Blackdog (50 page)

“Market rumour,” he said, with a shrug, when it seemed the gang-boss was also waiting for his answer. He lied without taking thought to make it credible. He'd barely been in At-Landi long enough to pass through the market.

“Do you know enough magic to teach another?” Gaguush asked.

“No,” the Blackdog said. Gaguush frowned at him.

“I…I could,” Ivah admitted, feeling her way cautiously. “But it's necessary to be born with the talent, you know. Magic isn't something that just anyone can be trained in.”

“The girl's got some talent of some sort,” Gaguush said, looking unaccountably pleased with herself. “Fine. I'll take you along, Ivah. You pay what you can, we'll get the rest out of the pair of you in labour, and you can do some teaching. Holla here has a daughter who deserves more education than she'll get from him.”

“I can certainly teach her the basic principles,” Ivah said. “You'll be wanting to find her a proper apprenticeship in time, of course, if she's skilled, but I'll give her a good start.” The gang-boss's face was so easy to read.

“You have your own camels?”

“Horses.”

“No good. You can't get horses across the Salt and Stone Deserts, unless they're your only goods and you've a camel-train carrying water.”

“Yes, I know. I came west from Over-Malagru,” Ivah reminded gently. “We'll trade them for camels at Serakallash. I hear they value good Grasslander horses there these days.” And she could see a need for swift horses, at the end of her journey.

“Up to you, I suppose.”

“She's a wizard,” the Blackdog repeated, as though he thought Gaguush had missed the point somewhere. “You can't—”

“I damn well can. You can't keep ‘Dhala a baby forever. What's wrong with her learning a few elementary skills from Ivah here, before she goes off to a real apprenticeship? Cold hells, I'd think you'd be pleased, Holla.”

“She's not…You've got no right—” And then he lurched to his feet and walked out, shoving past Ivah and Shaiveh as if half-blind. Maybe he had been drinking already, after all.

“Another restful evening,” murmured the Stone Desert tribesman. “Welcome to the gang, girls. I'm Kapuzeh, this is Thekla, the best cook between here and Marakand, and that was Holla-Sayan. You'll get used to him.”

“You didn't really expect him to stay here long, with ‘Dhala off drinking with Bikkim and Zavel?” The gang-boss slumped down on her cushions again, all the fine lines of worry and desert winds returning to her face. “Ivah, Shaiveh, we're at Attapamil's caravanserai. We don't need you yet, you're on your own till we pull out. We'll send word to Benno's. Now out, go away.”

Ivah bowed and left, towing Shai.

“It's the goddess,” Shaiveh said, as soon as they were in the street. “She was the only young girl with them. They want you to teach wizardry to the bloody goddess.”

“Shut up about the goddess!” Ivah looked around, but there was no man lurking in the dark street, no great black dog, either. She couldn't keep back her grin. “I told you she'd take us on. I didn't expect it to be the moment we met her, though.”

“Yeah, but teaching the—all right, all right. And that monster doesn't like you.”

“He can not like me all he wants, so long as you don't go giving him a reason not to. We'll be fine. Just don't let on you've ever been nearer Lissavakail than the desert road, and we'll be fine.”

“Last trip, anyway, praise the Gods,” Shaiveh said, and flung an arm around Ivah's shoulders.
“Home.
Beds without bugs and no more kowtowing to peasants for pennies and sour beer. How about we get a jar of wine and take it back to Benno's, to celebrate?”

“Wine and aged cheese and sweet saffron bread,” Ivah said. Both the latter were Northron delicacies she had developed a taste for. Anything that might get the Blackdog's burning stare out of her mind.

The noise of the feasting at Varro's cousin's ship carried half a mile up the river from the landing beach. Pakdhala continued on, until the noise had died away and there was nothing but river and wind. Nobody came looking for her. She had told her father flatly that she was going and he did not need to follow, that yes, she'd be sensible, yes, she'd be careful, yes, she'd stay with the others—and she had meant to. But she had told Varro and Judeh she'd be along later, and assured them no, she wouldn't walk through town alone in the dark. And then she had eluded Bikkim, with Zavel tagging him, when he came looking for her around the caravanserai.

And had walked through town alone in the dark and out of town. The beached ships bypassed, she had pulled off her boots and walked along the shore, mud oozing between her toes, avoiding the sharp shells of freshwater mussels, ignoring and ignored by the leeches that infested this soft-bottomed stretch of the Kinsai-av.

Eventually she found a convenient rock and sat, dangling her feet in the water.

Sister Kinsai, lend me your strength.
It was contact with the water kept her going, all through these years, Kinsai's strength and that of the little goddesses of the desert wells, and what blessing distant Sayan could give, not any power of her own.

“Little sister.” Kinsai herself rose from the water, human-solid, bumped her over with a hip and joined her on the boulder, dripping.

“I have to go back.”

“To the party?” Kinsai asked, and chuckled. “I'm tempted to drop in myself. That Ellensborg's a lovely thing.”

“You can't seduce a bride on her wedding night. It would be rude.”

Kinsai sniggered. “The amount of mead they have down there, she'd never notice the difference. And the way her Olav is drinking, he won't be able to do anything for her by the time they get the pair of them off to bed.” Sobered, eyeing her sidelong. “Nothing's changed.”

Pakdhala shook her head. “No.”

“What was it like, before? When you grew into your strength?”

Pakdhala shrugged. “I think…gradual at first. Growing stronger, while I was a child. And then, one day, it would all come back. I would be a woman again, I would be able to contain it.”

“Why humanity, anyway?”

“So that I remember better than to seduce a bride on her wedding night.”

“Hah, you've never seduced anyone. Have you, little sister of the lake?”

“Hm.”

“What's ‘hm’?”

“’Hm’ is none of your bloody business, Great Kinsai.”

“Thus speaks the caravaneer. Such language. Have you?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Why not?”

“It would hardly be right,” Pakdhala said primly. “If I was their goddess. To…pick favourites, that way.”

“Great Gods above, girl, don't be picky, then they've got nothing to complain of.”

“My father raised me better than that.”

“He's one to talk.”

“This is not what I came out here for.”

“No?”

“I wanted to think.”

“I'll leave you to it, then.”

“Don't be insulted. Stay.”

Kinsai patted her back. “Little sister, don't be so serious. You'll be old before your time.”

“My people are slaves—bondfolk, it's the same thing. The Serakallashi are slaves. It's my fault. I failed to defend them. They're waiting for me. You've heard it, you hear the stories carried along the river.”

“If you go back, that wizard—if he is a wizard, your dog believes he's something else, I think, some demon gone bad, perhaps—will claim you. Make you his bride as he threatens and rule with your authority, at best. At worst—maybe he can leech off what power you have, batten on you and feed. My children at the ferries think it's possible, if he's not entirely human but something closer to us.”

Pakdhala shivered. Feed off her. She had never lost the nightmare conviction that the warlord intended her utter destruction.

“Kinsai. Forgive me. They say you…the gods of the eastern shore, it is said you destroyed them, long ago. I don't—” Pakdhala clamped suddenly shaking hands between her knees. She had never felt Kinsai so still, so great and potent a power. The whole weight of the river, massed to strike. The lake of Lissavakail was nothing to the might of the Kinsai-av. “But I saw it, back when the warlord first appeared. I understood what Tamghat meant to do. Consume me, make me a mere part of himself, my power his, my being lost in his. Did you…is this possible?”

“We could all have died, one by one,” Kinsai said quietly. “Long before the devils’ wars the Northrons sing of. They hid within me. We became one, to withstand the storm unleashed over the black hills. But they could not survive as individuals within me. They were weak, small gods and goddesses. It was not my will, to overwhelm them. But I did, I took them into myself and their power became mine. They return, some few, as shadows of what they were. Ghosts, almost.” Her eyes gleamed like pearls under the moon, ghost-pale. “Attalissa, you will not survive, not as yourself, if that wizard is capable of what you foresaw, if you surrender to that. You need to be strong enough to let him make his attempt and turn on him. Devour him, instead.”

“I'm not strong enough. And I don't want him…”
within me, in any way.
She could not stomach sharing even that thought with Kinsai, the image it brought to her. “I can't believe, anymore, that I ever will be strong enough. To even resist him, let alone defeat him. There's something wrong with me.”

“Perhaps. Like a woman whose monthly courses never begin. It happens. Perhaps you need to die, and try again.”

“No!”

Kinsai chuckled. “Then take your dog. Use it.”

“Use it how?”

“As I used my brothers and sisters of the eastern shore.”

“No!”

“Why did you enslave it, if not to use it, someday?”

“Enslave it? I didn't.”

“Don't be a child. You can't hide in that innocence now. I don't know what the dog was, when you bound it, but it's more akin to that devil-wizard than anything else.”

“Devil?”

“Who knows? I've never seen him. He might be. They do say one or two of the bound seven got loose some generations ago, in the north. Or he could be demon's child, god's child, who can say? Not one of mine, mind, my children have better natures, and nothing like that power; I have more sense than to let it pass to them in such strength. But it hardly matters, how he came by his power. Don't try to ignore the truth. You've bound yourself into that weak body and now you hide behind poor Holla-Sayan, who's doomed by that parasite soul he carries, and you know it. You can't save him; he'll try to fight Tamghat for you, and die, killed by the wizard or by the dog tearing free at last. Your only choice is to rip the dog from him, take it into your own soul, and kill the warlord yourself.”

“I can't do that. Anyway, the dog only goes to male hosts.”

“You made it what it is. Virgin goddess, but you liked having a man about to cringe at your feet, didn't you?”

“I did not! I did not make him anything—I don't remember.”

Kinsai dissolved into sudden fog and an angry smashing of waves over the stone.
Open your eyes, damned fool! Stop pretending innocence. If that wizard consumes you, he'll eat his way along the desert road with nothing to stop him—I'll be the next true power he takes, or the Lady of Marakand, and then the Old Great Gods themselves won't be able to stop him, if ever they find a way back to the world. Holla was damned from the moment you tricked him into helping you, with your sweet, lying child's innocence. Kill him now or watch him killed later, it's all one in the end. Make the dog part of yourself, or see yourself fed to the wizard. You created this situation, with your spirit slave and your little-girl games of mortality.

Harm Holla-Sayan and I'll give myself to the wizard, to see you destroyed!

Kinsai laughed, a disembodied voice over the water. “I
like
the man too much to betray him so, Great Attalissa, and I want no part of whatever the Blackdog truly is. But he's doomed. It's time you stopped hiding behind him and did something.”
Before we all perish through your weakness like your sister Sera of the Red Desert.

’Dhala, what are you doing up the river? At-Landi's no place for a girl your age to go wandering alone. You promised you'd stay with the others.
Her father, and angry.

Get away from the river
, she almost screamed.
Just…go back to Gaguush. Stay away from Kinsai, and leave me alone.

’Dhala—

Do what I say, dog!
And she flung him away, hurting him, she felt, and slammed her mind closed against him.

She stumbled away from the river herself, feet finding painful rocks and shells, vision reduced to the merely human by tears. Anger. Shame? What in the cold
hells
did Kinsai think she knew, anyway? Pakdhala dragged on her boots, set off along the road, above the reach of Kinsai's waters, half-running, and then running outright, running, running, but memory, mere echo of memory, nothing more certain, snapped at her heels. The Blackdog was no slave, the dog was her protector, it had always been, she and the Blackdog and the waters of Lissavakail…She shaped herself a body in a woman's womb, flesh of her flesh, a village diviner, a woman strong in wizardry, if untrained. She was born a wizard, Attalissa incarnate, because…because…something hunted in the mountains…something savage and sorely wounded, mad and afraid, but never dying, and the villages lost yaks, and ponies, and goats, and herders to it, never many, but unceasing, over the years, as it fed the physical body it struggled to hold together, and a goddess of the waters could not lure it down to the lake, could not force it into a more useful shape, but such things wizards’ power could do—

“No!” she screamed. “I didn't!”

“’Dhala? Pakdhala? Are you all right?” Not her father but Bikkim, peering into the darkness, sabre half-drawn. “Are you alone? Are you hurt?” Imagining the Great Gods knew what.

She scrubbed a gritty coat-sleeve over her eyes, mortal embarrassment. “Bikkim. It's all right. I just…” She found no explanation. “What are you doing out here?” Sniffed and hoped he didn't notice.

“Looking for you,” he said grimly. “Everyone at the wedding-feast thought you were at the caravanserai. And Django thought you'd gone with the rest of us. Holla-Sayan came down to the beach looking for you. He sent me.”