Blackdog by K. V. Johansen

told him, scowling. She had married a man from a village in the higher valleys last autumn and gone, tired of breaking her heart over a homeless swordsman who never came by but a few days in the year. So Holla-Sayan had gone to Lissavakail's one wineshop instead, and settled in to getting drunk on the thin mountain beer. Imported wine was beyond his current means, since he had given all his wages from his last trip to his youngest brother, who wanted to marry.
    But then the bronze bells of the temple began to ring.
    Holla stood with the defenders until sometime in the darkness of the night, when it was clear the island town was lost. The raiders were no small band, intent on the most gain for the least loss. There was something unnatural in the way they pressed on, ignoring their own fallen. They made him think of the berserkers of Northron tales, or the drug-mad assassins of southern Pirakul's tiger cult: some band of obsessed devotees of a mad god. But they were of no one village or clan and could have no one god. Among them were brown- or olive-skinned, dark-haired folk, mountain men as well as tattooed men and women of the deserts and the Western Grass like himself, but their tattoos, the glimpses he had time to recognize, named them of several score disparate folk. Most were men and women of the Great Grass to the north of the deserts, a few of those with bear-masked helmets, bear's-tooth pendants, or ritual scars on their cheeks imitating the slash of a bear's claws, a new cult that had begun showing up among Grasslander travellers. A good few were tall, pale, prow-nosed Northrons with eyes like the sky, blue and cloud-grey, and a very few were gold-skinned Nabbani.
    Whatever had brought them together, they were too many and too unrelenting to be overcome by Lissavakail's fishermen. There had been a handful of Attalissa's sisters among the defenders at first, but they had been singled out and cut down early on. No more had come from the temple, though among the militiamen there had been pleas and prayers cried out to the lake.
    While the surviving Lissavakaili scattered to make separate stands or flights in the narrow streets, Holla-Sayan reclaimed his borrowed horse from the bear-masked Grasslander who was trying to steal it from the inn's fowl-yard, rode over the Grasslander's body into the lake, and swam ashore. It was not his town, they were not his people, and nobody was paying him to die for them. The best thing the people of Lissavakail could do would be to come to terms and pay the raiders off. Dying on the terraces of Lissavakail once it was lost did no one any good.
    Holla waited out the rest of the night in the shelter of a walnut grove, wet, cold, and shivering. His coat, which had been bundled behind his saddle, was lost, as was his hat. A cut on his right forearm throbbed, wrapped in a cotton headscarf that had been meant as a gift for Timhine.
    She was well out of it, at least.
    Come the first lightening of the sky, Holla began to follow the winding trail along the steep southern shore of the lake, to work his way around to the east and the long, twisting track down to the foothills and the Red Desert in the north. There was no more direct route. The mountains of the Pillars of the Sky were savage, blade-edged towers, and offered few paths even to those bred to them; none he was fool enough to risk in the dark. There were still fires on the island, and the shouts and whoops of drunken raiders. The sooner he was out of the mountains, the better. He had no desire to find himself pressed into mercenary service for some bandit warlord.
    But he could not ride on past the child.
    Holla's anger at those who would ignore a crying child by the road was almost as great as that at the raiders, who had ruined a good bout of self-pity and slain honest folk in their own streets and homes and left him feeling half a coward, for leaving them—
    —but anger seeped out of him now, and a thick, autumn-lake fog filled his