Gods of Nabban by K. V. Johansen Page B

otherwise, but she hadn’t wanted Ahjvar along either.
    â€œThat one’s mad,” she had said, with a jerk of her head back towards the tea-house doorway. Her braids, all wound with silver rings, had danced and tinkled. “Watched you prowling about town with him trailing like your shadow. Wondered about you, but him, I’ve seen those eyes before. Boy I used to know went off as a mercenary to fight in Nabban’s wars in the south. Came home, married the girl who’d been waiting for him, cousin of mine. Don’t know what had happened to him in the wars, but he was broken like that. Smothered her, one night, and cut his wrists. That friend of yours is the same. Dangerous mad, the sort that’s quiet till someday he kills for no reason and maybe takes someone else with him. You don’t want to be the one standing next to him when that time comes.”
    â€œHe’s not mad,” Ghu had said. “He’s getting better.” Which was perhaps not quite the contradiction he had meant it to be. And he had collected Ahjvar, waiting propped against the wall outside because he would not go into a crowded room, and they had gone back to the hill of the god and the shepherd-priest who let them shelter in his shed in return for Ghu’s help doctoring the lame asses and coughing sheep of the hillfolk. Neither god nor priest spoke ill of Ahjvar; they had left him space and quietude. It was Porthduryan had set Ahjvar sidling and tense as a misused yearling, but he hadn’t trusted Ghu to be safe there without him. He would do better by the time they came to Nabban. Ahjvar healed. He must.
    Ghu rather thought it might be the silver-ringed eastern desert caravan-mistress whose caravan trod so close on their heels. She had been preparing to leave about the time he decided Ahj would be better off if they went on their own, and that he himself could not wait in Porthduryan all winter. Travelling as they did, they should have pulled well ahead of any caravan that followed, but with so much wandering aside, they lost what they gained in travelling light and at a faster pace than the heavily laden baggage train could maintain.
    Time. He should not feel time gathered and began to outrace him, flowing like the tide. But it did. Ghu knew it. Powers moved of which he understood nothing, except that Nabban lay beneath their uncaring feet.
    They left the camels, already fed from their nosebags, browsing some twiggy brush that Ghu trusted wasn’t poisonous, to climb the nearest height. The northerly branch of the trail continued more easterly, heading down into a sinking, stony land, ridged and tightly folded. To the southeast there were higher hills, yellow-dun with old grasses between the drifts of sand, and the right-hand road angled into these, rising, falling, curving. It was clearer, the same well-trodden, well-dunged track that they had followed all this way. The northerly route was more difficult for the eye to follow. Southerly, too, lay the lands of the eastern desert tribes, pastoral, nomadic folk from whom so many of the eastern road caravaneers came. Their gods were many and small; they drifted between them on their yearly cycle of grazing, so that the folk of one tribe, one family even, might be born to different gods, depending on the seasons of their births.
    â€œSouth?” Ahjvar suggested.
    Common sense said it was safer to stick to the better-travelled road. The caravan-masters knew what they were about. Yet, there was that caravan behind. It would likely swing south of the badlands. Most did. The flowing tide tugged at him . . .  You should not linger on the way.
    â€œThe northerly road is straighter,” Ghu said.
    â€œAnd worse terrain,” Ahjvar countered. “Stone.”
    It was lying up a day with a lame camel, a blister turned to a deep sore in the sandy one’s pad, that had first let the never-seen caravan creep up on them. He had remembered