CHAPTER XXXI

Damn Dotemon. What game does she play? She stalks him, stalks the empress. If she understands what he wants, she may yet deny it to him, destroy her own tools to keep them from his hand.

Empress of Nabban with a god leashed to her hand? An empire in the east? Would Vartu ever ally with Dotemon again? Would Nabban follow Yeh-Lin the Beautiful, twice rid of her before?

She is nothing to fear. She never has been.

He does not want her loose to interfere regardless. Difficult to destroy her.

Drown her, break her, leave her trapped in long years to pull herself back together. The best course. And it will shake their confidence in their slave-born god.

Over five thousand men, nearer six, marching, but not on the highway, which swung away from the river to hug the shadow of the escarpment. The river road was shorter, though in this season it was also muddy, puddled, and outright gone half to swamp. They had no wagons and wrapped in the river’s breath, they were harder to see. So said the heir of the gods.

The important thing had been to get them out of Dernang, which could not feed them. They were joined by straying bands of rebels and fugitives, drawn to the banners of the god and Prince Dan, who would be making his base at the fort of the Dragon’s Gorge. One could not have two cooks in one kitchen, in Yeh-Lin’s opinion, and two lords in one castle, even serving the same master, would be ill-advised as well. Leave Dernang and the rule of Choa to the Kho’anzi, leave his lieutenant Daro Raku to command the sizeable garrison left behind to guard it against brigands and banditry, or against some counter-rebellion of hidden imperial support. Zhung Huong remained as governor of the town under the two Daros to deal with the day–to-day practicalities. Dwei Ontari was sent into Alwu with Dan’s orders, which he would follow where he would not have followed the god’s. Couriers were sent to Shihpan, announcing their prince’s restoration, commanding the borders be held against any imperial incursion, summoning certain lords to their prince at the Gorge. Couriers were sent, less openly, out south and east, carrying messages to the shrines, or to hunt those priests and families of the shrines who had fled into hiding. The dreamer Nang Kangju had been left with Lord Daro Korat. The young wizard Gar Sisu, who had given her oaths to the heir of the gods, travelled with that part of the army sent down the river and was to remain with Prince Dan.

And all in less time, Yeh-Lin thought, than any army had ever been stirred to move in all Nabban’s history. A few thousand men and, as the strays joined them, women as well, still winter-weary, many still barefoot, for all the soldiers might be somewhat better fed than they had been under Zhung Musan. As they wound their way down through Choa they could see the village fields being planted and tended again, and they did not raid them, nor trample them. But the river could not feed them all with its fish. If Dwei Ontari proved false . . . but she thought him true to his lord, willing to set aside his own doubt for Dan’s faith in the heir of the gods, so long as the god’s aims seemed to follow the same path Dan had committed to when he raised his banners the previous year. So long as the heir of the gods did not drag Dan to death in his confrontation with the empress. Nothing to lose. They were condemned traitors, both Dan and Ontari; if the god proved true, then well and good; if a deluded madman who journeyed to his death, at least he left the north in better order than he had found it, and under Dan’s hand. And the restoration of his prince to himself would count for much with Ontari, she judged. So he would come with the cavalry of Alwu. The eastern ferry landing, where the river made a border between Alwu and Choa, was very close to the border with Numiya. It would be held for them.

Her mirror showed her nothing of the empress, though Yeh-Lin sought her almost nightly. Nothing. Divination—hers, Ivah’s, Gar Sisu’s—found nothing. Even the dead king was persuaded to make a drawing of the wands in the Praitannec way, but no revelation came to him. It was as if Buri-Nai, and whatever force she travelled with, had vanished from the world. Enclosed in a devil’s fist.

A worry. But it was a long way from the Golden City to Choa, even if the empress went first by sea to Kozing Port or the fishing towns of the lower mouths of the Wild Sister, and the imperial armies of recent history moved broken, crawling, driven by fear at an oxcart’s pace.

Yeh-Lin was impressed with what young Nabban had, by contrast, inspired—persuaded, driven—his folk to achieve. Speed, most of all. They marched light, and in hope and trust of their god. They were organized in half-companies, bands small enough to start to feel kinship, to know and maybe to trust. In the five weeks they had been encamped at Dernang after she took the town, she had seen that their officers drilled them with spear and what swords they had, and new crossbow companies had been formed.

It was her rafts freed them to move. No clumsy platform of logs but a shaped thing given form by their layers and lengths, higher in the water—a vessel, not a desperation. They rode the water as if it carried them willingly, and maybe it did. Even the one that had run aground the day before was floated clear undamaged, losing none of its load. The god blessed his own. The riverers, proud of what they had achieved and in so short a time, held themselves to have become the personal followers of Nang Lin, the god’s captain-general. That she had named herself after a devil in her challenge to Hani Gahur was her biting humour, and they loved her for that, as well. It was that brought her out onto the rafts. She would rather have ridden ahead with the advance guard, who were also hers and who would have the camping ground chosen, hearths and latrines and laneways marked out with flags before even the rafts, always the last to leave and the first to arrive at any camp, ever arrived, but it mattered to the raft-captains and the folk who crewed them that she be among them sometimes, that they not lose her entirely to Prince Dan’s army before they came to their end and their craft were broken up for their timbers. While they had the river and their unity as a company, they wanted to have her.

Nabban was somewhere out here on the water today, too. He, too, had come to understand the need to give himself to his folk, to share himself.

The chill of fog stroked over her skin, but there was no fog. The raft, heavy thing that it was, nevertheless danced with the water, no contrary wind catching their load like a sail and sending butting waves to make them labour at poles or oars to force their way downriver. The two sisters at the great steering oar at the stern sang with it, a song of menfolk left behind and the river’s freedom. Ti sat out of the way, as enrapt as if he listened to one of the great poets. Folk had sung that same song on the river in Solan when she was a girl. Jang and Kufu were up in the bows sitting with the grizzled raft-captain, who was teaching them, so far as Yeh-Lin could overhear, the river, talking of currents and winds, floods and storms she had known, the lore of the sky as it related to winds and water. The rafts did not keep the strict order of the marching companies and half-companies. Sometimes, where it was broad enough, two might even race, raise a bit of sail on stubby double masts, if the wind was right. One swung close now. Half a company of the archers on that one, rather than tents and provisions, a great offering of souls to the river if they tore one another apart. Though every raft-captain seemed to fear the shame of carelessness, with the river’s very eye upon them.

Green fields to either side. The river was safe and quiet, the god’s own place.

But the fog Yeh-Lin could not see felt greasy on her skin.

She stood up, swaying atop the net-bound stack of their cargo, turned through a full circuit of the horizon. For what good that would do. The scouts were out of sight ahead, the main force behind, hidden by the river’s twisting course. Nothing moved on the eastern shore. Alwu, like Choa, was a sparsely populated province, though between the rocky, forested hills its soil was deeper and its grazing fatter. Once into Numiya, the pastures and meadows that made a web around the crumpled hills would fade away into cropland and villages and manors each nearly within sight of the next. She was still not certain how best they might travel, Nabban and what she could not help thinking of as his hearthsworn, old phrase of the north. Disguise meant giving up their far-too-excellent horses for commonplace nags, and what to do about the dead king’s hair and height . . .

They should have been secret on the river. She had the chill conviction they were not.

Yeh-Lin descended to the deck in a few hops.

“My lady?” The captain broke off her talk.

“Children, go to the stern with Ti. Get your backs to the cargo and stay away from the water.”

“Why?” Jang asked.

“Now!”

Too indulged. She was not their grandmother. But they ran without further word. The captain had bounded to her feet at Yeh-Lin’s tone, taken up the long-hafted boathook of her authority. Blunt, maybe, but the bronze head was no weapon to be discounted.

“Danger, my lady?”

“I don’t know.”

The gentle sway of the raft was changing. The river was narrow here, swifter, deeper than it had been. Dark. Tangled stands of willows lined the shore. Ambush? No, nothing living there but what one expected: birds, snakes, frogs, voles.

Silence. No song. The water was loud, slapping against them, under them. The captain breathed too loudly and Yeh-Lin almost snapped at her to hold her breath, as if that would help.

Small clouds above made patches of shadow.

Cold, cold, cold. Claws of ice, not fog, striking, freezing, ice in her veins, ice to hold her, stilling thought, paralysing—

Waves gathered. The motion of the raft changed, diving and bucking, a gathering of current like a bunching muscle, a snake coiling to strike. The captain shouted, turning, so slowly, too slowly, to stare at the darkening water, shadow coalescing into . . . life.

The shadow gathered itself, creature of old bone and mud and water, reared up high as a tree, struck. Fangs long as a hand splintered logs; the prow ducked low, flinging a wave over them all, but it surged up again as the fangs tore free. A child screamed and a woman cursed. The captain had fallen to her knees, but struggled up again, water sheeting from her hair, her boat-hook gripped like a spear.

“Dragon!” the woman shouted—warning, terror, disbelief in equal measure.

The great head, the size of a man’s torso, had disappeared beneath the water again. River water, cold river water, soaked her.

Move! Dotemon raged, burning in her veins. Move! But ice held her.

At the steering oar they were shrieking of dragons, repeating their captain’s cry though they hadn’t seen what hit them. Trying to summon the crossbows of the following raft. No good. The river carried them all.

Stench of old rot long buried, ancient death, forgotten, gone to slime and stone. The water heaved and churned, brown and frothing. Something dark beneath the surface, arrowing towards them. No. No, no, and no.

For a moment Yeh-Lin felt herself what she was not—was not, bone, gaunt skin, old wounds, and the fire beneath, the fire within her marrow, cold and hungry, the stuff of stars, of ice—

The raft-captain glanced her way, stared, mouth opening on some cry of horror.

Unravelling—

No. We are not.

Yeh-Lin tore herself away, pulled herself together.

“Behind!”

And as the captain spun back to the river it thrust from the water again and Yeh-Lin leapt to meet it, snarling, her sword a song in the air. Skylark, she had named it long before, that voice that only she-Dotemon heard clear as water, edged as glass, keen and piercing as the sun in the sky. But the ice still clutched at her to slow her, ice or memory of ice, and the creature struck the captain, seized and shook and tore shoulder and arm away, flung back its head to gulp and swallow even as what was left of the women fell away and the Skylark sang, carving the snake-neck to the spine. They were screaming at the stern, the raft tossed and flung, new shadows coiling under the water, darkness in the air. This head was the length of a tall man, maw snarling wide enough to engulf and bite a woman in two. It snatched and tossed the bulky green-brown body of the first aside, lashed away as Yeh-Lin swung for it, whipped around and struck. She stepped aside and brought her blade sweeping up, but the thing was fast as a striking snake, fast as her own thought. So was she, rolling away. Wood splintered from its missed strike.

Yelling. Another raft angling close, the crossbows shooting at the shadows, the dark thickening of air that was striving to become—something. Fools would hit the children. She screamed at them to hold, hold as another massive head reared itself over her, Skylark’s edge opening a gouge in one great throat and at the same time she reached into the water, the air, reached for what shaped this forgotten monstrous life . . .

Something went into the waves from the other raft, smooth and silent as a diving bird. She knew him before her eyes had understood, felt him, the river suddenly a live thing, and it sucked down the smoke-shadows and the cold fire burned free through her veins, waking from its ice. Her second kill slid away, dissolving into river-muck and weed. The last head lashed back the neck’s own length and plunged down after Nabban. The raft rolled over god and monster both, carried by the current, as Yeh-Lin leapt the mangled body of the raft-captain and raced to the stern and her children.

The water roiled. The creature thrashed half out of the water alongside them, a thing that should not have been, streaked now red and white, rolling, its belly opened like a gutted fish.

They had pushed little Ti up tight against the net-bound storage jars, Kufu and Jang shielding him, all clinging together. The steerswomen knelt, one with a knife, one with another boathook. The head began to rise again, wounded as the creature was, snaking across the surface of the water for them. Yeh-Lin stood with a foot braced on the frame of the steering oar, waiting, but steel flashed up its neck and ripped a gash a yard long before it reached her. It sank. Red curling and coiling in the water, darkening, water foaming pink along their sides, fading, shadow, dissolved into nothing, the river quiet, gone bright and dark and sparking in the sunlight. The god hooked his knife into a crack between logs and heaved himself onto the deck, black coat and trousers clinging, hair slicked flat. No expression, none, as he came to his feet. Cold eyes, black and deep as night’s own ocean. But it had not been she who summoned the creatures from bone long gone and the memories of the ancient seas held in the stone, and his anger faded as the shadows had. He went around her with merely a nod of acknowledgement—going to the dead captain. She turned and the pages were staring, but Ti broke from the other two and rushed to her. She dropped her sword in time to catch him, hold him against her, and Jang and Kufu followed. Ti was sobbing. He was so very young. She tried to remember being so young, and went down to her knees to hold them all, three shaking young bodies pressing close.

“Captain Lin?” She looked up into the face of one of the women, grey, sweating, river-soaked. “That—was that a dragon?”

She had no name for it. “I don’t know. But it was sent by the enemy of the heir of the gods. Look to your steering!” They were drifting out of the current, twisting sideways, and other crews were recovering from alarm to hail them, crying out for news.

Ghu came walking back down the deck, sombre, as if shadows still clung to him.

“Your sister died fighting the monster,” he told the two leaning on the steering oar again. “I gave her to the river.”

A fit funeral for a riverer, and better that they did not see her dismembered body, Yeh-Lin thought. Better that the children did not see.

Did she mean to take them beyond the fort of the Dragon’s Gorge? Had she given it any thought at all? Better they stayed with Prince Dan, who had left his little Jula in the care of Lady Willow’s governess at the White River Dragon. Better she had left them behind to attend on Lady Willow and chase after Jula.

The sisters of the raft wept, but they did not leave their steering.

“Take us in to shore,” Yeh-Lin said. “The danger is past . . .” Switched to Praitannec. “Is it, Nabban?”

He considered her. “I wasn’t their quarry.”

She had not given that thought. “Ah. Take us to shore, if you would, sisters. The danger on the river is past and Prince Dan and the lords must be shown the heir of the gods is safe.”

“You knew,” the younger of the sisters said, and Yeh-Lin was about to deny any such thing, but it was Ghu who shook his head.

“You knew,” she insisted. “You knew the false goddess sent dragons against us and you came to the rafts with Lady Lin today to protect us.” And she loosed her hold on the oar and went to her knees. “My lord, I know you would have saved my eldest sister if you could, but she died honourably and is surely blessed on her road, to die fighting your enemy’s creatures. My lord, is the river safe now?”

“They’re gone,” Ghu said. “I don’t think there will be any more.” But he looked worried, and too young, with it, until his gaze fixed on Yeh-Lin again. “At least, not of that kind. But we need to raise some guard against any further attacks by whatever it is the empress has made her ally. Lin.”

“Yes. I—will work on that. At once. Shall we find your rihswera and Lady Ivah?”

“Best we do, yes.”

“Take us in to shore, sisters. The river is safe for now.” She felt confident of that, at least. Nothing watched; no attention stroked over her skin, raising warning hairs. Not that its defeat had been any of her doing.

Humbling that.

Perhaps it was good, to remember fear.

But not at the cost of these children. What had she done, taking them to herself?

Ivah’s eyes had snapped suddenly to the river, leaving some remark to Prince Dan unfinished. Ahjvar, riding aside, beyond the crowd of the commanders in a solitude no one was going to break, had felt it too, a silent thunderclap, a burst of light he could not see—something flooded the world and Ghu’s attention fixed on it with the total focus of a striking falcon. Felt it, as if the light, the sound that was neither light nor sound coursed through some invisible channel between him and Ghu.

And then he was shut away, as if a door slammed to between them.

Ahjvar could have drawn a line straight to him nonetheless, ahead on the river, the rafts, late starting, slow in passing the march this day. He had already set Niaul to a gallop, swerving around the herald and banner-bearers who preceded the lords, startling the archers of the vanguard, even before he heard the hooves behind. Ivah’s grey Denanbaki, gift of Daro Korat to the god’s Grasslander. She wouldn’t catch Gorthuerniaul and he didn’t wait, though she caught up when he had to rein in, a cat-scramble over scrubby ground, down to the riverbank. The dogs, too, hurtled after him, barking, for what good that would do. He had his crossbow out, spanned and loaded, the moment Niaul was still. Could see the one raft beset, the water dark and churning, rising in storm-waves, something hidden there, flash of sleek greenish-brown, gone again, nothing to aim at. Shark, was his first illogical thought. Wrong colour, wrong water, but that slick hide and the twisting speed in the water—he couldn’t see Ghu, only a slender figure shrouded in pale fire, and the creature fell away, was gone. Ghu heaved himself out of the river to the deck, forage-knife in hand. Ghu was the only real and solid thing, a stone, as the rest of the world went thin and blurred as ink on wet paper.

Ivah was swearing in a language he did not know and his skull was splitting with the sort of headache he used to get in the aftermath of the hag’s hunting, vision gone half-blind and ragged. Then the world took slowly its proper solidity again. The burning figure of light was gone, become Yeh-Lin, down on her knees engulfed by children, and he had nearly squeezed the trigger.

Ivah knocked his aim down to the stones, snatched the bolt and shook it at him.

“Whatever that thing was, it’s done for. What’s wrong with you? You could have killed one of the pages. Bloody fool, can you not see?”

“No,” Ahjvar said through clenched teeth. “I can’t. What in the cold hells was that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what lives in Nabbani rivers. Crocodiles? Horse-whales?”

“Burning.”

“What?”

“She was—” She was Dotemon, and I do not think you would see the difference between us, naked of the body of this earth. “Was she—did you see her all burning, turned to pale light?”

“No. Ahjvar, do you have seizures? You look—”

“No!” He tried to slow his breathing. Niaul was tossing his head, ears back, catching his—panic, was what it was. He slung the crossbow behind the cantle, quieted the horse, reassuring himself just as much as the stallion. “What in the cold hells is a horse-whale?”

“I don’t know. Something in the sea. The Northrons hunt them for ivory and rope, though.”

“What?”

“It’s what my father said.”

“Hunt them for rope?”

“Never mind.” She offered him the crossbow bolt back. He rammed it into the quiver as a party of the lords arrived, confused and questioning and noisy. Ivah turned her grey to deal with them, letting him escape down to the water’s edge as the raft grounded its nose in the shallows. His vision was clearing, though every step the horse took jarred up his spine as if he’d leapt and misjudged the nearness of the ground.

Ghu was giving Yeh-Lin’s two elder pages a hand to leap over to the shore. Yeh-Lin swung the youngest herself.

“Lord Yuro!” she called. “Will you look to my pages? They’re unharmed, but I fear rather shaken. Gar Sisu, the danger is past for now but look to your lord—the empress’s reach is greater than we realized and the prince may be in danger.” The devil went back to the two rafters, standing arms about one another, and spoke to them softly, heads together. A second raft had followed them in. Yeh-Lin leapt over to it, was giving its captain orders. While she waded ashore, a party of a dozen soldiers with crossbows crossed to the first, helping to push it back out to deeper water, climbing aboard as it came to life again.

Someone had died out there. Ahjvar knew that as if he had seen it. Ghu stood at his knee, apart from the flurry of questions, Yeh-Lin’s firm seizure of the moment holding all their attention: an attack against herself as the chief wizard of the heir of the gods, the holy one’s defence of her, the heroic death of the woman who had captained that raft.

Ghu would fade away and leave them if he could, Ahjvar rather thought, but this was not the moment for their god to drift from their view and Ghu knew it. He leaned against Niaul’s shoulder, arms folded, looked up at Ahjvar. The dogs were silent at his feet.

“All right?”

“No,” Ahjvar said. Should it not have been he doing the asking? “What was that?”

“Something sent by the devil behind the empress, I think. It wasn’t after me.”

“Wasn’t it?”

Ghu nodded at Yeh-Lin.

“Huh. And she failed to stop it.”

“Yes.”

He could let his hand rest on the wet hair a moment, reassurance.

“Time to haul her off for a quiet talk?”

“It might be. Bring Ivah.”

Ahjvar gathered his reins, turned Niaul as Ghu went to the lords and their officers, reassuring them the danger to the rafts had, for the moment, passed. He caught Ivah’s eye, crooked a finger at her. She followed obediently. Some of Yuro’s folk were bringing up Snow, saddled and pulling ahead, scenting his master, with Yeh-Lin’s cranky piebald and the pages’ ponies. Ghu escaped, moving through the folk with an assurance that parted them like blowing leaves, a straight line to Snow, a nod to the young man who turned the bridle loose, and he was up, barefoot, still dripping.

“Y—Lin. Ivah. Ahjvar. Come.” And Ghu was shaken, for all his apparent calm. Her name had almost escaped him.

Yeh-Lin bowed. “Children, stay with Lord Yuro and the prince. It’s safe now.”

Companies of foot had passed on the river road when the lords turned aside. They folded themselves back into the line, with the blue banners and their household warriors about them. Ghu set off inland, crossing a field, furrows crumbled and rounded by the winter’s frosts and tangled with weeds, but still uneven going for the horses. A ditch to jump and then a narrow cart-track angling up a low green ridge that had surely been an island in the spring floods.

Deserted now. Stitchwort, pigweed, foxtail grass. Blackened timbers hidden beneath. Village straggling along the lower ground, manor house above? Nothing, now. No sign of any folk having returned to raise a shanty, plant taro and beans, round up straying swine. Zhung Musan’s handiwork on his march north.

Clean wind, no scent but bruised green and horse. There was still a stone coping to the well in a hollow of the hillside; Ghu turned there, watching the last companies pass below. He might have only been seeking privacy, and a place they could speak without watching for ambush, but the folk below would see their god watching over them, the black-clad figure and the white horse standing like a blessing, and be reassured against whatever rumour might be passing up and down the line.

“What was that?” Ghu asked.

“I don’t know, Nabban. They were creatures made from the memories of the stone of the river.”

“Don’t play games.”

“My lord, I—do you want a name? I do not have one. You know what it was. The devil who serves or is served by the empress is not in Nabban, but he reached, from wherever he is, to strike at me.”

“A woman died, Dotemon, and you stood by and watched. You didn’t even try to defend her.”

“I could not. I could not—her death is my failure, and I am sorry for it. I was overmatched and held, for just that little. I told you, I am . . . restrained. The goddess-tree of the underground river still holds a part of me. If the captain had not attacked the monster herself, it might have taken me in that moment.”

“A river monster could have killed you so easily?” Ivah voiced Ahjvar’s scepticism.

“Oh, I’m sure I could have survived, and recovered, but taken me into the river, yes, left me wounded and useless to you for a time, yes. And forced me in doing so to reveal myself as something other than a hale old wizard-woman. Which may have been what was intended.”

“Why?” Ghu asked, and Ahjvar demanded, “Why not attack Ghu directly? Assassins in Denanbak, on the mountain.”

“I don’t know. But consider, dead king—” At least she used the Praitannec words and Ivah might think it title or insult or a byname as she chose. “—that it is the empress who sends the assassins. This was not the empress. This was not an attack on the convoy or on the army. A single raft’s worth of, what, barley and oil? What sort of a target is that? They could expect us to lose so much by mere everyday accident, the hazards of the river. It’s a miracle of your young god we have not.”

“Why attack you and not Ghu?”

“How should I know? Because our enemy does not believe we are anything other than what he himself is, a power holding a human mask before it.”

“He thinks you’re his real enemy?” Ivah asked.

“He thinks. Maybe. Am I not? Nabban, what, in the name of the Old Great Gods, do you think you can do against a devil? Against Jasberek or Jochiz or Vartu, what do you think you can possibly do, in the end, god of all Nabban though you may become? Yes,” to Ivah, “you deny Vartu is our enemy and I do admit this is not her—her style, but—”

“Not my enemy,” Ivah said. “Not Ghu’s. She is yours. Yeh-Lin, she’s killing the devils. The rest of you. She’s hunting you all.”

Yeh-Lin’s expressive face was masklike in its stillness then.

“The black sword,” she said.

What black sword? But there was the chill of deep water in Ahjvar’s marrow. It stirred beneath the surface of nightmare, the Lady’s mad dreams spilling from her lips. The sword of the ice is coming is death . . .

Ghu, unspeaking, reached across the space between them, brushed the back of a hand against his cheek. He blinked and gasped and felt the sunlight again.

“Why?” Yeh-Lin demanded. “And why does An-Chaq’s Grasslander daughter know this?”

“I’m also my father’s daughter.”

The devil considered her a long, cold moment. Ivah just raised her chin, but her horse shifted nervously under her.

“Ahh,” Yeh-Lin breathed. “I see. You have his eyes. And his way of knotting your forms into the unexpected when you weave your strings. I should have known you sooner. So Tamghiz Ghatai has had another daughter. Well. We shall see what comes of that, when it comes. Ulfhild Vartu I will face if I must, but she is not here. Her, I have seen, and I think we have an ocean between us now. And I also think that you are correct and that it will not be she we find holding the mask of the empress before her, at however great a distance. So. Nabban. I ask you again, what do you think you can do against a devil, alone and without me?”

“But it’s what he thinks that matters, whoever he is,” Ghu pointed out. “So that’s answered. The empress may believe me her rival and her enemy, and send her assassins because of whatever her wizards see, but the devil holds me of no account and attacks Yeh-Lin. Good.”

“Good?”

Ghu shrugged.

“Not good if our devil is going draw the attention of our enemy to us all the way to the Golden City, whoever’s will was behind this attack,” Ahjvar asked. “How do we prevent him striking again?”

“I was foolish. I thought of the empress as our enemy and whatever she served as too distant to be a threat till we came to her, unlikely to act except in her defence. He will not fix on me again.”

“Are you so sure, old woman?”

Yeh-Lin only looked at him. There was fire living in her, white, now, and cold. He could see it for the space of an eye’s blink.

“Fine. Ghu?”

“If she says so. But we should do more to be certain we have some warning, if she is wrong. Ivah, work with Yeh-Lin. We want to know—what? When we are watched. When something begins to reach for us. We want these companies on the road and the rafts on the river protected, so much as they may be, from this sort of attack out of nothing, this shaping of the stuff of the world against us. I can . . . maybe. On the river, now, I might know sooner what he began.”

“Yes,” Yeh-Lin said. “I did feel it. Not soon enough. I was not certain what it was I felt until too late.”

“If he does strike at you again and you’re warned, can you do anything?” Ahjvar wanted to know. “Or do you just stand by helpless a second time?”

“That’s unfair, dead king. And yes.”

Ivah had pulled leather cords from her pockets and was weaving cat’s-cradles, frowning, shaking her tangles free. She might as well have been muttering, thinking aloud. “Trying to shield against a devil’s attention, when he already knows where we are?”

“He may not,” Yeh-Lin said. “We may be—I may be, only glimpses in the fog.” She shrugged. “Difficult to explain, if you do not see as I do.”

“So show me,” Ivah said. “And guard yourself better in the meantime.”

Ghu’s face, watching the devil, seemed less hard now. “Go with her, Ivah. Go now. Do what can be done, both of you, together. If she’s some bright spark among us to draw a devil’s eye, she puts all the folk in danger.”

“And you, Nabban?”

“I—am only the river, Dotemon. Do you see me, when you look?”

“Not always.”

“And you know where to look and what I am.”

“The assassins have found you twice.”

“Yes. And you weren’t much help on either occasion. No, sorry. I didn’t mean that. You saved Shui from the poison. I don’t expect you to guard me, Yeh-Lin. Leave my rihswera to do that and look to yourself, so that you don’t draw the lightning down on the march again. Go on ahead. We’ll follow.”

“My lord.” No argument, and no snide remarks about the god wandering off alone with his dead king.

They watched as the women rode away, down to find themselves in the dust of the rearguard.

“You want to stay here, catch up tomorrow?” Ahjvar did. He felt as though the world had gone quiet, clean; as if he could breathe again, and it was not the absence of the noise or the smell or the dust, but of the people, that freed him.

“Yes. But better not. Better I’m seen in the camp tonight. Yeh-Lin would say so.”

“Don’t let her decide what you should do.”

“It’s common sense, Ahj. My folk, here because of me. I need to wander the fires, to be seen.”

“Is that what you were doing out on the rafts?”

“I suppose.”

“And that was so very safe.”

“Hah. You. Come here.” Ghu reached over to embrace him one-armed, cold and damp and smelling of the river, horses jostling together. Pulled his head down to kiss his forehead. “I’m all right. I am.”

“Ghu?” His head still ached. Something he wanted said, because around all the fires tonight they would be saying it with awe but also with acceptance, because the holy one was their god and of course he had killed a dragon for them. It wasn’t awe Ahjvar felt. What? Pride? Something that made him want to laugh. His starveling stray cat, his half-wit boy. “You killed a damned dragon. With a forage-knife.”

“Didn’t have anything else,” Ghu said, with that slow smile that was like the warmth of a hearth in the night.

“I shouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

“Those weren’t really dragons, anyway. Did you see? Something the devil made. Memory. Ancient, older than the river. Older than men.” He considered. “The dragons of the river—are mine.”

“What dragons?”

Ghu looked over, gathering his reins as the dogs plunged ahead down the hillside away from the river, barking at nothing more exciting than a hare. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re long gone. Maybe they never were. But I dreamed a dragon once, when I was small. I dreamed dragons again last night, Ahj. I think we may see dragons again, before we’re done.” He set a course after the dogs. “Let’s see what’s inland. Don’t need to catch up till evening.”

Did they not?

Good.

The empress had given herself to a devil. No, there was a devil in the north, who set up a slave as a false god to deceive the folk. A necromancer led an army over the provinces of the north, leaving villages burned and empty behind her, and the holy empress, clothed in the radiance of the Old Great Gods, marched to oppose her. The Mother and Father were reborn in a champion who would end the tyranny of the Min-Jan and throw down the Peony Throne, and all the slaves of the land would be free.

These were now the whispers that flowed south to meet them, here in Numiya Province. Somewhere, the empress’s army prepared to move—she was in the Old Capital, she marched through Solan, she was in Kozing Port and sent her generals of the northern provinces to encircle Choa, who could say? Rumour at least was certain as rumour could be that to the north the rebels of Prince Dan and the holy one of the gods—the devil’s puppet, the necromancer’s toy, the false god who was only another rebelling slave—held Choa and maybe even Alwu and to the west Shihpan as well.

Nearly all the length of the empire crossed, night-travel, in haste and secrecy, hidden under wizardry Rat said was something else, a blessing of the goddess of the Little Sister, who had given herself up to become part of Mother Nabban, to fight Yeh-Lin long ago. A Nabbani goddess, yes, but the Little Sister was Lathan too, Rat claimed, and some echo of what she had been blessed them. The few men and women with whom they dared speak, being without papers, were mostly outliers of the villages—the poorest, the outcast, the least likely to hear reliable news. They had found secret dwellings of priests, more than once, but their news was no more certain. The holy one was in the north—was that not enough? As warriors travelling to the service of the heir of the gods in the battle to come, Kaeo and Rat went on their way from such folk with a blessing, if no other aid, poor as such priestly fugitives were.

Rat might be touched by holiness, but Kaeo no longer dreamed visions, not since the night of the typhoon. It was as if all the prophecy had drained out him as he lent his voice to Rat’s—to Anlau’s prayers and her magic that had built some little protection against the storm. Had the dreams of the gods left him, or had he walked away from them? He no longer wanted to find Prince Dan, to lay his sword at his feet. The sword of a free man. The freedom of all the folk might have been Prince Dan’s desire, but it was the Wild Girl of Darru and Lathi who had freed Kaeo and given him that sword. He no longer even wanted to lay it at the feet of the god, who should be his god, the holy one, the heir of Nabban. Not that he doubted the god’s holiness or his cause. Not that he regretted his service to Prince Dan, either. It was only that he gave himself elsewhere.

But he did not know if that was something a god of the land would understand. Nabbani birth and blood and bone, the land was in him; Kaeo was of the land. How could he face the god whose prophet he had been, to say, I’ve given myself to a priestess of Darru and Lathi and through her to her gods of the jungles and mountains and the river she says is hers as much as yours—I cannot serve you?

Rat stirred, warm against his side in their hollow nest. Sunlight had finally found them beneath the canopy of young leaves, coppery sunset striking low through a gap in the greenery. Another night’s journey.

“Soon,” she said.

“Soon, what?”

“Soon we eat.”

They had only a handful left of the roasted sedge tubers, grubbed out of a forest pond and softened in the ashes of their cautious little fire as the sun rose. It was going to be a long and hungry march this night, and that Rat could nuzzle at his ear, a cold hand warming itself inside his shirt, and ignore a gnawing belly made him feel . . . most thoroughly desired, and rather less weary than he knew he was.

“Not that we have much to eat,” she said, voicing at least the more practical of his thoughts. “I’ll hunt when dawn comes, find us a lizard, at least. No, I meant, soon, we’ll find him.”

“The god.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He folded arms around her, held her close and gave up what he had begun, which was undoing the ties of her shirt.

She lay over him, cupped his face in her hands, kissed him. They made a long moment of it, but the time for lovemaking was past, or had slipped away with the growing dark. Miles before them, and the nights grew shorter, the roads, even these byways between villages, more dangerous. They had spotted scouts in imperial colours only the previous evening, heading to a manor house they were circling at a wary distance. There had come a heavy smell of smoke in the night, after that. They had not gone back to look.

“And then?” he asked.

“Then,” she said. Her smile was lost in the gathering dark. If it was a smile, and not a grimace. “Kaeo, I don’t know. I only follow, now, where I am led. Or go where I am moved to go, and what our two swords may do . . . but if we do not win the god of Nabban to be a friend to Darru and Lathi, and not another conqueror, then we will have war, still, and no peace in the south, and how many more generations can live so, before all our very souls are born crippled in our hate?”

To that he had no answer.

It did not take long to eat their sparse meal and gather up their small bundles. They passed from the forest eaves to the rutted cart-track beneath a clear sky and a full moon rising bright and silver. If he were a poet and not a mere singer of the songs of others, he might make it a portent of hope, of new light in the world.

But it could as well be said it was a very cold and distant light. A poet was not a prophet and could make of a sign what he would. There was a chill in the air that night, a wind from the north.