by Greg Keyes
He listened to all of that helplessly, desperate to respond, but without anything to say. Because it was all true—all, save the implication that their recent closeness was no more than a ploy on his part. But he could see that it seemed that way, and besides, he didn’t have the energy to argue. If she wanted it this way, it would only make things easier should they reach an impasse later on.
So instead of arguing, he only lowered his head, knowing that she would take that as a sign that everything she said was true. And after a moment she rode off to where Tsem, Brother Horse, and Yuu’han traveled in a little clump.
In two days they entered the dark majesty of Balat. Hezhi was awestruck by the trees, for though she had seen them in dreams long ago in Nhol, the dreams failed to do justice to their sheer, overwhelming majesty. Some were two horse-lengths in diameter, and the canopy those gargantuan columns supported was like distant green stained glass, the occasional real rays of sunlight that actually fell through that imperial ceiling shining like diamonds amongst the ferns and dead leaves of the forest floor.
Her godsight showed her many things skulking just beyond the edge of vision: ghosts, and gods of a hundred descriptions. Balat was alive in a way that she had never imagined. Despite her resentment—despite having been herself threatened—she began to understand why the Huntress strove so implacably to protect this place. She saw now that Nhol and its empire rested on merely the corpse of a land. The only things that thrived there were Human Beings and the plants and animals thralled to them—as the Humans were thralled to the River. Balat was as the whole world had been, once—alive. The “monsters” her ancestors had destroyed lived here still, and they gave breath to the world.
Though to be fair to her ancestors, being rid of such creatures as the Blackgod and the Huntress could at times seem desirable.
Five evenings later they capped a hill and she saw She’leng. She realized, with a start, that she had seen it earlier that day and believed it to be nothing more than a remote cloud, for it was so distant that it was only just darker than the sky. Nothing could be that far away and yet fill so much of the sky except a cloud. But when the sun touched it, and red-gold blood quickened on the outline of the peak, it stood revealed, like a ghost suddenly reimbued with life and substance. It was still so far distant as to only be a shadow, but what a shadow! Its perfect cone filled the western quarter of the horizon. Truly such a place might give birth to gods, might humble even the likes of the River.
Throughout the journey, Perkar had become more and more distant, and though Hezhi wept about it once, secretly, she hardened her heart against him. She had given him the opportunity to dispute her, to tell her she was wrong, that he felt something more than some offensive mixture of anger and duty regarding her. He had refused the opportunity, and she would not give him the chance to hurt her again.
Besides, as the mountain waxed in the following days, recognition of the sheer audacity of what they were about grew proportionally, and that brought with it not only fear but a thriving excitement that she hadn’t expected. Once she had stood on the edge of the palace, proposing her own death. Now she proposed to kill a god, the god of her ancestors—her ancestor.
Feeling an awkward need to express such feelings, she reluctantly guided her mount to where Brother Horse rode. He greeted her cheerfully, though since Raincaster’s death his face more often fell in solemn lines.
“Hello, shizhbee,” he said.
“It is well,” she answered, in Mang—her acceptance of his calling her granddaughter once again. He understood and smiled more broadly.
“I did have hopes of making a Mang out of you,” he remarked.
“I had hopes of being one,” she returned, a little more harshly than she intended. They wouldn’t let me, she finished silently. But Brother Horse knew that, caught the implication, and an uneasy silence followed.
“I’m sorry,” Hezhi went on, before the quiet could entirely cocoon them. “You’ve been good to me, Brother Horse, better than I could have ever expected.”
“I’ve done no more than any other old man would do, to keep the company of a beautiful young girl.”
She actually blushed. “That’s very—”
“It’s true,” Brother Horse insisted. “I’m like an old fisherman, come to sit down by the lake for a final time. I rest here with my feet in the water, and I know in my bones I won’t be taking my catch home, not this time. Old men spend so much time thinking about the lake, about the dark journey that awaits us. The sight of beauty becomes precious—better than food, beer, or sex. And you have a glorious beauty in you, child, one that only someone with sight like mine can appreciate.”
“You aren’t going to die,” Hezhi whispered.
“Of course I am.” Brother Horse snorted. “If not today, tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, the next day. But it doesn’t matter, you see? There’s nothing to be done about that. And this is fine company to die in.”
“I was worried that you came only because you thought you had to.”
“What difference does that make?” Brother Horse asked.
“It’s just that … I’m sorry about …” She remembered just in time that it was considered rude to name the dead until that name was passed on to another. “About your nephew,” she finished lamely.
His face did cloud then. “He was beautiful, too,” he murmured. “What is comforting about beauty is that we know we will leave it behind us—that it goes on. When it precedes us, that’s tragedy.”
He turned his face from her, and she heard a suspicious quaver in his voice when he spoke down to Heen, who trotted dolefully along the other side of his horse. “Heen says that’s the problem with being as old as we are,” he muttered gruffly. “Too much goes before you.”
He reached over and ran his rough hand on her head, and she did catch a glint of moisture in his eyes. “But you won’t,” he muttered. “I’ll see to that.” He straightened in the saddle and coughed. “Now. What did you really ride over here to talk about?”
“It’s not important.”
“I think it is. You’ve been silent as a turtle for three days, and now you choose to speak. What’s on your mind?”
She sighed and tried to collect the fragments of what she had been thinking. “I was wondering how I should be feeling, going to slay my own ancestor. It should seem like murder, like patricide. Like killing my own father.”
Brother Horse looked at her oddly. “But you don’t feel that way.”
“No … a little maybe. I was brought up to worship him. But then I remember my cousin, D’en, and the others below the Darkness Stair. I remember him filling me up, being inside of me, and I don’t feel very daughterly at all. I want him to die. With so many gods in the world, he will hardly be missed.”
“Not true,” Brother Horse said. “His absence will be felt, but gladly. The world will be better without him. Are you afraid?”
“I was. I have been. But now I only feel excited.”
The old man smiled. “Felt that way myself, on my first raid. Just kept seeing that trophy skin in my hand, decorating my yekt. I was scared, too, but I didn’t know it. The two feelings were all braided up.”
“It’s like that,” she affirmed. “It’s just like that. It’s frustrating because I can’t picture what will happen when we get there. I can’t rehearse it in my mind, you see? Because I don’t know what I am to do!”
“I rehearsed my first battle a hundred times,” Brother Horse said, “and it still went completely wrong. Nothing I imagined prepared me for it. You might be better off this way.”
“But why is this kept from me? Why shouldn’t I know?”
“I can’t guess. Maybe so no one learns it from you. Moss might be able to do that.”
“Oh.” They traveled on silently for a bit, but this time it was a comfortable pause. In that interval she reached over and touched the old man’s hand. He gripped hers in return.
“If we succeed—if we slay him—I wonder,
will the little gods like those who live here return to Nhol? Will the empire become like Balat?”
“No place is like Balat,” the old Mang assured her. “But I take your meaning, and yes, I think so. When he is no longer there to devour them, the gods will return.”
“That’s good, then,” she said.
Two days later they reached She’leng. Its lower slopes were folded into increasingly higher ridges, and they wound up and down these, torturously seeking the place whose name she had begun to hear muttered amongst Sheldu’s men. Erikwer. Her heart seemed to beat faster with each moment and passing league, filling her with frenetic energy. She could sense the fear that Brother Horse spoke of, but it could not match the growing apprehension of danger, which—rather than fear—kindled a precarious joy.
The fact that Perkar only seemed more sullen and drawn each day scarcely had meaning for her anymore. Four times before her life had changed forever: first when she discovered the library and Ghan; again when she understood the nature of her Royal Blood, its power and its curse. Thrice when she fled Nhol to live among the Mang, and again when she had stepped through the drum into the world of the lake and become a shamaness. But none of these had brought peace to her, or happiness, or even a modicum of security.
Tomorrow would. In Erikwer she would find release in one way or the other, release from the very blood in her veins by slaying or dying. And with that thought, tentative elation waxed fierce, and she remembered the statuette Yen had given her—so long ago it seemed. The statuette of a woman’s torso on a horse’s body, a representation of the Mang belief that mount and rider were joined together in the afterlife. She had become that statuette now. She was mare, bull, swan—but above all she was Hezhi, and she would live or die as herself. That could never be taken from her again.
Though everyone else trotted, she urged Dark into a gallop, stirring a small storm of leaves in the obscure light. The others watched her go, perhaps amused; she did not care. She wanted to run, to feel hooves pound in time with her heart. Tree branches whipped at her as the trail narrowed and steepened, but Dark was surefooted. Whooping, suddenly, she rounded a turn that plunged her down along a hillside—
And nearly collided with another rider. The horses shuddered to a halt as the other person—one of Sheldu’s outriders—shot her a look that contained both anger and fear. She opened her mouth to apologize, but he interrupted.
“Mang,” he gasped. “We can’t go that way.”
“What?”
“In the valley,” he insisted, waving his arms. “A whole army.” He frowned at her and then urged his mount past, disappearing up the slope.
Hezhi hesitated, her reckless courage evaporating—but not so fast as to take curiosity with it. The trail bent in a single sharp curve ahead, and through the trees bordering the trail she could see the distant slopes of another valley, far below. She coaxed Dark around that curve—hoping for just a glance of the army the outrider spoke of.
Beyond, the trees opened, and she faced down a valley furrowed so perfectly it might have been cut with a giant plow. On her right was only open air. To her left, the trail became no more than a track reluctantly clinging to the nearly sheer valley wall. So steep and narrow it was, she could hardly imagine a horse walking it without tumbling off; there were no trees on the precipitous slope to break such a fall before reaching the lower valley where the grade lessened and trees grew. Nevertheless, a group of Sheldu’s men stood, dismounted, farther down the trail, and far below them another knot of men and horses struggled up the track. Below them, through the gaps in spruce and birch, sunlight blazed on steel in a thousand places, as if a swarm of metallic ants were searching the narrow valley for food.
But they were not ants; they were men and horses: Mang.
Yes, it was time to return to the group. She wondered how long it would take the army to climb the trail, and if the riders already coming up the slope were friend or foe. They were dark, like Mang, but even with her god-enhanced sight they were difficult to make out, though one seemed familiar.
That was when her name reached her ears, borne by wind, funneled up to her by the valley walls.
“Hezhi!” Very faintly, but she recognized the voice. And then it came again. Gaping, she turned Dark back toward the approaching army.
XXXIII
The Steepening Trail
Ghe’s fingers tightened around his throat, and Ghan felt that his eyes were about to pop from his skull. Fighting for the merest sip of breath, he scarcely had leisure to understand that all around him, men were dying, throwing themselves between Moss and the demons Ghe had summoned from his veins. Ghan wondered, inanely, if the men could really fight and die in such grim silence, or if it was the roaring of blood in his ears that kept him from hearing them.
He clawed at the talons biting into his windpipe, but he might as well have pried at steel bolts set in marble.
“Now, what lie were you about to tell me, old man?” the ghoul snapped at him. “Why were you calling me a fool? Or shall I just find out by opening you up and peering inside?”
Ghan answered him the only way he could: by beating feebly against his attacker’s chest. Ghe looked puzzled for an instant and then roughly pushed him back. Blood and breath roared back into his head, and he fell, ears full of ocean sound.
He probably had only instants, but his throat was still closed up. Ghe had paused to examine his self-inflicted wound, the one the grass-bears had sprung from; it had stopped bleeding.
“I remember now,” Ghe told him, eyes suddenly mild.
Ghan grunted; it was the best he could do.
“When I died. Hezhi’s mouth was bleeding, and her blood was turning into something.” He settled his feet onto the ground. “Blood, you see, gives spirit shape. Did you know the stream-demon I took in? She had Human form because a Human girl bled to death in her. And my blood is so many things now.”
“She’s driven you mad,” Ghan shouted urgently. “Qwen Shen has you on a rope, like a dog, Ghe. Like a mongrel cur from Southtown.”
“Shut up, old man,” Ghe gritted. “No more lies from you.”
“It’s true. Did you know you call Hezhi’s name when you sleep with Qwen Shen? She owns you, bends your soul to her devices.”
Snake-quick, Ghe was there, slapping him with an open palm. The earth rippled like a sheet waving in the wind. Another slap, and Ghan saw only night.
When he awoke, Ghe was daubing his mouth with a wet rag. He spluttered, raising his arms reflexively to defend himself. Ghe shook his head, a silent no that served only to deepen Ghan’s confusion.
Moss stood behind Ghe. He looked weary, and one arm hung in a sling.
“What?”
Ghe shrugged. “I nearly killed you. That would have been a mistake. Like the River, I have trouble seeing myself; I need others, outside of me, to watch me. How do you feel?”
“Confused. I thought you and Moss were fighting to the death.”
“We were,” Moss interposed. “To my death, very certainly. You saved me, Ghan, gave me the information I was missing. I wish you had told me earlier about Qwen Shen’s hold on Ghe. If I had known a day ago, many of my warriors would still be alive. It is fortunate for us both that you blurted it out at last.”
“I trust none of you,” Ghan muttered. “I’ve made no secret of that. I keep what I know close. If you want it, he knows how to get it.” He jerked his chin defiantly at Ghe.
The ghoul shook his head. “No. Your knowledge would have been bound up inside of me with everything else, if I had taken you in before. I remember now why I wanted you on this expedition alive: because even hostile to me, you are more useful as you are.” His eyes narrowed. “But I will have no more betrayal. You have balanced the old debt; do not incur new ones.”
“I still don’t understand what happened.”
Moss smiled faintly. “I showed him his—what did you call it? Leash. I showed him the trap Qwen Shen had laid for him. Once I knew it was there
, it was simple enough to see and reveal.” He rubbed his hurt arm. “She is powerful, that one. Dangerous.”
“What has become of her?” Ghan asked.
Ghe’s visage furrowed in wrath. “Gone, she and Bone Eel both. Gone I know not where. I will search for them.”
Ghan drew a deep breath. “Give me a moment to think,” he said. “Because I have something to tell you both. And some questions, as well.”
Now his senses could make out a cricket chirping half a league away, see a nut hanging on a tree at the same distance, scent the distinctive odor of a soul from even farther. Yet he found not the faintest trace of Qwen Shen or Bone Eel. It was as if they had wrapped a vanishing about themselves, the way powerful priests were able to—the way the temple itself did.
Out of sight of the camp, he raged. Trees splintered beneath his claws, small creatures of wood and field shriveled into skeletons in the tempest of his anger. He wanted to hurt himself, to pound his knuckles until bone cracked and blood covered him. He wanted desperately to feel pain once again, to purify himself through it.
But his skin no longer registered such sensations, and his flesh was no more susceptible to tearing than his bones to shattering. At last he gave up. He had failed the River, but that failure could still be redressed. Especially if he could puzzle out what Qwen Shen had been doing, and why. He remembered their lovemaking sessions now, and part of it at least was plain. She had labored to twist his fundamental desire to find Hezhi into some buried desire for her. She had not failed; he still trembled when he thought of her, her flesh, her eyes. But now he could remember the betrayals, the illusion of Hezhi in the throes of passion, the whispered conversations he forgot, the subtle suggestions that made such perfect sense from her lips …
