Gods of Nabban (70 page)

His
, Ahjvar said of himself.

What is he?

The empty arms of the Old Great Gods.

But she had been wrong. It was not a puzzle but a foretelling after all. She did not think they would find the god in council with the empress, arguing, persuading. She did not know how they could have let him go, except that it was his will to go alone and somehow . . . he had edged them into allowing it. Yeh-Lin said he went to distract the empress, to delay Buri-Nai while his captain-general moved, because surprise was all they had to give weight to their numbers, and to sit and wait at the ferry would be to offer themselves to inevitable defeat and he had not meant her to do that at all, whatever words he had spoken. Perhaps he meant to set Ahjvar loose among her command. Ivah was not so certain.

Ahjvar might be an assassin, might once have been king's sword among his own people, but the only person Ivah knew who had ever truly slain a devil was far away, trying to hide herself from the Old Great Gods, to escape the doom they had set her, which was to slay Dotemon, and Jasberek, and Jochiz. If she could summon Moth to plunge from the night sky, bird of prey shaped from the Northron wizardry of the feather-cloak, she would. Whatever the cost, even to Yeh-Lin.

Find Ghu. Get him out, if they could. Hope he had learned what Yeh-Lin thought he intended to learn, the truth of the empress and her devil and some way to sever them, or that Ahjvar had slain the empress.

Hope he was alive to find.

They drifted, like the fog that wrapped their ankles, to the inner compound. The gates were closed, but they circled to where there was less torchlight. A spell was laced through the bamboo, a thing of warning. Ivah caught and wove the characters into a ring of yarn, white like the fog, and they went over using Yuro's coat to cushion the sharpened stakes. Wagons, covered ones like huts on wheels, several more ornate carriages, and wagons with open beds. One grand tent, several lesser ones. People, in clusters, muttering, anxious. Banners hanging still. Fog pouring tendrils over the fence. Torches burning, mostly before the grand tent, and it glowed, lit bright within. She moved that way. The other two followed.

To cross that threshold . . . no. That would push the spell too far, under the eyes of the watching giants. Another of her mother's stories proven true, that the imperial bodyguard were giants. A blue-gowned wizard strode out, paused, looked around, eyes lingering on them. Frowned. Continued on her way to one of the other tents. Sudden voices. Ivah caught at Awan's arm, drew him down. Yuro followed into the shadow of a wagon, crouched in blackness, fog caressing like a friendly cat.

“Exalted, the surgeon—you must let him attend you now.”

“The Old Great Gods hold me in their hands. There is no need.”

“Exalted, please. For the sake of your people—”

“One more word and I will have the tongue out of you! I am going to rest, yes, and that will suffice. Any fool who disturbs me—”

The speaker bowed and fell away from the hurrying knot. Two women carrying paper-shaded lanterns, four giants, a handful of more ordinary men and women in armour coats, all armed, though some wore long gowns beneath. In their midst, a long-haired woman whose robes gave her the shape of a young spruce tree, Ivah's first thought. She strode out unhampered by them, but stopped suddenly and stood, peering around.

Her head was wrapped in bandages, covering one eye. Blood seeped through, and her chest and one gloved hand were stained. She put that hand to her breast, closed her visible eye as if she prayed.

A groping hand, reaching for them . . . Ivah set her own hands to the earth, to Nabban's earth, and slowly, because she was only drifting fog, a stirring stem of grass, wrote.
Beneath the sky, the sea of grass, the breathing hills.
The empress breathed out audibly and passed on, into the largest tent.

Ivah breathed again herself. She touched Yuro's hand, Awan's. The priest had his own eyes shut, praying. He looked up, pointed. She nodded. The empress had come from the further side of the compound. They went that way, crouching in deepest blackness, crawling, even. No oxen or mules, but there were people sleeping under many of the wagons. The more menial slaves of the imperial household, she supposed. Some lying wakeful, too, pressed close for comfort, whispering, afraid. Guards patrolled.

One wagon had been pushed away from the others. Guarded, where no others had been, and a lantern hanging from a halberd driven into the earth at its rear. Two men. Not giants, but they looked like imperial guard, until one walked over to speak to the other, heads close together, and that was not a soldier's way of moving but a hunter's, light on the feet. Ivah waited until they separated again, touched Yuro, found his ear.

“Wind in the Reeds.”

She pointed Yuro to the left. He had left his mace with the archers, but he carried a forage-knife at his back as Ghu did. She tugged at the high collar of his coat of scales, reminder of the enemies' armour. The forage-knife was no stabbing weapon. He nodded.

A sudden head-on rush would be seen. Yuro followed her lead, approached warily, circling to the side as a dog would. He stepped behind his man and jerked his head back. She was a pace behind, damn, and took hers in a lunge, arm over his mouth, dagger punching between plates into his back, down on top of him so her whole weight made the blow. He still struggled, biting her. She got a knee between his shoulders and both hands on his head. Their helmets were plain, without the visor-masks of a lord's, and she pressed his face into earth, leaning on him, as he bled to feeble twitches and suffocated together. She cleaned her hands methodically, rolled to her knees and looked around, jerking her knife free. No stirring. She had lost the spell, though, disrupted by the man's blood spattering it. Yuro was rolling the bodies under the wagon. No one sleeping here. Awan dashed over. Had she warned them not to make sudden movements—no one cried alarm. Fog rose waist high now, as if it were water, trapped and pooling.

Absence of light, where there likely was not usually light anyway, would be less noticeable than absence of guards. The wagon was a rough carriage, a wooden box with louvred windows to its sides. Yuro unlatched the door and went through like a badger into its den, on his belly. Ivah blew out the lantern and gave Awan a hand after the castellan, then followed, pulling the door closed behind her. The latch could be worked from both sides, good. She secured it before she sketched a light.

Yuro had already found them, down on his knees, and she had known; she could smell the blood. They had thrown Ahjvar in all anyhow, dumped like rubbish, but Ghu they had at least laid on his back, arms at his sides, and his eyes were decently closed. His coat and shirt were flung open and she shut her eyes a moment.

Didn't need to check for a breath, a heartbeat, not with such wounds, and Ivah was not one of those who saw the waiting dead. There was an emptiness, though, that made her think their ghosts already gone. Sent to the road. She might pray so. That rather than taken, please. She knelt and touched his lips. Cold, already. Her breath was catching in her throat, sobs stillborn, because she must not scream and wail, not here. She had believed, she had truly believed, that he could come to no harm, that he had some foreknowledge. He was
god
, he must have seen . . . Yuro had turned away. Awan was praying, a low mutter, rocking where he knelt.

“We can't leave him here. Either of them. Not like this. Can we carry them away?” Yuro asked, still not looking.

A gasp, horribly gurgling, like someone fighting lung-fever. Not the last sighing of the dead. Another, deeper. A muttered unintelligible string of what sounded foreign cursing.

“What was that?” Awan looked up, eyes wide in the dim light.

Ahjvar's corpse shifted, shadows moving.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Light. Many lights, small lights, faint. Stars. Fireflies. They swam and stirred, stars in water, but that was only his unsteady eyes. He hurt. He was cold. Could not remember how to move. Remembered trying to breathe, drowning, that bubbling in the chest, that fire.

“Can we carry them away?” someone asked, the faintest whisper.

Ahjvar took a breath, a deep one. It seared like a slow knife, gods, yes, dragged and rattled, but the next was easier. Not, after all, dying. Again.

“What was that?”

Light, growing, coalescing. Light in a wizard's hand.

Fit of coughing, choking. Hacking up clotted blood.

“Oh gods, Ahjvar's still alive.” Ivah, down on her knees by him. The floor moved, was still. “Ahjvar, hush, be still. They'll hear.” Her hand covered his mouth, which made him taste the blood that filled it, think he would choke again. He tried to turn his head aside. Weak as a new pup.

“Cold hells.” Yuro, moving carefully around him. The floor shifted again. A small space.

Third man. The priest Awan, his face expressionless, crawling over to him.

“There is something very wrong in here,” Awan whispered. “Ivah, don't you feel it?”

“Where?” Ahjvar muttered, against the hand he was too weak to push away. Managed to clench and unclench one hand. They hadn't cut his hands off, anyway. Not that one. The other—hurt, rather, but it moved. A very faint hurt, under a weight of pain that was a sea, drowning him, too great to understand.

“A wagon,” Ivah said. “Hush, they—they've brought you to a carriage in the empress's compound. I don't know why.”

Not what he wanted to know. He did get free of her hand, rolled to his side, or tried to.

“Ghu.”

“Great Gods, don't move. You'll bleed again.” She had found the buckles under his arm, was undoing the coat now. He clenched his teeth and still a sound escaped him, hardly human in his own ears, when she folded it back, flesh and leather pulling apart.

“Gods, gods, gods.” Her hands did something, which also hurt, did him up again, with shaking care. Bloody hands took his head. “Ahjvar, gods. How—There's nothing I can—it's beyond anything I can do. I'm sorry. Just—lie quiet. It—won't be long. We'll stay.” Tears ran faster.

He struggled over again and she put arms around him, trying to hold him down, and he did not like people touching him, clinging, pulling him into the fire, into the well, holding him down.

Ivah. She was trying to be comfort, to be kindness. To help. Don't hurt her.

Too weak to be a danger anyway.

“Not dead,” he said. “Not dying.”

The next breath was easier yet.

“Ghu,” he insisted.

“They killed him, Ahjvar. They killed you both together. He's here. He's beside you. There. Don't move. Just turn you head a little. Can you see?”

Her light moved, a little higher.

“Too bright,” Yuro whispered. “Cracks. The shutters. Someone will see.”

It dimmed.

Beside, on the carriage's floorboards. A shape, only. Not close enough to touch. He made it onto his side. Good. Arm.

“Ahjvar . . .”

Up onto his elbow. Knee, next.

“Don't!” But now her hands hovered, afraid to touch. The priest knelt beyond.

“He's not dead,” Ahjvar said, and fell beside Ghu, arm over him, leg. Hauled close.

Ghu's armour and shirt had been half stripped from him, baring his chest as if someone frantically sought to staunch the blood. Pointless. A grey taint to his skin, no warm colour of life. Cold, to a hand on his face, his neck, spread palm to his chest above the jagged, black crusted slits. One to his chest, one his lower ribs. No rise and fall. No breath against a hand. Cold and still.

“He's not dead,” he repeated.

“Ahjvar, he is. He'd bled his life away before they ever brought him here.”

He hurt and he was tired, and he'd had a spear run through his back and out and into Ghu, twice, and still he breathed, and hurt, and woke to crawl onwards.

“I'm alive. So he is.”

“You're dying,” Yuro said bluntly. “Man, they've ripped you through the lungs and how you breathe—”

“I died almost a hundred years ago. I was cursed. I don't die.” Cursed, and now trailing into the borderlands of godhead at Ghu's heels. “My stepmother burnt me to death and a goddess cursed me to live, to always live, trapped me in life no matter what's done to me. Why doesn't matter. That's done with, the use she had for me. But I heal. I survive. Fate and bloody chance will twist the world to keep me living, the blow is never quite fatal. Gods, they tried to behead me in Sea Town once sixty years ago, and the executioner slipped and fell beside me when there was no other way he could miss his stroke. Broke his neck. Or I did, can't remember. I
survive
; I'm trapped in life. I can't be killed for all so many have tried, myself included, and the bloody Lady of Marakand. But the goddess who cursed me is put from the world and I am taken from her. I belong to Ghu, my curse does. He holds me in the world as she once did. 'S'why they keep hunting a necromancer.”

His laughter was a horrible sound even to himself, thick through clotted blood. They thought him mad, raving.

“He's alive, or I wouldn't be. Dust an' ashes. How you'll know. I go to ash and bone, you know then, he's dead. Saw my own hand. Bone and ashes. I know what I am. I saw, I knew, when the curse took me and I crawled from the ruin of the hag's bower . . .”

But Ghu seemed cold and still and dead; he knew death well enough when he saw it.

No. Ghu would not die and leave him behind, leave him trapped, immortal, enduring and unending, in this life he persisted in only for Ghu's own sake. He would not, he would not. Ahj had faith in that one thing, beyond all else.

“How long?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long since we came here?”

“You were only half a day ahead of us, maybe.”

“When?”

“Well, today,” Ivah said.