Gods of Nabban (55 page)

Yeh-Lin padded back to the bed and lay down, hands folded over the mirror against her heart, not looking into it. Cold. It did not warm to her flesh.

CHAPTER XXIX

Ghu and the assassin who was his shadow drifted about the castle and the town, rarely seen, once the lords had been set to make their own way on the path the gods approved. The holy one was among them often enough that they appeared to feel him a presence in all their counsels. The castle folk took it for granted the heir of their gods might come and go like a bird, a ghost about the town and the White River Dragon, with no regard for walls. Ivah thought they actually lived in the gardens and the loft of one of the stables and simply avoided the folk because they were as shy as thieves. They had the look of wild things, the wary watchfulness, as well as the calm assurance of a wolf in its own land, and they carried the scent of the river and the forest. And horses, and hay, which was why she suspected the stables, and possibly the collusion of Castellan Yuro and his people in their avoidance of Yeh-Lin's civilizing intentions.

It didn't matter if Ghu were some physical avatar or incorporeal god who chose to take so ordinary a man's form. Those who had come to the holy one in a fervour of faith did not waver; others, who followed where the Kho'anzi led or because they did not approve a faith that slew the priests, kept perhaps their doubts, but found nothing to denounce. He was there when he was needed; the folk of the town and the countryside said that. They came to him cautious, shy, carrying troubles too great. So many lost ones, so many slipping away into despair. He rarely said much, but the folk, and the land itself, seemed to take new heart as the floods receded and the earth greened, walls, roofs rising, the oxen put to the plough, the little fishing boats on the river again.

A week, she had been working on this binding. No divination. She thought she already knew where the lost prince might be found. She had her father's eyes. Her uncle had his sister's. And the set of her mouth in a jaw that was hers made masculine, and . . . she did not know, she only suspected from the nagging familiarity there had been in his face when first she saw it, and what the coins gave her confirmed what she thought. Which made this a matter for the god, not for Dwei Ontari.

Better to leave him lost. There were heirs enough to the Peony Throne without him.

No. She pushed the thought away. Nagging. Scratching at her.

She did not want the damned empire. Why did her thoughts keep whispering that she should? As if her father's ghost lingered and reproved her lack of ambition, her hiding, as she had used to hide her face, eyes downcast, behind the curtain of her hair.

Meet me, she had asked, this morning at the shrine of the Father in the town. She had given the message to Yeh-Lin's pages, with no idea where the god might be. If he could be found, they would find them. Meanwhile she waited, tried to meditate, finding her way, warily, into yet another of her father's practices that she had once rejected.

To clear her mind of the chatter of the world, the stir and hurry of it, was no easy thing here at the gate of the shrine, though it was habitable again, and inhabited. She had claimed the bench in the porch, new and yellow as the unpainted doors, with bark still clinging to the edges of the raw planks. There was even a priest again, a worried little man who had arrived only the day before, saying his dreams had called him to serve in Aoda's place. He had come up through Vanai and Shihpan from Taihu away down the western mountains, a free tailor's youngest who, for all his hard-won education, had never before left the town of his birth. His first act had been to borrow a mule, to go up to the forest of the holy mountain; he intended to bring back a sapling pine to replace the sacred tree. In his absence, the handful of homeless folk set by the new governor of Dernang to rebuild the shrine and to round up and care for the lost and homeless and orphaned children there carried on. Ghu seemed to approve both the priest and the gathering of orphans.

The children were playing some noisy game in the courtyard, shrieking and laughing. Cross-legged on the bench, Ivah dropped her mother's divining coins into the circle of the four-strand braid that was only one part of the larger binding, drawn in ink up and down both arms. Nabbani characters, not Northron runes, and ink, not blood, but the working had more the feel of the north than Nabban, she thought. Her father had worked much Northron wizardry into his Grasslander practices. She, too, could make a thing of her own.

For all her mother had claimed otherwise, it was not wrong to break and overturn and remake the patterns of one's traditions. Ahjvar worked so. She had watched him in the castle gardens, and perhaps others who did thought it only a sword-drill, but she saw the meditation it wove, and the way it worked, like Yeh-Lin's nightly circling of the castle walls, to brush away some attention that reached and drifted and sought to see them. She knew Praitannec magic used no such dance.

They talked in their councils of the empress as an usurper, the murderer of Emperor Otono and possibly Emperor Yao—small loss from what she heard—and many lords of the city. They did not call her Daughter of the Old Great Gods or debate why she took such a title. But that was there, she suspected, when Ghu and Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin talked alone. That was behind the devil's nightly patrols and Ahjvar's sword-patterns and restless fidgeting with broken twigs and sprigs of greenery. They did not include her yet. It didn't matter. She would bring to them what she could, when the time was right.

Would they come? And if they did not, should she go ahead? She was not sure.

“Ivah?”

Ivah looked up, startled. Ghu and Ahjvar, trailed by their dogs. No Yeh-Lin—good. Her inattention, their footsteps lost in the noise of the market and the shrieking of the children. Something about the assassin still prickled warning on her skin, and not only, she thought, the sense he always gave of being a predator only lightly leashed.

“You already know where he is,” Ghu said. Not bothering to ask why she had wanted him.

“I . . . think I do. A divination I made. It spoke—it wouldn't have meant anything to anyone else. And—” Honesty, before her god. “I suspected anyway. There was a man I wondered about, before ever you came to Dernang. But Ghu, now I—I'm not sure, what I should do. I know Lord Ontari doubts me. His people have searched every cellar, every place a prisoner might be hidden and forgotten.” She shrugged. “But Dan isn't hidden. He's
lost
. Wounded and lost, and if he's so hurt, if he is no longer able to be himself, should we bring him back at all?” From her satchel she pulled out the bound codex and the scroll both. “You read Nabbani, don't you, Ahjvar? And you're a wizard. What do you make of it?”

She threw rapidly the remaining five falls of the hexagram, dropping and gathering, dropping and gathering the coins, forgetting that he wouldn't likely be able to hold the unfamiliar patterns in memory.

Ahjvar shrugged, squatting down beside her, watching the coins unblinking. Disturbing, the way he would stare like a cat, too singly focussed. Shook his head.

She showed him the text in the bound book. “The gates stand closed without the key.” He took it, frowning over the official interpretations and commentaries, which were not entirely helpful, she considered, not in this case. Advice on further reflection and patience. She found, by long practice, the place in the scroll, and her mother's tutor's notes. That which was locked might be unlocked, if its truth could be recognized, said that commentary, but to recognize the truth, one must unlock the gate. . . .

Ahjvar read that too, shrugged and pushed it back at her. “Means nothing to me, but my training's a completely different tradition. I'm good at locks.” A narrow grin. “Find me one, and I'll teach you.”

“It doesn't mean he's a prisoner.”

“No.” He sat back on his heels, peeling off a strip of soft, almost ropey bark from the fresh-split wood of the bench, shaving that into slivers with a narrow knife, rust-red and fragrant. A pattern, fallen half over her coins and the circlet of braid. But he lifted the braid clear with the point of this knife, delicately, disrupting his pattern, or reforming it. “There's hair in this. Yours.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I'm his sister's daughter.” At his raised eyebrows, she added hastily, “Not the empress. The younger sister. She was wizard-talented, which meant they allowed her to be only the lowest rank of diviner for all her ability to be more, because of Min-Jan's law against imperial women holding power. But she studied in secret; she fled to the Five Cities and Marakand, went to the Grass with my father.” A touch of pride. “Escaped all the Wind in the Reeds they sent after her. I never believed her stories, when I was young.”

She gathered her coins up, warming them in her clasped hands. A trading of answers? Worth a try.

“What are you?” she asked.

A glance up at Ghu. “His.”

“I know that.”

“A murderer,” he said levelly.

“Ahjvar.” Not exactly reproof. Just something Ghu would rather were not said.

Ahjvar ignored him. “Mad. An assassin of the Five Cities.”

“Ahj, don't.”

“The folk say you're a king.”

“Not really. And that was a long time ago, anyhow.”

She snorted. “You're hardly that much older than me, Ahjvar.”

He shrugged, looked at the pattern his bark parings now made, met her eyes again. “Lost within himself,” he said.

She wasn't sure why she had pressed him. Why Ghu had let her. But it . . . mattered. Ahjvar was not lost, but—she thought he might understand why she asked. “Yes. I think so. So tell me. You, not Ghu. Lost within himself. Hidden within himself? Maybe we should leave him there.”

His look was . . . considering.

But, “No,” he said flatly. “Ghu wants him. Dwei Ontari isn't Daro Korat, blind with faith and trust. Ontari will be gone and over the rivers again himself before long; he'll sit quiet in Alwu and let Choa fall to ruin on its own, if we don't have his prince to hold him.”

She dropped the coins, holding his eyes, but his hand flashed out and caught them before they hit the wood.

“No,” he said, very soft, and if she'd been a dog all her hackles would have risen and she'd have been backing and licking her lips and crouching. “Don't.”

“
Ahj.
”

She wasn't a dog. She only swallowed and held out a hand. Ghu took the coins from Ahjvar, dropped them into her palm. A quick glance, to know what they showed, and she slipped them into her pocket. Later.

“Whatever I am, I'm his,” Ahjvar said again. “Leave it at that. You mean to bring Dan to you.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Do it.”

“Ghu?”

“Yes,” Ghu said. “Lost, but not, I think, of his own will, Ahj. Nor for his own healing.” He considered. “Why the shrine? Ah.” And a smile, beginning. “Here all the time?”

“I think so.”

“Let's see.”

Ivah forced the assassin, the nearness of the god, from her mind. Pushed herself away from the calls of market vendors with greens and eggs and oil to sell, and the children, who were still running and shrieking and squealing, and took up the braid, weaving it through her fingers, then a long loop of leather thong twisting, doubling, passing and crossing, a cat's-cradle the folded over and under and through it, a path, a labyrinth, a calling through the endless circling of a mind bemazed.

The threads of hair were warm, burning like sunlight against her fingers. She let thought trace the way, breathed a name, another, and again, and again, to the beat of a drum that was only her heart, swaying to its rhythm where she sat. When she looked up again, the shadows had moved around her and the children were quiet. Ahjvar was propped against the wall, looking bored, but she thought that boredom a shield, not truth. Ghu sat cross-legged in the street, watching her.

And Dan had come out from the shrine.

As she had expected.

One of the littlest children clung to his hand.

“Uncle,” she said respectfully, to the mute and sightless man who had shared Aoda's refuge.

They had to shift out of the way then, Ivah taking Dan by the arm to steer him inside. He seemed almost to be sleepwalking. Daro Korat had sent a wagon-load of supplies. It barely scraped through the gate. Lady Willow, as his heir, had come to escort it. What was she, nine? Ten? She wore such an air of gravity, but Ivah had seen her running laughing through the garden with Yeh-Lin's pages in some game, and it was she the devil had charged—or bribed? to begin teaching them the first sets of the syllabics, the simplest of the Nabbani writing forms.

An old woman appeared to take charge of the unloading and Willow, putting aside her quilted over-robe, plunged into helping the various children and cripples and old people unload alongside the slaves of the castle. Former slaves. Twelve thin moon-crowns a year was the wage to be owed by lords to the lowest of their labourers, six if they had their board and lodging, and it must rise with skills and trades. Easier to say so than see it done, but even the promise meant much already in Dernang, which surprised Ivah somewhat. The folk trusted it would be done. She did wonder, would the lords wear less silk and drink less wine of the Five Cities, to see that made so? Daro Korat, certainly. The lame old man would do whatever the holy one asked of him. But all of Nabban?

A fire-hot faith in a god might change a land.

Cynicism said, a god with an army at his back.

Willow was struggling with one end of a chest far too big for her and the scrawny little boy who had grabbed the other rope handle. Dan gripped Ivah's arm, his hand shaking, too tightly for her to plunge away to rescue them before they crushed their toes, but Ahjvar was there, plucking it from them and saying, “Grab those jars instead.” Ghu disappeared into the throng and reappeared with a dusty sack of grain on his shoulder, meekly trudging off in the direction the old woman indicated before she saw who he was. And then they were not sure, all that crowd, if they should appear to notice, or not, their god labouring among them.