Blackdog (30 page)

Brave dead man. Attavaia found the wall at her shoulder and followed it, keeping behind the crowd of Serakallashi. At the street she turned and ran in the shifting new sand, keeping to the shadows. Behind her, the Serakallashi were shouting ragged war cries, sept names and their goddess's, working themselves into a fool's charge. And the bows began singing.

No sign of Jerusha and Enneas. They should be safe back at Mooshka's.

Her eyes grated and ran, blurring her vision, and despite the scarf her mouth and nose were full of grit. She clawed the cloth from her face and spat, but it didn't help. Armed men and women ran or galloped through the streets in twos and threes, all heading for one point to the west. Warriors mustering to their chiefs, or on urgent duties that would come to nothing. Perhaps they meant to regroup and attack in a more coherent fashion. The Great Gods’ luck to them. Tamghat was in the town, and if Treyan Battu'um could come galloping at the head of a Battu'um warband—she would be very joyously surprised.

“Get inside, you damned fool!” one shouted to her. “We don't need camel-drivers underfoot!”

She kept to her course unheeding, cut down a lane an arm's width across where poorer-looking townsfolk still clustered in doorways, talking urgently. An old man grabbed her arm, demanding to know what was happening.

“Tamghat—the Lake-Lord,” she gasped, remembering their name for him, and found her throat raw from the sand. “The deposed chiefs were expecting him, tried to stop the alarm being given, killed the person who rang the bell. A lot of people died. Sera raised the sand against him but he's a wizard, he drove her back. He's in the market still. Big house, with a tower.”

“The Chiefs’ Hall?” someone else asked.

“Don't know.” She pulled her arm free and went on. Let the truth loose, and see what followed. They'd know it wasn't their goddess's will and invitation, at least. And the lie about the bell-ringer's death might protect Jerusha from any petty vengeance by Siyd or her followers against the one who'd raised the alarm.

“They'll be gathering at the Zaranim Hall,” a man said. “Let's go.”

Brave folk. She left them to choose their own fate as best they saw fit.

The caravanserai ridge was a battleground. A company of Lissavakaili led by Grasslanders had run into what must have been several fleeing caravans as they entered the town from the north. Half a dozen panicked camels bolted past her, riderless, still roped together. There was no order, no line of defence or attack she could identify to put herself on the right side, just a jumble of people and animals. A dying camel spasmed in the street, knocking another to its knees. A Northron woman riding a mountain pony careened from another lane and shouted back over the kicking beast, “Go around, you fools, or kill the thing.” And then she wheeled on Attavaia.

“Don't just stand there gawking, boy. Have at them.”

Attavaia swung even as the woman's eyes narrowed. The mercenary raised her shield, hauling savagely at the pony's head and striking awkwardly down to her left with her long Northron sword. The shield splintered under the sax, a shock Attavaia felt up her own arm, and she kept moving, shieldless and unarmoured, kept the short, swift blows beating on the woman until she slid and tried to crawl, one foot still twisted in the stirrup. A camel careened into the pony, which went down on Attavaia and its rider both, and the cameleer's long lance thudded into the ground by Attavaia's head.

“Hells,” that swarthy man said, as the pony kicked and squealed in terror. “You're one of ours.” He withdrew the lance, held it over her. “Sorry. Grab on.”

She hardly felt the sudden dull pain as a hoof connected, hauling herself with the caravaneer's help from under the pony. The Tamghati had taken most of the animal's weight, and wasn't moving. The pony found its feet and fled in white-eyed panic and Attavaia let go the lance, nodded thanks the man didn't see as he swung his camel round and went loping back along the ridge.

Attavaia fell again, a sharp, flaring agony climbing her right side. She levered herself up with her sword, looked down expecting to see some bloody mangled mess, but there was nothing to see, only torn and scuffed trousers and a few bleeding scrapes. Just a headache of a bruise to look forward to.

Tamghat's Lissavakaili were retreating. Probably half in terror of the camels.

She could put no weight on her right leg. Not a bruise. She picked an abandoned spear from the street and leaned on that. Mooshka's mulberries were an unbearable distance away, and for a moment her vision went red and her ears rang.

Priestess. This way.

She went, blind and halting, along a narrow way between caravanserai walls, down the western side of the ridge.

Priestess. Hurry, before he comes for me.

She blinked, rubbed away the grit that accumulated in the corners of her eyes, looking around. She was on the side of the ridge; it dropped steeply below, where some grey-green trees dripping hairy tendrils clustered, and water chimed over rocks. She did not remember walking so far.

The water reared up into the figure of a woman her own age, a body solid as her own, with Serakallashi horses tattooed not only on her face, but every inch of her. And they flickered and ran over her skin.

Attavaia dropped heavily to her knees. Not reverence, but she could not stand. White pain stabbed through her, blinding her a moment.

“Sera,” she whispered.

“Priestess of Attalissa, you will help me.”

She looked at her bloody hands. Flexed her fingers and it cracked and flaked away, a thick paste of it drying.

“Tell me about Tamghat. I didn't understand, I thought he would not come here unless he was following her, and she is not here. What is he, Priestess of Attalissa?”

“A wizard.”

“There are wizards with the caravans and he is nothing like them. Your child and her dumb slave are blind and in their blindness they've doomed my folk with yours. He is something escaped from the cold hells. He is going to
destroy
me—I am no powerful lake that can bide my time and take vengeance at my leisure on such a power. I am small, weak, against that. He has wounded me. He will kill me, unless you act for me.”

The goddess looked like she had been through a battle, gaunt, sunken-eyed, her hair a wild snarl. Her body ravelled away into a mist hanging over the water and a restlessness of ripples even as Attavaia tried to speak.

She desperately wanted a handful of that water, and could not touch it, not put her bloodied hands in Sera's sacred spring.

“We didn't bring him here, Sera.”

No. I was wrong, I was wrong, I should have listened to the Blackdog. But there is no time. The Lake-Lord's warbands ride against my folk; they came in the grey dawn to the longhouses of the chiefs of the pastures, they have killed them and chained them and burned the houses, the pastures are aflame, do you understand?

“He's conquered Serakallash.”

And he comes for me. Now! He will kill me as the hawk kills the sparrow. I am too weak to be any use to him; he despises me as too powerless to be even a tool, I saw it as we fought.

Attavaia drew a deep breath. She did not think she could walk anywhere. So she would die, defending a goddess not her own, as she had not died at the water-gate, and Lissavakail must seek its own doom doing what to it seemed best, as she had thought of the Serakallashi commoners gathered in that lane.

“Did not one of your own folk come here to defend you?”

“I sent them away. They can't help me, now.” The goddess took form again, kneeling in the water, holding herself up with her hands on the red stone of the bank. “Wash your hands, Priestess of Attalissa.”

Attavaia obeyed, leaning awkwardly, and the goddess caught her hands with hands cold as the dead, that felt to Attavaia as though they would melt away if she so much as gripped them firmly. Sera guided her hands down, palms against the stone.

“He will kill me, so before he does I'll die a death of my own choosing, from which I may awaken.” She laughed, sounding wholly human and as though she tasted some bitter irony. “Your child is all my hope now. She's no weak water-spirit, if she could only free herself from her stupid mortality. You should pray she doesn't get a taste for the life of the road, for all our sakes.”

“Die?” Attavaia tried to jerk her hands away, but the frail goddess was surprisingly strong.

“Die. Sleep. A sleep that seems death, as the toads that die when the desert pools dry, and are reborn when the spring snowmelt softens the mud of their tombs. And you will take me to your mountains and give me to the priests of my brother Narva, where Tamghat will never think to search, if he ever dreams what I have done. And when your Attalissa does come home to kill the monster, you will bring me back to my waters and free me here.”

“To the priests of Narva?” Attavaia repeated stupidly.

“I'm not ignorant. The rivers of the snowmelt carry tales. Narva is mad and has turned his back on the world. Mad, but he was strong once, before your goddess defeated him. Whatever monstrous thing Tamghat is, he will not attack hidden Narva as he has me or your mortal child, not yet. Like you, he thinks Narva no more than the ghost of a god. Narva's priests will keep me safely.”

“Keep you how? What are you doing?” Attavaia's own hands were cold as if trapped in ice and the earth shivered, sending wavelets trembling through the spring. The shelf of rock their palms rested on cracked. A jagged chunk, large enough her spread hands barely covered it, broke away.

“I trust you with my heart, my life. You love your goddess. I do not, but I see your worth in your love. Guard me well, Priestess, and carry me safe to the Narvabarkash. Because I cannot be freed until my tomb returns to my waters.”

Attavaia pitched forward as the triangular slab of rock, a layer more than half as thick as her thumb's length, slid into the water. Sera was gone.

She caught the stone by reflex rather than intent and sat back, almost screaming as she shifted her weight on her leg.

“Sera?” she whispered and then shouted, “Sera!”

Silence, except that down below the ridge, a caravan was winding its way into the desert at a long swinging stride, and another close behind it, heading west.

Tamghat was coming; she remembered that, then. To kill Sera. Clumsily, she sheathed the sax and climbed upright, leaning on the spear, with the wet rock clutched against her breast.

The rock weighed several pounds and pulled her down, but she clamped her teeth together and started up the sloping ground.

A nightmare that slid in and out of her awareness. Narrow passage between walls, but a well-trodden path. A wider street, trampled and empty, dust churned to mud in fly-buzzing patches around the dozen or so bodies that lay scattered. They were mostly Lissavakaili—boys, young men her own age, staring astonished at the sky. A moment of clear thought and she noted the tracks, the boots and iron-shod hooves over all the milling confusion of camels—the caravans had escaped and Tamghat's small northern-approaching force, the one that had raised the dust, had come in the short time she had been gone, and had passed on into the town to join their master.

She couldn't reach the alley that ran alongside Mooshka's place, the small private door. She leaned on one of the mulberry trees and realized tears were running down her cheeks, and her nose dripped. She wiped her face on her sleeve best she could; her left arm grew cramped and numb with the rock's weight, and her elbow burned. One step, then the spear to take her weight, drag the right leg, another step. Mooshka's gates. She leaned against them, then pounded, after a moment's hesitation, with Sera's rock.

A goddess's tomb. She could have chosen a stone that would fit in the pocket of a cameleer's coat.

A smaller door set in the gates opened a cautious crack and the plump servant looked out. He started to slam it closed again, recognized her and jerked it wide.

“Get in,” he said, and grabbed her as she pitched over the threshold.

“’Vaia!” That was Jerusha, limping towards her, Jerusha with her arm and leg wrapped in bloody bandages, Jerusha flinging her arms around her like she was her own sister, sobbing, unheeding of her mewl of pain.

“She's hurt,” the servant said, as Attavaia sagged in Jerusha's arms and both of them seemed for a moment likely to fall. The servingman shouted and more people came, offering arms in support. An arm to lean on wasn't enough and someone, Master Mooshka himself, simply picked Attavaia up and carried her.

“Enneas,” she said then, and struggled to get down.

“Yes. She's here,” Mooshka said gravely, no longer the panicked man of the dawn, focused now, and calm. Jerusha gave another gulping sob.

He carried Attavaia to one of the upper rooms. Enneas lay on a low bed in a welter of rags soaked in black blood, packed around below her ribs. A man with bloody hands stood by her, washing in a basin a woman held. Clean, he turned and strode from the room without a word, a hawk-nosed, grey-haired Serakallashi with angry eyes. Physician, surgeon, something like that.

Someone had bathed Enneas's face. In the light of an oil lamp she was an ugly grey colour, and her lips blue. She opened her eyes once, focused on Attavaia, and her hand twitched weakly on the blankets. The room reeked strongly of blood and fouler things, leaking out. No treating that, not if the greatest physicians of Marakand came.

Mooshka set Attavaia down, gently as he could, by Enneas, and she grasped the limp hand. Cold as the goddess. The stone was still cradled in her arm and she dropped it, at last, on the bed, barely able to move the arm. Enneas's eyes rolled a little towards it.

“Gift?” she asked, not much more than a movement of the lips and a breath.

“Sure.”

“Good. Like gifts.” Her eyes drifted closed.

“This isn't even her place,” Jerusha said savagely. “Right outside the gate! We were right outside the gate and they tried to pull us down.”

Mooshka put a hand under his daughter's elbow, led her from the room, and shut the door behind them.

“Not her fault,” Enneas said then. “Northron with an axe. I cut him but it was that horse killed him. On purpose. Good horses, down here. They'd have killed me then but the caravan came out and just trampled over them and Jerusha dragged me up and inside. Great Gods, it hurts.”