Blackdog (46 page)

And then what?

Don't leave me to do all your thinking for you, daughter. She's with this woman's gang, a member of the gang, it looks to me. And the caravans turn back at At-Landi.

Are you sure she's the one? How is she living away from the lake? You said she'd probably be sickly, an invalid, at best. But a mercenary?

And she didn't say, no virgin bride for you, then, the reputation of the gangs being what they were. A little twinge of satisfaction on behalf of her mother's memory.

I can only tell you what I turned the caravaneer's memories to see
, Tamghat said impatiently.
The caravan-mistress is a Black Desert woman.

The woman who summoned me is a Grasslander named Tusa, an older woman, nearly forty years, I'd make her.

What about the Blackdog?
Ivah asked.

There were no mountain men among the gang in Tusa's memories. Make of that what you will. As for Attalissa, once she reaches Serakallash you can lure her, trick her, drug her, anything short of her death, and bring her to Lissavakail. I'll have
noekar
meet you in Serakallash. Use her as a hostage against the Blackdog, if you can't elude it. It must have that much reason, at least. Once she's in your hands, the creature will be powerless.

As you say.
But he was already gone and she blinked lazily, then shook her head, rubbed her eyes, and muttered, “Great Gods damn it!” to the horse's twitching ear.

“What?” Shaiveh reined her in, waiting for Ivah to come alongside.

“Nothing.” She failed him again. Some bribed mercenary found the avatar, while she wasted her time fortune-telling. “We're going over to At-Landi, as quickly as possible. Straight to the Upper Ferry from here.”

“Not so straight.” Shaiveh frowned at the hills. “Four days at least, and we can't avoid farms. We'll have to stop so you can do your tricks.”

“We don't stop. Who cares if a bunch of peasants think I'm rude? I've had an urgent summons to At-Landi, say.”

“How urgent?”

Ivah kept her face impassive. Time Shaiveh remembered who and what she was. “My father needs me to go there, now.”

“Told you, did he?”

“Yes.”

“When?” Great scepticism.

Ivah allowed herself a little smile. “Just now. Didn't you realize? We're never out of his reach. My father and I discuss our progress all the time.” Somewhat of an exaggeration that, on all counts, but sometimes Shai's assumption of Ivah's general lack of usefulness was galling. “We've picked up her trail at last.” She gave the gelding a touch of her heels, taking the lead, letting Shaiveh fall into her proper place as bodyguard, to the side and a little behind.

“My lady.” But she never could tell if Shai was mocking or chastened.

The antelope fled them, white bellies flashing, into the next valley.

Ivah cast the oracle coins, using a charred twig to mark the hexagrams on the hilltop boulder to which she had stuck her stub of tallow candle. It was almost habit, by now; she had cast the coins every morning and evening since they came to At-Landi. On the grass, she had almost given up trying. They never told her anything of Attalissa.

Thirty-six falls of the three coins. Six complete hexagrams: three for the sun, three for the moon. Three for success, three for warning, as An-Chaq had taught her. For the first time she felt the slow heat of anticipation unfurl in her stomach. Perhaps, just perhaps, this was what she sought. She had been beginning to doubt her father's information.

Although she had committed most of the hexagrams to memory through long, protesting, whining study, Ivah checked each in
The Balance of the Sun and the Moon
anyway, confirming each reading. The block-printed sheets had been pasted together into a scroll, as was usual, though this was smaller than most, only as wide as her hand. She muttered empty curses as she wound it back and forth, searching for an elusive section, and thought, as she always did, that someday she would have it cut apart and rebound in a Marakander-style codex. She ignored the lengthy and, so far as she was concerned, pointless commentaries that had accrued to each hexagram, and the glosses added by her mother's master in careless, sometimes illegible calligraphy. An-Chaq's few elegant notes she paid closer attention to.

The long-sundered paths are joined:
meeting, the restoration of the lost. Possibly…possibly…Attalissa was lost.

The ship precedes the wind:
wandering, a traveller, a journey with no set end. “Destiny cannot be gainsaid,” An-Chaq had added. That was irrelevant, but a traveller, yes, if this mountain-blooded caravan-mercenary her father had seen in his watcher's memory was the lost avatar.

Lost until now. A meeting with one who wandered, the recovery of a lost wanderer? Six more throws of the three coins to give her the third hexagram and the completion of the sun set made that more likely.
A goddess dances:
that was simply water. Or of course, the sign of a goddess taking some active part. Oh yes, she was right to feel the hot excitement of the threads of power in her hands, the sense that a pattern was coming clear, better than Shaiveh's touch on her skin.

And the first of the moon set.
The mother weeps:
a daughter.

Mothers and daughters were much on her mind, lately, perhaps too much so. She had dreamt of An-Chaq often over the past winter, as she never had before, and she could not discover what it meant. When she put the question to bone or coins, her answers were only nonsense, contradictory muddles that told her nothing but left her brooding on those unburied bones somewhere in the Great Grass. It was simply guilt, Shaiveh told her, a bad conscience, a duty neglected. But she could not help but think it was more, hope it was more. An-Chaq's hand on her, An-Chaq's love returned, and forgiveness, and care.

In her dreams, dreams she would have prayed that her father never entered, if only she had a god to pray to, Ivah lived again through the casting of the great spell that had moved the army, and saw An-Chaq's head fly off. She wandered the stone halls and stairs of Attalissa's temple, searching, she could never remember for what, but she could hear her mother's voice whisper words just below the edge of comprehension. She watched her father cast the nine pebbles on the painted leather chart of the constellations, and she watched as he drew in charcoal on the paving stones of the courtyard—he disdained brush and ink and paper—forecasts of the movements of the sky, calculating the date when he could again perform the ritual to unite himself with Attalissa. Watching in the dream, as she had in life, Ivah felt that An-Chaq stood at her shoulder; Ivah had only to turn her head to see her. But she never could.

After such dreams she felt furtive and guilty. She feared too much that Tamghat might see, might know, and be hurt and angry at her disloyalty. It was a failure of love, a betrayal of him, to realize she still mourned and missed her mother. But like someone with an uncontrollable habit, drunkenness or hashish or opium, she craved the dreams, the approving smile as they wrote the words of the spell on the earth (no matter in the dream that the smile hid thoughts of betrayal and murder), the sound of her mother's voice, the sense of her presence. Sometimes she dreamed of her mother weeping, dreamed her mother feared for Ivah's own life.

The mother weeps.
But the descriptive name of the hexagram was not to be taken literally, An-Chaq had taught her that.

You're letting your mind wander. Again. Why can you never pay attention?
She could almost hear An-Chaq's voice, feel the rap of a fan on her knuckles. She pulled her wandering thoughts back to the marks on the stone.

So, “Daughter” was the first hexagram of the moon set, but she cast for knowledge of the goddess and the future, not of herself and the past. Attalissa was no one's daughter. “Daughter” could less literally mean loss to the house, as a dowry paid out was loss. Perhaps a sacrifice required or a setback to Tamghat's plans, which were once again dependent on the patterned dance of the sky. The Maiden-Warrior and the Bear would join again this year in the house of the Seven Daughters, three weeks before the autumn equinox, and it would be, by most estimates, the fifteenth of this incarnation's life, which was one possibility Ivah's divination with the human shoulder blade had indicated, the day they took Lissavakail. But only one. If it was fifteen years after, then…a problem, since the configuration of the stars would not be right. This might warn of such delay.

The fifth hexagram was “meeting” again.

And the last,
The wren turns on the falcon:
change, upheaval, reversal of some right order.

Ivah found the moon set more difficult to interpret to her satisfaction. A warning of loss, of disruptive change arising from some meeting? A warning of the rebellion of a daughter caused by some meeting? She would never betray her father; she disowned her mother's treachery. And she had lost nothing that could be restored. Besides, she must discount any personal reading. The set spoke of her father and of Attalissa, that was all.

She threw one last set of three hexagrams, independent of sun and moon in threefold singularity, since she did not want indications of benefit or warning.
The sheaf is bound.
That meant some coming together, gathering.
The gates are opened.
An imminent arrival. And that was repeated as the third. Ivah felt almost sick. Soon. And she needed to plan what she should do. Sun or moon. Action or receptivity.

Her father called the Nabbani philosophy which broke everything into sun and moon, active and passive, good and bad, male and female, a hobble to the expression of power. And yet it was what An-Chaq had taught her, it had beauty, order…easy answers, she could hear Tamghat's voice.

Ivah rolled up and wrapped the book again in its square of protective leather and tied it, stowed it in her pocket, and swept the coins back into their small silk purse. That she hung again around her neck, inside her silk shirt, and refastened the ugly, shapeless cameleer's coat that was sensible garb, Shaiveh insisted, for an unremarkable wanderer, a humble diviner.

She stretched, flexing her shoulders, and blew out the candle.

“Any luck?” Shaiveh sounded bored. The
noekar-woman
trudged up the sheep track from where she had been keeping watch. She had seen Ivah do this too many times over the past year to expect results, despite any promises of Tamghat's.

“Yes…” Ivah found her throat dry, voice croaking. She swallowed. “Oh, yes.” Though there was one test, to be certain. That, no bribed mercenary could do.

She stuck the stub of candle into her coat pocket and took Shaiveh's offered hand to pull herself up, legs stiff.

“So where do we go now?”

“We wait here.”

“What for?”

Ivah smiled in the darkness. “For Attalissa. As my father saw.”

“And then what?”

“Then I'll see.”

Ivah led the way back down the narrow path, fingering a symbol carved splinter of human bone deep in her pocket. It was cool to the touch, as it always had been, repulsive, though that was her squeamish mind. Shaiveh followed, more sure-footed, and fell in beside her, hand finding hers as they headed for the broad river track, towards the houses and warehouses of the town.

T
here was a god on this hill, a wary, elusive presence, hardly known to the folk of the Landing. Only the shepherds came to honour him, when the lambing was over, and to leave a new cheese or a hank of fleece by the rough cairn on the summit. It was rare to find a god close along the Kinsai'aa’s course, at least on the eastern bank, and the goddesses of the tributary streams that struggled through the dry hills of the east were less than the least of demons, all force and will lost in great Kinsai. The land to the west was different, stronger, and the goddess of the Bakan'aa that rolled down from Varrdal on the forest eaves had a will to match Kinsai.

Busli, the hill-god's name was. He watched, nothing more than a faint, cold touch of attention in the night.

Moth knelt by the boulder, ignoring him, but the black-and-silver-hilted sword in its sheath was tucked under her arm, cold as an iron doorlatch in the Baisirbska winter. It sucked heat from her body even through the scabbard.

The black marks the young Nabbani wizard had made were just visible in the faint light that preceded the dawn, though she could have read them in utter darkness, if she'd had to, by the differing natures of charcoal and stone.

Mikki loomed behind her, his axe over his shoulder. “A spell? I can't smell it.”

“Just soothsaying. That character means a goddess, I think, and that a joining. The one that's there twice together means something about to happen.”

“That could mean any number of things.”

“Nabbani soothsaying usually does.”

“And yours doesn't, of course.” Mikki rubbed a thumb over the charcoal lines, stood up wiping the smudge on the front of his tunic. “Do you think she's really found the goddess?”