CHAPTER XXXIII

Sarzahn was lost. Dead. Taken. Or made beast again, it was all one. Ripped away, a fool’s defiance on Vartu’s part—if that had been Vartu. There had been the whiff of a god about it, that severing as he reached too late to hold what ran through his hands like water. A god, and not the old power of the hills who cowered weak and helpless behind Vartu’s shield. Nabban? He dared…? And how? Vartu allied with Nabban, using him, somehow? He had never intended to show her any mercy regardless. Now—she would burn and he would swallow what was left of her, and the god of the hill as well, and come in the end to Nabban, and destroy him.

—he should have devoured Sarzahn so, not to lose him to this foul world that had made a beast of the wreckage of his soul.

Put Sarzahn from his mind. Vengeance for his loss would come, but not now. Now Jochiz had a city to take.

And the folk of this wretched army of his were cattle, mindless of any understanding, fit only to be beaten along their road when they baulked. Beyond reasoning with, many beyond answering even to the driving spur of faith and fervour.

The All-Holy had a captain of archers, who defied the knight commanding him, saying his men could march no further, dragged aside and strangled with his own bowstring, and strung up on a little stunted wild olive as a warning. The rush they had made after the taking of the Western Wall carried them only so far. They wanted to stop, to gorge themselves and drink, like beasts, as if the victory were theirs and not the work entire of their god—his grace, his blessing.

The weak, the wounded—they were left behind, to struggle on or perish in their shame and failure, he did not much care. They were a harvest, either way.

The less time Vartu had to prepare her Marakanders against his coming, the better. He would march them through the night till they dropped, drive them with whips outright if he had to.

“They need to rest, Holiness.” A whine in his ear, a man riding at his side. He had been bleating on some time, unheeded. Primate Ambert. Jochiz turned a look of reproof on him. Forbearing. Did anger cast a light in his eyes? Ambert ducked his head, his horse reacting to a tension on the reins. Jochiz tasted his fear, felt the man’s heart quicken. No doubt he would take it for the light of the All-Holy’s divinity.

“They can’t march all the way to Marakand, Most Holy. Even a courier takes a day to ride it. May we give them some promise of a halt?”

Clio murmured, “It would show wisdom.”

Not Clio. She was dead. The other woman, riding at his side. The bright Northron horse, the cape of mottled silver sealskin.

“The gap,” he said. “We take the gap, the place they call the Shiprock, and camp beyond. If we come too slow, they will hold it against us.”

They already did, unless they were fools—something waited, he thought, a shadow to his seers and even his own vision. Nothing of any account, in the end. Let them fall here, let them fall at the walls of Marakand—so long as they offered themselves, and made his name a conqueror, a god, a force of nature whose great tide sweeping east could not be stopped, that the rulers of Marakand and the cities and the lords of the tribes and even the empress of Nabban should know and fear what rolled towards them, and abandon their gods. That their gods might know themselves abandoned, Nabban be rejected by his folk, deprived of the worship of the godhead he had stolen, mortal fool, claiming what he had no right to be, what was withheld from even the greatest of wizards, even those born of gods, a birthright denied…

Not for much longer. After Marakand—there would be deaths enough before ever he breached its walls; they would be slaughtered in the ravine trying to come at the walls, its bridges denied them. He would let his followers prove themselves there; he needed only the knights, the seers, the administrators of the seventh, his faithful commanders. The rest might die and be replaced, as Marakand abandoned its god for him.

Perhaps, at last…an anticipation to be savoured. Once Vartu was dead. Once Marakand was taken. It would be time, then, to prepare the greatest ritual of them all. Self, sacrificed to self. Heart’s blood offered, heart opened, to take in what he had drained himself to bear, to nourish, to nurture to its ripeness.

The heart ached in his chest. Ached, all through him. Scars of his bleeding burned.

He grew tired. Weary, Sien-Shava’s weakness.

Sien-Mor smiled her old, sweet smile.

She wanted something. She always did.

He rubbed an aching forearm, frowned. The company nearest trudged in silence. No hymns, no chanted prayers. Were they a retreat, a defeat?

“Let them sing,” he told Clio. But of course she was not there. Sien-Mor raised her eyebrows. He looked over to Ambert.

“I shall see to it,” the primate said, and turned his horse aside, summoning a lesser priestess to him.

Why this ache, this pain? Pain was the body’s. It could be set aside, should be disdained. But it warned.

“You won’t bring them to Marakand’s walls even tomorrow,” Sien-Mor said. “They’ll die on their feet if you keep driving them.”

He frowned. She was probing at him, taunting. She always did, in her sly and subtle way. Trying to assert that she too partook of the god their father’s wisdom and his strength, which was not the case. It never had been. One womb, one birth, but her cleverness was only their mother’s, a mortal cunning.

Ache. As if the wounds were freshly opened.

Ache. As if something burrowed into his heart, which beat steady in his chest, which pulsed in the sanctuary of his godhead—

Vartu—

No. Not she. Dotemon. It was Dotemon. Sly, mocking, ever-treacherous—Yeh-Lin Dotemon, and she had crept undetected into the very heart of his mystery. She was there, she was within the cavern, within him, the sacred reservoir of his blood, she dared, she profaned his holiness, she threatened…everything.

“Does she worry you?” Sien-Mor asked. “She should.”

But he was not listening. He dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and shut his eyes not to see her. The ghost. The imagining.

Madness, his sister suggested. Perhaps it was not your doing, what broke me. Perhaps we were always mad, the both of us.

He shut his ears to her and fell away into a place where he could reach and shape, could make a death. Mere wizardry would not serve and he could not turn his back on what passed here in the pass, either. That might be their intention, to distract him from Marakand. Dotemon and Vartu, allied? Perhaps. Far more likely that Dotemon was sent by the god to which she pretended—it must surely be pretence—submission. A spider in cunning, Nabban was, hidden in the heart of his land and sending out his tendrils. Jochiz knew he should have gone to hunt the assassin, that offence of necromancy and abuse of divinity, in the mountains himself when Nabban’s sword came after Sarzahn, should have left the army to its march—even Clio could not have gotten them lost, coming south along the edge of the Malagru. He would prune that arm of Nabban’s reach away soon enough. And this one, Yeh-Lin Dotemon, this traitor who ought to have remained forever damned to the cold hells, he would finish her now. Did that slave-boy made god all undeserving, profanation of the very concept of divinity, think Dotemon so great, so subtle, that one so mighty as Jochiz would not see what she intended?

Jochiz reached, found what he might, to shape, to ride—a small, soft thing, pregnant with potential, hiding in the damp gravel of a passageway worn to a channel by floodwaters. It would serve.

He began to shape it, to put into it his thought, his will. His fire, to consume beyond any restoration.

Sien-Shava rode distracted, abstracted. Some work afoot. Sien-Mor could not tell what he did. Devil’s work. She probed but could get no sense even of where he directed his attention. Such were the limitations of mortality. If that was what it was called. Ghosthood? She knew the shapes of things, but could no more manipulate them than she could touch or lift or taste. She relaxed her hold on her seeming, a little. Not too much, lest she be swept away, out of this place that seemed so—strange, now. The life burned in everything—human, horse, tree, bird, weeds underfoot. It all pulled at her, and her yearning to fall into it was strong. Free of the body, at last, at last. Free of the pull of the road, the summons she yearned, with all that she was, to obey, and could not not; fighting, fighting, a current that swept against her, a wind, an endless storm of sand, of ice, of timeless, hopeless journeying…Vartu did not know what she had done, summoning a ghost so, tearing her free of the nightmare struggle—and Sien-Shava had always held a little piece of her, even after her soul had sought the road. She had not been whole in so, so long.

How strangely clear, her thoughts. She had not shaped a clear, clean thought in so long.

Quite a few of her thoughts were of how she should like Sien-Shava to suffer—as though pulled again into the world, she took on all the grime of life, the pain and the hate of it, that she had put from herself. Or at least—it was there again, like a garment shaped of memory, of pain and guilt and sin acknowledged and shed like a caterpillar’s last skin, left an empty shell on the twig once the butterfly had flown. She fit herself inside it, and it began to cling to her.

Must she then die, and make the journey, and cleanse herself all over again?

And it had been a long, long road. Beyond enduring. But one endured. It was necessary. Her sins were very great. She had never yet come to the heavens. What she thought she knew—that was only fragments. Tu’usha’s memory.

She rode—she and the illusion she made of her favourite horse, the memory she shaped—as a chill breath, a drifting air. She hoped it was not Vartu that Sien-Shava so intently worked against. Miles, and more lost souls falling by the roadside. Did he mean the whole of this army to die? She began to think he did.

He screamed. He screamed most terribly, and clutched his chest as if struck to the heart, and slumped forward. Unbalanced, fell slowly from his horse, tipping, tipping…she might have reached to stop him, had she any physical form to bear such weight. If she had also wanted to. She smiled, and watched. He slid down the horse’s side, crumpling on the ground. Senseless. Unmoving. Scarlet spread over the unnaturally dustless white of his gown. Scarlet trickled down his wrists. His lips were very pale, blue-grey. Drained.

She had not thought anyone, not even Vartu, had the power to wound him so.

But alas, he still held to life, Sien-Shava, Jochiz, still himself, still live and in this world, anchored. Life flickered. His sycophantic folk swarmed about him, their cries like the peeping of a brood of chickens deprived of the hen’s warmth. Lost, shelterless…witless.

Let them sort it out.

Too soon, the one called Ambert asserted himself to do so. It was not entertaining. They bandaged Sien-Shava’s bleeding wounds, the gaping tear as if someone had tried to cut the heart out of him, which clove through the bone and should have killed any mortal man. But of course he was their god, and his heart beat still. Indeed, she had a glimpse of it, while a shivering surgeon and a frantic seer reaching far beyond his talent or knowledge tried to put Sien-Shava back together again. That, at least, was gruesomely fascinating.

They put him in a horse-litter between two steady mules and Ambert—really, the man was devoted beyond all reason—refused all cries, all pleas for a halt.

It was not the will of the All-Holy that they rest. They must take the defensible gap of the Shiprock, lest Marakand come to hold it against them. He shouted. He spoke with quiet menace. He denounced as cowards and apostates those who spoke against him. He claimed to utter the All-Holy’s own words.

It was when he cried, vengeance, vengeance for the devil’s attack that had laid the All-Holy low, that the commanders, and perhaps more crucially the common soldiery who stood behind them, were stirred. They must push on. Marakand must fall. This was only the first march, the first great stride, and if it faltered, the whole might fail.

It was not enough to have taken the Western Wall, which had never in human memory been taken.

They were already so close to the camping-ground that the All-Holy in his wisdom and foresight had decreed for them. The Shiprock was in sight, and the scouts reported no sign of any Marakander defences. Sien-Mor whistled a little tune to herself. Cheerful. Lilting. A Northron thing. “My brother lies in the cold, cold ground…” One seer frowned, looking around blindly. She chuckled, drifted over, dropped a chill kiss on his cheek, a whisper in his ear.

“You won’t live to see the dawn, poor boy.”

The scouts sent through the gap of the Shiprock reported nothing. No hasty fortifications, no archers on the heights, no engines concealed behind the windmill. Deserted.

The Marakanders were fools who had trusted entirely to their Western Wall, Ambert declared, but he did not believe it, and he ordered the tent of the All-Holy erected and a guard drawn up around it even as he sent the vanguard on beneath the cliffs, and dispatched parties with sixth-circle seers among them up the treacherous cliff-paths to investigate the windmill more closely.

A low camp bed. The black sword was laid by the All-Holy’s side, and his own as well. They did not dare carry those elsewhere; their god was never without them. Sien-Mor drifted out again. Nothing had changed. The companies still marched. Ambert was determined to prove himself the All-Holy’s most obedient and faithful servant—and successor? They would seize the broader space beyond the Shiprock gap for their main camp, a bridgehead from which they might march on to Marakand. The sun at their backs pushed long shadows up the pass. It grew dark, down in the narrow place, but the white windmill gleamed.

She began to be disappointed in the Marakanders. They should surely have seen the value of this place. Sien-Mor returned to her brother’s side, as a faithful and devoted sister ought.

The All-Holy stirred and muttered, clutching his bandaged chest beneath the sodden bandages. His forearms, too, were bandaged, elbow to wrist, and those were soaked as well. He bled yet, not healing swiftly as he should, being what he was. Could not summon the will, or was there some thing that worked against him? Sien-Mor could not tell. So limited and limiting, humanity, even for a wizard. She reached—and Tu’usha was gone from her, even memory of what it had been, to be her, gone remote and dreaming. But perhaps that was her madness.

She felt quite sane. The healing of the road, even if the journey were uncompleted?

The physician was coming with more wrappings. They would swaddle him into a cocoon, and still he would bleed. He had, after all, a great reservoir of blood to shed. They prayed, priests and seers, stationed in ranks about him, voices raised in songs of pleading and praise. Praying to their god for their god’s restoration.

“Poor fools,” she told them, unheard. Crouched at Sien-Shava’s side, considering him. Little she could do. Whisper into his mind. You should die. Give up, flee away. You aren’t anything greater than you ever were, for all your hunger. You might consume every god and goddess of this earth and every soul and still you will be nothing but a sick and bloated parasite, a tick feeding on what it cannot digest. Pregnant with sterility. The world will take back what you have stolen…what we have hidden… The thought distracted her a moment. When she focused on him again, his dark eyes were open, fixed on hers. Ah, he saw again. She smiled, sweetly, as he had liked her to smile.

But no, he looked through her, beyond. His lips were still pale with the blood he had lost, and he shaped some word she could not decipher.

Twitched and thrashed, struck away the physician who tried to take his arm, knocking the clean bandages from her hands. Sat up.

It seemed to take a very long time. The world, slowed. A massive strength, gathering itself.

There was a rumbling, as of thunder. The ground shook.

“You.” He did not shriek. It was hardly more than a whisper, but it carried a rage she felt through to the bones that were so long ash. And what washed over her—she lost her hold on herself, scattered, dissolved almost to nothing, to shredded confusion of memory, of will—

He saw her. He knew her, at last, to be no dream, no delusion, not even a ghost, but a soul stolen from the heavens, a soul flown willing on the path laid open to it into the dream-delusion Vartu had sought to create, back down the thread her brother had always held, refusing to give her up even to death—

For a moment he was their father, a great silver seal rising from the curling waves, a great tall man striding up the white beach, and the air about him, the cloud building, the waves, the slow weight of a god’s anger…

Lightning, white, burning. A roar, a crash that was more hammer-blow than thunder-growl. Blinding. Scent of scorched wood and cloth, flesh and hair. Chaos and wailing and a ring of dead, struck down as cattle crowded under a hilltop tree to shelter from the thunderstorm. The canopy of the tent flapped rags in a clear-sky gale.

Sien-Mor was already fleeing as Sien-Shava—whatever was left of Sien-Shava in the thing that had risen from the litter—reached. She was running, flying, crying out on the Old Great Gods to see, to stretch out a hand to draw her home—

No road before her, no deep well of safety into which she might plunge. No way back.

He closed on her, in fire, in the white light of the heavens and the molten heart of the earth.

She was only a small thing, in the end. A butterfly held in the hand, crushed to ash.

Nabban… The necromancer god dared think himself something greater than he had any right to be, to walk beyond the bounds of his land, to do what no god of the earth might, what only the god of the earth, god of all the lands, Great God of the earth might do.

Nabban stole the trophy of Jochiz’s victory from him, made of the corpse from which Dotemon had been driven some heroic fallen vassal, to be honoured, entombed—she was traitor to her kind, she was his,Jochiz’s own, her bones—she should rot and lie in the heart of his mystery and her soul be forever denied its road—

And to steal her the false god of Nabban revealed what Jochiz had suspected, that he did ride the soul he had withheld from the Old Great Gods, the bones he had kept from their right and proper grave, he rode the soul of his dead lover even into Marakand, which was Jochiz’s, his sister’s city, a place belonging to him and all the souls within it his as well and Nabban dared defy that—

There was only one god, one God, who might range the road, and it was not the slave-born mortal boy of Nabban, whatever trickery of necromancy he worked to free himself from the constraints of the godhead he had stolen. Base human mother, base human father, elevated beyond due by the senile desperation of a land’s dying gods…

And Nabban had even taken Sarzahn his brother from him.

Jochiz left the army of the All-Holy to look to itself. They were lost to him, useless, until he could shape a new sanctuary in which to gather them. There were caves enough beneath Gurhan’s hill, and the god—like would bind to like. He was become soul, the world contained within him, a creature who burned with its light. Very godhead lay now within him, he made it in himself through those he had carried, encysted, the gods of his army’s march, and now he might—he did, he swallowed them, felt himself spread, and deepen, felt he might stretch and reach the horizon, reach into the beating heart of the world and draw it fully into himself, contain it all.

There was still a long road to the eastern sea, and there were still roads beyond, south, more easterly yet. But he could reach, he would, and with every land he crossed he would grow. Here he could dispense with the ritual, the sacrifice of the children made vessels, earth-soul to itself. He was god and he was God and he might take Gurhan so, and bring Gurhan’s land into himself, and its folk and all, and spill out along the roads east, by desert and by sea.

And Vartu’s defences—

They were nothing.

She was nothing.

But Nabban, he would deal with Nabban first. Since the false godling rushed so headlong to meet his doom and offered himself, in the body of his Praitannec king.