“Close the door,” she said, and he did, latching it. “Now, then. What shall we doT
“I have some questions for you. If you do not answer them, I will be forced to—”
“Hurt me? Will you hurt me, Yen?”
“What?” He stopped in midsentence.
“Why not hurt me first!” she cooed, reaching for the scarf at his neck. He reached to stop her, but she shook her head.
“If you want me to answer your questions, you must cooperate with me—at least a little.”
Ghe had not expected precisely this, he was certain. If she had been responsible for the attempt on his life, there should be some fear on her part, some worry that he suspected her. After all, he had rebuffed her advances since the voyage began. Why should he extend his own now?
Perhaps she had some weapon, concealed in her clothing.
“No,” he said. “You take off your clothes first.”
She stepped back from him, her grin broadening.
“Very well,” she whispered. She shuffled farther back and undid the sash on her kilt, then the kilt itself. They crumpled into a pile about her ankles, revealing slim, brown legs, a thick dark scorch of pubic hair, a sensuous curve of belly. With the same enigmatic grin she shucked off her shirt in a single motion, and then she was entirely, beautifully naked.
But nothing stirred in him, and he knew that it should. Would, if he were the man he had once been rather than a ghoul. She walked carefully toward him, as if balancing on a beam.
“And now you, my lord.” She pushed him back on the bed, and he numbly allowed her to.
He lay there, watching her undress him, feeling nothing save the stroking of her hands on his flesh—but his flesh seemed like wood. She flicked her tongue along and around his necklace scar, and a spark fluttered, guttered, and died. He tried then, suddenly frustrated. Could his body not remember this, remember what to do at all? He forgot about what he came here to do, forgot that he had never once desired Qwen Shen. He tried, concentrating on her beauty, her warmth, and the luxuriant softness of her flesh.
“Ah, Lord Yen,” she sighed. “You are keeping a dream from me. That is the problem. Don't try, don't worry, my love. Just let me know your dream.”
My dream is to be alive, he thought, but he knew now, for certain, that he was dead. He wondered, dully, if when he was fully certain—when every corner of his brain accepted the truth—he would return to oblivion.
“I believe I know your dream,” she said softly, coyly. “You dream of a little girl, a little heart-shaped face, a little girl named Hezhi.”
Anger stirred, if nothing else. What was this woman doing? Besides touching him, that is, here, there…
“Yes, Hezhi. You can say the name of your dream, can't you?”
“Shut up!” It exploded out of him before he knew what was happening. She sat astraddle him, and he struck her across the face. Her head snapped back, and she gasped, but instead of shrieking, she laughed. She gazed down at him with a broad, bloody grin.
“Say it,” she repeated.
“Hezhi!” he snarled, and struck her again.
And suddenly he came alive. A jagged bolt of sensation was born in his belly and roared out into his limbs, his groin. In that instant, Qwen Shen ceased to be Qwen Shen, and he recognized who she actually was.
She was Hezhi. Not the little girl he had known but the woman she would grow to be. She still had the same face, and he was amazed that he hadn't noticed before. The same pointed chin and bottomless black eyes. The breasts pressed so passionately against his own bare skin had been barely hinted at before, the curve of her hip deepened, thickened appropriately with the passage into womanhood. The legs were longer, almost as lean, but had more shape. It was Hezhi as she would be, his lover, his queen. Her flesh met his in ardent rhythm, and in rhythm he passed from passion into forgetftilness. He remembered Hezhi, gripping her lip in her teeth, a look of adoration in her eyes. Then he forgot that, too.
QWEN Shen was dressing as he awoke. He brushed at the fog that seemed to hang about his brow.
“What?” he sighed.
“Shhh. Quiet. You made enough noise earlier.”
“I don't …” He was naked, his body and the sheets drenched in sweat. Qwen Shen grinned faintly at him around her swollen lip.
“There, my sweet ghost. You rest.” She fingered her injury. “Next time you should not hit my face. I can explain it this once, but if you continue to leave marks, even Bone Eel may come to the obvious conclusion.” She bent, playfully nipped at his nose, then kissed him more fully on the lips. It seemed a distant thing, but his body still hummed with remembered passion. He could even recall the surge of volcanic pleasure …
He just couldn't remember doing it.
“Thank you,” he told her as she approached his door.
“Save your thanks for later,” she whispered. “There will be another time.” Then she was gone, a patter of footsteps outside of his room.
With her going, he continued to cool. An image hung tenaciously at the edge of his vision, a young woman's face, one he almost knew …
But he could not summon it in detail, could not call it into recognition. He felt a slight frustration. It was probably some old lover, called back to his mind by making love with Qwen Shen.
He had to have made love with her. It was the only thing that made sense. But he couldn't remember, and that meant that the River must still be making him forget things.
He felt—not quite resentment, but puzzlement at that. He had assumed all along that the memories he lost were parts of him that died before the River salvaged what was left of him and made him into a ghoul. He still felt certain that such was the case, because many of the things he had once known would have aided him in his mission. Not knowing the Jik back in Nhol, for instance; the necessity of killing him brought on by his forget-fulness had hastened the Ahw'en finding him. But if he could still forget things, new things … He shivered at that thought. How much of what he knew was real?
And floating around that memory was the one he had finally recalled. He knew who Li was, knew that he had loved her and trusted her more than any mortal creature. And in his ignorance, he had slain her. Why would the River allow that?
The pain of remembering who Li was had come closer to killing him than the sorcerous arrow that impaled his heart, but the remorse, like his passion, was cooled in him now. He wondered if it had cooled on its own, or if that, too, had been forgotten for him.
In the end it did not matter; all that mattered was finding Hezhi, the rest was mere distraction. His longing for her was almost frantic now, though he was not certain why. He must have her, his daughter, his bride …
This time, the strangeness of that thought troubled him not at all.
XXIII Deep Wounds
COWARD, coward, coward, T'esh's hooves seemed to beat on the sand of the gorge. Perkar bit down on his lip until he tasted blood.
“Where are we going? ” Harka asked.
“To get something that was stolen from me. To kill a thief.”
“That's a riddle, not an answer. ”
“You're my sword. I don't owe you any answers.”
“You just spent five days sleeping on the threshold of Deaths damakuta. Whatever you are about, you should wait until your head is clearer. ”
“I don't think my head is likely to get any clearer,” he snarled. “It's too much for me. I just want to be home, with my father, with my mother, tending cows. Why mel What did I do?”
“Loosed your blood in the Stream Goddess. Swore an oath. Killed Esharu, who guarded me. Betrayed the Kapaka and your people—”
“Stop, stop,” Perkar cried. Tears coursed down his face and streamed back toward his ears. “I know all that. I only meant…” He kicked T'esh harder, and the horse stumbled violently. Perkar's stiff legs almost failed to maintain their grip, as they jolted to a confused halt on recovery.
“Easy, ” Harka cautioned. I can help you see in the dar
k, but not your horse. ”
“She had a name!” Perkar gasped.
“Of course she had a name. ”
“And you know it?”
“She was my guardian. ”
“You never told me.”
“ You didn Y want to know. You still don Y. ”
“That's right,” Perkar whispered furiously. “I don't. Don't ever tell me anything else about her.”
Reluctantly, Perkar returned T'esh to a walk, at least until they were back to more open, level ground. Soon. The eastern sky was pinkening, as well, and so, shortly, T'esh would be able to see.
“ Where are we going? ”
Perkar collected himself before he answered. “I'm on some sort of edge,” he answered at last. “If I fall one way, I become an animal, hiding from the sun, afraid of everything. I have to fall the other way.”
“ Where do you fall if you fall the other way? ”
“I don't know. But if I let my terror overtake me, I'll be worthless for anything.”
“So, where are we going? ”
“It's death I'm terrified of. The last men to hurt me so, to defeat me, are down there following us. If I defeat them, I defeat my fear.”
“I doubt that. Many who bore me thought that by killing, they themselves could conquer Death. As if Death would be so pleased at them for feeding her that she would never swallow them. ”
“I didn't say I would defeat Death, only my fear of her.”
“This is not a rational decision. And you should know, because you made this same decision before, when you charged down upon the Huntress. You build up so much debt in your heart—and then try to discharge it by dying. But I won't let you die, and so it just builds up again. Anyway, you know that when a man dies in debt, his family must pay the balance. ”
“Shut up. Shut up.”
“Not rational. ”
“Listen,” he said savagely, “it is. First of all, this is not the Huntress and an army of gods. These are five Human Beings, nothing more, and you and I have defeated twice that number. We have a long way to go to reach the mountain, and we can't worry about pursuit the whole way. We don't have enough horses to keep the pace ahead of them. Better to deal with them now before they come upon us one night.”
“But if you happen to die in the endeavor, you will die a hero, and no one will blame you for not solving the larger problems you have created. ”
Perkar did not answer, nor did he respond to any more of Harka's overtures, until the sword—glumly, it seemed—warned him.
“There.”
Without Harka Perkar might not have seen them, camped in a wash and shadowed by cottonwoods. Now, however, he caught the motion of horses and men. Probably they heard him already, and he had no intention of being coy. If he did, if he hesitated, he would never do it. Terror beat in his breast, a black bat with clawed wings, and for a moment his fingers were entirely nerveless. He drew Harka anyway.
I'm going to die, he suddenly knew.
“No!” he shrieked, and rode down into the wash in dim but waxing light. An arrow and then another flew by, and his fingers ached to tug on the reins, to ride out and away. But the arrows were terribly wide of their mark, and his shriek became a whoop that pretended, at least, to sound brave.
“Something wrong here, “ Harka said.
Perkar sensed it, too. He counted five Mang bodies, sure enough, but only one of them was moving. That one was Chuuzek, leaning heavily against the bole of a tree, bow raised awkwardly. Perkar leapt from his horse and rushed toward the thickset warrior, splashing through the shallow water of the wash. He suspected that at least some of the bodies he saw were merely bundles of clothes and the other Mang were hiding in ambush.
Chuuzek fired once more, missed, and drew his sword barely in time to meet Perkar's attack. It was a weak parry; the Mang weapon was flung back by the force of the blow, and Harka plunged into the warrior's lower chest. Perkar withdrew the sanguine blade and quickly stepped back.
“That for our game of Slap,” he snarled.
“You be damned.” Chuuzek coughed raggedly. His knees folded, but oddly, he did not fall. He seemed to balance on his toes, one arm draped against the cottonwood. Perkar searched for other attackers.
“No others, ” Harka assured him.
“What?”
“He was the only one, the only danger to you. ”
Chuuzek was trying to gasp something else out. The sword fell from his fingers, and he tried to reach for it. His hand seemed to be stopped by some invisible barrier that would only allow him to reach down so far. With a sudden shock, Perkar realized that Chuuzek was lashed to the tree. He could see the cords now.
He could also see that the man had numerous wounds other than the one Perkar had just given him. They were crudely bandaged, but the blood soaking them seemed fresh.
“Chuuzek?” Perkar asked. “What happened here?” He moved up to cut the man's bonds.
“No!” Chuuzek roared. He almost seemed on the verge of tears. Blood flowed freely and formed the largest pool amongst several already in the sand. “No. I deserve to die on my feet, you hear me? I deserve it.”
“What happened?” Perkar repeated. “Are the others all dead?”
“All dead, all but me. Knew you would come. Go away, let me die among my own, without some shez around.”
“Why do you call me that?”
“You are an abomination,” Chuuzek whispered. “You are the doom of us all.”
“Who told you this? This gaan I have heard about?”
“A drink of water. A drink of water and I will tell you.”
Perkar found a waterskin near the remains of a fire that had not been fed in several hours. He brought the skin over to the dying man.
Harka warned him, but he did not move quickly enough. Chuuzek's knife slid in, cold as an icicle. He felt it scrape his ribs. Perkar sucked for air and fell back onto the sand, clawing at the offending steel. He got it out with considerable pain, then lay there gasping as the day came fully to life around them.
“We are still weak, both of us, “ Harka apologized. ”I should have known more quickly.”
The wound had stopped bleeding, though it still hurt mightily.
“Chuuzek …” He rolled over, so that he could see the other man. Chuuzek's eyes were already glazed. The knife, coated in Perkar's blood, stood point first in the sand.
I murdered him, Perkar thought grimly.
He had just managed, shakily, to stand, when he heard horses arriving. He retrieved Harka, lying an armspan from where he fell.
“Not enemies, ” the sword soothed him. His hand was shaking.
Harka, of course, was right. The riders who came down into the wash were Ngangata and Yuu'han.
PERKAR was not greatly surprised to find that Chuuzek had either lied or been wrong. Three of the other Mang were dead, their throats torn open. One remained alive, however; the young man, Moss. He wasn't even bleeding, though there was a nasty bruise just beginning to purple on his forehead. He was spattered with a black fluid that Perkar recognized.
“That's godblood,” he told Ngangata. “Godblood is either black or gold, in my experience.”
“Something attacked them,” Yuu'han muttered. He was staring suspiciously at Chuuzek.
“I killed him,” Perkar admitted. “He had a bow. I didn't know he was wounded already.”
Yuu'han shrugged. “He was brave, but his notions of honor were twisted. And at least he got to stab you.”
Perkar almost retorted, but then he took Yuu'han's meaning. When he stabbed Chuuzek, it had been murder, plain and straight. The Mang had been in no condition to fight him. But he probably would have died anyway; he had strapped himself to the tree so that he would die standing up, with some slight chance to kill another enemy. Perkar—unintentionally—had given him that last opportunity. Perhaps Chuuzek had even died believing he had killed Perkar. Perkar felt a brief smile play on his lips.
His humor was short-l
ived. He had proved nothing to himself. There had been no battle, no real test of his courage. Indeed, he had killed an already dying man and then been duped into being stabbed. If the knife had been witched as the Slap paddle had been, he might be dead now despite it all.
Ngangata shot Yuu'han an irritated glance but did not speak to the Mang's comment. Instead, the half man followed the speckles of black blood across the wash.
“They wounded this, too, whatever it was. Perhaps that explains why two of them survived.”
“Chuuzek must have wounded it before it could kill Moss. The others died in their sleep, I think.”
Perkar joined Ngangata and stared intently at the trail himself. “What sort of footprints?”
“They look Human.”
Perkar nodded. “That's no surprise. Gods take their mortal forms from the blood and bone of mortal beings. Most are said to appear Human, more or less.”
“Should we follow?”
It took Perkar a moment to register that Ngangata was actually asking him what to do. “Maybe,” he answered. “It could be the Blackgod, couldn't it? 'Helping' us?”
“It could,” Ngangata replied, his voice empty of inflection.
Perkar followed the trail of dark fluid with his gaze, thinking.He remembered the hideous strength of the Crow God, the casually summoned lightning. He remembered Good Thief's doom, and how easily the fickle Blackgod might have chosen Ngangata instead. “Whatever it was—the Blackgod or some local spirit—it has done us a favor,” Perkar finally said, trying to keep his voice even. It felt shaky, and he seemed to have trouble backing it with breath. “I think we should leave here now, before whatever it is turns on us.”
“Good,” Ngangata replied, heat creeping into his voice. “I wanted to see if you had even that much sense. If you had chosen otherwise, I would have clubbed you unconscious, magic sword or no. What kind of stupid idea came into your head and sent you down here alone? Playing the hero again? Haven't you learned your lesson by now?”
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