The Last Road Read online

  “We don’t want to travel with them,” Iarka said. “Traitors to their gods already, in their hearts.”

  “You can’t blame them for wanting to save their lives,” Rifat said.

  “I can,” said Iarka.

  “We don’t want to travel with them,” Holla said, “because we don’t want them talking of us, when they do run into some Westron priest or knight. You two make sure they forget us.”

  As if that were an easy and ordinary thing. Jolanan did not think it was, even for a wizard of Kinsai’s folk.

  The two wizards put their heads together, riding side by side, voices low. Holla rode ahead, until the paleness of his camel and the baggage-carrier faded into the desert night. Iarka and Rifat followed without seeming to pay much heed to their route. Passengers. It was the camels who followed. Jolanan hung back as rearguard, for what use she could be there. Moonlight was enough to tell ground from sky, not much more. The sun would be rising in a few hours. In the meantime—Holla’s nose and ears were a better watch for danger than any she could keep.

  Jolanan swayed with the camel’s pacing, felt it, the difference underfoot as they crossed yet another thread of the braid that was the hard-packed road, deep rutted by the passage of centuries of soft-padded feet, a flowing river of lives and hopes and goods, a pulse pumping along it, east and south to west, to north and back again…she could feel it like a heartbeat, but she was groggy with sleep still, dreaming. She was no wizard, no poet, no bard to think such things. But if the road held memories, its own dreams…maybe they drifted into hers.

  Silver light on the barren slopes found a cluster of hairy saxaul marking some hidden dampness. She could see they were riding south, not south-easterly. Dry hills before them and the mountains beyond, mountains that dwarfed the western Karas, the skyline of her childhood. No one crossed the Pillars of the Sky. The lands beyond, to the south, were a silence even to the bards. One might climb into them, but only by a few tracks. There were folk lived there, folk of the gods of the mountains and goddesses of the mountain waters. But to find the road to the high lake and valley town of Lissavakail, and the folk of the goddess Attalissa, whom the Blackdog had once served, they must come first to Serakallash though the desert-edge town of the goddess Sera.

  “There are ways,” Holla said, looking back, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “We’ll travel the tracks through the mountains’ feet. No caravans, no Westron strays or outposts left to watch their supply lines, we can hope. Water, if you know where to seek it.”

  The murmuring of the wizards had gone silent some time before. Their magic-making done, whatever they had been doing.

  “Yes,” Iarka said. “Fine. Whatever. Will we come to the lake sooner, this way?”

  “No.”

  She muttered something under her breath.

  “What?”

  “This camel is making me sick.”

  “It isn’t the camel,” Rifat said.

  “Fine, this baby is making me sick and the camel isn’t helping.”

  “Aren’t there, I don’t know, herbs…?” Jolanan regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. Silly to feel that as the only other woman, she ought to be the one offering advice. Two wizards—and even if one was only a boy of fifteen, he knew things, far more than she about almost everything. Except killing, maybe, and cattle. Two wizards, and a man who’d been around a very long time, with women in his life, and babies, whole lives lived of which she knew nothing, because he didn’t speak of them. But her mouth persisted. “Ginger? I think I heard that somewhere. Or—some wizard thing?”

  “We have no ginger left and some wizard thing is the only reason I’m not losing my breakfast all down this beast’s shoulder, not that we’ve had any breakfast.”

  “Sorry,” Jolanan said. “I should just shut up, right?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Maybe we should stop, make some tea?” Rifat suggested.

  “Not yet,” said Holla.

  “Soon,” said Iarka. “Or else, old man.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  That didn’t sound like Holla at all, and won a snort of laughter from Iarka.

  Dawn followed as the moon sank from its height, colour seeping into the land. Red sand, red stone, frost in the hollows melting dark as the day’s breath warmed it. They were climbing, and the hills, sand and red grit and flakes of stone, were held together with yellowed grass and low-growing plants long gone to seed, pods empty. She didn’t recognize the shrubs, except the saxaul trees Holla had named, more of them here, growing along what she guessed must be some slough where water would gather in the spring. The Red Desert bloomed then, he had said, when the snows melted and for a brief space it turned green and scarlet, white and gold. The white-cloaked mountains seemed closer now. The Pillars of the Sky, holding up the great high blue.

  They made a halt low on the southern side of a long ridge, where their little smoke might spread itself very thin before it rose against the sky. Not that anyone from the caravan was likely to come after them, if Iarka and Rifat had managed to make them forget the encounter, turn the four travellers into some boring dream no one thought worth speaking of, or whatever wizardry might do. Even if the caravaneers did remember, once they’d checked and found their own camels all accounted for and their goods unplundered they’d likely not be bothered. But enemies were ahead of them. Westron scouts might roam far from their march.

  Jolanan’s left eye, or the scarred socket that was all she had remaining of it, was aching again. Or her head was, around there. Hard to tell the difference. Windblown sand found its way into the seams of the scarring despite the leather patch that protected the scars.

  Hideous. She still tried not to touch it, washing her face with a dampened rag, while Rifat made the smallest of fires that would boil a kettle with a few lumps of dry camel-dung and some dead twigs. Still couldn’t stand the feel of it to her fingertips. A hollow, filled with scar, crossed with ridges. Being scarred across the face, as if someone had tried to take off the top of her head with an axe, which they had…being blind in one eye—neither of those would have given her this twist in the gut, this flinching from herself. But her eye was gone, and whatever the wizard-surgeon Rose had done, it had left no socket for a crystal eye like in the Lay of Brued One-Eye that the bards sang; she had no eyelid, no lashes. Just—ugliness. All that he could save.

  Not dead of a cracked skull. Not dead of a festering lump of rot sunk in her face. Not dead.

  “Here, let me.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  “I know. Let me?”

  She let Holla-Sayan take the cloth from her hand. Childish and cranky to deny him. He meant only kindness. When he was finished, he waited for her to tie the patch in place again, but wrapped her headscarf for her. A lover’s intimacy, or a sick-nurse’s condescension? She leaned her face into his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. For being cranky. For feeling as she did, still— angry, and ugly, and lost. Let the feel of him holding her deny all that. Warm, solid. Arms around her. Unwashed sweat and smoke and camels and the oiled leather of his brigandine. The man she had left her friends, left her duty to the memory of her goddess Jayala to follow.

  She felt too young.

  She let him go on holding her, standing there, the two of them leaning together.

  “Tea?”

  Jolanan twisted in Holla’s arms to take the cup Iarka offered. It was black, smoky, almost syrupy. One thought of the ferry-folk of Kinsai as practically beggars, with their ragged, piecemeal looks, their collecting of the odds and ends others threw away, including children like Rifat, who had run from his Black Desert tribe with his small brother for reasons he didn’t go into, but there was always sugar in the tea, and the jewel Iarka wore in the side of her nose was surely a ruby.

  Holla didn’t let Jolanan go, accepted a cup over her shoulder, one arm comfortably about her waist as if she belonged there, tucked against him. The fire was out ag
ain already, the remnants of the fuel to be carefully packed away once they cooled. Rifat shared out cold, oily campbread from the previous night while the camels ate a little. Jolanan leaned back against Holla-Sayan again, shut her eye. Wished this feeling of misery would stop creeping up and hitting her, this childish despair that she was—somehow no longer herself. Iarka, Rifat—they had lost family, friends—they had ridden away knowing death was going to follow for those they left behind. They didn’t wallow. They rode to something, in anger, in love, in hate, to save something…all of that at once. Holla—Holla-Sayan, she had to make an effort to think of him by his true name—him, too. And Iarka made jokes about her morning sickness, and Rifat was earnest and tender with Iarka as if she were his own sister, and brotherly to Jolanan too, the stranger who’d come among them, despite all they had lost. And she couldn’t shake this petty loathing of her own face.

  Holla—Holla-Sayan—tipped her head back, kissed her forehead, turned her and kissed her nose and then her mouth. Not playful. Serious. Testing. She knew it. And she felt…nothing. Exhaustion that had nothing to do with long days and lack of sleep, which she should be well used to by now. Anything else was a distant dream, a life half forgotten.

  “Into the mountain paths by nightfall, if we push it,” he said, letting her go. “Ready to ride?”

  They hadn’t lain together to make love since the evening—the night she had been wounded. Too ill, too tired, not enough privacy, too much grief—there were many reasons and all of them good. She thought Iarka and Rifat would not have minded what she and Holla-Sayan might have done under cover of the night, but someone was always awake on watch and they slept under the open sky. It seemed a good excuse.

  She didn’t know what she felt, what she might feel, knowing now what he was.

  Which shamed her. Maybe that was the ugliness she felt in herself. Not her scarred face after all, but her secret thought that she had lain with a monster unknowing.

  Nothing had changed in him, not his kindness, his patience, not his sudden glints of humour or the passion that lurked under the weariness. He hadn’t changed. Something in her had. For good? He looked like a man. She had seen him turn into a monstrous dog.

  She wanted him to hold her. She didn’t want him to touch her. She wished she were home, that the Westrons had never crossed the mountains…might as well wish papa had never been injured, that blow to the head that made him a cantankerous child again, in need of constant care, wish mama hadn’t died when her little sister who never lived was born, wish she were a child again.

  Wish herself the adult she pretended to be, the skirmisher and then lancer who had fought the Westrons through a summer and autumn of unending retreat, the woman and warrior Holla-Sayan seemed to think he wanted.

  Wishes were nothing. Less than mist drifting on the wind.

  Iarka had the first watch of the night when they had camped, as Holla-Sayan promised, in the feet of the mountains. There was even water, a little spring welling up from a crack in the rocks, shimmering away to lose itself in a dry, gravel gully, where thirsty roots drank all that it had. There was no goddess, but the mere sound of the water gave a sense of peace, at least to Jolanan.

  The air off the mountains was cold, and their fire was already out. They could not go on sleeping in the open much longer, but there were not so many more days ahead of them, Holla-Sayan said, and once they were right into the mountains they could keep a fire going, or cut brush to make a shelter.

  She laid her blankets down next to his, the first time she had done so since they left the Upper Castle. He looked at her. Solemn. He had such beautiful eyes. That was what she had first noticed about him, when he was a worrying stranger. The air, too, of danger, of something that might be let loose. It had drawn her, then. Matched something in herself, she had thought.

  Well, she had seen that hidden danger surface, seen it wake. Found it wasn’t what she had thought, whatever that might have been.

  She didn’t know how to say she was afraid, but she wanted his arms around her again, like this morning, when they drank tea. She wanted to have responded to his kiss.

  That was all. That was all there would be, with Iarka or Rifat sitting up, watching the night.

  It wasn’t going to be enough for him. She felt that, when they pressed close together under their shared blankets, but what did she expect? And she…wanted him. She very badly wanted him and wanted not to be afraid of him, but she dreamed of a black shape laced with fire, and burning eyes, and fangs, leaping out of the night, and sometimes it was her enemy whose throat it seized, and sometimes it was herself.

  He pulled her closer to him, more comfortably against him, and she settled her head on his chest. If they started kissing at this point…Iarka had climbed away uphill a little and Rifat had turned his back, blankets pulled up over his head. She wanted, she badly wanted, to slide a hand up under Holla’s shirt, to stroke over that bare warm skin, the curling hair there, to let herself touch, as she had used to. To have his hands moving, too, to lift herself up to lie over him, face to face, mouth to mouth…

  One arm around her, hand on her waist. The other on her cheek, cradling her head against him. He didn’t move again, just held her there, whatever else he might want.

  She was so damned tired. And safe. And she wanted to laugh. Rifat was snoring, and Rifat—did not snore.

  She settled more comfortably into Holla-Sayan’s embrace. Sighed. Fell asleep.

  Woke at a hand on her mouth, a skittering of stone, a body gone tense, half rising, carrying her with him as he sat up. Jolanan rolled away, reaching for the sabre she had laid at her side. Knelt, blade unsheathed. Hearing nothing.

  “Something,” said Iarka, and Rifat was on his feet, a spear in his hand. Late enough the moon had risen and she should have had the second watch. The two wizards had let them lie, or someone had slept when they should not, which she did not believe of either of Kinsai’s folk.

  “Get out of here,” Holla-Sayan said. “Go! Run! Iarka, go! Jo, get her away.”

  Because it was Iarka, Iarka of all of them, who must live.

  Jolanan grabbed her boots in her free hand and ran sock-footed, nothing but a shirt between her heart and an enemy’s blade, to Iarka, who still wore her shirt of Northron mail and stood hesitating by the camels, unsaddled, but restless, now. One began to heave itself up.

  Nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, but the air felt like a thunderstorm. Hopping, she pulled on her boots.

  “Go!” Holla-Sayan said—snarled, as Rifat yelled and hurled his spear at a blackness that thickened out of the night. There was a flare of white, as if lightning answered. Jolanan grabbed Iarka’s arm and they both ran. Camels bellowed behind. Something howled. Rifat cried out again. Iarka jerked her arm free, began muttering, tracing shapes in the air. Sparks danced along her fingers and she fell to her knees, crying out, holding her head.

  Something shrieked, a high, animal sound. Lightning blazed a path into the sky and for a moment Jolanan saw it, a man, standing, a knife that trapped the light as if it were ice, and he held the dog, huge as a wolf, in the air by the throat, as if it weighed nothing. He stabbed between its clawing forelegs and into its heart even as it twisted and broke free and it fell and was a man, with the hilt of a knife standing out of his chest, but the metal—melted, like ice, in the dancing lightning’s glare, and Holla-Sayan was still. And the stranger seized him up in his arms as if he were a child and they were gone.

  The sudden dark was blinding.

  Too fast. Too much. In the space of a thunderbolt’s strike she could not have seen, have known…

  She had, she did.

  He was gone. Again. And this time she could not follow.

  Jolanan found Rifat sprawled amid the rocks. She feared him dead, struck down by lightning, by wizardry or devil’s rage. But he still breathed, though he was cold as the frosted earth and couldn’t be woken. Iarka, crawling to them, felt her way over his body from head to heel and said no bo
nes were broken, so they made a nest of all their blankets and took it in turns to lie close against him, one sharing warmth while the other kept watch. They didn’t speak, beyond the few words necessary to wake each other, trading the watch. Words seemed—too much. Jolanan felt she must scream, shriek like the mad, if either of them so much as spoke his name.

  Around the same time that the night began to leach out of the east, Rifat stirred and began to mutter in his native Black Desert tongue. Iarka woke him, gently, murmuring in the same speech. For a moment he clung to her like a child, whimpering, panting, that child woken from nightmare.

  “What?” she asked. “Tell me, Rifat, what do you see?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. Dreams—I can’t—it was cold and screaming…I can’t, Iarka. I don’t remember. It’s all…smoke. Gone.” He looked around. “Holla-Sayan’s gone.”

  Gone.

  Dead.

  No. You didn’t murder someone and carry away their corpse. Even—

  “That was the All-Holy himself,” Jolanan said, her voice tight. “No wizard could have done that. It was Jochiz.”

  No answer. Iarka had scrambled away and was on her knees throwing up. Rifat looked like he might join her, unsteady and cautious as a hangover in moving, a black and swollen bruise on his temple.

  “Holla isn’t dead,” Jolanan said. “He isn’t.” Wanting contradiction so she could argue, could yell. Or confirmation, so she could believe it. Neither wizard answered.

  No tracks to follow. No wizardry of any use.

  It took them four days to come to Lissavakail, Iarka guiding them, tilting her head sometimes, as if listening, or raising her head to sniff the wind. She mostly rode with a hand on her not-yet-swelling belly, as if to remind herself of what she had to protect. Sometimes her fingers tapped a rhythm. Hearing music in her head, or working some wizardry? Jolanan didn’t bother to ask. Couldn’t care. The older woman led them wrong only a few times, paths that disappeared, or climbed to where only goats might go. A change in the air, flurries. It was winter already, not so far above them. Feet cold, and fingers; sleeping two together and one on watch with a fire, because there was brush enough to burn and lack of a fire had not stopped the worst of enemies from finding them. On the night that Iarka said should be their last in the open before Lissavakail, enough snow fell to threaten the flames, and they huddled together sitting as close to it as possible, shaggy camels turning to snow-mounds at their backs. They broke up their camp at first light and set out, the world dull white around them, the sky grey, threatening more. There were no shadows in that overcast world. Too easy to misjudge a distance, to ride over a drop. Some great black bird circled overhead, wings vast enough to dwarf an eagle, never flapping. She thought of the devil Vartu, who flew in the form of a bird, but she was gone to Marakand. And Vartu had already proven she would not stand against Jochiz. The spark of hope died. Jolanan had not till then realized it had been even been struck to life.