Gods of Nabban (71 page)

That confused him. He shouldn't be moving. Not yet. He could lie like the dead for days, while the curse pulled him back into life and wounds that should never heal knit themselves to yet more scars of bloody history.

Or Ghu was dead and he himself dying in the ordinary way, too stupid to know it. Why should he think he would burn again?

No.

“We need to get them away,” said Yuro. “The empress might come back.”

“She's dead,” Ahjvar said. “Killed her.”

“She isn't.”

“Knife in her eye. Deep. Blade's full length. She's dead.”

“She was walking back to her tent from this wagon. That's how we found it.”

“Her eye was bandaged,” Awan offered. “Perhaps you missed, only wounded her.”

“Don't miss,” Ahjvar muttered. “Lots of practice. Been killing people a long time.
Tired
of it.” Long sigh. “Devil.” It came out like an obscenity, not an explanation.

He shut his eyes, still wrapped around the dead man as if he could warm him. Cold, cold, cold and heavy flesh, unmoving. All the world, centred on Ghu. They were bound; it was not a fool's thought. Ghu held all the web of the goddess's curse that kept him in the world. He'd never felt it as a
thing
before, as if for a moment they were one creature, shared nerves and blood and soul, or he some lesser part of Ghu's greater being.

Some other thing. Some other web, some clinging, burrowing, sucking thing—

Opened his eyes and pushed himself up on one arm.

“Where?” he said.

“What?”

“Priest said, something's here. Wrong. Where?”

“I don't—I'll throw the coins.” Rustling behind him. Looking for her damned coins. The priest came to kneel by them, his hands on Ghu's temples, brushing back the hair that lay over his face, blood-sticky.

“The holy one should not be so cold,” he said.

“He's
dead
.”

“Don't shout.” Yuro put a hand on Ivah's shoulder, warily, as if she might bite. It hadn't been a shout so much as a strangled whisper.

“At my age,” the priest said, “I've sat with many dead. Laid them out, blessed them, buried them. I've never yet known one be colder than the air, unless they were taken from the river and even then, they have only the river's chill.”

Too weak, too heavy, and the pain grew deafening. Ahjvar was lying down again, and the priest was right. Winter-cold, seeping into him. Flesh. Bone. Heart. Creeping down the chains that bound him, spreading, frost on spider's web, ice. Spreading to him from Ghu, through what bound them. Blood, thick in his mouth. Ice. Stone beneath his tongue. Not his. Ghu.

He fumbled a hand that could hardly move, pulled Ghu's head to the side so that they were face to face, too close to focus eyes on, but his eyes were blurred and hazed anyway. He shut them, the better to feel what he did. Cold lips. Fingers clumsy, pushing clenched teeth apart. Tongue, that had shaped such careful, wary words, tongue that could be so sweet and gentle, urgent and teasing, to give him back what he had forgotten and teach him what he had never known. Tongue that could whisper comfort even against the worst of the darkness in him. Stiff and dead, sheathed in a web of ice. Under the tongue. Sharp. He fumbled it up against the lower teeth, hard needle of not-ice, hooked it out, lost it on the floorboards, groped and pinched it as if it might turn to some many-legged horror and skitter away.

“Light,” he demanded, and when Ivah's dim light settled over him he struggled to sit up and pressed the sliver of stone into her hand. Pale, like milky quartz; a splinter, nothing more. Cold, biting in the fingertips.

“What in the cold hells . . . ?” she asked.

“Don't know.” But the icy horror that had been sinking roots into him was melting. He let himself down again. No change in Ghu, except that a hand laid on him warmed, slowly, the skin beneath. Only as any dead thing warmed to what touched it. No life, no breath.

Remember my name, Ahj. Don't let me drown with them and be lost. Find me, hold on to me, no matter what.

Call him. But he was not here. Lost.

Find me.

He was no damned shaman. He did not know the way of wandering in souls and dreams. Did not want to. Hold onto Ghu, though, he could, and did.

Mouth on Ghu's mouth, one last breath between them.
I have you.

“Ahjvar—Gods be merciful, he's stopped breathing.” Hands on him. Very far away.

“Leave him,” the priest whispered. “Let him go.”

He fell, as if into dark water.

CHAPTER XL

Cross the river and hold Choa.

Was she his dog?

The damned dogs trailed her, wolf-shadows, looking accusing, as if Yeh-Lin were the cause of their banishment. The clouds that had threatened in the evening had rolled in overnight as they marched, and fog had followed and overtaken them out of the river valley. Not the god's fog, but her own, drawn about them, cold and chilly. The air was heavy, though. Past the dawn, but hardly lighter than the twilight. Storm coming. The clouds were black and churning, somewhere above the fog, and she could only hope that Sien-Shava could not pierce it, to know for certain more than that she moved. It was not only fog she shrouded them in.

They were near, she thought. Near, very near. Her folk—Nabban's—sat or lay and rested, even slept, in their ranks, and had water and what food there was so, as well. Waiting. Few lanterns, kept low and shrouded, just enough to help them keep their place.

Her children were tight-lipped and shadow-eyed with their fear. They had not gone when she ordered them, with the wounded and the exhausted over the river under Prince Dan's command. Could she argue? Jang had said, “You're going after him. We'll come after you.”

This was not the proper behaviour of a page. She would have to point that out, if they all survived.

A frenzied night. A weary march. She had not been able to pull together the force she wanted in an hour, which fear screamed at her to do. The Grasslander had gone ahead. The priest Awan had gone with her, and Yuro, and a company of mixed rebels and archers of Alwu. Yeh-Lin supposed she was fortunate Dan had remained in command of the companies left to hold the crossing, though she would rather have had Yuro's good sense than Dan's utterly irrational faith in his fool god's wisdom. There was an apprehension among the soldiery, conscripts and converts and rebels alike. The holy one of the gods had ridden alone against the empress and her army. They followed, awaiting some sign . . . They might already be doomed and damned and godless.

Not godless. The empress had wanted him alive. The assassin the dead king questioned had said so. Alive and captive, and he counted on that, her mad, beautiful, innocent god.

Half-witted fool. He didn't even wait to ask what she might do, what they could do, she, he, a devil's daughter, and his half-mad champion. Just went and left her bound in the weight of an army and his word, his trust, his thrice-damned eyes.

Yesterday's rumour had run like fire through the companies, the numbers coming against them, ten thousand, twenty, fifty, a hundred, all the armies of all the provinces of the south. Tell them the south is fully engaged fighting the Wild Girls, she told the officers. Tell them there is not enough grain in all the provinces north of the Gentle Sister to feed the numbers they fear.

But there had not been panic, and she had not after all withdrawn from the east, only sent what she must, to secure the west, which confidence must, she hoped, spread downward. She did not like retreat. If she had done as Ghu had seemed to order, they might march and countermarch up and down the Wild Sister for weeks and gain nothing. No. He said one thing and willed that she listen.
All in your hands, do you hear me?
And so she left Dan to pull together what he could from the wreckage of her own ruin, if it came that.

If it came to that, they were all lost, godless together.

“My lady?”

Zhung Ario, leading his horse into the lantern-light she made. A lantern carried by Kufu, but wizardry lit it.

“What?” she snapped—too angry, tired, hopeless, she did not know. All courtesies fled.

“My lady, the scouts have brought in two you should see.”

“Imperial spies? Wind in the Reeds? All scouts from the empress's army are to be killed.” She was not feeling forgiving, and she did not want assassins getting loose at her back.

All too clear Ghu did not trust even to the Praitannec tongue to keep secrets within the camp, or they would have been able to make some more co-ordinated plan.

Or perhaps he really had that much faith in her.

“I don't know, my lady. They say not.”

“And you believed them, of course.”

Zhung Ario rubbed mud from his cheek. “I wasn't sure, my lady. One says, well, she says she's an ambassador of the Wild Girls, come to speak with the heir of the gods of Nabban. She says the other is a servant of Prince Dan. Wiser to let you see them than to obey mindless and kill an ambassador, I thought.”

Give the man greater command than he had, for that. When she had time and leisure to think of such things. “Yes. Take me to them, then.”

The captives sat under a tree, guarded. She could not see them till she was almost on top of them. That they had been taken at all in this fog argued that they had wanted to be found. A man with a crooked nose and a face cross-hatched with fine scars, a sharp-boned woman, both young, both road-ragged and dirty. Their quilted gowns might have been decent ones, once.

They had been disarmed of swords. Not the beggars they looked. There was an air to the woman, something to her, a presence. Not wizardry.

And her eyes, the clear brown of hazelnuts, went wide, seeing Yeh-Lin. She rose to her feet, her hand pressing her comrade down when he too would have risen. Their guards stirred warily.

They faced one another in silence.

“The heir of the gods of Nabban,” the woman said at last. “What have you done with him?”

Truth in her. Yeh-Lin gave truth back. “My lord rode yesterday to meet the empress.”

“
Your
lord.”

“Yes. He is.”

“Alone?”

“He ordered—”

“You let him go alone? Do you know what whispers in the empress's ear?”

“Sien-Bloody-Shava,” Yeh-Lin snapped. “Yes, I do, and I see you do too. And what are you?”

“Anlau, a queen of Darru and Lathi. Call me Rat.”

“Queen is hardly all, is it? But I'll let it pass for now. And who is he?”

“Dwei Kaeo? My friend. A singer and actor. A prophet of the gods of Nabban, maybe. A spy of Prince Dan's in the Golden City, till they took him. He came to keep me company on the way.”

“I've heard that before,” she muttered.

“Queen?” Ario was asking. “One of the Wild Girls, she means? Here? Her?”

“You left him to go alone?” the rat-girl persisted.

“He—Why in the cold hells do you think we are here?” Almost on top of the enemy, not even a mile between, and the fog smothering all.

“The empress is nothing. Why the god of Nabban there and you here?”

Because he arranged it so. To give Buri-Nai what she wanted, her rival, the heir of the gods in her hands. To distract her, let her think she'd won, while Yeh-Lin . . . did what she could. Or just as likely, for all they denied it, to put Buri-Nai within his assassin's reach.

The fool who had taken a castle with two swords and a forage-knife.

Had he even believed the empress to be the enemy he must face?

Did he see—

To the east, and high, the fog glowed, showing itself smoky and restless, pearly. Ivah's signal loosing the archers. Time to go, and now she saw, now—

“Cold hells damn him for a half-witted fool!”

And herself, blind, blind—blinded, known and blinded from the moment Jochiz smelt her hovering to spy on the empress in her mirror.

She spun on her heel, hair flying, loosing all hold on her form. To the cold hells with all of it. She was through with playing games.

Now.

All in her hands. He put
Nabban
again in her hands.

She did not want it. She would not be his heir. It was not the empress he had gone to distract and draw out but the devil and he did not know, he did not understand, he could not, what that might mean.

“Jang, Kufu, Ti! Go tell the commanders to follow the plan. I go to our lord, and they must follow on.” And die, and all Nabban was lost. “You understand? Go now. Run!”

Kufu nodded, backing away before he ran. Ti and Jang both stared a moment. Then they, too, ran, Jang calling some instruction to the boys, sending them different ways.

And so she broke her pages' hearts.

Zhung Ario backed a step or two. “My lady—”

“Go, go, if you love our blasted young god,” she said. “
Our
god.
Mine
. Yes, I am Yeh-Lin Dotemon. Did you think I lied in my challenge to Hani Gahur? My
god
, he is. I have given myself to Nabban, to his Nabban and what he will make of it, and he is gone to face not the empress but a devil, a tyrant to make Bloody Yao look a kindly grandfather. Trust me, there are powers we never yet unleashed on the world, even in the end, but our enemy is one who would break the very heavens if the power to do so came into his hands and I see, I did not understand and now I see.
And
there's another damned goddess half-formed wandering out into the land. Turn these two loose. They are what they say and the Wild Girls and the Little Sister may yet be your best hope, if all else fails.”

“My lady,” Zhung Ario said. He bowed to her and mounted, a curt gesture sending the prisoners' guard running ahead. One delayed only to offer them back their swords.

Yeh-Lin drew her own sword and turned through the circle, the steps, weaving a pattern to call the wind. And the wind, pulling storm in its wake, shredding fog, came to take her.