The Lady (52 page)

No. Desire of possession was not love.

He drew the last threads of Hyllau free, held in cupped hands. Open-eyed, what did he see? Fire, with darkness at its heart. He would have cast Hyllau away, even Hyllau, with a blessing to seek the Great Gods' road, but she turned and dove for Ahjvar's heart, burning as she had burned then, and the junipers were lit with flame.

Ghu closed his hands over her, like a man catching a butterfly, felt her fluttering there, and crushed.

His hands burned. When he opened them, there was nothing to see in the moonlight but a little ash, sifting away. He blew, and a wind took it, so that it did not land on Ahj. The branches above him were scorched and dead. When he laid a hand on Ahjvar's forehead, the skin was cool as he'd expect of a man in damp clothes lying out on a nighttime hill, and no warmer. He breathed, sleeping, a heartbeat still to be felt in the hollow of his throat.

Mother Nabban, Father Nabban . . .
prayer had no words. He had done what he had done. The east pulled him. Ahjvar muttered, whimpered in his dreams, grew quiet when Ghu spread a hand on his chest. He watched him a long while, sitting, stroking his hair in silence, keeping the dreams at bay as the swelling moon drifted, throwing silver through the naked branches. Finally, though, he bent over, whispered, calling him. He wanted to let the man sleep, to watch him sleep, to wait for the dawn, but that was not what he had promised, and to take more ungiven—he could not.

“Ahjvar.”

Ahj twitched and woke and reached, found his hand and looked up at him.

“Not morning.”

“No, it's still night.”

There was fear, clear even in night and shadow. The curse had been rising, the hag waking, and now he was awake . . .

“Ahj, no. You've been here. With me. Safe. Hyllau is gone. She did die in the fire, ninety years ago. What was left is burnt away. She is gone from you.”

Ahjvar looked as if he did not understand, but maybe empty was how he felt. Lost.

“You said I could die,” he whispered.

“I know. I know. I don't lie. But I wanted, Old Great Gods forgive me. Ahjvar, I wanted—I ask now. She is gone. You are made clean. You won't kill for her again, and your nightmares will be only nightmares. Memories. I promise you, it is over. But what Catairanach made you, you are still. I took her from you, but Ahj, I've put myself in her place, to hold you. Because you died too, that night. You were always right, you were dead. In some degree. Not so dead as she . . .” Not so utterly destroyed, not past saving, body or soul. He put fingers to Ahjvar's lips when he would have spoken. “No, wait. I want to ask you this, promise you this. I will let you go. Now. Or whenever you desire it. I swear to you, by the heart of the mountain, the waters of the river, by all I am and will be, I swear I will let you go, when you ask it. This night, now, or any time to come. But you are
free.
I know you are tired, and I know the world is too heavy, but please. I have to go to Nabban. It pulls me, now. I can't stay here. I want to ask . . . try living, again, first? Come with me, a while yet? As long as you will? Only as long as you will. Please. Neither to be my champion nor my captain, nor my assassin.” He laughed, half a sob. “Nor my lover. Just, come to keep me company. I am afraid of this road. I can travel it alone. I expected to. I'd rather not.”

Ahjvar didn't speak, pulling himself up slowly, as if every bone ached, sitting shoulder to shoulder, his sword pulled across his legs. His fingers traced the gilt leopard's head, but Ghu thought he had his eyes shut.

“God of Nabban,” he said at last.

“Not . . . quite. Not . . . yet.”

“You do promise. When I ask.”

“Yes.”

Ahjvar rested his head against Ghu's. “I don't like gods much.”

“That's all right.”

“Or men.”

“Did I ask that?”

“Hah. Do you not? I just want to sleep, Ghu. I can't think. My head hurts.”

“I know. But we're very close to the Praitannec camp, and maybe we should go farther, before anyone comes looking for—”

“For what?”

“I don't know. The ghosts of dead kings?”

“Yes. Do I have to walk? Where are we going?”

“Nabban.”

“Not tonight, we're not.” Ahjvar sat up straight again and rubbed his face. Both dogs jumped up, expectant, tails stirring. “So?”

“So, then?”

“So, we go far enough to boil some coffee in peace. That's all. And you're in charge of horse-stealing. We have no money.”

Ghu did, Ahj's money and Ivah's, which he had taken with her scroll-case and blanket that he had salvaged from the street, after the Red Masks took her, but he didn't think a man looking like one of Ketsim's folk was going to find a very friendly market for buying horses in the Praitannec camp.

“I'm sure I used to own some good horses,” Ahj muttered. “Someone gave them away, though.”

“While you were with the kings, I talked to a groom named Rozen. She has our horses. She thinks they belong to Deyandara, but we can't take horses across the eastern deserts anyway. They'll be happier here, but I do have to go back to Nabban. That means the sea or the deserts. I've been a sailor. We could—”

“I get seasick.”

“Do you really?” Ghu grinned. “Have you ever ridden a camel? Some find it's just as bad.”

“I don't want to go back to the Five Cities. I don't want to go anywhere I've been before.”

“We'll cross the deserts, then.” Ghu laughed, leaned against him again, just for a moment. “These Praitans have captured a lot of the Marakander mercenaries' beasts. Let's go steal some camels, Ahj.”

CHAPTER XXXV

Nour and Hadidu wanted Ivah to stay in Marakand, of course. Strange there should be that in her thoughts,
of course
, as if she could think she had earned it. A place, if she wanted it. A home. But Talfan was sharp and bitter in her grief, and blamed Ivah for Varro's death, as fervently as she'd held her Nour's saviour, and that bitterness hurt Hadidu.

She didn't want to see Hadidu hurt.

They had burned Varro's body in the Northron way, out on the edge of the desert, given his bones to the desert and the ashes to the wind. His sword, though, had been gone by the time anyone had had the time to go reclaim his corpse. Talfan, she thought, harboured dark suspicions of Ivah on that point too, though the apothecary had the lingering courtesy not to voice those, at least. Ivah thought of the missing temple guardsman, the one who had come with Ashir the Right Hand, his ally in betrayal of the Lady. He had offered to help, and had disappeared into the woods when she refused. Maybe he'd gone back to his fellows, to join in their butchery of the poor old man and his bear, and had been cut down by Mikki's axe. Maybe he'd gone up the ridge and was dust with blessed Belmyn and her patrol. But maybe not. Maybe there was a Marakander mercenary gone to the road with a cursed and kingly sword.

Mikki had not come back. Ivah had no idea where he had gone, once the Lady was dead. Moth had left him, Holla-Sayan said. More to it than that, which the Blackdog didn't think her concern, and she was surprised how it hurt her, to think of the demon heartsore and alone. She wanted to divine for him, to follow him, but resisted the impulse. He wouldn't want company. Not hers, not anyone's but Moth's, and if she did find the demon and intrude on him . . . what then? Nor would Gaguush welcome her to Rasta's caravanserai, seeking Holla-Sayan's companionship. Aside from Varro's funeral, where she'd kept back and silent, she'd seen the Blackdog once, only the once, since the Lady—since Tu'usha fell. He kept out of the city, busy about the caravanserai's business and putting together a new caravan for At-Landi, Nour said.

Ivah had a place in the library as a scholar, if she wanted it. She lived there, now, in a small room with Moth's horse-skull set in the lamp-niche, the clay lamp balanced on its head, and Mikki's heavy axe and a set of carpenter's chisels carefully wrapped in oiled leather under the bed. She wasn't sure why the devil had travelled with a horse skull, which sometimes seemed to watch her in the night, or why Mikki had not at least come back for his tools, but she felt she needed, somehow, to care for them. Awkward, useless remembrances of—of, she didn't know what. She'd been making a bad joke when she told poor lost Ghu that Moth was her stepmother. They weren't family, hardly even friends. But Ulfhild's daughter had been Ivah's sister; her son, Ivah's brother. That was a strange thought. Dead long ages, but siblings. It was a bond. It meant she needed not to abandon some—some memory of Moth and Mikki. To hold something, to draw them back to her, or so that if they came back, singly or together, she could say,
I thought of you, see? I worried, damn you.
Which was what true families did.

The librarians, those that remained, and the young, Nabbani-trained wizards drifting back from the Five Cities, were deferential. Ivah had defeated the Lady in the first battle against her, destroyed the Red Masks, freed the god Gurhan . . . denial did no good and began to seem too fervent a false modesty.

She began to dream of horses, and falcons, and waves of grass under the sun. Of a mountain she had never seen, snow-peaked, hung with patches of dark woodland, and a great slow-winding river, pewter-grey under rain. Marakand wasn't her place; Gurhan, for all his friendship, not her god. She didn't belong here, and she didn't know where she might, ever.

Nour came seeking her one day, as she worked at a copy of
The Balance of the Sun and the Moon
to replace the one lost when the Red Masks took her. It was scribes' work, and there were a dozen scribes eager to do it for her, but she wanted the book—and it would be a bound codex this time, not a damned unwieldy scroll—in her own hand, with her own notes incorporated, and not her mother's ghost in every commentary.

“Kharduin and I still have a living to earn,” he said. “We're heading out for Nabban. You were a caravaneer, once, Holla-Sayan says. Come with us?”

EPILOGUE

There is a story-tellers' cycle of tales, and they begin like this:

Long after the Old Great Gods had made the world and left it for the Lands Beyond, in the days of the first kings in the north—who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, as all but fools should know—there were seven devils, and their names were Honeytongued Ogada, Jasberek Fireborn, Vartu Kingsbane, Tu'usha the Restless, Jochiz Stonebreaker, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, and Twice-Betrayed Ghatai. If other tellers tell you different, they are ignorant singers not worthy of their hire.

Now, as all should know, the gods and the goddesses live in their own places, the high places and the waters, and aid those who worship them, and protect their own. And though the demons may wander all the secret places of the world, their hearts are bound each to their own place, and though they once served and once defied the Old Great Gods and are no friends to human folk, they are no enemies either, and want only to be left in peace. But the devils have no place, and walk up and down over the earth, to trouble the lives of the folk. And the devils do not desire loving worship, nor the friendship of men and women. They do not have a parent's love for the folk. The devils crave dominion as the desert craves water, and they know neither love nor justice nor mercy.

And in the days of the first kings in the north, who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, there were seven wizards. And two were of the people of the kings in the north, who came from the western isles, and five were of other tribes, of the Grass and the sea, and from the eastern lands far from the forests of the kings in the north, but the seven were of one fellowship. Their names were Heuslar the Deep-Minded, who was uncle to Red Geir; Anganurth Wanderer; Ulfhild the King's Sword, who was sister to Hravnmod the Wise; Sien-Mor and Sien-Shava, the Outcasts, who were sister and brother; Yeh-Lin the Beautiful; and Tamghiz, Chief of the Bear-Mask Fellowship. If other singers tell you different, they know only the shadows of the tales, and they lie. These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. And the stories of their deeds are many, for they were great heroes among their peoples. And these all can be told, if there be golden rings, or silver cups, or wine and flesh and bread by the fire.

But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet more, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

And the seven devils, having no place, had no body, but were like smoke, or like a flame. They hungered to be of the stuff of the world, like the gods and the goddesses and the demons at will, and as men and women are whether they will or no, and having a body, to find a place. So they made a bargain with the seven wizards, that they would join their souls to the wizards' souls, and share the wizards' bodies, sharing knowledge, and unending life, and power. But the devils deceived the wizards, and betrayed them.

The devils took the souls of the wizards into their own, and became one with them, and devoured them. They walked as wizards among the wizards, and destroyed those who would not obey, or who counselled against their counsel. They desired the worship of kings and the enslavement of the folk, and they were never sated, as the desert is never sated with rain.

So the kings of the north and the tribes of the grass and those wizards whom the devils had not yet slain pretended submission, and plotted in secret, and they rose up against the tyranny of the devils, and overthrew them. But the devils were devils, even in human bodies, and not easily slain. They were bound, one by one, and imprisoned—Honeytongued Ogada in stone, Jasberek Fireborn in water, Vartu Kingsbane in earth, Tu'usha the Restless in the heart of a flame, Jochiz Stonebreaker in the youngest of rivers, Dotemon Dreamshaper in the oldest of trees, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai in the breath of a burning mountain. And they were guarded by demons, and goddesses, and gods.