Gods of Nabban Read Free Page B

safe out of any killing when he went about his work in the Five Cities. But Ghu was not that boy.
    â€œAnd leave you alone? No, Ahj.” After a moment, Ghu added, “We knew they were going to come on us sometime, once they started following. It may as well be now. These are the same who murdered the shepherd.”
    Ahjvar had been a king’s champion once, and a king’s wizard, too, a long lifetime ago. The king’s wizards might divine truth from lie, when charges were brought for royal judgement, but those thus condemned might still appeal for the justice of the sword, a trial by combat within the circle of nine witnesses, which was generally only to have a more honourable death than the slow hanging that was the fate of wilful murderers and certain other most heinous criminals, the king’s champion being the best sword of the tribe. He did wonder if Ghu had gone so far as to make the two of them bait, if he had on his own decreed a trial by deed, to give the justice the little chieftains of this land might fear to exact from the lordless mercenaries when they travelled in gangs. He could not be certain any more what Ghu might and might not do, but the man would do it quiet and clear-eyed and whole. His simpleton groom—hah. He would trust Ghu’s instinct for guilt or innocence over any wizard’s divination, including his own, and Ghu’s judgement, too, and set his sword to serve what Ghu appointed.
    Two days past, they’d come upon a shepherd slain with her dog, her hut burnt and her ghost confused and lost on the hillside, what was left of her flock still keeping close, sensing her there. Six, she had told them. Foreigners, four men and two women, and they’d killed her the previous day for the bit of barley meal and cheese in her summer hut and a couple of sheep they could have driven off unchallenged. She had had more sense than to face them; she’d been hiding in the thorn thicket, she and her dog in silence, but they searched and found her and dragged her out . . .
    Ahjvar and Ghu had buried the shepherd and the dog together, setting them free to take the road to the Old Great Gods, getting well away before her kin could come seeking her, to make mistakes about which wild and lawless wanderers might have done such a thing. The two of them could have been the warlord Ketsim’s followers, Praitannecman and colony-Nabbani together, Ahjvar dressed in battlefield gleanings and Ghu, barefoot, having worn through the soles of his boots, in a too-tight caravaneer’s coat scorched and shredded to rags.
    The road ran over a thousand miles through the hills beyond the eastern boundaries of the Praitannec kingdoms before it climbed to the dry uplands that became the eastern deserts, near enough now that sometimes the sun rose in the yellow haze of some distant, dust-bearing wind. These hills they travelled, though, were not so unlike Praitan, but wilder, emptier. There was dry scrub forest, the trees low and tangled, where reclusive demons, spirits of the land, watched warily as they passed: a blue-eyed stag, an owl, a white wolf without a pack. When they ventured into the shade of such woodlands, the camels paced crunching along paths drifted with past years’ curled leaves, brown and leathery, smelling of resin. When there was a demon, it would trail them, unspeaking, attracted to Ghu, uncertain about Ahjvar.
    For the most part, Ahjvar and Ghu had kept to the open lands, the rolling hills where lower scrub and autumn-yellowing grasses were grazed by wild goats and antelope and the sheep, asses, and camels of the semi-nomadic hillfolk. They were Praitannec kin, pale of hair and eye, skin an oak-tanned brown; Ahjvar could have passed for native here, but for his tongue. They spoke the same language, or near enough, but with a guttural desert-harsh intonation, not the singing lilt of the seven kingdoms farther west. They had no kings, only chieftains ruling