CHAPTER XIII

It seemed to Ghu that for Ahjvar, the days rapidly faded again into a haze of dreaming, a confusion of wind and snow, cold and stone. The divination had woken some sleeping fear, torn some half-scabbed scar of the soul, Ghu thought. He should never have asked it of him. Maybe what Ahjvar had foreseen walked too closely with what had been, or he had read it so and sent the underlayer of his mind down that path again. Maybe, Ahj said himself, on one of his good days—when he was speaking, when the words were not too great a weight to deliver and he was capable of seeing and reacting to the world around him—it was only that the tide of his madness turned to flood again, its ebbtime over.

“You aren’t mad,” Ghu said, which only stopped him speaking again. He was as bad as when they had first set out for the east, or worse. Even Ghu found he began to have doubts Ahjvar could find his way back. When, after half a month more of blurring cold and wind and hunger, the land rose in a day to softer hills and there was turf beneath the thin skin of snow, Ahjvar did not at first seem to understand the desert passage was over. He did not react to the flock of brown and white ground-pigeons that went up in a great wing-clapping cloud from feeding among the grass-seeds—Ahj, who, like the leopard of his sword’s hilt, wild and wary predator, had twitched to every movement and possibility of threat.

Ghu had his sling out and felled five of them in as many breaths.

Denanbak was the name of this country, a land of small gods and summer-nomad herders who pastured their herds on the hills, while related tribes tilled the green, better-watered valleys to the east. A folk he knew, not Nabbani, but kin, maybe, coarser-boned and lighter-skinned than Praitan-folk or most Nabbani, and free. Their own gods still lived and they owned no emperor, rarely even cast up a paramount warlord to unite them. Traders, familiar neighbours, enemies old in history, who sold their fleeces, horses, and camels, as well as mutton on the hoof, in the market of Dernang. Almost home. He felt it not with any gladness; Nabban was a weight pulling him down, his return an icy slope he could not climb again. They turned to the southeast. The camels’ humps were going slack, the dogs ribby, and Ahj, Ahj was grey, sunken-eyed. His hands shook, and he stumbled like an old man at uneven ground. They should have gone seeking the winter settlements of the Denanbaki to buy provisions, but “Do we need to?” he had asked, low-voiced. “Just keep going. Go where you need to be. No people. I don’t want people.” A mistake, maybe, to listen to Ahjvar then, to let his unreasoning fears grow, but Ghu suggested it again a few days later and was sworn at, which meant nothing, but there was fear in his eyes. . . .

Meat. There were the ground-feeding pigeons, hare and pheasants on the hills, and a gazelle would feed them for several days, sparing more peas and barley for the camels. He took the crossbow himself to bring down a gazelle, since when they crossed the trail of the herd Ahjvar was having one of his bad days and better left wrapped up by the fire, staring unseeing at nothing, with Jiot to watch him. The good meat revived him, for a little, and put flesh on the dogs’ bones.

Here, the desert gnawed the edge of the land, and the wind blew bitter and biting out of the northwest, a constant whistle in the ears, stinging with desert dust and sometimes a fine, hard snow. In the kinder seasons, the chieftains of the land would no doubt watch the road more closely, to claim tolls of the caravan-masters and also to prevent their poaching the chieftain’s game. He had never met a lord yet of any folk who did not think the deer of the hills his own. They wandered far from the braided ruts of the caravan road, taking a twisting way that kept them remote from the winter villages, whose sod-built houses were dug half into the hillsides, so that from a distance it seemed the earth was smoking.

A caravan passed them, keeping to the road, the one that had dogged their heels through the desert. He thought of trying to persuade Ahjvar of the wisdom of overtaking it, joining it for the last leg. It would be a way to get themselves past the border legitimate and accounted for, set down on paper as caravaneers of a gang. But he did not think any caravan-master was likely to be more pleased by Ahjvar now than they had been in Porthduryan, so he let them go. It would likely have meant an argument with Ahj, anyway. The border was going to be a problem. Wanderers did not just wander in without giving some good account of themselves. There were other ways, smugglers’ ways, high and dangerous ways . . . they would have to abandon the camels. Well, it could be done, when the time came. He would find a way. Every ridge and fold and tree of the god’s mountain seemed to be held in his mind, when he sat silent and listened for it.

In less than a fortnight’s travelling, in which Ghu knew they were spotted twice, once by children driving cattle along a snowy ridge and once by a hunting party, they came, on the road itself rather than shadowing it, to where a great hogsback hill rose against the southern sky. The caravan road curled around it to the east, crossing an avenue of broken pillars. Ruined walls and snow-filled hollows spread out about the skirts of the hill and halfway up its terraced slopes, where the snow drifted against hard angles of stone. The crest of the hill was bare of any sign of human working, save for the stump of what must have been a tower, a broken ring of great stone blocks, with bushes growing from the joins and thick-girthed poplars inside.

“Letin,” Ghu said. It must be. There could not be so many ruined cities on the road, and that meant they were very near the border, two days, maybe, or three, at their current pace. But he had known as much by the way the land lifted and by the low mountains, which made a ragged wall to the south.

Ahjvar made an effort and looked around, flinched when he looked at Ghu, who had a split lip from last night’s dreaming. It ached in the cold, and the scab broke and bled when he spoke, and how did he make that better for Ahjvar?

“What’s Letin?”

Words. Words were good.

“Godless Letin, they call it, in a song we still sing in the north of Nabban. It was a great city where the queen of all Denanbak was wed to the god, but the devil Dotemon duelled and slew him, sword to sword, in fire and thunder and the breaking of the sky. The tower of his worship fell. He was the paramount god of Denanbak and the queen the overlord of all the chieftains and all the tribes, so Nabban took Denanbak and made it a province of the empire. There was a hero united all the tribes again and drove Nabban out during the rule of Yeh-Lin’s grandson, a descendant of the last queen, maybe, but we don’t sing songs about that.” He chuckled. “Probably the Denanbaki do.”

No folk dwelt there now. It had the emptiness of utter desertion. When they followed the pillared avenue towards what might once have been the city’s heart, they found that good water still welled up from a broken fountain, oozing over its own mound of ice to fill a stone-curbed pool. It flowed away down a channel overhung with bush-willow and red dogwood and dead reeds, bridged with occasional slabs of stone, all that was left of some culvert through the city.

“Camp here,” Ghu decided, though it was little past noon and usually they would only stop to rest the camels a while, before going on into the dusk. “It should be safe enough. Let the camels forage. You can rest. I’ll hunt.”

Ahjvar didn’t argue. Ghu didn’t expect he would; too much effort. They offloaded the camels, working in silence, one to each side. Ghu let them wander free of hobble or picket and they headed for the bushes along the broken culvert. Don’t fall in and break a leg, he wished them, but it was mostly eroded to a slope-banked stream now, nature taking back the course it had followed before ever a city grew at the god’s feet.

That was the emptiness he felt; not that the people were gone, but the god.

He cleared snow, sent Ahjvar with the axe to cut branches, and built a lean-to in one of the hollows, in the corner of two walls below the wind.

“Make a fire,” he said. “Make tea. Sleep. Stay warm. I’ll be back by dusk, and I’ll leave Jiot to keep watch.”

Ahjvar just watched him, kneeling on the floor of brush he had made in the shelter. As if the words made no sense, as if Ghu suddenly spoke Denanbaki or some tongue of Pirakul, sound without meaning.

“Ahj . . .” He dropped down by him, helpless, hurting so badly.

Ahjvar touched the swollen corner of Ghu’s mouth. That hurt, too.

“It’s all right,” Ghu said.

“It isn’t.”

“I was tired. I wasn’t fast enough to wake.”

“Old Great Gods . . .” Ahjvar bowed his head to Ghu’s shoulder, shaking. “I am damned. I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“Hush.” Ghu held him, tight against his shivering, rocking him. “You’ll find a way out. You will. We will. Remember the desert, before the badlands? You were better in the desert. You will be better again. You will come through this.”

“What if I don’t?” That was a whisper, a breath.

Ghu didn’t need to answer. He pressed his face to Ahjvar’s hair and thought, not yet, not now, and let him go when Ahj sat back on his heels, eyes shut, hands fisted on his knees.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“No.” Ahjvar opened his eyes, swiped a palm over his face. “Go,” he said hoarsely. “Go. Don’t get yourself taken for poaching. I’m in no state to talk you out of some angry chieftain’s stronghold peaceably.”

“Yes, Ahj. Ahj . . .”

“What?”

He caught up Ahjvar’s hands. A tremor in the right. In the cold, scars were blanched dead white against the brown. He raised the hands and kissed them, and left Ahj kneeling there. A sharp whistle brought Jui to his side. Ghu headed down the watercourse, gathering pebbles as he went. Jiot remained without a word needed, lying alert in the sun.

Ghu was gone, and the silence heavy. Wind over the stones. A distant raven. A flock of grey juncos flitted and twittered into the brush and weeds rooted along the edge of the fountain, taking flight again when Jiot, lying atop the wall, turned his head to watch them.

Cold. Ahjvar got to his feet, stiff as if every year he had lived lay on his body. Fire, Ghu had said, but he didn’t think fire would warm him. One word, three maybe. Let me die. All he need say to end this, to end everything. He could still feel the touch of Ghu’s lips against his hands, still a smear of blood on the right. He pressed that angrily to his own mouth, going out into the sunlight, taking his shield from the baggage, climbing up to a broad plateau and into the harsh wind. Jiot followed, chose another stone. The dun dog turned his head into the wind, sniffing, alert, but after a moment settled and lay down again. The camels browsed unconcerned among the bushes away below, eating with determination. Ghu and the white and grey dog were already lost to sight in some fold of the land.

Ahjvar stripped to his shirt, laying his coats, sheepskin and camel-woollen, on a bare patch of wall. Jiot, being a dog of good sense, immediately moved over to lie on them.

He drew his sword and, slowly at first, set himself to work through all the practice-patterns of his long-dead boyhood sword-masters, as he had so rarely since leaving Sand Cove. It hadn’t seemed to matter, when the sword was no longer his first weapon and he had thought he was riding to a final death. Again, and yet again, until he had trampled a great circle in the snow, like a courting grouse’s dancing ground, and was soaking in sweat, folly in this land and season, aching in muscles that had not been so driven since they took to this road. It was something to do. He thought it might shut his mind away, but it did not. No stillness here, no peace.

Better he were dead. Better dead than dangerous as a mad dog. Better dead than casting divinations that warned so vaguely of doom and forces they had already survived more by chance than any power of their own—if he could be said to have survived, useless as he was.

Yew and pine. Death and the Old Great Gods. The devils and hope. Betrayal, the berried holly of battle, peace and peace unmade.

Did he tell Ghu anything he did not already know, or only confirm it? Confirm something Ghu wanted denied. His simpleton boy was foresighted. He had known that much years ago.

Ghu should be seeking a shaman of this land if he wanted a true divination for the shape of his return to Nabban, not the wreckage Ahjvar had become. He was no wizard to put trust in. He never had been. If anything, it was the king’s champion that the heir of Nabban would need, and not a damned sick and broken madman and self-doubting wizard who cried out at dreams that had no power over him—no power over him, burn that into his heart—and struck out witless at his bedmate.

Friend.

Whatever.

Ghu was peace, yes. A stillness he could hide in. Useless, to be a child and hide, loathing himself, to let someone else ward him against the world and the screaming in his own mind.

He could try, at the least, to be a king’s swordsman again. And maybe exhaust himself to the point the body would sleep, deeper than dreaming could reach.

Ghu brought down a pair of cock pheasants so intent on their rivalry he could almost have walked up to take them by hand as they danced and strutted with the first stirrings of spring in their blood, but he kept going after that, the birds hanging at his shoulder, for all it felt an effort to put one foot ahead of the other. Jui flushed a hare. He added that to his catch. Two men and two dogs to feed, and he wanted to make good time the coming day. Something was making him edgy, the dead city, maybe, or . . . he couldn’t say what. He wanted to be out of this naked land. He wanted mountains, trees, white water over stones. This land was too quiet, and he began to feel he moved across it a bright and alien thing, out of place, a glitter of forces that did not belong. Kingfisher-bright against the snow, to senses that could see. Something watched. In his own land he might be a quieter thing. You didn’t see the kingfisher in the woods for all its brilliant blue.

The wind gusted wildly about him, snow rising in a sudden flurry, a whirlwind. Jui set up a great outraged barking, leaping as if a taunting crow circled him.

She plunged from the sky in a swirl of colour, peacock-blue and green, red and brown. High boots and red leather leggings, short gown of quilted silk brocade, a confusion of bright flowers wrapped tight with a broad embroidered sash. Incongruous Praitannec plaid blanket worn over her shoulder, Praitannec plaid scarf about her neck, and her sword on her back. The scarlet tassel of its hilt tangled with her black hair loose and long, streaming like a banner in the wind that still gusted around her. Her face was all elegance—high cheekbones, deep brown eyes, warm complexion. A little taller than he. Perfection of beauty. He loved beauty, could see it in even those, man or woman, the world called plain, but she left him cold.

“Dotemon.” He did not reach for his knife.

“Nabban.” The devil, the usurping empress of Nabban, the conqueror of Denanbak and Dar-Lathi, north and south, bowed with full and formal mockery. “Yeh-Lin, please.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.”

“I thought you took oath to Deyandara. Broken so soon?”

Yeh-Lin shrugged, and waved a languid hand. The captive wind settled and died away. Jui had retreated behind Ghu’s legs, where he grumbled softly.

“She doesn’t need a tutor any longer. She’s betrothed to the king and gone to the bards. I told her I wanted to go to you and she released me. Here I am.”

“We don’t want you.”

“We? Catairlau is with you still?”

“His name is Ahjvar.”

“He should have died. I thought you were going to take him from his goddess and let him go. It was for that I put his mad goddess to sleep in the earth.” A red ember woke in her eyes. “You did not leave him walking this world with that hungry thing still in him.”

“Hyllau I destroyed. Ahjvar is free.”

“He can’t be free. He is—”

“I know what he is. He knows what he is. He comes with me by his own will and I will let him go when he wills it. And you will not touch him, Dotemon, or Nabban will see you into a grave there will be no escaping.”

Wind raised snow about them, snapped at her hair.

“This is not Nabban,” the devil said, and did not step away, but he saw it—almost she had.

“Ask him what he wants, if you doubt me.”

The fire he had seen faded. She did take a step back, to bow again, no mockery this time. “I do not think you would lie to me, Nabban, or to him. Young fools, the pair of you. Is he even sane?”

“He’s—better. Sometimes.”

“Poor fools. Take care not to damn him before the Old Great Gods. They’re jealous of what they’ve marked as their own.”

“The dead, you mean? He isn’t. He may have died, but he lives and breathes and bleeds and keeps his soul. As do you.”

“I am not under discussion.” She shrugged. “Even I have no idea what to call him, truly.” Her lips curled up. “But ‘dead king’ does annoy him so.”

“Well, don’t annoy him. I won’t stop him hitting you. What do you want?”

“Your company.”

“We don’t want yours.”

“No? You might need it. What exactly do you plan to do in Nabban? They are at war, you know. Civil war, the surviving children of Emperor Yao, who died a year ago, fighting for the Peony Throne. Uprisings of slaves. Lord and generals seizing what they think they can hold, and revolt of the tribes in the highlands and jungles of Dar-Lathi. I’ve seen it in the mirror. I can show you.”

“No.”

“Will you retreat to the wilderness of the gods and fade to sleep? Nabban will break and die around you.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

Ghu shook his head. “I don’t know. Yet. I will know, when I see.”

She studied him. “You do know. You do see—”

“I don’t know what I will do,” he snapped. “I only know what needs to be done.”

“And that is?”

“None of your concern.”

“It is,” she said. “I sowed the seeds of it, did I not? This rot that you must mend?”

She spoke the truth in that.

“You do need me. What do you know of war? You may fight well in a corner and your dead king was a captain, yes, but the armies of the Praitannec tribes are rabble and their idea of a war is a hundred riders on a cattle raid.”

“Not entirely true.”

“Not entirely untrue. They’re a folk who esteem geldings as warhorses!”

“For raiding, yes. They find them quieter when they’re stealing their neighbours’ mares. So?”

“They didn’t defeat Marakand by any tactical skill or strategy of their own; it was the loss of the Red Masks and the Lady’s fall let the kings claim the day. It was you and your dead man gave them their victory. Catairlau—”

“—Ahjvar—”

“—has no more idea what to do with a real army than you have.”

“I’m sure he’s read a book on it.”

“A book! You—” Her brows lowered and she snorted. “Not a matter for joking, Nabban. I swear—”

“Don’t. You make oaths too lightly.”

“Deyandara sent me to you. Truly, she did. The damned Old Great Gods be my witness—”

“Don’t. Don’t swear.”

“By the tree that held me and released me, whom I do respect, I will not cross the border without your leave. I put myself at your service, Nabban.” She went down on her knees in the snow, like a Praitannec spearwoman exchanging vows with her lord, offered her hands. “If you won’t take my oath, how do I prove that? How do I give you some word you will believe?”

“No words. By your deeds, Dotemon. Day by day.”

And that, how could he lay that before his dying gods? That he brought Yeh-Lin Dotemon, whom they had sacrificed themselves to vanquish, back to Nabban?

But it felt . . . necessary.

“I want,” she said softly, “to come home.”

She was a devil, and one whom the songs said had ever worked subtly on men’s minds. Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, Dotemon Dreamshaper. He wanted simply to like her—he did like her, he enjoyed her company, which worried him. No enchantment there, surely, though danger none the less. It was with a more obvious form of seduction that the songs usually concerned themselves, though he did not think she needed either wizardry or devilry for that. The face she wore was her own, no glamour.

And it was for Ahjvar’s own sake she had been outraged, to find him still walking the world. That—he could forgive her much that he should not, for that care for Ahj.

“Get up,” he said, and offered his hand. “You can come with us. For now.”

Her grip felt real and human, warm, with a swordswoman’s hardness. But underneath, underneath flesh and bone, within it, she was fire and frozen light.

He wondered what she felt in him beneath the stiff and wind-chilled flesh and pulled his hand from hers, pocketing his sling, putting on his mittens.

“I’m hunting,” he said. “Make yourself useful and carry the game.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes. I should have said at the start. There were a handful of riders to the northeast, heading for the ruins of Letin. They don’t look like a hunting party. They have no dogs. There is a wizard of minor power with them.”

“You should have—”

“You distracted me, talking of your dead king.”

“Who is alone in the ruins of Letin.”

“Well, if all you did was take over the goddess’s curse intact, they can’t kill him, can they?”

At Ghu’s look, Dotemon bowed again.

“I am,” she said, “possibly, too fond of the sound of my own voice.”

“Yes. Possibly, if you’re going to live in this world and do it no more harm, you should cease looking on it as all a game laid out for your amusement.”

Ghu turned back on his tracks and left the devil to follow.

Jiot sat up, sniffing the wind. Ahjvar was drawn out of his half-dreaming concentration to watch him. The dog settled once more but then lifted his head again, casting back and forth, nose high. Turned around to watch the other direction. Ahjvar, alert now, moved with him. Nothing stirred against the white and dun landscape. There must be something faint in the air, but not upwind, he thought. No unaccounted-for tracks marred the snow. Ghu, the dogs, the camels wandering along the watercourse . . . The camels browsed undisturbed; nothing prowled along the stream that they could sense, but the land was rippled and folded, more than he had realized. To come down from the north and around the rising ground of the ruined city unseen would be possible. Careful stalking might have gotten near and left no betraying tracks, using the lines of bushes rooted in drifts along the stone ridges and ditches, their own footprints, even. The hollows, the walls that still stood a course or two high—there was far too much cover, in fact, for a skilful hunter to use, and the shadows were stretching long and blue with the dying afternoon.

Now that he stood still, even for a few moments, the wind froze his shirt to hard folds and ridges against his skin. He might have frozen his hands. Surely should have. They ached, instead, merely red with cold. He forced his fingers to flex, considering. A moment’s dizziness, white spots in his eyes, ears ringing, a moment’s deep weariness. He shook it off. He wanted the crossbow, but, as he judged the lay of things, if he were stalking an inattentive sleepwalker out exercising on the hillside, and if he had worked around from the northeast in so doing, he would be down in that very hollow, or behind the further slumped ridge of stone.

It was possible, of course, that Jiot had only scented uncertainly some distant fox.

He left his coats lying and started purposefully down the slope towards the camp, not keeping to cover himself. If anyone were going to shoot him, they could already have done so. Watching, uncertain whether to approach, maybe. He didn’t break his loping stride when in the corner of his eye a patch of dirty white heaved over a broken wall to the north and raced towards him, but vaulted the ridge down into the hollow of the camp, striking the person who rose up there with his shield. She reeled back and fell, caught herself on one hand and was on her feet again, a hooked forage-knife slashing. It could have laid bare his ribs, but he turned out of her reach and struck her hand with the flat of his blade, knocking her arm wide, sending the knife spinning away. She had a bow at her back and a quiver on her belt, could have shot him any time.

“We’re no enemies of the lords of this land,” he said in the Nabbani of the road, and stepped back, giving her room. A breathing space, there, as the second—second and third—topped the wall. Time enough for her to call a truce, a word—time for all to hesitate and change the moment. The urge to kill them, to make a clean silent space with no one near to hurt him, was loud, but he did not have to listen, he did not; it was madness and the nightmares and not himself. He knew it, and so he made himself say it again, “Wait—”

She flung herself after her knife and a man leapt down from the wall, swinging as he came. Ahjvar pivoted away and back, slashed up across his belly as he landed, took the other’s faltering blow on his shield and cut the cords of the woman’s neck and reeled, ears ringing and spots again, bile rising in his throat.

Wizardry, to break and hold him. Wizard, the fourth enemy, hidden in the shelter. The last warrior came after him wielding a two-handed sword, swift and sure for all the snow and blood-slick ground, which ran and shifted like water in Ahjvar’s vision, unbalancing him, never quite where his feet thought they were. He gritted his teeth on the burning in his throat and went down on one knee as the world whirled around him, but the man’s sword was a fixed and steady thing in his vision, and his splintering shield was there to take it as he rocked up again, Northron steel driving through his attacker’s guts and up, back ribs shattering, grating. The man fell, spewing blood as Ahjvar yanked his sword loose, choking and swiftly dead. The wizard knelt keening over her clasped hands, a chant rising and falling, what had been a whisper lost in the wind risen only now to audible song. She flung a scatter of pebbles at Ahjvar’s feet and bowed her head, hands open and empty. The fever-dizziness vanished with the dropping of the pebbles. No. Not his enemy. Maybe. Ahjvar put the bloody point of his sword to the woman’s throat and raised her chin.

She swallowed and licked dry lips, placing her hands carefully on her knees, sitting back on her heels. She was young, little older than Ghu, and tattooed with a mask of black braids about her brown eyes. Ahjvar did not remember seeing tattooing on any Denanbaki caravaneers. A sign of her calling, maybe. She wore feathers worked into the end of her long braid. He only now had time to think that the other three had been Nabbani, alien to this land.

“Jiot!” he called, and risked a glance around, but the shaman did not take even that slight chance and stayed as she was. The dog stood on the wall, hackles raised, but tail wagging gently.

“Much help you were. Any more?” Easier to talk to the dog than the woman.

Jiot sat.

“What kind of an answer is that? Out,” he told the shaman, switching languages again and making his point with the sword. He didn’t want to be down in this blind hollow, even if he trusted the dog to know this was the lot, which he did not.

The shaman crawled out of the shelter and stood in silence. She was dressed in a quilted grey coat and sheepskin boots, with a sheepskin over her shoulders, the legs tied about her neck, and a white headscarf over her hat. The dead all wore white headscarves and sheepskin coats with the fleece turned outermost.

So, they had come—from where?—prepared to stalk Ahjvar and Ghu, or someone, over the snow. That did not suggest a curious hunting party or a chieftain’s men out to claim a passage-toll, even leaving aside that the three dead were no natives of this place.

“Go on, up.”

He took the crossbow and hooked the quiver to his belt before he followed.

“Who were they?” he demanded, as the shaman, keeping a wary distance from Jiot, climbed the wall.

The Denanbaki glanced down at the nearest. “Nabbani,” she said briefly, and spat on the body. “Assassins.”

“Not friends of yours?” He prodded and pointed to steer the woman up what might once have been a street of the city, picking up his coats on the way. “Up. Right up to the top of the hill.” The words came more easily with each one he managed. Speak like she was a dog, an honest creature in the world, which she might, after all, be. “I want to see who else is crawling around here wearing a dead sheep.”

“No one is here. Only the dead. We don’t come here,” the woman said. “It is cursed.”

“Today, you did. And it isn’t cursed. I’m cursed,” he said, and suddenly laughed, as if he were on the bare edge of too much wine. “I cursed a whole folk, once. So trust me, I can tell. This hill is quite empty of curses and gods and anything at all, except maybe more of your friends.”

“Nabbani,” she said again. “Not my friends. There are no more, only you and I, alive. The hill is cursed, even its stones. The hill remembers the god who died and the devil who killed him.” But the shaman nevertheless trudged upward without demur, moving as Ahjvar directed, using her hands on the bare turf of the steep banks of the terraces.

“I kill people who work spells on me,” he said.

The shaman nodded, resigned, and did not point out that she was the only one still alive. Ahjvar found this irritating, but he still felt drunk with the aftermath of the fight, the fire in the blood dancing in the void of exhaustion, and perhaps he was not thinking clearly.

Up on the height, the wind sounded like rushing water in the crown of trees about the ruined tower. He pointed at the ground and she sat meekly with her back against a stone, hands withdrawn into her sleeves and folded on her knees. He knelt to clean his sword and shrug on his coats again. Shivering. So was she, but not with cold.

Lots of weeds growing here, dead stalks about the base of the stones and the narrow trees. He didn’t see exactly what he wanted, but, if he let his mind drift, didn’t watch his hands, it didn’t matter. Old grass would do. She watched as he knotted brittle stalks.

“You weren’t with those Nabbani of your own will, were you?”

The shaman hesitated. “You speak for a god?”

“I’m not speaking for anyone.”

The woman frowned, nodded at the grasses in his working hands. “Shaman. Wizard. God-touched.”

“Maybe.”

“You are an enemy of Nabban?”

“No.”

“The Nabbani said you were. Not you, but the one you serve. They said.”

“The Nabbani didn’t know me. Obviously. Or him. No, first, who are you? What were the Nabbani to you, if not your friends? You were working with them.”

“They have poisoned my brother’s daughter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They said they would cure her if we gave them aid. But I think it was a lie. We had to hope it was not a lie, of course we had to hope, but we thought they lied, my brother and I, and now they are dead and you will kill me, so I will not even be able to search them. She will die, too.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Those who come to Letin hunting this enemy of Nabban will die. I saw it.”

“Seeing does not set the pattern. Deeds do. We’re not enemies of Nabban. And you’re not hunting me, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Not my enemy, not my friend’s enemy?”

“No.”

“Good. No reason to kill you, then. Stay here.”

He cast the knotted grasses to the wind and watched how they broke apart, falling, the scatter of them on the snow. They told of emptiness, not concealment. And, because he no longer trusted himself, he spanned and loaded the bow, left the shaman sitting and walked the circuit of the tower. No tracks crossed the snow to shelter in the brush there, no patches of bare grass were so placed as to let someone reach it without leaving a sign, and nothing stirred anywhere up the road to the north or on the empty hills. They had followed in his and Ghu’s own camel-tracks, of course, to reach the ruins.

The shaman sat resigned where he had left her. No place to run, no safety she could reach from a man with a crossbow in the time his circuit had taken him, but she should have tried. Either she trusted his word, or she believed her own foreseeing and counted herself already dead. Or possibly, with Jiot lying close by and watching her, she had not dared to move.

“They poisoned your niece. Why?” He stood with his back against a poplar trunk, watching the east along the watercourse where Ghu had gone.

“They came to us because we are close to the road, close to the border, too. They said they were servants of the empress in Nabban.”

“Empress?”

“The emperor is dead. The empress wars against her younger brother. These said only, they were servants. It’s said the new empress claims the title of Daughter of the Old Great Gods, that a prophet has said she is chosen by the Mother and Father to take their place. They speak of her so in Dernang. We hear. These said, an enemy came, an enemy of Nabban, a false prophet who would bring war and the destruction of the empire.”

“From what I’ve heard, the Nabbani are doing that quite well on their own.”

“They said we were to give them aid in finding and killing him. They needed a wizard, because their own had stayed behind in Nabban to serve the lord of the empress’s army there. The lord of Dernang wars with the empress in the name of the Mother and Father, I think.” She looked up at him. “Thus they came to our winter settlement, to demand the service of shamans from the chieftain Ganzu, who is my brother. There is only the one, myself. I went to the spring of our goddess and sang the prayers and danced for her, and slept there and dreamed. I saw that those who sought to hunt this enemy of Nabban would die, but our goddess told me, aid Nabban and you may yet live, but be certain it is the truth of Nabban you aid. I rode back to the settlement and they had poisoned my brother’s daughter, Shui his heir. They thought to enforce our obedience to their will, as if we were slaves of their own. They demanded I track their enemy with the gifts of my goddess. I told my brother what I had seen, that those who went would die, and I asked him to send me. He would have killed them then and buried them at his daughter’s feet, knowing they lied when they said they could undo what they had done, but I thought I might yet find if they did have some means to save her, and I went back to the spring and begged our goddess Galicha of the spring to do all she could, to preserve the girl’s life a little longer. Her hand is on Shui, but she cannot drive the poison from the child’s blood. Shui’s feet are on the road to the Old Great Gods already, our goddess says. And yet I had to have hope. That, she said as well, our goddess did. I should have hope in our enemy. I thought she meant Nabban. Nabban has always been our enemy.

“Then I threw the stones and saw that the one they sought would be at Letin, so we rode here, and watched from a distance as the one walked away to the east. We came here first, thinking the servant hunted and the master waited, but we found only you. The Nabbani decided to wait while you made your prayers with the sword, thinking to take you unawares as you came back wearied to your camp to make a fire against your master’s return. They would question you before they killed you, they said, and learn more of your lord and what power had sent him against their new god. They did not tell me these things. They did not think I had the true Imperial tongue, but we sell horses and fleeces in Dernang, and I speak for my brother with the lord of Choa, so I heard and understood them, and I said nothing. I hoped they would speak of my niece, but they did not.”

Ahjvar rubbed his forehead. Headache. Prayers with the sword? Maybe. What power in Nabban was there to foresee a threat in Ghu and seek his death? Not the god and goddess who called him back. Surely not. The empress the heir of the gods? He did not like the sound of that.

That was not what mattered, there and then. “I know poisons. Some. Tell me.”

He knew the symptoms: vomiting, purging of the bowels, deathly chill alternating with fever, and the bloody pinpricks that wept on skin and coloured the tears and saliva, seizures and an agony of the joints that left brave men weeping and begging for death. They called it tears of repentance in the Five Cities, which was only the usual Nabbani poetic circumlocution. It was some blended distillation that cost a fortune, a foul thing that took its time and left its victim lingering all too long. A poison for hatred and revenge, not expediency. They had pricked her with a forked needle, the shaman said. A small dose, then. But a child. And even a small dose was deadly, only . . . slower. He had used it a time or two, when some clan-father insisted and could not be argued out of a cruel vengeance. Pointless. Such slow deaths had done little to feed the hag and keep her quiescent, which had been Ahjvar’s reason for selling himself in the cities in the first place. The girl might linger a day or two yet in the hands of her goddess, but there was no antidote he had ever heard of. To work wizardry against poison was no more effective than to battle it by a physician’s skills—both required understanding of what the poison did, and that the damage be not more than what the body could overcome.

The assassins had come prepared to compel by such tactics, or prepared, Old Great Gods damn them and make their road a long one, to use such a poison on their ultimate victim.

He thought of the arrows in the quiver at the dead archer’s belt and sweat chilled him.

“Come,” he said abruptly. “There’s no antidote, but we’ll see what else they’re carrying. What’s your name?”

“Ketkuiz.”

“Ketkuiz. I’m Ahjvar. We’ll go back down. Let me search them. You build a fire.”

Two distant figures, dark and abrupt against the white hills, had risen out of a fold in the land, proof of how easy stalking was, for all the barren ground. He stopped Ketkuiz with a hand on her shoulder, but he and she were against the trees, dull-coloured, hidden.

“Your people or more Nabbani?”

“Ours, no, not on foot. There were only the three Nabbani. Your master?”

That was where he had expected to see Ghu, yes, but not with another person. Yet something moved white on white, four-legged. Jui, and he breathed again. It was Ghu after all, moving at a steady jog-trot. The one who followed was taller, more slender, long hair loose in the wind and a flash of red at the shoulder, all bird-bright colours against the snow . . . Surely . . . no.

“Cold hells.” Now he was cold, yes. “Ketkuiz, these assassins, when they said they were sent against an enemy of Nabban, did they say he or she?”

“A man,” she said. And, losing some of her dull resignation. “Why?”

He shook his head. “Maybe Letin’s past returns to haunt it after all.” But he left that remark in untranslated Praitannec. “Come. A fire.”

He waved an arm, stepping away from the concealing trees. Ghu saw him on the instant, waved back.

All right, then. Both of them all right, for all they each had a shadowing stranger.

Ahjvar burnt the arrows clean in the fire Ketkuiz kindled, setting the iron points into the hottest heart of the flames. He did not like the glossy dark gleam on them, no. He fed the bamboo quiver to the fire as well, and searched the bodies, inert and awkward weights to move and fouling to the hands. Each wore an enamelled badge on a chain about the neck, some device identifying their service, intricate as a coin or a seal, interwoven geometric shapes, flowers, maybe, on one side, and two characters just as intricate and intertwined on the other. Court script, but so ornately stylized he couldn’t make it out. Each had a tattoo, as well, deep black and new-looking over the heart, a round-cornered rectangle like the border of a slave’s brand. He found the first by accident, getting at the chain of the badge, which that man wore inside his inmost shirt, then pulled open the shirts of the other two and found them marked the same. The script within he could not read, either, but did not even recognize it or what language it might be. Flowing, yet jagged and barbed with thorns. Wrenched further at clothing and found that all three had a slave’s brand on the back of the shoulder. Min-Jan, the imperial clan. Slave-assassins of the emperor? He did not know how to interpret what any of that meant.

Every damned blade they had carried he laid on the fire, burning clean any poison that might taint them. Good knives, a fine sword, but they could lie here and rust. In a satchel under the last swordsman’s coat Ketkuiz found an array of small jars, stoppered, some sealed in wax and some with their seals cracked, and a roll of soft leather containing several two-tined bronze needles, a blowpipe, darts.

“Don’t touch,” he snapped, though the shaman had used a dead man’s scarf wrapped about her hand to open the bag. “Let me.”

The jars were labelled in court Nabbani. All poisons, every one. Most he knew, by name or by sight. Seeds, resins, dust, oil.

“Out!” he roared when Jiot came nosing in. “Ketkuiz, more wood, a hotter fire. Gods, I hate this, I hate it.”

“Is there—” she began to ask.

“No, no antidotes to poison here, not even for these—” He pointed to the jar of small red beans. “—and there is a leaf that taken soon after will cure their victim, often. But there is no antidote to tears of repentance at all, unless maybe you vomited it up the moment after it was taken, though I doubt even that—and certainly not when it was given in the blood. I’m sorry. But we need to burn all this, so there is no accident. Out, dog.” He certainly wasn’t going to carry those foul little jars; he was through with such deaths.

The ghosts of the slain Nabbani were very still, unnaturally so, not a flicker in the corner of the eye, not a pressure of presence on the mind. He was used to that. The dead saw the wrongness of him, as the living did not. He worked the stoppers out of the jars using one of the assassins’ knives and upended each into the flames, dropping in the emptied jars and corks.

“Take the dog and get upwind,” he advised, and thought to look to see where the camels had gone. They were far enough away to be safe from the smoke, which turned first heavy and yellowish, then greasy black. Only when every jar and every edge had been given to the fire did he try to reach out to the ghosts, thinking he might persuade them to speak of their master, this empress of Nabban who foresaw and feared Ghu so.

Nothing remained of the assassins but cooling flesh. He had felt nothing, handling them, but now that he searched—still nothing. Empty, not shocked and quiet, confused and lost as a new infant, which was not uncommon in a murdered soul. Empty, as if . . . but the hag was dead.

“Did you free the souls?” he demanded angrily of Ketkuiz, who had gone to sit on the wall, Jiot at her side.

“No. I don’t see ghosts. Are they already gone to the road to the Old Great Gods? I would have left them unblessed with the ghosts of Letin.”

Earth, fire, deep water, even salt in the corpse’s mouth might set a soul free to the road. Or a god’s blessing, which death by Ahjvar’s sword certainly was not. Baffling, and contrary to nature.

“There are no ghosts in Letin,” he growled. “Not even these ones that should be here.”

Except of course the devil Yeh-Lin herself, striding up at Ghu’s side. She had, since he saw her from the hilltop, taken on her old woman’s guise again, her lovely face lined, waist a little thickened, her hair iron-grey and swinging short about her shoulders. Even the splash of brilliant colour she had made against the snow was muted, brocades faded to something more in keeping with her Praitannec plaids. Only the scarlet tassel of her hilt was still bright as blood and flame.

“Dead king,” she murmured in Praitannec, as Ghu, silent, stepped up on the wall to look down on Ahjvar’s butchery. Ketkuiz watched him, eyes gone wide. Ghu did strike some women that way.

“You’re still here—Ahjvar.” The devil made the name sound like a child’s pretence she condescended to share. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’m not sure you’re a good idea. I thought you swore service to Deyandara. What are you doing here?”

“Your granddaughter, or whatever you call her, is content and well and in no need of a tutor, as I have already told Nabban. She sends me after you, with instructions to be useful. So. Here I am. Being useful, as you can see.” She offered the dead winter-white hare and brace of pheasants she carried as proof. “What have you done to make Nabbani enemies? You haven’t even crossed the border.”

“I was wondering if you might know that.”

“They’re nothing to do with me.”

“They were sent, the shaman says, by the empress of Nabban, to destroy the enemy of Nabban. He, this enemy, not she, although now I wonder if perhaps whatever oracle sent them made a mistake.”

Yeh-Lin raised her eyebrows. “Interesting.”

“Can you read this?” Delicately, he worked the chain and badge off over the dead woman’s head, tossed it up to Yeh-Lin. She snatched it from the air and held it in the light.

“Oh, you are in trouble, and you haven’t even crossed the border yet. That device is meant to be peonies—the badge of the imperial family.” She turned it. “And this says, in a very obscure form, wind in the reeds. Or reeds in the wind. You could read it either way. Spies. Assassins. The emperor’s own. The Company of the Wind in the Reeds, they were when I formed them to be my eyes and ears in the land. Interesting.” She slipped it inside her gown.

“What about that?” He rolled over one of the men, exposed the tattoo. Her nose wrinkled fastidiously, but she hopped down, forgetting to seem to have a care for old knees, and came to squat beside him. Touched carefully with a forefinger.

“Huh.”

“What does it say?”

“Interesting.”

“It’s not Nabbani.”

“No.” She shrugged. “It is—a calligraphy you would not know.”

“I know I don’t know it. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“It’s a phrase. The gate and the bridge. That’s all. It means nothing to me. Poetry, maybe. It sounds like something your granddaughter could make a song of.”

Ahjvar turned away in annoyance.

Ketkuiz still watched Ghu up on the wall, not the devil. Finally she looked to the old woman, back to Ghu, to Ahjvar, and licked dry lips. No powers here for a great empress to fear, he could see her thinking. No blessings here to save her niece. “Your master,” she said to Ahjvar, softly, as if that might stop the others hearing. “Is he a priest?”

“No!”

“He looks no priest. No wizard, either. But they feared him, and I do see there is the hand of a god on him. My lord—” She slid off the wall herself and bowed to Ghu, deeply, in the Nabbani fashion, hands together. “Forgive our aiding your enemies. We were forced. Your swordsman Ahjvar has freed us but please, if you will, lord, come to my brother’s hall. If my niece still lives, perhaps—perhaps she might yet be saved, by your will.”

Ghu looked down at her, but Ahjvar didn’t think he saw. Fallen into that old deep darkness, maybe, the world losing him. Perhaps he did hear his gods. Or ran, to hide.

“Your master?” Yeh-Lin murmured. “My, my. I can’t help but notice neither of you has rushed to correct her. And here I thought he was your horseboy.”

“Shield-bearer,” Ahjvar said. “So? Now I follow him. Ghu?”

“What sent them to the road?” Ghu asked, returning to himself, coming down to crouch by the dead.

“I don’t know. They were just gone. I don’t know when.”

Yeh-Lin spread her hand on the man’s chest, frowned, now. “Interesting. They aren’t gone to the road, Nabban. Can’t you tell? There would be a . . . a scent of it, an echo, the call of the stars. . . .”

Ghu shook his head.

“Something has taken them.”

“No,” Ahjvar said flatly. He felt nauseous, cold and yet sweating again.

The devil shot him a sharp look. “Not destroyed,” she said. “Not necromancy, either, not exactly. Just . . . taken.”

“By what?” Ghu asked.

“I can’t say. I don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

“I think—nothing,” she said. “What does the shaman know?”

“Nothing,” Ahjvar said. “She wouldn’t have given them any blessing even if the ghosts had begged.”

Ketkuiz had waited out the Praitannec discussion in a tense silence, but when they all stood up from the body, she bowed yet again. “My lord—”

“Wait,” Ghu said. “I don’t know what you want of us. Ahjvar?” He might be asking for an explanation, but he meant, Will you try? Can you try? Try to bear being among people.

‘Yes,” he said, before the tide of his fear could start to rise and swamp him again. “We should go. We don’t want to cook here where I’ve been burning poisons, and we owe Ketkuiz all the help we can give. Poison. They forced the folk of this land to aid them against us by poisoning a child. There’s no cure I know, but she wasn’t dead yet when the shaman set out with the assassins. Lin?” He in his turn made the shortened name a question.

“Ah,” said Yeh-Lin, eyes narrowing. “No promises. Tell me.”

He did, as briefly as he could. Weariness, now that he had stopped moving, seemed to crawl his veins. Cold beyond hope of warmth, and words a labour. He would not let it pull him under, not yet. Not his doing, this child’s death, but nonetheless . . . he felt the sin of it. It came because they were here, in this land.

“Maybe,” Yeh-Lin said briefly. And to the shaman, “I don’t think our lord—” and no whiff of irony touched the words, “—can help you, but I know something of medicine and of healing wizardry. I can promise nothing, you must know that, except perhaps to ease her suffering until the end. But I will try what I can do. If,” she said, with what still seemed utter sincerity, “my lord Ghu says I may try.”

The look Ghu gave her was unreadable.

“Yes,” he told Ketkuiz. “We’ll help if we can. But we know nothing of these assassins. We’re only travellers. We’re only going home.” As the shaman bowed to him again, he gave Ahjvar’s shoulder a reassuring touch before climbing back to the top of the wall and whistling. Only Ahjvar failed to look impressed when the camels appeared shortly thereafter, looking down and snuffing inquiry.

They walked, the laden camels following, no need to lead them. Ahjvar fell back to Ghu’s side. They had no language between them that the devil did not speak, but a glance was enough. Ghu shrugged.

“For now,” he said.

Yeh-Lin, walking beside the shaman, looked over her shoulder and smiled.