CHAPTER XXXVIII

Ivah made braids as she rode, following the track, not the highway, and then village paths. Two horses, long-striding Denanbakis. Not so difficult to track, and the archers of Alwu were mostly hunters off the grassy hills, half Denanbaki themselves, like their horses. She left them to it, knotting the braids up into shapes like some unopened bud. In a deserted village they found signs the men had made a fire and rested. Reassuring to know she and hers had not gone astray. She used her teeth as well as fingers to work the final knot, as the sun set.

Difficult to find their way in the dark. No wizard’s light. A scout in the lead carried a lantern on a pole, held low. Just the one. It would be taken for fox-light, maybe. They kept their ears open for any sound of an alerted watcher. Tendrils of fog began to creep out of ditches, pool in hollows. It had the smell of wizardry. Yeh-Lin’s, not hers. Clouds rolled over them, shutting out the stars and the rising of the moon. After midnight, for certain. She smelt the smoke before she saw the fires, and the man in the lead put out his lantern.

“Fire,” she said. “Like fireworks, it will be. You’ll see it even in fog. Ride then.”

They carried smouldering pitch in jars swinging from yokes. Even the clay grew hot. Yeh-Lin’s wizardry, not hers. It was not only tar meant for ropes and rafts. Other things had gone into it. A foul weapon, the devil had said. Ask Kozing Port why they forbade building in wood and thatch. Her smile had been—unpleasant.

They left the archers under the eaves of a forested hill. Ivah did not really expect ever to see them again. She traced, in spit, with apologies, characters on each forehead, each wrist, of the three of them. Grasslander and Nabbani, woven together.

“We’re invisible?” Awan asked, curiously.

“Not yet. And no, we won’t be invisible. Difficult to notice. Don’t walk into anyone. Don’t go near wizards.”

A final character.

“Now,” she said. “Keep quiet, as well. They’ll notice sound.”

Yuro and the old priest followed her, walking softly, unhurried. Awan stubbed a sandalled foot on something and grunted, stumbling, but Yuro caught him before he fell. Past sentries keeping watch, huddled close together. They seemed to peer inwards as much as out.

Stench of smoke and dirt, after the green lands. She had no idea what they sought. Prisoners? Some late council, some debate? Ghu should not have gone alone. She had completed that hexagram she had begun to throw weeks ago. It had been, The open arms of the Old Great Gods. Some commentaries had it empty arms. It was generally read as an unequivocal foretelling of death, regardless. It had not been a foretelling she had meant to throw, only a question she sought to answer for herself, regarding the god’s champion and the unease he gave her. What is he? she had asked.

His, Ahjvar said of himself.

What is he?

The empty arms of the Old Great Gods.

But she had been wrong. It was not a puzzle but a foretelling after all. She did not think they would find the god in council with the empress, arguing, persuading. She did not know how they could have let him go, except that it was his will to go alone and somehow . . . he had edged them into allowing it. Yeh-Lin said he went to distract the empress, to delay Buri-Nai while his captain-general moved, because surprise was all they had to give weight to their numbers, and to sit and wait at the ferry would be to offer themselves to inevitable defeat and he had not meant her to do that at all, whatever words he had spoken. Perhaps he meant to set Ahjvar loose among her command. Ivah was not so certain.

Ahjvar might be an assassin, might once have been king’s sword among his own people, but the only person Ivah knew who had ever truly slain a devil was far away, trying to hide herself from the Old Great Gods, to escape the doom they had set her, which was to slay Dotemon, and Jasberek, and Jochiz. If she could summon Moth to plunge from the night sky, bird of prey shaped from the Northron wizardry of the feather-cloak, she would. Whatever the cost, even to Yeh-Lin.

Find Ghu. Get him out, if they could. Hope he had learned what Yeh-Lin thought he intended to learn, the truth of the empress and her devil and some way to sever them, or that Ahjvar had slain the empress.

Hope he was alive to find.

They drifted, like the fog that wrapped their ankles, to the inner compound. The gates were closed, but they circled to where there was less torchlight. A spell was laced through the bamboo, a thing of warning. Ivah caught and wove the characters into a ring of yarn, white like the fog, and they went over using Yuro’s coat to cushion the sharpened stakes. Wagons, covered ones like huts on wheels, several more ornate carriages, and wagons with open beds. One grand tent, several lesser ones. People, in clusters, muttering, anxious. Banners hanging still. Fog pouring tendrils over the fence. Torches burning, mostly before the grand tent, and it glowed, lit bright within. She moved that way. The other two followed.

To cross that threshold . . . no. That would push the spell too far, under the eyes of the watching giants. Another of her mother’s stories proven true, that the imperial bodyguard were giants. A blue-gowned wizard strode out, paused, looked around, eyes lingering on them. Frowned. Continued on her way to one of the other tents. Sudden voices. Ivah caught at Awan’s arm, drew him down. Yuro followed into the shadow of a wagon, crouched in blackness, fog caressing like a friendly cat.

“Exalted, the surgeon—you must let him attend you now.”

“The Old Great Gods hold me in their hands. There is no need.”

“Exalted, please. For the sake of your people—”

“One more word and I will have the tongue out of you! I am going to rest, yes, and that will suffice. Any fool who disturbs me—”

The speaker bowed and fell away from the hurrying knot. Two women carrying paper-shaded lanterns, four giants, a handful of more ordinary men and women in armour coats, all armed, though some wore long gowns beneath. In their midst, a long-haired woman whose robes gave her the shape of a young spruce tree, Ivah’s first thought. She strode out unhampered by them, but stopped suddenly and stood, peering around.

Her head was wrapped in bandages, covering one eye. Blood seeped through, and her chest and one gloved hand were stained. She put that hand to her breast, closed her visible eye as if she prayed.

A groping hand, reaching for them . . . Ivah set her own hands to the earth, to Nabban’s earth, and slowly, because she was only drifting fog, a stirring stem of grass, wrote. Beneath the sky, the sea of grass, the breathing hills. The empress breathed out audibly and passed on, into the largest tent.

Ivah breathed again herself. She touched Yuro’s hand, Awan’s. The priest had his own eyes shut, praying. He looked up, pointed. She nodded. The empress had come from the further side of the compound. They went that way, crouching in deepest blackness, crawling, even. No oxen or mules, but there were people sleeping under many of the wagons. The more menial slaves of the imperial household, she supposed. Some lying wakeful, too, pressed close for comfort, whispering, afraid. Guards patrolled.

One wagon had been pushed away from the others. Guarded, where no others had been, and a lantern hanging from a halberd driven into the earth at its rear. Two men. Not giants, but they looked like imperial guard, until one walked over to speak to the other, heads close together, and that was not a soldier’s way of moving but a hunter’s, light on the feet. Ivah waited until they separated again, touched Yuro, found his ear.

“Wind in the Reeds.”

She pointed Yuro to the left. He had left his mace with the archers, but he carried a forage-knife at his back as Ghu did. She tugged at the high collar of his coat of scales, reminder of the enemies’ armour. The forage-knife was no stabbing weapon. He nodded.

A sudden head-on rush would be seen. Yuro followed her lead, approached warily, circling to the side as a dog would. He stepped behind his man and jerked his head back. She was a pace behind, damn, and took hers in a lunge, arm over his mouth, dagger punching between plates into his back, down on top of him so her whole weight made the blow. He still struggled, biting her. She got a knee between his shoulders and both hands on his head. Their helmets were plain, without the visor-masks of a lord’s, and she pressed his face into earth, leaning on him, as he bled to feeble twitches and suffocated together. She cleaned her hands methodically, rolled to her knees and looked around, jerking her knife free. No stirring. She had lost the spell, though, disrupted by the man’s blood spattering it. Yuro was rolling the bodies under the wagon. No one sleeping here. Awan dashed over. Had she warned them not to make sudden movements—no one cried alarm. Fog rose waist high now, as if it were water, trapped and pooling.

Absence of light, where there likely was not usually light anyway, would be less noticeable than absence of guards. The wagon was a rough carriage, a wooden box with louvred windows to its sides. Yuro unlatched the door and went through like a badger into its den, on his belly. Ivah blew out the lantern and gave Awan a hand after the castellan, then followed, pulling the door closed behind her. The latch could be worked from both sides, good. She secured it before she sketched a light.

Yuro had already found them, down on his knees, and she had known; she could smell the blood. They had thrown Ahjvar in all anyhow, dumped like rubbish, but Ghu they had at least laid on his back, arms at his sides, and his eyes were decently closed. His coat and shirt were flung open and she shut her eyes a moment.

Didn’t need to check for a breath, a heartbeat, not with such wounds, and Ivah was not one of those who saw the waiting dead. There was an emptiness, though, that made her think their ghosts already gone. Sent to the road. She might pray so. That rather than taken, please. She knelt and touched his lips. Cold, already. Her breath was catching in her throat, sobs stillborn, because she must not scream and wail, not here. She had believed, she had truly believed, that he could come to no harm, that he had some foreknowledge. He was god, he must have seen . . . Yuro had turned away. Awan was praying, a low mutter, rocking where he knelt.

“We can’t leave him here. Either of them. Not like this. Can we carry them away?” Yuro asked, still not looking.

A gasp, horribly gurgling, like someone fighting lung-fever. Not the last sighing of the dead. Another, deeper. A muttered unintelligible string of what sounded foreign cursing.

“What was that?” Awan looked up, eyes wide in the dim light.

Ahjvar’s corpse shifted, shadows moving.