CHAPTER XX

The Daro castle, called the White River Dragon for an old, old tale of its founding, sat to the northeast of the town, separated from it by a broad moat. The spring flooding often reached so far, lapping at the town’s eastern flank, mingling with the waters of the moat, but Dernang was on a low mound and the castle itself on a higher, safely above the waters in most years. The castle’s main gate faced the town, with a bridge between, but its second gate looked east and flung out a raised roadway towards the river. Ghu did not want to keep too close under the city walls, so he led them out into the fields, heading cross-country to circle to the river road, across wet fields that sank into ankle-deep water. The ditches became drowningly treacherous, marked only by lines of cattail and reed. Ghu and Ahjvar went barefoot; there was water even over the road, and boots meant for the winter desert were no use for wading. The cold numbed Ghu’s feet. These were the waters of the Wild Sister, Mother Nabban’s own river, whose three main sources converged two and three hundred miles south of here, carrying the waters of the mountains that bordered Choa and Alwu over shallow, stony beds. Spring melt, always, and sometimes the autumn rains in the mountains, swelled her waters to push over the land, a shallow lake drowning thin clay and the beds of ancient stone beneath. He felt her in the water, felt him in the stone, the Mother, the Father, like a slow, slow breathing, a tide in his blood, rising. The river’s tree-lined banks were only a weight in his mind, lost now in the night. The bridges over the small streams that fed her rose humped and forlorn, like the hulls of overturned boats, from the lake she was becoming, and then even they faded, as the fog thickened and they moved blind in darkness that felt muffling, no reflection of moonlight on water to guide them. The drowned lanes he followed through the fields were only memory to his feet. In the fog, he could fade to nothing himself, to memory, instinct, with only the shuffling splash of Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin, the more rapid spatter of the dogs, to anchor him.

Something brushed over him like a trailing cobweb, an insect on the skin. Something drawn by the fog, wondering at it. An awareness, searching.

He held himself very still, very small, as he had when the eyes of the Lady passed over him in Marakand. There was nothing. Only fog, cold air and day-warmed water, damp fields breathing. Fog was common to the season, fog was blinding, muffling, a blanket in the dark.

The touch faded, distant as a dream and he slid down again into his own place, the night and the fog. Found the pattern . . . became a part of it.

The Mother stirred uneasily, like a sleeper disturbed, but she did not reach to touch him as the gods had when he crossed the border. Already, she was less than she had been, even then.

No matter, in this moment. What might be, what must be—what could, what should be if only he could move the world about him as he needed—hovered. No words. Pattern, yes, a juggler’s wild spinning of pieces, a weaver’s threads flung all in the air but he could seize and move and bind and shape if only he kept all moving to his hand.

No words. Easier to have no words, to let them go. Ahjvar grew angry when he forgot to speak, when he let the words go because they were too thin and yet too complicated and cumbersome a thing to hold in mind. No words in the fog, in the night, only the flying threads, the pieces of a shattered shape all tumbling through the air, falling, and this one, now, to save, others to lock into it, others it would draw, and hold in strength, to build . . .

Ahj was angry now. Not for silence. For this place, for the old lord, for Meli. Ghu was not sorry it was so. It warmed him, oddly, and awed him. There had been no one to be angry for him, for them all, when he was a child.

He climbed the bank to the raised road and broke into a jogging trot. The way beneath him was his, and the night, and the fog. When the castle loomed, an artificial island the size of a Praitannec village, it was as though it was a mere slow thickening of the fog. Stone walls and whitewashed towers, low spreading roofs upon roofs, only a faint solidity. The moat was lost in the still floodwaters, but the shallow fishback arch of the bridge showed where its depths lay. The eastern gatehouse rose dark over them, wings of the roof held out like a swooping bat.

Too cold for swimming. He waited for the other two to come up beside him.

“Take my pack. I’m going around to the postern. There’s a boat there. Keep well back and follow along on the shore. Don’t splash. Don’t fall in.”

“I could open those for you,” Yeh-Lin whispered against him.

“No.” It must not be her doing, not Dotemon’s, to be the first assertion of—of what he would claim. He knew that, felt it in the marrow, and the riverwater that for this moment seemed to flow in his veins.

But he did not want to pass over this threshold. He did not want to be again within these massive walls. He had not wanted to bring Ahjvar to this place. Deep in his chest there was a slow-smouldering anger that had never died, all his life. He had taken it in with his mother’s blood, been nourished on it within her womb. The lord, the castle, all Nabban . . . he did not know which it was for. Pity, mercy . . . they were what he needed. He had found them for Meli. The Kho’anzi Daro Korat had been a fair master, on the rare occasions when he had had to do with such as Ghu—small things, the least of things, within the great compass of his lordship. He had had far worse treatment from fellow slaves and from folk in other lands who would call slavery a sin against their gods. But something burned. He did not want Ahjvar, who would have killed that spiteful, stupid, pitiable fool Meli for striking him, to know of it, to unleash on the folk of this place the rage that burned undying in Ghu himself. Nor to be by him here, where he had been owned and despised and beaten and of no worth. It sickened him to stand here.

Ghu took a breath, and crossed the bridge before there could be any further debate, most of all with himself. Torches burned there to show up any approach but the fog swallowed them, muffled their light. He passed under the blackness of the outflung eaves of the gatehouse; wings, but not for his sheltering. The outermost gate was a grille of age-dark cypress, bronze-studded. He set a hand to it. The river’s breath wrapped him. He could bring it down, the gate, the whole weighty stone strength of this tower. In this moment . . . he turned away, to move a little longer in quietness, like the river’s rising in this broad vale.

The angle of the high scarp where the moat rose to meet the curtain wall was steep, faced in smooth stone. Just around the next bend to the north there was a postern gate and no bridge, only a boat, usually, moored to a ring in the wall. There were carp stocked in the moat once the floods subsided, harvested for the family’s dinner. Slaves of the outer services, stables and gardens, weaving-sheds and workshops, potters, carpenters, smiths, masons, tile-setters and all, had poached them when they could. He remembered that, now. Much he had put from his mind and pretended it was forever. Steeper than he remembered, this scarp, almost vertical, a great cliff, but he had been smaller last time he clambered along it. He splayed himself flat, toes and fingers seeking the joins in the stone. If he slipped, it would be a splash too great to be dismissed as a leaping fish or disturbed duck. If he slipped, better to have swum after all. He remembered the water, deep but swampy, stinking—it would be fresher now in the floods, if colder. He’d been thrown in more times than he wanted to remember.

Too much he did not want to remember. But he remembered everything, everything since the river. His mother drowned him . . .

Foot slithered. He clung by fingers alone a moment, till toes found a hold. Crawled up and went on. Finally, the first of the many rounded corners, but the only one he needed to pass. There, the jutting darkness of the postern gate, a stone porch, and the punt where it had always been, as if he had never gone. It dipped and bobbed as he used it to scramble around to the little landing-stage, still an inch above the waters. No torches here to gild the fog, which had thickened as he worked along the scarp, until he could see neither the far side of the moat nor the moving shadows of Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin. He leaned against the door and closed his eyes, fingers spread on the wood. Let himself go again, into cold, into night, into biting frost and the death of the year, when even mountain oaks might crack and stone split, hillsides sheer away . . .

Iron bolts, top and bottom, secured the door. Wood cracked. Stone split, a snap like breaking ice. Loud, but there was no other sound within. Ghu leaned, gently. The door moved.

Not, Ahjvar would say, subtle. But it was done.

He left it to cast off the punt, sculling over the stern. The oar creaked on its pin. Too loud. Ahjvar caught the blunt prow and steadied it as Yeh-Lin and the dogs leapt in, followed them, pushing off from the drowned and stony shore, leaning up to his elbows in the water.

Ghu sensed, rather than saw, Yeh-Lin’s movement to speak and touched her hand to silence her. Once inside, he picked up the bolts, fallen with splintered wood and flaked stone, staples and nails and all. They were still white with frost, but warmed to his hand. He closed the door behind them, cutting off the fog that reached to follow, and fitted the broken ironwork back in place. Even by day the passage was dark. It would fool the eye until someone tried to draw the bolt. Time enough.

The passage was narrower, lower, than he remembered. A sharp bend, a grille suspended above, meant to be dropped to trap an enemy, and gaps in the ceiling through which to finish the work. Mostly, in the peaceful years he had known, it had been a passageway to the punt and the fish for the kitchen staff. There were two men in the chamber above, asleep. He wondered if they were meant to be, and wished them to stay so. Through the thickness of the wall to a covered passage and out into a cobbled yard. The fog pooled there, wrapped him as if in welcome, followed him.

The castle was a maze of interconnected baileys, buildings, towers, lanes, and narrow passages on many levels. The main keep was a serene and lofty island floating amid gardens at the centre of it all, stronghold without, palace within. Neither slave nor free servant of the outer castle crossed those gardens on the green moss of the lawns or the white-gravelled paths unsummoned. Ghu was not sure he would even know the way, but the keep wasn’t his aim—not yet. He threaded a path between walls, through gates, across cobbled yards and hard-packed earth, along narrow alleys, up and down steep, shallow steps and around broken-backed turns, making for the stables near the western gate, but taking a shortcut he would not have dared as a boy, along the bamboo-laid pathway from the house-slaves’ quarters. Burnt ruin of a weaving-shed. Burnt ruin of the soldiers’ kitchens. The potters’ building with its doors smashed in. Gates into yards wrenched off their hinges. Truly a village, this, but one made to be a maze as well. Dawn could not be far distant. Past the household troop’s barracks, its doors hacked open, a reed screen hung to keep out drafts. No one kept a watch there, though many slept within. The stable complex, beyond an intact granary, was familiar. Strong scent of horse. He crossed the square of it to the western stable block, with its grand entry porch and low square tower over it. Sacked, Meli had claimed, but the damage could have been far worse. The general would have wanted the castle whole and fit to live in. A watchdog stirred and came to him, nosing at his hand. Not one he knew—he had been gone almost a dog’s lifetime—but it did not growl even at Jui and Jiot.

Here, he risked a whisper, a few words, sending Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin to wait, with the dogs, in a corner behind a stack of straw. Ahjvar stood a moment, but then followed Yeh-Lin in silence.

Through the door. Not a homecoming, no. He had a strong impression of the ruined broch on the cliff with the unending sound of the sea below, smoky, salt air, the shaft of light where their attempt at a turf roof had fallen in. A deep and painful yearning to be back there, not here, not in this place again, whelmed up in him, choking, but horses stirred, and horses were welcoming. He quietened them, not even a word, urged the boys asleep in the far corner room with the lord’s most expensive harness to sink deeper in their dreams, and took the stairs to the tower room.

The door opened silently when he lifted the latch. Much as he remembered, smell of horses and oiled leather. He found his way to the side of the bed, a pallet on the floor, without tripping on anything. The room seemed smaller than he remembered, only a few paces to cross. He crouched just out of reach. The shutters of the windows were closed against the night. It was some sense other than vision that assured him this was Horsemaster Yuro. Fortunate he was here, and not over the river with the foaling mares. In a nest of blankets in the far corner, like a dog’s bed, a child curled sleeping. Ill, Ghu thought. Usually the ill of the stables were handed over to Baril, who oversaw the eastern stable wing and the girls and womenfolk of the horses, especially if they were female, as this child was. Baril was the one who made the salves and the potions for drenching. Fever on the child. Her dreams were formless, fearful, dark things, hard to grasp.

“Master Yuro?”

The man stirred.

“Master Yuro! Wake up.”

He woke with a groan and a snort and a mumbled, “What is it? Ghu . . .?”

Eight, nine years it must be at the least since he had gone off down the river—time was a bit vague before he came to Gold Harbour, and he had been a boy then. The man couldn’t know his voice.

“Ghu,” he confirmed. “Master Yuro—”

“What?” More alert now. “Is that—? No . . . Who?”

“It’s Ghu.” The room was cold, no embers in the brazier, nothing at which to light a candle. He rose and opened the shutters. From here the fog was a sea of white, hugging the ground, but the sky was clear and there was enough light to make out shapes; the moon would not set until after sunrise. Yuro folded a gown around himself. “Oh, Sen. What is it?”

“No, it’s Ghu, Master Yuro,” he said patiently, and stood still while the man trod close and peered into his face.

“Ghu? No.” Hesitantly, “I was dreaming of Ghu. Come back drowned out of the river looking for that damned white colt.”

“Yes.” Words fled him, but Yuro thought he still dreamed. He must speak. “Not dreaming, Master Yuro. The gods’ truth, I’m Ghu. I’ve been in the west.”

“Ghu. Ghu! You damnable fool, what did you want to come back for?”

Ghu turned aside from the swinging arm and hooked the man’s feet out from under him, reflex more than anything, as the failed slap had been. Yuro lurched up and flung a punch, not now the mere back-handed cuff that had driven so many words home when he thought a boy wasn’t listening. Ghu knocked him flat on his back, standing off warily as the man gasped for breath. The dog down with the horses barked once at the thump, which would likely wake someone, but if nothing else followed they wouldn’t bother crawling out of warm blankets . . . No one called out, not even Ahjvar.

Yuro sat up, didn’t move to come after him again, so Ghu offered his hand and Yuro did take it to help himself up. Ghu gripped his wrist and jerked him close. “Don’t hit me. Ever. I have a friend down below will kill you for it.” His own anger surprised him. Yuro had never had too heavy a hand, compared to some.

The horsemaster stood frozen, till Ghu let him go. He moved away, rubbing his wrist. “You’re not Ghu. The boy’s long dead.”

“I am. Truly.”

Master Yuro groped on a shelf, seeking flint and steel, from the sound. Eventually he struck a spark into a dish of tinder and lit a tallow candle at it. The yellow light showed his hair grey-streaked, which it had not been, his broad weathered face more lined than formerly. He brought the candle too close to Ghu’s face, peering at him, only half a head taller now.

“You look like him. Maybe. Grown up.”

“It’s been a long time. If you didn’t think it was me, why hit me?”

“I thought I was dreaming.”

He could hear Ahjvar’s acidic comment on that. Even in their dreams, people hit him.

“You shouldn’t have come here. They’ll burn your face for you.” A glance at the heap in the corner. “At best. They’ve killed her, I think.”

“Who is she?”

“Doesn’t matter. Let her sleep. Maybe she won’t wake ever. What in the cold hells did you come back for, if you actually survived to get away? I figured you were in a ditch with your throat cut years ago.”

“I needed to come back.”

“I used to dream you were drowned. I don’t know why. It was the snow nearly took you.”

“But I was drowned.”

“That. No, you weren’t. You were alive and wailing when Gomul fished you out.”

“I know, I remember. But I was drowned, regardless.”

“You don’t remember; you were a newborn babe.”

“I do.” Smell of mud and water and crushed green reeds. Cold water that wasn’t cold, that carried him . . . The boy whose hands felt so hot they burned, though it was only that he was cold as the water himself, when they plucked him up, thumping his back, and words . . . no meaning in the words then. It was a long time before words had meaning. The world had been such a vast and overwhelming thing . . .

That Dar-Lathan girl, the one they had to keep in chains . . .

They spread them around the imperial manors, after the last battle of the war. Never too many. Gave them to the lords. They didn’t make good slaves, the warriors of Dar-Lathi. A lot of them died, one way and another.

She got the baby on the long march north . . .

Wouldn’t give suck to the infant . . . They kept her chained to stop her killing it. To stop her running.

The lord didn’t know they’d chained her. He wouldn’t have stood for that. Old Duri’s orders . . .

Worked the staple out of the wall and walked into the river in her chains, with the baby . . .

It was Gomul who named him, and the stable-folk used to hold him to suckle among a litter of puppies until the scandalized and furious house-master Duri found out about it and, since the Kho’anzi forbade that he be thrown back to the river, which Duri at first ordered, made one of the under-cooks his wet-nurse. Gomul was dead of a bad fall by the time Ghu was sent back to the stables, four years old, maybe, or five, not old enough to be any use among the horses but judged too slow of mind for the kitchens, and mute besides.

He remembered the smell of the kitchens. Disorder wild like a storm. Incomprehensible noise. Heat and shouting and the kitchen-master who struck out with an iron ladle at any failing or slowness. The stables were better.

He took the candle from an unresisting hand, stuck it back in the horn-paned lantern on the shelf. “Sit down, Master Yuro.” But it was the polite honorific of the road he gave him, not the Imperial word for one’s owner or a higher ranking servant of the house. Slightest of differences in sound, a world of meaning. Yuro raised his eyebrows at it, hand folded across a probably-sore midriff. Ahj didn’t always hear that difference when he snarled about it.

“Where do they have Lord Daro Korat? I need to find him.”

“Old Great Gods have mercy, do you not know what’s been happening here?”

“Don’t shout. Yes, I do. I need to get the Kho’anzi away. I need his name, to take this province.”

“Need?” Yuro, who had not sat, took a step back. “The province? Do you know what you’re saying?” A frown. “You never used to put enough words together to make sense.”

“I’ve had to learn. My friend growls at me when I don’t.”

“You’re not the boy. You look like him, maybe. If he went north. All sorts of wild things in the Denanbaki hills and the desert. Demons. Spirits of the wind and the sand. The stories the caravaneers tell . . . You’re not him. Something’s putting words in your mouth. His mouth.”

“I went south, Yuro, and east. To the cities and the sea. And west, after, to the Five Cities and beyond. Now I’m back. Do you want Daro Korat to die?”

“No! Never such a death as they mean for him.”

“You didn’t join Sia.”

“Lord Sia was a fool and damned all his family. Once he had the Kho’anzi, the general said he was going to kill even the children. Don’t know if he meant it, but the ladies poisoned them to spare them. Their own children.”

“Who’s the girl?” Ghu tilted his head towards the heap of blankets.

“Lady Daro Willow.” Yuro’s lips thinned. He had not meant to answer.

“The baby?” The Kho’anzi’s third and last daughter’s baby. A scandal, that had been. She had been refusing a betrothal to a young lord of Musa Clan in Taihu, an alliance the old emperor had strongly hinted would be to his liking, when her pregnancy became obvious. The father had never been named that Ghu knew of, but it ruined her marriage prospects. She had always wanted an officer’s commission in the couriers anyway, not to be lady of a household. She gave that up, as well, to raise her baby herself and not leave it entirely to slaves and her brother’s wife. Or maybe she had had other reasons for not wanting to leave the castle . . . riding down along the river, and a man who thought himself out of sight in the willows at the stony spit where the coltsfoot bloomed so thickly in spring. Take my dogs for a good run, Ghu, she said. Take both horses. I’m going to sit and watch the water. . . . Lord Sia’s confidential secretary, he had been, secreted in the willows, some minor banner-lady’s younger child, landless, rankless. No fit match for a high lord’s daughter. Ghu had always understood the baby’s name, if nobody else did.

“So you know who the child was. Doesn’t mean anything. You could know what’s in Ghu’s mind, maybe, what he remembers. Whatever you are.”

“Two of the Kho’anzi’s family left to him. And he himself.”

“One.”

“I am Ghu, Yuro. And if I did not talk much, I listened. Are you going to let your father be sent to die in the Golden City, or will you help him?”

Yuro sat, then, as if the wind had been knocked out of him a second time.

“Where did you hear that? Old Great Gods, not even—no one—”

“It’s in your heart,” he said gently. “Every time you stood before him. And in his.”

Yuro said nothing, so Ghu bowed and turned away. It would have to be the river, then. The punt would not hold so many, once they had Lord Korat, but he could swim the moat, and they could raid the village on the mound southward for a proper boat—would the Kho’anzi in hiding be enough to rouse the province, with an imperial army in Dernang? He needed—he knew what he needed and could not see any way to it, but through the devil.

To start so . . .

He paused by the girl. “What did they do to her?”

“She ran from her aunts—her mother’s dead. I mean, two years dead. Died in childbirth with a second baby and no father known for that one, either. Though—Sia’s secretary had died of winter fever not long before and I saw the life going out of her with that, if no one else did.” He added, “She always liked the horses.”

Yuro had had affection for her, then, the sister who did not know him her brother. Ghu had liked her too. It spoke well of both of them.

“But Willow, she hid, when the family—did what they did. House-master Duri couldn’t roll over fast enough for the Zhung general. He told him who the girl was, when they found her halfway down the fishpond overflow drain. General Musan said a bastard Daro brat wasn’t much of threat if she was put in her proper place and ordered her branded for Zhung Clan and set in the castle records as a captive of war. As if she were a foreigner! They sent her to the kitchens, and I don’t think that lot were any too kindly. Scared for their own skins if they were, maybe. So the child took the punt across the moat, three nights ago now—the flood hadn’t come up so high yet. She stole a horse from a courier station—no one knows how she managed that—but they caught up with her, of course. Don’t know where she thought she was going. So Musan marked her as a runaway.”

“Someone meant her to die,” Ghu said.

“General Musan. With his own hand on the iron. I took the girl out of the kitchens to see what I could do, for her mother’s sake, but I’ll have to send her back in the morning. If she’s still breathing. Musan is—” He shook his head. “To execute rebels is one thing but—”

“Bring the light.”

Yuro hesitated, just long enough to make it clear he was not jumping to the order. But he brought the lantern and held it up. The child lay on her side. Her skin was slick with sweat and a flushed, unhealthy colour; her hair had been shorn to a knuckle’s length all over her head. The wound on her face was a crusted burn, purple, black, red, oozing. The iron left in place too long, searing too deeply. The eye above it was swollen and her breath heavy and wheezing. Ghu knelt and pulled back the thin gown. The brand on her shoulder had nearly healed, deep and livid though it was, only seeping a little, and crusted, smeared like her face with some rank-smelling salve Ghu doubted was doing any good. He put his hand over the festering new burn on the girl’s face. She was dreaming now of the moat, of cold, lightless water, struggling to reach it, to drown herself, while hands like claws clutched her back.

“You’re stronger than that,” he whispered, because it was true, but despair and surrender were heavy on the child, as killing a force as the fever that ate her. “Be stronger, Willow.” The little hand found and gripped his suddenly. Eyes flickered, not quite opening.

“Tell me again,” Yuro said abruptly. “Tell me again, why you’re here. Why you’ve come back, why you talk so. To take the province. Are you mad?”

“No. Yuro, do you truly think a newborn baby should survive, in the river? How long was my mother dead when Gomul found me? How long had I been in the water?” Almost a whisper. “Yuro, I am here; I belong to the gods, who send me to you, to Nabban, and if you love the gods, believe me. I need Daro Korat.”

“You need. You tell me what you are, before the gods.” The horsemaster’s voice shook. “What thing you are and what you did to young Ghu.”

The fever was cooling. Ghu put a palm over the burn on the girl’s back.

“Why come back?” Yuro demanded. “Whatever you are, and I don’t believe you, why? What’s the old lord to the gods? I know what’s planned for him; I know how the emperor killed his enemies and the empress’s rule is no different. Worse. She executed all her brother’s counsellors before his body had even cooled, that’s what they’re saying. If it’s true. Had them summoned to her and murdered by Wind in the Reeds there before her, to show what would happen to those who didn’t accept her. I don’t want the old man to die a traitor’s death for defying that kind of tyranny. He was always—he wasn’t like Sia, after anything with breasts. Whatever my mother was to him, it was something that mattered, and to both of them. He was always kind to me as he could be, while his mother lived and ruled the Daro, and kind to my mother who was mistress of the stables before me, and after—she died in the same year as the old lady so it was too late, wasn’t it? But the little lady—he let Willow have the Daro name and set her in the family descent acknowledged in her lordship and that was for—for what he hadn’t done for me, as much as for his daughter’s child, I knew it. But Lord Korat will die. So many have, and the gods have done nothing. If they exist at all. Why? Why say you need him?”

“I told you. I need his name—”

“The Daro name is worth nothing now but death. Look at Willow.”

“I need the Kho’anzi. I need the army of Choa, the banner-lords of the Daro Clan.”

“There is no Daro Clan in Choa. The name is forbidden. They’re to be Zhung, all Zhung, even the banner-lords, those few who’ll keep their rank. Or their heads. There is only General Zhung Musan’s army; he’s been appointed Kho’anzi of Choa now. All the companies of the town and the border posts are his. Prince Dan’s army—I don’t know if it ever existed, or it was just a wish of Lord Sia’s. There were certainly companies from over in Alwu roaming like brigands here, mostly harassing the imperial forces, but they’ve scattered. There’s rumour that there’s still a rebel army over in Alwu, but we haven’t seen them here. Here, the garrison of the castle, our lord’s own banner-lords and his soldiery—they were disarmed when Lord Daro surrendered himself to the general. They laid down their weapons trusting in General Musan’s word and honour, and they’re imprisoned now and to be sent in chains to the Old Capital with the Kho’anzi, to die with him. The younger sons, the warrior daughters of every Daro family, the household armsfolk. There is no Daro army. They’re all prisoners here.”

“The Kho’anzi was a good lord and the soldiers of the clan and lords of the province and their banner-lords will find their heart again for him,” Ghu said. “But they won’t follow Daro Korat’s horseboy.”

“Why should they?” But it sounded a plea.

Ghu sighed, sitting back on his heels. “Yuro—I am all I ever was, and I become all that the gods, who claimed me before Gomul ever fished me from the river, mean me to be. Believe, or don’t.”

“The empress—her people say the gods are dead. They pray to her as a goddess, Chosen Daughter of the Old Great Gods. They’re tearing down the shrines of the woods and waters, building temples and altars to the empress. They kill the old priests, now, if they don’t turn from the Father and Mother to serve the new cult-centres in the towns. The family of the Swajui shrine are dead. You think the gods have sent you to fight that?”

“Yes. They have. The gods aren’t dead yet, but they are dying, Yuro. They have been dying a long time. But they have not set any child of Min-Jan’s line to take their place.”

“That’s not a prophecy to bring the folk to follow you, boy, or to bring them to the Kho’anzi’s banner either. Anyway, there’s not a mad fool who claims to hear the whispers of the gods who doesn’t die for it in short order.”

“There is more honour in fighting to renew this land than in making yourself a slave, surrendering choice and leaving the struggle to others. I don’t claim to be a prophet, but it is the true heir of Nabban who will shape the fate of this land now, not the children of Min-Jan. Not the empress.”

Yuro snorted. “Not the Min-Jan. That’s what the prophets say. Old Great Gods—yourself, you mean?”

Ghu looked up. “Yes.”

Something touched him again, brushed over him, hesitated, lost in fog, and passed on.

Yuro was silent, lips working as if he chewed his thoughts.

“You’re mad,” he said at last. “But you’ll take Lady Willow away? You’ve been in foreign lands. You’ve been out in the world. You’ll take her over the border to Denanbak?”

He could not answer that. It felt wrong. Where? Swajui, the shrine of the Mother’s rising. No. He must go to Swajui, to the holy spring, and up the mountain to the Father, but Daro Korat—the Kho’anzi was where he needed to be. Here.

Prince Dan. If the man was not dead, he must find him, too.

He was mad. They were three, against a castle.

But they were already inside the walls.

“How do you think you can get her out? Demon magic?”

“I’m not a demon.” But he had a devil leashed by her word. For now. If he thought it right to use her.

He did not. But she was the only weapon he had to hand.

Yuro shrugged. The little girl, beneath Ghu’s hand, mumbled and curled up smaller, like a dog getting comfortable. Her grip on Ghu slackened. “How?” Yuro persisted.

How, indeed. “We’ll manage.”

“Who’s we?”

“Friends.”

“Caravan-folk?” Eyeing Ghu’s sheepskin coat.

“Not exactly.” Ghu sighed. “It’s you I wanted, Yuro. Your help. Your sense. Your care for your father. But if you will not, at least stay quiet here. Bar your door and keep the child safe. I don’t think we’ll get Daro Korat away without bloodshed.”

“I’ll meet you on the road,” Yuro said. “With horses and the girl. We can run for Denanbak.”

“There are two wizards.” Yeh-Lin’s voice, the door ajar. “There were wards and guards on this castle, and you walked through them without a stir, my lord, I don’t know how, but the attention of something has been drawn by this fog, and now one at least of the wizards is waking and knows things run amiss. We’re out of time.”

“My lord?” Yuro repeated.

Time. The moment, flying. Not away. Here. Now.

“Daro soldiers,” Ghu said. “Prisoners. Where?”

“What? Cellars of the western tower,” Yuro said. “If they’re not drowned. It’s flooding down there.”

“Get them out. Arm them. Where’s Daro Korat?”

“At the top of the great keep in the sunset room. Don’t be a fool. You can’t—”

“Ahj!” He was out the door and halfway down the stairs, with Ahjvar coming out of the darkness there to fall in at his side.

“What?”

“The Kho’anzi,” he said. “We need to take this place. Now. Tonight. We need to hold it. Come.”

The gods in him gathered strength, and the thing that watched the fog, the tendril of awareness that had touched him, wary, wondering, was dispersed. For a time. It did not see him clearly, not yet. But one of the imperial wizards stirred ink in a silver shell, and breathed on it. Eyes met his, widening, lit by candle’s flame.

“No,” Ghu said aloud, and brushed the man away.

“What?” Ahjvar asked.

“Wizards. Watching.”

Ahj shed their packs in the mulberry orchard, cut a thin branch from a tree they passed and stripped the bark from it as they went. “Wait,” he said, and as Ghu paused, impatient and yearning to run, Ahjvar split the wand, leaning back against the wall, and scored lines on it, muttering, “Walnut, mountain ash, grape . . .” none of which would be growing in this enclosure. There was some shape of will there, made between his hand and the knife and the green wood. That which was hidden and the reversal of sight. The wizard, away in the keep, cried out and dropped his silver shell, blinded and clutching his eyes. A woman demanded of him that he speak, say where the danger lay, and he cried, “We are cursed by the gods, lady. Forgive me, Father forgive me.” Another . . . another wizard, somewhere in the keep, walked into a wall, rubbed her eyes, and began to run.

“Damn. I’ve lost one,” Ahjvar said. “Where’s—” But no point asking, Yeh-Lin was not with them. He snapped the stick in his hand, dry and brittle now as if a year dead, and dropped it, loaded the crossbow. “Go on?”

“Yes. Run.” A bell jangled alarm somewhere high above.

They ran where they could, crossing gardens, went warily in the narrow passages between buildings and on the shallow steps. The place was designed to lose and trap. The Zhung soldiers had been quartered here only a few weeks. More likely they would trap themselves in dead ends than he would. And from the cries, they were mostly being sent to the gate and the outermost yard, after the stables. The air smelt suddenly of smoke.

“She wouldn’t fire the stables,” Ahjvar said, and gave him a shove when he broke stride, almost turning back.

No. She would not. Trust. The smoke was doing what she meant, drawing enemies away from the keep. He ducked into a narrow gap between buildings, damp walls, mossy stones underfoot, eaves nearly touching. Steep climb, three sharp-angled turns. Broader passage, a gate, closed. He jumped to catch the top and swung over it, dropping down into a family garden. Ahjvar followed one-handed, holding the crossbow. Soft lawn, clouds of magnolia opened like white stars, and dark mountains of juniper. The ornamental fishpond, a stone statue of a leaping fish. Beyond, there was a low retaining wall and then a raised platform of crunching white gravel to cross, before the towering keep itself.

Torches burned at the entry porch. Lanterns lit the perimeter of the keep’s platform. Light glinted up high. No windows in the stone-built ground storey.

They were two, and this was madness. Fog, which had trailed them through the passages, across the garden, thickened over the pond, climbed to blur the lights.

There was a darkness against the plastered walls high above. Shapes. Not shuttered windows. Elongated . . .

Death.

They cried out to him, wordless, beseeching. Ghosts, trapped souls. Bodies. Four. Old man. Young man. Young woman. Girl-child.

Hanged from the upper windows of the keep, swinging over the eaves of the next storey down.

He swayed and would have fallen as their fear and pain and loss poured through him, but Ahj seized him as he crumpled, and he caught himself on the top of the retaining wall.

“Who?” A whisper. Ahjvar could see ghosts, and must see these.

Ghu shook his head, could not speak.

The old man—the old man he knew, the old man had turned on his heel once, in the horsefair, eyes wide, and bowed to him, stable-grimed slave that he was, leading a pair of yearlings Lord Sia had purchased for racing, and hurried away . . .

He knew all of them, even the child, who could not have been born when he fled. He knew them. They knew him.

The family of the Swajui shrine.

The shrine, burning. Soldiers. The shrine, burning. The general, a face of terror, a moustache, a helmet with a crest like antlers. Soldiers, and more soldiers.

The gods were dead, they cried. The empress’s will would have no gods set before herself, no prophets crying of the wind from the desert, the wind from the northern mountain, the fall of the house of Min-Jan and the Peony Throne cast down.

Soldiers hunted them through the forest. Soldiers dragged them away and beat them and kicked them, and the shrine burned and the house and they hacked at the holy tree.

They were kept with the former Kho’anzi, to die with him for hiding his rebels, which they had not done, but two days past the priestess who kept the shrine of Father Nabban in the town had preached against the new goddess in the market of Dernang. The empress as goddess was a lie, she cried. The time of the Min-Jan emperors was ended. She was cut down by soldiers in the town, and then in his rage, because that was not punishment enough, the general hanged the family of priests of the Mother, the child last of all, grinning, laughing, as he put the rope around her neck. Hanged them from the window of the upper room, while the lame old lord in his chains tore his wrists raw to come at him.

They fled to him, the ghosts, nothing to see, memory and soul, scent and light—they flung themselves into him, and the river was waking in him to set them free, to give that blessing and break those bonds, to end the pain and let them go.

The corpses hung empty and he was on his knees, leaning his forehead on the cold and fog-damp stone, fingers clawed against it.

He could break the stone, in this moment, this place. Shatter it, pull down every tower. He had but to call to Dotemon and turn her loose to do what she would. He hanged our priests, whose family vows forbade them weapons. His thought. Theirs, Mother and Father. Zhung Musan hanged a child. He made the child watch, till the end, the last of them, as they were thrown out the window. There were no words.

He shivered as with deep cold. Ahjvar laid down the crossbow and crouched by him, hands on his shoulders.

“Zhung Musan,” Ghu said. Words. There, he had found words. But too few. Found more. Enough, if they could ever be so. “Priests. The family. Because a priestess in the town spoke against the new lying empress, the false goddess. The child. It was not a swift death, hers, Ahj, she was so light. Ahj, they are all our folk, all Nabban, but I will not, we offer no quarter to Zhung Musan.”

There was a weight of oppression lying on the gods, crushing them. Smothering. But their rage went deep as their sorrow, and he was their outlet. It flooded blood and bone.

“Yes,” Ahjvar said, and caught up the crossbow to follow when he went over the edge and strode to the door, and the torches flared like bonfires and the fog roiled and spread like wings about them.