CHAPTER XVII

…summer, and the All-Holy has come into the lands of the caravan road

Song. Light that moves like slow flames. A pulling, a yearning…shed what holds him here, fall into it. Take it into himself…

A voice, whispering. Can he even hear? My brother, my captain…is it you…?

Calling. Sorrow. Desperation. Fear?

It is another voice entirely, and the first is lost, memory discarded, in its urgency.

The light shatters. The loss is pain and he wakes, crying out a denial…

The echo still resounds in his mind. Not his own voice, that cry. No, not the whisper that haunts his dreams, either.

Known. Beloved.

Father, long, long years dead.

No. Not his father.

His god, crying out to him.

Holla-Sayan…

Night would soon burn away into dawn, a clear sky in the east already thinning toward day, but clouds piled in the west, dark and starless, and the wind threatened rain. Long waves of wind rolled before it, combing the grass, colourless in the night, pewter and black like a lake. A herd of blue cattle grazed somewhere near, he smelt them, but there was no rider tending them. Abandoned. The folk had fled the land. Only scattered bands remained, harrying an advance they could not hinder. Gesture. Futile.

As, maybe, was his coming here.

He had grown used to the idea of immortality.

Time to remember he could die?

“Blackdog.”

Holla-Sayan turned, turning, flowing from dog to man in the drawing of a breath. It was like breathing, now, he and the dog, one thing and not two. Mostly. Not the bone-cracking pain the change had once been. They were one, and that one remade itself, man, dog, swifter than thought. Not natural, no, he carried clothing and weapons and what he bore through the change, and the dog itself changed its form to answer need. He was only, perhaps, a thing of malleable flesh and bone, bound in memory and two souls that melted and flowed into one another like copper and tin in the smelter, making something new. Which was a monster, perhaps. A devil, certainly, and not one of the seven of whom the storytellers told.

“Sayan.” The god had been all about him since he came down the last valley, a presence like a scent, here in his own land, but now Sayan was beside him. A man, like him. Or not. Sayan wore flesh as one might put on a coat, clothing himself for human eyes. He was not a god who had ever been incarnate. To Holla-Sayan he recalled, in many points, his father’s face, calm and patient, always, no matter how he was tried. Wild colts and wilder boys. What others might see when Sayan spoke with them he had never asked.

A black lark took to the air, singing as it rose to greet the dawn, leaving the mottled-grey female sitting unafraid on her nest. A small owl, grasshopper in its beak, watched from the mouth of its burrow, eyes golden like twin suns.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Sayan said. “I don’t think it will be much longer. But Holla-Sayan, why have you come?”

“You called me.”

Sayan’s frown was almost humanly startled.

“I…” he said, and shook his head. “I did. But I did not think you would hear.”

He had abandoned the gang that he travelled with, a caravan-mercenary of Marakand on the desert road. Taken no leave, not even acknowledging the cry of the woman on watch. Bolted and gone, a wolf-shadow in the night. That dream, that cry.

Running, running, and coming with the dawn to the river, well below the Fifth Cataract, where ferry-folk of Kinsai’s Lower Castle would have taken him across and charged him not even a song. They knew him, at the castles. Blackdog of Lissavakail. Blackdog of the Sayanbarkash. Devil whom their goddess called friend.

No need to swim.

“Go,” Kinsai had said, and there had been a narrow fowler’s boat but no woman or man of the ferry castle to row it. Only the goddess herself, full-figured, naked, leaning hard-muscled to the oars and not, as she ever was, laughing at him. No games, no teasing, no price to be paid for his crossing, old joke between them.

Kinsai’s hair was streaked like river-water, brown and sunlit gold and her eyes, which usually shifted colour through all the shades of human and river, were the dull pewter of water under heavy cloud. She had kissed him, on the western shore, standing ankle deep in the water still, the abandoned boat drifting south. Kissed him long and slow and hard, with everything that was between them. Years and lifetimes, a child. “Run, Blackdog. Go to your god. There are shadows in the stream, nothing more. Changing every moment. A current that might be turned. Run, don’t delay.”

He had run, day and night with only the briefest of rests, jog-trot that had carried him across the world, into lands the young man who had left his family’s holding in the Sayanbarkash for the restless road had never dreamed to see, if even he had heard their names. Run into the All-Holy’s path, which was aimed, like a river’s flood, at the Sayanbarkash. This last day and night he had pushed hard, no rest at all under a growing urgency, a terror. Storm about to strike. As if he raced avalanche downhill. He had cried the god’s name aloud as he crossed into the valley.

But now he was here, and all was quiet. The black larks sang in the air and a killdeer cried in the distance. The Western Grass, waking. They were only ordinary thunderheads that piled on the far western horizon. Breath slowed.

Home.

“They’re coming,” he said. “What can I do?”

“If you don’t know…” The god shrugged, all too human. “I don’t know, Holla-Sayan. The All-Holy—I don’t even know what he is. Devil?”

“His name is Sien-Shava,” Holla-Sayan said. “Jochiz.” A certainty. It was Sien-Shava who had lain in the west, working against Marakand, reaching even into Nabban. He had had that warning from an empress, when he was still a husband and a caravan-master out of Marakand.

“You can’t fight him.” Sayan did not make it a question.

“Oh, I can fight him.” Hopeless. Inevitable. “And I can die. Even Moth—Vartu, fears him.” And if she were here…would it make any difference?

Lakkariss would. Perhaps. In the right hands. Wielded by a swordsman to match Sien-Shava, yes, the sword of the cold hells would end this. But it had nearly taken him the only time he had borne it.

“We may be a devil, the Blackdog and I, but we aren’t—I’m not— what the seven were.”

Broken, weak—the faint shadow and last remnant of a devil’s soul.

I. We.

He. It.

That he thought of himself the man and the dog the devil was, perhaps, only a trick of the mind, a way of pretending to himself that he was still human, that he did not know what he knew, had not done what he had done, did not remember…what he had not done, and had, in the years before Holla-Sayan was ever born not so very many miles from here.

He was not what he had been, caravan mercenary, camel-driver, master of his wife’s caravan gang in the years she stayed behind to run the caravanserai. He had been captain, commanded armies in small wars along the mountains, just and unjust. He had held the long thoughts, once. Or the men who had been ridden by the Blackdog before him, parasite soul riding soul, not the welding of two into one, had. Yet their memories gave him no way through this.

“They are gone,” Sayan said. Distress. A child’s pain, facing the unthinkable. Made small and helpless. “Brother of the hills, sisters of the rivers, Retlavon, Jayala, Yalla of the north. Just…gone.”

Holla-Sayan took his hands, as he would a friend, breaking. He had sat by too many deathbeds. No easy lies, here. Not between them. No hope in himself, none he could pretend to.

He had counted years. Counted births, lives. Deaths. Some of them. Scratched a mark for the turning of the year in his sabre’s scabbard every spring. Because he wanted it to matter. Small mark: a year that meant nothing, beyond another winter past. A bold, taller one for the years that mattered. The years where there was joy. Or hurt. Gultage’s birth—his son, his wife’s son, the child of Marakand. Every granddaughter: Gult-age’s family. His wife’s death.

No particular notch to note Gultage’s death. He had gone away for good, left Marakand and the caravanserai the family ran there when those granddaughters were young women. He had not wanted to see his son, Gaguush’s son, become an old man.

And so he had not. Regret. Nothing learnt.

No comfort to offer. No wisdom.

“I’m nothing but a weapon in the end, no different from when the dog first took me. A beast. I was made to be, out of the wreck of this devil. I’m no wizard; I don’t have the blood. I’m no true devil. I can’t raise the powers of the land. I can’t shape—whatever it is they do—out of my will and soul. Flesh and steel I could face for you, but I don’t even understand what he is doing.”

Called or not, he had had to be here. To die, at last, defending his god, or trying to avenge him.

Death stalked closer. The fading stars overhead felt black and purple as the horizon, smothering. For a moment, Holla-Sayan could scarcely breathe.

“Blackdog, I called—I don’t know why. I don’t want you here to die with me. I did not think you would hear.”

“Maybe Kinsai carried your call over her waters, through her valley. I was with a gang on the road, coming up west. I was on my way home anyway. Listening for you, maybe. We were hearing bad things in Marakand.”

“They’re true.”

“ I know.”

“I only—I wanted to see you one last time, Holla-Sayan. That’s all. Strange, isn’t it? You’ve become something strange, as well, strange to me, something I’ve never known. Close and dear. You know what it is to see the lives come and go. I have known you longer than any man or woman of my folk. Do you ever think of that? You are…” Sayan seemed to consider words, frowning, choosing carefully as a man might select a piece of wood for carving, turning each this way and that. “Brother? Yes. Become more a brother than one of my folk, a thing akin to me as no one of humankind has ever been. And so—I know I will die and leave the barkash godless. My folk are fleeing. Most are already gone over the rivers. But my thoughts went to you. My brother. I am sorry that I called, though. It was—the cry of my heart. I did not mean to bring you here to die. They are within the lands of the barkash. Very near to where you grew up. Very near to here. I think—I fear he prepares— whatever weapon it is, that can kill a god. I should not have brought you here. You should not have come. Go east, Holla-Sayan. Remember me and this land. It’s all we have left. Remember my name, that I was, in this land.”

He would have the throat out of the devil or die trying. Shatter what spell, what weapon, Jochiz would make.

And Sien-Shava Jochiz would weave it again, once Holla-Sayan was dead. The dog within him snarled. The dog—resisted his rage, and mostly the dog was rage, and reaction, and did not shape coherent thought, only emotion and that painted stark in black and the red of fire and blood.

But in all the miles beneath his paws he had found no plan, only a shadow of an idea, something he could hardly frame, could only feel in fragments—the shape of it, the way.

He, or the dog?

They. It was they. It was always they.

Yes, the dog said, and the dog had no words left in its damaged soul. Or so even gods and devils believed.

“We have now, this moment, nothing more, and only ourselves. Sayan, listen. I took Attalissa out of Lissavakail, and she lived. And once Sera of the holy spring of Serakallash put herself into a stone and was sheltered in the Narvabarkash.”

“Attalissa was incarnate as a human child and she lived only because you found goddess-sisters to lend her their…life, I suppose you could call it. But I’ve thought on your story of Sera.”

“Can you?”

“I…cannot feel the way. I am earth, stone. Not water, to pour myself into another way of being. Not a thing of water, to find a sleep like death through drought and winter.” The god stooped and dug fingers into the turf. “I am—this.”

“You are a soul of the earth.”

“How can I be anything else?” The god’s voice went soft and slow, a man puzzling over something. Fumbling. Like a person drunk or stunned. Holla-Sayan felt the fine hairs of his skin prickling, the dog’s unseen hackles rising. “I can’t…feel my way to it. It is not my nature…I think. I think…Holla—?”

Now he was a thing of haze, of shadows half-formed, not flesh or seeming-flesh at all, and he held out a hand to Holla-Sayan.

What he had never thought to feel from his god, that soul of deep earth and stone. Terror.

Blackdog…

His own terror was like ice in the heart.

The god was briefly in the world again. He clenched his teeth, an arm braced against the earth, hand splayed, eyes shut, head flung back, human form echoing human agony, and Holla-Sayan seized that other reaching hand, which was there and not-there, cold and solid as stone in his. Went down on his knees to pull the god to him, himself to the god. It was the grass, the birds hopping near, which were things of smoke half-seen.

“They are…” Sayan seemed almost to waver within his arms, hot and cold, near and distant. They clung like brothers washed ashore from shipwreck, and the waves still savage to wrench them apart. “They sing against me. Blackdog, hold…”

The dog wrenched at him. Tore through him. Here. Now. This way. See. Command without words. Ripped open a path for vision, and he saw. A thing of fire, of light, red and sullen dark silver, a flame bound in flesh and bone, made by that flesh and bone a thing of the earth, where it could not otherwise endure. Sien-Shava Jochiz stood by the broken ruins of a stone barn, his head raised, singing. Words in a speech Holla-Sayan did not know. Equally alien to the Blackdog; it was a tongue of the earth, but belonging to some distant land, weaving pattern as a wizard of the Great Grass would weave spells in yarn, cat’s-cradles of power. Children stood in a circle about him, hands clasped as if they might dance, but they did not. They sang, high and clear, every note true, as the sun edged up out of the night. The mists in the valleys were set alight, the colour of wild roses. So earnest. So single and simple, their minds, their hearts becoming one greater thing, a unity, a vastness…a well to draw down a light and a mass they could never individually have contained. The dog felt this in the shape of what they made. The words were nothing to them, syllables learned in fear and awe and service of their god, in the evenings and in the wagons. He understood that, found a vision held in them, as if each were a diviner’s shell and their life lay within to be seen. They knew themselves special. The blessed. The chosen. All willing, all wholehearted, and once they had promised themselves to this, all emptied of doubt and fear, of yearning for parents, for their old life, for their homes. Westron and Westgrasslander together—there were many who had come over the mountains parentless, following the army as if it made a pilgrimage, or hoping for glory in service to the All-Holy. A beautiful innocence. They offered their souls in song to their god, and their god of his grace accepted them.

No! he cried at them. Lies. Don’t. Don’t sing.

The dog quashed the urge. They would be seen, known. The children were doomed. The children were already—

Souls would fuse to one vessel, one heartbeat’s space, no more, to contain even a god. Creatures of the earth and a soul of the earth made one, and made the devil’s, the soul that held the centre, the hungry and devouring heart of fire, the man who sang…They were within him, not gods but their godhead, their potentiality, but…oh, the fire, the weight of them, the dark heart of stone and the roiling of waters. The earth. He, dog, man, devil began to feel its pulse beneath his own in every stillness, as if he stood there, as if he sang, as if he held himself open, to drink the god—

His own voice, smooth, weaving through them.

Not that way.

The children in his vision shivered like reflection on water, barely to be seen; it was their souls stood sharp and clear, the flame of life within, but that flame spun out in thin threads into the heart of the devil, and flowed like blood. In Sien-Shava’s upraised hands, before his face, he held—only a stone.

A piece of the barkash, stone of the hills. Holla-Sayan wore a stone, a white pebble, in a soft leather amulet bag hung about his neck. Caravaneers, bards, such wanderers did so, to remind themselves they were not godless in the world. A token of his god, of his land, a stone he had taken from the crest of the barkash and the god’s holiest place before he went, a young man not yet twenty, to the caravan road. It was a little magic, a small thing. A symbol only, perhaps.

Perhaps more than a symbol. Some wizardry worked so.

There were other words wound within the foreign singing, harsh, clear, shouted almost, by the devil alone. The children could not have shaped them. They were not heard but felt, a pain, a cry of longing in the marrow. A shape almost grasped, a meaning—he should have understood. Sayan cried out at his own name.

Sayan was shredding, threads of smoke pulled into a hungry wind, a burning heart. Flowing into the fire, to be consumed.

Holla-Sayan pulled himself away from the vision, felt earth, felt grass, smelt earth and grass and rain in the wind, his god.

He had no song to sing against this, no words. No wizardry. He was only a monster, a plain man made a broken devil.

No. The dog. Under the temple, dying, he called it. Dying, it came. Remember? It needed him to remember now. Flowing into him, consuming him in fire, in pain, in…flood of living light, filling him.

In this place he was fire—scarlet, peridot green, molten silver—two souls spun together.

Wizardry had always a shape, he knew that. Something to hold it. All he had was words, and this was not wizardry as he understood it. This was only truth, what they were, he and the dog, he and the god. This was—what was. Words made a shape. The truth did, forcing itself acknowledged.

Words made a shape. So speak them. Force their truth into the world.

“We are kin, Sayan.” His voice cracked. Weak, as if every word fought through smoke and blood to shape itself. “We make ourselves kin, we do, as deep a truth as that I am my parents’ son, as deep a truth as that I am my brothers’ brother.” He had not been. Foundling, abandoned baby, claimed and loved. Truth. “We share a name, Sayan. My mother gave me your name and you blessed it. You’ve let me hide in you from my enemies. Held your hands over me so many times. Hold on to me now.” Words clearer now. Stronger. More certain. Feeling…truth, making a shape in the world. “I’m not a god, but what is a devil, Sayan? We warred against the Old Great Gods. We are powers to destroy gods of the earth. I’m not strong enough, whole enough, to stand against Jochiz. I’ve lost my own name. But I can be—” He hardly had words. Friend. Love. Brother. Where it mattered. In the heart, the soul. “You are my brother, I name you so, as you name me yours.” Tightened his grip on the god, illusion though that might be. Wrapped him, pulled him close, drowning brother, kin to kin, heart to heart, soul to soul. “Hold to me. Hide in me. Let me carry you.”

Shaped what he did not need to speak aloud, then. Sure and certain. A blessing: no matter what I am, what I’ve become or may yet be, you are my god and my brother, you are a part of me as I am a part of you. My bones are grown from your earth. I’m stone and water of the Sayanbarkash but I am fire and ice of the stars and the hells. I can hold you, I will hold you, if you can give yourself up to me.

The stone in the hands of Jochiz shattered. A cry of fury, of pain. Something ripped away from him. Falling to his knees, hands reaching. The singing children were silent, dead husks folding to the ground, burnt away within, as once Holla-Sayan had seen priestesses die, their life consumed by Ghatai in the working of a spell of protection as the Grasslander devil strove to possess the goddess Attalissa of the mountain lake.

Holla’s arms were empty and he knelt on the dead earth. Frost edged seam and rivet of his brigandine, melted from cold-stung hands.