Gods of Nabban by K. V. Johansen

Author:K. V. Johansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633882041
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2016-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXII

The White River Dragon and Dernang were joined like two bubbles on the surface of a river, clinging but separate, with castle wall and broad moat and town wall between the castle’s west and the town’s northeastern gate. Or like a double-yolked egg, Yeh-Lin thought, and grinned at the homely image. Eggs boiled in the tea. So long since she’d handled an oar . . . strange, the memories a few simple actions brought back. What would that girl have made of young Nabban and his soul-wounded shadow? What of this woman who wore her face and her name? Suspicion and calculation in equal parts for the latter, she suspected. No sense of humour, that girl. She rather preferred the old woman.

And her young god wanted Dernang. No fool, whatever fools might think. Dernang, and the army encamped in the horsefair, and all Choa, three strides to take to a place they could stand in strength . . . for a little. It had taken only the three of them to seize the castle. Well, three, and the gods’ own hands laid on their young heir. And they left her to him? Perhaps they also had developed a sense of humour, which was to say, perspective. Some might think there were worse things to have loose in your land than a tame devil. She laughed, looking down from this balcony under the highest gable of the many-gabled keep.

Grey light, the harbinger of dawn, and the moon a broken coin, high, hazy behind thin and drizzling cloud. From here she could see into the town, almost a bird’s view. Still sleeping, the bell to end the night’s curfew not yet rung, but the army’s camp in the old horsefair was astir and there was a busy back-and-forth down several of the larger streets. Officers and officials of Zhung Musan’s following had taken over a street of grand merchants’ houses and guildhalls for their headquarters, Ti-So’aro said, before the castle fell; many had been left there when the general shifted his headquarters to the keep, to ensure the town still felt his boot on its neck. The market square by the northern gate was empty yet, save for bodies on the gallows—nice to thing to hang over your vendors of vegetables—and a flock of crows busy at them. Fresher meat than the foul display they had passed beneath on the road in the night. The squat gatehouse of the north and the ruin of the south, the gate there roughly barricaded to a single cart’s-width with rubble, and the small tower that watched the gate of the castle’s bridge, all flew the imperial banners, deep purple-red and gold, with the Zhung characters black on white in a centre roundel to show which clan here represented the imperial will. The imperial banners—Zhung, not Daro—still hung from this keep as well, and from their gatehouses. She did not suppose that Zhung Musan’s deputy believed the story of an outbreak of disease, despite the

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