CHAPTER XXXI

…the moon is just past its last quarter, and it nine days since Yeh-Lin left Marakand, riding the winds to Tiypur in the west

A hot supper. A proper hot supper, and a bath, or a bath first, a bath and hot food and sleep in a bed and most of all, no fear, no watching, listening, alert at every shadow, every sound. Would they go first to the ambassador’s house, or to the god’s hill? The priests would have something hot for their supper, that dish of eggs and vegetables and cheese, perhaps, all wrapped in pastry, a Marakander speciality, or just the everyday sort of meal of broad-beans and vegetables cooked together in a crock, with a bit of meat, rich with garlic and oil. Or if the ambassador’s house, and in time for the formal evening meal that all the household took together, as was Imperial Nabbani custom, then there might be a variety of foods, meats and vegetables and noodles, with spicy sauces to dip into, or a simple meal of rice with fermented vegetables and salt-fish, or perhaps the dumplings Ahjvar was fond of. But he’d be happy with a skewer of roasted goat and onions from a market-vendor’s stall. Anything hot and savoury that he could eat without fear. Ailan was lost in thoughts of food, the scent, the taste, trudging in a dream. They had eaten little in the last three days. Ahjvar, he thought, had eaten nothing since the day before. He hadn’t set out expecting to feed two, and they had travelled far more slowly than the Rihswera would have done on his own, even without dodging pursuit, though no hunters had overtaken them since the gully of the waterfall.

Ailan had actually taken thought to carry some supplies with him, when he followed, but not nearly enough. Another lesson learnt.

Smoke. He could not see the city, but he could smell its smoke. See how the air smudged a little, to the south. Something he would not have noticed, before he went into the Malagru. They were close. Could not let their guard down, even here, but it was hard enough to put one foot in front of another. There was a part of him that wanted to stop, to huddle down and say he was done, he was dying. Stupid. He’d been hungry as this before. Worse. He’d scrounged through refuse heaps by the market square, snatched for rotten fruit, shoving beggars—other beggars— aside. Cried when a stray dog as starved as he snapped a burnt crust from his hand. That was before the red priests and their mission-house and the soup and porridge they offered. They’d done some good in the world, and he’d burnt them down. Hands on this throat, choking. Evil. Charity a mask for evil, charity a thing muddled with their need to win souls for their god, good a means to a foul end, and murder, and…he hoped it might be the pastry with the eggs and cheese. He thought that was perhaps his favourite.

He should learn to cook. There was no reason he could not learn to cook, as well as use a sword. He would certainly make no scribe. Nikeh left him in no doubt of that. His head ached strangely but that was being hungry, and he was not starving, in no danger of it; soon they would come to Marakand, down a track along the cliffs, to cross the road and walk to the gates without fear, and—

He walked into Ahjvar’s back.

“Sorry.” Steadying himself, a hand braced against Ahjvar. He looked around for cover, shocked into wakefulness, terrified how hazy his thoughts, his awareness had grown. Thorns growing all about them and he didn’t know where the threat was.

“Ah, cold hells!” Ahjvar said, with his head flung up as if listening to something distant. And he dropped to his knees on the stony ground. Ailan crouched by him, reaching for an arrow, looking around wildly, seeing nothing.

“Get me wood,” Ahjvar said.

“Wood?” he repeated. But he didn’t ask why, that was something understood, ask questions after, not when Ahjvar spoke like that. He was already scrambling up over the rocks. There was a litter of dead twigs under the thorn trees. “What kind of wood?” He could maybe hack some bigger branches away with his knife but Ahjvar had sounded so urgent.

“Anything that’ll burn. Now!” Ahjvar was scratching lines on the stones with the point of a dagger. Writing, not Nabbani characters. “Alder for flame,” he said, Praitannec words and all the Nabbani overtones slipped away. It was beautiful. It did something, inside Ailan, as if the sounds were a home for him. Maybe his mother had spoken so, maybe his father, if ever he had one. Even when he didn’t know the words and had to guess, or ask, they gave him that feeling.

“Yew for a devil. Hermit’s pepper for binding.”

Ailan was gathering the broken twigs even as he listened and tried to watch, to understand what need drove this sudden spell-casting. Thorns jabbed, stuck into him, but if he used his hands lightly they did not strike deep. Swept them into the skirt of his coat and scrambled back clutching it up.

“Good,” Ahjvar said, and piled them all in a loose heap between his three—symbols? words? Laughed, even as he did so. “Hawthorn. Kingship and a god both. But we want myrtle.” He wrote in the air with the dagger, and Ailan could see the lines, like frost, tiny flakes of it, sparkling a moment before they melted away in the sunlight. “Myrtle sets free.”

The pile of dry thorns burst into flame, snapping and spitting, and Ahjvar rocked back a little on his heels, in time to keep the swinging braids of the hair before his ears from being set alight. He pulled one of his bracelets off his wrist, not the heavy golden ones with the cat’s heads terminals, but the thin black braid of silk.

Not silk. He threw it on the fire and for a moment it lay there, untouched, but twisting, as if it were a live thing, and a white smoke coiled up. Then it burst into flame as well, a dirty grey smoke then, stinking. It was hair. Ailan had wondered, to tell the truth, if it were his god’s hair, some lover’s token, though it seemed a bit irreverent really.

It was over in a moment more. The hair turned to white ash, a braid of it clinging to the swift-burning thorns, and then it broke and sifted away, and the twigs too were crumbling, falling into nothing, consumed.

“Take care, old woman,” Ahjvar said in Nabbani.

They watched in silence a little longer, but the fire died quickly, no charcoal remaining to smoulder, nothing but ash, and the characters Ahjvar had scratched on the stones turned from the white marks a rain would wash away to rusty stains. Ahjvar got to his feet and scuffed a foot across it all, scattering ash, flinging the stones aside. Offered Ailan a hand to pull himself up.

“What happened?” he asked, shrugging on his pack again. It was far too heavy, empty though it was. The sword. He took up his bow. It didn’t seem as though Ahjvar were going to answer. He was already picking a way down another steep slope that looked something only goats should dare.

But he stopped and looked back. Waiting for Ailan to find a way down to him.

“The old woman…”

“Yeh-Lin,” Ailan said, as they went on. “Has something happened?” And on another thought, “Is Nikeh all right?”

“I don’t know. But Yeh-Lin was…her wings were clipped, a little. All this time. And she needed to be free.”

“Is that bad??

“Yes.”

“Is—has the city fallen?”

“I don’t know.” Ahjvar frowned. Held out a steadying hand, stopped where he was, a narrow place now, squatting down to study the way below. Ailan sank down beside him, grateful for the rest, so soon. “She’s—far away, Ailan. I don’t know what’s happened in the city.” He pointed, marking a route. Hunting signs, not words. Secrets of the Wind in the Reeds, the unseen agents of the empire, which possibly even the Rihswera of the god should not be teaching to a godless Taren whore. But he obviously thought he should. Practice, always practice. Ailan still didn’t know for what. Maybe Ahjvar didn’t either.

“If we don’t get back before he takes the Suburb, we’ll have a battlefield to cross,” Ahjvar said. “The Western Wall has fallen.”

Yew. Hermit’s pepper.

Myrtle sets free.

And in the crystal cave beneath the ruins of the ancient temple of Grandmother Tiy, Yeh-Lin reached. She stretched, as if she stood straight at last after years stooped under a ceiling too low. Unfurled, self into burning, screaming, rotting self—

—and it was not enough.

There was poison in the scraping, gnawing bite of the legless newts, poison in their slime, their skin, their blood—poison that was of Sien-Shava Jochiz, the venom of his words, of his intent, a song sung and set against her and it flowed deep in her blood now, turning her marrow to ash and rot and—

She could not hold it. She could not remake herself; flesh and blood and bone, he corroded, he devoured. He tasted her soul, would drink her light, swallow fire—

Fire was what she might be, and cold light, and she flung wide wings of it, swept the creatures from her, crumbling into ash, hissing as hot ash fell into cold water, clouding it.

This time, they were not reborn.

For a while she only breathed, leaning on her sword. Fast, shallow, deliberate: a rhythm, a chant of it, counting. One. Two. One. And out. Control. Shaped what she could. Vision. The grip of her hands. The strength of her limbs, yes. She stood. She saw. She breathed.

She hurt, damnit, and her mouth was full of blood. She spat. Black blood and bright scarlet and there was a light that was not of her making, a fire, rose-tinged, growing, the crystals encrusting the walls brightening to something like daylight, nearly, or at least a dawn, and light rising on the water, the hollow in the black altar-stone, filled with blood.

He moved. Wherever Jochiz was, before Marakand’s gate, whatever he faced there, his need turned this way.

She…dying?

She had not thought a human body could endure such pain, and her daughter’s had been a birth that neither of them would have survived had not the foremost wizard-surgeons of the empire been at the emperor’s command.

A part of Jochiz moved here. She…could feel the echo of his presence, like a scent, a whisper. Could hear nothing. The ringing of her own ears. Smell nothing but her own blood.

His blood.

It stirred, and the light, too, stirred, slow and sluggish. Waves, heat shimmer, patterns of currents in the depths.

He will make himself a god,Vartu had said. In the end, when he has gathered enough souls—when they are such a weight and power in the world—he will take them into himself and become a god of this world.

And now Dotemon had come threatening into this place, this womb pregnant with a fusing of stolen souls, and Jochiz was at the gates of Marakand, where Vartu waited, and she might have lost the soul-hungry sword that the Old Great Gods had forged from a shard of the cold hells to destroy the seven in the world, but Vartu was still, for all Jochiz might tell himself otherwise, something to fear. Even with Lakkariss in his own hand. Something, at least, to require his full attention, and—

He gathered himself here, a soul divided, an entwined and doubled being spread, reaching, across half the road of the world. He meant to destroy Dotemon, to not leave her even broken, failing, a ruined body that could no longer contain what it bore, dying at last out of this fascinating, wonder-filled, delightful world, at his back, in the heart of his…unborn godhead.

Everything must end sometime, somewhere.

She was on her knees. She had not realized she had fallen. Yeh-Lin pushed herself up with her sword. It was a good sword. An emperor’s sword. They said she had not loved him, a young mistress risen to wife and widow, regent and usurper and tyrant by wiles and wizardry.

A lie. Partly a lie. She had…been fond of her emperor, her ageing husband.

Strange to think of him now, a man so long dead.

His sword in her hand.

She felt a coldness forcing its way into her. Like a hand, reaching for her heart, to crush, to seize and tear.

Tendrils of rose light spreading over her, wrapping her. It was not the failing body imagined it was cold, imagined new pain of ice. The tendrils pierced her, they grew into her through the wounds of the creatures Jochiz had created in the perversion of some small meek thing of the dark caves.

He savoured this like wine.

“You always were a sick bastard,” she remarked to the cavern at large. “Hravnmod should have told Ulfhild to take your head when first you came to his hall, guest-rights be damned.”

All that she was, Yeh-Lin and Dotemon, will and body made one, flaring into the fires of her soul, spilling out, so she became a thing of light and shadow, stretching wings and tongues of flame, and the sword she had sworn to Nabban sweeping down, as if her enemy knelt bound before her, executioner, which she had never been, for all the heads she had taken.

One last time. And Nabban strengthen her arm.

She poured herself out, the blade a channel. The blow resounded, not steel striking stone but the sound of breaking glass, and the black stone did not so much split as shatter, spilling the blood into the water.

Not only the black altar. A rain of quartz-dust, of grit, came sifting down the walls, falling from above.

The light that crawled the water like mist flared wildly, breaking apart into a thousand, an uncountable flock of lights, flung like birds, like sparks roaring from a bonfire from wall to wall to wall amid the pattering rain of falling flakes of stone.

She heard his howl of outrage, his scream. She felt it, reverberating in her bones, going weak and flawed as the quartz that had imprisoned the souls, threatening the same dissolution, and what were Yeh-Lin’s bones but a vessel that had carried Dotemon all these years, to reach so many shores…

He was fallen, wherever it was he stood. Weak. Mortally weak, Sien-Shava drained of his life’s blood, fed into this place, bleeding after bleeding, a sacrifice of self in the Northron manner but taken to madness—

Larger fragments of stone, beating on her, the sound of rain. Hail, plunking into the water. No longer the quartz but the stone roof of the cavern, and she was losing her way, her dust to be drowned here, in this pollution of poison, this venom of malice that ate still her steel’s edge and her flesh, but the souls, the stuff of them—there was nothing of selves left in them, what ought to be the slow healing and flowing of the river, of the road, to peace, denied them in an abrupt theft, an ending in pain. But at the least they should not be lost to the world and the life of it, drawn away, flickering, the river—in this place, where once Tiy had been their guardian, their last conductress to the peace of the Old Great Gods, it was still river that felt the right word—to join the great soul, the great life, of which they had been born, from which all came and to which all returned—

But there was light in the darkness, the blood-black water rising, reaching, the seething, flowing light of Old Great Gods—

Nothing with any right to call itself God rose here.

Jochiz was here, in Sien-Shava’s long-drained blood, and he reached, he opened himself wide to what he had bound here—

She felt the pull. The water, the freeing gate through which she might pass—but it was not the road to the heavens, the river to the underworld, the long and healing west of the soul. It was the fire roaring, drawing in all the air and every dancing mote that rode it; it was the maelstrom, swirling, swallowing, pulling down to drown and no strength to swim free, masts, oars snapped, doomed—

Yeh-Lin might, Dotemon might, pull herself free. Cling to the anchor of her bones, cling to pain, embrace it as a lover, a mother, a saviour. Cry out wordless, Nabban, hold me fast, root herself in stone and earth.

But he drank the thing the he had made here, Sien-Shava Jochiz did; he took the souls, the generations immured here, lost even to themselves, he devoured them—

The world in him. A piece of it, the stuff of the world’s great soul, the stuff of godhead, the earth’s own truth—

It flooded him. She saw him drown, in what he would drown, and she dared almost to hope, to see the life of the world take him, dissolve him into itself, to swallow in turn what was soul of the heavens and did not in the end belong in this place—

She was ignored, briefly forgotten. A small thing, in his drowning. Fires wild, raging. A heartbeat stuttering.

An anchor, dragging loose. Hers. His, as well. His, that faltering heart, that unravelling web. Sien-Shava, abandoned, weak. Dying.

Jochiz felt it. And was gone, back to the vessel that held him, back to Sien-Shava, filling him, overfilling, bloated, unsated, with all the souls he had swallowed…

She was left to silence. Darkness. Stillness.

Not silence. Yeh-Lin could hear her own breathing. It sounded— rather dreadful.

Her life a long road and it would not end here, she would not let it. A long road. Good, bad…if she might weigh her deeds, good against evil, virtue against sin…There was no atoning but in the life lived, and that—must end.

Nabban was a free land now.

Nabban was…

She wanted to go home.

Nothing more she could do.

She did not want to leave herself in this place.

She hurt. There was little left but hurting, and Dotemon was…fraying. Pulling away, from what could not be endured. From what could no longer hold her.

She was Yeh-Lin. She was Dotemon. For a little, just a little, hold together. She was the Dreamshaper. She needed, now a dream.

Mirror. Still with her. And strength, to grope for it. To make a little light, a faint memory of the moon. The silver was mottled, patchy with black corrosion. Her blood stained it when she took it in her hand. Was it her hand, that twisted thing, pitted, red, raw?

It shook, and the mirror trembled.

It was fifty miles from the Western Wall to the city walls of Marakand; the gates of the pass had fallen that very day, Ahjvar said, after a little. Maybe he could see things, have visions, even while they scrambled down rocks, into yet another narrow cleft of the sort Ahjvar too often treated as plain and easy roadway. But it seemed they were in no real danger of coming to a battlefield. Abruptly the Suburb was there, west of them, quiet and ordinary, or as ordinary as Ailan had ever known it, and the city walls rising high, the buildings of the city climbing behind them, plastered white, gold, pale pink, bright blue, washing strung on people’s roofs in the sun, just an ordinary afternoon. The gates in their towers still stood open.

Battle would come to them. He and Ahjvar were hurrying towards it.

Why? They could go east, go back into Taren lands. Go down to the coast, find a ship, sail far and far away, back to Nabban and the god who did the cooking for his servant, and what would Ailan do there, anyhow?

He might leave on his own. Run away. He could, now. He thought he might. Might survive, that is, on the streets of Star River Crossing or Two Hills. He wasn’t a body waiting for someone, some night, to batter it senseless, to die and be thrown in the river. He could survive, now. Do something. Be something. Some knife hanging about on the fringes of a gang, some use as a thief, maybe, small and slight as he was and climbing a wall, creeping over a roof, seemed not so difficult a thing to contemplate. Killing…The ones that hung around the north gate, they’d give him some space, some respect, now. They’d let him in, what he’d become. They’d be afraid.

He liked that idea.

No, not really. He didn’t like that person he was making in his head. It wasn’t him.

You didn’t run off and abandon your brother.

He was going to die, wasn’t he?

At least he’d die like a good man. The sort of person his mother had used to sing about.

The city was probably not ordinary. In times of peace, there would be more children running about in the green forest-garden of the Ravine, which coiled halfway around it. They had begun felling the trees there months ago; it was a wasteland of stumps, a wound. In times of peace, there would be caravans come from the west as well as the east, and the markets busy and loud and happy. Not riders on tired ponies coming from the west, bearing, by their faces, no good news. Ahjvar hailed one, showed some token of the ambassador’s house.

The Western Wall had fallen and the army of the All-Holy was surging on. The All-Holy had destroyed the gates with some great wizardry. The girl—and she was a girl, almost a child—was grey with exhaustion. Maybe they would hold at the Shiprock, she said.

“Maybe,” Ahjvar said, and in his distraction sent her on with the blessing of his god. “Nabban be with you.”

“Yeh-Lin’s not at the Shiprock, though,” Ailan said. It wasn’t meant to be held, whatever those not in the secret might think.

“Wizards are. Come on. Last bit of hiking for the day.” A crooked smile. Ailan had sunk down on his heels. He used Ahjvar’s arm to pull himself up, not thinking. But Ahjvar didn’t pull away, just gave him a pat that was more of a thump on his shoulder. “Good lad.”

Did he know what Ailan had been thinking? But he hadn’t meant it, even to himself. He was here. He was this person, who was here.

They continued through a corner of the Suburb. Caravans there. Not just caravans. People. Families, children. Camels, ponies, asses, carts. People on foot, with bundles and baskets. Word came faster than the couriers on their ponies. All it would take was one diviner in a neighbourhood…it wasn’t cowardice, to get your children away, but if those who could fight or help those who did all fled…

He wondered which he was. How long he would really last in the press of battle with a sword in his hand.

Through the Riverbend Gate. Ahjvar didn’t linger to talk to the street-guard on watch there, or ask for the captain of the gate to get more official news. He strode on as if he hadn’t been climbing and hiding and walking for days on little or no food, and Ailan had to push himself to keep up. People got out of their way. He remembered how Ahjvar had looked, riding in to Star River Crossing. A caravan mercenary without a caravan, carrying some whiff of the desert with him, barren places and harsh winds, and menace. Like he was a hawk and they were all mice scurrying about beneath him, and maybe he wasn’t hungry just now but later, he might notice them…

They were looking at Ailan that way too, the people in the streets, plain ordinary Marakanders. Giving way, as if he were something dangerous.

He liked it, and then he didn’t think he did. Gave a pretty girl with her hand through an old man’s arm, tugging him away, a reassuring smile. He hoped it was reassuring. She didn’t smile back at him.

He thought he could probably eat any number of mice right now.

He walked into Ahjvar again, or would have, except that an arm was there to catch him.

“Sit,” Ahjvar said, and pushed him down on a bench outside a teahouse. He went away, not into the shop. Ah. They were by the little Riverbend market. Had Ahjvar spotted someone, some agent of the ambassador’s…but he was coming back, and he had—the man was a god—a stack of flaky pastries wrapped in grape-leaves. He dropped them on Ailan’s lap, lifting off the top one himself.

“Eat,” he said tersely, and went into the teahouse. He was back before Ailan had wolfed down more than two of the pastries—egg and dried mushroom, salt sheep’s cheese, spiced olives and spring greens—as if there wasn’t a war on at all, as if they might never be huddled starving behind their walls, but of course they had all the Taren Confederacy behind them, if only the clan-mothers and -fathers resisted being bought by Jochiz…why did he have to think of such things?

Because Ahjvar did. Because he wanted to be the kind of person who thought about things and understood them himself. Someday.

Ahjvar sat beside him, sword propped against his thigh, long legs outstretched. Handed him not the dainty cup favoured by the houses that served Nabbani-style teas, delicate and perfumed, but a hearty mug that smelt of smoke and cardamom and cream. Caravan tea, or a city version of it. Ahjvar took a long drink from his own mug, and another pastry.

They split the last, returned the mugs. The briefest of rests. Ahjvar led on as if it had been hours, with a good sleep thrown in too. Ailan was feeling more and more that the day was a dream that would never end, but at least he wasn’t sick with hunger, or staggering, or wanting to whimper like a baby.

He had thought they must be going to the ambassador’s house in the Silvergate Ward, but Ahjvar led the way into Palace Ward instead, so it was to Gurhan’s hill they were going, which meant climbing all those broad stairs up the hill beyond the palace plaza to the library and senate palace, and up the paths in the forest beyond.

His knees might possibly turn to some sort of floppy leather hinge, like a puppet with someone who didn’t know what they were doing managing the strings.

Now that he was fed, he just wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep for a week.

The plaza was a great open square, a place of public gathering and political debate and festivals, paved in slabs of white marble. Mosaics of stone and glittering glass told stories in panels all along the walls that surrounded it: the two goddesses and the god of the city, the deaths of the goddesses, the heroes who had led in the war against the devil who had once ruled the city and sacrificed its wizards to a lie, ordinary folk of all walks of life, heroes just as much as the men and women every child could name…a great black dog with green eyes that glowed, catching sun.

All the wood of the clear-cut ravine was stacked there now, firewood and timbers for the siege they knew must come.

To the south, broad, shallow steps rose to the complex of buildings that was the great library, and the senate palace by it. All white columns and domes gilded or copper-green, broad arcades and galleries. But tracks led beyond, plain forest tracks, winding softly into the green dim holiness of the god’s hill. Ahjvar was walking faster; Ailan had to make little jogging dashes to keep up. It was not nearly so crowded as any of the markets they had walked through, but still people hurried by, heading to or from the library or the palace, or they sauntered in chattering gaggles. A puppet-theatre had been set up by one of the woodpiles, drawing the more leisured. Ahjvar didn’t bother going around even that. Strode his shortest way, like an arrow shot from the gateway where they’d entered across to the great steps. Worse rudeness than his usual assumption of space. A woman weaving wreaths from baskets of spring flowers had to snatch at her goods and scuttle back on her knees. Ahjvar went as if blind.

“Sorry,” Ailan gasped, and gave her a little bobbing bow, scurrying after him, skipping over a scatter of cherry twigs white with bloom. “Gods bless, mistress, sorry.” Another dash to catch up. “Ahjvar!”

He didn’t look around. The skin-crawling menace of him was strong, now. Ailan had thought he had just gotten used to it, the threat that Ahjvar carried in his tension, his watchfulness that never relaxed, but this was something more.

He’d been in the presence of a god. He’d spoken with Gurhan, shared tea—brewed by the bear-demon—with him. This was—like that and not, it was the opposite, it was not calm and quiet and the feeling that the world was right, deeply and beautifully, it was some jarring wrongness in the world, it was—

—every play told it so. Black and gold mask, black for a ghost, the dusting of gold for his holiness, the touch of the god on him. The Rihswera of Nabban was a dead man, a soul captured from the road and bound to a body that should long ago have gone to dust and—he had been some evil thing, before. That wasn’t in the plays, usually, except the hint of it. The god had taken him away from some evil, saved him—bound him, because love and wanting alone could not keep a dead soul from the road to the Old Great Gods—

And then Ahjvar stopped, and fell to his knees. Head down, hands braced against the pavement. Muttering under his breath.

“Ahjvar?”

People looked around. Nobody came over to see what was amiss, which was the sort of thing Marakanders would do, he was certain. They were mostly a well-meaning and generous folk. But they were afraid, and they didn’t understand why, he saw that in their faces. They wanted space between themselves and whatever it was they felt that they did not understand.

He wanted space himself. He wanted to back away, out of reach, out of sword’s reach, wanted not to suddenly feel it was a corpse that he had— wanted, yes, desperately, those first few weeks. When he hadn’t understood he could even have other ways of needing a person and being needed.

“Ahjvar…” Ailan put a hand, carefully, on Ahjvar’s shoulder. It was shaking as badly as what he himself had tried to hide in the Heron. His hand. Ahjvar’s shoulder. Both of them shivering, as if they had come into a pocket of dank winter. Ahjvar didn’t lash around, seize his wrist, which he more than half expected. Didn’t move. But then he reached up and put his hand over Ailan’s. Warm. Hot, even. Not a corpse-hand.

“Stay with me, Ailan,” he said. “Watch my back.”

Against what was he watching? He wasn’t going to get an answer if he asked. Ahjvar was sitting up now, hands resting on his knees, head bowed, eyes closed as if he had just fallen asleep, or as if he prayed, maybe, in the quiet of his mind.

But maybe it wasn’t a very quiet mind. Ahjvar breathed as if he were running.

And he didn’t have his armour. He hadn’t worn it, going into the mountains. If something came, he had only a leather jerkin with a few steel plates to reinforce it, and no helmet and no shield either, and Ailan even less.

Ailan took out his sword. He couldn’t see anything threatening at all in the people about, going around them the way respectable people in Star River Crossing would go around a beggar, a ragged whore. Or a muttering madman. Ahjvar was whispering something, under his breath. Praitannec, Nabbani, he thought he caught the cadences of both. Not Taren.

And it was against the law to carry a sword within the city walls, unless you were an officer of the street-guard or a licensed guard of some very high official. Even the household guards of ordinary senators only carried cudgels.

Ailan had a badge that said he was of the household of the Nabbani ambassador but he’d used it to close the neck of his gown; it wasn’t on his coat where it should be, visible. Well, they’d know Ahjvar, any who came to arrest him. There weren’t that many big blond men in the city who were Taren tan rather than Northron ruddy.

Ailan turned slowly through a circle, sword held across his body. Nothing. No one even looking their way but with the sort of worried curiosity he’d expect. He tried to be calm, to have that self-assurance that Ahjvar wore like a scent. Breathed deeply. Slowly.

Didn’t work. His heart was racing, hands sweating.

He grew cold in the wind. Shadows raced over, little clouds out of the west. Nothing happened, except that Ahjvar lifted his head. Ailan didn’t think his eyes were seeing anything in this city. Certainly not Ailan. He moved aside again, circling, keeping always his back to Ahjvar, to see what might be coming at them.

For what little use he might be.

Moonlight, Yeh-Lin cast on the mirror in her shaking hand. Faint. Watery. On her knees in the water. Clouds marred the mirror. Marred the ruin of it. Beyond, might she reach, might she at the least touch, hear a voice, a kindness at the end—?

He was stillness, calm water, ancient stone. He was deep current, a river that could not be stayed. He was—too alien a thing. A god of the earth. He was earth, and she was…what she was, and she was so very far away, in space, in the miles of the caravan road. Too far in nature. But the dead king was fire, and the dead king was flesh, and he was bone, and he was soul in a vessel made and remade to carry him held in the world he should have left, he was—

Fire. Not death in fire, which he carried, scar in his soul he still could not shed. But the truth of him that Nabban saw, or had led him, perhaps, to become—he was warmth, was light, was passion and the dawn after the dark night and she could know him, reach him, kind reaching to kind, the denial of the road, the once and should-have-been dead in life. And she could taste in the air, have the scent of him, of what he was, the great singing chord struck loud and glorious, could reach and grasp as if she drowned, and flung a hand, and found her wrist seized, and drawn into a hold that she could know would never fail her.

“Dead king—Ahjvar.”

She walked in dreams. Always she had. Knelt now, not in corrosive water, in the taint of Sien-Shava’s curdled blood that floated in the water like vomit, reacting to the poison his own devilry had made. In a place of stone. White and cold, beneath her, and she was beyond shivering, numb, with that drugged numbness that said the body still felt, the nerves still shrieked, but the mind was severed from them, hearing only the faint echoes of what destroyed it. A mercy.

He was warmth, and his arms were around her; she was pulled hard against him, safe as she could be.

Incorrigible Yeh-Lin,Dotemon observed, even now. She could not say she had not dreamed this, in the ordinary way of ordinary woman’s dreams.

“Ahjvar…”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Necromancy, she had been willing to call it, once, and not so different from what his disturbed goddess had done to him. Not now. Maybe it never had been. She could see, now, what she had not. Perhaps as what was mortal frayed away, and what was human, and what was soul of earth, all unravelled from her, what was Dotemon saw, with the truth of vision that was askew from this world, this matter, this plane. They…flowed within one another, he and his god, soul and soul, lay heart in heart. Chains bound him, reins of light, shackles of adamant, a soul chained to a god’s hand—she had seen it so once for all he embraced it and for all the promises they claimed between them, but it was not…not chains but the flowing pulse of a life shared, an interwoven, entangling web of soul. He wore a collar that was spun of sky and sea, and it was no symbol of bondage but a pattern made, a symbol and a tool, a wizardry that partook of god’s will. A tracery that carried something of them both and what between them was one, that made a road to run the miles between them which a god could not, in the nature of the world, pass over. A sacred way between the god to what was of the god in the man? Nabban beyond Nabban?

Oh, let it be a path at need.

This place…not a marble pavement but a field of snow. White, cold beneath them. Then it was only a nothingness, the faint idea of white and cold and she was too far gone to see more, perceive more, make more in this dream to hold them.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I want to see him. I want—not to leave my bones in this place.”

The water was cold and foul. The white field was a place of dreams and she had lost it. Ahjvar knelt with her in the cavern, in the dirty water, and leaned over her, shielding her with his body from the falling rain of crumbling rock-dust.

She was not here to cuddle with the dead king, though pity was it could not be so and Dotemon might feel that pity, might stand aside from pain, now, all their close-knit union uncoiling, dissolving.

For a moment she lost that sense of herself, was only a child. Less: a small and broken animal, gathered close. Found herself again, Yeh-Lin, Dotemon—Yeh-Lin Dotemon.

“Vartu,” she said. Her voice was very weak, not her own, slurred and stumbling. Maybe she only dreamed she spoke. Tell her, I failed. Jochiz has devoured the souls he has stolen and hoarded all these years and made himself a thing greater than the gods of the earth, and since he has devoured gods and goddesses on his way, too, I do not know—don’t let him take Nabban, Ahjvar, save him, somehow, not that end for him, not for Ghu, not him, please…

Even Dotemon’s thought grew weak, unravelling from her.

Ahjvar was warm, and clean, all honest dust and sweat.

“Hush,” he said. “Yes.” And she was not certain now who spoke. The wind was cool, and clean, spring-fresh, sap stirring, snow’s retreat, and there were pines in it.

A whiff of horse, drawing near.

Even a splashing, and a horse could not walk the shard-spiked bottom of this pool, must not, warn him—

No, she only dreamed.

“It hurts,” she said aloud. It sounded like surprise she had not meant; only a little whimper, was she not allowed? And, “I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to rot in this place. I don’t want to leave my bones here in the filth he has made, in this darkness. I want the clean earth, I want the sky, Ahjvar—I want to go home, let me go home, Nabban—Ghu, please, let me come home—”

Whisper, pathetic, child’s whine, and how she hurt; it deafened her, blinded her, and this was only dreaming. The winds would not carry her; she had not the strength to call them, or the life left to endure the riding. There was no road to the east.

“Shh,” Ahjvar said and he kissed her, which drove the pain back a little, touch of his lips: forehead, failing eyes, what she had dragged back into being blurred again, bleeding, the worm’s work reasserting itself. Lips, that were raw and oozing blood and poisoned slime. Kissed her, slow and careful, a lover’s kiss, and it eased her, spread some clean quiet through her, a little.

“I did sometimes wish I had found you first,” she said, and maybe that was her thoughts wandering death-drunken, delusion, into reckless truth. She thought he lifted her, and was walking. Through water, that splashed and echoed from a close stone roof, and still the crumbling empty crystals pattered down, and the stone to which they had clung. The roof would fall…

If she had found him, cursed and despairing—she would only have killed him, to set him free. And never known what thing she sent from the world, the hope of the land, her land, because what would his horseboy have been without him? Running to the edge of the world, and denying the call of his dying gods.

“But then, I do not think I could have done for you, what he has done. Better you’re his, in the end. For all of us.”

Shadows. She could see nothing but shadows. Something moved, near.

“Good,” he said, and she thought she caught a whisper, a mind’s fleeting touch. They spoke together, not quite overheard, and she could not clearly see, only murk and haze now, and the moving shadows. The pain washed back, with the absence of his touch, his—did they drink her pain, to take it from her? Or only bless her with their breath, pour life into her, a little, a staving off of what must be? She did not think that was the dead king now, who kissed her forehead, blessing, pouring into her the quiet of deep water. Did not think those were his arms, his heart, under her head.

“I’m dreaming,” she said.

Wind touched her face. Cold. Not the still, smothering wet air of the cavern. Sound…was wider.

“Dreamshaper,” her god answered. “If you can hold this dream, we can ride it home.”

“You cheat the rules, Nabban. How does a god ride over his borders?”

“In him.”

“I am not in him.”

“Oh, we all are. He is my bridge, my voyaging vessel, and we are all three and this dream you make—held within him. And Snow and wind and road and all.”

Of course there was a horse, and he held her, and the white stallion Snow stepped out, light, easy, and the snow crunched under his hooves in her dreaming, and then he leapt, and he ran, in a dream between snow and sky.

He carried the fading of what was left of her home to Nabban, with the wind in the pines of the sanctuary of Swajui, where the cold springs flowed.

Darkness, but it was only the darkness of the night, and the stars were bright overhead through gaps in the boughs of the pines, which shifted and swayed in the wind. A warm wind, carrying spring. Water tinkled and burbled somewhere near, and the wind hissed in the needles. Like incense, the air. The ground beneath her. Soft. Years of falling needles. Warmth. Heavy on her, pinning her down. Weight of a quilt, only a quilt, filled with down, and she lay propped up a little, her head in his lap, his hand another weight, a warmth, a livingness so strong she felt the shape of it, spread resting on her, thumb, a finger, touching her collarbones.

Took a breath. It seared her. Decided not to do that again, but the body wanted it, took another, shallow. It didn’t seem to do much good. Wasn’t much left to breathe with. Tried to start there, to build again what once she had been. She had been bone, she had been a desiccated corpse sealed in a tree, she had been…many things. Nabban, when he was only Ghu, had scattered her to bone and put her into the earth, as another man might have slapped her face, and three days it had taken her to find her way back then. What Jochiz had done, the malice he had shaped by devilry into the gnawing, scraping, sliming amphibians—it ate at her still, and she could find no way through it. Dotemon was uncoiling from her, and even human eyes might see, she thought—because she saw, now, tendrils against the sky, between her and the stars. Moving like water-weed, swaying with current. Could feel, still herself, two in one, still rooted, still held in what they had made between them, but the inimical world began to tear at them.

Soul of the heavens, of the hells, of the underworld that had once been the shape by which it was understood…none true, and all, but what was truth was that they had no place within this world, and they could not long sustain themselves here, naked, cut off from their own place, which was within them…

It was all very confusing to Yeh-Lin’s mind. She remembered that it had not been so, when she was whole. When she was devil…

Mystics, philosophers, even rhapsodists who should have contented themselves weaving tales, had driven themselves half-mad, meditating on the recursive truths of the cosmos and the nature of the Gods. Perhaps they should have put their minds to other things, or drunk less hydromel brewed from the bee-maddening rhododendrons of the coast.

She hurt, and there was nothing but the hurt, no sight no sound no warmth no wind, and then she dragged another breath.

“Let us go,” she said. “I can’t—” A moment of clear thought, of vision. Of urgency. “Let us go. He needs you. Go to him. Now! Take him, run, hide. Save yourselves. Jochiz—”

“Hush. Yes. Don’t worry.”

“Please, Ghu.”

“Yes,” he said, and he bent over her, kissed her mouth one last time, touch she barely felt, drowned in her pain. “Safe journey on your road, Yeh-Lin.”

The road was a river, the great Wild Sister, who was this man, a rushing current, and then a wind, sweeping down the mountainside and it called, and what had been Yeh-Lin shed her ruined body and her pain to leap to it.

Dotemon twined into a column of fire that lit the grey trunks like the moon that was yet to rise, and spread wings of light. Hesitated. But she—it—could no more live long in this place than a fish on stone.

“Stay,” Ghu said. “Do you understand what you’ve sent her to?”

I? The dead go to the Gods. I did not send her. Your blessing on her.

What else could I do? The road is broken, Dotemon. They go—do they even reach the Old Great Gods? They don’t return.

They never did return,Dotemon said. The God did. It was an Old Great God filled the space between the trees, that lit the pines with the nacreous colours of the northern sky-dance. Not as you mean it. Not as…selves, into self renewed.

No. I never thought so. He shrugged. I never thought on it much at all. Save to keep Ahj from it.

You thought as most folk of the world think, the heavens a place, an ending. But we are the guardians. We welcome. We hold. We remember. We do not keep. In the end…soul fades to soul. Death to birth. The great mystery of mysteries. But we hold all in our hearts forever. It is what we are.

Something holds them now, forever. Holds the souls from the great soul of the world that should take them back. They never return to the world. To us. To the life we all are. Lost children.

That is a lie of the All-Holy’s cult, that we broke the road against human souls, to sever them from the Old Great Gods in the Heavens. Jochiz is the stealer of souls, the destroyer, who tears soul from the world itself and devours it. He will make himself the soul, the god, of the whole of the world, unchecked. My failure—

You did what you could. But Dotemon, I think there’s a core of truth in his lie.

No. We never barred the road to human souls.

Dotemon—go to the road. To the heavens. Serve me, one last time? Be my scout. Find the truth. I know it’s a hard road, a damaging one—you did it yourselves.

Yes. They had.

So make it your road of penance and atonement, as every human soul that travels it must do. Go, and find the truth, and return—find a way. Walk my dreams. Tell me what truth you find, and why the soul of the world cries out for lost children. He stroked the dead woman’s hair, faded to iron grey, the truth of her. Old woman when she joined with Dotemon. Maybe you can overtake her on the way. Share your burdens. You made your sins together.

Not all of them,Dotemon said primly, Yeh-Lin’s very intonation. Yeh-Lin might have laughed. Dotemon did not.

A wake. A remembering. Dotemon was not what it had been. Never would be. Something of Yeh-Lin within, always. Value that.

“Go,” Ghu said. “I’ll look to her as she would want. No imperial tomb. The clean earth. Go. Leave Jochiz to the storyteller.”

A fey boy, dream-dazzled with truths half-seen before ever he was a god.

The heavens were within the Gods, and the hells too, and the Gods themselves…a mirror turned on itself, containing itself, light lit of itself. The devils—Dotemon, and Jochiz, and Vartu, and Tu’usha, and Ghatai, and Anganurth, and Ogada together, united at the last in anger, in vengeful defiance, had broken the way between the reality of the world and the Old Great Gods. Dotemon might seek the heavens. There was no certainty that it would find its way, or come unscathed to the Gods in the end.

And certainly no welcome, when it did.

But it was the only open road. It did not believe he could be right, that they had made it a trap and a barrier for human souls as well.

The god of mountain and river sat with the dead woman still held resting on his lap, but now he was an emptiness, a waiting.

Gone within himself so very far away. Seeking his other self.

Dotemon wished him well and sought the heavens.