Gods of Nabban Read Free Page A

and had stolen only the best to start with, not but what the Praitannec kings had owed him more than the price of two camels for their victory.
    When no attack came by dusk, Ahjvar and Ghu had made their camp with a careful eye to the ground. Trying to outrace the dogged pursuit, when they had no safe fastness to run to, seemed futile, as did making any great effort to lose them in the hills. Besides . . . they had been fairly certain who the six were. If the brigands lost Ahjvar and Ghu, they would only go looking for other prey, less able to deal with them.
    At Ghu’s insistence, Ahjvar had slept the first half of the night; he had insisted in turn that Ghu wake him, let him take the second watch. Ghu had done so, and Old Great Gods forgive him, Ahjvar had slept. He did not even remember lying down.
    He might as well be an invalid for all the use he was. His body healed. Wounds did, far more quickly than another man’s might. He had only clean scars to mark his road from Sand Cove to Marakand and the Lady’s well, to the battle at the Orsamoss and the burning tower at Dinaz Catairna. His mind, heart, soul, whatever, was another matter. A cripple. Even waking, there were long gaps in his days, as though his mind slept, or curled away small somewhere, leaving the body to manage the camel and the business of not falling. He would wake to awareness, though his eyes had never closed, and the light would be changed, the sun travelled several hours on its way, the land about them new.
    Ghu should have known better than to trust him.
    In some moods, he was strongly tempted to threaten to knock Ghu around the ears for treating him as a struggling child, letting him run, there to pick him up when he found he couldn’t. Even for a grumble that would not be meant or taken seriously, he wasn’t going to complain of the nursemaiding, though; it was Ghu who risked hurt, lying near to seize him back when the nightmares turned too foul. They might be only memories, festering unhealed wounds of the mind that he deserved to carry, not madness, no possessing ghost lurking in them, but even so . . . fast as Ghu was, the fading bruise on his cheek was Ahjvar’s doing, two nights old. It was the murdered shepherd who had woken the dreams again, when he’d been a week without them. He turned over, face-to-face, muttered on a sigh, “Sorry.” No atonement, and none for sleeping when he should have watched.
    Bar himself from dreaming? He had attempted it, briefly, a few weeks back. The nightmares had leaked foul and vicious into his waking mind, or his half-waking; the periods where he lost time and place and self turned to horrors, and that . . . that was worse. To be mad in the daylight world . . . He had burnt the woven knot of herbs he had made against the nights, but the spell had been already failing, too weak to hold against the strength of the dreaming.
    His sins; the dreams were his just punishment and atonement to bear for them, maybe, whether on the Old Great Gods’ road, or Ghu’s. He could not set them aside.
    â€œWatched? Where are they?”
    Neither dog was by them. He rose on an elbow to look. There. Pale, slinking wolf shape: Jui, just barely visible in the thinning night. The dog came up, keeping low, lay at Ghu’s feet, watching the deeper darkness along the willow-lined bend of the coulee, just where a pool of water still lasted. That was where Ahjvar would have been. The rest of the slowly rising land was open of any cover but the night, grazed earlier in the summer, though no herds were near now.
    â€œFour in the trees. Two up on the high ground, lying flat. They’ve been there a while.” Ghu sounded apologetic. “You needed to sleep.”
    That someone had been keeping watch after all made him feel no less shamed for his failure.
    â€œYou get downstream, keep out of it.” Old habit, to make sure the boy was