by Greg Keyes
“In the well-wrought flesh,” the voice answered.
“Perhaps you have come to taunt me, then,” she said. “Perkar speaks of you as a malicious god.”
“Perkar seeks to assuage his own guilt by blaming others. No matter; I am fond of Perkar, though he maligns me. Tell me, did he return to the camp yet?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he tell you of his journey?”
“Nothing. He was injured.”
The Raven stepped forward, or perhaps became somehow more visible. “What injury could prevent him from talking? He carries Harka.”
“He is ill; some sort of spirit is eating his life. That is one reason I attempted the drum.”
“To save him?”
“Yes.”
“How delightful!” Karak cackled. “But don’t speak of that to anyone else here; his name is not particularly distinguished in these halls.”
“I know.”
“Well. This brings me, I think, to the point of my visit. I have decided to aid you.”
“You have?” Hezhi asked, hope kindling but kept carefully low. She did not ask why.
“Yes, as I said, I am fond of Perkar and, by extension, his friends. Actually, what you just told me clinches my decision. If he is ill in the way that you say, it will take a shaman to save him.” He changed then, went from being a bird to a tall, handsome man, though his eyes remained yellow. “Grasp my cloak and follow.”
Hezhi stared at him helplessly for a moment, but whatever he had planned for her could be no worse than remaining in this glass room for eternity. Karak had helped her once, in the past, or at least she had been told he had. Reluctantly she took hold of his long, black-feathered cape. Karak gave a little grak, became once again a bird, but this time the size of a horse, and she, she was knitted like a feather to his back. He rose effortlessly up the tube, spiraling higher and higher, until at last she saw a glimmer of light.
Karak emerged from the hole and alighted on a mountain peak, became a man again, and Hezhi was able to step away from him. If she had had breath, she would have been without it, for she had never been upon a mountain, never gazed down from the roof of the world onto it. Clouds lay out below her, like tattered carpets on a far vaster floor; they hardly obscured her vision of the surrounding peaks, marching away to the edge of the world, snowcapped, clothed in verdure elsewhere, revealing their handsome granite bones now and then. Farther down still, blue with mist, were the bowls and gashes of valleys.
She saw no streams save one: a bright, silver strand winding from the base of the mountain.
“Your kin,” Karak said, gesturing at the River.
“Then this is She’leng,” Hezhi breathed. “Where he flows from.”
“Indeed, your people call it that. We merely call it home.”
“You keep calling him your brother. Are you kin to him, as well?”
“Indeed. I suppose that would make you a sort of niece, wouldn’t it?”
“I—” But Karak was laughing, not taking himself seriously at all.
“What are those?” Hezhi asked, waving her hand.
Small lights, like fireflies, were drifting up from the valleys. From most places there were only a few, but from one direction—she was not sure of her cardinal points here—a thick stream of them wound.
“Ghosts, like yourself, coming to be reclothed. Some Human, some beast, some other sorts of gods.”
“That thick stream? Where do they come from?”
“Ah! That is the war, of course. Many are losing their clothing there.”
Losing their clothing. Hezhi had seen men die; they never seemed to her as if they were merely undressing.
“Can’t you stop the war?”
“Who, me?”
“The gods,” Hezhi clarified.
“I don’t know,” Karak said thoughtfully. “I doubt it. I suppose the Huntress could come down from the mountain with her beasts and her wotiru bear-men and join one side or the other; that would, I think, bring the war to an end more quickly. But I can’t think of anything that would prompt her to do that—nor, I suspect, is that solution the one you were suggesting.”
“No,” Hezhi replied. “It wasn’t.”
“Well, then, you have your answer.”
Hezhi nodded out at the vastness. “What of me, then? You said you were going to help me.”
“Yes, and I will. But I want you to remember something.”
“What?”
“Trust Perkar. He knows what should be done.”
“He said that I should come to the mountain. I am here.”
Karak cocked his head speculatively. “This is not what he meant. You must come here in the flesh.”
“Why?”
“I may not say, here and now. Perkar knows.”
“Perkar is very ill.”
“Ah, but you will save him, shamaness.”
“I am no—” Hezhi broke off and turned at a sound behind them.
The Horse Mother stood there, and the ghost of the horse.
“Is this the only way, Karak?” the Horse Mother asked. Hezhi could hear the suspicion in her voice.
Karak—huge crow once more—ruffed his feathers, picked with his beak at them. “Can you think of another?”
“No. But I am loath to give my child like this.”
“You have many children, clothed in flesh. And it is only for a time.”
Horse Mother nodded. “I know. Still, if I discover there is some trick here …”
“All of these years, and you still cannot tell the Crow from the Raven.”
She snorted, and it sounded like a horse. “No one can.”
Hezhi followed the exchange in puzzlement. She wanted to ask what they meant, but felt she had already been too bold around such strange and powerful creatures.
The Horse Mother turned to her. “Swear that you will care for my child.”
“What do you mean?”
The woman glanced hard at Karak. “She doesn’t understand.”
Karak stared at Hezhi with both yellow eyes. “To return, you must have a spirit helper. The Horse Mother proposes to give you her child, since the Huntress will part with none, nor will Balati. Your only other choice is to wait here until you die and then be reclothed in the body of some man or beast, bereft of your memories, your power.”
Hezhi frowned down at the stone of the mountain. “I might be the better without those.”
“Your choice,” the Horse Mother told her. “But if you choose life now, you must do so quickly, before the others discover us. And you must swear to treat my child kindly.” Her face hardened. “And your companion, Perkar—he has offended me, tortured one of my daughters. When the time comes, he must pay a price, and you must not stand in my way.”
Hezhi turned her startled glance back to the goddess. “Perkar? What do you mean?”
“A trivial thing—” Karak muttered.
“Not trivial. Her spirit arrived here lately, told me how shamefully he treated her. I will remember.”
“Perkar is my friend,” Hezhi said. “He saved me from a terrible fate. I cannot knowingly allow harm to come to him.”
“Not necessarily harm,” the Horse Goddess said, “but he must certainly pay a price. Tell him that.”
“I will tell him. But if you seek to harm him, I must stand between you, no matter how grateful I am.”
The goddess eyed her steadily for a long moment before finally inclining her head slightly. “I give you my child freely, with only the single condition. I understand loyalty, no matter how misguided.”
“I swear to care for your child,” Hezhi said. “But—”
Karak vented an exasperated squawk. “What now?” he croaked.
“I don’t know if I want some creature living within me. I hadn’t decided when all of this—”
Karak cut her off. “Your time for making such decisions is spent. Either you take the child, go back, live, save Perkar, and fulfill your destiny, or you
expire and spend your days here, first as a ghost and then eventually as a salmon or some such. It should be an easy choice.”
“None of my choices is easy,” Hezhi burst out. “I should be choosing which dress to wear to court, which suitor to allow to kiss me, what kind of bread I want for breakfast!”
“What is this nonsense? What are you babbling about? You were never destined for such humdrum choices! You walk between gods and men. Your choices are only between despair and hope!”
“Karak is a poet,” Horse Mother grunted. “Who would have known that?”
“Not I!” Karak answered, spreading his wings and contracting them.
“He is right, little one, though he knows more of you than I do,” the woman continued, her dark eyes kind. “You will have my child. I will watch over you.”
Perkar would die without her. She would die and be lost, a ghost, as pathetic as the apparition that once inhabited her apartments.
“I agree,” she said then. “I will be as kind as I know how to be.”
“Fine, fine,” Karak snarled. “Quickly, now.”
Horse Mother stroked the horse. Like Hezhi, she had cooled from her flight and now had the appearance of a gray skeleton filmed with gauzy flesh. Still, Hezhi could sense the creature’s confusion, its fear. “Hush, my sweet,” the woman said. “This is Hezhi, and she will return with you to the land of the living, to the pastures and the plains.”
“Now?” Karak snapped.
“Now,” the goddess replied, reluctance still clear in her voice.
“Good,” Karak answered. He pointed to Hezhi. “Cut to pieces.”
Hezhi just stared at him, wondering what he meant, and then pain was all that she could comprehend. Something chopped her to bits, dismembered her violently; she felt each bone wrench apart, and each individual piece ached on its own, so that even severance added layers of agony so profound that, though she did not lose consciousness, she quickly lost the ability to interpret anything. How long her ordeal lasted, she had not the slightest inkling; she was only aware of trying to scream and scream without lungs, tongue, or breath.
She had no awareness when the bits came back together, knitted solid. The Horse Mother and Karak spoke, but she understood absolutely nothing of what they said. After that, she had only flashes of the purple and black landscape beyond the drum and a persistent pounding that seemed like hoofbeats. And inside, a frightened voice, as confused as she.
When sense truly returned, it was to those same hoofbeats. She was still high in the air above the otherworld, but rather than being swept along, as she had been before, she was running, her own hooves carrying her through the empty spaces between the clouds.
Hooves? She glanced at herself. As before, she was glowing like a coal, striking sparks from the very air, but this time she had more of a form. She could see her own arms, her hands, her naked upper body. But below …
Hooves, the thick, layered muscles of a horse’s forepart. Turning back she could see rump and a flying tail of lightning.
I have become the statuette! she thought. The half-horse woman.
But she was still herself. She could feel the Horse in her—that was who ran, who flexed the great muscles that carried them through space. But the spirit in her was not invasive, not seeking to seduce her as the River had or bludgeon her like the gods she had seen since escaping Nhol. Instead, she was there, tentative, but a companion willing to learn.
“Thank you,” Hezhi said. “Thank you for coming with me.”
The Horse did not answer in words, but Hezhi understood her response, her welcome. Together they struck lightning across the sky, and soon enough, Hezhi knew that they had reached the village of Brother Horse, the yekt where her body lay without her. Nearly laughing with the pleasure of thunderous flight, ecstasy replacing their fears, Hezhi and the Horse raced thrice about the village, above the racetrack. She could not see the people, save as flickers of rainbow, and she wondered if any of them could see her.
It was actually with reluctance that she approached the yekt and lit upon its roof. She saw no one there and so descended into the house along its central pole, whose shadow in the otherworld resembled a tall and thickly branching tree.
The tent was the belly of a shadow, the people in it less than specters. She saw them as frames of dark bone, cages that enclosed furnaces of yellow light.
One of the figures lay prone—Perkar, of course—and something squatted upon him. Something real.
As soon as she saw it, Hezhi steeled herself for the sickening stab she had felt before, but it did not come. It was as if a strong wind parted around her, and she suddenly remembered what Brother Horse had told her about spirit helpers. About how she could see now without the vision clutching her.
So she examined the thing carefully, though even so it was terrible to behold. At first, there was no sense to what she perceived, only a jumble of coiled, glittering sinew, scales, and polished black ivory. But then the Horse moved in her, just a bit, and her perspective changed. It was like a snake, or more, like a centipede, jointed and sheened as if with oil. It nestled a cone-shaped skull into Perkar’s chest, and a thousand smaller worms wriggled from every part of the creature. The radiance in Perkar’s breast was dim, though a stream of orange light fed into it from the sleeping, birdlike form at his side she guessed to be his sword.
Every now and then, the worm—or perhaps mass of worms—shuddered, rippled, and broke into crawling parts that then reformed. Two yellow eyes opened on the base of its “skull.”
“Leave. He is mine,” a voice told her. It was a clattery voice, like bones snapping.
Hezhi had no reply. She just stared at the thing.
“If you have come to fight for him, shamaness, you will surely fail. Go back to your bright world, leave this dying man to me in mine.”
The monster did not gesture, but she felt her eyes drawn beyond it, as if somehow it had directed her to look. There lay a circle of light. Through it she saw the interior of the yekt—part of a support pillar, a rug, and a hand. Her hand. The image wavered a bit, as if it were a pool into which grains of sand were dropping.
Hezhi hesitated. She could see plainly enough now that the thing on Perkar was killing him. But as of the moment, she had not the faintest idea what to do about it.
“I’ll go,” she muttered to the thing. But I will return. Then she edged up to the drum and stepped through.
In a swirl of dizziness and disorientation, she bolted up, gasping. The horse body was gone, and she felt her own flesh upon her, suddenly so familiar, so well fitted that she would have burst into melancholy tears at being reunited with it.
Save that at the same moment, the body of a man slapped into the ground only an arm’s length from her; she saw his eyes widen in surprise as the impact shattered his spine. All around her was shouting and the harsh grating and hammering of steel on steel.
INTERLUDE
The Emperor and the Ghoul
The great door creaked faintly as the emperor pushed it open, startling the orange-speckled house lizard on the wall into frantic though short-lived flight. It ran only a few spans before crouching against the edge of a tapestry, watching him with its cat-pupiled eyes. She’lu felt a brief amusement, considered flicking the tiny beast with his power. What audacity it had, a common house lizard, entering the court of an emperor!
He let it go. It was told that the spotted ones were good luck, and even an emperor needed that. Especially now, with the increased Dehshe raids on the border garrisons, the icy relations with once-friendly Lhe, and Dangul, at the limits of the Swamp Kingdoms, pressing to levy a tariff—a tariff—on goods shipped through their territory. It was a modest tax, of course, easily paid, but a subject did not—could not—tax its emperor. Even the backward Swamp Kingdoms knew that, which could only mean that Dangul was testing the waters, hoping to gain greater, if not complete, independence.
In the morning he would dispatch a company of soldiers and Jik under the co
mmand of his nephew Nen She’ to deal with the governor of Dangul, but there was no telling how well prepared the governor was, how good his spies were. Another reason to send Nen She’; he would be a capable enough ruler if the governor bowed to him without resistance, but if the mission failed and he was killed, no one would miss him, either—at least, not much. But then, of course, She’lu would have to send real troops, and that he did not relish doing at all. Wars cost money, and it seemed the Nhol had fought many wars of late. All small, all mere nuisances, but costly nevertheless.
He walked out onto the polished, bloodred stone of the court, enjoying the measured, solitary clapping of his wooden soles upon the floor. Seldom enough was he alone; even now, guards were near, but he had laid a minor Forbidding on them, preventing them from approaching him unless he requested their aid or called out. So now, in the hour past midnight, he could pace, sleepless and finally, finally alone in this, his favorite of courts, the Court of the Ibis-Throated. It was small, much too small for grand ceremonies, not severe enough to convene the everyday matters of the empire. Indeed, since his father’s day, the court had seen no official use. But after She’lu’s accession—when his father had begun the withering, as often happened to the Waterborn when they passed their seventieth year—his father had brought him here, with Nyas, the vizier, and the three of them had stayed, long into the night, drinking plum wine and speaking of things they had never spoken of. There were many such things; after all, She’lu had barely seen his father until after his fifteenth year, and even when he moved down the Hall of Moments to join the family after passing the priestly tests, his father was distant, cold, the emperor. It was only after, when the crown came off, that the old man spoke of love, of his pride in his son, of his grief over the loss of his other son, L’ekezh. Even that last had touched She’lu; he had always been jealous of L’ekezh, but when they took his twin off, shrieking, to the depths below the Darkness Stair and left him to inherit the throne unchallenged—well, after that he could afford to be generous, to pity his brother.
He had often met with his father and Nyas, secretly, the guards away and Forbidden, learning from the two of them how to be an emperor. Two years only, but he remembered them as the best years of his life. Young, excited by his role as lord of Nhol and its empire, touched by his father’s long-hidden care. Then the old man withered and died, and his corpse was taken off by the priests while it was still warm, to be joined back into the River, and he had become emperor in earnest, learning the eternal, wearying drudgery that mingled with and eventually overwhelmed the excitement.
