,” Ahjvar explained.

Ghu offered his hand again and this time she took it, a foot on his foot, to swing up behind him. The white horse flicked his ears and strode off without further remark on the extra weight, the bay matching him stride for stride like a wagon team. They did not resume their flying race.

Ivah felt oddly shy, this close to him. Ask a man you had abandoned to die at the hands of Red Masks in the street if he was actually your god . . . ? He wore no coat and his shirt was torn, and though she was careful not to touch him, her hands resting on her thighs, she still felt the heat of his body, the barest space between them. He smelt of camels and horses and earth and smoke . . . camel was the sheepskin coat beneath her, insecure pillion. She did not know what she felt. Not attraction. It was almost fear.

“Castle or town?” Ahjvar asked.

“Castle, I think.”

“Assuming she's left it standing.”

She
. “Ghu—” Ivah said. “Ghu, there's a devil in Dernang. She's saying she serves the—the heir of the gods. She's killed the imperial general and his lieutenant, a week ago, and taken control of the town. She claims she speaks for the lord of Choa and all his folk are as obedient as if she does, but—is it true? You do know what she is?”

“
We
killed the general,” Ahjvar observed. “Or I did, when some fool took him on with a knife.”

“Hah. What was I supposed to do, since you weren't handy to hide behind?”

“There's a
devil
,” she repeated. “One of the seven. Yeh-Lin Dotemon.”

“We know that.” The assassin's tone was mild. “How do you?”

There was challenge under the soft words. Skin prickled. She looked to see him watching her, unblinking. Mad, she thought. But no. Not that. Not quite. But deeply, searingly scarred—trailing tendrils of other sight still wrapped her. Something broken and reforged and all the veiling skins that folk grew over their raw bones of the soul to deal gently with the daily world pared away. Which might be to say mad, after all.

“Dotemon is my captain, for the time being,” Ghu said, as it were an everyday thing to speak so. “I do trust her.”

She pulled her eyes from the assassin. “You're my god,” she said, to Ghu's back. She could not have said it to his face. Wondering. Certain. “You're my god, and you were running from the street-guard in Marakand—but I dreamed of you, in the desert.”

“Great Gods, another one,” Ahjvar said, and followed it with something incomprehensible, which made Ghu snort with sudden laughter.

“No,” he said. “I think not.” He turned his head and she glimpsed a flashing grin at the assassin.

Half a guess as to what that was about. She could imagine he drew women, yes, now that he wasn't hiding himself. Her face heated, but the grin was catching, and the laughter. “No,” she said, and managed almost to sound indignant. “
Not
that sort of dream.” It was Ahjvar chuckled then.

Ivah made an effort to speak soberly, though she felt almost drunk, still walking the edge of vision. “Yeh-Lin Dotemon. Your captain.”

“She says she's mine,” Ghu observed.

“
Says.
”

“How did you know her?” Ahjvar persisted, as if the brief flurry of—of not-flirtation had not been. But he looked less burningly intense now, less like a predator about to strike.

“I—” she picked careful words, not to lie, and again forgot care in others. “I've met devils, before.” Ghu cocked his head and considered that, and again did not remark on her royal form of the pronoun.

“So have you,” she said in haste, to distract him. Man. God. He might know all her secrets. But he would not take them; he would wait till they were given.

“Have I?” Ghu asked. “You mean the storyteller in Marakand, the Northron skald. You knew her.”

“Ulfhild. Vartu Kingsbane, they called her in the north.”

“Ah.”

“There was more than one of them there?” demanded Ahjvar.

“I did tell you,” Ghu said. “One of the bad nights, when I talked halfway to dawn because you wouldn't sleep and kept dreaming awake, you said.”

“I don't remember.”

“She was telling stories. I told you the story she told. I didn't know what she was, then, in Marakand. Not for certain. Not till later.” Ghu considered. “She knew me. She saw me. I didn't see myself.”

The assassin said nothing to that but went suddenly alert like a hound scenting prey and put his horse a little ahead. She saw then what he had—a dark movement that was not the sway of roadside willows but distant riders. The road had descended and water lapped the verge of it here as if they followed a causeway, the flooded fields a wind-riffled lake. No way to avoid a meeting. Banners unfurled, a pale blue without device.

More movement, another and larger company away east and south, just breaking free of the dark scribble of the taller trees that marked the true bank of the river. They flowed up what might be some flooded lane, a dark blot against pewter, stretching out and still coming. Ahjvar unslung a crossbow, freed a foot to span it and slot an arrow in without dismounting. His attention was on the far, not the nearer, company.

She considered her own bow, wrapped and strapped to her bundle, but began pulling off lengths of yarn and leather cords she had slung around her neck instead, knotting them into loops, doubling and redoubling those loosely about her wrists.

“Yeh-Lin,” Ghu said, with a nod at the riders on the road. “The others, I don't know.” He urged the white to a canter. Ivah caught at his hips at last at the sudden change of pace and they overtook Ahjvar's bay, the pair stretching into a run together as they had raced, close enough to touch.

The small party of riders waiting on the road opened out to admit them as they slowed, the devil's piebald stallion flinging up its head to trumpet, half challenge, half greeting.

Ghu shushed it like a father might a froward child.

“Yours?” Ahjvar demanded.

“Dead king.” The grey-haired woman half-bowed in the saddle. “I find I am glad to see you with us yet.”

He gave her a long and—definitely challenging—look. The corners of her mouth turned up. “Guess,” she said, as if she replied to some unspoken question, and Ivah wondered. The Blackdog had spoken once into her mind, and she knew he and the bear-demon Mikki did so, too, but for all the skin-prickling unease Ahjvar gave her, he was human, she would swear to that.

“That's an answer, Dreamshaper. Don't you
dare
try that again.”

Ghu gave him a sharp look. “Ahj.” The nearest rider, that weather-beaten lord of middle years she had stood next to as witness when the devil fought Hani Gahur, she now knew for the high lord's son and castellan Daro Yuro. He was frowning thoughtfully. Ghu said something in Praitannec, which could equally well have been a warning not to quarrel with a devil, or not to do it in a language they all could understand. Ahjvar only shrugged, but the flare of anger—Ivah felt it almost as a fire—died. He gestured with the crossbow to where the other company neared the road and repeated himself. “Are those yours?”

“Nabban's, you mean? I have no idea. They ferried themselves over in barges they dragged across the floods beyond with buffalo. Before I realized you were on the road and going to be cut off by them, I had thought to let them reach Dernang, rather than sending the army out to drown in ditches intercepting. Half of the conscripts lack even sandals—they are appalling ill-equipped. Shall we try to avoid them by going west of the town, Nabban, if you can find us a route through the floods, or do we carry on regardless?”

The castle was a distant mound of white on the horizon, Dernang a dirty smudge like its shadow. The riders from the river would be on the highway ahead of them before they could reach it.

“Go on,” Ghu said.

“Holy one,” the castellan protested.

Even the devil frowned. “Is that wise, Nabban?”