CHAPTER XVI

…early spring of the year in which the All-Holy came east of the Karas

Snow bound the mountain in sleep, and the pines bowed under the weight of it. Water still flowed. The springs of Swajui steamed; the brooks gurgled under ice. Lower down, the river too moved, hidden, the boundaries of land and water blurred, softened by snow. It sought the sea and the unending slow breath of the tides. Waves that washed the shores of Nabban, and of Darru and Lathi, his mother’s lands that he had never seen but through Ahjvar’s eyes, never would. Waves that swept the Gulf of Taren, that hurled themselves, high and breaking, wild, against the cliffs, where he and Ahjvar had sat on the drystone garden wall, warmed by sun or damp with fog and spray or chill with night, moonlight pouring silver over the water. Changeless, unchanging. Breath of night air, the downs behind grown with wild thyme, with lavender. The air tasted of thyme, and salt, and seaweed.

A moment, held close. He could be there. A foggy day. Damp woollen cloth. The man’s knee, and he leaned his head against it as they sat in silence, the man on the wall, he at his feet. Tolerated. Maybe welcomed. In that time, he didn’t know. No deeper why, then, but that he needed to lean there, needed that rare touch, as some kitten escaped drowning might need, more than milk or mother, to press itself into that warmth, any warmth, whatever creature it might be that had plucked it from the depths.

Ahj had taken Evening Cloud, the horse he called by the Praitannec name Gorthuernial, and ridden down the course of the river of the Wild Sister before the heavy mountain snows came. Restless. Something gnawing at him, which was never a good thing. Stories drifting in the wind, coming to them on the caravan road, like cloudy silt in clean river-water, like smoke from over the horizon, a faint stain on the sky. Rumours of war in the far west, of armies moving in the name of Old Tiypur and a new god. An empire broken and gone over a thousand, almost two thousand, years before, and a god who had no name, no place. A god incarnate and not rooted in earth, crossing boundaries a god of the earth could not cross, leaving his place, moving into the places of others.

A god who called for the deaths of the gods of the earth and waters.

A story could change, crossing the half of the world. Could be born from nothing, twisted out of all recognition, and yet…and yet.

So Ahjvar had gone to the City of the Empress, which had been called the Old Capital when the Golden City ruled, before typhoon and devil’s malice swept that all away. Ghu might have gone himself. He might go now, move and be there, as he might be where he would, in all the land, all its hills and rivers, mountains and waters—his. But he preferred to be here, and Iri—Suliasra Iri, the young priestess-empress, daughter of the son of the daughter of the son of the son of Suliasra Ivah who had been with them when they took Nabban, did not need him under her feet. He was in all the land, and he was here. It was…how he was. God, heir of gods and goddesses gone, containing them all within himself. When she needed him, he would be there, or she would come to him, because sometimes the journeying was the prayer, and the empress must know her land, and be in it and a part of it, a little in the way the god was. Better Ahj went, who did not have the heartbeat of the land so strongly in him, the breath and dream of all the folk flowing over him like a thousand thousand rivers of soul. Ahj, who could stand aside and more easily look from outside, at need.

Ghu had always been confused by the noise—always, until there came a point, when need was that he was not, and all went clear and cold and clean as a blade’s edge. Maybe that was just him, and not godhead. So Ahj went in his place, to see and to hear for him. Ahjvar had read what he needed in the archives of the palace, letters and reports, talked to those who had been lately in Marakand and the cities of the Taren Confederacy, which in his day had been the Five Cities with their feuding clans, rule by wealth and assassination, and the tribes of that land still, in the north at least, the free kingdoms of Praitan.

There had been little in the reports available to the palace that differed from the stories of the caravaneers. The folk of the road had their news from Marakand, after all, and Marakand was not a place for secrets. So all that they learned in the palace that the road did not say was that the senate of Marakand had decided to send agents to the west, across the Four Deserts and the Western Grass, over the Kara Mountains into the blighted lands of Old Tiypur, and that those agents had not yet returned when the most recent report from the Nabbani ambassador in Marakand had arrived. So Ahjvar had ridden down the river, the Wild Sister, and along the Empress’s Canal that Yeh-Lin had built long ago to join it to the Kozing, and down that valley to Kozing Port, to talk to captains and sailors and merchant folk. He was still there, going every day to the wharves and the warehouses and the markets, among the sailors’ taverns and tea- and coffeehouses, camped out by night in the rare peace of the temple garden, because Ahj did not really like to sleep under a roof, enclosed by walls.

The folk of the ships spoke of the Empire of Tiypur unified again under the rule of a holy man, maybe even a god, called the All-Holy.

They spoke of towns, Tiypurian towns burned, of crews of foreign ships seized and executed, of folk, Tiypurian folk, massacred for failing to give their allegiance to the All-Holy, for continuing to worship their dead gods with the rites of their old mysteries.

They spoke of the folk of all those lands being gathered into companies, commanded as the companies of an army are commanded, in every aspect of their lives. Of demands made of those ships of south and north which, by some accommodation of their captains, were still permitted to trade, for Rostengan iron and tin from south over the sea, for timber and hides from the kingdoms of the North.

Of agents of the priests of the All-Holy making the dangerous journey across a dead land and the high mountains of the Karas, onto the Western Grass. Buying horses of the tall, strong-boned Westgrasslander breed.

Iron, bronze, timber. Horses.

That was as much as to say, weapons.

And wagons.

And such news was already old, even the newest, whether it had travelled by the caravan road or by sea.

Ghu could reach, could touch Ahjvar…be with him. Now. Here. Did not. Easy to hold Ahj too close. To wind himself through him so that they became thought and thought, breath and breath, here in Nabban, in this land, his land. It was different when Ahjvar went beyond, as sometimes he did, reluctant in the going, but he went because Ghu could not and it mattered, sometimes, to see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears what the priest-emperors could not. Or need not. Or what was no concern of the palace, but must be the god’s, for the sake of the land and the folk of the land. When Ahj went out of the land there was a hollowness, like a piece of himself missing. A second heart gone.

A strange god Ghu might be, different in his birth and growth and being, but still he could not reach beyond Nabban’s natural borders, no more than any small god of hill or spring could stretch their awareness and will beyond their own natural reach, but Ahjvar could, and in that, he—he, Nabban—had resources a god did not. More than an agent, a priest, a witness, which any god might ask a man or woman of his folk to be in a foreign land. Ahjvar was what no servant could ever be: his own eyes, ears, mouth, heart…sword.

He had not asked that of Ahj, ever. If Ahjvar had killed on his ventures abroad—and he had, because enemies came upon a traveller through no fault of his own, even the Leopard of Gold Harbour, who had to work very hard not to make enemies—it had been not the reason of his going.

Ghu did not know why he thought that, now.

Yes, he did. Only he did not want to. And that was the boy in him still, who wanted to make all safe and small and hidden, and shut the world out from himself, and from Ahjvar, who was so hurt by it.

He could not lose Ahj. He could not bear it. He could not be, without Ahjvar. And a god had no business to let his heart be tied so into one man, one flawed and sometimes dangerous man, brittle in his scars, like a broken cup mended with lacquer. Dangerous man, dangerous to love so humanly intense what was not his to hold, what was long ago doomed to take the road to the Old Great Gods. That was the sin that had led to Ahjvar’s cursing so long ago: a goddess who could not bear to let her daughter go.

He could not lose him. He would not use him.

Ahjvar would say otherwise. To both. And Ghu had promised, he would let Ahjvar go, when Ahjvar would.

But to choose the road was not to be ripped away to it by another. And he could not, he could not bear to be alone—

What might come was only patterns on water, uneasy reflections, broken, uncertain.

Eyes shut. Long, slow breath. What he must, not what he would. For both of them, maybe. Because Ahjvar surrendered self and choice and would not take them back.

In his hands—squatted on his heels, his back to the sacred stone at the heart of Swajui, beneath evergreen oaks that had been acorns once, carried from that place of cliff and downs and the unceasing breakers— shells. Small things, carried long, like the acorns. Carried much longer, now. Opened his eyes and looked on them again. Names Ahjvar had given Ghu when he first brought them back up from the shore to the ruined broch on the headland, small fascinations of colour and form. Limpet, the shade of a mouse’s belly, with a contrasting ring of lavender. Already pierced. Topshell, tight-whorled snail flecked in repeating broken bands of pale blue and pink and green on lustrous white. Periwinkle, blue as final dusk. Tower shell, like the ivory-gold horn of an imagined beast in one of the palace library’s bestiaries. Cerith, another fantastical horn, its spirals marked with russet knobs.

There were acorns, too, under the snow. Over-Malagru cork oak, which was not native to this place, this mountain, and lived maybe because the deepest frost was kept at bay by the hotsprings, or because he had willed it so when Ahjvar planted them. He found three by reaching for them, fingers burrowing barehanded beneath the snow. So.

From the deep pocket of a ragged caravaneer’s coat, stripes faded to fawn and cream, he took a folded leather wallet carried almost as long as the shells, tools for mending. The needles were perhaps too fine, but the smallest awl would serve his purpose.

The sun climbed over the trees, pines and evergreen oaks all carrying their snow-burdened branches like clouds. The drifts glittered like restless water, breaking and flinging sparks. Shadows of the trees made depths, dark pools, and the steam of the springs added another layer of hoarfrost to twig and lip of curling drift. Patiently, carefully, he drilled with the awl, piercing the shells, the acorns. If once he slipped and pricked a finger, and blood marked them…that was no wrong thing for what he would work.

Rain began to patter on the road as the afternoon turned to evening. Most travellers had already sought their lodgings; only the few last home-going peasants hurried along now, returning to their villages from riverside fields. Spades and mattocks and muddy to the waist; they must have been working on some ditch or dyke, awaiting the blessing of the spring floods for the intervale land. Free folk, all, in this land they had made, he and Ghu and Ivah between them.

Yeh-Lin, too, and others long dead, remembered, always. The great council had met at Dernang, to reshape the customs of the land. An annual autumn festival commemorated it now. Ahjvar avoided going down to Dernang, the town below the holy mountain, during the week-long holy days, though he would be welcome as their god himself, who wandered the festivals of the land—all of them, in that strange and dreamlike way he had.

Ahjvar was not good at people. Maybe he never had been. He couldn’t really remember. Too long ago, too far away.

Tired, deep in the bones. Too long among cities and folk and what he had gleaned had not led him to anything but a weight on the heart, chill and heavy.

Rain on the road seemed only an echo of his mood.

He could not fold the land around him, step here and there in a passing dream, and by times he enjoyed the travelling for its own sake, alone or wandering together, as they often went. Important, for him, for the both of them, to hear and see and smell and feel the land, to know the roads as well as the rivers, the folk tied together by them, the life of the villages and the city streets as well as the shrines and the palace. Sometimes. He had made a long journey of it, heading down the river valley last autumn and winter, a slow progress. Now…it was enough. Time to go home.

He might not wear the land like a coat. He did not need to, to find his way. Needed only to be found.

He passed a last straggling party of ditch-diggers, young men and women dallying on the road, talking, teasing. Faded out of their awareness, no more than shadow and river-fog. Laughter loud as he rode by, a bit of elbowing. Two holding hands, which was the source of the others’ amusement. Lives decided. One boy turned to look after him, frowning, uncertain what and if he had seen, and a dog growled at nothing.

Ahjvar turned the dusky bay aside from the paved imperial highway, down a track between fields. The river sang in his blood. The sun was setting, turning the grey clouds a curdled rose in the west, when he came to a shrine, one of the old holy places where local folk might come to make personal prayers, seek advice, or give a gift of food to the priest. It was a grove of willows on a slight rising of the land that had probably been a sandbar or island before some shifting of the river’s course. The holy ground was fenced with living willow woven together; the gate stood open. There was a bell to alert the priest to the coming of a visitor to the god’s enclosure, but Ahjvar did not ring it. The ducks foraging on the green between the trees, all moss and mint, turned bright eyes to him and went back to their feeding. The priest’s cabin was built of grey planks, wooden-shingled, and stood on stilts against the floods still to come. A thread of smoke rose, the smell of frying vegetables drifting from above. He headed away from the cabin, down towards the water.

Shadowy, half-seen, and then there, solid and real…Swan-white, black-legged Snow watched, as the ducks had, gave him a nod that was more human than horselike. He leapt down from the saddle, looped up the reins and left Gorthuernial to follow at his heels. Out in the river something stirred beneath the surface, two shapes, chasing, long and lean, one pearly pale, the other pewter streaked on gold, one rising like a whale—glittering scales, twisting, and they both swarmed ashore, changing as they came, shaking water from shaggy coats, barking and leaping.

“Sh!” He didn’t want the priest down here. “Jui, shut up!” But Jui leapt and swiped a tongue at his face, and even Jiot, more reserved, flung himself up, so he got down on a knee to take two armfuls of soggy, wriggling dog. Told them they were good, told them they were wicked, and wet, and ill-mannered, and smelt like fish, which made them grin, and they went back into the river as dragons again, lengthening and changing and disappeared upstream.

Laughter, in the shadows under a big willow where the river overflowed its bank. Ghu, waiting. Ahjvar went to him.

He looked what he was, and was not: a young man. Not tall, lightly built but with an athlete’s strength and assurance, grace even in the turning of his head, the lifting of his chin. Flash of a smile. Barefoot, ankle-deep in cold water, dressed in blue cotton trousers and loose white shirt, no gown over it. He could have been a labourer come to bring the priest some little gift, eggs or a handful of cresses. Black hair unruly as a Malagru hill-pony’s mane, a fine-boned face of strong angles, the warm golden brown of the south provinces, eyes black as the sky between the stars, and as deep. They leaned together, and Ahjvar buried his face in Ghu’s hair, in the reassuring, familiar scent of him, moss and stone, pines and horse. Held to him—Ghu thought it was good for him to go out into the world alone, to separate himself a little, but damned Great Gods, he had needed to be home—till Ghu pushed him back against the willow bole and pulled his head down to take his face in his hands, kissing him as careful as if he might dissolve to smoke and drift away at any rougher touch, which quickly turned to something more urgent. But—

“What?” he asked, because there was something of concern in that, and not merely desire.

Tongue tracing his ear, playing with the gold ring there. And words, whispered, tickling. “You were a long time away.”

He slid hands beneath the shirt. Warm skin, solid muscles, heart that beat with his own. “Whose fault is that? You could have come to join me any time you chose.”

“It’s good to be missed, sometimes. And I was watching.”

“Watching what?” Not him. No need. Ghu held his soul in his hands; what he had found was known, did not need to be said. They would only choose to haul it out to argue over conclusions. Inevitabilities.

That might come. Not tonight. Time enough.

“Everything. Dreaming, mostly.”

“You’ll get lost, someday. Who’ll come to find you?”

“You, I expect. I was trying to see into the west.”

“Was that wise?” Ahjvar asked. Old Great Gods, no, it was not. The devils might act even in dreams. Fingers busy with the fastenings of his jacket, the ties of his shirt…

Was this wise? He did not trust the priest to stay quiet in his house, and a priest, if anyone, would know the presence of his god. Besides, who would eat within-doors on a fine spring evening? He captured the exploring hands and held them against his chest. “Ghu—”

“I don’t know. When do I ever? Necessary. I wanted to find Dotemon.”

“Did you?”

“No.” And that troubled Ghu; Ahjvar heard it, and it certainly troubled him. They had exiled the devil Yeh-Lin Dotemon many years back. Not for anything she had done, exactly. She had settled into the imperial family over several generations: tutor, eternal auntie, counsellor…even Ahjvar admitted it was not her fault young Hezing had grown so infatuated; she really had done nothing to encourage him. His ambition and disloyalty to his brother had been born of his own dreaming, not hers, and that he had made her a focus for it…well, she had gone, and left the House of Suliasra to sort itself out, which it had, eventually, with the god’s wisdom, and without fratricide or any lethal act of Ahjvar’s, though it had been a near thing, in his view. Prince Hezing had ended his days a relatively honourable mercenary captain somewhere in Pirakul, a better end than Ahjvar had ever expected for the boy.

“Dead?”

It was possible. The devil whom Ghu persisted in calling “the storyteller” was an assassin of her fellows. She may have found Yeh-Lin, though she had claimed not to be seeking her.

“I don’t think so. Hiding, maybe.”

“From you?”

“Would she?”

“Depends on what she’s up to.”

“Yes. Hiding maybe from the storyteller. But Yeh-Lin had gone into the west, the last I dreamed of her. Beyond Marakand. Beyond the western deserts.”

“What’s beyond? Grass, the north…”

“Tiypur. Ahjvar…”

“Not now.”

“No. Alright.” Ghu escaped his hold, hands sliding down his ribs, over old scars. Breath caught at nipping teeth, teasing…Ghu laughed at him, stepped away then, but kept him by the hand. “You’re right. Not now. Come home, Ahj, before we scandalize the priest’s fowl.”

“More concerned with scandalizing the priest,” he muttered, and let himself be drawn a step, another. Willows and the river, pines and its headwaters, the springs of Swajui where those scarred and battered in mind and soul came to find some peace and healing—all ghostly, light and shadows of mist. Then stone and storm-sculpted snow and the wind harsh, the hanging valley under the peak of the holy mountain, the tall standing stones along the track, the creeping pines and red-barked willows, low bushes here, where no true trees could grow. The shallow stream loud, ice-edged over rocks, pouring away towards the cliff and the waterfall. They were so high that spring only waited on the threshold, not yet come. The horses were there before them, heading into the open shed that some long-ago friends had built, to do them for a stable.

And Ghu, being Ghu, abandoned him to turn groom and tend to Gorthuernial, who was saddled and muddy and hungry for more than the dry winter grass beneath the snow.

The most holy sanctuary of the god, this, a high cold valley on Nabban’s northern border, above the trees, below the unmelting snow, where even priests and emperors did not come unsummoned.

Their house here was only a cave, partway up the steep and stony eastern slope. It expanded beyond the narrow crack of its mouth and ran far back into the mountain’s dark. The fire on the hearthstone near the mouth might be the same Ahjvar had laid at the first frost of the autumn before he left for the south, because wood had to be packed up from lower down and Ghu did not always remember that the fire should be fed—or perhaps merely did not see the need any longer and so neither did the fire. And time was anyway a strange and dreaming thing here, for all that the seasons and the stars kept their ordered turning. Sometimes it seemed to Ahjvar that he could take a breath and a year was gone. But it was home, and better than the last, the half-ruined broch they had so inexpertly repaired with a sod roof that was more often on the hearth than over their heads. The wind never found its way back so far as the alcove where they made a deep nest—juniper, hay, bracken, and camel-wool stuffed quilts—on the clean-swept floor.

He had brought coffee from Kozing Port, and a new map of the lands west of Marakand made by the empress’s wizard-cartographers. Maybe would hope Ghu forgot that, for the time being. He had only put the scroll away with the other few books he kept in a chest well out of reach of any blizzard wind when Ghu came back, shaking snowflakes from his hair and laughing. Ahjvar met him at the fire, wordless. Ghu had the coat off him, and his shirt, and the sword, before ever they reached the bed.

But the shadow of the west was on him, and would not lift.

On both of them.

“I won’t let go of you,” Ghu whispered over him. “No matter where, how far your journey. You know I won’t.”

“No. Don’t.” It wasn’t the being let go of. It was fear of being taken from that woke him in the night in sweating terror. But not this night, not when he was held hard and close, timeless in the dark.

Dawn just greying the world outside. Ghu sat shirtless by the fire at the cave’s mouth for all the winter-cold wind, humming. An old lullaby, something from his childhood, maybe. Maybe they had sung it over him in the stables where he was first sheltered. Maybe his mother had, before she drowned the both of them. Certain it was that he had sung it over Ahjvar some bad nights when the hag stalked beneath the surface of his mind, not waking into the world, but not lying quiet, either, and the fear of her hunting and the guilt and the loathing of what he had become, ridden by her, racked him in nightmares and he feared to sleep lest it was she who woke.

Humming became words, nonsense rhyme. The moon rides in a sea-shell, Ghu sang, and the sun is carried by a golden fish.

Maybe Ahjvar woke. Maybe this was a dream. Often hard to tell. He rolled from the bed and went to Ghu anyway, wrapping a blanket over naked shoulders.

The fire blazed high. The kettle sat steaming on a stone for tea. The snow still fell, driven by the wind. Spring was not going to release their high valley yet; nor would the pass to Denenanbak and the road across the deserts and Praitan to Marakand be open soon. He was glad of it.

Ghu looked up and smiled. Turned his gaze again to what his hands did, as Ahjvar settled down by him. The dogs were curled into a single mound of fur. Jiot opened an eye to check on him, catching a gleam of firelight, a spark of jewel-tone, dragon eye. Lifted his head to yawn, curled it down again. Jui thumped his tail.

“Duck,” Ghu said, setting aside what he held. There was a knife in his hand.

Ahjvar ducked, obedient. Fingers wove through his hair, found the longest lock of it, and the knife sliced, a little sawing needed. He should take that off Ghu and sharpen it, after.

“What do you want with my hair?” he asked, rubbing a stubbled patch the size of a thumbprint.

Ghu turned Ahjvar’s head to face him. He did not explain the sudden need to sheer a hank of his hair. Only held him, hand cupping his jaw, fingers combed into his beard. Leaned in and kissed him.

Let him go and took up his work again. A braid, an elongated knotted web that had echoes of a Grasslander cat’s-cradle spell in it. Ghu was no wizard. The framework of the thing was white and dull black horsehair, long and strong, but braided into it was glossier black—shorter, finer. Much of that. Ghu separated the strands he cut from Ahjvar’s head into several, gold and coiling loosely through his fingers, and began to braid and weave and knot. Shells were strung on the horsehair, and three acorns, pierced through, cap and nut.

Ahjvar recognized them. A boy’s treasures. A place.

“Give me your thumb,” Ghu ordered.

“Why my thumb?” But he offered it. The knife jabbed lightly, just enough to draw a swelling bead of blood. “What in the cold hells are you making?”

“A…thing.” Ghu considered, still holding Ahjvar’s thumb. “I don’t think it has a name.”

He set the knife aside and smeared the blood on his own thumb, went back to what he was doing. Now there was blood smudging the shells, the braids, hardly to be seen. “For you. For memory.”

Ahjvar sucked the wounded thumb. “I remember too much.”

“Not always the right things. It’s also for…I’m not sure. Ivah would see it, I think. More akin to her wizardry than yours. Or maybe not.” Ghu paused, considered again. His eyes were deep, dark as night, unseeing, at least of what lay before them. “Not a binding. A dance of edges and knots. Something we make between us, you and I.”

“Also Snow.” Deflecting, that. Was his god trying wizardry? Rarely a good idea, to mix human wizardry with what was power of the earth, the force and will in gods and demons, grown out of the land.

A frown. A shrug. Ghu shook his head. “No. Doesn’t count.” Like a child in a game, declaring rules as he thought of them. “The horse isn’t part of it. I needed something strong to hold it together, is all. I could have used flax, but I thought you wouldn’t want me pulling your shirts to bits for the thread.”

“You can have such things for the asking down in Dernang, you know. Thread, cord, string. Or beg at the castle. They’d give you what you needed.”

“True. But Snow’s tail was closer. And he is mine.”

Strands of gold against black. Fingers danced. Through, around. They knotted shells and acorns and bound them, black and gold, and wove a pattern. Ahjvar smelt, for a moment, the sea and the shore, the thyme-grown downs above the cliff. Memories he didn’t hold close, for all Ghu did. Ghu walked the downs and the cliff and the shores of Sand Cove in his dreams, longing for that place again, as Ahjvar did not. A bad time. They were all bad times, for Ahjvar, till they came here…except for the sun on the stones of the wall, and the sound of the surf, and the young man sleeping on the other side of the fire, who did not have the sense to be afraid.

That was good. That was there at Sand Cove, and not to be forgotten, held in scent of sea and weed and thyme.

In the dreams, when Ghu’s dreaming drew Ahjvar there, the place held no nightmares. In the dreams, when they walked in that place, there was peace, and the scent of thyme, of lavender and the sea.

“Duck again.”

“What do you want this time, my ear?”

“Maybe.” Ghu caught and bit him like a puppy, but was solemn the next instant. Kissed him like a blessing. The web made a crescent, a young moon, the shells caught in it, the acorns. He knotted the cords of its two tails behind Ahjvar’s neck, under his hair.

It was warm against Ahjvar’s skin. Scratchy, a little. He expected he would grow used to it.

The tying of it brought them to where they would not be.

“The horses can’t go far over the border, can they?” he asked. Ghu sighed. “They’re not exactly…real and living beasts. Not entirely. Not any more. Too much drawn into what I am.”

“As I am not?”

“It would seem so.”

He had been east to Pirakul in the service of his god and emperor, and south over the sea to Barrahe for the god. That had not been—as Empress Iri had irreverently suggested when she was only a girl being fostered for a time by the god and his consort, as all the imperial children had been—an expedition in search of the secrets of growing coffee beans. Many times in Denanbak and Darru and Lathi, where Ghu could not go and yet had reason to send more than an imperial envoy.

“This is going to involve camels again.”

Sober, then. “Ahjvar…I am sorry.”

“Camels. You should be.” A deep breath. “There’s a devil behind this Westron cult of the red priests, Ghu. You know, I know—it’s Sien-Shava Jochiz. He’s what the Lady feared.” And he said it unflinching, who could not speak of her, would not. “An empire in the west, Tiypur rising again. That’s what the empress and the council of the provinces thinks, and the Pine Lady of wizards and the captain of the Wind in the Reeds. I think there’s more. It…is it you who feels there’s more? I don’t know what I know. What’s you knowing, what’s me fearing. You were trying to find Yeh-Lin. What did you see that I can’t remember the shape of?”

“I don’t know. Something. I can’t see. Shadows.” A hesitation. “Death. For us all.”

“He builds an army. He already has his own folk well under his heel, and he builds an army out of them. It sounds mad to say it. We’re the other side of the world from him. But we hurt him and he hates us. Nabban, which defeated him, drove him out. The land he would have made a puppet-empire in the east. Hates us, you and me. We hurt him.”

“Yes.”

“Cold hells, Ghu, I don’t know how we kill a devil.”

Because it was hard for him not to see the world so and in this he did not understand how else to see it. When an enemy came hate-filled to kill, not in some confusion, some pain that could be eased, some wrong to be amended and the cause of hate made less—he did not see that there was any other way. But he had barely survived, and Jochiz had not even been in Nabban, not truly, only casting a part of himself into the land through a puppet, a vessel of his will.

“Go to Marakand. Speak to the god there. They are the strong point, the fortress that holds the road,” Ghu said. “The Lady was right in that. By the time you come there, we’ll know—we and Marakand alike—far more of what he intends. Go west and find Dotemon, Ahj, if you can. She may hide from me, but not from us, not from you hunting her. Or maybe it is only Jochiz she hides from, or the storyteller, and is hidden from us only by that, not intent.”

“Yes.” He wore heavy golden bracelets, the terminals leopards’ heads, on both scarred wrists, warm and hardly noticed at all, but cool against the skin of his left, a braided circlet of black as well. An uncomfortable thing, a binding, even if it was not of himself. He would have given it up to Ghu, but Ghu would not take it.

“Find her. Remind her what she has sworn. Hold her to it, hold her to me, to Nabban. Whatever we can do. Whatever we can be, together, against this.” And fierce, “You have to go. I have to send you. You’re all I have against him. I said, you don’t kill for me. Not my assassin, I said. But—”

“I am your champion, the Rihswera of Nabban. Your sword to send where you will. I gave myself to you to be whatever you would.”

“Not for this.” Not to die for me. Ghu had not spoken those words. They were only in thought, like a memory. His, Ghu’s—he didn’t know.

“Yes, idiot boy. Even for this.” Even for that.

Ghu was shivering. Not cold, he who walked barefoot in the mountain winter. Shivering like that boy who had huddled forlorn on his garden wall in the rain, following—gods knew what he thought he had found. You drew me like a fire, Ghu had said. Ahjvar wrapped himself around him, man and god, heart of his heart, bore him down and pulled his blanket over the both of them.

“Shh,” he said.

Ghu! she cries, glad. A friend, seeing a familiar figure at a far distance, and he looks for her, in this dream-place that is more hers than his, the wind-waved grass, the bowl of the sky, but his eye cannot find her.

Ivah…

She is dead, of course. She died long ago. He misses her. Remembers her. Horses, racing. Earnest frown over a tangle of knotted cords, a Grasslander cat’s-cradle wizardry. Commander of armies in the years of trouble, the rebellions, the attempts to deny, to resist the new Nabban they would make. Mother, in the first years of peace, to son, to daughter. He had held her so only the two times, in joy, in celebration, they took it so, of what they were, of friendship and what might be born of that love, which took nothing from any other. Well, Ahj had said so. Had found, maybe, he did not like it, not deep down, but he let Ghu go to her when they asked it. Which he would not have done, Ahjvar denying. Better a friend than a courtier who’ll always be looking to gain from an imperial child, she had said, and Nour won’t.

Have you asked?

Yes. He said Kharduin would beat him.

Would he?

I doubt it.

So I’m only your second choice?

She had shrugged, grinned, knowing he teased.

It was a wonder, to be a father.

He had thought he understood. He held the land in his heart; he was god. But that understanding was not complete, it woke to something more, hot and urgent. To hold a child, a tiny thing, and know it part of oneself—what would one then not do, to keep it safe?

But that was an animal’s thought, right and natural, but such a need must grow and change as the young outgrew it. Eggs hatched, nestlings fledged and flew. Children, humans, souls grew, and one did not cage them.

He did understand, though, in that moment, Catairanach, who made a hell of horrors for Ahjvar in the need that had burned in her to keep her lost daughter’s soul in life, and he had felt a pity he had never been able to find, pity even for her, whom he hated still with a hatred wholly human, in that perversion of her love.

But still it had been perversion, and crime, and a sin against the soul of the man and against the daughter too, made, by the goddess’s desire to save her, into a worse monster than the murderer she had been in life.

But why this dream, now? It is not Ivah, truly, who calls to him, from the distant heavens. The dead do not return from the realm of the Old Great Gods. It is a world separate from the world, oil and water, which do not mix.

There is something there, that thought…

Holding tight what is meant to fly free…to return…

No, it is not Ahjvar’s soul he dreams warning for. It is not. It is…He is not stolen; he is given. And that is all the difference.

But they are taken.

What is sundered must be whole. Yearns, reaching…

A cold wind, but it smelt of green, of singing waters, of life. The small garrison of the border fort had taken themselves back to their watch and their daily tasks, blessed by their god, and wondering, maybe, what took the Rihswera of Nabban—Praitannec word that had entered into Nabbani meaning not its original king’s champion but Ahjvar and Ahjvar alone— away to Denanbak. Only the captain had lingered, to offer with her own hands the parting cup of herb-pungent white-spirit, Denanbaki custom, and now she had gone too, leaving them alone, standing face to face a few yards within the natural border, which was a little beyond the ridge where the fortress sat. A difference in the stone that Ghu felt, real and vital as the skin of his own body.

Ghu took Ahjvar’s hands in his own. Long, strong hands, a soft brown that darkened with the summer sun. Calloused and seamed with pale old scars. Fingers wove through his.

“Hey.”

He couldn’t, for a moment, look up.

“Ghu.”

He did. Ahjvar’s eyes were the uncanny colour of a clear winter sky. What did one say? Travel safe, be well, come back to me?

What did one need to say?

Nothing. Ghu touched Ahjvar’s face: the shape of him, the warmth, the strong bones. Let vision fade to what he was, flesh and bone, yes, made and remade living in the world, not the shadow of charred bone and ash, no, never that, but the fire and the light of him that was Ahjvar’s own, bright and fierce and glorious against the night and the cold of the world. The old, old tangle of the curse Ghu had stolen from the goddess of the Duina Catairna and made his own, to hold Ahj to him undying in the world against all nature and the pull of the Great Gods’ road, a snarled mess spun stronger than steel and adamant, binding them.

Necromancy. Of a sort.

Ahjvar pulled him close and he held tight, raised his face to lips that found eyes and cheeks and wordless mouth.

Let him go, last hand loosing its hold, trailing down his arm, fingers’ last touch, parting, warmth of skin and skin to hold in memory. Ahjvar mounted the brown camel, which had no name, because that was Ahjvar, and it grumbled, because that was a camel, and the red one grunted. Tall, shaggy beasts, beginning already to shed their weight of winter wool, to look rather patchwork and moth-eaten. They had little to complain of, more lightly burdened than they had ever been in their previous lives in a caravan. Two, a gift from the high lady of Choa Province for the god’s asking, because it was folly to cross the northern deserts between Denanbak and the lands Over-Malagru with only one mount, even for a man proven somewhat immortal, since the camel was not. And Ahj meant to go by the badlands, through the striped and twisted stone sculpted by wind and sand and ancient waters, which was the road he knew, or at least, had travelled once before. Doubtful how much of it he remembered. It had not been a good time.

At least it was not winter.

“Ahjvar.” Ghu found words after all. A word. The only one that mattered. Took from his belt at the small of his back the sheathed forage-knife. He had armed himself that morning without thinking. Instinct—Ahjvar, the road…of course he would go armed. The heavy crooked blade was tool as much as weapon, and since that battle in which they took the empire he had cut fodder and bedding and trimmed saplings for this use or that, but never human throats. He offered it.

Ahjvar, after a long moment, nodded. He leaned, dropped half down the camel’s side to take the knife, and a last kiss in passing. A tap with the quoit to wake the camel out of the sudden doze into which it had affected to sink. A grumbling grunt and a long stride forward, a tug on the pack-beast’s leading rein.

Tug on the reins binding them. The border, crossed. A piece of himself, gone from Nabban, which was himself.

The dogs stood and barked—because they might have grown up into dragons and spirits of the river serving the god, but underneath it all they were still dogs—until the camels and the rider were tiny figures indistinct against the rutted road. That was the only time Ahjvar looked back. The bay stallion whinnied after him, and then the white. Ghu raised a hand in farewell. Ahjvar returned the gesture, faced north. Did not look back again. Ghu watched nonetheless, until man and camels were out of sight, the road lost in the sinking of the land. Mounted Snow, turned him with a touch of his heel and whistled to Evening Cloud, still staring after his master, to follow.

“Shall we go to Swajui?” he asked the dogs.

Ahjvar liked it there; a place where he had long ago first begun to find the road to his peace, among the pines above the sacred springs. It was to the hotsprings that the folk came now for the healing of the soul, not the body. The pines above where the cold brook rose were quiet. Few found a way there, and chance was not what brought them. Ahjvar’s place.

Ghu needed a bit of that peace himself, right now.

There is a terrible yearning, a pain. Hands, heart reaching to enfold, to hold self to self, to make whole what is sundered.

It is the dream yet again, the severed self that seeks its restoration.

Yes, he says, and, But how?

No words, only the pain. Loss, need. The urgency. There are no demons in Nabban, no life returning in new forms, where once they lived, and fought, and died fighting a devil. No gods reborn in the far west.

A thing known in all the world, but why, he wonders, do we accept that that should be so?