CHAPTER XXVI

Ailan was asleep under the shelter of a bank of hollies. A little thin grass softened the earth there. The hillside, a mile north of the road, was stones and sparse soil otherwise, not growing much but campion and dry mosses. The young man slept like a puppy, dropping deep the moment he laid his head down. Exhausted. Driving himself hard. Fits of rebellion, of course, of protesting he couldn’t, he was tired, he hurt, he wasn’t someone who could learn these things—

“I’ve brought up worse brats than you,” Ahjvar would say. “And mostly they were princesses. You’re doing fine. Stop complaining and try again.”

Patience he didn’t know he had. An ability to stand back and not grow frustrated. Something gathered into himself, long years watching Ghu, who was patience itself, with children and beasts and madmen. Or maybe he had always had it and had never noticed before, till he was here on his own, with this stray soul who was only a frustrated, lonely, frightened mortal youth, and in need of what he’d never had.

Some vague shadow of fathering?

So the man could handle the camels—had a knack for it, once he got past his own fear. Had the patience and even the calm to deal with the beasts, but not with himself. Nonetheless, he learned. Could make a fire with flint and firesteel, and pluck and gut a pheasant, cook porridge and bannock once Ahjvar bought millet and oatmeal off a caravan-master they crossed paths with, one swinging down to Two Hills and Gold Harbour. He’d been tempted to pay them to take Ailan off his hands, apprentice him, after a fashion, if a silver cup would buy that. The gang-boss seemed a decent woman. But…he didn’t.

Had he ever wanted a son? Could have filled that need with the princes and princesses who passed through their lives, if he did. Didn’t think a man of Ailan’s age should be so desperate for a father, but what did he know of sons or fathers? It had all been such a long time ago. Certainly hadn’t been what he’d found with Ghu, not what either of them had been looking for. His stray cat. Ghu’s…hearth, Ghu would say.

Ghu’s world was a strange one.

Ailan could maybe make shift to defend himself, unarmed or with a knife. Maybe. Didn’t learn so swiftly as Ahj expected, didn’t seem able to feel where his own body was, his own balance…but Ghu had been Ghu and the sons and daughters of the imperial house had some training in such things before ever they came to the god and his man, so maybe Ahjvar expected too much, too soon. At least Ailan could walk softly, aware of where he set his feet, and keep alert, and look, and smell, and listen. Began to read the land, a little, the tracks and the wind. Not entirely useless.

Not skills for the city, though.

He was not training up a poacher, though. Nor yet a young assassin.

Horse-thief?

Ghu’s thought, not his own. Was it?

Ghu laughed at him.

Or maybe that was a dream. He dreamed waking, sometimes. It didn’t bother him the way it once might have, but then, the dreams were better ones, these days.

Ailan could read, to Ahjvar’s surprise. That came up, talking, one day. He knew the variant of the Nabbani syllabics used in the Five Cities and Marakand. His mother had taught him. He might make some caravan-merchant a clerk, once he learnt some ciphering.

No pursuit, or none that ever caught up with them. Maybe the fire had after all dealt with any of the priests who knew anything of them. Maybe Jochiz had lost track of him again, or was letting Ahjvar run, deluded he was unseen.

Maybe the devil was as mad as Tu’usha had been and acted with as little consistency, and assassins, some Westron version of the Wind in the Reeds, might come unheralded out of the night, with poisoned blades and wizardry against what held the Rihswera of Nabban in life.

Ahjvar didn’t sleep much. He wished he could, because in his deeper dreams, when he truly slept, he found Ghu on the headland over the Gulf of Taren again.

They had passed below the lands of the Duina Catairna, though that was not the name. Just a backwater of the confederacy now, no king or queen, no hall or tower. He thought of turning aside, riding up to Dinaz Catairna…no town up in those hills, a pedlar said. Never heard the name. The king’s hall had moved elsewhere, once the goddess Catairanach was gone, of course. The seat of Marnoch and Deyandara had been established near where whatever god or goddess had in the end chosen to take on the protection of that folk. He had never heard, never asked. Never wanted to know.

Tonight the mountains loomed close, jagged teeth against the stars. A faint smudging of the sky to the north, some rising smoke or fume. The Malagru, marching down to meet the Pillars of the Sky, grew restless. He had led them off the road, but in the morning they would return to it, to climb the stone-paved highway up the pass. Be in the city by nightfall, probably.

There was a chill in him. A reluctance.

He had drowned in Marakand.

The Lady of Marakand, everything of her, was gone. Felt nonetheless as if he braced to plunge his hand into fire. War and earthquake, since he had last ridden this way. His doing. Well, his had been the pebble that started that avalanche.

And this time?

The fire he had made burned bright. In Marakand, he would go to the ambassador’s house. Not expected, but welcomed, as he must be, the god’s own consort. A place where he might command, if he wished to. He did not.

Yeh-Lin was there, in the city. He could feel her, now. So close, there was no hiding any longer. They had lived too near, too long, and she had sworn herself to him.

No. To Ghu.

Sometimes he was not altogether certain whose thoughts he was thinking. It should bother him, and it did not. He was the god’s champion, his sword…his eyes and ears and voice, to go for Nabban where Nabban could not.

Twelve years ago, he had made a voyage.

The diviners begin to dream dark dreams, and the shamans of Denanbak, and the Tigress of the Little Sister. His god, in his fey and dreaming moods, when he sits watching unblinking through the night, sees a fire rising in the west and spreading over the world, sees shrines godless and souls lost, torn away from their road, devoured.

Sees the tides of the world shifting. Rivers wander. Forests walk. That is as it has always been. They remember that the Badlands of the desert road to northern Denanbak were once a lake, an inland sea. But the spring comes later and later to the northern provinces; the snows are deep, starving the herds in allied Denenbak, in Choa Province and Alwu and the hills of Shihpan. The rains in the south fail; the little rivers dry, and die, and the rice new-planted in the paddies grows yellow, parched. The imperial granaries that stockpile reserves against bad years are depleted and the folk of the villages flock to the cities, seeking work that is not there, and beg on the roads, and murder their neighbours to steal their little all. Storms come out of season, and a city in Pirakul is washed away by typhoon, its temple fallen, its goddess…silenced in the sea, her holy well drowned.

Is this what was, or what might be? Now, here, Ahjvar does not remember.

This is as it was when the great lake died, a woman says, a goddess, standing stretched, her arms reaching to embrace the sky, broad toes digging into the earth. Brother turns on brother, sister on sister, the white bones of the beasts bleach on the cracked earth. She is a tree, not a woman, holding up the sky. A piece of the land dies, and its death births new winds. Currents change, and the sea bleeds fire. My folk are dead, all dead, and the generations lost to the gods of other folk, and the gods themselves, have forgotten my name. But in the coming time the desert will flow to the sea.

This is a tale told by the devil Yeh-Lin: a goddess who is a lost river, a lost river who is a tree.

A thing does not have to cross the borders to bring death and destruction upon them. Better it is prevented before it ever does. And a god of the earth has responsibility to the whole of the earth, not merely his own folk. Ghu says that. It is not a thought shared by any other god or goddess Ahjvar has ever met.

What disrupted, what would disrupt, the balance of the world, neither they nor the diviners and seers of the Imperial Corps can determine, but—it seems ominous, and not merely a few bad seasons, when ships and caravans begin to bring stories of lands troubled by unseasonable cold, or drought, or sandstorms, rivers dried or lowlands flooded. True tales, not foreseeings. The caravaneers tell that the sleeping volcanoes of the Malagru grumble and leak smoke once more.

Then there comes a great wave, striking the coast east of the marshes where once the Golden City of the emperors had floated in its lagoon. Ghu has dreamed, or felt its rise; the few seers dwelling among folk of the stilt-villages, the fishers and fowlers and salt-harvesters there, see his vision, cry his warnings, and many are able to flee inland in time.

Not all.

They hear, after, that an island in the southern archipelago, where the pearl-chieftains rule, has been torn apart in eruptions of a green and sleeping mountain over the course of a week, and nearly all its folk, save some fishers out in the great canoes, have died in smoke and burning stone and poisoned air.

It is as if the world shivers in fever-dreams.

It does not seem to be any devil’s working. And yet…

The Rihswera is the god’s sword, held not over the land but against the things that might come to threaten the land. And to that end, the protection of the land, perhaps the world itself…there are other weapons they might also wield. Perhaps.

The young too-soon-empress is only a princess in these days, and Yuan, too-reckless hunter of wild buffalo in the marshlands of the south coast, is emperor still, when Ahjvar finds himself on a pilgrimage through the lands of the Nalzawan Commonwealth, which occupies the east of the southern continent beyond the sea.

“Try not to annoy any gods,” Ghu says, before he boards the ship at Kozing Port. “Or princes. Or Yuan will come to me to say that if I must meddle beyond the borders, could I perhaps not send an armed thunderstorm to do it?”

Not Emperor Suliasra Yuan’s term, but his mother Ruyi’s—Can you not keep your armed thunderstorm at home, Holy One?—when the irate ex-ruler of a small hill-kingdom of Pirakul had begun to send increasingly undiplomatic letters to the empress and high priestess of Nabban demanding compensation for the slaying of that king’s god and his subsequent conquest and exile by a neighbouring queen.

“Have the emperor lend you an ambassador, then, if you want,” Ahjvar says. “I won’t complain.” He has no especial desire to travel to the lands south overseas, particularly as it means a sea-voyage of well over a month even with fair winds, and whatever he tries, he still suffers seasickness as badly as he ever did. If godhead has to spread tendrils through him, so that he dreams dreams not his own—not that he minds, Ghu’s dreams being far the more restful—

Am I dreaming now?

What do you think?

I think I should be keeping watch.

I think you do watch.

—he might wish his good head for the sea were catching as well.

“I don’t want an ambassador. This isn’t a matter for courts and emperors. Try not to make it one, won’t you?” A grin warm as a touch. “And Ahj, this time, whatever you do, don’t start any wars.”

He hadn’t that other time. Nor killed a god. Not really. Only a halfling god, anyway, born into too much of his father’s power, which most deities who took it into their heads to consort with human mates had better sense than to let happen. Not his fault that while he was in Pirakul the darkest rumours of the tiger-cult and its sacrifices turned out to be true, there in the far reaches of the hills, or that the deluded godling had chosen to set his devotees hunting the man who had been, in another life, the Leopard of Gold Harbour. That the king who had profited from fear of the cult so long suffered at last the wrath of his neighbours, his protector gone, was no responsibility of Ahjvar’s.

That isn’t what he dreams tonight. If he dreams. He can see Ailan, sleeping, a hummock of blankets. Hear the old, familiar song, the night-lark. A night-hawk, too, squawking, less melodious. See the stars, the streaks of high cloud trailing over them, like the smoke of distant fires.

But he is carried there, then, twelve years past, and it feels like dreaming, not memory.

The Nalzawan Commonwealth is governed by a council of elected tribal elders and the hereditary kings and queens of those tribes. The folk of its various lands, the lush coastal forests and the green hills that make the north to south spine of the country, the grassy plains and the desert edge beyond, regard both their monarchs and their gods as a shared heritage, unusually. Priests and priestesses of all their many gods and goddesses might travel to study and serve at the Temple of All Gods in the capital Barrahe at the mouth of the goddess Sato’s river. Some never leave. It is a centre of learning and scholarship, like a library of the north. Ahjvar gets out of teeming Barrahe as swiftly and quietly as he can.

I would have liked to have seen more of it,Ghu says. A beautiful city. Iri should send architects to study its domes. So light, compared to Marakand’s.

I don’t like domes. However light.

You’re not an architect.

A pilgrimage is a thing most Nalzawans try to make at least once in their lives, travelling one of the holy trails that begin and end at the Temple of All Gods in Barrahe. It is a worship of the young, almost a duty, a widening of the world, a way of keeping coast and lush hills and dry, desert-edged plains all united and in understanding—a chance to flirt and court, make friendships and partnerships of lives and trade both, and return home travelled and allegedly wiser.

A scholar from the north might do so, come to learn about the Nalzawan lands and gods.

To travel with the pilgrims seems a way to pass through the land quietly, not wandering unwitting into the forbidden, or disturbing presences who might see a straying power, however minor, as a menace and a threat, as had happened in Pirakul and not only in the affair of the tiger-cult. Go humbly with the shield and cloud of a company of souls about him, walk the sacred lines that have been walked for generations, and he will be part of an acceptable pattern, whatever his folk and his land.

The difference between a spy and a diplomat is more in how you approach a foreign court than in what you do when you get there,Ghu says.

“That sounds like Rat, not you.”

Wisdom of the Tigress, says Ghu. Yes, her words, not mine. He laughs. The goddess of the Little Sister has her own way of looking at the world. As goddesses go, Ahjvar rather likes her.

From Barrahe he travels up the valley of the Sato by boat on the broad, slow river, where in the wild places hippopotamuses are as great a danger as the crocodiles, the latter giants compared to the small beasts of Nabban’s southern rivers. Sato never appears to bless them, though several pilgrims who belong to the folk of the valley speak with her in dreams. All up the valley Ahjvar feels watched.

She feared us. Ghu regrets this.

Feared him. This is dream, memory flowing in waking dream, and Ghu is with him, which he was not.

Ghu has all this in his own memory. He must. He holds all that Ahjvar is. This memory, the dream that colours it. But they share it now. They walk this road of pilgrimage together.

It is a path. A pattern. A dance.

A summoning, cast to the wind.

The wind blows out of the east, west to Marakand.

He is glad when the company leaves the boat and its crew below a waterfall higher than any he has ever seen, a thunderous pillar of furious white.

Ghu stands, humanly entranced, the boy again. For a moment Ahjvar even sees him, solid as the stone beneath their feet, hair damply greyed with spray.

A broad road of steeps and stairs angles up the side of the gorge through dense forest, mist-cool, which clings with roots and tendrils into every crack in the stone. Locals who make their living off the pilgrim-companies have come to carry baggage for them, and to marvel at the foreigner who has travelled so far inland from the busy port to visit the holy places of their gods.

As they climb away from the water they move into heat and out of the trees. They follow the river past the falls to where the hills open out and the high plains stretch before them. Another shrine, another halt. Forzra, the god of the last of the hills, does not bring himself fully into the world to bless the pilgrims, but later that night, the god wanders down to the yard of the pilgrims’ guest-hall in the town. No one else feels the god’s presence out in the high-fenced yard, not even the chief of their guides, who is a holy sister of the Temple of All Gods in Barrahe. Ahjvar leaves the habitual evening drinking of an oily-tasting tea, said to encourage dreams of the gods, to go out to him.

“What are you?” Forzra asks. Gods do not always take human form, though it is most common. He looks a man, young, strong, black-skinned, his eyes long-lashed, hair in many short ringlets. The god dresses as the folk of the plains do, only a striped cloth twisted about his hips like a kilt, chest bare. Ahjvar has been getting used to that in both men and women, though it is not a fashion he has adopted, feeling naked enough when the heat drives him to strip to the short gown and sandals of Nabban’s south provinces, with all the ancient scars even that exposes, to pilgrim’s eye or god’s.

An attractive young man Ahjvar would rather not have staring at him with quite such cool assessment.

Certainly not now, when he can even smell Ghu beside him, the lingering faint scent of horses that is never out of his clothes, the indefinable mingling of man and pines.

“A servant of Nabban, travelling to visit some of the shrines of your land,” he says.

“The Nabbani have become like the Marakanders, thinking nothing real till they have seen it with their own eyes and set it down in their words.” Forzra leans on a staff patterned in fine scales, its head carved like that of snake. He speaks as if he addresses it, not Ahjvar, then turns it so the eyes, chips of glittering stone, seem fixed on him.

Or on what stands beside him, shadow not quite seen. If he reaches— he won’t, because to touch and find nothing would be worse.

“Yes. I serve my god in this.”

“And how do you do so?”

“Here, in your lands? I’ve said. I travel to visit your shrines and hear the tales of the land, and to carry greetings to any gods I might meet.”

“And what else?”

Ahjvar shrugs. “Nothing that is any harm to this land.”

Forzra frowns. “There is something in you like a sudden wind from the north. The breath of the storm that brings the first rains.”

Armed thunderstorm.

I’m glad you’re finding this entertaining, Ghu. Why? Because there are other dreams he would rather dream, and other memories to live in.

Such as? Breath on his ear. Faint and distant laughter. Walk this path again. It brings us—

Forzra addresses the staff again, thoughtfully. “I am not sure that I like this storm-front that you bring.”

Ahjvar bows, though it isn’t Nalzawan fashion to do so. “I serve my god,” he says. “Nabban has nothing but goodwill towards your land and its gods and its folk. All your lands and gods and folks, here beyond the seas.”

The god says nothing to that, only continues to study him, which he endures in silence, until Forzra gives a nod, turns on his heel, and strides off. Corporeal enough to leave footprints in the dust. But his staff leaves no mark, and then he carries none, something thick as Ahjvar’s upper arm slung over his shoulder…swarming over his shoulder, riding there, tail twining his thigh. Snake embracing the god’s throat, rising over his head like an elephant’s trunk to look back.

The snake, mottled black and yellow and gleaming as if oiled, is in the guest-hall yard in the morning, when they gather for breakfast while their hired pack-oxen and their handlers assemble. A sacred animal of the god Forzra, their guide Sister Enyal says, and offers it an egg, which it ignores. “A blessing on our journey. Don’t disturb it.”

I prefer dragons,Ghu says.

Dogs.

The dragons don’t track mud into the cave.

The dragons don’t fit into the cave.

The dragons turn into dogs, and the dogs roll in the mud and track mud into the cave. They miss having you to tease. I miss having you to cook for.

He wants to reach, to hold. To be held. But he is by a fire, under a bank of hollies a day’s ride from Marakand. He is no devil, to ride the winds home.

The snake is at their hostel the first night out from the hills, too, or its sibling is, and Ahjvar does not sleep, but sits with his back against the wall and a knife in his hand. After that, Forzra’s lands are left behind. What watches him then, if anything does, he is never certain.

They have left Sato’s river at Forzra’s town; its course comes down from the south through the fading edge of the hills and will no longer serve them as they set off towards the northwest. Few shrines this way; nearly as few good wells, and not the most popular of the pilgrim circuits. There are only hill-gods of small semi-nomadic herding folk, their shrines often no more than a tree or an engraved stone, with a priest or priestess living nearby in some small thorn-walled compound to tell the stories of the god and accept alms for the blessing, or goddesses of the dry riverbeds that he calls coulees, their shrines rare rocky outcroppings that will be islands when the rains come.

A few gods and goddesses do appear to bless them, some as man or woman, one as an elephant—

No, he says to Ghu’s presence. Not even a little one?

No.

—two no more than a stirring of the air, yet a presence even those without a priest’s insight or a wizard’s senses could feel. They are wary of Ahjvar but do not approach him, wanting him gone. He makes them uncomfortable. Small gods, wishing to be left in peace and not to draw the attention of powers they do not understand. Much his own attitude to them.

Though the holiday pace frets him, Ahjvar finds the open land, the long views, ease his soul, at least in the mornings, before the chatter begins to grate. The grasslands are, in their own way, as strange to him as the hills, coulees marked by stands of tall, bare-trunked trees that lift their heads like clouds, unexpectedly graceful giraffes, which he knows only from scrolls in the imperial library, reaching to browse them, and wild elephants far larger than those that work in Pirakul. They see antelope of several kinds, some wild oxen that look to be all head and shoulders, wary wild dogs, red jackals with a different song from those of the deserts he knows. Lions, which take his breath away. And leopards. He watches it all and wishes he had an artist’s skill to paint it, especially the trees like solitary clouds and the elephants and the striped wild horses that they say cannot be tamed.

He knows a man would bring them gentle and willing to his hand. But it is only his own eyes can look on them, beyond Nabban’s boundaries. And at that time, he regrets the wonder lost that Ghu would find, more than he could ever see. The words he sets down for the imperial library are blunt and plain things. He lacks the gift of his long-gone granddaughter for poetry.

But I did see. You made me a winter’s worth of tales when you came home. And I see, now, with your eyes, your living it again.

The pilgrim-party spends its nights either in guest-houses maintained in the thorn-fenced dry-season villages, or in compounds that to himself Ahjvar calls caravanserais, hostels maintained for these pilgrimages and spaced for their slow and easy footpace.

So many voices, so much noise. Unending, entirely inoffensive, laughter and jokes and tales traded in several related languages; even the inevitable grumbles and complaints and frictions between people should be no cause for real anger. So many small fretting days, dragged down to the trudging of the white oxen. A lean and leggy breed, but still—he could easily outpace them, and not regret doing without the burdens they carry, the water-gourds no more than the twice-baked cakes. He stops sleeping, which is never a good sign, and is not so gracious as he could be in refusing the suggestion by one of his fellow travellers that they might quite pleasurably share their blankets for a night or two.

She seemed very nice, I thought.

Ghu… And reckless, because why should Ghu be the only one to tease, or for that matter, the only one to— Would you have minded?

Ghu seems to consider this carefully. Perhaps.

Good.

But if you did want—only tell me, is all.

No. No.

The daytime heat is oppressive. No worse than that of the southern provinces, but here there is no shelter other than the shadows of scattered stands of thorny acacia and baobab, the latter of which makes him think somehow of elephants, the same ponderous curves massive against the sky. He wraps a caravaneer’s scarf over head and face. Day by day the grass grows shorter, more sere and sparse, and the temperature climbs. The wind blows unceasingly, gritty with dust. They are drawing near the desert, Sister Enyal promises, and the turning point of their pilgrimage, after which they will make a shorter journey back to the hills and follow the highway of the legendary wizard Nalzawa, founder of the commonwealth, through the hills to Barrahe. The end of the world, this land, for them. If there are folk in the desert, no land claims them. Beyond, somewhere, one comes again to mountains, and the city-states of the north and west, the land called Rostenga. Few pilgrimages come this far, to the holy place of the goddess of the first and last tree, nameless and folkless.

A goddess of seers and diviners. A goddess of silences.

Last tree before the desert, first tree of the desert’s edge. Oldest tree, in the tales told in the north of the world, but first, oldest, that might be a translator’s error. Goddess of the underground river, a devil once told him. There are still occasional trees, mostly thorn, but there is no sign there was ever a river. Not even the least of coulees.

Ahjvar has always assumed an underground river must flow into or out of the earth—he expects hills, a gorge, a cavern, not just the pale grass and yellow dust reaching, it seems, to the world’s end in all directions, the sky burning above.

“By noon, we’ll come to her,” Enyal had said as they settled into the hostel the previous evening. “She’s not a goddess who takes form in the world, but she has been known to speak in the dreams of those who most have need of her. Perhaps tonight. She may watch us even now, as we approach her holy place.”

Nothing watches in the night, except what feels like the night itself, the natural world of these plains: insect, bird, rodent, hunter, all disturbed and wary, a single human straying. The hostel left sleeping behind him, Ahjvar stops and unslings the bundle he carries, the one bag he does not let them put on their oxen, though they laugh at him, insisting on carrying himself his sheaf of paper, his inks and reed-pens for his daily account of their travels. What else he carries, rolled in an old plaid blanket, he has never shown them. A thing of his god, he says when someone notices and asks what he has hidden there.

Ahjvar shakes out the plaid blanket, snatches the scabbarded blade as it flies free. Belts on his sword and two of his knives, digs in the bottom of the bag for his bracelets, which are nothing of Nabban but a king’s gold from another life, heavy, with terminals shaped as snarling leopards’ heads. They cover one set of scars, but that isn’t the reason to wear them. Declaration, of what and who he is, for himself as much as the goddess. Declaration and courtesy, offering respect. Ambassador, god to god.

Feeling even more unburdened than when he left the crowded hall of sleepers and all their pressing, dreaming souls, though a sword at his hip should be no lesser weight than in a bag on his back, he covers the last miles, as certain of his way as the arrow once it leaves the bow.

Only with the help of the Old Great Gods were the seven defeated, say the songs of the north. But the devils were devils, even in human bodies, and were not so easily slain, despite the aid of the Old Great Gods and only by the Old Great Gods were they bound, one by one, and imprisoned: Ogada in stone, Jasberek in water, Vartu in earth, Tu’usha in the heart of a flame, Ghatai in a burning mountain, Jochiz in the youngest of rivers…and Dotemon, who had been the Nabbani wizard and empress and tyrant Yeh-Lin, in the oldest of trees.

The girth of the ancient baobab is vast, a blackness against the stars. Ahjvar can believe it the oldest of trees after all. He has slept in houses smaller. Roots deep, deep, seeking hidden waters, and thick branches reaching like a child’s stubby fingers for the stars. The naked twigs sway, and the grass about him whispers suddenly like the wings of disturbed bats. Nothing else.

He bows to the starless darkness that is the tree, there being no other obvious focus for courtesy. “Lady of the tree, my name is Ahjvar, rihswera of the holy one of Nabban, and Nabban sends me to you to speak of the devil Dotemon.”

He waits for some thickening of attention, some change in the uneasy wind, but the answer when it came startles him.

“Priest of Nabban, they call you, do they not?” Human voice, a woman’s, not young, not old, and the feeling of a body near him, that impression of warmth, scent, breath. And she speaks Nabbani, with Yeh-Lin’s archaic accent. “But what is rihswera?”

“A Praitannec title. The rihswera is the champion of a king or a queen. What the folk of the north would call the king’s sword. Lady of waters, you’ve seen Dotemon? She came back here?”

“She did, yes. Forty-four rains past. She stayed with me through a year.”

Two rainy seasons, greater and lesser, in each year. Not so long ago, then.

“Why?” he asks, because it might have a bearing on what he has come to ask. He hopes not.

“She wanted quiet, she said. Peace in which to think, and to empty herself of thought. She had been many years travelling in Pirakul. She said—” the voice chuckles, deep and rich, and says something in a southern tongue he doesn’t know, and then in the speech of the coast that is the second language for everyone of the commonwealth, “she said she must sit and let the winds off the desert blow the cobwebs and the clutter from her mind, because they weighed her down and made her coward when she faced thought of—she did not say what.”

“Do you know where she has gone?”

“No. Is she an enemy of your god, Rihswera of Nabban?”

“No.” He hopes not.

“She spoke of you. She spoke of your god. Her god, she says. She spoke of him often, when we spoke at all. Generally she only…was. Beneath the sun, and the rain. She is able to sit. The devils were restless, and the wizards they seduced to them were restless souls. Yeh-Lin Dotemon has found stillness. I value that in her.”

“You believe her true, lady?”

“Do you not?”

“By her deeds…I think so. Nabban does. He trusts in hope.”

Yes,Ghu whispers.

“And yet he keeps a killer to run his errands? Do not deny that you are that.”

“I am not—” He doesn’t bother. “No.” Denial and agreement. “We’ll find her when it is time, regardless. Lady of the oldest of trees, I’m sent to ask you to free her.”

“I have freed her, in defiance of all that the Old Great Gods asked of me when they laid her like the dead above my river, within my trunk, with a stone arrow in her heart. I freed her, though I had wound roots all through her within my own Gods-wounded heart, to hold her deep in her dreaming death. I freed her and I let her go into the world to see it with newborn eyes. Why ask?”

“Because either she lies, or she is still constrained by you. Leashed and limited. You hold a part of her still.”

“I do. Rihswera of Nabban, why would you have her otherwise? The devils were not meant for this world. They do not move through it lightly.”

“Yet we would ask you to free her, lady. A time is coming when we may need her strength unleashed. My god sees it.”

“Nabban goes to war? Is it Pirakul you would have her invade again, or the jungles and the highlands south of you? I know your land from her tales of her own old sins. It was great and it was feared, in the days of her rule. Would your god make it so again?”

“No. Not war. We hope, not war again. Lady, we know the devils are free, and some have died, and some are hunted by one of their own. There will be war, maybe, between them again, war to tear and scar the world as they tore and scarred it long ago. We don’t know. We hope to avert it. We hope Dotemon will be our ally. We know—my god has seen—that there is a darkness growing in the west, a storm brewing— beyond our horizon still, but coming. He wants Dotemon freed to stand with us against it.” Though if it reached so far as Nabban again, it would be too late.

Ghu shapes him, he knows it. He shapes his god. He is a corruption, he sometimes thinks, as much as consort—

No,Ghu protests, urgent. No.

—and he knows that other gods, and the philosophers and priests of other lands, might say it. A god should not look beyond his bounds, should not reach, and act. They do, he and Ghu—

We do now. Ghu, how?

We dream in one another.

Typical cryptic Ghu, going poetic and elusive.

Idiot boy.

Oh, always.

—They will use what they have, to prevent that storm ever rolling over Nabban. He knows it, there before the goddess of the baobab. He knows it now.

Come with me, not to be my assassin, the man had said, long ago, and, You don’t kill for me, not like that. But that was a different time, and in defence of the souls of his folk, Ghu, who is Nabban, will use whatever weapons he has. And if Ahjvar his rihswera be one, Dotemon is surely another.

Ghu says nothing. Ghu knows this, knows he has always known it.

“He used the devil in his wars before,” the goddess says. “He allowed his first empress, the Grasslander Suliasra Ivah, to use her.”

“No. The devil served as general and wizard. Of her own will, and as a duty to the land. She was not used. She served, as lords of the land do. She kept her oaths, and she kept faith.”

“You believe—your god believes she will still do so? In her full strength, which he cannot match? He would trust in a devil to choose to stand with the folk of the earth and their gods against her own kind?”

“Yes.”

“Certainty, or hope?”

“Lady, we ask. We trust her. She has been tried and proven.” To a point. So far.

“Fighting fire with fire? A tactic, but what if the wind changes? Should I tempt her, or let you push her, to be what she once was? Think— she was the tyrant of Nabban. Perhaps she still covets it. It is your land and its folk will suffer if your trust is misplaced.”

“You think Nabban, he and I, would not suffer, if she turned against us, first and before ever his folk and his land? She knows us, and what we could and would do against her, however doomed that might be in the end. She would not leave us free to act against her. We don’t offer our folk as sacrifice to our trust being misplaced, without offering ourselves first.”

“I do notice you say ‘we,’ now, and not ‘my god.’”

He keeps his silence.

“Do you speak for him, or he through you?”

He shrugs. No answer to give. To him, it makes no difference.

“Priest and champion. That is not what you are but what you do. What you are, your nature…There is the hand of a god on you and the breath of a god in you, and his roots run through you, blood and marrow, river and stone. You unsettle the winds of this land and the currents of its water. You are—a wrongness.”

He is not going to apologize.

“You should take yourself out of this place, Rihswera of Nabban. Go back to your own land and stay there in peace with your god.”

No arguing with that. He craves the solitude of two, not loneliness.

Ghu says, I’m sorry. I miss you, every breath.

The wind off the desert is hot. It gusts about them suddenly, and dry twigs rattle together. Some fall.

“Dotemon,” he says. “We ask that you release her.”

“Are you come to threaten me, if I do not accede to Nabban’s wish in this?”

“No. But we need…he says, he sees her free. He will…I don’t know. I don’t know what we might do, or what you might do to prevent us. Or might try, to do so. Do you think you would succeed? Better we neither of us have to find out, don’t you think? Gods and demons have died trying to hold the devils bound. None succeeded in the end. We need Dotemon, unleashed to do what she may.”

“And when all the north is laid waste in another devils’ war, will you come with the survivors of your folk to beg refuge?”

“I would be dead with my god. It’s another devils’ war we fear and try to find some way to prevent.”

“So you say. Sit, priest of Nabban. And find silence. Wait with me for the dawn.”

He settles with his back against the smooth bark, sword across his lap, and watches the rising stars until they begin to fade in the swift lightening of the southern dawn.

The goddess stands only a few paces distant, watching for the sun. The ground about them is a litter of broken twigs, dead leaves.

The tree is not dry-season bare. The tree is dying, or dead.

The goddess turns to look down on him, a face grave and beautiful, with broad cheekbones and a small chin. Shorter and stockier than most of the plains-folk, with full breasts, broad-hipped. She is quite naked, her cloud of iron-grey hair neither dressed nor trimmed. Her only ornament is a braided bracelet, cold black against warm near-black skin. She is quite humanly handsome, but she forms and wears the body as a shell, a dress to show respect and honour a guest, as he has armed himself and worn the gold. This is not she, not as the appearance of the god Forzra living among his folk had been the true expression of himself. This appearance of a woman was not something that the goddess of the tree has ever been or needed to be.

An underground river, Yeh-Lin had said. Did the devil think it so? They have met before, she and he—Ghu, not he, but now he remembers that vision as if it were his own. This is the goddess of the dreaming. This warned of—what would be, or had been?

The weight of a great and ancient lake, an inland sea, lost and remembered, and all the land tilts inwards to wrap around her, dizzying, folding up about him so that he feels he is falling towards her, to drown.

No. She does not intend that. She only is, existing, a weight in the world. As is his own god, but Ahjvar does not feel it so alien, being within it in himself.

A weight, still, even dying. Fading, as her waters, into the earth.

He bows low where he sits and straightens, waiting for the world to steady, as she seats herself across from him, legs folded under her, hands on her knees.

In silence, he can find the deep waters of his god, that stillness of stone, the light sparking out of darkness into bird-bright flight, all flowing wind and water. But the goddess does not keep her own meditation. He feels her brushing along the edges, listening, tasting, testing, and cannot help the jolt of anger, of outright fear, that gives him. He does not rise and pace, does not trace the lines in the air with the sword’s edge, weave the dance, but he walks it within, sets rowan for protection, almond to forbid, prickly ash to counter what she works: her quiet insistent pressing to see beyond the surface of him. Too late, maybe, to keep her from seeing more than he would have her know, but she…backs off, or at least fades, no longer touching. The god’s stillness is lost to him, though. It becomes only the waiting, the timeless watch, which might be for a death or a dawn or a changing of the guard, the stillness only of the drawn bow, of the breath yet to be taken.

He is not hunting. Remember that. It is the goddess who first breaks the stillness.

“I have seen what you are,” she says. “I understand what it is I feel in you. Priest of Nabban, what has been done to you is against the proper nature of things. It is wrong. Would you be free of your god and the bonds that hold you?”

“No. No.” A deep breath, to stop himself bolting to his feet, reaching for some defence. He spreads his hands, lightly resting on the scabbard, not to clench them. “And do not you think to tear me from him. You will fail. Others have.”

“I do not see how I might free you, yet, though if I sat long enough in silence I might come to see. I shall do so, if you would have that gift. This is an ugly thing.”

“Yes, but it is not his doing. He only took what he found. I am his now, as I am—and of my own will. Leave us be.”

“Is it you yourself who say so, or he?”

“I.”

“Do you know so? What is your own will, and what his? How do you know?”

“Faith,” he says.

Oh, Ahj.

But it is as true an answer as any and less complicated than his own truth, which is that, for himself, still and after all these years, he does not find it matters.

Ahjvar…

“It is a terrible thing to keep a soul from its road,” she says. “It is wrong. Wrong. But you are not of my folk. They are long ages gone, farwandered and folded into other folks, following the waters. But if another god had taken one of mine to hold as Nabban holds you, I would have raised my folk to war to take them back and free that enslaved ghost to its road. Yes, even if it cost a thousand lives.” She speaks as calmly as if she discusses the unchanging dry-season weather.

“I am not yours.”

“No.”

“And no slave. My will is my own.”

“But how do you know?”

“You repeat yourself.”

“And so do you. Faith is no answer, when you cannot step aside from him to see yourself clearly.”

“Faith is my only answer. Love. Trust. But this argument is pointless. I’m no concern of yours,” he says in Nabbani. “Lady of lost waters, you speak of binding and yet you don’t answer me. Will you give Dotemon back to herself?”

“You have not said, servant of Nabban, what you will do, if I do not.”

He shrugs. “I suppose, when the time comes, I will go to find her. I will tell her, as my god bids me, that Nabban would have her free to keep the oaths she swore him long ago. And we would all, you and we alike, await what came of that. I don’t think you could hold her if she truly fought to be free. Certainly not if my god chose to aid her.”

“You said you did not come to threaten me.”

He shrugs.

The goddess shuts her eyes and sits so, long enough for the shadow of her to move, to turn to touch his knee, and he does not like to have even the shadow of her on him when she has spoken of taking him from his god, which is childish.

“Not for your threats,” she says, opening her eyes at last. She speaks slowly, as if hearing and considering each word as it leaves her mouth. “Not for fear of Dotemon. Not even to have the corruption of you gone from my land while it is yet mine to protect. But because I dream as you dream, you and your god.” She rises to her feet, ponderous, graceful, a weight like flowing stone. But she is water. “Take this, then. Make me free of her when you must, if you must. Yours, the choice, what you do.”

The wind veers round, storm-wild, swinging through all points of the compass. Trees thrash, branches bend. Ailan wakes with a cry, but Ahjvar stays where he is, sitting by their fire. Walking memory. Dream. Reaches, then, a hand. Seizes the young man’s arm, pulls him down, beside the fire under the bank of hollies, beside the fire under the baobab.

“Stay,” he says, slow and slurred. “Nothing to fear.”

Peace,Ghu says, to that wild-beating heart, and sets a hand on Ailan’s head as he might calm a panicked beast.

Ailan settles into Ahjvar’s forbidden side, close and innocent for once as a small child, frightened as one, baffled. Surely he thinks, will think, he is dreaming, when the morning comes. It’s all right for him to be here. Ghu stands by Ahjvar. He can lean his shoulder against his leg, head to his hip. Feel the hand rest in his hair, fingers twining in it.

The wind settles into the west.

Young Ailan, who was not there, stares up at the naked goddess.

The woven ring of black the goddess wears about her wrist lands before Ahjvar. He catches it up, but when he looks to speak to her, the land is empty. Even the sense of her is gone, deep beneath her roots, into her waters…Only himself, the tree, the clear golden land to the horizon.

Ailan is only a shadowy shape, huddled into the side of the shadow-shape that is himself. Not here. Very far away, twelve years and thousands of miles.

Ahjvar rises to his feet and bows low to the thick skeleton of the baobab, sliding the bracelet onto his wrist. Silk sleek hair. He sets his hand on a long, ridged scar of the otherwise beech-smooth trunk. Once there had been bones coffined within the tree, prison and grave, and then a second birthing into life. Or a third life, maybe, or a fourth. She has remade herself more than once, Yeh-Lin Dotemon, starting when the peasant girl Nang Lin set off to find a noble patron and training for her wizard’s talent.

We are reborn each day, and must make ourselves anew, the poet Yeon Silla wrote.

The pilgrim party is approaching. He feels them, the life of them, the intrusion, as if it were something he might smell on the wind. He turns to see Sister Enyal catch sight of him, come striding ahead, the white headscarf she wears over her priest-shaved scalp floating back like a banner.

“She called to you?” Enyal asks, foregoing the rebuke he expects with something like wonder in her voice.

Close enough. He agrees with a nod. The priestess’s eyes go to his sword. “What have you done here?”

“Prayed,” he had answered, then, and around him the dream is fading the land gone to shadows. He sits by the fire, a chilly night on the edge of spring, and Ailan is in the crook of his arm, as another young man should be, and is not. “Prayed. And been answered. I’ll wait for you back at the hostel, Sister.”

“Ahjvar…?” Ailan, close within the circle of his arm. Shivering. “Ahjvar, I—was that a dream?”

“Was what?” He took back his arm, stood and moved away. Ailan stared up at him, all ruddy and shadow in the firelight. Hurt. Confused.

“I—I’m sorry. I had a dream. A nightmare. Sort of a nightmare? It—it scared me but it wasn’t bad. You were there. A woman. She was a woman but in the dream I knew she was really a tree, and—Did I see your god? There was someone else and I knew he was your god. He was—he said—he…” Ailan shook his head. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to—not this time, I mean. I—” Incoherence trailed to silence. To get close, he meant to say. Which boundary he did try to push, once in a while, and Ahjvar put him off while pretending he didn’t notice, which seemed the best tactic.

“It was a dream,” Ahjvar said. “Don’t worry about it.” Added, “Sorry,” himself, because he had dragged the man in somehow, or Ghu had, or—

The wind was gusting wildly, rattling the stiff leaves of the hollies. Ashes swirled. Then stillness. But there was the feel of thunder gathering in the air.

She came like a dragon, a typhoon, a sandstorm howl of wind in the badlands. The hollies bent almost double. The fire went out like a candle in a draft. Ailan yelped and jumped to his feet. Camels bellowed but stayed put, hunkered low, shutting their eyes, heads down. Ahjvar shut his own eyes against the gust, rocked with it, but didn’t move from where he stood. Rubbed ash and grit from his face as the wind died. Ailan scrambled over to him, the knife he had taken from the priest unsteady in his hand. He crouched, free hand on Ahjvar as if he were a rock to cling to, all warnings to keep himself off again forgotten.

“Dead king,” Yeh-Lin said. “You called?”

“Did I?”

“I wonder.’

“Someone did. And I believe you have what is mine.” She held out a slender hand.

“No,” he heard himself say. “Not yet.” Echoes in the mind. Ghu.

“You deny me? Even constrained as I am, I could tear you from your young god’s grip, dead king, and put you from the world. I could take back the empire that was mine and even your sweet-eyed horseboy in the full strength of his land could not in the end endure against me. Why should I serve him?”

“It’s more interesting than the alternatives. We wouldn’t want you getting bored. Also, you swore an oath of your own will.”

“That.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “Sit down, put my fire back together, and have some tea. It’s nearly time for breakfast. Ailan, it’s all right. This is—?”

“Scholar Daro Jang.” She winked at him and bowed gracefully.

“Scholar Daro Jang, who serves the god of Nabban.”

“Does she indeed?” Yeh-Lin asked, speaking Nabbani, Imperial, and as it had been two hundred years past, or longer. Her hair, loose and falling to her waist, still stirred in the memory of the wind she had ridden. “It seems we have established that I do, as you are still standing there. Oh well. Tea, you say. Proper tea or the tar they call such on the road in these parts?”

“That. You didn’t bring any coffee?

“I was asleep in my bed, as a virtuous middle-aged historian ought to be in the small hours of the morning. A god boxing my ears and shouting for my attention does not immediately bring to mind the thought, ah, I should pack a little basket with a picnic breakfast, no.”

“I wish someone would box your ears.”

She laughed. At least she was not in her nightrobe. She wore a Marakander caftan, carried her sword on her back. Shifted it off into her hand, but only to throw it down. Ahjvar caught it by the brocade-covered scabbard before it hit the ground.

“I am Nabban’s. Did you doubt? Did he? And that being the case, Rihswera of Nabban…What took you so long? I’ve been expecting you these past two months, and, since I have introduced myself properly to the ambassador at last, in all confidence, so has the ambassador. Lord Ilyan Dan has on my suggestion asked his house-mistress to supply herself with the best Rostengan beans, and has found a tailor to produce a decent court gown in Nabban’s colours that may possibly fit even your long bones, since you must of course present yourself to the senate, and the priests, and Gurhan the god, and I knew you would show up looking like something even the most desperate caravan-master would think twice about hiring. But—who is this?”

She folded herself to her knees—graceful, as her every movement ever was—and began to pile up the sticks of the wind-scattered fire. Smiled at the youth. Deliberate. Devastating. Wasted effort in the night.

Ailan was far too close. Ahjvar could feel the heat of him, pressing to his side. Moved off again. “A man.”

“A young man, yes, so much I had observed. Have you acquired a son?”

“No!”

“Are you sure? He has rather a look of you, but for the pretty Nabbani eyes.”

“Quite. He’s—someone who needed to get out of Star River Crossing.”

“Oh, indeed? And you brought him along out of the goodness of your heart?”

Ahjvar shrugged.

“I see. Well, that’s between you and the young god, I suppose.”

“Cold hells, do you think—”

She was snickering. Flicked a finger at the fire and watched the flames blaze up again. “I think nothing. He looks a charming companion. Perhaps I’ll—”

“No.”

“He’s surely old enough not to need a keeper.”

“Just leave him alone, old woman. Call him a page.”

“He’s too old.”

“Not your horseboy, I suppose?”

“Nor my shield-bearer. Gods, he can hardly grab a knife by the right end.” That wasn’t fair. Ailan was vastly improving. “Call him whatever you want. My ward.”

“I must introduce him to mine, though I fear she takes regrettably little interest in pretty youths. Or maidens, either. I’d worry less over her if she did. Does he speak Nabbani?”

“Not that anyone in Nabban would acknowledge. He’s Taren. But yes, he claims he has a little Imperial.”

“A very little, I think. For your god’s sake, reassure him. He thinks we’re discussing how to cook him for dinner, by the looks he’s giving me.”

“Weren’t we?” he asked. “Ailan, it’s all right, truly. She’s—a wizard, the greatest of Nabban. She serves my god. She’s—”

“Reformed,” said Yeh-Lin, with excessive piety, hand over her heart.

“She’s annoying, is what she is,” Ahjvar said. “And she’s not nearly as young as she’s choosing to look. Pretend she’s an embarrassing relative and don’t let her bully you. Can you fill the kettle? Jang, tell me about these red priests.”

“The army has crossed the Kinsai’av. I have that from the witness of one Moth, whom you might better know under the name—”

“We know Moth.”

“Oh? She does get around, for a woman who by her own report spent nearly eighty years trying to turn herself into a glacier. I believe her humours are out of balance. Too much black bile, the physicians would say, although—”

“What? No. Never mind. Shut up about bile. What army?”

“Ah. Dead king, you are very behind the times. I don’t suppose the empress has sent an army to follow you?”

“No.”

“Pity. We could use one.”

“What army crossed the Kinsai?”

“Jochiz had made himself god of Tiypur and is marching east. The Western Grass has fallen. The goddess Kinsai is dead.”

So.

Yours. To die for you, idiot boy. Even for that. He will not reach Nabban.