by Greg Keyes
The man’s sharp features began a scowl, but then suddenly transfigured. “Why, it’s little Ghe, isn’t it? We haven’t seen you about here in an age.”
“No?”
“No, not since… well, I can’t remember when. Since before the priests came asking about you.”
“The priests came asking about me?” Ghe asked, straining to control his voice, to sound casual.
“Months ago. There’s some flame for you.” He presented Ghe with a burning splinter of black willow from his cook fire.
“Thank you.” He couldn’t ask more; it would seem too suspicious. Why would they have sent anyone here?
Because, of course, his body had never been found. The Jik he had killed in the palace had indicated that someone had seen him dead—and then he had disappeared. They had looked for him.
Did the priesthood suspect? Could they suspect? That was worrisome. He had been trained to kill, but his knowledge of priestly magic was not great. Was there some way of seeing what had happened to him? Some magical trail or signature?
He turned back to the old woman. She must know that the priests had been here, but she hadn’t mentioned it.
“Light the incense, silly boy,” Li said, when she glanced up from arranging the bones. He complied, touching the brand to the cone until it sputtered. A thick, pungent scent drifted up from the cone.
“Now, just sit here. I’ll cast the bones, and we’ll read them, just like we used to.”
Like we used to. Ghe grimaced. Who had she been to him? She was so familiar, in some ways. And he had confided in her, told her of the vast empty places in his mind. That had been stupid, but what other choice had there been?
Watching the people moving up and down Red Gar Street, he knew the answer to that. He watched them; the wealthy and the poor, the noble and the mean—none of them saw an old woman and a man clad to his neck in rough silks. They were unnoticeable, invisible. Every person that passed had some pressing business, some private thought, some destination, known or unknown. If he were to reach into Li, take her life …
He still didn’t want to do that. She had meant something to him once, that much was clear. The only person who meant anything to him now was Hezhi…
That brought a frown. The priests might have been looking for him, but it must have been her they wanted to know about. To what lengths would the priesthood go to retrieve her? Had they already sent an expedition after her? Ghe knew that thought should have troubled him, stung him to action, but for the first time since his rebirth, he felt a heaviness, a pleasant weight across his forehead and eyes. The sun was warm, relaxing, and Li’s voice floated soothingly as from far away.
“Now I cast the dice. Oh, see, they’ve fallen in the ‘telling’ pattern, the eye of the clouds…”
There was more, but he lost it, his eyes fluttering shut just for an instant.
When he opened them again blearily a moment later, the old woman was glaring at him, livid. He shook his head, uncomprehending. Why was he so tired? Why was the old woman so angry?
“You are not Ghe,” she hissed flatly. “I knew that you were not. You are nothing more than some ghoul who has swallowed him.”
No! Ghe wanted to say. No, see my neck? It is my body, my head, not some ghostly simulacrum. It is me… But he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t speak at all; his mouth and throat were numb, as were his extremities and his senses.
The incense! He should have recognized it, should have known. He sharpened his sight, and everything changed. Li faded to her little bundle of life, as did those on the street, vibrant strands in a transparent world. The incense was a spot of nothingness, of black beyond darkness, a hole sucking his strength into it. Snarling, he swept at it clumsily.
“No!” the old woman managed to choke out. She had clearly believed him weaker. She began muttering under her breath.
This time Ghe did not hesitate. He reached out, around the vacuum of the smoke, took hold of her life, and ate it.
It took only an instant; she writhed a moment, then was part of him. Gasping, he stumbled up, away from the burning cone, and the instant its fumes were no longer brushing him, feeling rushed back with a fierce, insistent tingling, as if his limbs had been momentarily deprived of blood.
Around him, the street continued to bustle, people hurrying hither and back. He struggled into the pedestrian stream and let it sweep him along. He glanced back once, saw Li lying as if asleep, her hat with its moon and stars fallen and lying across her bones.
“It’s beautiful,” he suddenly, sharply, remembered her saying once, long ago, of that hat. “The moons and stars seem to shimmer. Is the thread gold?”
“I don’t know,” he had replied. “I only knew that you would like it.”
And though he remembered nothing more than that, he began to weep.
That night, he slept for the first time in seven days—since his rebirth. He slept and he dreamed.
Dreams were not as he remembered them. They were not vague, strange reiterations of his little fears or of days gone by, not shadow plays with little sense or substance. They were strong, clear, and simple. The colors were not right; they were too sharp, too bright, and without shading. Everything that was green was the same hue of viridian; all red was sanguine. These dreams had meaning, however, meaning that blared like the din of a cracked horn, rattled the frames of his dream images. The messages were loud, but they were not clear. Ghe imagined they were the sorts of things insects might hear if a man stooped and spoke to them.
He dreamed of being whole, knotted perfectly together, a vast and content serpent gnawing his own tail. It was an ancient feeling, barely remembered.
He remembered the Bright God coming, taunting him, cajoling him. In his dream, the Bright God was like a little sun, golden-feathered, light incarnate. He dreamed shame then, and anger, as the Bright God tricked him into uncoiling, into stretching himself out. Shame at being tricked, at being opened up. In revenge, he ate the Bright God’s light, nearly killed him, but his foe escaped, though without his brilliance and beauty.
Now he rushed across the world, and his fear and shame began to fade; he coursed out for leagues, taking it all beneath him, cutting himself a bed, a comfortable place. And for a short time, he knew another kind of contentment, a wonderful hurtling joy. Time passed, and the earth changed, his bed shifting now and again, and he started to feel a hunger. At first it was merely discontent at no longer being whole. He was not a circle anymore, not a thing unto himself. The sky drank from him, plants took him up into their long, narrow bodies, and in the end he poured into a great emptiness, a gulf too vast for him to fill. He had become all motion, and nothing about him was still, nothing all his own. So the hunger began, a desire to take in the world about him, devour it, make it of himself until there was nothing without. Until, once again, he was within himself, a tightly coiled snake eating his tail. After a time, this hunger was all that mattered to him.
As ages passed, he found the limits of his reach. The other gods could see what he was about. His brother, the Forest Lord, sent the Bright God and the Huntress about, and boundaries were made. He paid them no mind, but his reach faltered nevertheless. He had dug himself into the world, and it would not let him out again.
Ages, again, and Ghe felt himself ache with need greater than he had ever known. He grew angrier with each decade.
At the height of his anger, Human Beings came to his banks. They were like the gods, in certain respects, though without the same sort of fire within them. Still, they were inventive, and in some ways they had great strength. He realized that these people were like vessels he might fill, feet that he might walk within, to leave his channel and devour the enemy gods.
So he set about filling them up. They were small, they could contain only a bit of him—but over time, he knew, the vessels of their bodies would be slowly perfected. That was another good thing about Humans; they were malleable rather than fixed, as gods were. All gods but himself, that is, for h
e could change. That was his chief strength, the thing that set him apart. It was also his agony.
He sent the little bits of himself out, patiently, and to his surprise the people built a city. They went out from his banks, and they slew the gods of the borderland, pushed his boundaries farther than ever he could have himself. This was good, and he continued to wait as generations passed and his people grew stronger and stronger, became more and more capable of carrying him in their bones and veins.
But then torpor overcame him, and he slept. He awoke only briefly after that, and thus it was a long time before he realized that something had been done to him, was making him sleep, robbing him of his sentience. It was a dull, muted frustration. He still did not know what had happened to him, though he could sense a dark well in the heart of his city, bleeding him, binding him somehow. He still had his children, born stronger with each generation, but they were distant from him. One was finally born who could contain him.
Now she was gone.
Ghe woke then. He woke and sat up on the pallet he had arranged. His little room was dark, but he could nevertheless see the spare walls, the small bundle of clothes and weapons that were his only possessions.
Hezhi, he thought. She was the one the River had waited for. He shuddered briefly. The thoughts and feelings in his dream were not human; he understood that they only seemed so because they had bent through his mind.
What the River felt for Hezhi, however, would not bend, would not settle upon any emotion Ghe had ever experienced, though it resembled lust in some ways. The old Ghe would not have understood it at all, but he was beginning to. That was why he shuddered.
Ghe understood something else now that he had not before.
The River did not know about the priesthood, did not even know they existed. To him, they were blank spaces, nothing. And the center of his pain—the dark vortex that bled his power, drew him relentlessly into slumber—Ghe knew what that was. He had been there, many times.
It was the Great Water Temple itself.
X
A Game of Slap
Tsem met them near the edge of the camp. He was perched on an old house foundation, fending off a swarm of curious children.
When Hezhi saw him, she slid down from behind Brother Horse and flew across the intervening distance to him.
“Princess,” Tsem growled, “where have you been?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Hezhi said. “Right now, stay close to me. Please.”
“Of course, Princess.” The Giant turned wary eyes on the newcomers and said—loudly enough for the horsemen to hear, in his broken Mang: “They not hurt Princess, do they?”
“No,” she answered. “They only escorted me back here.”
“Princess, this is not the palace,” Tsem said more quietly in their own language. “You can’t go running off alone whenever you want.”
“I know,” she said. “I know that.”
Brother Horse spoke to Tsem, also in Nholish. “Giant, take your mistress back to my yekt. Keep close watch on her. Things are happening I must attend to, and I need for you to keep her safe. I will send Yuu’han around, as well.”
“What?” Tsem asked. “What is happening?”
“I am not sure,” the old man replied. “I will come tell you when I know.” Hezhi noticed that Moss—and Chuuzek, of course—seemed restless.
Chuuzek confirmed that by growling to his cousin, “What is this babbling? What are they saying?” Moss shrugged, conveying his own puzzlement.
Ignoring them, Brother Horse turned to Hezhi and continued in her language. “Please do not fear me, child. I know what you saw, and it is nothing for you to fear. I should have explained more before asking you to see, that is all. Accept my apology, and I will come speak with you as soon as I can. In the yekt, with your Giant present.” He smiled, and she could not help believing him; his sincerity, for the moment, was more real than the strangeness she remembered.
Brother Horse switched back to Mang to speak to the other horsemen. “I am sorry to have been impolite,” he said. “The Giant knows but little of our speech.”
“I could teach him a word or two,” Chuuzek snapped. Moss only nodded.
“It was my honor to meet you, cousin,” Moss said to Hezhi, emphasizing “cousin.” “I hope to speak to you of your homeland soon. I have many questions about the great city, and I have never seen it for myself.”
Hezhi nodded politely but did not answer aloud. With Tsem’s massive hand on her shoulder, the two of them made their way through the crowd. Behind them, whoops went up as horsemen rode up to meet the newcomers.
“What is this all about, Princess?” Tsem asked again, as they moved toward the yekt they were staying in.
“I wish I knew,” Hezhi told him glumly.
Hezhi noticed that Yuu’han appeared not long afterward, subtly. He sat near the fire outside of the yekt, talking with animation about something with a warrior near his own age. Hezhi noticed, however, that his eyes wandered the camp, fastening more than occasionally on the yekt.
“Is he trying to keep us in or keep someone else out?” she wondered, and Tsem’s brow ridges bunched deeper. He did not repeat his earlier question, but Hezhi explained her meeting with Moss and Chuuzek. She skirted around the issue of why she had run off into the desert in the first place; she did not want to talk about that until she understood more. Tsem seemed content enough with that; after all, he had spent countless hours in Nhol following her at a discreet distance when she sought privacy by wandering the labyrinthine ways of the abandoned and ancient sections of the palace.
“I wonder what this means, this war?” Tsem asked.
“I don’t know. I think that at the least, it means Perkar and Ngangata will receive a poor welcome when they return.”
“But what does that mean to us? To you?”
“I hope Brother Horse will tell us when he returns.” She paused. “I think Brother Horse believes me to be in some sort of danger.”
“That seems obvious,” Tsem replied. “But what sort of danger? What would these Mang want with you?”
Hezhi spread her hands to acknowledge her ignorance.
Tsem sighed. “I understood things in the palace. There I could protect you. Here… here I know nothing. We should leave this place, Princess.”
“And go where? There is nowhere we will understand better. And of course we cannot go back to Nhol.”
“Another city perhaps. Lhe, Hui…”
“Those are very far away, Tsem. How would we get there, just you and I? And when we got there, what would we do? They would not accept me as royalty there. We would have to live in their Southtowns.”
“Where do you say, then?”
Hezhi thought about that for a moment. “Here may be as good a place as any. Or…”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps with Perkar’s people.”
Tsem grimaced at that. “His people are no better than these. Barbarians.”
“Well, then,” Hezhi grunted, dismissing the whole question with the back of her hand.
“You once said we might seek out my mother’s people,” Tsem put in, unwilling to let the matter drop.
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Hezhi said. “But where do they live? How would we find them? The two of us cannot travel alone. Can you build a fire, or kill game, or set a snare? I can’t.” She looked up at Tsem squarely. “Back then, Tsem, it seemed as if the whole world was open to us. Now I see things in a different light.” She hesitated for just an instant before going on. “Yet there is something I can do, something to give us some choice, I think.”
“That being?” Tsem grunted, rolling his massive head back on his shoulders.
“Brother Horse says I have a gift for sorcery. It is the only thing I have, it seems.”
“You have me, Princess.”
Hezhi softened her voice and patted the Giant’s arm. “And never doubt how much I value that, Tsem. You are my only true friend. But here, in this plac
e, value is counted in terms of kin, and we have none. It is counted in horses, and we have none. It is counted in yekts and war honors and hunting trophies, and we have none. Nor are we likely to acquire any of those things.”
The Giant nodded ruefully. “Yes, I can see that.”
“But they also reckon worth in power, and that, perhaps, I have.”
“Witchery is dangerous, Princess.”
“Yes. Yes, but it is the only thing I have to make a place for us. And if we are ever to go where we will, we must have people willing to help us. We must have some way to pay them.”
“Or coerce them.”
“Yes,” Hezhi admitted softly. “I thought of that, too.”
The village was not as Perkar and Ngangata had left it: it had bled out over the plain, filled it with color and life, horses pounding around makeshift racetracks, riotous noise. It was wild, barbaric, exciting—and not altogether unfamiliar. It had the quality of a homecoming or a hay gathering, though it was bigger, brighter, and more boisterous.
Where he and Ngangata rode, however, faces pinched tight in suspicion, even faces they knew, and by that Perkar understood that the news of the war had already come to Brother Horse’s village. How could it not, with clans from the entire Mang world attending?
“It might have been best not to come here at all,” Ngangata gritted from the corner of his mouth.
“We have no choice,” Perkar muttered back, wondering how many warriors he and Harka could take before all of his heart-strands were severed. His sword made him much more powerful than a mortal, but it did not make him invincible; the Blackgod had made that more than clear to him.
“If they attack me, I won’t have you fighting with me. The war between their people and mine is not your concern.”
Ngangata shot him a scathing, raw look. “You may have forgotten this, Cattle-Man, but though I have no kin or clan amongst your people, it was still there that I was raised, and it was to your king that I swore my allegiance. Your people never gave me much, but what I got you will not take from me.”
