Blackdog (21 page)

Pakdhala ate with grim determination whatever she was given, as though to prove that if she died, it wouldn't be for lack of will on her part, and the life continued to drain out of her.

“Don't look like that, Holla,” Immerose said, suddenly serious. “Once you get her home, once she's with your mama, she'll pull through. You'll see.”

“Right,” he said, and she gave him what was meant as a heartening smile, too falsely encouraging, flicked her braids over her shoulders, and kicked her camel into a lumbering gallop, away from the line and up to the ridge above them again. Gaguush had turned back, no doubt to shout that scouts were bloody little use tagging along the line gossiping. She passed, and glancing back he saw her giving Tihmrose an earful before she turned again, catching up and matching pace alongside Sihdy.

Holla eyed her slantwise. Gaguush's features were harsh, a knife-edged elegance like the wind-chiselled rocks of her desert. Familiar, every line and edge of them, but not easy to be with. He wanted, very badly, to be touching Gaguush's face, tracing the line of her neck, her red-and-black braided spine. He quashed that thought, with a glance at the sleeping girl.

Gaguush tilted her head. “I don't mind her, you know. You don't have to act like you've been caught. I never
said
I minded your mountain woman. I could have just thumped you on the ear and told you to stay out of the mountains, and I didn't. You don't owe me. I don't own you.”

He shrugged.

“For Bashra's sake, tuck her in with the twins tonight, why don't you? She'll never notice the difference. Let Immerose fuss over her a bit, the Great Gods know she's had enough practice.”

Another shrug.

“Anyway, you'll go over at the lower ferry, meet us up at At-Landi?”

“No.” He meant to say yes. He did. “I can't.”

“Can't what? Look, if you want to stay in the Sayanbarkash till she's on the mend, go ahead. I won't ask you to just leave her, sick as she is. Catch us up when you can. Keep Sihdy long as you need to. I do trust you'll come back eventually.”

That was trust, and kindness, and maybe even love. Camels weren't cheap, and Gaguush cared for her beasts.

“I can't leave her behind.”

“You're going to have to. I don't let Immerose drag her brats along, or Tusa and Asmin-Luya theirs. And you're going to kill her, much more of this. It's plain she's not strong enough for travelling.”

Don't leave me alone, dog. You can't! You promised you'd never leave me
. Pakdhala stirred in his arms, opened her eyes, staring wildly.

That wasn't me. But hush. It's all right. Go back to sleep.

Pakdhala settled again, clutching the amulet-bag.

Gaguush frowned. “She's fevered, and what with worrying over her, you're not much better. You need to get her someplace with a roof over her head.”

“I can't cross the river.” He could see it, a waking nightmare, the water heaving, the ferry swamped, dropping like a stone, like the fishing boat that a single wave had pulled down as the Blackdog swam from it in the Lissavakail. Pakdhala drowning in waters colder and wilder than she had ever known, powerless as an utterly mortal child.

“What in the cold hells is wrong with you? ‘I can't cross the river.’ You're bloody well going to have to.”

Holla shook his head. Couldn't risk the river crossing, couldn't go on, with Pakdhala dying in his arms a little more every day, couldn't go back, within Tamghat's reach. The Blackdog flowed into him, its emotions all trapped animal again, frantic, on the verge of losing all restraint, clawing and biting till something, anything, gave way. Killing, until there were no enemies left and the world was right again.
There are no enemies here. Lie down!

Sometimes it was easier to just shout at it, like it was the dog it pretended to be. He shut his eyes, trying to clear the dog's angry, narrowed focus from them. Gaguush did not seem to have noticed anything amiss.

“I'm leaving you at the ferrymen's castle, Holla-Sayan. You can cross or not as you choose, but you're not coming on with us. If I were you I'd pray to my god there's a physician among the ferrymen, or pray to Kinsai for a miracle. I don't think she'll make it to either At-Landi or the Sayanbarkash. You can be a fool and keep travelling till you kill her, but I'm not having it happen where I have to watch.”

“Leave us alone,” he snarled. “Just go away, leave us
alone.”

Gaguush's eyes widened. He didn't want to think what she had just seen. He felt the heat of the damned dog's eyes in his own.

“Damn you, then,” she said, and hit her camel an undeserved blow on the flank with her whip. “Keep the damned camel. Don't bother coming back.”

I
t was no new thing, he and Gaguush having a falling-out, acting like a pair of cats, each bristling and spitting and going to great lengths to pretend the other did not exist. This time, though, the rest of the gang seemed to feel it a more serious rift, a heavier weight on them. They acted as though they believed he really would not be coming back, told him they'd miss him, told him to take care of himself, with the concern of parents sending a too-young son out into the world. And they talked of Pakdhala as though she were already dead.
She was a bright little thing to have around, it's a shame…

Since her panic at the thought he might abandon her in the Sayanbarkash, she had not woken on her own, not without desperate shaking to jar her back into a groggy awareness. The morning they expected to reach the Fifth Cataract, Holla could not wake her at all, and waking or sleeping he could not reach her mind.

The damned dog had started to hover again, like a thunderstorm overhead, needing only the first crack of lightning to erupt. The sooner he left the gang the better, before someone spoke too sharply and he lost all hold on it.

It was mid-afternoon when the caravan passed by the ferrymen's cliff-perched castle, where the road rose into higher hills as bare and broken as those downstream, though basalt rather than sandstone.

Holla-Sayan handed off his string of pack-camels to Django and reined aside, watching the gang pass. Home, family—something too great to throw away. He kept silent. Gaguush rode with her eyes fixed on the horizon, scowling. Immerose blew him a kiss. Sihdy tried to plod back into line, then gave in to pressure on her nose-rein and stood, resigned, as the slow clanking of the tin bells receded. He felt eyes on him, the castle itself, watching.

The Blackdog heard and smelt the horseman's approach before Holla ever would have, and he had drawn his sabre, turned Sihdy, while the rider was still many yards distant. A piebald mare climbed the path up from the river surefooted as a mule, no flighty desert-bred but a good, solid Westgrasslander. Her rider was anything but.

The ferrymen were a folk apart. Tall as Northrons, they ran to desert-brown skins and Northron-pale hair. They used no particular pattern of tattooing to declare their folk and land the way their neighbours of the Four Deserts and the Western Grass did, but decorated themselves as they pleased, if at all. It was their eyes that truly set them apart, though. You'd hardly find one in four of them with matched eyes.

Holla sheathed his sabre before the ferryman could take offence, clenching his empty hand till his nails cut the palm. No threat, no threat, he assured the dog, but perhaps the only hope the goddess had, if she were to live this life. His only hope, if the dog were not to drag him back to Lissavakail, to guard an unborn avatar and die at Tamghat's hand.

“You startled me.” Holla offered the apology with a hint of a bow, as due a priest. Or a wizard. The Blackdog's knowledge said this ferryman was that: the smell of magic in the blood, rain on dry earth. It grew angry, more focused in its anger. Wizards, old treachery. “I'm Holla-Sayan of the Sayanbarkash, of Gaguush's gang, up there, that's heading for At-Landi. My daughter's ill. I'm hoping there's a physician among you.”

“Several. But I don't think it's a physician you need.”

The ferryman reined in beside Holla-Sayan, studied him, head a little to one side like a bird. A heron. He had a long, thin body, a long, thin face, sharp-nosed, and carried a three-pronged fishing-spear. Panniers behind the mare's saddle held a dozen fish, each as long as an arm. He was an older man, his light-brown hair streaked with grey, braided up with ribbon and knotted at the nape of his neck with a fan-like arrangement of feathers. One eye matched his hair; the other was a pale, mist-sky blue. The outline of a single feather was stitched along the side of his face, curling around his eye, in black. What it meant Holla had no idea. The man wore a ragged cameleer's coat, patched trousers, and was barefoot, but he had pearl pendants swinging from each earlobe and what Holla was fairly sure was an emerald in the side of his nose. In addition to the trident, he wore a plain Northron sword at his belt.

The man smiled, following his glance to the sword.

“Blackdog,” he said, and gave Holla a little bow in turn. “Rumour recalls you distrust wizards. A precaution they thought I might need, since I'm chiefly a soothsayer—” he used the Northron word for one who was half-diviner and interpreter of dreams, half-dispenser of advice, sought or unsought “—rather than a caster of spells. But I remember you, I carried you over the river once, years ago, and I think you're strong enough to keep the dog on a leash. I'm Kien, son of Kinsai.” Which might be a title, or might be literal, one never knew with the ferrymen. “We've been expecting you.”

Holla hesitated, until the moment felt too long. “Have you? And you went fishing while you waited?”

The man's narrow face creased into a thousand lines with his grin. Older than he looked. “Why not? Kinsai was in a bountiful mood, and there's always too many mouths to feed.” He tapped Holla-Sayan's booted leg with his trident. “You're a long way from home, Blackdog. Why have you come here?”

“Pakdhala's dying. She needs help.”

Kien shook his head. “None we can give her. Attalissa's gone beyond mortal aid. She chose mortality. She must live in the body, or not, as she can. Why have
you
come here? Think. Tell me truly.”

Holla frowned. “I don't know, anymore. I wanted to cross the river, to take her home to the Sayanbarkash. To hide from Tamghat.”

“Tamghat? The warlord they say has sacked the Lissavakail? No good. He's a wizard, a wizard to be feared by wizards. He'd find you.”

“Maybe to pray.” Sayan help him. No one else could, or would. And how had news of the fall of Lissavakail run ahead of them?

Kien nodded. “That's better. Give me the goddess.”

“She's—”

“Dying. Yes. You said. I can see that. Give her to me, and do try to resist the urge to tear out my throat.”

Holla frowned down at Kien, who rapped his leg sharply with the trident again, the piebald mare pressed in close to an unusually tolerant Sihdy's flank.

“Kinsai's no enemy of yours or Attalissa's. Don't make her one. She doesn't tolerate fools. Give me the girl.”

It took all his strength of will to keep the Blackdog down, but then as if in a dream where nothing could matter anymore, he handed Pakdhala over to Kien, who sat her on his saddlebow, cradled against him. She murmured indistinctly and fumbled an arm around his neck. “Good. Leave the camel.”

“Leave…?”

“You said you came to pray. The camel doesn't need to pray. She needs to rest and chew her cud, and she can do that more happily in the stable-yard. Go and pray. I suggest Bitter Hill.” Kien pointed to the east, beyond the road, where the hills were dusty pale stone. “Up there, the central peak. It's a good place for praying. No one will bother you. There's a demon at the moment, but she has a good sense of self-preservation—I'm sure she'll leave you alone.”

Kien clicked his tongue to his horse and it strode off. The Blackdog nearly flung Holla after it, to seize Pakdhala from the ferryman's arms.

No
, he snapped.
Lie down.
Like it was some badly behaved hound.

“Let the camel loose,” Kien called back. “She'll follow. Go on. It'll take you till dark to climb it as it is.”

Holla slid down Sihdy's side, rather than asking her to kneel, and tied the reins, the nose-line and the reins from the halter both, loosely to the harness. The red camel, with only a single backward glance at her master, did follow the ferryman. There was no frantic cry from the goddess. Nothing but his own heart, racing, panicked.

She's as safe with him as with me. You. Us.

Perhaps she was already dead, her spirit fluttering back to the Lissavakail, where some unfortunate young woman was lying in the embrace of some…If she were dead he would know. Holla-Sayan rubbed his face and headed across the road. After picking his way over the rough land for a mile or more, he began to regret his so-sudden giving in to the ferryman's suggestion. Order? His water was on Sihdy, his throat rasping with dust.

He found water, a seepage, reed-grown puddles in the mud, some crooked miles later, after too much clambering over cracked and tumbled yellow rock. His hands were torn, nails broken and bleeding, trousers torn as well from a fall down an unstable escarpment. And he was only at the foot of Bitter Hill. But the water, though muddy, was sweet. Holla drank deeply and began to climb.