Blackdog (70 page)

He needed to work out who was who.

Did it matter?

Sayan be thanked, light also reduced the chamber to human understanding, colour and memory, and those armoured bones, collapsed together in the corner…

Six women hid there in the shadows, waiting, uncertain, afraid, knowing and not knowing him.

“Sister Meeray?”

She had not changed. No, of course not.

“Blackdog?” She seemed uncertain. Well she might. What did ghosts see of the world that lay beyond human vision?

“More or less,” he admitted.
What are you still doing here?
was the foolish question that came to mind. Killed and left unburied, a final cruelty on Ghatai's part. “My name's Holla-Sayan.”

There was room in the water-filled stairwell for their bones, burial enough to release them, but he had lost so much time already; Pakdhala had been in Tamghat's hands two days now, too long. “Sisters, I'm sorry. I'll send someone to honour your bones as soon as I can, but I have to go, I need to find the goddess.”

“No!” Meeray said. “We've waited—Blackdog, we've been waiting for you. We knew you'd come back.”

The door did not look forced, though it was not barred. He frowned at a heap of broken stone, quarried from somewhere and piled beside the door. Had Tamghat tried to tunnel in to them? No…The bones…the ghosts shied away as he came near, carrying the lamp. The skeletons lay—or were heaped—along the wall, as if the bodies had huddled there together, sitting or lying on the floor. One, quite clearly, had settled over the swordblade run between rib cage and pelvis, a mountain shortsword. She had killed herself.

“He sealed you in here.” Holla-Sayan felt sick.

“We couldn't dig our way out.” Meeray shrugged, no clink of armour, no rasp of cloth. “The whole corridor beyond, maybe the whole wing, I don't know. We can't leave the Chapel now anyway. But out there, it's all rubble. More fell as we dug.”

“That's where Jabel and I died,” another woman put in softly. Shy Altira. Jabel, at her shoulder, nodded.

He counted four skulls among the bones at his feet.

“But—” Lying under earth, under stone, chance-fallen or deliberate burial—those two should have gone to the Gods’ road.

“I know,” said Meeray. “At least, they should be free. But he cursed us.”

“Ghatai—Tamghat did?”

“He said we could wait here till Attalissa returned.”

“So we did,” Jabel said, and smirked.

“Don't be so smug about it. At least you died quickly. We began to starve.”

“Until it was better to—”

“That's over and done with,” Meeray snapped, and turned back to Holla-Sayan. “We thought Tamghat was coming in by the tunnel. There were powers there, fighting. But then there was only you?”

“There was always only me,” he said. Memories of Otokas, of host upon host, name upon life upon name, running back to Hareh the wizard of Tiypur. He did not owe them explanation; he could still claim the Blackdog's authority over the temple.

“Sisters, you swore to serve Attalissa. Do you serve her still?”

“Of course. Oto—Blackdog, that's why we're here. We would have waited if we could regardless.”

He put out a hand to a spear, ghost of a spear. The real weapon lay abandoned on the floor, its shaft broken, no doubt in levering rocks, before that escape attempt had been abandoned.

He could feel it, if he tried, cold, sharp-edged. It was real to what he was.

Words had power. Hareh knew this.

“Then the Blackdog tells you, Attalissa has returned and has need of your service still, and no curse of a Grasslander wizard, devil-souled or not, may bind you here.” The words came in the dead speech of old Tiypur, thought shaped by what the devil held of Hareh's mind, but they were said, and the ghosts understood. “Come with me.” He added, in plain speech of the caravan road, “Once I figure out how to leave myself.” He pulled the door open, peered into the low tunnel they had made. They had moved a lot of rock, for women with nothing but lake-water to sustain them. They had tried to follow the known corridor, though. Above lay layers of shelving rock that must have crumbled downwards. The buildings of the whole south side of the temple complex must have rocked and shifted as if in earthquake.

Back into the lake and ashore elsewhere?

The dog—still no other name—thought not.

The dog was the shape of his slavery, of his service, but on the other hand, it was familiar and came with ease. He tore through broken stone, claws, a force that drove the shards of shattered ceiling aside, hauled himself into open space again, an overgrown subsidence where the southern wall of the temple compound was cracked and slipping as if undermined, which in truth it was. Above, the temple rose, climbing the rocky hillock into which it was rooted. The fog had lifted, only a few banners still smoking over the lake when he looked around, and the stars burning whitely, so distant, so remote, lost to him…

Fire burst nearer, a thunderclap echoing and re-echoing off temple walls and enclosing mountains, carried by the waters. Red chrysanthemum floating down, petals fading slowly, sparks dying in the lake. Another, white, and red again, and two yellow. A final green one, each a resounding bang. There were shouts within the temple. Lights kindled, dancing past windows. One bound took him to the roof of the kitchens.

A bell in the town began to clang, and from the corner of his eye he saw another fire-tube blossom, somewhere in the mountains, and then, slowly, the bloom of a beacon-fire grew.

Holla-Sayan shook dust and stone-chips from his coat, flowed back to human form. This was not the Blackdog's twofold existence, he had no other being. He remade himself, remade what he had been, and now his clothing was whole and the cuts and broken claws healed as he rubbed mud from his face, drew the sword that he had, what? Dissolved to ghost and remade? The physical and the fire of his being flowing one into another…Ghatai could do this too. He was going to be very hard to kill.

Meeray's dormitory formed up around him.

“What are the Blackdog's orders?” she asked. He could feel the tension of the ghosts, quivering like hounds straining at the leash. More urgent, though, he knew where Pakdhala was, searching for him, seeking a soul she touched and recoiled from in horror and still longed to find.

Not Pakdhala. Attalissa, whole and entire.

The lake, of course.

And he had been pushing her away, that old, deep hatred beyond thought reacting, all this time, while his attention had been on other things.

He was aware of Ghatai, too, a building thundercloud of uncertainty and anger. Ghatai's awareness swung, questing, seeking the goddess. Found her free. Found the Blackdog.

“Go!” Holla-Sayan sang. “Raise the temple for Attalissa!” He didn't look back to see how or where the ghosts dispersed to, simply ran along the roof, dropped down to the herb garden, and went in the unguarded door.

’Dhala! He's found you!

Father! Holla-Sayan, I thought you were…Gods, Holla, what's happened to you?

An old woman lurched up from what seemed to be her bed, a huddle of ragged quilts in the corner, but her lurch carried smoothly on into the thrust of a long knife from which he rocked aside, catching her wrist. Not a lucky strike in the dark; she was blind, she had tracked him by his boots on the floor. Her eyes were empty, scarred sockets, but her expression was grim, mortally determined, as she suddenly dropped all her weight from that wrist and swung a sandled foot upwards. He twisted from that, faster than thought, released her.

“It's the Blackdog, Sister Darshin.”

On her knees on the floor, she raised her head. “Truly?”

“Yes.”

“Not Otokas.”

“No.”

Her face twisted, weeping tearlessly, not for Otokas, but with relief. “The wizard has her, Blackdog, he's bespelled her somehow.”

“She's free, and the temple is rising. Did you hear the fireworks calling the valleys? Will you fight?”

Darshin laughed bitterly. “I wash dishes, Blackdog, and these new novices tie my sandal-straps together and laugh when I fall. I'm Eyeless Dardar, addled as a forgotten egg. But other than me, you won't find many will fight for her. We all know what the Lake-Lord can do.”

“You haven't seen what we can do yet,” he said, and that
we
was his thoughts running on Vartu, wherever she was, not the little lake goddess.

Gods—no, don't swear by the treacherous Great Gods, ever. His thoughts staggered a veering course between the man he had been and the devil.

“Call Meeray, ask her where you'd be most use,” he suggested.
Pakdhala, I'm coming to you.

“Meeray's dead, Blackdog.”

“I know. Call her.” He took off running again, left Darshin behind, flowed into the dog's form and launched himself down the stairs.

Blackdog, Holla, no! Stay away!

Gaguush tried a series of deep, slow breaths, but they didn't help the tightness in her chest. Call it the thin mountain air, not heart-clenching fear for a wretched, unfaithful Westgrasslander and a brat who wasn't his any more than she was hers. Call it exhaustion. They'd had hard riding, half a day of it in the teeth of a storm, and little sleep. She'd have expelled from the gang anyone who used one of her beasts as they'd used them in this chase, and she'd probably have beaten whoever it was to boot. Definitely docked their pay. Another breath.

“Which way?” Immerose asked. They were huddled in a narrow lane, armed and armoured to the full extent of the gear they'd brought, exhausted and footsore. Since sometime that afternoon, Gaguush had had the strange, floating feeling of dream or fever, as if the world had gone slightly off-kilter and she was slipping away from it. They had overtaken Asmin-Luya and Django the first morning, the two of them in the midst of a furious argument over whether or not to follow a single Tamghati mercenary they'd spotted slinking along through the hills back towards Serakallash. She'd ended that and swept them on with her. The poor camels and Master Mooshka's horses had been left behind today at the shepherd's hut where the priestess calling herself “Auntie Orillias” lived with a handful of younger priestesses, most of whom had come on to Lissavakail with the gang. Orillias had sniffed at the notion that her goddess could possibly have been captured by the Lake-Lord, but she had not been unwilling to help. “Sister Vakail” was a powerful name, it seemed. Orillias had stayed to watch the beacons, as she had for years.

And while they were making their stealthy way down to the lakeshore where there was supposed to be a boat kept by someone's cousin, muttering about the fog that had lifted too soon, there had been an explosion of fireworks from the far side of the temple islet, and answering beacons on the high ridges, running away out of sight into the mountains.

The boat hadn't been there, but one of the sisters had gone scouting and reported, in her barely comprehensible mountain speech, the guardpost that oversaw the bridge to be ablaze, the bridge itself in the hands of the stonecutters’ guild, busily building a drystone wall to bar the bridge to Tamghati reinforcements from outside. They simply walked across, introduced as mercenary allies come seeking a kidnapped comrade.

Simple, hah. In the dark, no one was going to see the fluttering indigo rags they all wore, strips hastily torn from shawls and head-scarves to tie about neck or brow. What use was a token when it had been invented by some stonecutter's wife on the spot and no one else knew about it? The Lissavakaili rebels would see a long-braided shadow too tall for a mountain native and that would be enough. Bashra help her, she wanted to die in her own tent in her own desert.

And at her bedside a crowd of devoted grandchildren—greatgrandchildren—yes, while she was dealing in wishes. Not in some ill-organized peasant uprising which seemed to be taking its own leaders, if these sisters were supposed to be that, all unawares.

“Gaguush, which way?”

She rubbed her eyes and looked around. Nodding off on her feet, she was. She had missed something. “How the hell do I know? Ask the sisters.”

“They've gone. Said they had to meet the guild-leaders. Weren't you listening? Boss, you all right?”

Immerose had always been smugly capable of sleeping soundly anywhere, even on the back of a camel, while the rest of the human race dozed and woke and dozed again.

“Idiots! All four of them shouldn't have gone. We'll be taken for Tamghati.”

“Then let's get moving.”

Immerose, who by her face had been about to ask which way yet again, backed off, as someone put a hand under Gaguush's elbow. The demon, of course. The first dawn as they travelled had proved true everything Varro's winter-tales said about him. Really a bear, or really a man? Man enough now, at any rate, and even a crazed Lissavakaili out for foreign blood might have the sense to pick a different group to attack.

“The temple's west of here,” he said gently. “Your Holla's there, I think.”

“And your Moth?” she muttered. Her Holla. Hah. He was the Blackdog; she had thought it bad enough she had to share him with that long-forgotten mountain-trollop and then with Kinsai of the great river, but he belonged to the goddess of Lissavakail until he died.

“Ya. Come. Come quietly, and perhaps they'll ignore us.”

“That's a wish.” But maybe it was demon magic, because the mobs in the streets, which were flowing in much the same direction, did ignore them, or glance and glance away.

There was another bridge to the temple island, plain timber and held against them by Tamghati mercenaries. The sounds of oars and hushed voices, the sudden leaping slap of water away in the darkness, suggested a flotilla on the move. Now they were trapped among this useless confusion of townsfolk.

Not so confused after all. Their milling numbers took on form, rough division into companies, and they did have leaders, men, and a few women, under sudden banners of tattered blue. Weapons, too, slings, bows, spears, pitchforks, iron-spiked staves, and here and there a sword—how much of that iron had she carried to Jerusha Rost-vadim? Clever little townsfolk, using their guilds as the framework of their revolt. This wasn't a mob; it was a militia, rising up according to some plan. Gaguush felt a lot better about being on their side, or she would if she didn't look so much like she belonged on the other.