Blackdog (72 page)

Not entirely willing, not all of them. Fearful, doubting, curious, angry…not necessarily hers, though. The leaders of the temple under Tamghat. Not necessarily his, either. Survivors, women trying to do the best they could for the others, women afraid to refuse, women who saw opportunity for power, women proud to partake of the least scraps of the fear and reverence Tamghat garnered. There was Luli, queasy with some great anticipation, and staring with revulsion at Pakdhala's tattoos and long hair. These were turned out as honour guard to her, were they? Or to put a gloss of reverence to Attalissa upon whatever plan the devil wove now that she was free.

“There you are, my dear,” Ghatai said, mild as if she had wandered in to offer him tea. “Just wait where you are a moment.”
Not another step, Attalissa. Stay!

She stumbled to a halt, all unwilling. Gritted her teeth and pulled herself straight, sword at the ready, not dropped to the floor as the force running through her arms, into her fingers, urged. Great Gods help her, even as a mere wizard he was powerful, and cunning. She had not noticed that she was bound in multiple layers of spell.

But here there were witnesses, and she still had her voice.

“I'm here, Tamghiz Ghatai!” she shouted. “Where your wizardry brought me. Now what? Turn me loose and fight me sword to sword, human to human, coward devil that you are!”

She felt the shock of that run through them, Tamghati and sisters alike.

“He is a devil!” she yelled at them, fighting simply to force the words out now. “And through me he means to make himself your god!”

She was forced to her knees, sitting slumped on her heels.

Stupid earthbound creature
, Ghatai snarled in her mind.
Do you think these animals care? Do you think it matters now whether they do or not? Make myself a god—what do you know of the great world, all you feeble sparks of this earth's soul?

Pakdhala dragged against his binding, which tried to pull her prostrate. She levered herself up with Altira's sword, so that she was at least upright, though still kneeling. She bowed her head on clasped hands on the sword's hilt, shut her eyes, shut everything out, the better to see within, to find the snares about her. The whispering pulse of the ghost-sword warmed her hands now. A gift of faith.

You can't fight me, Attalissa. I am greater than you could ever dream to be, alone. When we are joined, then you will know what it is to be true god, born of the stars.

I thought you were waiting on some earthbound bit of astrology
, she taunted, with effort, to distract him. No human wizardry now. She found pattern, threads and knots, and dissolved it, washed it away. She was water. Breathing came a little easier. She raised her head.

Ritual of the earth binds power of the earth
, Ghatai said. Pompous. He had gone back to painting, was not even watching her. Where was the Blackdog? She didn't dare reach for him.
Look to the east, Great Attalissa. Do you see the gap in the horizon where your servants used to watch for the dawn? See where the wandering stars rise. White Vrehna, red Tihz. See how close they lie, as though they could reach out and join. Those are you and I. Do you feel how we are drawn together? Do you feel how already your heart beats with mine?

Sayan, Kinsai, Great Gods help her, she did. Pakdhala felt her own racing pulse slowing to march in step with his. She remembered riding, a little girl, leaning back, her cheek to her father's chest, and the beat of his heart rocking her into sleep.

We will wait here, you and I, growing into one another as the stars do. Not quite the marriage ritual I had planned, but I am no human wizard who sees profanation in any change to his precious constructs. Vartu forgot that, when she came meddling. I am fire, you are water—we grow and flow around what lies in our way. She can throw up obstacles; we will change and roll over them as though they were not there. Arrogant Northron. She believes a Grasslander too ignorant to think on his feet, doesn't she? You will sleep, Great Attalissa. Float in dreams with me, and we will merge as the stars merge, and wake six days hence a god of earth and fire and stars, and call the others to us, break the walls of the cold hells.

The Blackdog will come.

Your slave is nothing. A dead thing, a ghost that clings to an alien world. He will run away rather than face me, as he did before, or I will take the chained soul into myself, which it would welcome, if it were free and knew itself again.

No.
She snuffed her burst of hope. The Blackdog was free, and if it had not run to Ghatai…it had spoken with Holla-Sayan's mind…

Vartu is the worse danger.
Ghatai's thought was not spoken to her, but she felt it nonetheless. Panic welled. She was being drawn into him, he knew her thoughts, he would know what she did…but at least he was distracted and thought himself so much stronger that he could ignore her.

There was a distant uproar. She found and destroyed another knot. Now she felt the minds of her folk again—excited fear and eager bloodlust and over all, hope. They were fighting, here on the holy islet. Townsfolk, sisters. Whispers of individual thought.

Sister Meeray!

Rise, fight, the time is now.

Attalissa returns.

The free temple is making war.

The high valleys rise against their occupiers.

The town in arms.

Burn the barracks, burn them all.

No more.

The dead come back.

Attavaia. Meeray.

No more shame and lying.

Sister Vakail and the free temple say Tamghat is a devil, escaped from the cold hells.

Attalissa is here! The Blackdog will fight for us.

Attalissa is here!

She felt Ghatai's emotions, too, anger building like a thunderhead. Nothing must interrupt him, not now, so many delays, so long waiting…For six days, the Dawn Dancing Hall must withstand whatever came from outside, whatever destruction and death spread through the lands of the Lissavakail, and whatever came against him.

He thrust himself into the souls of the human sentries. Pakdhala screamed, their blinding, animal agonies burning through her veins as through his. They died as one would die thrown alive on a pyre, not swiftly. Only Altira's sword kept her from collapsing on the pavement. Ghatai shed their pain like water, shook himself, and went on with his painting, muttering aloud to himself in the Grasslander of centuries past. Pakdhala raised her head again, swallowing bile. Old Lady Luli turned to look at her, expressionless.

Fire burned behind Luli's eyes.

Pakdhala clenched her teeth and swallowed, forgot about hunting Ghatai's bindings on her until the ringing in her ears faded and she could control the nausea. Humanity betrayed her now. She must be as remote as him, as cold, to go on.

Shadows moved, two-score figures climbing the rising ground, coming to the edge of the torchlight beyond the pillars, and from among them a sudden cry, croaking and laboured but she knew him nonetheless.

“Pakdhala!”

She tried to fling herself to her feet, staggering against the threads woven round her, was pulled back to her knees, and cried against all rising hope,
“Bikkim?”

Ghatai did not bother to look up, which warned her. “Bikkim, run, get away!” she shrieked, before her tongue was dragged into silence and she choked.

Women in peasant gowns and leather jerkins, women in scale armour like her own, men in boiled leather—all hers, folk of the Lissavakail, broken through the Tamghati defences by the bridge where battle still raged and come seeking her. Bikkim, Bikkim alive, and Gaguush and Immerose and Varro in the vanguard of them, running now, Varro shieldless but with a sword in either hand, his own sabre and some scavenged Northron sword. Archers, former sisters, one heavily pregnant, swung out to the sides and took aim. “Attalissa!” they cried, and arrows hissed, straight and low, rang on armour, pierced some, sank into flesh. She saw one of the sisters taken by Ghatai stagger back, dark shaft standing in her throat, and then a jerky hand closed around it and it fell away into ash. The sister strode forward, unarmoured and unarmed. Immerose reached her first, rocked back on her heel and then thrust her lance with her whole weight behind it. The lancehead stood out from the sister's back, but she lurched forward and got her hands around the Marakander's throat. Pakdhala felt her friend's rising terror, saw with her the empty eyes, black pits with flame in their depths, and then the pain at her throat rose beyond enduring, beyond thought, and went on, until Immerose was gone and the body fell empty. The sister irritably brushed away the shaft of the lance, charred through, and turned towards a Lissavakaili man armed with an axe.

He could not stop her either.

She knew their names, every woman, every man, every sister already dead and a vessel for Ghatai's deathly fires. The dead and possessed Tamghati were less terrible—unstoppable, but they killed with their weapons, not their touch. The little band was forced in on itself, a huddle, and though more and more of her folk were straggling up from the bridge in handfuls and dozens, few dared engage the fire-eyed defenders of the Dawn Dancing Hall. They began to retreat towards the main buildings of the temple, to seek enemies they could fight.

Bikkim was cut off from the main group of attackers, back to back with pregnant Sister Pollan, who wept as she fought. She carried twins, all unknowing, and the father of her sons was dead at the burning hand of his own aunt. The two
noekar
who engaged them were pressing in, and the thing that had been Luli turned and ran, stiff, because Luli had not run in years, towards them.

The games of mortality, Attalissa. You don't need such attachments. They only hobble such as us. See, if I say, stop fighting my bindings—did you think, I didn't notice?—or he dies, you stop.

But he meant to kill Bikkim regardless, did not want or need a hostage, was spitefully angry that this earnest Serakallashi princeling would die for a mere cameleer, would die for a goddess the same, without worship, without anything but love for her, that this petty peasant godling was given as a human girl such unfaltering faith while he never found anything but faithlessness. Bikkim would fail and die and before dying he would suffer enough to hate the girl who had brought him to this, suffer enough for love to shrivel and die before he did, enough for his thoughts to reject and deny her.

Attalissa was the lake, the soul of the lake and its mountains, and flesh and blood were nothing, were matter spun of longing
and she did not need them, they were not her self.

She had lost her way. Kinsai said it.

Flood, winter-rain-swollen, and the eastern stormwinds driving rising waters the length of the lake. Force to shake the earth, to break rock, to tower to the clouds. Between earth and sky she stood, waves lashed to flying cloud, waves heavy as granite, edged as steel, and tore the threads that fed the
noekar
and sisters with the devil's will, the sinews that bound them, and they blazed and were consumed by what they carried. Ghatai was the one to scream, this time, and he ran to the body that fell, small and battered and clad only in a damp shift, forward on its face on the pavement in a tangle of dark hair. He ripped the thin cotton and, with a bear's claw from the tangled necklaces and loops of yarn and ribbon about his neck, he cut runes into the skin, sliced his own palm and pressed blood against it, but he was too late for whatever he tried; the body bled only weakly, seeping, heart stilled.

Bikkim and Sister Pollan clutched one another, holding themselves upright. The corpses at their feet were black husks, charred beyond any hope of recognition. Even armour and blades were twisted and melted, jewellery gone to bubbled slag.

Bikkim let the former priestess go and she sank to her knees, sat there while he went on, haltingly.

Ghatai screamed curses at the sky and flung Pakdhala's body away. It landed between the pillars on the edge of the raised platform, sprawled and empty, bone-broken doll. “Great Gods curse your name, drought and plague and loss of all hope…” Power rode his words and she trapped and held them, dissolved them, purified the syllables of hatred and let the mists go harmless.

Bikkim cried out hoarsely and ran to gather up Pakdhala's body. Gaguush and Varro came staggering after him, and a straggle of Lissavakaili, who spread out along the pillars in the pools of torchlight like sentries themselves.

Ghatai caught up his sabre. His heart was a seething pillar of fires, cold silver-white and the scarlet of molten rock, and fires lay just below the human frame that contained them, was spun of them, blood and bone and flesh and flame, black cold to shatter ice and heat to burn granite, and she was afraid.

You are only one and you cannot take me now. We are no longer any kin in our nature. I'm out of your reach.

Little goddess of water, do you not remember why the Westrons have no gods?

I'm not Sera. Do you really think you can defeat me? You bastard
, she added.
Try it. Just try.
But fury did not lessen the fear. He might be strong enough to destroy her. But his mind was muddy, swirling, tangled in human thoughts, failure and betrayal looming,
Vartu
had done this, somehow, she had turned his daughter against him and it all began to unravel there. His rage was human, distracting him.

I will not leave one stone of your temple standing. I'll sink your town to the bottom of the lake and scatter the bones of your folk to the winds. Your very name will be forgotten.

You are still just one, Ghatai
, she taunted, probing, seeking some way to come to grips with him.
All alone in the world. Your poor human subjects are slaughtered or in flight in all the high valleys. They are laying down their arms at the bridge but the townsfolk are offering no quarter. Women you cursed and left to die unburied have led my priestesses to retake the temple. Serakallash has fallen…
There were messengers on the road, her road, bringing him that news, a handful of survivors on horseback, but they were set to overtake the homeward-marching band of Lissavakaili boys who had served in Serakallash, and none of those Tamghati refugees would come to Lissavakail.