CHAPTER IV

…early spring, a day or so before the full moon

The prisoner had not tried to free himself, through struggle or persuasion. He had been on his knees, chained to the wall since he was brought here. Praying, ignoring Yeh-Lin as she sat watching him, waiting for Ulfhild to arrive. A priest of the fifth circle, a knight. One who had striven hard to attain rank in his faith, who had served wittingly and willingly; who had not come so far on the road from the west of the world without committing what any god would call sin, killing, knowingly, to seize what was not his, killing in the service of one who slew gods.

Deserving of a swift death, and condemned thereafter to a very long road of atonement, until knowledge of himself should make him finally fit for the presence of the Old Great Gods. Except that the faithful of the All-Holy were spared that penitential, revelatory, and cleansing journey. Snatched away—either to be with the Old Great Gods in that instant, by the grace of their emissary, the nameless god of the west made incarnate in the All-Holy, or held safe in his bosom, to be released into the presence of the Gods when their emissary should return to them. Their doctrine was unclear on some details.

“Be silent,” Yeh-Lin said. She spoke Tiypurian. The priest, on his knees, ducked his head a little lower and continued his mutter of prayers. She struck him, a backhanded blow to the cheek, and seized his arm.

She had stripped him of his armour when she brought him here.

She and Nikeh had captured him as he led a patrol afoot into the hills, seeking to come around the southern tower and the end of the Western Wall. Easier than she had expected. That doomed dozen men had gotten themselves what a Malagru shepherd would call cragfast, and the hillfolk who had accompanied Scholar Jang had picked them off as if they were shooting at ripe mangos hanging from a bough, until Yeh-Lin and Nikeh, creeping near under cover of a simple working, had seized their commander before he could fling himself off the ledge.

No need to take him to the Warden, Scholar Jang had said. He was wanted for questioning in the city.

No need either to say by whom. And she had bade Nikeh stay at the south-end tower of the wall with a friend of hers stationed there. This was no business for an apprentice scholar, even one who had lived all her life as if she trained to be Wind in the Reeds, the spies and agents of the empire.

Yeh-Lin pulled the sleeve back from the man’s wrist. The tattoo of the cult was a round-cornered rectangle enclosing a swirl of symbols. It was not unlike the badge of ownership that might indicate a clan’s property, or be found on their banners, or a potter’s or painter’s stamp. Or the brands that had once marked a person a slave, she supposed. She wondered, even, if that was what had given Jochiz the idea, during his meddling in Nabban. This was not the searing of an iron but ink, though not ink only.

“You’re tattooed,” she said, “with the All-Holy’s blood. Do they tell you that, your priests, when they mark you for the first time?”

She knew they did. The man sneered.

“The All-Holy binds his own in one blood, one fellowship. We are all brothers and sisters.”

“Such a vast reserve of blood, he must have,” she reflected, tracing the border with a fingernail. Not, alas, an empress’s, carefully filed and lacquered. A trifle nicked, jagged at a corner. Blackened beneath. One could not expect to go clambering up cliffs like a monkey and keep immaculate.

The man shivered. She smiled and turned her attention to the pattern within. The script was both jagged and flowing. Nothing that he, nor any scholar even of the library up on the knees of Gurhan’s hill, could read. The pattern expanded outward, smaller satellite designs, but those were only to denote his rise through the circles. There was no power in them.

“Your All-Holy must spend his life opening his veins, to accommodate all his many converts.” She pressed a little, marking him. His breath caught. It seemed some small corner of his mind might be enjoying that.

And Ulfhild was there, slinking like a grey wolf down the stairs. Yeh-Lin had not felt her approaching through the Suburb, or over it. Stealthy.

She came to stand by Yeh-Lin. She looked…somewhat disapproving. Yeh-Lin smiled warmly at her, and turned back to the prisoner.

“Or,” she suggested, “perhaps his blood is so holy that a few precious drops are enough for the vast jars of ink you must go through?”

Unfortunately, that seemed to be the case.

“Can we get on?” Ulfhild asked, speaking harsh Northron. “I mislike being so far from the god.”

Yes, there was an abstracted air about her, a sleepwalking slowness. Even here, in this cellar beneath the burnt shell of the red priests’ mission-house—boarded up by order of the Warden of the Suburb after the arson that had followed its inhabitants’ flight—Ulfhild maintained a watch over Marakand’s last god and a shield against Sien-Shava Jochiz. Set runes, and songs, and kept them live and thrumming with power like the notes of a harp still ringing. If she listened, Yeh-Lin might almost hear.

“The bridge and the road,” Yeh-Lin said, which was the meaning of the signs, what was not mere ornamentation. “Bridge or gate. Signifying, I suppose, that he is the bridge over which their road must cross.”

“I don’t much care at this point,” said Ulfhild. She had taken the long dagger from her belt in her hand and was turning it restlessly. Tapping the disc-shaped pommel on her thigh, flipping it, catching it by the point, tossing it, hilt again, tap, flip, catch, toss—

“Stop that.” Yeh-Lin snatched it from the air. “You’re as fidgety as the dead king.”

Ulfhild plucked it back. “He’s one of the few humans I’ve met I can really understand.”

“You would say so. Given he’s mad. He and his sweet god together.”

“They’ve ensnared you.”

“Yes, well. You don’t need to mock me for it. At least I’ve found something to believe in.”

“And that would be?”

“Hope, dear heart. The hope that one single being, one action at a time, can make things better.”

“I’ve only ever made things worse.”

“Black bile.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. A stray remark. The dead king would understand. No, I knew Ivah well. You set her feet on a road once. A few words. A mother’s talking-to, she told me, or at least an elder sister’s. And that road led her to her god, and that—all Nabban, and lands that are no longer Nabban’s, are the better for it.”

“Says Yeh-Lin the conquerer. Those were your conquests they gave away, Ghu and Empress Ivah between them.”

“Why does no one ever believe I’ve reformed?” Yeh-Lin sighed, as theatrically as the dead king’s acolyte Ailan could manage when he was feeling hard done by. Nikeh had been tasked over the winter with improving his very haphazard literacy in the simplest Nabbani syllabic script, which was shared between Tarens and empire. Neither young person was enjoying it.

“But as you say.” She resumed speaking in Tiypurian. “Is there anything we actually need to learn from this devil-worshipping killer of children?”

“I’ve never harmed a child!” the knight protested, finally trying to jerk his arm from her grasp. She gripped it tight as the manacle on his other wrist by which he was chained to the wall. Her nail, that jagged corner, cut red lines on his wrist, outside of the black border of his initiate’s tattoo, just touching it. He winced, but then held proudly still.

Thinking she tormented him so pettily for her pleasure. “You call me devil-worshipper, when your own gods consort openly with the seven? It’s no secret Vartu Kingsbane has fled to your city after the All-Holy defeated her at the Kinsai’av.”

Four characters, she scratched into him. Court Nabbani, the complex symbols only a few scholars and poets still studied.

Ulfhild, playing with her dagger again, cut herself. Holding the prisoner’s gaze, being certain he saw. Dipped a finger in the welling blood and traced runes at the corners between Yeh-Lin’s characters. They were not the ordinary ones of Northron inscriptions or spell-casting. He whimpered. Seemed more repulsed and fearful of that than of Yeh-Lin’s cutting of his own skin.

“Are we ready?” Yeh-Lin asked.

“Ya.” Ulfhild stepped over behind the man, seized him by the hair, and cut his throat.

“Cold hells!” Yeh-Lin darted aside from the spewing blood. Further outrage at the lack of warning had to wait. He was still there for a moment, a breath, a roiling thing of confusion. So swift had been the execution he had hardly felt the pain grow, hardly had time to understand.

Ulfhild let him fall and stooped after him, dropping her dagger. Scooped red blood from the puddling flagstones. She knelt there and Yeh-Lin had perforce to kneel across from her, knees in the spreading pool. Her own hands under Ulfhild’s, cradling them. The blood leaked, as anyone who had ever scooped up water in their hands to drink would know it must. She bowed her head—thank common sense she wore her hair short and grey as Scholar Jang and had not changed herself for this, even to annoy Ulfhild, who thought her unduly frivolous and always had. Breathed on the cupped blood, and her breath was mist, smoking over river-water.

Island, long and narrow, dividing a river. Broken pillars. Cypresses towering dark. Small roofs, peaked or barrel-vaulted, fallen. Tombs, they were, and ancient. Overgrown. Vines, even trees, thick and ancient, rooted on what remained. Ridge of stone, and stone terraces, supporting more broken pillars, one arch still standing. Foundations, crumbled. Dark water swirling past.

A town, white walled, red roofed, south over the water. Glimpsed, forgotten. Unimportant.

They rushed, dove like swallows into the darkness of a barn. Now they were in a narrow place, the walls brick, the low roof vaulted. Cold. Damp. Water pooled on the floor. They were one—an unnerving brief awareness, she and Ulfhild Vartu, uneasy sharing of soulspace. Pain, a heavy weight of it. Grief. For what? The Northron had her beloved verrbjarn back from Sien-Shava’s torments—

Bones. A chamber of bones, stacked in niches where once shrouded bodies might have lain, jumbled on the puddled floor. Painted walls, bubbled with damp, flaking…

The walls were bright and fresh, not new but often renewed. Lamplight. No bones on the floor, only the dead decently laid out. Singing. Westron, the ear said, but not one of the languages she knew. Women’s voices. Women with shaven heads, white-robed. Girls preceded them with lanterns. The grown women carried between them a byre, a linen-wrapped figure on it. Those following sang. Prayers. Grandmother Tiy, she heard. They passed and faded. Memory of this place, that had seeped into the stone. Then—not lamplight. These latter days of scattered bones. They rushed, flying, fleeting, themselves wrapped around the soul of the dead knight, which struggled, now. Not against them. He hardly knew their presence, faint shadow-souls trailing his flight. No, he struggled to be free of this current, this—this chain, that pulled and dragged and drew him against all the weight of the Heavens, the opening of the road. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and he fought as a caged thing fights, battering, breaking himself, mad. Futile. She would have reached, have torn him away, let him fly blessed and free to the road that reached for him and his long journey, but Ulfhild pulled her back, prevented that mercy.

Not the purpose for which they had taken him. Not mercy.

A cavern. Part of these catacombs? She had not seen. The link between themselves and the captive soul began to fray. Cavern. Soft glow of light, not the seeing of vision, a light that was truly in that place. Pearly, rose-tinged. Moonglow.

Stone. Teeth, fangs. Not the dripping spears and daggers of slow water’s work. A crust of crystal. A pool of water beneath and curving from it, walls, meeting overhead, narrowing further away.

An egg. They were within an egg lined with jagged crystal. A cavern. She wrenched around, vision spinning dizzily. Black fissure, narrow, vertical.

Egg, womb of crystal.

And what might gestate there, and why such images in the mind, why such thoughts, such fear—

Within the water, crystals reflecting, crystals breaking the light they themselves cast. A stillness, there in the pool’s centre. A darkness. A black stone. A shivering. There was a hollow carved in the centre of it, a basin. The liquid surface rippled. Not water. Blood. Black, in this monochrome place all pale rose and black and pearl-white glow. She did not need to strain to see it crimson, to touch, to feel the viscous, living touch, to taste or smell. It was blood, his heart’s blood, living here, and the soul of the knight they had executed—even her god would not say murdered, would he, he who had once cried, no quarter, no mercy, for those who torture children—was drawn inexorably to it, though that Westron knight fought with all that was left in him, to answer the call and the demanding pull of the road, the summons of the Old Great Gods his faith had denied to him.

There was nothing that eyes might see, but the mind made a picture. A butterfly lands at the edge of a puddled rut in the road, uncoils its proboscis to drink. The water rises, a living thing, and engulfs it. But this butterfly landed fluttering wildly, beating its frail wings to pieces.

It did no good. The dark liquid swallowed it. The blood pulled, as if it were a well and she some trickle of water, rolling down its stones.

No. Ulfhild hurled them away while Yeh-Lin still strove to linger, fascinated. If she let it pull, let it take her too, just a little way—in that moment she had—not seen. Felt. Felt the vastness, the weight, the mass of what was there, growing, within that egg, that womb of crystal—

The glorious, terrible strength of it.

Not salt. Not quartz. Souls, made stone. Generations of them, bound in blood, and he had left his heart’s blood there and walked half-dead, a necromancy of his own, sustaining himself—

What were souls, in the end, but the sparks that made the life of the world—

They were in the cellar of the burned mission-house, kneeling in a puddle of sticking, stinking, cooling blood.

“Old Great Gods,” Yeh-Lin said. She still clasped Ulfhild by the hands. “Old Great Gods, Old Great Gods be merciful to us all. Vartu, did you see—did you taste the air of that place, that—did you see?”

“He steals their souls and seals them in stone.” Vartu—they must be Vartu and Dotemon now, this was no human matter, though humans were very much the matter of it—Vartu shook her head. “I already suspected as much. Though not that he could have bound so many. To what end?”

And gods, Dotemon said. He devours gods. He swallows them, in the ritual by which he destroys them. My spies have witnessed. The weight of them in the world is gone from their land. No self, no one and another. Dissolved into his blood, held in crystal, not souls but soul. Soul of the earth, growing and growing, as water in a cistern, drop by drop—

Vartu agreed. His own blood, binding them.

Trust the Northron to focus on the blood-magic of it. And Northron magic was worked with one’s own blood, most often.

Sien-Mor, Sien-Shava—they had gone north following the rumours of a new folk come over the sea, a new magic, worked in runes and blood. Admit it, so had she. Wandering, angry and outcast. Old bones aching in the bitter winter.

Not binding them, Dotemon said. Binding it.

He will make himself a god. In the end, when he has gathered enough souls— when they are such a weight and power in the world—he will take them into himself and become a god of this world.

Or the god of this world? she wondered. Oh, my horseboy, to be swallowed by that, and your bright burning king. And my lady of the baobab in her grace and patience and—every innocent babe and old man marked with his blood, witting or unwitting of what it might mean.

“I will go,” she said aloud.

“We.”

“No. You have work here. Gurhan still to preserve. And there is your Mikki. And—I am not a fool, Ulfhild Vartu. You never trusted Jochiz and you always loathed Sien-Shava. I do not think for a moment that you ever intended to serve out some penance here, guarding the god of Marakand until all is lost and Jochiz uses your own sword to cut the head from your neck. You are not defeated, and you are not through. I will go.”

Ulfhild Vartu was still. Then got to her feet and bowed, very Nabbani in manner. “What shall I tell your apprentice, Yeh-Lin Dotemon?”

“Tell her I’ve gone where I must in my god’s service, and she must stand tall and find her own road now. Tell her—tell her she has been a daughter to me, and she is—oh hells, tell the girl I love her and she must take care in conjugating ‘to know’ in the poetic form, because it does not conjugate like ‘to understand’ no matter how similar they seem in their root, if ever she would write good Nabbani prose. There. And tell the dead king, tell Ahjvar, to give my love to his beautiful shield-bearer, and kiss him, which I have never yet done, much as I have wanted to.”

“I have no intention of kissing either of them for you.”

“Not you, fool Northron. Though—”

“No.” But Ulfhild’s grin escaped her. One forgot, the woman had dimples when she smiled.

Yeh-Lin laughed aloud and hugged her, hard, as if they were children and sisters.

“Oh, Gods and devils and cold hells all forgive us, Vartu. We have had a strange road of it. Come, leave that Westron’s body to rot. I suppose there’ll be company enough for it soon enough. The Western Wall can’t hold whatever you do and it won’t be long. Jochiz is not prepared for a siege, whatever pretence of it Dimas has been making thus far. Come see me off.”

She strode to the stairs, blood drying on the knees of her leggings. She dusted it away, and from her hands, her immaculate short nails. Shrugged her shoulders, settling her armour, the long coat of black lacquered scales and blue cord fastenings which she had not been wearing when she came into this cellar. Hair streaming back, no grey in it.

Ulfhild Vartu, behind her, sketched a rune. Yeh-Lin felt the shape of it. A simple one. Fire.

Oh well, Northrons must have their little excitements.

The ruins of the mission-house were burning bright over them even before they reached the top of the stairs.

“Perhaps you overdid it?”

“Never.” Ulfhild gave her a shove. She jumped down into the street, through the boarded-up window by which, dragging her captive, she had prised her way in. A crowd was already gathering, a desultory effort being made to form a bucket-chain. No great urgency. There was little left to burn inside the mud-brick walls, and the neighbouring houses had lane-ways between.

No one noticed them walk away. Yeh-Lin turned up the first empty lane they came to, caught a window-ledge, pulled herself up, caught and swung to a screened gallery, smashing the screen in the process. And from the railing there to the flat roof. The household below slept. Ulfhild landed beside her in a flutter of feathers.

“Show-off.”

“Says you.”

Yeh-Lin smirked and drew her sword. Bowed solemnly, seriously. “Wish me luck, King’s Sword.”

“Luck, and fair winds, and all good fortune, Empress of Nabban. For all our sakes. I’ll buy you a drink when you come to Marakand again.”

“You’ll buy me a whole jar, and it will be the best twelve-herb white-spirit, too, not the thin wine of these hills.”

She settled her helmet on her head, the long ribbons, Nabban’s sky blue, mingling with her unbound hair as she turned, drawing the circle in the air with her sword’s point, its own scarlet ribbons and blue floating, and then began the dance.

Yeh-Lin called the winds, and the winds answered.