CHAPTER XVIII

Ghu seemed to know where he was going. So did Ahjvar. The fool high king had gotten himself trapped by the Orsamoss, or maybe he had meant to meet his allies there, those horns in the distance. . . . The long ridge was a good defensible height, if only you came to it first and seized the length of it. The royal dinaz was where it had always been. His earliest memories were of riding these hills. The world kept slipping away from him, though, and he would surface, heart pounding, gasping, thinking he drowned, that he was being pulled again beneath the surface of the well, or that the hag was rising, but it was only exhaustion. Shouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, on a trotting horse. His body felt strange and slow, heavy, and his mind seemed to run too slowly as well. But that was being half asleep. Half starved and half asleep. He remembered, now, what it was like. He had stopped eating once. Hadn’t helped, of course. The gibbous moon slid down towards the west.

He jerked awake again. The moon touched the horizon, setting a silver halo on a few towering clouds. Those dogs were running ahead, disappearing over a hilltop. They followed, and he knew that long slope and the sudden height ahead, and the little unfailing brook that snaked along the valley bottom, Catairanach’s waters, but the hilltop flickered and flared in scarlet.

Straight took them to the steepest face of the hill, the goddess’s spring and no break in the wall, not in his day, at least. He put the weary horse to a gallop, the Old Great Gods alone knew what had already been asked of it this night, and surged ahead of Ghu onto the old track, still there where he expected it, firm and sure underfoot, circling around to the west and the twisting causeway that rose to the gate.

It wasn’t a mere house that was burning; it was the whole damned dinaz. It lit the sky.

The gates were shut. No time for the slow rituals of wizardry. Ghu swung his horse alongside, stood in the saddle with the horse still sidling about, caught the top of the gate and pulled himself over.

Someone yelled. It didn’t sound like Ghu.

Ahjvar heard the great bar grinding, and then a leaf of the gate swung outwards. He took both horses through; they hopped and flinched at the blond man who lay there with his throat cut. Ghu said nothing but reclaimed his horse.

Penned horses, and camels too, were bunched together, jostling and afraid, but safe enough for now. It was the houses, far too few and set in untidy rows, and hummocky dark shapes he realized a moment later were collapsed tents, which burned. The roofs of many had already fallen in and the walls were failing. Save for the noises of the animals, it was strangely silent at this end of the enclosure. Not, he thought, because the place had been abandoned. Because the screaming was over. He knew the meaty smell of roasting human flesh. What in the cold hells had been happening? Beyond a massacre. There were a few bodies out in the wide and weedy lanes, but not many. He could hope the folk had all been dead before the fires, but somehow, somehow he doubted. There was a terrible air to the place, not the physical reek but a battering on other senses, a screaming that was felt, not heard. Somewhere a dog wailed. Ghu was white-lipped and looking—small, and young, the boy who’d sat on his garden wall in the rain, remote and dazed, as if he fled inside himself. The grey-and-white dog tipped its head back and howled. The black-and-tan joined in. Ahjvar reached over to put a hand on his shoulder, to pull him back, because if he lost Ghu . . . he was shaking, he knew it. Fire. Not fire, Old Great Gods have mercy, not fire. After a moment Ghu shook his head, blinking, tilted his head to press his cheek against the back of Ahjvar’s hand.

“All right,” Ghu said. “I’m here. Go. Jui, Jiot—enough.”

He was manifestly not all right, pale and cold to the touch.

The dogs were silent. There was noise enough to the south. They rode to it in the growing grey light, going warily, alert for ambush, but Ghu suddenly slipped down from his horse to turn over a body lying in the lane. The man had been clubbed, the forehead stove in. Ahjvar circled to return, seeing Ghu sit back on his heels, hand on the corpse’s chest. He looked down on a mottled black face. Not charred, which was his first thought.

“The bleeding pox,” he said. “Ghu, get away. You didn’t touch him—” But of course he had, and still was. “You’ve had the eastern pox, haven’t you?” Please. The man had no scars.

Ghu shook his head. “I don’t get sick.” He rose, throwing a handful of dirt from the lane onto the body, and caught his horse again, clumsy and seeming half blind, Ghu who always moved with quiet, compact purpose. “They were all ill, in the houses. All of them, and left behind, when their comrades rode out to the battle. Dying. Murdered. Burnt alive. It was their Praitan allies, the folk of the lords who had gone over to Ketsim, who set the fires. Their souls are gone to the road to the Old Great Gods, those that burned, but Ahj, Ahj, their memory is still here, in this earth, in this ash. Do you—Great Gods have mercy, I hear it, still. This place will never be clean again.”

“Up,” Ahjvar ordered, when it seemed Ghu had lost himself, forgotten what had brought them here and even the horse he leaned on. Ghu looked up at him, vague and lost. “Deyandara,” Ahjvar said, and that brought him back. “Where is she? If it was one of these houses—” they were too late. His horse shied at another body, a woman with a face that looked like a boiling pot, a broken spear standing in her ribs. The girl wouldn’t have ordered this, but she wouldn’t, he thought, have the strength to resist someone ordering it in her name. And it was an effective way of taking back control of the dinaz. But the pox would have done it for them, anyway.

“Tower,” Ghu said faintly, and mounting again, took the lead at a careful canter, leaving Ahjvar to follow, the horse too tired to make more than a halfhearted token of resistance when Ghu veered sharply between two still-burning ruins, into blinding, choking smoke, and the heat reached for him—No. He didn’t dare shut his eyes; he knew damn well what fire he’d find himself in then. Ghu had disappeared. He caught up, bursting out of the smoke into a churned area like a stableyard.

The square stone tower, built up against the dinaz wall, was under attack—Praitans, and defending the doorway, a pair of Grasslanders. No, the Grasslanders were trying to force a way out, and the thatched roof was ablaze. They cut down the foremost of the men penning them, forced their way down a few of the steep stone steps, more behind them, Grasslanders and some woman of the west, a handful, half dressed, mostly barefoot. Fire glared red through the doorway. Thatch, on a stronghold. Fools in haste. And no Deyandara among the attackers. Ghu had said, burning, so she would be inside. Prisoner or ally? He ought to be asking himself why the girl was his responsibility, but that was pointless. The Red Mask’s helmet might have come in useful for clearing a way.

“Keep out of it,” he said, drawing his sword. No time to assemble slow wizardry. They’d scatter from the horse and by the time they realized he was only one—he just had to keep going, to make it onto the stairs without being pulled down and hurt too badly to keep moving. And then deal with the defenders, who would see another Praitan coming at them. There was fire beyond them. Surely nobody was alive.

“Ahj!” Ghu called, and led off again, so he followed, with the dogs. The Praitans rushed the steps again, as he passed, forcing those trying to escape back. The Grasslanders retreated, slipping, falling, back towards the doorway. One down, two, wounded or dead didn’t matter; once they fell they had no chance of rising. There were more within, shadows in smoke, and another woman fell, the last up. It didn’t take more than one or two bleeding out their life on the stairs to make them slick and treacherous. Those within thrust the door to. They’d rather burn than fall to Praitannec spears? They’d never been touched by fire yet.

“Here, get back to the gate!” someone shouted, running after him. “If you’re thinking you can get in for that blasted neck-ring, any man drags that from the ashes and doesn’t hand it over to the king’ll be—” His face went wide-mouthed with shock as it sank in he faced a stranger.

“What king?” Ahjvar demanded, but the man was already turning to run the other way, shouting, “Help, here! The high king’s men are in the dinaz!”

Ahjvar rode him down with hardly a thought and circled back to Ghu. “They’ve named one of their own king.” Ghu nodded at a window overhead. Narrow, and the shutters were closed, but—maybe. “Fine for an acrobat. You make sure the blessed horse stands still.”

Ghu nodded and grabbed his bridle, so before he had time to think it through overmuch Ahjvar climbed onto the saddle. The horse shifted its weight about unhappily, ears back. Ghu murmured nonsense to it, and he caught the lintel, pulled himself up as the horse swung right around and away, and kicked. The shutters burst inwards, and he ended up crouching on the sill.

He squirmed through and narrowly avoided getting himself hung up with his sword, came down awkwardly onto what turned out to be a stone stairway rising along the wall, half-seen through rising smoke. The benches and tables were overturned in a heap, burning, as if someone had made a bonfire of them. Above him on the stairs a beam from the second floor had dropped, and above that was all flame. No one could be alive on the second floor, none on the upper floor beneath the roof, if there even was a floor there any longer. Ghu followed him, landing lithe and silent as a cat.

Fire roared above, and the burning meat reek was stronger than out in the dinaz. He swayed, deafened by the roar, and crouched down, but the smoke was thick, being sucked towards the window now. There were voices. Figures moving, down on the floor, he saw as the flames dropped and rose again, but there was another wall of fire beyond, between them and the door. If those who had shut themselves in rather than die on the stairs still stood beyond that, he couldn’t see them. But then smoke hid them all, and he hadn’t seen anything but dim shapes to know if the fool girl was among them.

Voices. A voice. Shouting at him. Calling.

Cairangorm the king was dead. He had fallen at the top of the stone stairs that led from the hall up to his private chambers in the loft. He had fallen, and he was dead. It was a sad end for a proud old man who had survived so many raids, so many skirmishes along the caravan road, fallen drunk, and right to the bottom of his new stone stairs in the grand new hall he had built to please his wife. But Lord Talwesach who was his wizard said, poison, and that changed everything.

There was stone beneath his fingers. He felt it. There was smoke in his lungs, and his eyes ran acrid tears, but he could not die; his curse sealed him to life and even burned, he would live and heal, in time, and he could leap over that fire from this place on the stairs and the girl was beyond it, he heard her calling on her god Andara and on Ghu, of all people, and he could not move, he shook so. He could not even release his grip on the edge of the stairway to stand.

Poison, Catairlau said flatly, but not in the wine. He cast the leaves in the hall fire to prove the truth himself, being a wizard, and one who would probably have been summoned to Duina Lellandi to serve the high queen there, had he not been his father’s sole adult heir and his champion besides. His hands had not shaken then.

Poison. Not in the wine, which Hyllau had likewise drunk, but in the water, in the cup, the king’s own cup, in which wine and water had been mixed. No, it wasn’t like the king to drink to drunkenness, but Hyllau never mixed her wine. Lord Talwesach, knocking his hand aside when in fey mood he would have touched the water to his own tongue to test it, tried it with rose for truth and yew for death, and so proved it poisoned. They broke jug and cup and carried the shards to the hall fire below to burn clean. Had Cairangorm gone out to summon help, feeling unwell, or had his body been tumbled down the stairs to explain his death? His ghost had not lingered, and that was strange, when not even the simplest of rituals had been given him yet to free his soul, not a prayer or a pinch of earth, or salt in the mouth, which was a rite of the eastern deserts spread along the road of Over-Malagru. Catairlau called him, summoned him, writing a circle about the bier on which his body lay with the alphabet of trees, which was bordering on necromancy and sin against the Old Great Gods, but nothing woke in King Cairangorm to speak his murderer’s name.

The hall might need that proof, but he did not. He went to the lady’s bower beside the king’s hall, where in her grief she had withdrawn, alone, saying she would see none but the new king. Even her son and his nurse were ordered away.

He couldn’t stand. He could crawl. He could feel his way, blind in the smoke. She caught his hand, and her fingers were like claws. She pulled him forward, arms locked behind his neck, and he fell onto her.

Catairlau was his father’s champion as well as his heir and his wizard, and if it was not quite justice, with no accusation made before the hall and the goddess and no proof laid before the king’s councillors, it was not quite murder, either. He had been king-presumptive scant hours when he went into the bower of the king’s wife Hyllau with his sword drawn.

She was in her bed, waiting for him. She must have seen her death in his face; he saw hers change as she leaned up on an elbow, naked and welcoming, her hair unbound and combed in a curling cascade down one shoulder, not quite hiding one breast, her sly, sweet smile stretching to an ugly grimace.

“He was old!” she shouted at him, as if that were a shield.

It was all her defence. But she was mad. He had always known it. But he forgot why she was accounted the third wizard of the king’s hall, with himself and old Talwesach, though her wizardry was not theirs. A child who could not be bothered with tutors, who ran ahead of them and thought she had nothing to learn, and was never any use but when she stood with them in a drawing of the wands, because she had no structure, no discipline, knew few spells and saw no need, but spilled petty spite in ill-wishing when slighted. In her tantrums small lightnings crackled on her nails and she would laugh and say, “There, don’t make me cross. You see what happens. I can’t help the way I am.” But underneath it all had lain a great dark reservoir, which only leaked and spat in the small seeping spring of her tempers, and now she was afraid, as she had never been afraid, and her rage had never been so great, either. Insulted, thwarted, rejected. She cowered down into the deep feather mattress as he reached for her hair to drag her out where he could kill her cleanly, without hacking and chasing, and the bed erupted in fire. She shrieked and clutched at him.

Her fingers were claws and she pulled him down, and then she laughed in his face and cried, exultantly, “But he’s dead. We could have ruled together now, it could have been your time. I’ll see you dead instead, if you’re such a fool. My mother will come for me, you’ll see, before you burn. I’ll be the king’s mother if not a king’s wife. I don’t need you.”

Her hair was already burning, shrivelling, and she screamed and screamed, but he couldn’t break free of her. The linens burned, and the feathers, and they stank worse than hair. Catairanach wailed and screamed at him for leading her daughter into this place. He had killed her darling, led her into this step by step, poor Hyllau, who should have been protected and understood . . . but he was burning, and she was already black and crumbling beneath him. The goddess had him in the spring beneath the mountain ash, in the waters beneath the stone, and Hyllau was a little child, and an infant, small and curled and beating tiny fists, but she smiled the same sly, sweet smile and opened knowing pebble-brown eyes at him, and she was a spark of light and he swallowed her, with Catairanach’s hand on his lips.

“Ahjvar!”

There were ashes, hot, and charred posts, and stones, and he was ash and flaking, blistered skin. He crawled away blind, seeking water, cold water, where he could die and drown. His hand found the hilt of his sword. After a while he used one hand to close the other around it, and used it as a prop to stand. His baked eyes could see, hazed and dull. There were shadows moving, but they darted and swooped like swallows, too swift to be known as folk of the hall. Their voices were high and chittering and far away. They didn’t see him, either. That was because he was a ghost. Catairlau the king was dead. He heard them say so. Hyllanim the king saw him, ever-solemn infant, and clung more tightly to his nurse’s shirt, watching. He walked out where there should have been a wall, and fell down the steep hillside that was almost cliff, and found the water, which did not ease the burning. Flesh wept into the water, and the spring ran fouled. Catairanach sang over him, but her songs were for Hyllau. He wove his own words into her song, only half aware he did so, dreaming, nightmares, caught in the fire. Hatred of Hyllau, cursing her lust for the shell of kingship, her greed and ambition and childishness, his own besotted folly, which had been as selfish, as blind, and it was only later he knew he had cursed what they had made between them too, the child who was not his father’s son, and all who came after him, and as the king was the heart of the duina, all his folk.

He didn’t remember what came after, not for a long time. There were stories of a creature in the night, which came to the dinaz and dragged men out to slaughter. When he did find himself again, he sought the wild places and tried to keep away from men, but Hyllau was with him in the long nights, and there was always the fire. It would be right, if he burned. If she burnt him again, calling him, holding him, long enough, this time, hot enough, even he could die—

“Ahj!”

Not Hyllau’s arms, fingers clawed into his back. Ghu’s, locked about his chest, holding him back as he crouched with one hand on the edge of the stairs and one reaching into nothingness, blistering, fire below him. Ghu was coughing, his body shaking, wheezing; Ghu couldn’t drag him back, but he wouldn’t let go, let him go into the fire, not like that, into Hyllau’s arms, which still reached for him. Ahjvar flung himself back so violently they both struck the wall behind, holding onto Ghu like he was a log in a drowning sea.

“You’re here, Ahjvar. Not there,” Ghu said. “Never there.” But every word was a bone-shaking cough that rattled the both of them, face against his chest. “Deyandara. Down—”

“Get out.” Damn Deyandara. He shouldn’t have led Ghu into this. He shoved him back towards the window. “Out.” He could hear the goddess of the spring, calling his name, exultant and afraid, and Hyllau, feel her fingers like grappling hooks, digging in—

“Ahjvar,” Ghu said, and grabbed him again by the shoulders, resisting being forced to the window. “You’re Ahjvar. Not Catairlau. I didn’t take you from the devil in the well to give you to the fire. Don’t listen to them.”

“All right,” he said, to make Ghu let go, but he still heard them, Catairanach screaming, Damned fool, cursed and cursed again, she is yours. Forget the outlander halfling, let him burn. Do you want her to die here? She’s the last of my children, the last, the last, the last of Hyllau’s children, and you leave her to burn, worse than Hyllau who never meant you to die, you know she didn’t, she couldn’t have, she loved you. It was you who held her in the fire when I could have saved her body and soul. Be cursed again. You’ll never come to the Old Great Gods’ road, you’ll burn in the night forever—

“Don’t listen,” Ghu said, and his lips brushed Ahjvar’s like a blessing before he let him go and went out the window. Ahjvar saw him drop and stumble away, falling on his knees, head down, coughing and coughing, and a pair of the Praitannec traitors closing in, spears levelled. Ghu, crouched and bowed and shaken with coughing as he was, had his hand to the handle of that great wicked knife at the small of his back and the dogs were slinking up, so Ahjvar turned away and stood, breathing smoke. Shaking, still. I can’t walk into fire, he had said. I can’t, I can’t, I’ve tried, and Great Gods have mercy, he could not take that step and he was going to fall, down into the hungry flames and Hyllau’s open mouth. So he leapt.