Blackdog (6 page)

“If you want to marry her, come back when she's old enough to wed, and ask her yourself!” Kayugh called down.

Tamghat laughed, but it sounded forced. “She's already far older than I. Why should I wait for her to grow older? What do you mean by too young to wed?” Otokas felt the wizard's attention crawling over the women, forcing into them. A few, the more sensitive to magic, shook their heads or flinched back from the parapet. One older woman dropped to her knees, vomiting.

“A little girl?” The warlord's voice teetered on the edge of rage Otokas could almost smell, but then it seemed to evaporate like dew in sunlight. He threw back his head and laughed. “Blackdog, you should have told me. This alters things.”

A stir of hope ran among the sisters. Even Otokas wondered for a moment if they might have won some time; enough, at least, for Serakallash's warriors to arm and climb the mountain road.

“I can be patient, good Sisters. The stars will run round again and the patterns re-form, and she'll be old enough, by then, to know a man. Till then I'll rule as her regent and guardian. You've no need to fear I'll harm her. I'm a father myself.”

“He lies,” Otokas growled. “He'll eat her alive.”

“Tell them,” said the warlord, “what you can see across the channel, Blackdog.”

Otokas kept silent.

“Then I will. There are folk there, Attalissa's folk. Your folk, Sisters. And they will die, if I do not have your child goddess in my keeping before the dawn, away from that mad dog and his poisoning lies. Eat her! Do I really look like some fox-eared Baisirbska savage to you? That's a nonsense and you all know it. But I will do what I have to, to win Attalissa. The stars have knotted our fates together and I won't be turned aside. Those folk on the shore, their lives are in your hands, Sisters. Do you have kin in the town? Brothers, sisters, parents? Do you think they might be among those the Blackdog can see? Ask him.”

“No,” Kayugh said. “Attalissa won't pass to your keeping till every last one of us is dead. And our kin would say likewise.”

“Well, then. It's as you choose.” The warlord jerked his head to one of his followers, a tall, butter-haired Northron, who spun on his heel and started down for the boat bridge at a run. A fool of a Northron, who carried a torch high over his head. Possibly he meant to signal with it to those guarding the hostages.

The first arrow took him in his cloth-wrapped calf, sent him stumbling, and of the dozen following, some found a home through his mail; one took him in the throat and he thrashed and choked, the torch smouldering on the ground.

Tamghat looked back, shrugged, and faced the tower again.

“So be it,” he said. He dropped the reins to lie slack on the golden mare's neck and drew one of the long cords off his shoulders, wound it over the fingers of both hands, twisting and looping a pattern like a child's game of cat's cradle.

“What…?” Kayugh started to ask.

Tamghat turned his hands palms out as if to push, the narrow ribbon dipping slack. Then he snapped his hands apart, the ribbon breaking, flying free…

“Down!” Otokas screamed, howled, and seized Kayugh's wrist, jerking her for the stairs from the bell-tower roof as the abandoned jade lion swayed, tipped—tumbled. “Run!”

With the shock of an avalanche mowing trees before it, the gates blew in, timbers and stone cutting a swathe through the sisters in the Outer Court. The archers pelted after Otokas and Kayugh as the stairs twisted, tilted beneath their feet, and the gatehouse collapsed in a choking cloud of plaster, a wounded jangle of the bells. Women tumbled down around them, shaky, ghost-white with dust. Otokas stumbled, sick, the Blackdog's senses overwhelmed with the stench of broken bodies, the cries. In the Old Chapel, the goddess was screaming, high and shrill in his head, and the Blackdog gathered itself into the world.

“Don't!” Kayugh snapped, shaking him, and he snarled at her, crouched on blood-slick stones. Forced the dog away, trying to understand what she said, hardly able to listen. “Get her away, Oto! If it's true, what you said, what she saw he means to do, get her away!”

He flung himself up, sword in hand, focused not on her but on Tamghat, urging his horse to pick its way over the precarious rubble of the gatehouse, dainty as a cat. The warriors of his guard followed, blades bare. The warlord held up a hand and, unwillingly, the sisters hesitated, each one caught in a moment's anticipation, spears raised, swords drawn, or broken stones in hand. Even the dying were silent, the space of a breath.

“Attalissa
, Sisters, and you, Blackdog. To save yourselves, and your kinsfolk in the town—send for Attalissa. Bring her to me.”

Otokas took a step and was jerked back by Kayugh's hand in his hair. His helmet was lost in the tumble down the stairs.

“Can you kill him?” she whispered angrily.

“I'll find out,” he muttered.

“Die here, and you leave her to be defended by a damned raider, since the dog won't take women. Or you die.
Both
of you, Oto. He's a god!”

He shook his head. “No.” Not quite.

“Go!”

The strong reek of gathered magic was gone, to the dog's nose, and the grey and the gloss of a fevered sweat more pronounced on Tamghat's skin. He might not want to knock down another wall right away, but the red fire still lurked behind his eyes. He was more than the Blackdog could overcome. The dog recognized it, was willing to let Otokas think clear-headed and single-minded for a moment. But waiting, still, to kill anything that moved against the goddess.

Someone among the wounded was weeping, a grating, heartwrenching sound, and another whimpered, “Mama, mama, mama…” over and over without pause. Most kept silent, as if the wizard held them, stifling the moaning and the screams, denying them that freedom in their dying.

“I'm sorry.” Otokas turned Kayugh's face, kissed her on the lips, lingering the space of a heartbeat, no more. “I'll see you,” he said softly, “soon enough, I expect.” And, loud enough for the surviving sisters from the gatehouse to hear, “The horse is a mare. I told you.” He heard the deep breaths, the faint settling shuffle, weapons taken in surer grip.

He walked, not looking back, between the living and the dead. Perhaps Tamghat was simply waiting for him to hail those beyond to open the narrow door in the thick wall between Outer and Inner Court, waiting for it to be opened. He ran the last few steps, letting the Blackdog take him at last, a moment of burning, breaking, a blackness flowing up and over the wall, Kayugh's voice already raised, no orders, just the cry,
“Attalissa!”
taken up by a few-score throats, and the sudden clash of steel.

The dormitory of six older sisters guarding the door of the Inner Court scattered as he came down, spun past them, and headed inside. The Blackdog had no human voice, and he had nothing to tell them. He ran four-footed through corridors and stairways deserted. They were praying in the New Chapel, singing hymns. He heard Old Lady's voice among them. No arguing with her, then, just as well. More stairs. He skidded on the smooth-worn stone outside the heavy door of the Old Chapel, barked, the dog's temper frayed past sense and the door closed and locked. He pulled himself back to Otokas, lifting a hand to beat on it and stumbling in as Meeray jerked it open.

Attalissa flung herself on him, a warm, fragile, shivering weight that clung when he picked her up as though to let go meant her death. Practical Meeray had changed her from her ceremonial robe; she wore a plain, full-skirted dress of black wool over red woollen leggings now.

“I was about to send for you,” Meeray said. “She's…it was worse when she
stopped
screaming. What's going on out there? Are they attacking the gates?”

He shook his head, setting the goddess down again. She gripped his hand hard enough to hurt and said nothing.

“We can't hold out. The warlord's a wizard, stronger than a demon and vicious as a devil. The gatehouse, the bell-tower—gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gone. Smashed.” He gestured with a free hand. “Like that. The tower fell.”

“But how—”

“Meeray. Listen. He's more than a wizard, I don't know what. He wants the goddess. She knew it, she was right. I have to get her away till she's come into her strength. Kayugh—they'll buy some time, out there. That's all we can do.”

“But ‘Lissa can't leave the lake. Where can you hide her?”

“That's my problem.”

“And how do you expect to get her away, if they're fighting at the gate? The water-gate's under attack as well, and barely holding. No chance of making a sally there. One of the girls came here a little while ago, checking to see if we had any arrows.”

Otokas gave Meeray a crooked smile. “The Old Chapel is
very
old. We were at war with the Narvabarkashi, not long after the first temple was built, and the goddess made a way into the lake, one that Narva and his priests couldn't watch. So there's a way out from here, for the goddess and me, at least. Move the altar.”

“Narvabarkash has three yaks and a lame rooster.”

“That's about all we had then, too. I said old. Come on, help me.” The dog slipped a growl, too much, too much fear and anger and the world falling around him.

With his shoulder and those of several sisters against it, the altar slid, grating, over the floor, pivoting on one corner. It was wood sheathed in beaten brass, and time he replaced the rotting corner posts of its frame again, before it collapsed in on itself and spilled the bowl of sacred water that sat there.

No one had reached to move the bowl, which was carved of some coarse, dull-black stone and was always beaded with moisture, no matter the temperature of the air around it. No one ever touched it but the goddess herself, and the water in it never needed refilling. The bowl's lip curved in like the petals of some night-curled flower, but that was not enough to keep it from evaporating. An ancient mystery of Attalissa, and one that even the Blackdog, an ancient mystery himself, preferred not to pry into. The bowl gave off a chill of its own, left you feeling cold, and lost. Women called it the dampness of the chapel that made them uncomfortable there, and built a new one, but in their unseen hearts they knew it was the stone bowl on the altar they avoided.

’Lissa—

Yes. Don't leave it here for him. Take it down to the lake. It's too heavy for me to carry.

That was not right; the lake was not the place for it. The dog was reluctant. But the Blackdog would not argue with the goddess, when it was her own mysteries she dealt with.

But for a moment, with almost a sense of relief, he saw the bowl slipping in his grasp, shattering on the stones, spilling out its water…

That hit him in his very bones. He shook his head, confused at his own imaginings.
No. I shouldn't touch it.

“You'll have to, Oto,” Attalissa said simply. “I trust you. Don't drop it. It's important.”

“If you say so.”

The hole beneath the altar was narrow, lightless, and a damp, chilly air rose from it. Meeray crouched to peer down.

“That explains why the altar's always so cold and sticky,” she said, with false cheer. “I always thought it strange, that mildew would grow on brass. Where does it go?”

“To the southern shore, under the overhang where the split pine grows. You know that deep crack there, that we're always telling the novices to watch they don't break a leg in? It runs under that, where it comes out to the lake. It was meant as a way for the dog to come and go unseen from the temple.”

And the dog had killed the priests of Narva, who were strangling Lissavakail's trade, sending fighters to kill traders on the road down to the desert. It had been a ruthless age, and Attalissa…harder. The god Narva kept to his mountaintop, now. His folk still sent a tithe of their turquoise to the temple every year, and Attalissa's priestesses kept the slopes of the Narvabarkash free from bandits and raiders, protecting Narva's folk like their own, even the priests, who had dwindled away to a family of half-mad farmers.

Narva himself would be no help to them; his great vision that had once spanned the mountains almost to the foothills had been long since destroyed, for Lissavakail's safety. He kept disembodied to his cave, and spoke in oracles, when he spoke at all; most believed him dead and gone.

Meeray frowned at the dank hole. “Should we follow?”

Otokas shook his head. “You'd drown. It drops below the level of the lake for longer than you could hold your breath, before it rises again. It's meant as a trap. I'm sorry. Once we're gone, slide the altar back. Then go.”

“Go where?” Meeray asked. “The main gates?”

Otokas hesitated. But the women at the main gates were lost and from the report Meeray had, those at the water-gate as well. Sending a handful more to die with them would not slow Tamghat any, even if the wizard were temporarily exhausted of magic. He should have sent his niece away before the attack began. They should have sent all the young women, so that there would be a temple for the goddess to come back to. His sister had never wanted Attavaia to go to the sisters anyway.

“Over the walls, wherever you can. Attalissa will come back. You know that. When she's able, she'll come back. And she'll need her women then.”

“The longer we hold here, the more time you have to get her away,” Meeray said. “Don't waste it. Go on.” She dropped to her knees, took the girl's hands. “Remember us.”

Attalissa gravely kissed her forehead, looked around at the other women.

“I bless you,” she said. Her voice trembled, and she scrubbed the back of a hand across her eyes. “Oto…”

He had to grit his teeth as he picked up the stone bowl. It was surprisingly light, but dank, like handling a dead thing. The water within seemed to move with its own life, against the expected balance as he crooked it in his arm.

“Keep her safe,” Meeray said, and the other women spoke too, reaching hands to touch the girl as she followed him, clinging tightly to his free hand, down the steep steps beneath the altar.

Ten steps down, and then the heavy altar ground over them again, cutting off all sound from above and plunging them into a darkness so absolute it was impossible to tell if his eyes were open or shut. Even the Blackdog was blind. But there were no wrong turns to take; the only danger was slipping on the unevenly carved steps.