Blackdog (13 page)

Moth shook her head.

“And how long have the others been free?”

“At least one, a few-score years. The others, I don't know. I've dreamed, I think—”

“Dreamed what?”

“Nothing to tell me anyone threatened the world again.”

“Perhaps they don't.”

“Or didn't. Something's changed.”

The Gods might have their plans, but fate ruled all, and it was not the Gods, in the end, who shaped the worlds, much as they liked to think so. There was some comfort in that, scant though it was.

Mikki yawned. “It can wait till spring, can't it? Even the likes of we should have better sense than to travel in a Baisirbsk winter.”

“Lakkariss is awake, Mikki.”

“Spring.” The man yawned, chuckled, and reached out a broad hand and an arm muscled like a smith's, furred with golden hairs. “Tell the sword to wait, my wolf. It may be awake, but I don't want to be. Come back to bed.”

Moth stood, her head bowed over the sword in her arms, hair hiding her face. He did not know what she risked, if the Gods decided she was refusing them. But it cost them such effort to touch the world, for all they watched it, dimly. That she did take Lakkariss from its grave should be token of good intent. She turned away and laid the sword on one of the benches along the wall. The scabbard was covered in plain dark leather, unornamented; even its mouth and terminal, silver once, were blackened with the years. Ordinary enough, but the scrolling, knotted lines incised on the hilt drew the eye, and could drag the unwary mind into dreams a human soul should not have to endure. She would wrap the grip in leather again, to break the pattern.

“Spring, then. But once the rivers open I have to go.”

“We
have to go.”

“You don't need to come.” Leave him behind, wean her heart away…it would break, and the Great Gods would have no hold on her, and she carried a sword that even they should learn to fear.

He did not bother to answer, only laughed, showing eyeteeth too large for a human jaw. “Where are we going?”

“South, I suppose.”

“Yes, well, up here, we're beggared for choice, aren't we? South I could work out for myself. Even half-asleep.”

“South will have to do, for now. Perhaps the Great Grass.” Why that? Nothing in the runes suggested it. But she trusted such impulse, when it felt of certainty.

“Bear-fetishists,” he said with distaste.

“They used to be.”

“I wouldn't mind, if they'd worship them living. It's the obsession with skulls and teeth.”

“You could start your own collection of teeth.”

“If we spend too long there, I might be tempted. Are you coming back to bed, or going out to terrorize the woods?”

Moth stood staring down at the sword, her face expressionless. Then she blinked, looked up, and gave him a faint smile. “Hungry?”

“Possibly.”

“I was gone all last week and you never woke to miss me. There's a brace of hare hanging outside the door. I'll stew them. A change from smoked fish. It's too late to start bread if you're hungry now, but I could make oatcakes, and there's plenty of butter and honey still. Mikki, if you won't stay behind, you'll have to abandon your bees. I'm sorry.”

“The bees can look after themselves. Anyway, the winter came so early this year, they probably won't make it through. Next time you want to lose yourself in the wilderness, pick someplace bees can thrive?”

“Someplace with a longer summer night?”

He grinned. “That too.”

“At least we won't have to dig the garden this spring.”

“What do you mean,
we
, princess?”

Moth laughed and dropped her fur cloak over the sword. Pinching the candle out, she crossed the floor in a few long strides to scramble into the bed. The man yelped and disappeared beneath the heap.

“Great Gods, no! If you're going to stand around half-naked in the cold, wolf, don't think you can warm yourself up on me!”

Frost began to settle on the cloak over the sword, spreading across the bench, white as bleached bone.

These wizards were wise, and powerful. They knew the runes and the secret names, and the patterns of the living world and of the dead. And the stories of their deeds are many, for they were great heroes among their peoples. And these all can be told, if there be golden rings, or silver cups, or wine and flesh and bread by the fire.

But the seven wizards desired to know yet more, and see yet more, and to live forever like the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the forest and the stone and the sand and the grass.

I
n his own mind, his name remained Tamghiz, though he knew he was Tamghiz Ghatai and that it was Ghatai, mostly, who drove him. Calling himself Tamghat freed him to play at games he had long exhausted, petty ambition and wizardry and lordship. He had been royal, once, clan-chief of the Green Banners by right of birth and his father's choosing, by right of victory over a brother who did not bow to their father's will and tried to split the clan. Tamghiz had made the Green Banners the paramount clan on the Great Grass, and made the shaman's cult of the bear he followed the paramount faith over all the gods of the hills and the goddesses of the waters. Such victories were empty, in the end. The Great Grass was a small world, bounded by its own narrowness of mind, its own celebration of brute strength, which led to treachery and betrayal, till a man could not trust even his wife, even his children, to follow to his vision's end.

But it was amusing, to make himself Tamghat, less than he had ever thought to be, mere wizard, mere warlord, clanless. A game, while he followed the path the stars laid out.

In the galleried apartment that had been the incarnate goddess's, and still bore evidence of her in child's clothing—a certain lack of evidence of childish amusements, poor thing, not a carved horse or a skipping rope, a pet dog or a songbird—Tamghiz breathed on the pebbles in his hand, nine of them, three black, three red, three yellow, and tossed them over the unrolled calfskin on which was painted the map of the Grasslander sky.

Tamghiz sat back on his heels and studied the pattern they made. Frowning, he rose and walked around the painted hide. It was not, entirely, what he had expected, and certain of the pebbles stirred something—chill, warmth, he could not even say which—in the blood. Anticipation.

—What is it? he asked that half of himself that stirred.

—Change.

Well, of course it was bloody change, Tamghiz thought. He chased a goddess loose from her place in the world, and who before him had ever done that? Ghatai's joy, that of a predator scenting its prey, went deeper. Change in the order of the world meant something that stirred even the devil's soul.

It was illusion that there was any separation between Ghatai and Tamghiz, between devil and wizard soul, or that there was any way to say
self
and
other.
There were only shades of self, the spread of thought and opinion and will any human being carried in his or her own mind. But still, they could argue, as they once had in truth, and sway now one way, now the other, on any matter that struck close to their, his, conjoined hearts.

It was more apt to name that part of himself Ghatai, wilder, more far-sighted, less rooted in the careful moment, which felt an anticipatory thrill. But studying the constellations, running over the stories in his mind, it was Tamghiz, who was man, living, breathing, feeling body, who felt a catch in his breath. Speculation. He guessed, perhaps, too much, invented sure pattern where there was only a hint.

But still—interesting. He almost forgot the missing goddess for a moment. But that was the crucial matter in hand, the pressing issue on which he needed to fix his wide-roving mind.

His bodyguards watched patiently as he settled down on his heels again. They knew better than to interrupt or ask questions, had grown familiar with wizards’ ways over the years. Just as well. He wanted to think. To decide what should be done. Too much had changed too suddenly. He had come to Lissavakail expecting, by this morning past, to be…dead, quite possibly, which was something he barely understood. To have ceased existing. Or to be changed, terribly changed.

He did not feel relieved that somehow that change had been delayed, he did not. He did not falter now, in that much he was all Ghatai: he knew no fear. But he was tired, as he had not been in years. Hollow. Cold. It had taken more than he expected to break those gates. Power lingered in this place even with its goddess gone, and the lake itself fought him, not actively, but as a hostile, draining presence. It still smouldered sullenly on the edges of his awareness, but it had weakened; it was a faint nagging pain, no more. Not worth whining about.

His
noekar
, his retainers, expected some greater anger at the loss of his bride, and they all, even his bodyguards who knew him best, were walking warily around him. His bride—that was a joke. A pity An-Chaq had taken it literally, but her willingness to try murder proved he had been right not to trust her; he trusted no wizard with the secrets of his heart, and a scheming Nabbani princess least of all.

The wedding was something the folk, Attalissa's and his own, would understand, that was all. It had the shape of old tales, a hero winning a goddess's hand. He had not wanted to kill so many of Attalissa's folk; they fought better and longer than he had expected, and the temple held out long after it should have. He had been promised, years before, a quick surrender. Luli, who had grown old and bitter-mouthed, claimed she had been unable to persuade the others in the ruling threesome to negotiation. He thought she had not tried very hard; she had wanted to see the temple destroyed, wanted all cleared, so she could raise something new. She imagined she could use him, a man, a wizard, a conqueror, to reshape her goddess into what she wanted. Deceiving herself that she wanted that dream of a new god of snow-cold purity emptied of will, of caring, when all she truly yearned for was certainty in her own righteousness. Human folk were easy tools; they wanted to be used, and would serve till they shattered themselves, once aimed. And Luli, Old Lady, would continue to serve, though she was afraid now, afraid of the scale of the destruction, afraid of her own folk, afraid they would come to realize her betrayal. Afraid to find him unchanged from twenty years before. Wizards were long-lived for humans, but not so much so to pass for thirty still, after twenty years. At least fear would keep her from imagining she had any prior claim on his body, which could have been an embarrassment. It was always disgusting when mortal humans failed to accept age with grace.

It was a pity so many true to Attalissa had died. He had wanted the goddess trusting, thinking she bought peace by conceding. He had been confident he could win her to think it no unpleasant concession, and he had had faith in Tamghiz's body and charm to win a cloistered young woman, as he had won most women he set his mind to. Even if she did see he was something other than a mere wizard, he thought he could fascinate her, talk enough doubts away. There were always those oddities in the world, the halflings, semi-divine, semi-demonic, who fit uneasily in among the wizards or wandered rootless, discontent. She would know only too late what he intended, and once he had taken her, she would understand, as Tamghiz had once come to understand, his soul engulfed in Ghatai's fire.

But the child was, according to all he had ever heard, only a shadow of the goddess, and he was not going to be cheated, bind her into his own being and find the better part of her godhead lost. He would wait. He had learned patience humans could not imagine, and if that was the price demanded by her mortality, he would pay it. It was her mortality left her vulnerable to him, in the end, gave her a shape he could seize. It made them the same substance, their souls alike, humanity and divinity blended, like two dyes making a third colour. He had nearly destroyed himself, thinking he could possess Sihkoteh, his gaoler in the volcano's heart. When he learned in Marakand from the so-willingly-seduced Luli of the lake goddess who was godly soul and mortal body, Ghatai had recognized, then, the path the stars set him. Attalissa might be a being of only one soul, but that soul nonetheless was more akin to the two-ply spinning of his own than any other divinity. He understood it, he could touch it, grasp it, as he had not been able to fiery Sihkoteh's.

Tamghiz swept up the coloured pebbles, left the patterned calfskin for his servants to put away, and strode out to the balcony. The lake still stirred restlessly, the wind uneasy. His captains had sent warriors after those sisters who had fled, with particular attention to the road to the desert. That was where any threat worth taking seriously would arise.

“Shall I make you a lord of fifty tents, Ova?” he called back over his shoulder.

“If you can find tents in these hills, my lord,” Ova said, with something like relief in his voice, that his lord was not about to curse them all or smash the walls. The Northron should be cheerful; it was an offer of rank, of bondfolk.

“A village, then. Since we're here to stay, my tent-guard needs the honour due a chief's chosen men.”