Gods of Nabban (32 page)

She fell silent, eventually, and he did, throat raw, rain in the mouth a blessing to be swallowed. Their hands were clasped together over the bone and the rain drummed hard. The wind would seem briefly to weaken, and then roar again with renewed strength. Dark shapes moved, new leaves, birds, who knew what hurled inland. When finally it did begin to die, Kaeo could not trust he did not imagine it. The darkness did not lift. The air was colder, though. He dared to lift his head. Softer rain, and icy. He could see—not much. Night had come on them. Rat whispered something, and spread light above an opened hand, but when she unclasped the other from his, the bone they had held together was only a little white dust. She touched it to her lips, then to his, then wiped it away. Tried to take up the rest of the bones and found them gone, a little white graininess in the mud.

She shivered. “Toba's grandmother,” she said. “Did you feel her memory with us?”

He shook his head. “I don't understand these things.” The warmth of the tigress tattoo was gone, though. So was the lingering soreness, and the itch of it. “Why say you're not a wizard?”

“Powers lent me,” she said wearily. Her teeth chattered. The pale light smearing her other hand faded and died. “That's all. I don't think it was enough. This is Nabban, not the shores of the Little Sister, and your god is not even—a god, yet.”

She picked herself up. The wind was blowing from the north, where a few stars showed.

They went to find what was left of the camp.

The palisade still stood, and the Council House, mostly roofless, but filled with elderly Nabbani, small children, babies. Little else. Fires were already being built—a good thought, whoever had ensured some fuel was kept dry. People everywhere, and all down the sheltered side of the Beacon Hills, where the wind had been a little less.

No food, no tea. Fire was enough. Someone made a place for them closest to the warmth and they sat shoulder to shoulder. Rat fell asleep against him, which was—awkward, when Jian came searching for the youngest queen, to find him with his arm about her. She said nothing, though, except, “Nawa says, come and see.”

Dawn. He shook Rat awake and they went out into the open again.

The marshes were flooded deep, and the waves still rolled high, spitting over the dykes. The palace hill looked as though it had been struck by a thousand hammers, trees splintered, smashed, buildings that been spared the fire gone as if they had never been, or lying in shattered heaps.

“Plenty to burn,” Jian said. “Plenty to build with, too.”

“Look further,” Nawa told them.

He did. Found he was holding Rat's hand.

“Yes,” said Jian, to something in his face.

The Golden City was—gone.

Waves churned rough and white. Sandbars, ancient pilings of massive logs, stone-paved plazas, and canal-side streets, there. Buildings—a few. Broken things, sagging, leaning. A scum of flotsam heaved with the waves, made rafts that drifted on the surface of the lagoon. Mia. Shouja Wey. The Flowering Orange, the masks, the scrolls of the plays.

Yeh-Lin's ghost-haunted and long-deserted palace loomed over all, roofless now, but still standing.

He had not thought wind and wave could do so much.

“We were spared,” Nawa said. “The full force of the wind was weakened as it came over the hill, a little. Our walls and fences still stand, and they were better shelter than none. The Little Sister is with us.”

A wall of finger-bones, a memory holding out its hands, to guard them. A tiger, crouched defiant, snarling into the wind.

He looked at Rat.

“No,” she said. “It was only the last memory of Toba's grandmother. The last strength in her bones. We have nothing to set against the power the empress holds, whatever it is and however she came by it. We need alliance with the god of Nabban. We'll go to him, Kaeo and I. Kaeo is his prophet. I—go only as the youngest of the queens, I think. Find us food, if there is any. We'll leave today.”

Neither Nawa nor Jian made any protest this time.

CHAPTER XX

The Daro castle, called the White River Dragon for an old, old tale of its founding, sat to the northeast of the town, separated from it by a broad moat. The spring flooding often reached so far, lapping at the town's eastern flank, mingling with the waters of the moat, but Dernang was on a low mound and the castle itself on a higher, safely above the waters in most years. The castle's main gate faced the town, with a bridge between, but its second gate looked east and flung out a raised roadway towards the river. Ghu did not want to keep too close under the city walls, so he led them out into the fields, heading cross-country to circle to the river road, across wet fields that sank into ankle-deep water. The ditches became drowningly treacherous, marked only by lines of cattail and reed. Ghu and Ahjvar went barefoot; there was water even over the road, and boots meant for the winter desert were no use for wading. The cold numbed Ghu's feet. These were the waters of the Wild Sister, Mother Nabban's own river, whose three main sources converged two and three hundred miles south of here, carrying the waters of the mountains that bordered Choa and Alwu over shallow, stony beds. Spring melt, always, and sometimes the autumn rains in the mountains, swelled her waters to push over the land, a shallow lake drowning thin clay and the beds of ancient stone beneath. He felt her in the water, felt him in the stone, the Mother, the Father, like a slow, slow breathing, a tide in his blood, rising. The river's tree-lined banks were only a weight in his mind, lost now in the night. The bridges over the small streams that fed her rose humped and forlorn, like the hulls of overturned boats, from the lake she was becoming, and then even they faded, as the fog thickened and they moved blind in darkness that felt muffling, no reflection of moonlight on water to guide them. The drowned lanes he followed through the fields were only memory to his feet. In the fog, he could fade to nothing himself, to memory, instinct, with only the shuffling splash of Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin, the more rapid spatter of the dogs, to anchor him.

Something brushed over him like a trailing cobweb, an insect on the skin. Something drawn by the fog, wondering at it. An awareness, searching.

He held himself very still, very small, as he had when the eyes of the Lady passed over him in Marakand. There was nothing. Only fog, cold air and day-warmed water, damp fields breathing. Fog was common to the season, fog was blinding, muffling, a blanket in the dark.

The touch faded, distant as a dream and he slid down again into his own place, the night and the fog. Found the pattern . . . became a part of it.

The Mother stirred uneasily, like a sleeper disturbed, but she did not reach to touch him as the gods had when he crossed the border. Already, she was less than she had been, even then.

No matter, in this moment. What might be, what must be—what could, what should be if only he could move the world about him as he needed—hovered. No words. Pattern, yes, a juggler's wild spinning of pieces, a weaver's threads flung all in the air but he could seize and move and bind and shape if only he kept all moving to his hand.

No words. Easier to have no words, to let them go. Ahjvar grew angry when he forgot to speak, when he let the words go because they were too thin and yet too complicated and cumbersome a thing to hold in mind. No words in the fog, in the night, only the flying threads, the pieces of a shattered shape all tumbling through the air, falling, and
this
one,
now
, to save, others to lock into it, others it would draw, and hold in strength, to build . . .

Ahj was angry now. Not for silence. For this place, for the old lord, for Meli. Ghu was not sorry it was so. It warmed him, oddly, and awed him. There had been no one to be angry for him, for them all, when he was a child.

He climbed the bank to the raised road and broke into a jogging trot. The way beneath him was his, and the night, and the fog. When the castle loomed, an artificial island the size of a Praitannec village, it was as though it was a mere slow thickening of the fog. Stone walls and whitewashed towers, low spreading roofs upon roofs, only a faint solidity. The moat was lost in the still floodwaters, but the shallow fishback arch of the bridge showed where its depths lay. The eastern gatehouse rose dark over them, wings of the roof held out like a swooping bat.

Too cold for swimming. He waited for the other two to come up beside him.

“Take my pack. I'm going around to the postern. There's a boat there. Keep well back and follow along on the shore. Don't splash. Don't fall in.”

“I could open those for you,” Yeh-Lin whispered against him.

“No.” It must not be her doing, not Dotemon's, to be the first assertion of—of what he would claim. He knew that, felt it in the marrow, and the riverwater that for this moment seemed to flow in his veins.

But he did not want to pass over this threshold. He did not want to be again within these massive walls. He had not wanted to bring Ahjvar to this place. Deep in his chest there was a slow-smouldering anger that had never died, all his life. He had taken it in with his mother's blood, been nourished on it within her womb. The lord, the castle, all Nabban . . . he did not know which it was for. Pity, mercy . . . they were what he needed. He had found them for Meli. The Kho'anzi Daro Korat had been a fair master, on the rare occasions when he had had to do with such as Ghu—small things, the least of things, within the great compass of his lordship. He had had far worse treatment from fellow slaves and from folk in other lands who would call slavery a sin against their gods. But something burned. He did not want Ahjvar, who would have killed that spiteful, stupid, pitiable fool Meli for striking him, to know of it, to unleash on the folk of this place the rage that burned undying in Ghu himself. Nor to be by him here, where he had been owned and despised and beaten and of no worth. It sickened him to stand here.

Ghu took a breath, and crossed the bridge before there could be any further debate, most of all with himself. Torches burned there to show up any approach but the fog swallowed them, muffled their light. He passed under the blackness of the outflung eaves of the gatehouse; wings, but not for his sheltering. The outermost gate was a grille of age-dark cypress, bronze-studded. He set a hand to it. The river's breath wrapped him. He could bring it down, the gate, the whole weighty stone strength of this tower. In this moment . . . he turned away, to move a little longer in quietness, like the river's rising in this broad vale.

The angle of the high scarp where the moat rose to meet the curtain wall was steep, faced in smooth stone. Just around the next bend to the north there was a postern gate and no bridge, only a boat, usually, moored to a ring in the wall. There were carp stocked in the moat once the floods subsided, harvested for the family's dinner. Slaves of the outer services, stables and gardens, weaving-sheds and workshops, potters, carpenters, smiths, masons, tile-setters and all, had poached them when they could. He remembered that, now. Much he had put from his mind and pretended it was forever. Steeper than he remembered, this scarp, almost vertical, a great cliff, but he had been smaller last time he clambered along it. He splayed himself flat, toes and fingers seeking the joins in the stone. If he slipped, it would be a splash too great to be dismissed as a leaping fish or disturbed duck. If he slipped, better to have swum after all. He remembered the water, deep but swampy, stinking—it would be fresher now in the floods, if colder. He'd been thrown in more times than he wanted to remember.

Too much he did not want to remember. But he remembered everything, everything since the river. His mother drowned him . . .

Foot slithered. He clung by fingers alone a moment, till toes found a hold. Crawled up and went on. Finally, the first of the many rounded corners, but the only one he needed to pass. There, the jutting darkness of the postern gate, a stone porch, and the punt where it had always been, as if he had never gone. It dipped and bobbed as he used it to scramble around to the little landing-stage, still an inch above the waters. No torches here to gild the fog, which had thickened as he worked along the scarp, until he could see neither the far side of the moat nor the moving shadows of Ahjvar and Yeh-Lin. He leaned against the door and closed his eyes, fingers spread on the wood. Let himself go again, into cold, into night, into biting frost and the death of the year, when even mountain oaks might crack and stone split, hillsides sheer away . . .

Iron bolts, top and bottom, secured the door. Wood cracked. Stone split, a snap like breaking ice. Loud, but there was no other sound within. Ghu leaned, gently. The door moved.

Not, Ahjvar would say, subtle. But it was done.

He left it to cast off the punt, sculling over the stern. The oar creaked on its pin. Too loud. Ahjvar caught the blunt prow and steadied it as Yeh-Lin and the dogs leapt in, followed them, pushing off from the drowned and stony shore, leaning up to his elbows in the water.

Ghu sensed, rather than saw, Yeh-Lin's movement to speak and touched her hand to silence her. Once inside, he picked up the bolts, fallen with splintered wood and flaked stone, staples and nails and all. They were still white with frost, but warmed to his hand. He closed the door behind them, cutting off the fog that reached to follow, and fitted the broken ironwork back in place. Even by day the passage was dark. It would fool the eye until someone tried to draw the bolt. Time enough.

The passage was narrower, lower, than he remembered. A sharp bend, a grille suspended above, meant to be dropped to trap an enemy, and gaps in the ceiling through which to finish the work. Mostly, in the peaceful years he had known, it had been a passageway to the punt and the fish for the kitchen staff. There were two men in the chamber above, asleep. He wondered if they were meant to be, and wished them to stay so. Through the thickness of the wall to a covered passage and out into a cobbled yard. The fog pooled there, wrapped him as if in welcome, followed him.