Blackdog (59 page)

He strode to a horse, sheathing his sword. “Everyone not within the circle
now
gets left behind to face the Blackdog,” he snarled, riding to Ketsim's side. “Scuff the lines and it'll cost you your head.”

Somehow they all crowded in, men and women, horses and baggage. Tamghat began to chant, eyes shut, swaying from side to side. The language was very old-fashioned Grasslander, drawn high and thin and wailing, peppered with words that sounded like nothing she could imagine at all.

Some
noekar
had dropped the bridle of a sweat-dark horse, one of the last relay, and it stood outside the circle, swishing its tail, cropping a tuft of grass. Deliberate? Pakdhala thought so. Hoped so, wanted to believe in kindness. Ivah didn't notice, still hunched small as she could make herself, still weeping.

The air went watery around them, the landscape running like cheap dyes. Horses laid back their ears; some fought their bits, trying to flee. The ground hit them, hard. Horses stumbled, folk afoot fell. They were in a field of shoulder-high green millet, trampling the sweet stalks, some of the horses, quickly recovered, already snatching greedy mouthfuls. She recognized the place, the shape of the cradling horizon, though not from this life. Farmlands of the temple a few miles from the Lissavakail.

She could feel the waters of her lake, cool, deep, pulling her.

Pakdhala was taken from the horse, Tamghat standing close, never touching her. They bundled her into an elaborate, high-wheeled cart, a box lacquered red and black, covered with plaques of gold and turquoise. Its roof rose in a multi-tiered spire; the curtains were heavy brocade, shutting out all light. The yak-cross oxen drawing it were both black, their horns decked with red tassels. Two
noekar
, both female, were ordered in after her. There had been no priestesses there. Had he slain them all? In Serakallash they said many had died when the temple fell or been executed after, and others had surrendered to serve the conqueror. One of the warriors leaned over her to lace up the curtain. Ah, Tamghat did not wish the folk of Lissavakail to see her brought back an ill and constrained captive. Or he did not wish them to see their goddess a caravan-road mercenary. Either way, if she could shift herself over—she should hear when they crossed the bridge. Once they were in town, if she could fall, if people could see…

“Sleep, Attalissa,” Tamghat said from outside. “Sleep, my dear.”

That was all she knew.

The Blackdog would come for her and she would die as she deserved. Perhaps it would at least be Holla-Sayan who killed her and not the beast. Ivah sat waiting as the wind died and the sand ceased to blow, its purpose served. Even getting to her feet took more strength of will than she could find. A horse whinnied, left behind by the spell, abandoned by its herd. There was a step on the stones behind her, and Ivah looked around. She had nothing to say to Holla-Sayan, but she would at least see him again before she died.

Not Holla-Sayan. Some Northron woman. Left behind like the horse? Her pale hair was windblown and her clothes red with dust. She blinked grit from her eyes, shook herself, animal-like, and dust rose in a cloud from a cloak improbably shingled with feathers.

“Carried her off to the temple, has he?” she asked conversationally. “I thought he would.” She walked away around what the wind of their going had left of the lines of powders, head cocked, reading the words still written there.

“Hmph,” she said, coming back. “What are you still doing here?”

“He left me behind,” Ivah said blankly. “He called me whore and left me behind.”

“He does that to those who outlive their usefulness, those he's drained to nothing.”

“He as much as said I'd betrayed him.” Ivah looked up, seeking some explanation from the stranger, from the sky, from the world in general. “I never did anything to him. It was he who stopped coming to my dreams.”

“Ah.” The stranger rubbed her face, left pale streaks. Had she ridden through the storm? A messenger pursuing them from Ketsim's household in Serakallash? Now she would leave, knowing Ivah outcast, knowing talking to her an offence to Tamghat.

“Poor Ivah. It was to be expected, I suppose. Did it never occur to you
not
to do your father's will, to take the space the freedom from his watching gave you and travel on with the gang to Marakand?”

Ivah stared. “But he told me to bring Attalissa to him.”

“And you do what he tells you, ya. But now he has told you he doesn't want you, told you to go. What will you do?”

Ivah shook her head. It didn't matter. There was nothing to do. The Blackdog would come for her.

The stranger might have read her mind. Maybe it was in her eyes.

“The goddess isn't here, so the Blackdog isn't interested in you. Holla-Sayan, should you ever run into him again, will be.”

“What should I do?”

“Don't expect me to salvage the wreck of your life. Your mother asked me to save you, but there comes a point when you can only save yourself. This is it.”

“But what can I do? Where should I go?”

“How should I know? Only go cautiously. The Blackdog went by just now, but the gang is following, and you don't want to meet them on the road either.”

“I have no home. No folk.”

“You're not alone in the world in that. Don't try to feel sorry for yourself. Your Shaiveh is dead for you, Bikkim will never speak easily again—Attalissa of the lake may die. Did you see them dying in Lissavakail when your father took it? Did you see the hill of skulls in Sera's spring as you rode into Serakallash? You've come out of Tamghat's grasp alive, which is more grace than many get. Go to Marakand. That's what everyone else in this part of the world does when they want to disappear. Isn't it?”

“They kill wizards in Marakand.” She didn't offer it as protest; it was simply what came into her mind. Marakand. They killed wizards. But it caught the woman's attention. Her grey eyes narrowed.

“Do they? Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe you should find out.” The stranger offered a hand. Ivah took it automatically, climbed stiffly to her feet and found, not surprisingly, that she still had to look up. She was used to being short. Northrons, even the women, made her know it all over again.

“
I
should find out?”

“Someone should. What else do you have to do with your life?”

Ivah shook her head, not in denial, just…emptiness.

“You have a good horse there. Trade it for a camel, join a gang, I don't know. But don't sit around waiting for death to find you, Ivah. It comes fast enough anyhow. Defy him. Claim yourself.”

“Defy death?”

“Near enough. I meant your father, though.”

The horse had wandered close, curious. When the woman reached for the bridle it tossed its head and shied away, almost falling in its haste to turn. She gave a laugh that didn't sound happy, turned her shoulder on the beast. “At least unsaddle the poor brute if you're planning to sit moping all day.”

“Moping? Devils take you, Shai is
dead
, she's dead and it's my fault! I left her. Pakdhala's going to die, I know she is, no matter what my father says about marriage, and I…I did that, too, and she trusted me, she
liked
me, not even Shaiveh would have liked me if I wasn't my father's daughter.” Screeching, her father would say, and she couldn't curse any further, couldn't see, for the great heaving sobs.

“So who was Pakdhala's comrade, the person whom she liked? Not your father's daughter. Who are you when you're not that?”

“I don't know.”

“Find out.” The stranger put a hesitant hand on her shoulder, and Great Gods, her impulse was to fling herself at the woman and howl on her breast like a child, not to pull away. “You can't change what's done, Ivah. What's to come…Pakdhala isn't dead yet, but it's not you who can save her. The Blackdog might not come looking for you, but if you turn up under its nose it will remember you. Just…go on, and remember, and choose differently. You're not useless, you're not untalented, you're not weak, you're not stupid. You don't need Tamghat to be your strength.”

Ivah gulped. She wiped her face on her sleeve, but felt strangely quiet, unashamed. Madness, a stranger to come out of nowhere, knowing her so well.

“All right?”

Ivah shook her head. The woman let her go.

“You will be. Don't put yourself in the way of Gaguush's gang. I doubt they'll forgive betrayal.”

Words spoken a few moments before sank in. “You knew my mother.”

“I talked to her last autumn.”

“But she's…she's dead.”

“Ya. I buried her, after a fashion. Set her free, anyhow.”

“Oh. Thank you.” She said that without thinking.

The woman shrugged. “I threw your sneaking father out of your dreams for good. You could thank me for that, too, someday, when you're ready. Spite him, Ivah. Seize your life for your own.”

Then she was gone, a falcon in the sky.

“You—” Ivah screamed after her, screamed again in wordless anger. She snatched a handful of dry grass, knotted and wove it, flung it, a dark spear trailing streamers of fire, after the speeding bird. The falcon dropped, wheeled away, soared higher and was gone, and the spellbound weapon disintegrated. Ivah sat down again, holding her head. It ached. Throbbed, tears and the mess of her nose together making it unbearable. “Mama,” she whimpered. No one to answer. “You made him hate me, you damned—” But she didn't know what to call the woman, and screaming tantrums at the sky was…was not her father's daughter. She sighed, held her nose. Great Gods, but it hurt.

She was a damned wizard. She knew spells that could heal a battered nose more quickly than nature allowed, if only she trusted her own working of them.

The horse came back.

She was a wanderer, she was godless, she was…she was on her own. Which might mean free, she supposed the Northron wizard, whoever she was, would say, but free just meant abandoned and forlorn and outcast, alone. It also meant no one else was going to look after the horse and, stupidly, what came to her mind was what Gaguush would say about someone who left a hard-worked animal uncared-for to see to their own comfort. Ivah got up again, held out a hand, chirping to the golden mare. “Come, beauty, we'll make you more comfortable. Come and we'll go to the river.” She choked on another sob, swallowed it. “We both need a wash.” And once she'd worked on her nose so she could breathe again, she would see what she could do to coax the hair back to the Nabbani “tam” syllable branding the horse's rump. She couldn't take a horse across the Salt Desert, and she didn't need to be turned in as a horse thief when she tried to sell it in Serakallash. She would go to Marakand after all, though she didn't want to seem to be taking the meddling stranger's advice. Marakand was at least someplace new, someplace she had never been with Shaiveh, and a stage on the road to Nabban. Maybe she could find the truth of her mother's kin, learn she really was a princess, be welcomed by the emperor as a long-lost granddaughter, greater and grander than any Grasslander warlord could ever dream. Hah. Winter-tales for market storytellers.

Still: a new land, a new chance, at the far end of the caravan road, farther than the gangs of the Four Deserts and the Western Road ever went. Nabban was at least a conveniently distant goal, and it would leave her father and the Blackdog, leave Shaiveh and Bikkim and Pakdhala, far behind. It could be like being born again.

T
he dog ran. If it was tired, it did not feel it. Pakdhala was in Lissavakail. It knew this. It had been told. It would not overtake the abductors, but it would come in time. She would not be harmed, not yet. It had been told this as well. It did not remember being told; it only knew. It left the steep road for steeper tracks, swam a river, went down a cliff a goat would not dare and up a cascade. It was followed. It ignored the grey shadow in the sky. Not an enemy. Kin. It had been alone, so alone, so long. It was not alone. The shadow vanished, reappeared, went its own way, but always returned. There was no betrayal in that one, the dog knew it, as though it were memory. It might have been, must have been, because the other was kin too, yet thought of that other was sickness and rage, and not all for its goddess.

The rocks were sometimes ice. Sometimes the dog did not think it ran. It flew, a flame in the air, a shard of light. Memory fell in drops, fragments, as if some cave of ice began to thaw. Drops pooled, brought emotion it had not known, forgotten since it began this life. Slow, so slow to gather, to become clear to the watching mind. Dawn was on it soon after it left Serakallash. Day followed, when the few travellers on the mountain road fled the pony-sized hound and whispered,
The Blackdog…
Sunset and night falling, and the memories gathered.

Light, liquid as water, warmth and companionship and
home.
Ice, sharp as black stone. Ice and stone and darkness, loss and exile. And the white sky cracking, and a world to shape into a weapon, a bridge thrusting home…That world nearly broke beneath them; in their hundreds they fought upon it, till so much was ruin. But they failed.