CHAPTER IX

The night air of Marakand smelt of smoke and barnyard, but the god Gurhan’s forested hill breathed the scent of cedars and ferns, water and stone and moss. There was frost in the air, cold rolling down from the Pillars of the Sky.

The horse that grazed nearby had no scent at all, save a whiff of old bone. Why Storm grazed, tearing at the grass along the edge of the path as if he had not eaten in centuries—which was the case—Mikki could not imagine. Habit, perhaps. How he grazed—that was another question. Something for the wizard-philosophers of the library to debate, if ever they had time for such things again. The shaggy-legged blue roan stallion left no piles of dung on the forest floor.

Click of hoof on stone. Sigh. Gust of air blowing Mikki’s hair, and a great soft muzzle brushing over the top of his head. Nearly two centuries abandoned, a skull set carefully on a ledge in the god’s own sacred cave, had given Storm time to grow sentimental, it seemed. Or whatever passed for that in an ancient, frequently contrary, bone-horse, which was to say, a creation of Northron necromancy meant to summon, for a brief period, the seeming of a horse into the world for a wizard’s use. Not to recreate, in body and soul and excess of character, a particular horse, whom Moth said had not only been slain in battle under her, but cut up and thrown into a well in hatred of his rider.

“Jealous?” Mikki asked. “Don’t like her playing with other ghosts? Neither do I.”

He considered the burl of grey olive-wood he had been working by the light of the fire and the moon. It wasn’t only the skull of the horse Styrma that Ivah had left in the god’s keeping when she set out east for Nabban, but Mikki’s abandoned axe and chisels.

He wasn’t sure what he was making. Had made? It seemed—nearly finished. A little roughness here and there to smooth away, a little delicate detail to add: a feather’s edge, a horse’s eye, maybe. There. Done? He thought so. The god of the hill had asked what he did, and had nodded, understanding, when he answered that he was finding something that seemed to need discovery. He had roughed it out over the nights since finding the burl, cutting it free from the old storm-broken bough of a wild olive, years weathered. A bowl, rounded, but irregular. It looked right, so. The inside he had smoothed like the inner curve of an eggshell. The outside he carved with tiny figures, ships of the north and swans, bears and wolves, horses and eagles, all flowing one into another, circling, spiralling inwards, covering every surface save the base.

The figures he made cast shadows. In the moving firelight, they seemed to swim, run, fly. Rushing away.

The horse nosed at him again. Mikki got to his feet, taking the carving and the chisels back up to the god’s cave, a well-worn path between tall grey trunks, the ground beneath cushioned with fallen needles. He had to duck to enter the low opening, a curtain of ivy hanging down, trailing over him. A holy place, a shrine, but not a home. All the hill was riddled with caves and tunnels, water-worn long ago, and all were of the god. Gurhan took human form, but he was not and never had been human; he had no dwelling-place and needed none. If his guests treated this sacred place as a shed out of the weather for their convenience, the god did not complain of it, and so neither could his priests and priestesses, who would rather, Mikki suspected, have the god’s somewhat worrying friends conveniently lodged under their eye in their rambling family compound down towards the library, rather than camped like tramps within the god’s holiness.

He left the bowl sitting alone on a ledge of stone. Gift. Offering.

Felt something whole in himself again, for having made it. Hands that might still shape.

The horse trailed Mikki like a dog as he went back down the hillside, crossing the track and climbing again. Like a shelled walnut, the hill was seamed with gullies and channels, little dark ravines to which the sun never found its way. Moth had laid out her ground on a small plateau, a shelf of stone across from the cave of the god, and above it, facing the east. The high moon was growing faint, the sky lightening. Sun would not find her there till nearly noon, but its still-unseen rising found him as he climbed. He was already shedding his caftan, the only clothing he wore, leaving it hanging on a cornel sapling, as the dawn this ravine did not yet see ran through blood and marrow. An ache in the bones, an old man’s pain, as he went down on four legs. He was white about the muzzle now. Moth never mentioned it. White streaks in her pale hair, frost on oat-straw.

Left behind down on the path, Storm grumbled and tore mouthfuls of twigs from a hazel, dropping them, snorting, looking up to see if his tantrum were noted. Mikki did look back, to laugh. Offended, the horse plodded away.

Moth only looked up when she heard Mikki climbing through the scrub, held out a fending hand as he leapt to land beside her. Something caught in his shoulder, twinge, like someone drove a nail into the joint. Old man, old bear. He lowered his muzzle to her palm, closed his eyes a moment, just to drink the scent of her.

And of charcoal, chalk, blood. New cuts on her arms, and she had her sleeves rolled back still, healing lines of red, faded white that might be yesterday’s bleeding. A devil’s healing. He settled down behind her where he would not disturb the working, but could keep his head pressed to her thigh. She had been extending the pattern. It looked like a Grasslander cat’s-cradle painted on the stone, with runes set at its crossings. He could feel the power that flowed in it, a barrier like moving water, like wind and the rising draft of a fire. A shield against Sien-Shava Jochiz, an armour wrapping the city and Gurhan, held against the devil’s presence, his reaching power.

At her feet, though, a vessel of folded birchbark, no bigger than the cupping of two hands, half-filled with fine ash, and darker clumps of ash, too, curdled with blood. Fresh. Blood in the ashes was new. She had only whispered and sung over them, before. Telling them what she would have them be.

“What are you doing, princess?”

“Just—wondering,” she said.

“Wondering in blood?”

She rubbed ashes between thumb and forefinger, breaking up a sticky clump. “Wondering, if I were to call, what might answer.”

“That’s not even she.”

“Don’t tell the runes that. Don’t tell her. You don’t hear him, old friend, do you? You know who you are, still and always. You remember, now.” She was whispering, almost crooning the words, looking down into the ashes, not at him.

Mikki growled, softly, to himself. Flexed claws. If he thought of stretching a paw out, striking the birchbark away, scattering the ashes…he did not.

She had written on the outside of the bowl. A lie bound in words, a name. But Sien-Mor was dead and gone, her soul lost. Destroyed, maybe. Moth had said she thought Sien-Shava believed so, that he had thought to destroy Sien-Mor and Tu’usha together, and though the devil had fled to nest in the heart of a goddess, and it was certain he had torn one from the other and destroyed the conjoined being they were, Sien-Mor might only have died as mortal humans died, and found her long road to the Old Great Gods. Fire, like earth, and submersion in water, and salt in the mouth, was a ritual to free the soul. Even when it was also a means of murder.

Necromancy might bind the souls of the dead before they had taken the road. It could not draw back those on their journey to the Old Great Gods, nor yet pull a soul from their safekeeping. Of the dead and gone, it might only wake and use a memory, an imitation. That was a tenet of every folk’s beliefs surrounding the dead, a truth of the world.

Storm—challenged that, and he was a beast whose soul ought to have faded back into the life of the world, no matter that Moth had reclaimed his skull, no matter what she wrote on it. Of Sien-Mor, Moth had not a fingerbone.

No bones left, not even a tooth, and teeth are always what remain, to go into an urn, into the earth, when the funeral pyre is cold. Only a barren little valley where nothing grows and no waters run, high on the northern face of a peak in the Malagru. The horses, Lark and gentle Fury, have been left below; Moth would have left Mikki, too, only he would not be left. Stubborn and silent, following her. He knows what she intends. They have argued it out, and she will not give up her intention. The place is still. No bird, no insect. No demon, though it had been a demon’s home, once. A creature of fire; salamander, the wizards named it, though Mikki thinks it more likely that the demon had been northern dragon-kin.

There is no fire. Once this place burned undying, a crack of pale flame rising from the earth. His paws stir ash, not downy soft like wood ash, but like fine, light sand, black and white mingled to grey. Faint scent of sulphur. He sneezes. Moth gives him a reproving look. She squats down, takes up a handful of ash and blows on it.

“There’s nothing of her here,” he says. “This is stone, burnt stone. Nothing that was ever a living being.”

“Best leave wizardry to the wizards, cub.”

“Leave necromancy to the necromancers, you mean. Moth, don’t.”

“If there’s nothing of her here, you can hardly call it necromancy.” She pulls a small cloth bag from her belt. It held dried figs once, from the pantry of the Upper Castle on the Kinsai’av. He watches as she fills it with several handfuls of the ash.

“You’re going to summon the memory of a fig tree, not a ghost.”

“He has already summoned her, or a memory of her. It’s there, that tang, that taste—like a scent on his skin. It doesn’t matter if it is something of her he took into himself, unwitting, though I think that’s very likely, or if it’s merely a shaping of his own mind, his guilt. It’s there— she’s there, already. To breathe a little life into her—” She grins, knotting a cord about the neck of the bag. “If I must fight him, cub, I want him to have always half an eye behind.”

Moth stirred the ashes with a finger, breaking up the rest of the blood-bound clumps.

Down in the ravine, Storm whinnied, a trumpet of warning.

Vartu! The silent cry came with a gust of wind that tore leaves and twigs from the trees, raised a plume of ashes, till Moth clapped a hand over the container, looking up. Gurhan was with them, not in any physical form, but a presence, the heart of that agitated wind. Mikki surged to his feet. Scent in the air, there, gone, back again. Above them. He gave a grunt of laughter, unexpected joy.

Holla-Sayan? But it wasn’t Holla-Sayan he touched, reaching out. Something…broken ice, that was what was in his mind, the image of what he met. Cold. Edged. Sharp and brittle, and fires like a devil’s soul, but likewise broken, flaring and cold and flickering erratically. And chains, the touch of chains grinding over his skin, the raw tracks of them and he roared and swatted at what was no longer there, batting at the air about his head.

Moth gave him one startled look, while he still struck out and backed away, stumbling, sliding when there was nothing under his hind feet. She flung the ashes skyward and yelled, “Go, then, and be what you will.” Came after Mikki, who had mastered himself, panting. Watching for movement that did not come, with Moth’s hand on his head.

“He doesn’t hear me,” Gurhan said aloud, standing with them, something like a man, a shadow half-seen in the corner of the eye.

“Don’t disturb the lines,” Moth said, not to the god, and then, “Go to your priests, lord of the hill. Let them pray. Every word raised in your defence is one word more to strengthen what I’ve woven.”

“Holla-Sayan?” Mikki tried aloud. “Hey, dog? Your horses are in the priests’ stables down by the Silverward shrine. You can tell your young woman I didn’t eat them after all.”

Old Great Gods, and what had become of Holla’s Jolanan, since he’d fallen into Sien-Shava’s hands? And what of the Rihswera of Nabban and his fosterling, who had gone into the mountains seeking the Blackdog on Moth’s word?

Stillness. Gurhan was all about them, an awareness, but he was with his priests, centred there, and they added what they might to Moth’s defences. Mikki backed from under her hand, moved away, began a slow stalking sidelong up the hillside. A bear need not lumber and crash its way, forest beast in forest, soft and subtle for all his size, but he did not expect to circle the Blackdog unseen, unsmelt. Only let the dog’s attention be on him, let their enemy be drawn away from the lines of charcoal and the blood-painted runes.

Holla, oh, Holla-Sayan. Can’t you hear your name?

The dog came down the hillside in a rush, leaping over Mikki’s head as he wheeled and snapped, fangs closing on air. It struck Moth as she rolled from its path and they crashed down together. She grappled with it, trying to seize its jaws and hold them closed, her own teeth bared in a grimace. Silent, both of them. Mikki circled, slapped with a paw, knocked the dog aside and gave Moth space to rock to her feet. Still she did not draw her sword. Mikki swatted the dog flat when it would have leapt again, pinned it down with his forefeet, but it twisted under him, nothing of Holla-Sayan in its eyes, no recognition, no fear, no struggle, only the yellow-green fire of the dog. It changed its form, growing monstrous, more bear than wolf in bulk, and it flung him off, came after him and caught him by the ruff. He felt the teeth in the loose skin there, and in the stiff scars of the devil’s collar. Went limp, like a cub, a pup, unresisting.

Holla-Sayan—Blackdog… He tried to find something, some crack, some chink through which a word might strike. Some fleeting memory. A scent, briefly, of bruised green grass, sun-warmed dry earth. He seized on that, held it like a spark that might be breathed into flame. Holla-Sayan!

The dog snarled, released him, but only to turn on Moth again and he lost the touch of what he had held. Moth had Keeper in her hand, face grim; she struck with the flat of the blade, dodging aside as the Blackdog charged her, fleeing down towards the path. Leading it farther from the plateau where the spell was drawn, but the charcoal lines and the runes binding them were only a part of it, the rest an active working that took some part of her attention even when she spoke with Mikki or Gurhan or whispered over the ashes.

Mikki crashed down after them, heedless of brush and saplings, barely avoiding a stand of larger poplars. Moth had crossed the path, had her back to a cedar’s bare trunk; it did not look as though she used the flat of the blade any longer. The Blackdog was bleeding. Fighting to fend it off only, though, not striking to kill.

“Holla-Sayan, in Attalissa’s name, for Gaguush’s memory, for Jolanan, try to hear us—”

A snarl was the only answer. Mikki bounded over the path, slammed into the dog as it turned to sink teeth into his foreleg and they all three went down, tumbling, crushing ferns. There was fire in Moth’s eyes, red and silver, the flesh and bone of her become shadow over half-seen veins of flame, and she slammed the dog back when it would have seized Mikki’s throat, thrust it down to the earth and pinned it, knee and blade over its ribs, her other hand gripping its throat, a strength to match its own. Mikki sat back on his haunches, breathing hard.

“Now what? Can we bind him?” Great Gods, to what end, though? “Can you see what holds him? Is he—is it Holla-Sayan at all, or is he already dead?”

Wolves, running savage in the forest, ridden by a devil’s will…

“I can’t see.”

Vartu.

That whisper had not been Gurhan. Not Holla-Sayan. Mikki did not know the…call it voice. The touch, the colour and the shape, a stranger.

Distraction. Destruction. That was all their enemy’s intent.

“Kill it,” he said. “If they’ve killed Holla-Sayan and this is some other using his form, enslaving the dog, kill them both. The dog’s something that should have been gone from the world long ago anyway.”

“So am I,” Moth said, which did not entirely sound like disagreement.

They were both watching for its reaction. Maybe it had not even understood the words. Maybe that mind’s voice did not even belong to it. Fast, shallow breaths, as if it still struggled, or was wounded more severely than it seemed. Eyes fixed on empty space between them.

It twisted free of her grip, ignoring the sword that opened a new furrow across its ribs all unintended, and lashed up swift as a striking snake to seize Moth by the throat.