Blackdog (14 page)

“You think there's enough villages?” Siglinda asked, joining him, to look over the lake and into the towering range of grey and white, sharp planes like shattered tile, that hid the green hearts of the valleys. Like wise dogs, they took their mood from his, and he treasured that confidence, that trust. A warlord's tent-guards were the chosen among the
noekar
, who were the chosen themselves, the trusted, the faithful. Family of the sword and the heart. He never stood on formality with his guards, not when they were alone. They needed to feel they were trusted, in order to love.

“You don't know mountains, not real mountains. There's rich grazing out there, and mines, and rivers where the sands breed gold.”

“Mines sound promising.”

It would be amusing to rule these town folk for a time, play at kingship, remember past times when he had thought that enough to fill a dozen lives. It would keep the
noekar
happy, having small lordships over bondfolk families as
noekar
ought, enable him to keep the mercenaries well gifted and loyal. He could take a foothold on the desert road; the goddess in Serakallash was a feeble creature, hardly worth the name. It was a wealthy town, and its herds…those would be worth the taking. He remembered a desert-bred he'd owned once: was it when he rode to the north? Or after, when he'd ruled half the Hravnmodsland?

It would fill the time until Attalissa returned.

The sky-chart did not tell him when that might be. He could calculate, roughly, when the next conjunction of Vrehna and Tihz would come even without his star charts and almanacs, see the patterns in his head. He had always, even when he was mere mortal human wizard, had an affinity for the skies, an understanding of the heavenly dance.

So. Long enough to shape a small kingdom, perhaps, but not long enough to grow weary with it. In such a crucial matter, though, and with the goddess momentarily out of his reach, it might be wise to have another wizard's divination in confirmation. It might shed light on the other matter as well, the
other
that the sky-chart and pebbles said moved towards conjunction with himself.

Not wise, perhaps, to ask anything too directly bearing on himself. Ivah had great power in divination, as though the streams of fate flowed more closely by her soul than that of most wizards. He'd known another like that, for whom the runes always fell true. But Ivah was perversely stupid in her interpretations, too knotted up in fear and desire to please, to see clearly what she could. Or simply stupid, but he did not believe that possible of any child of his getting. And he had sent her to inspect the room he allotted her, told her he would come to see her once he had dealt with other matters. Being Ivah, that meant she would do nothing else but wait until he came, as though daring otherwise would bring some punishment. He had never raised a hand to her in her life, never.

Some dogs were born cringing. Probably the dam's fault then, too.

—Waste of time fretting over her. You never learn. Find another wizard-woman and breed another child. But don't put any great expectations on that one, either. They'll always fail you in the end.

“My daughter, and then the baths,” he told the bodyguards, and saw their weary drift from alertness shaken away. Probably the guard should have changed hours since, but Rolf and Fenghat and Shannovai had all died when the Blackdog escaped, and nearly everyone else in the tent-guard he had set to other commands, overseeing all that needed to be done in a temple still filled with sullen, hostile warrior priestesses and a new-conquered town that he would rather the mercenaries did not completely turn against him.

Ivah squatted on her heels on the slate-tiled floor, arms hugged tight around her knees. Waiting. She had learnt early in her life how to wait, patient as a toad for flies, on the sudden bright light of her father's attention.

Ivah had learnt it was best to go warily into the world, showing nothing of herself. This quiet, watching face was one she never uncovered when there were any to see. She sometimes thought they had been a cult of two, she and her mother. A society of secret knowledge, in which she wore a mask she had learned to make from An-Chaq's example, as her father's
noekar
, his sworn warriors, wore the bear-masks of the ancient Great Grass cult he had revived, when they danced naked at the winter solstice.

Ivah was a cult of one, now, with even greater cause to wear her mask. She was bright and sparkling, adoring and attentive. She asked the right questions, the ones that showed her eager to learn and to please, but always, utterly and totally, a disciple at the feet of the master to whose lofty height she could never attain. And she never, ever, cried for loneliness or loss.

She had cause to wonder, now, if her mother's mask had been a mask at all. Perhaps that face had been real all along. Or had become real, until An-Chaq's winsome charm and childlike volatility betrayed her into true passion.

That was loss, if the great mystery Ivah thought she had observed in her mother, the secret teaching, were no such thing, but An-Chaq's true face. A betrayal.

Ivah rose to her feet and paced the room, now hers. It had been the sleeping-chamber of the chief priestess, who now lodged in one of the simple dormitories of the lesser sisters. In the desert language she was called the Old Woman, which sounded to Ivah like it ought to be an insult. She was too grovelling and simpering for the dignity of her elderly years, but Ivah's father seemed to value her, and like most, she preened under his attention like a bird in the sun.

It amused him, and how he could find anything in this ludicrous situation to amuse him, Ivah could not imagine. It must be the great joke on himself, that he had come ready to be wed and found his bride a child.

Perhaps it did amuse him, at that. He always told her the stars would revolve to humble the mighty, unless the mighty remembered, every day, that they were humble before the stars.

The Old Woman had been permitted to remove only a few of her furnishings: a basket of scrolls and a much-thumbed codex containing translations of writings on divinity from the godless ruined cities of the west, a box of toiletries, her clothing. Her bed, so high it was reached by a footstool, remained, with its soft quilts of red and indigo squares, as did a cushioned chair of queenly proportions and a bronze brazier with supports shaped like leaping fish. Ivah had kindled a fire of wood and dried dung-cakes in it, and thrown on incense from the sisters’ chapel, but the air still smelt like overdone meat.

The room had a row of windows looking south over the Lissavakail's waters to the ever-rising mountains. Each window reached from floor to ceiling, and had a set of heavy doors or shutters, to close against rain and wind and winter's cold. They let onto a long balcony, where white, maroon-tipped tulips bloomed in stone pots. Ivah would have liked to close the shutters, but then she would have had to tell her father why, and she could think of no reason he would not mock, or worse, grow angry at.

The air was greasy with smoke coiling over the temple roofs from the garden in the west. She was a warlord's daughter; she shouldn't mind such things. She would not be weak, unworthy of his blood and love.

There were brisk footsteps on the stairs outside, which climbed only to this high room, and Ivah whirled back to the centre of the room, a smile lighting her eyes.

Her bodyguard Shaiveh, sent out to wait, announced, “Lady Ivah—your lord father.”

Tamghat pushed the door open. She caught a glimpse of his favoured bodyguards, the Northron nephew and aunt, Ova and Siglinda, taking up station on either side of the door, exchanging greetings with Shaiveh, before Tamghat slammed it closed. Despite the exhaustion that only those close to him would notice, he filled the room with life, energy, raw power like a Baisirbska bear or an enraged stallion. Despite their great failure, he seemed quite cheerful. He still wore his damaged armour and had not yet taken time to bathe, probably not even to rest or eat. He reeked of smoke and sweat and blood and power. Ivah felt guilty for having had the old chief priestess show her and Shaiveh to the sisters’ baths. No servants. Priestesses had heated the water for herself and her bodyguard, and combed their hair afterwards. Their faces had been closed. Watchful, like her own behind the mask.

There were few enough priestesses left in the temple. Most had died defending it. The sworn warriors and mercenaries were burning their bodies in the garden, which was the roast-meat smell she choked on, even here in her high room.

Some of the holy women had no doubt fled. Those neither dead nor fled were captive and would soon join the corpses being burned, except for the handful who had knelt to Tamghat, blubbering and shivering and calling him Attalissa's bridegroom. It was only right they had submitted to her father, as the guild-masters of the town had done, but Ivah would have respected the sisters more if they had brought more dignity to it. They would be given work as servants of Tamghat's household, as though they were the captured bondfolk of some rival chief, carried off in a raid. Folk of that class were not owned, as slaves were owned in her mother's homeland; they were not bought and sold, but they were bound nonetheless to the service of their clan-chief, or such of his
noekar
or favoured warriors and higher servants as he chose to assign them to. All Tamghat's servants were captured bondfolk, since he had no clan of his own.

Ivah hoped there would be no former priestesses given to her as servants. She did not like the blank and watchful looks she saw in some of them, behind their submissive masks.

“Daughter,” Tamghat said, catching her hands to draw her up from her bobbing bow and drop a kiss on the top of her head. “What do you think?” His spread hands swept the room.

“It's wonderful,” Ivah enthused. “So high, and light. I feel like an eaglet in its nest.”

“It looks too bare and holy for pleasant dreams, but once I've settled things we'll brighten it up. Pirakuli carpets, eh, that's what you like. Nabbani screens. Those gold lamps from their chapel, for you to study by. Little eaglet.” He smiled, flinging himself into the thronelike chair. “I want you to read the oracles for me, daughter.”

“Me, Father?”

“Yes.”

His flat tone warned her not to protest lack of skill, lack of knowledge, or his own vastly greater resources of both. He was not in a mood for coy delays.

“The coins?”

Shaiveh had drafted several of the heftier warriors to help carry up Ivah's chests. She had brought them with her from the sheltered valley above the lake, leading the packhorses herself. The servants would not follow with the wagons until the town was more peaceful and the streets cleared, but there were some things Ivah did not want to be without, or did not trust to bondfolk.

One of the chests had been An-Chaq's. It still held, in addition to her tools and scrolls, her jewelled combs and fans, bottles of scent and pots of cosmetics. The containers alone were a small fortune in delicate porcelain and gold filigree, onyx, and alabaster. The combs and fans and a fantastical headdress of goldwork whose flaring rays, sprinkled with pink pearls and amber, evoked the rising sun, were almost enough to make Ivah believe An-Chaq's story of being a Nabbani imperial daughter, who had studied wizardry in secret and fled her prisoned life. Certainly Tamghat had titled her princess, when he was pleased with her. Whore when he was not.

It was this chest she opened. Ivah's hand hesitated over the embroidered silk purse that held her mother's oracle coins. Probably not a good idea. She reached under them for her own, a mismatched assortment in an older purse, its red silk long since faded to a dull mud colour.

“No, not the coins. Read a bone for me.”

“Of course.” Ivah found instead the leather case that held the tools she needed, a sharp bronze stylus, a slender iron rod like a small poker, also sharpened and dark with repeated heatings, a knife with a thick, short blade, very sharp. She set the poker in the brazier to heat.

“I'll need a blade-bone, Father. Do you mind waiting? I'll send Shaiveh to search the midden.”

Her father shook his head, flourished an ivory bone he had carried tucked into the back of his sash. She ought to have noticed.

Ivah took the bone and almost dropped it. It was not flat, but slightly cupped, and looked almost like some broad-finned, swimming thing.

“This isn't—”

Tamghat leaned down to pat her arm reassuringly. “It isn't fresh, daughter. I took it from the tomb of one of Attalissa's earlier incarnations. They have a room full of stone coffins, all lined up in a row. I wonder if they ever let the living goddess go in there? They'd give the poor child nightmares.”

The thought of seeing a row of one's own tombs was enough to give anyone nightmares, child or not. An-Chaq had no tomb. Ivah set that thought aside, her face carefully intent, thoughtful.

“What do you want me to ask, Father?”

An-Chaq had taught her Nabbani magic, consulting the oracle coins and the blade-bones, the casting of spells by the sixty-four patterns and harmonies of sun and moon. Her father taught her the string-weaving spell-casting of the Great Grass, and the divination worked with sky-charts and nine river-pebbles, which depended on knowing all the stories of all the constellations, and how to interpret their interactions, their roles in past, present, and future. It was not a horoscope such as they cast in the kingdoms of Pirakul, but a dance of constellations, of stories each with message and moral, and the wandering stars to give choice and warning, as they rode among the constellations through the fixed gates and altered the tale.

Ivah felt no sympathy with the sky-chart; in all their lessons, Tamghat generally dismissed her readings, and told her she had missed layers of meaning in the stories that utterly undermined what she had said. He corrected her even when she read the fall of the coins for him, a Nabbani soothsaying he often mocked as something little subtler than thrown dice. He had never asked her to read the bones at all.

That had been An-Chaq's privilege.