Blackdog (4 page)

“I said, don't waste arrows.” Kayugh's voice was gentle and very, very far away. She prised the bow from his grip. “Blackdog: look at me. Stay sane, or go to Attalissa.”

Otokas sighed and folded a hand around Kayugh's shaking fingers. Bad, if he was frightening even her. He forced the dog to settle and found words again. “He'll have to cross the bridge to get to her. We have to kill him then.”

“We will.” As though she soothed a child. Or a half-wild beast.

Kayugh freed her hand from his, still gently, but rested it on his shoulder, an anchoring touch. Or a readiness to seize him if he flung himself over the parapet.

But the other sisters edged away. From the corner of his vision he could see the dog's shadow lying over him, black form on the edge of existence, a breath from taking shape. The yellow-green peridot light of the Blackdog's eyes would be burning in his own.

There is a storyteller's cycle of tales, and they begin like this:

Long ago, in the days of the first kings in the north—who were Viga Forkbeard, and Red Geir, and Hravnmod the Wise, as all but fools should know—there were seven devils, and their names were Honeytongued Ogada, Vartu Kingsbane, Jasberek Fireborn, Twice-Betrayed Ghatai, Dotemon the Dreamshaper, Tu'usha the Restless, and Jochiz Stonebreaker. If other tellers tell you different, they are ignorant singers not worthy of their hire.

O
ld Lady crouched before the altar in the New Chapel. It was covered with golden plaques depicting scenes of Attalissa's former glories: processions bearing tribute, warbands of women marching, the god Narva prostrate, raising a pickaxe on extended hands, symbol of his lordship of some of the wealthiest turquoise mines of the high peaks. Slain enemies and accumulated wealth and joyously dancing human souls. The lamplight made the raised figures shimmer and move, gave them life.

In the past, Attalissa had been a true power. A glory to bring folk to their knees, a great mother to them all. When had she fallen away from that? Old Lady didn't know. Before her time, generations gone. Gods and goddesses rose, and ruled, and fell away to act as nothing more than petty wisewomen and wisemen, as though they lost their will after a few generations of life. That was what all her reading and her study, the travels she had indulged in younger years, had taught her. Gods and goddesses simply…lost interest, like children bored of playing house, of echoing their parents’ strength.

Even the Old Great Gods had abdicated all concern for the world and retreated from it.

She had believed that abandonment to be the truth, in her youth. She knew better now. Like every sister, she had served her turn as a mercenary. From travellers, she first heard of the nameless god who had come to the west, who was spirit, nothing but spirit, and spoke through the conscience and wisdom of priests, not in the supercilious platitudes of a village grandmother. And some said that god was but a servant of the Old Great Gods, a messenger, to call the folk back to their true path. She asked permission to travel herself, and eventually, though the Old Lady of that day was reluctant, received it. In the caravan towns she sought wisdom, and she found it, very occasionally, in travellers’ talk and in a few rare, precious books, gleaned from the treasure trove of the abominable ferrymen on the Kinsai-av. She copied much, since that was what she had leave as their guest to do, but others, the rarest, the truest, she stole. It was unfitting that such books, the teachings of the new faith of the west, should remain in such a place, with the folk of such a defiled and corrupting goddess as Kinsai.

It was not an uncaring abandonment. The world was grown too impure for the Old Great Gods. Devils had walked among the Northron folk and on the Great Grass, had overthrown kings, defied the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters, and though in the end the Old Great Gods had heard the pleas of the war-torn world and bound the devils again, they had been angered by the wizards’ pride and human weakness that let the devils loose. They had removed themselves and would not return until human hearts were purified. And that would not happen while humans clung to the little gods and goddesses of the earth, who taught nothing of purity but led men and women to bind themselves in worldly cares.

Like the nameless god of the west, the gods and goddesses of the earth should remember that they were mere messengers, servants; they should lead the way back to the Old Great Gods, lead their folk to make themselves pure. But they could not do so when they mired themselves in the world, hardly different from the folk they guided. People were like children; they needed to see power and authority in order to be drawn to listen, to emulate. To lead folk to cast off the world's cares, it was needful to have the strength to be respected, to be obeyed. Then, and only then, could the purblind folk be led back to the Old Great Gods.

But there was no strength, no certainty, in the divinities of the earth and waters, and by their example they kept folk fixed to the petty worries of field and trade, the squalling of babes and the pains of old age. They kept human folk from understanding that their true home was not this world, but the land of the Great Gods; they kept them weak, their minds clouded, so that all of human life was passed as one waking in the morning afraid and doubting and wondering.

Luli had been full of fear and doubt and wondering herself, until that last trip to Marakand, twenty years before, when she had been newly appointed Old Lady. It was her scholarship, her curiosity about the world, that led to that appointment, voted on by the sisters, approved by the goddess. Blind. They did not see that she had found a new truth, found
the
truth, that she knew all the temple a sham, a dead-end trail that trapped them all. The Westrons wrote that the dead, even the purest in heart, could no longer reach the land of the Old Great Gods, never know the great and overwhelming peace they had earned through their sufferings in life. They waited on the road, thousands upon thousands, for the way to open, and that could not happen till the Great Gods returned to the purified earth.

That Attalissa approved Luli's appointment showed her, beyond any doubt, that the strength of the goddess was a lie, that she knew nothing of the hearts of her folk.

That was when Luli had sinned against her vows in body as well as spirit. And again, Attalissa had never rebuked her. Perhaps had never even known. The final proof Old Lady needed: Attalissa was nothing.

He
had agreed with her, in so many things. He was a wizard, a scholar, for all he looked a Great Grass barbarian with nothing more on his mind than horses and women and brawling. He was only a little younger than her, and beautiful, lean and strong and vital like a tawny cat, no dull-witted mountain farmer but a man, truly a
man
a woman could lean on. She had found herself, astonished and amazed, listening to herself while they talked of more than gods and philosophies and the blindness of human folk who trudged cattlelike through empty lives and never lifted their eyes to the sky. She had found herself on fire, willing, wanting to give him anything, to keep the teasing smile and the knowing, cool eyes hers, to keep the deep voice whispering her name,
Luli
, against her ear, hoarse with passion she could not have imagined when she chose the temple over marriage to any of the dull, demanding young men of her village.

It was wrong, of course. Not a wrong against Attalissa. A sin against herself, against the Old Great Gods they both sought, to feel this passion, to fix such value to another mortal being, to tie oneself into the world so. But oh, those few days, they had been worth a lifetime…

She had told him of mortal Attalissa and the stultifying empty days, of the temple, all its secrets. Of the old woman her goddess had become, surely soon to die, and the dreary years she could see ahead of herself, the years of her prime, to be wasted rearing a child, like any fat-hipped peasant mother, surrounded by the clamouring needs of the temple that was no place of contemplation, no place to refine the soul, but a training ground for soldiers to safeguard men's greed for the soulless treasures of the earth. He had said, a man's, a wizard's will, wedded to divine power, could start to change the world, could begin the reform, begin to lead the folk towards the true path they could not see for themselves, but that the time and the stars must be right.

She had never, truly, believed that he would come. A lover's idle speculation, games they played, planning an impossible future. But now, finally, he
had
come, bringing fire and sword, to tear down the old and build it all anew. And now she was old, while he, a man, aged less swiftly, and being a wizard, less swiftly still. He might yet have only the first grey in his hair.

Old Lady wept, and the sisters she had summoned to prayer eyed her sidelong at their own empty devotions. But she was not going to be weak, she could not afford to be. The body was nothing; it was the Old Great Gods, the future, she served. In times to come she would be a saint, a servant who had shown not only her folk but her goddess the way back to the Gods. And all she and Tamghat had planned, lighthearted, a lovers’ game, over wine and books in his rumpled bed in a Marakander inn, lay before her. First was to stop the needless fighting. But Spear Lady and the Blackdog were narrow-minded, tradition-bound, and they had turned the sullen child of this incarnation against her. No support there. Let them suffer, then. Fire would cleanse the temple, and she could build it anew, if not as Tamghat's consort (and such thoughts showed that even she must look deeper into her soul, where the desires of the world yet lingered), then as his partner in all else. Attalissa would thank her for her vision in the end, when in sharing power with the wizard she stretched beyond the limitations of place that shackled all the gods, and understood the freedom she had gained to seek her own soul's purification and to lead her folk to true knowledge of the Old Great Gods.

“Attalissa enlightens me,” Old Lady said aloud, rising stiffly. Two sisters hurried to offer her support. Her knees creaked, taunted her with pain. “She will have peace with this warlord. He comes to fling open the shutters on a new dawn of glory for Lissavakail, he comes to show us the true path back to the Old Great Gods. We are wicked to resist; it is not Attalissa's will.”

“Should I go to the Spear Lady…?” her assistant asked, hesitantly. Sister Darshin aspired to the position of Old Lady, was all too assiduous in trying to ease the burdens of office from her, as though she were ancient, not merely arthritic and greying.

Go to Spear Lady Kayugh and the arrogant Blackdog, who thought himself so much closer to the goddess than all the women who truly served her. Go to plot against Old Lady, that's what Darshin would do, scenting a chance to weaken Old Lady's authority yet further with that pair of vow-breaking reactionaries, who would have the goddess subordinate to their will forever, having forced themselves into her malleable child's heart as parental authorities.

“No,” she said. “I've already told them we should have waited and offered to negotiate, and they refused to hear the goddess's word. If they are deaf to Attalissa's will, they are damned. We will wait here till wiser counsels can prevail.”

The women looked shocked.

“Bar the doors,” she snapped. “Admit no one. Attalissa has been betrayed by those who fight against her will. Attalissa will have peace with this warlord and love between our peoples. We will wait, and welcome him in her name.”

T
he air smelt heavily of blood; a priestess sat white-faced with her back against the parapet, her arm below the short sleeve of her armour tied with soaking bandages. There was more blood on the stairs where they had carried someone else down.

“We're nearly out of arrows already,” Kayugh said grimly. “I said we needed to keep more in the stores, but Old Lady said the fletchers’ guild was charging too much and we weren't going to send more than a few dormitories out as mercenaries this summer.” She wiped the back of her hand over her mouth, as if that could settle the unsteadiness of her voice. “’Prayer is our work,’ she said. ‘Lissa forgive me, I should have stood up to her.”