CHAPTER XXVIII

…a new spring, a new year, and the armies of the All-Holy advance on Marakand

From the Chronicle of Nikeh gen’Emras

The Army of the South swept over Serakallash while the sept-chiefs were still trying to negotiate a fee for its use of their wells. The fighting lasted a day, the winds and the sand aiding the defenders, who had hoped against hope that they might turn the army aside and drive it to pass on. By sunset, however, the goddess Sera had disappeared into the depths of her spring, the chiefs had knelt to Prince Dimas and submitted to the All-Holy, accepting hasty instruction in the catechism and initiation on behalf, they said, of their folk, although the chiefs and warriors of the Herani sept had defied this decision and fled the town, after murdering the red priests of the mission-house.

The bodies of all the Herani remaining in the town were presented to Dimas, as part of the surrender. They were laid out, men and women, in the courtyard of the burnt mission-house. The Herani were few in number. None remained alive.

In his mercy, the sept-chiefs asked, in the All-Holy’s great mercy shown through his princes and primates, let no further vengeance for the murdered priests be taken on the folk of the town.

And Dimas was merciful.

And if the dead Herani seemed more to have fallen in battle than to have suffered execution—well, they had barricaded themselves into a warehouse, had they not, and been extracted by their own fellow-townsfolk only with hard fighting. And not one cried out, my son, my daughter, my father, my mother, when Primate Ambert ordered their bodies buried in an unmarked pit in the desert.

And not one said, Herani? Who are the Herani? Why are they not included in the song of the tally of the septs? Not one whispered in a Westron ear, “These men, these women, died in the fighting in the streets.”

In the days of Ghatai’s conquest there had been sept-chiefs who willing served a conqueror. In this time, for the little while it mattered, there was a unity of purpose. In this time, they held true to their goddess, in hope and in faith.

Dimas did not turn aside to climb the road into the mountains. He left a force to occupy the town, under the Knight-Commander Balba, and continued his march, while Serakallashi conscripts—converts almost over-eager to serve, rather—razed a number of houses of the Rostvadim sept and built a fort with high stone walls on the ridge at the north-eastern corner of the town, scowling down over the road.

A curse blighted the town, it was whispered in the markets, set on the very rock and water in the days when the devil Ghatai ruled them and left the heads of the sept-chiefs to rot in the goddess’s holy waters. Few children were born to them. They were a dying folk. The priests had promised that the All-Holy would bring blessings, and the women would bear children, and Serakallash would grow great again and rule the Red Desert.

The goddess of the spring appeared to have abandoned her folk.

But in Lissavakail, in the mountains, the children of Serakallash were fostered among the folk of the high valleys. In the far pastures of the desert edge, the children of the septs lived with distant kin, and in the months that followed those who were found and taken to the school in the fortress were few.

They, and the townsfolk, were taught their catechism and initiated into the cult, tattooed with the sign and the blood of the All-Holy.

But the sacred ink, carried with the army over the mountains, thick and dark as tar, was mixed with water from Sera’s holy well. A symbol, an old foreign woman who was said to be the desert-born aunt-by-marriage of one of the Battu’um sept-chiefs said. A symbol of how the All-Holy had conquered Sera and made her folk and her waters his own.

If it made the Serakallashi happy and compliant, let it be so. Knight-Commander Balba had other troubles to deal with. The old woman with the sketch of feathers tattooed on her cheek oversaw the preparation of the ink before it was sent out with the priests and their needles. She was most gratifyingly eager to be of help, and murmured prayers of blessing over them, calling on the Old Great Gods to shed their purifying light on that darkened land.

The sixth-circle seers meanwhile warned of traitors within the town, apostates who had never truly converted in their hearts, but the place had long been ill-omened for those with wizardry in their blood; all the market-gossip told so. Its only wizard-born left, by and large, for happier lands farther east. Everyone agreed this was so. It was even whispered that the curse that left them so few children took also its toll on those born with the wizard-talent. Certainly the priests and priestesses of the sixth circle were ill-fated in Serakallash. They wandered into the desert night, or walked into dust-storms, hearing the voice of their god summoning them, they said, and sometimes, raving, wild-eyed, they called damnation down on those who tried to prevent them. Sometimes they simply dropped dead in the street, with no one to witness.

The Serakallashi were an angry folk, and the ferry-folk of Kinsai both angry and inventive. They turned the waking and the dreaming minds of the Westrons against themselves, and waged a war of small and gnawing fears, which, as the worm in the roof-beam, weakened them almost unawares.

Knight-Commander Balba led a force into the mountains, but was turned back by storm and snow. He chose to leave the mountain-folk be through the winter; they were going nowhere, and his efforts must be to keep the road open for the caravans carrying grain and fodder and mutton-fat from the storehouses of the Nearer Grass to supply the armies through the siege that was expected when they came to Marakand, which was difficult enough. There were raiders in the Black Desert and storms of both sand and snow in the Red. Rumours swept through his soldiers of creeping death-worms, the colour of the sand, which would emerge from the dunes and spit poison; the touch even of their shed husks was death. Patrols did not venture far from the fort, after the first few failed to return.

In the early spring, as the waters poured in torrents down the valleys, Balba tried again, but discovered that the road that should have led to the town of Lissavakail and the temple of the goddess Attalissa disappeared beneath the surface of an unexpected lake. His scouts reported a river dammed between high cliffs to the west and the dam guarded by a single watchtower.

Commander Balba prepared to lead an expedition to seize the mountain watchtower and destroy the dam, opening the road to Lissavakail and the wealth of the mountain mines. A small company. The warrior-priestesses of Attalissa were legend, he said, not a truth to be feared.

Not like the death-worms of the sands.

Perhaps Prince Dimas had taken his wiser commanders on to Marakand.

The air was heavy, hot, and they did not even have a wizard’s light to find their way. Not that there could be any turning aside, or any hazard left to trip over that they had not left themselves. Jolanan was sweating and not sure whether it was the close air or the darkness itself that was so stifling. She felt she could hardly breathe, as if something squeezed her like a giant fist about her ribs with every inhalation. A good horse under her and a lance cradled in her arm…here she was a beetle under a stone, waiting for someone to step on it and crush her.

Tashi, beside her, touched her arm. “All right?” A whisper. A breath. The streets were too close above them.

She took a deep breath, aware, then, how her heart raced; she was almost panting. She had avoided the tunnel, had always been in the warehouse, carrying the baskets of rubble, filling the emptied grain-bins, first, and then raising the floor, layer by layer, till there were a few places where the tallest men had to duck under the beams of the attic floor above, where they ate their cold meals and slept in their exhausted shifts, lying alongside one another, men and women, friends and strangers, so many dust-coated corpses laid out, awaiting burial—

She wrenched her mind away from that thought, wiped her hand on the skirt of her coat, crawled on.

“Yes,” she told the young miner. “Sorry.”

Hand touched hand. She didn’t suppose even the miners, folk of villages from the territories of both Lissavakail and the Narvabarkash, felt at home in this utter dark.

This was blindness. This was the axe taking both her eyes.

“Steady,” Rifat whispered, ahead of her. “Low place here. You’ll fit, but keep down. Just keep going, don’t panic. It’s not far.”

Was her fear so obvious ?

They had been warned of this low place, where the digging had hit stone the miners said should not be cut away, for some mysterious miners’ reason. Twenty paces long, Tashi had said. Not far at all, if you could stand upright and pace it. Crawling on your belly like a worm, with a mass of stone over you, a town, streets, buildings, weight pressing down…

“Sera is with us,” Tashi said. Not his goddess, not hers, but she took a deep breath and repeated it, voiceless, but shaping the words like a prayer in her mouth. Sera is with us. Horse-goddess of Serakallash. Lady of the undying waters, who had survived a devil’s conquest and been born again from a stone. Whisper of wind past her. The presence of the goddess.

Sera, and Attalissa and her brother Narva of the deep mines, who sent them here. And memory of Jayala, give her strength. She touched her temples, her cheeks, feeling not for scars, just touching the tattoos. She was of the Jayala’arad. She had fought wolf and bear and devil’s scouts alone. She had ridden into battle at the Blackdog’s side. She was not afraid of…a little dark, a little close space. She would not be.

“I’m beside you,” Tashi said.

He always was. Jolanan was not certain how she felt about that.

Plenty of room, they had been told, those who had not yet been down the tunnel. You don’t want to rear your head up, or your rump—a bit of weary laughter, a bit of poking at the stouter among them—but you won’t get yourself hung up, even with your gear. Just go carefully, no more than two abreast, don’t shove the person ahead, not everyone’s easy in the dark, just keep going and we’ll all get through fine. Everything’s solid, everything’s propped and braced where it needs to be propped and braced, the folk of Narva know what they’re doing and the gods are with us.

Grit pattered down on them. Something happening, up above. It was night. Nothing should be passing in the streets. The earth itself, moving…no. Nothing to worry about. Rifat and the priestess with him were gone, an emptiness she could feel ahead, and Tashi’s hand brushed her face, reaching back. Jolanan drew a deep breath, started after him. The hand that still clutched her ankle released her. Someone else taking a breath, nerving themself.

It was hard, crawling. Like swimming, legs splayed. Pushing with elbows. She kept her eye shut. Opening it made no difference and her face was covered in dust. It gritted between her teeth. Her breath huffed in her ears. Coat caught. Something tore. Sabre’s weight still there, all that mattered. It was his, Holla-Sayan’s, a good weapon, heavier than her own, the blade much worn, the scabbard scarred. She had given hers to a boy of Serakallash, a caravanserai-mistress’s son who had no weapon of his own. His parents and elder sister had been killed in the fighting when the town fell. That might be him behind her, young Sayid Sevanim, with Sister Dorji. Like Tashi and Rifat, he and Dorji stuck close. As if she were someone to follow. Her own little band of raiders. If all failed, they could steal horses, take to the wilds…

If all failed, they would be dead. And probably before the sun rose.

Twenty paces? Cold hells, she had been squirming through this crack for far too long, quarter of a mile, surely, and the rock was growing heavier, lower, over her, the ground beneath shifting, loose. She gasped, clenched her teeth. Felt someone tap her foot. Sayid or Dorji. She had stopped. Been lying still. Old Great Gods. Please. Hand seized her wrist.

“Nearly there, Jo.”

Tashi. She surged towards him, heard something whimper. Herself. Crawled out into his arms, his hand on her head to stop her braining herself, trying to get up to hands and knees too soon. Shivering, kneeling there with her face pressed to the gritty leather of his jerkin.

Have to keep moving. More behind. Make space. Not leave Dorji and Sayid in that tight place. Sayid was like her, child of big skies and long horizons. Her mind shaped the thought but she couldn’t make herself move till Tashi tugged her on.

Got control of herself. This was nothing. This was mere darkness. Fear of it only served their enemy. The tunnel was broad and high, high enough to crawl, broad enough not to bang shoulders and hips with Tashi, though they kept close enough they were touching regardless. Crawled. And crawled. She wasn’t the only one found terror in that close, low passage, she was certain. Sayid, when he emerged behind her, was muttering, “Sera with me, Sera with me, Sera my shield and my strength and the spear in my hand, Sera with me…” the words all broken, rapid panting, while Dorji kept murmuring, “Not far, not far now, not far,” as much to herself as to him.

At least they wouldn’t be going back that way.

The assembly area had been the easiest part of the tunnel. They were a small party—and Old Great Gods, she wished she hadn’t felt obligated, for the honour of the Western Grass, or because Rifat had, or Tashi—whatever had driven her—to volunteer to be part of it. But sixty men and women seemed too few, in their planning, and far too many, crawling up this tunnel. Sixty-two, they were, beginning to sort themselves, standing, straightening backs, checking weapons, moving as swiftly as they could left or right, hands on a guide-rope, knowing their company. Cellars. Storerooms, once, of two cousins of the Rostvadim sept. Not even a whisper, now. They found places by touch, in their pairs. No spears: too awkward, too dangerous. Sabres, some of them, Serakallashi and ferry-folk of Kinsai. The sisters of Attalissa carried short-swords, the men and women of the mountains axes or long-handled hammers or clubs. And the wizards, Rifat, two others of Kinsai’s folk, and Sister Pehma, who was wizard as well as priestess and commander of the tunnel expedition, bore baskets with fire, of a sort, sealed within clay. A secret of the folk of Kinsai.

Still no light. They could not risk any open flame down here and there were a few surviving priests of the sixth circle in the fort; the making of wizards’ light might be detected, Pehma thought, though the wizards of Kinsai were dismissive of the Westrons’ understanding of wizardry. Leave that for the last moment. Which was now.

There. A soft white-gold glow grew with a word from Rifat, echoed by a man in the other cellar. Almost blinding, though it was so very dim. Those who had shuffled into place facing the wrong way realigned themselves.

The wizards were the first up the ladders, two to each. Cautious, still. No furious rush, not yet. A careful lifting, shifting. Cool air flowing down, heavy with the scent of horses.

Time to move. She and Tashi were the nearest to Rifat. Up, into darkness. Stronger scent of horse and manure and dust. As promised, they were in the block of stables within the fort, where the horses of the knights were kept. Restless beasts. Snuffing and blowing at the strangers crawling like marmots from a burrow. Jolanan went, the smallest glimmer of wizards’ light drifting to follow her as Rifat saw her intent, to where a man slept in a hammock hung by the door. Knife ready. But he held up a hand and rolled himself out, tall, lean Serakallashi, horse-tattooed face. Nodded to her and removed a sabre from beneath a heap of straw. Grinned, white teeth catching the light.

Dead man folded into the corner. His fellow in this watch on the stable.

The other trapdoor was out in the courtyard, but hidden close by the wall, where sand always drifted thick. Tashi and Rifat came to the door by her side.

The watch in the corner towers looked outward. Why should it do otherwise?

Boredom, perhaps. Some chance careless sound, though she had heard none. The wizards’ lights were out, people only following close on one another and enough light from the full moon—they had planned it so—that they needed none in the courtyards.

A cry from the nearest tower. Rifat stepped past her and Tashi, loading a sling as he went. For a moment all was still, save for the whisper of the whirling sling in the air.

The top of the tower exploded into flame.

No need for command. They went, then, with a rush and a roar. Too late for silence. The burning tower was one that looked outward to the desert, not over the town. It might serve as distraction.

Two gates. She led the charge on the one that opened on the town. The soldiers posted there were a handful, overwhelmed as they rushed out of their guard-room. Only two on watch above and Sister Pehma and a trio of priestesses were up the stairs and dealing with those as Jolanan, with Tashi and a pair of heavyset mountain men, wrestled the bar of the gate free. Many hands hauled its leaves wide, and more fires broke out, Rifat and others, now, hurling the fire-globes into doorways and unshuttered windows.

Red light and whirling shadows, rushing figures, voices crying out on their gods. Soldiers of the All-Holy threw some internal door to make a brief bridge over flame and poured from their barracks, but the outer gate was open and hooves were pounding, pounding up the moon-silvered ridge-road out of the desert night.

Warriors of the septs from the far pastures. Not only hooves, but the softer thudding of the camels. Tribesfolk of the further reaches of the Red Desert, and of the Black. From the town, they swarmed afoot, spears glinting in firelight, and the wind blew with them, the fires climbed to pillars, to the flickering forms of horses, rearing, dancing, racing. Two buildings dark, still: the stables, and the squat square tower that was the dormitory and schoolroom of the captive children.

The shrieks of those still within the burning buildings was terrible.

The soldiers who had escaped did not flee, not then. Some officer kept them under control. They formed a close company and tried to break for the gate into town. Sensible, maybe. Seize some smaller defensible place, try to get a message away to the garrison of the Lower Castle on the Kinsai, or wait for Knight-Commander Balba to return victorious from his expedition into the mountains. They met with a shock and a clashing of steel. Armed, but few in any armour. Few enough, in all. They had marched out two days ago, now that the snows that had sealed the mountain road had melted, to take Lissavakail.

Jolanan was not used to fighting afoot and missed Lark’s height, that feeling that she and the horse were one creature, a thing of mass and movement, a dance. Tashi had never fought for his life before. He swung his club with ferocity, yelling, but didn’t see what moved around him, how his rush took him into the enemy, left him surrounded, and she yelled and went after him, shielding him. They were beset, turned back to back, and she had no shield to her blind side, could steal frantic glances, swing wide, but she realized Tashi was watching for her, trusting her to take the other two quarters, ahead and aside to the right, and so she kept those clear and the Westrons fell back from them, leaving the bloody dead.

Serakallshi face, horse-marked woman, leaping over a body, spear thrusting. And more, and more, and camel wheeling around them, a dark man, braids flying, crying something in a speech she didn’t know, and she and Tashi leaned on one another. Gasping, the miner was, chest heaving. She, too. He wiped his face on his sleeve. The courtyard swirled with people, with torches, now, small embers against the burning buildings. Horses were whinnying, a child crying, but not in pain or even terror, only confusion. Someone had them safe, she thought, or that was the plan; they were to be hurried away out to the hall where the sept-chiefs met, where several elderly wizards of the Lower Castle of the ferry-folk, armed with tattooing-needles, were changing the design of the initiation tattoo into some pattern that, they promised, would undo the binding meant to steal their souls, if what they had quietly tried to work on the ink itself in the first days of the conquest had failed.

Which only the dead might know.

Perhaps thinking it did not bind them had been a comfort to the living, at least. There were Serakallashi dead in this yard, and certainly no one who had remained in the town had escaped tattooing.

Archers still shot from the flat roof of the central hall. Sisters of Attalissa shot back. Sera strode among them, a tall woman, desert-brown, her hair, red as the sands, streaming back like the mane of a running horse. She stopped at Sister Pehma’s side. The earth trembled. Jolanan clutched at Tashi to keep her balance.

The roof of the burning hall collapsed. The walls fell.

Spring, the wizards of Kinsai had said. Hope grew, in the spring.

Hope was a small thing. The All-Holy might yet look back at what happened in his rear. A small thing, but sharp as a blade.

“You’re going back to your own folk,” Tashi said. His voice was hoarse, smoke and dust and probably a craving for water as desperate as her own.

“Yes.”

His hand was on her face, brushing back her hair, which was free of the thick braid she had put it in and stinging her eye, prickling her scars. She had lost her headscarf somewhere after they left the stables.

“I know—” he said. Dropped his hand and looked away. Not even dawn yet, though the moon was sliding down in the west. Not even dawn, and there were fire-tubes launching red and green flowers from somewhere to the south. Painting a victory on the skies. Signalling to those who watched in the dry hills. The sounds of people, voices loud. Singing.

Too soon, she thought. Too soon, too late—

“I’ll come with you. To your land. Your folk. If you want me to.”

“Leave the mountains? Your god?”

Tashi shrugged. Fingered one of the beads of turquoise he wore at his ears. “I can carry Narva in my heart, wherever I go. Travellers do.”

“The Western Grass is a ruined land. Occupied. Even if Reyka and Lazlan have survived the winter—most of our gods are dead.”

“If you’re going, you shouldn’t go alone.”

She took the hand he had let fall, touched it to her lips. Taste of mud and sweat and blood that was probably not his.

“Tashi.” Tasting, too, his name. “I don’t—I’m not promising anything. I can’t yet. I just don’t know—” Know what? Herself, maybe. But—she would miss him, achingly. As she missed Holla, still. “Can you ride?”

“They’re coming,” Attalissa said. Iarka only nodded. She should not be here, but she had ignored the old women—cousins in this degree or that, for the most part—who wanted to hide her and her precious belly away. Precious baby, not belly, and she was an active one, now, pummelling Iarka from within, as if she were angry. Rose, Iarka called her. Little Rose, because…Rose. Not lovers, the two of them. Only the best of friends and…yet it was Iarka and the surgeon Rose whom Kinsai had called to her, of all the couples she might have asked; them she had asked, to do this thing. So they had lain together in the river and found they might have been lovers after all, that between them there could be not only friendship, but passion they had never suspected.

A strange and heartbreaking thing it had been to realize that.

So the baby was Little Rose, whatever other names she might come to carry, and she was angry now, but she would grow to be wise, and a healer, like her father, of hearts and souls.

Assuming Iarka did not get herself skewered with a Westron arrow first. That thought did make her duck down again, safe—safer—below the line of boulders that looked some natural tumble of the mountains, but was not. A parapet, of sorts. Notches for archers. Caverns, behind.

Below, the lake. Not the Lissavakail, the lake of Attalissa. The new lake, which had so taken her aback, exhausted, grief-stricken as she had been, when it barred her way to the sanctuary of the goddess’s town.

Ice still held it, though the snows had melted, save on the unmelting heights, and the rivers and brooks had thawed.

A bad winter, it had been. The worst in living memory. Attalissa, and Narva of the further valleys too, had gathered cloud and storm about them, but they had only shaped, a little, the direction of the storms, not spun them from nothing. The ice of the still lakes was thick.

“You should go back now,” Attalissa said.

From her, Iarka didn’t mind it. It wasn’t fussing; it was just an opinion.

“I’ll stay by you.”

“Hm.”

She needed to be here. She needed to fight, and if the cousins couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand—

She was fed up with them, dearly as she loved them all—most of them—some of them—seeing not her, but the baby, and not the real baby, her baby and Rose’s, but some idea, some—hope.

Which was all of theirs, yes, but—it was also Rose, Little Rose. Who kicked her in the bladder just then.

Attalissa’s mouth twitched at her grunt, the hand to her belly.

“If you can’t keep me safe—what use hiding back at Lissavakail?”

“A head start, running for the Narvabarkash?”

“And where then? I’ll be waddling, not running, before too many more weeks pass.”

She wore armour, a shirt of scales made for some rather stouter man.

“Hold till my word,” the grey-haired Spear-Lady, commander of the sisters, said quietly, and the word was passed from one six-woman dormitory, as they called their patrols, to the next.

In the watchtower on the north side of the lake where the road plunged under the ice they did not hold, but they were not asked to. They shot, picking off officers where they could. Arrows, lead bullets of the slings. A mere handful. The commander of the Serakallashi garrison did not command from the van, but midway back in the column, easy to spot. Only he and a score of knights were mounted. Before they came within range of the tower there were Westron soldiers smashing its one door, pouring up the ladders within, no doubt, pushed from behind, those in the lead reluctant, wary, if they had any sense.

The half-dozen sisters who had shot from the roof were meanwhile descending by ropes down the further side, scrambling away into the cliffs, leaving the tower deserted.

Cowards. Iarka took a grim pleasure imagining the Westrons’ first thoughts. Cowards, and then, perhaps, a growing apprehension. Though these were all of the Army of the South, they would have heard the tale of the destruction of the Upper Castle. Yes, there they came, in haste, not lingering to hold the empty tower. One running back down the road to report to the commander, but the vanguard was already on the ice.

The tower failed to collapse or offer any other threat. No ambush broke from the mountainsides. A pair of rash Westrons tried to follow up the cliffs.

They fell, dark figures dropping like a lammergeier launching from its nest, limbs spread, failing to unfurl into winds and rise. Perhaps a thrown stone or two had helped.

The edges of the lake thawed where they were sun-gnawed, fringed with dark shallows, but the ice beyond was still thick and clear, where wind had swept the snow away, pale where it lay packed into a rough crust. Balba had left it almost too late. They had begun to fear he would await a later season and attempt the destruction of the dam, though he had few wizards and fewer engineers, by what the Serakallashi reported. The former had been quietly hunted by Iarka’s kin and the latter taken on to Marakand by Prince Dimas. Though Attalissa’s folk could likely have defended that narrow, precipitous place better than this broad expanse of ice. To merely hold a line was not their intent.

Nerves wound tighter and tighter, as if someone turned the crank of a windlass. All up and down this steep side. Would the ice hold? Balba was known a fool, but not all his under-officers were so. The van had spread out, and men walked cautiously. Not mountain folk, not winter folk. Iarka saw not one having the sense to carry his spear crossways so as to catch himself should the ice give way beneath him. But once they passed the halfway point without disaster they signalled back, a waving banner, and the rest came on in closer order. Good, that was good.

“Not yet,” Spear-Lady murmured to some young woman who let out her breath, drawing her bow.

The goddess at Iarka’s side watched with the intensity of a cat at a mousehole. Snow-leopard, maybe, eyes fixed on the shepherd’s flock in the valley below. Grim. No smile, no pleasure in what she anticipated. Well, no. And no god should take pleasure in death, even that of enemies. Iarka rubbed her hand over her belly. Cold bronze plates. No comfort.

You hear, Little Rose?

Closer. And closer. Too close, surely. Balba himself was well out, halfway over.

A crack that echoed between the mountainsides. Even Attalissa looked startled. Horses shied. They rode too close, too great a weight. They were fools. They hesitated, which was further folly, before they spread themselves. Nothing happened and Balba stood in the stirrups, waving them on.

The rearmost company was starting onto the lake, but the van was almost to where water lapped over the ice again.

“Now,” Spear-Lady cried, roared to the echoing heights, and Iarka with the rest drew aiming and loosed, and laid the second arrow she held and loosed again, and with each she made thought a curse, a second strike. Die, in Kinsai’s name.

Some few of the vanguard made it to the shore, but none up the cliffs. Caught without shelter, they shot blind at movement guessed at behind the parapet, threw spears meant for thrusting.

Attalissa bowed her head. She wavered, no longer a woman, breathing, sweating, scuffed and wind-tousled. A shadow, a reflection as if seen on lake water, a girl, a woman, layered faces, young, white-haired, indigo-gowned, bronze-armoured, wearing a striped caravaneer’s coat, hair cropped short, veiled in blue, in a net fringed with golden coins, long hair in a caravaneer’s braids…A thing that was not woman at all, not a shape but snow and wind, green valleys and dark deep water…

The ice shivered, and—did not crack. Spring took the lake. A fog rose, billowing, and the ice went opaque and rotten in a breath, the work of days of warming air.

The cries were terrible. They did not last long.

Two of the horses made it to the shore.

Some of the men, too, of the rear company. They milled in confusion on the far shore, until arrows and sling-shot began to hammer on them from above. Rather more than the single dormitory that had held the tower was there. The Westrons began a fighting retreat, but there were sisters with spears and swords on the road behind them. Iarka did not see the end of it, as they made a rush for the north, but none came again to Serakallash.

The near shore was cleared before long, spearwomen descending. The soldiers of the All-Holy did not accept any offer to take their surrender.

Iarka waited it out at the goddess’s side. That much sense, at least. Felt herself remote, floating distant, above the death. Felt the deaths as she never had, saw them. Saw the lives, burning bright, flicker out in pain and confusion and, among the Westrons, growing terror. As they were snatched away.

This is what we fight. This, even more than invasion, than conquest, than slavery and death of the body. This theft of the soul.

Iarka wasn’t sure it was her thought. She wasn’t sure it was Attalissa’s, who stood at her side again, a human woman to all seeming, but for the light that burned through her, the sense that she was water and stone and shimmering reflection of the high peaks.

“We must open the sluices with care, once we hear from Serakallash and know that it’s safe to clear our road again,” Attalissa said. “We don’t want to send all this down in a flood.”

Iarka nodded. She would have liked to feel some joy in this. Satisfaction, even. She had thought she might.

A victory, but not her own.

Serakallash, Lissavakail—so they pushed the weight of the All-Holy aside a little. Broke his supply line of the road. That did not free the Western Grass, and did not free the shores of the Kinsai’av.

Lightning strikes, and strikes again, and again, and in the end the forest blazes. The voice was one she had heard in her dreams through the winter. A voice, sometimes near, sometimes remote. A woman’s voice, speaking as if to itself, conversational.

Go back to your river, child of Kinsai, mother of Kinsai. That wounded land will be a long time healing. It will need all the care you can give it.

And what of Jochiz, who had devoured its gods? This was no victory. This was only a small yapping at the heels of a great beast, which would turn and strike them down, hurl them broken aside, once it had dealt with the larger prey before it. And when he had Marakand under his heel, and had swallowed Gurhan, would he turn back, for the gods of the deserts and mountains, or roll onwards, growing and growing, and draw all the world in to him?

She dreamed it so, sometimes.

In her vision, there was a shape against stars, though the sky had been blue afternoon. A sword, and it was—absence of light. Frost edged it.

Iarka blinked it away. The Blackdog was lost to Jochiz and so was the Northron devil’s sword, and she did not know who spoke in her dreams.

Crisis passed, the baby resumed pummelling her in the vitals.

She most urgently needed to find a discreet corner to squat in, before the brat burst her bladder.