Blackdog Read online

  “Attalissa grant they’ve got my brother’s boat in that lot,” one of the sisters said.

  “Why?”

  “Lazy bugger. Rotten planking.”

  “Oh yes. Let it put a hoof right through.”

  “Pitch the godless wizard into the lake.”

  “Think he can swim?”

  “Not in armour. Not even if he is a wizard.”

  “I can,” Otokas said.

  “But it’s Attalissa’s lake. More reason to think he’ll drown despite his magics,” said the one who’d first spoken. “Leave us our fancies, eh, dog?”

  “I’d fancy seeing Otokas swim in anything.”

  “Or nothing.”

  Nervous giggles.

  “Children,” he said, tolerant of most teasing, so long as they left Kayugh out of it.

  Kayugh didn’t join the anxious laughter. The horse picked its way over the unstable bridge, held under some wizardly control, not mere Grasslander horsemanship. The warlord’s escort followed afoot, their horses left behind. The wizard’s mount gained the temple shore with a scrambling leap and broke into a trot, drawing further ahead of the escort, crunching onto a gravelled garden path. Those who had followed him onto the bridge ran to catch up, their torches streaming like banners.

  “Archers,” Kayugh said calmly. “Now. Kill him.”

  The first arrow struck with a powerful arm behind it, stout Kedro’s, and must have pierced through the rings of his mail. Otokas saw the warlord flinch back, arrow protruding from his chest. But in the space of an eye’s blink he gestured in the air before his face, reins caught on his pommel and what looked to Otokas like a web of yarn stretched between his hands. The following flight of arrows curved away as though a heavy wind had caught them. The wizard closed a gloved hand around the shaft in his chest and snapped it off, throwing it aside and taking up the reins again. Three of his guard were down, though. The wizard ignored them, ignoring the continuing ragged flurry of arrows, which scattered as if he were the centre of some deflecting storm.

  None of the raiders shot back.

  Kayugh peered down the slope. “Was he hit, Oto?”

  “Only one arrow made it through to him, but yes. Didn’t seem to bother him, and they’re just blowing away now.”

  “Damn him.” She made it a prayer. “Hold! Aim for those about him, then. His favourites, his commanders, whatever they are.”

  Kayugh drew her own bow again, took careful aim, not for the wizard’s guard but one of the torch-bearers standing on the near end of the bridge. It was a neat, powerful shot, through the throat and a leather collar that did not protect. That tattooed desert woman crumpled, and the dropped torch smouldered.

  “Burn,” Kayugh whispered. But it went out, rolled into bilgewater, perhaps. “Godless bastard.”

  Other arrows found closer marks, though many were turned by armour. None touched the wizard or his horse.

  Otokas let one of the sisters take the bow from him. He watched, eyes narrowed, as the wizard reined in below the gate. The warlord’s followers clustered behind him, largely shielded by whatever spell he had worked against the arrows.

  “Enough,” Kayugh said in disgust. “Wait a better chance, Sisters. Spears might get through, or stones. Wait for my word, though.”

  The raiders muttered among themselves in some foreign language, and laughter rattled off the wall.

  Women gripped spears, or hefted what heavy missiles had been carried up to them. Jars of pottery and brass, bricks, paving stones, oddments of statuary Old Lady certainly did not know the enterprising sisters had carted off. It might be harder to blow away a jade lion the size of a baby, Otokas considered, and he balanced that on the edge of the parapet, waiting with the rest on Kayugh’s word.

  She waited. The warlord smiled. His folk fell silent, though there were screams in plenty, shouts and riotous calls, from the island town. And the hungry red roar of burning houses.

  There were more folk gathering at the far end of the boat-bridge. Raiders, with townsfolk, men and women and children, their hands bound behind them. Hostages to the goddess’s acquiescence as the wizard had threatened. The torch-bearers had followed the warlord, though, and to the sisters the clustered families would be lost in the night’s darkness.

  Otokas said nothing of them to Kayugh, and hoped the goddess did not realize their presence yet. The man’s heart might tear, but the Blackdog had no heart-room to spare for any soul but his goddess. And if the warlord did not know that—it was one small weight in the balance on the Blackdog’s side, leverage the wizard might think he had, only to find he pushed against nothing.

  Otokas studied him with the Blackdog spirit’s eyes. The warlord wore a long mail byrnie like the warriors of the kingdoms of the north, its fine rings gilded, not just by firelight. No blood marred it where the arrow had pierced, though a dark mark showed the stub of the arrowshaft. His helmet was likewise gilded, the eyes of the bear snarling in the centre of his brow set with garnets, or maybe even rubies. Instead of any other jewels he wore a number of cords draped around his neck and hanging to either side down his chest—leather thongs, yarn, ribbon, what might have been braided hair or grass—each one doubled, a long loop. He carried the sabre of the steppes at his side, a single-edged blade, slightly curved, a horseman’s weapon, and his face was of the Great Grass north of the Four Deserts: brown-skinned, with narrow, light brown eyes. His long hair, the colour of his skin, hung loose save for braids to either side, into which bears’ claws had been knotted, swinging against his cheeks as he turned his head, taking a count, it seemed, of the women on the tower roof. Whatever he was, he probably saw in the dark as readily as Otokas did. He looked a man in the prime of life, but there was a greyish cast to his face, as if of illness or exhaustion, and his eyes were sunken.

  To man’s eyes he was an awesome figure, gold in the torchlight on his golden horse, demonic, eyes a glimmer, red, catching the light.

  No. Otokas saw that with his own vision and the dog’s both, a red glint that was not reflection, and the eerie, flame-edged shadow still shivered after his every movement, caught just in the corner of the eye. For a moment, just a moment, as though some curtain were swept aside, Otokas saw dark fire running like molten copper, tracing through the man’s body, twisting like a flame where his heart should be.

  “I am…Tamghat.” As though the name should mean something, or as if the wizard temporized, that pause. “As I told your mad dog there, I have come to make Attalissa of the lake my bride. We shall be wed and bedded with this morning’s dawn, and if you stand between us you will die.”

  The sisters were stunned into silence a moment, and the warlord sat on his horse smiling, with mocking confidence.

  “She’s a child!” someone shouted down in simple outrage, and there was a brief hesitation, a shifting of the wizard’s attention elsewhere.

  The Blackdog scrabbled at Otokas, wanting out. Fling himself over the parapet, have the throat out of the wizard. He resisted it. This Tamghat was something powerful enough to kill him, leaving aside the simple overwhelming numbers which could do the job just as well, and dead, he left Attalissa…not unprotected, never unprotected, but with a protector unfamiliar and ill-prepared, at best. At worst…best not to think of it, the Blackdog taken by the wizard, ‘Lissa’s trust and doom united.

  He forced the dog quiet and said softly, in Kayugh’s ear, “He didn’t expect that.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t know she was a child. Did he really come expecting to face and overcome the goddess grown and in her full strength?”

  But if this Tamghat had planned all along to seize the town, hold its folk hostage…perhaps the goddess’s power would never have been raised against him, if his magic and his numbers had gotten him over the stone bridge. Gods and goddesses had wed mortals before. It was not so unthinkable a thing. The wizard might argue that she would outlive him, and sharing rule and the wealth of the town for a mortal man’s remaining years,
even a wizard’s extended life, might be thought a small price for peace and the folk’s lives. But his eyes were hungry.

  “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 gate
house, 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.