Blackdog (10 page)

No. He means to destroy her. Make her strength his own. Maybe…make himself a god in her place. I don't know. Something worse than mere death.

Something from a tale, but the dog sounded convinced of it.

“Stay out of my thoughts! I don't care. She's a goddess, she can fight her own battles.”

Damn priest-ridden mountain folk. In the Four Deserts and the Western Grass, they did not clamour after their gods and goddesses so. The priests sapped the will of the deities, Holla had always thought, and made them weak and helpless as any city lord, too propped up by servants to ever stand on their own. Look at the Lady of Marakand, who had not been seen by her folk in a generation and left her Voice to rule the city unchecked.

It was not the goddess who would die, but the black-eyed child. She stared at him, a round, mountain-folk face, wet and tousled dark hair cropped at the level of her jaw, mountain fashion, hoops of gold in her ears. Black dress clinging to her, bare feet scratched. She did not look like any divine power.

“I'll take her with me, get her away from here,” Holla-Sayan said. “That's all. You can't ask more than that.”

She needs more than that.

“Sayan help me, no!” Holla said, and his voice was rough and ragged. “No. She's not my goddess. This isn't my place. I'll take her away for you, find a safe place for her until she's capable of driving that wizard out. Nothing more. Not that. You find one of her own folk for your cursed magic.”

None stopped to help her
, the Blackdog said.
They're not fit to carry the Blackdog's spirit.

“There were plenty dying for her, in the town.”

Dying for the town, I think, save the sisters. Besides, they're dead, or trapped. And they'd know less than I do of life beyond the mountains. ‘Lissa needs you, Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash. She can't hide in the mountains.

“No.”

But you'll take her away?

“I'd do that anyway, damn you, if there were no one else to take her in. Sayan knows I couldn't leave a lone child here to die.”

I'm dying. Nothing the dog can do can keep life in me any longer. The Blackdog must have a host.

“Then it can find one elsewhere, and hide and wait until she comes back. I'll keep her safe, and send her back when she's ready.” Holla-Sayan put a hand on the dog's head again, made himself meet those unnerving eyes. “I'm sorry…Otokas? Otokas. I can't do anything more than that.”

Go with him, ‘Lissa
, the dog said.
He's a good man. He'll look after you.

The girl gulped a wordless sob.

Be brave, love.

Holla heaved the girl up to the dun stallion's back, surprised at how light she was. His hands were shaking. A caravan was no place for a child, but they were at least heading into the easier half of the route, from Serakallash up to At-Landi, leaving the true deserts behind. He might be able to find someone travelling across the white-water river, the Kinsai-av, who would deliver her to his family in the Sayanbarkash. Might talk the caravan-mistress Gaguush into letting him go himself. His mother had always wanted a daughter, and so far his brothers had given her only grandsons. She'd be overjoyed to take in this waif.

I'm sorry, Holla-Sayan. The Blackdog…not my will…does what it must. You'll understand.

As he turned back to it, the great dog rose into black fog, swift as an exhaled breath, and settled on him, tearing through his skin, his eyes, roaring like blood in the ears, burning like water in the lungs, fire in the heart. He screamed, fell, bit his tongue, choking on blood and bile. In mindless flailing he found a man's hand and seized it, clung, until he could breathe again, dragging at air through clenched teeth.

He did understand, Sayan help him, in the space of a heartbeat: a night's memories of horror and death. The man's love for the girl, the Blackdog's devotion to the goddess. The panic both felt at the goddess's uncomprehending certainty that Tamghat intended to devour her.

“It's all right, it's all right,” a man was muttering. “It'll be all right, I'm sorry. You won't go mad. It won't kill you. You accept the dog. You must.”

He could breathe, could see…shapes, blurred, the world turned sideways in growing light, a face. Could…smell, dizzyingly, water and weed and stone, blood and fire, and the dun stallion's frozen, sweating fear. Could hear waves, loud on stones, the girl's quick breath and the bubbling rasp of a man's, hear his own heart, the clatter as the horse backed a step, blowing through its nose.

Could feel the goddess, a warmth like the egg beneath a hen's breast, sun on the skin, but within his own heart. This was what it was like to carry a child, was the confused shape of his thought: women knew this.

The rough hand he gripped, cold, tightened on his own, then loosened to let him push himself up. Holla rubbed his face clean, frowning at the slurry of blood and dirt on the back of his hand.

Broken spear in the man's chest, the overlapping bronze squares twisted, torn. Otokas. He was soaking wet, black and slick with slow-oozing blood. He tried to push himself upright, crumpled, and Holla caught him, almost as weak, crouched there holding him, feeling the racing, staggering beat of his heart, chest to chest, feeling its faltering. He didn't know the face, round mountain-man's face with its earrings and fringe of black beard and shaggy-cropped hair, a crooked nose that had been broken once. Just the dog's intensity, in brown human eyes.

“Go,” the man said. “Leave me and go, before the godless wizard comes looking for her again.”

“Oto!” the girl cried, and struggled to squirm down.

Stay there, ‘Lissa!
Holla heard himself snap, hard and urgent, his own mind giving words to the dog's fear and anger and pain. She sat still, sniffing back more tears.
You can't help him.

“Knew you'd be the one. You look after her, Holla-Sayan,” Otokas said, and the words were only a failing breath, life sighing out with them, the body too broken to endure now that the dog's spirit had left it.

Holla felt, saw, delirium or dream, a faint shimmer of light. Smelt it, like a fresh mountain stream, clear and cold, the soul going, hesitating, balanced on the edge before its long journey to the land of the Old Great Gods beyond the stars.

Safe journey, Otokas, our dog
, the goddess whispered.
Bless you.
She cried silently, clinging to the saddlebow.

Most of Holla-Sayan seemed somewhere very far away, still screaming. His body hurt, ached with remembered deathly pain, his head pounded like he had succeeded in the night of hard drinking that had been so early interrupted, leaving him sick and dizzy. Golden sun found the edge of a mountain, flooded them with full light of day, and birds sang in uncaring cheer.

He could find no easy words. The Blackdog enveloped him, a spirit intelligent but inhuman, more foreign to a man's mind than the demons of the wild places, who at least spoke among their own kind. Language was a remote and alien thing; the dog's thought was urge and need and emotion, a fierce protective passion fixed on the goddess. Any understanding of the human shape of the world was learnt from the men it had known, and that was submerged now in an apprehension mounting to panic. Too near the enemy, the wizard. Too long a delay. Too vast: the world, the future. It could form no certain plan of how to save Attalissa from a warlord who could follow them into the higher valleys tied to the Lissavakail by their streams and snows. It was Otokas the man who had decided on flight from the mountains when a lowlander turned back to rescue the girl, and who overruled the Blackdog's fear of that unknown.

Holla knew this. The Blackdog's memories, those of Otokas, of others, stretched back through generations, running through his own, streams merging, blending, lost in one another. But the Blackdog spirit would not let him think. It mistrusted, feared…his failure, his lack of that devotion to the goddess.

The girl slid clumsily down the horse's side and stood with a hand on the back of Holla's neck.

He would not have hurt you, if there had been another way, Holla-Sayan. I need you. I know nothing of the world beyond the mountains. Trust Holla-Sayan, dog. Trust what Otokas saw in him.

The Blackdog seemed to quiet, easing back a little.

Holla-Sayan did not look at her, flinched away from her hand.

The long head of the spear in Otokas's chest resisted pulling. Holla braced a knee below the jagged shaft, eyes fixed on those empty, staring eyes. He would not want to go to his grave with his enemy's weapon still in him. Holla heaved; the still-warm body bucked, flesh tearing again, and seemed to groan as dead air escaped the lungs. He hurled the spearhead away, clattering on the rocks. Gathering the man up, he felt only an angry grief, like he held a brother with whom he had quarrelled. He slid and half-fell down the steep lakeshore and waded out to lay Otokas in the water. An unburied body bound the spirit to the world for as long as the bones endured above ground, preventing it from finishing its journey to the gods, it was said, but deep water, earth, fire, all were fit burials. The man floated a moment, his eyes open as if he still watched, and then slid, drawn down, disappearing.

Thank you, dog
, Attalissa said.

Gods could not leave their place. Hers was here. And damned if he was going to wait here with her for a wizard to kill them both.
What did you expect me to do about that, Otokas?

No answer. The mountain-man's soul was gone.

Not all wanderers were godless, rootless. Most still knew where they belonged. He scrabbled in the stones of the lakeshore, found among the flat pieces of shale one small enough to hold easily in a child's hand, sharp edges blunted by seasons grinding in the waves.

It was like clawing through burial in snow, an avalanche—an image that was not his memory—to find his way to words and his own voice, when he regained the road.

“Here.”

The girl was small and forlorn, standing with her arms folded close to her chest, shivering. Afraid. Of him, of the horse, of the wizard, of the world. Holla pressed the piece of shale into her hand, awkwardly.

“Hold it. Keep it safe.”

“It's a stone.”

“It's a magic we know, we folk who go wandering. So we always know our home, and our gods know us. We take it with us. See?” He hooked a finger in the neck of his jerkin, drew out a leather amulet-pouch on its thong, loosened the neck, and tipped out a white pebble. “That's from the crest of the Sayanbarkash, where I'm from. Where my god walks, sometimes. So my hills are always with me. You carry that, you'll always be with your lake.”

The goddess looked close to tears again.
But dog…

“My name's Holla-Sayan, of the Sayanbarkash. Not ‘dog.’ And you need a new name yourself, love.” So easy, sliding into Otokas's affectionate familiarity. Damn him.

And even if he could do so, if he was not drowning in madness, fighting to throw the spirit from his soul, that did not mean he was any kind of willing, chosen successor to the Blackdog. Only that he did not walk away from lost children. Only that.

“What kind of name?” she asked, distracted.

“A good name. I'll think about it.”

Holla swung her to the horse's back again, mounted up behind her, and turned the stallion's head to the track. After a mile or so the child relaxed and settled back against him, trusting, a warm weight that was already seeming familiar.

Now, as all should know, the gods and the goddesses of the world live in their own places, the high places and the waters, and aid those who worship them, and protect their own. And though the demons may wander all the secret places of the world, their hearts are bound each to their own place, and though they are no friends to human folk, they are no enemies either, and want only to be left in peace.

But the devils have no place, and in the early days of the world they came from the cold hells and walked up and down over the earth, to trouble the lives of the folk. And the devils did not desire loving worship, nor the friendship of men and women. They did not have a parent's love for the folk. The devils craved dominion as the desert craves water, and they knew neither love nor justice nor mercy. And the devils razed the earth and made war against the heavens of the Old Great Gods themselves, and were cast out, and sealed in the cold hells once more.

I
t took nearly all of two days to come to Serakallash. The girl had slept most of the long, nervous ride out of the mountains, waking when Holla stopped to rest the horse, eating the unleavened bread and dried dates from his saddlebag when he told her to, and remaining silent, watching him. The chip of lakeshore shale never left her clenched fist, till he fashioned a crude amulet-pouch for it from the bloodstained headscarf with which he'd bandaged his arm.

Within a few miles of leaving the ramshackle shed the cut had healed, leaving a pale pink scar.

Where the road curved around and left the lake, beginning its downward scramble, they found the bodies of two indigo-clad priestesses, hacked and dismembered by Northron axes. Attalissa wailed and turned to hide her face against him.