The Blackgod

Now it had been swept away in wind, and what was left for her was someone who needed her comfort.

In all of her life, she had never been the one to give comfort. She had always sought it. It seemed a chore that she was probably not capable of. But she loved Tsem, and she had to try.

Making certain that Yuu'han was still watching Moss, she went to find her old servant, unhappy at how much she dreaded finding him.

XXIV Sorceress

GHAN emerged into the fresh air and light of the afterdeck reluctantly; he had much reading to do and too little time, he feared, to complete it. But the motion of the boat—imperceptible as it usually was—made him queasy when combined with many hours of reading and writing. And though in Nhol he had considered sunlight about as desirable as poisoned wine, here he found it revived him, soothed him for more work.

Unfortunately, Ghe's sharp ears always heard him emerge and the ghoul almost always joined him, where they sat like a pair of spiders, limbs curled and eyes squinting at the brightness of daylight. This time was no exception; the door soon eased open behind him and Ghe trod noiselessly across the baroque patterns of rust-colored stains that recalled the carnage of a few days before.

“The dream becomes more persistent,” the ghoul informed him, with no preamble, as if they were already in the midst of a conversation. Ghan glanced up from his absent study of the bloodstains, but Ghe was not watching him, staring instead at some middle distance.

“The dream about the Mang?” Ghan asked.

“Yes.” Ghe drew his legs beneath him cross-style as he sat. “The emperor included you on this expedition for the purpose of counseling me. Use your scholarly wits and tell me what these dreams mean.”

“I'm a scholar, not a soothsayer,” Ghan snapped. “You need an old woman with casting bones, not me.”

“An old woman with casting bones …” Ghe's eyes widened in startlement, then went far away—a sign Ghan had come to interpret as a search through his shards of memory. After a moment, he unfurrowed his brow and leveled an enigmatic gaze at Ghan. “Well, there are no casting bones here and no old woman. You must know something of dreams.”

Ghan rolled his eyes and then tapped the deck, as if he were explaining to a child. “Hezhi had dreams about Perkar, before he came to Nhol. The River linked the two of them with visions, drew them together through them. You understand that much?”

“Have a care, Ghan,” the ghoul cautioned him.

“You asked for my help.”

“Yes, yes, go on.”

“The River sends dreams, especially to the Waterborn. You told me he had sent you other dreams, in the past.”

“Yes, to explain my purpose.”

“Just so,” Ghan agreed. “If you press me for my opinion in the matter, you are being connected to this Mang man by the River. He is an ally or an enemy.”

Ghe twisted his mouth ruefully. “But which? I can sort that much sense into my dreams. Bone Eel could have told me that”

Ghan snorted. “Please, be my guest in seeking scholarly advice from Bone Eel.” He rocked back against the bulkhead. His hip still hurt, and he wondered if he had cracked it. He turned to find Ghe, jaw muscles locked, staring intently at the water.

“You are wrong, you know,” Ghan remarked.

“About?”

“I told you what I thought about your dream, and I told you I didn't know the explanation for it. A. fool—like Bone Eel—would have given you a definitive answer.”

Ghe fingered the little scar on his chin. Ghan thought he looked a bit more relaxed. “I see what you mean. Though even if you had an answer for me, you might not reveal it to me.”

Ghan let that pass. Why deny the obvious? Instead he settled for at least appearing to be helpful. “What do you think about this mysterious horseman?“ he asked. ”What feeling do you have?”

Ghe shook his head as if affirming something. “That he is like me, a servant of the River. That he seeks Hezhi as I do.” He shifted on the deck, produced a knife from somewhere, and began absently picking at the wood. As he spoke, he kept his gaze focused on the knife point, only occasionally half glancing at Ghan.

Like an embarrassed little boy. For some reason that comparison trotted a little shiver up Ghan's spine and disturbed him more than the moment when he had seen the scar and known what the man was.

“The odd thing is,” he went on, digging a little trench around one of the larger stains, ”though I have more frequent dreams of the horseman now, they are more shadowy, as well. His face is less clear than it was the first time I dreamed of him.”

Ghan continued to shiver despite the deep warmth of the day and turned to watch an enormous green heron lift from the reeds at the banks of the River. Beyond the reeds and a few willows, short grass extended to the horizon. Two days farther south it was desert.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed Ghe following his gaze—or, more probably, eyeing his back. His shoulder blades felt cold suddenly, like twin hatchets of ice buried in him. But when the ghoul spoke, his voice was tinged with wonder, so that it seemed impossible he could be thinking of killing. “He's out there somewhere, isn't he? She's out there.”

Ghan nodded and cleared his throat, surprising even himself as he recited:

“With their ship, the Horse, They ply the sea of grass, They stalk the walking mountains, With stones they make their beds.”

He trailed off and studied the deck more intently. “Well, you have to imagine it sung,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“From an old book, The Mang Wastes. I sent a copy of it to Hezhi when I learned where she was.”

“You've read much about the Mang?”

“Lately. Lately I have.”

“Since you discovered her whereabouts.”

Ghan nodded in reply, caught the crooked look Ghe sent his way.

“You do know where she is. Well enough to send her a book.”

“I told you that much before,” Ghan replied.

“So you did. But you never showed me how to get there. When will you tell me thatV

Ghan answered with some heat in his voice. “You could take what you want. I know that. In fact, I wonder why you haven't.” He set his chin defiantly, so that it wouldn't quiver.

“Qwen Shen wonders that, also,” Ghe said. “I'm not certain what to tell her.”

“Qwen Shen?” Ghan snorted. “Is she your advisor, too? Does she help you chart your plans as you take horizontal council with her?” He knew he was straying over the line, and he braced for the fist closing in his chest. But it made him angry, when people were stupid.

Ghe did nothing more than frown dangerously. “Have a care, old man,” he advised. “Qwen Shen is a loyal servant of the emperor and the River. She deserves your respect.”

“Five days ago you suspected her of plotting your destruction,” he persisted.

“Five days ago I had just been wounded. I suspected everyone. Now I conclude that the assassin was a Jik, placed among the guards by the priesthood.”

“Have you questioned him in this matter—the would-be assassin?”

Ghe raised his palms in a small gesture of helplessness. “He was killed by a Dehshe shaft just after wounding me. Not the death I would have invented for him, but at least he is no longer a danger.”

“You don't see the great convenience in that? In his dying before you could question him?”

“Enough of this,” Ghe snapped in annoyance. “We were discussing your decision to tell me where Hezhi is.”

Ghan sighed. “My life has recently taken a turn for the worse, but I'm still selfish enough to value it. I will take you to her.”

“Old man, if I were going to kill you, I already would have.”

“I know that. It isn't your killing me that I fear.” Which was not entirely true. Ghe inspired both fear and revulsion in him. And something was different about him these past few days, unpredictable since he and Qwen Shen had begun their liaison.

Ghe's lip curled, half protest, half snarl. “I told you—”

“I know what you think of her. But I am not sleeping with Qwen Shen—and I don't trust her. You just as much as said she's trying to convince you to swallow up my soul, or whatever it is you do.”

Ghe gazed straight at him then, his eyes like glass, the unwinking regard of a serpent. He clucked thrice with his tongue, as if chastising a baby. “You don't understand about her,” he said. He leaned close, and his voice became confidential. “I know we can trust Qwen Shen because she is the River's gift to me.”

“What?”

“For serving him.” Ghe lowered his voice further, and his murderer's eyes focused on the vast horizon. “Since I was reborn, I've never forgotten that I was dead,” he explained. “When I was a Jik, I used to say ‘I am a blade of silver, I am a sickle of ice.’ That was to remind me that I was merely a weapon, something the priesthood might wield against its foes. I was content with that. When I was reborn, I knew that I was still a tool, but this time my lord was higher, my purpose grander. But still a tool, to be discarded when the job was finished.”

A sickly grin writhed upon his lips. “Do you know what it is to live in nightmare? In my world, Ghan, food has no taste, wine no intoxication. The River has large, but simple appetites, and the small things Human Beings enjoy are beneath his notice. Nightmare, where nothing is as it should be. You bite into the sweetmeat and find it full of maggots. You shake your mother to wake her—and find her dead. That's what it's like, if you want to write it down. Yet now, now, the River has given me Qwen Shen. You can't possibly comprehend what that means.”

“You love this woman?”

“Love her? You understand nothing. She is a gateway. She prepares me.”

“Prepares you for what?”

Ghe stared at him as if he were insane. “Why, for Hezhi, of course.”

Ghan bit back a reply, but as it sunk in, he shuddered again at the sheer dementia of that claim. He very much wanted to leave the afterdeck and go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. Ghe asked if he understood living with nightmare, and he wanted to reply that he did. The entire barge seemed like a floor ankle-deep in broken glass, and him without shoes: no place to tread safely. His hopes of misleading Ghe and the others grew slimmer with each moment; if the self-styled “ghoul” ever suspected that Ghan was lying to him, he would merely devour him. It would probably be best for him to drown himself now, before they got what they wanted from him one way or the other. But even that might be pointless, if Ghe really was linked with some Mang ally of the River. In fact, since the Mang were nomadic, Hezhi was more than likely not where Ghan had known her last to be. This dream man of Ghe's probably had more current information on lier whereabouts than Ghan did.

So killing himself would probably not help Hezhi significantly, and it would remove the only real ally she had. No, as long as a chance existed for him to help her, he would not remove himself from this game of Na. He might not be an important counter, but he was a counter. Even the lowest such could eclipse and remove any other marker on the board.

“Tell me more about the Mang,” Ghe said, abruptly interrupting his thoughts.

Ghan motioned at the surrounding plain. “You see where they live. They travel and fight mostly on horseback. They live in skin tents and small houses of stone and wood.”

“That passage you quoted, about walking mountains. What did that mean?”

“The plains are home to many large creatures. The Mang hunt them to survive.”

“What creature is as large as a mountain?”

Ghan cracked a faint smile. “That was Saffron Court literature. Literature from that court is prone to hyperbole.”

“Hyperbole?”

“Exaggeration.”

“But what were they exaggerating?”

Ghan shrugged. “We shall see for ourselves, soon enough.”

“That's true,” Ghe murmured. “I'm looking forward to it.” He gestured once again at the alien landscape. “I never understood how big the world was, how strange.”

“I would settle for a smaller one at the moment,” Ghan admitted. “My own rooms, my library.”

“The sooner we find her, the sooner we can get you back there,” Ghe reminded him.

“Of course,” Ghan muttered. “Of course.”

SLEEP eluded Ghan for most of the afternoon, but he was near finding it through a dark thicket of half thoughts and full fears when he heard shouting. In that realm of semislumber, it seemed like a bell, clanging, and an image erupted from his sleeping memory into vivid life; the alarm ringing in his clan compound, himself just turned sixteen, the grim-faced soldiers filling his father's court like oddly colored ants, the look of terrible despair on his father's face.

“Hezhi!” The bell rang, and Ghan came entirely awake. The noise was from Ghe's cabin, along with the now-familiar rhythmic thumping of his bed. Ghan's mouth felt dry, and he reached a trembling hand to the stoppered jug near his bed and took a drink. The water was warm, nearly hot, and it failed to soothe him as it might. He wished it were wine.

Twice now he had heard Ghe shout Hezhi's name in the heat of his passion, and he shuddered to think what it meant. He forced himself to, however, because there was something crucial happening to Ghe, something the ghoul himself wasn't aware of—something Qwen Shen was doing to him. Ghan could see the consequence, but he didn't understand the cause.

The effect was that Ghe was becoming stupid. In earlier conversations—both as Yen and Ghe—Ghan had not been unimpressed by the young man's native intelligence. Despite a clear lack of formal education, he was still able to comport himself better than most nobles and to discuss topics of which he had no knowledge with fair dexterity once he had been supplied with basic items of information. Now, suddenly, he was unable to make obvious connections. His memory seemed worse than ever, erratic.

The manifest probability was that Qwen Shen had somehow ensorcelled him. That made it likely that Ghe's earlier—now stupidly discarded—guess that she was somehow connected with the priesthood was correct. He had seen but never read the forbidden books in the Water Temple, texts on necromancy and water magic. The references he had found to what lay inside those covers suggested that there were ways to turn the power of even a god against itself.

He remembered Ghe's tale of what lay beneath the Water Temple, the things he had learned. Many would have thought that account the insane ravings of a mad beast, but he had always had his own suspicions about the priesthood. How had Ghe explained the power of the temple to stupefy the River? It had to do with the resemblance between the temple and She'leng, the source of the god. The River sought, ultimately, to return to his source, and a part of him was tricked into believing he had found it, into forming a circle.

Ghan sat up in bed, fists clenched on his chin. What if Qwen Shen had somehow done the same thing to Ghe? His purpose in existing was to find Hezhi. Whatever Human emotions he confused with that purpose, it came ultimately from the River. What if Qwen Shen somehow convinced a part of Ghe that he had found her? Did Ghe somehow suppose he was making love to Hezhi?

Well, clearly he either thought that or fantasized it.

And this was making him stupid. Controllable.

That wasn't necessarily bad. Ghe was a dangerous creature, an eater of life, a ghost in flesh. Whatever motives Qwen Shen had, they were bound to be more Human in origin and scope. But what were they? Unfortunately, though, he knew little of her motives, but he knew at least one of her aims: his death. That in itself was incentive enough for him to find some way of freeing Ghe from her influence. If she ever managed to convince him that Ghan was worth more as a ghost than as a man, he was doomed.

He was probably doomed no matter what, he thought, and with that optimistic assessment, he lay back down and sought sleep once more, hoping that his own dreams might provide, if not answers, solace.

“How can we be assured this is the right stream?“ Ghe demanded, making certain that Ghan caught his suspicious tone.

The old scholar blinked like an owl in the brilliant noonday sun. He pointed vaguely at the River mouth. A sandbar trailed downstream from it, and the banks were verdant with bamboo and other plants whose names were unknown to Ghe.

“It's the first one wide enough on this side—since going upstream of Wun,” he answered, somehow managing to make those dry facts sound like grumbling, a sharp retort. Ghe considered chastising him, but Bone Eel and Qwen Shen both stood nearby, and appearances had to be maintained.

He turned to Bone Eel, who was gazing at the stream mouth unhappily. “Can we navigate that?” Ghe asked. Bone Eel knew little else, but he did know more about boat travel than Ghe.

Bone Eel waved his arms theatrically. “Not far, I suspect. That sandbar is a bad sign. Makes me think the whole tributary might be fairly silty.” He turned to Ghan, hands now balled on his hips. “Does your book make any mention of depth?”

Ghan looked cross and consulted the volume he had reluctantly dragged from his room to the Tiller Pavilion. It lay on a mahogany desk usually reserved for charts.

“Let's see,” he muttered. “Thick about with bamboo—the fishing is fair, if one likes trout—here we go. 'The mouth is twelve copper lengths wide, and the channel is five deep. Both the width and the channel maintain themselves for a distance of eight leagues inland, where the River splits into a greater and lesser branch, neither of which will take the hint of a keel. By flat skiff, one may then make one's way.' ” The scholar glanced up from the pages. “That's what it says,” he noted.

Though he listened to Ghan's words, Ghe found his attention drifting back to the open River mouth. It appeared, to his untrained eye, that the barge could easily fit, once beyond the sand and debris that seemed to clutter the entrance. Past that, the small river looked wide and clear.

Ghe narrowed his eyes. Something was happening where the tributary met the River. Water swirled into him, and where those waters met, Ghe saw a line of turbulence—not just in the liquid, but in the substance behind it. And he felt despair, humming in the air like some familiar song.

Despair and pain, hunger. The first two from the stream flowing in; the last, of course, from the River, for it exactly resembled the hunger he knew when he was away from the water and the living were his bread and meat. The River devoured this smaller watercourse: not just its water, but its spirit. Which meant that there were other spirits than the River in the world. Not gods, surely, but creatures like gods.

The sudden import of that struck him nearly physically, and he heard not a word of the conversation that continued between Ghan and Bone Eel. Instead, as he gazed at the continuing death of the tributary, he heard again the laughter of that creature beneath the Water Temple, its smugness, almost as if it viewed the River God with condescension.

He nearly killed Bone Eel when the fool plucked at his arm. He felt the might gather, and behind it a sudden renewal of hunger, perhaps a sympathetic reflection of the River's own hunger. But he caught Qwen Shen's concerned gaze, and he relented. “Really, Master Yen,” Bone Eel was saying. “I must insist you pay attention.”

“I'm sorry,” Ghe said, trying to infuse his voice with interest he did not feel. “I was just taken with the thought of leaving the River. It seems so strange.”

“Yes,” Bone Eel agreed, “and I wonder why we are doing it. Eight leagues isn't very far. What can we discover in eight leagues? It seems to me that we would be better off sailing farther up the River himself.”

“Darling,” Qwen Shen said sweetly, patting his shoulder. “Don't you remember explaining to me how important it is to chart navigable watercourses and land routes? Master Ghan assures us that both can be found up this stream. You may also remember that you said the crew needed a break to hunt and forage for a time. What better opportunity than now?”

“Oh, that's true,” Bone Eel said. “I was thinking that.”

Inwardly Ghe wondered how such a woman as Qwen Shen could stop herself from smothering this silly fop in the night, but he also knew the answer. For women in Nhol power could be had only through a husband, a son, or a brother. Bone Eel was heir to a fair amount of power but hadn't the wits to use it. Probably everyone at court understood the source of the nobleman's ideas and was relieved that he had a keeper.

“Very well,” Bone Eel said. “Haul on the tiller, and I shall command the dragons!” he called to a knot of sailors awaiting his orders. “Soldiers, I want to see bows and fire for the catapult! This is unknown territory, and who can say what we shall find?”

Moments later, their prow nosed carefully through the mouth of the River and entered, by way of water, the lands of the Mang. When they crossed that line—the one no one but he could see—Ghe felt a tremor, a wave of sickness that quickly passed. But it left undefined worry behind it. He noticed Qwen Shen's batted eyes, the invitation they issued. She understood his moods and knew just as well what was good for him. After a few moments, he left the deck and went to his cabin to await her.

Ghan was already back in his room, deeply engrossed in yet another tome. How many had the man brought with him? In passing, he noticed a feeling like… triumph? Hope? It was hard to tell with Ghan. He must have found something in his book he had been searching for. Hezhi used to light up with that same sort of ebullience when she found something she suspected or hoped for in her research. Though then he had not the power or need to sense those feelings; Hezhi radiated them, the way the sun produced light.

Hezhi. Soon!

His body stirred, in anticipation of Qwen Shen's arrival.

GHAN heard when Ghe went by; he had learned the ghoul's gait long ago. Desperately he began reciting a poem to himself, over and over, trying to mask his true feelings, his precariously balanced hope and triumph.

Ghe passed, but Ghan kept repeating the verse:

“Often sweeps Death

The houses of living, A menial task, That brings into her fair, dark eyes

A sparkle of joy

At the little things she finds there.”

Only when he heard Qwen Shen enter and the sounds of pleasure begin in Ghe's room did he return to the book, tracing his finger back to the point he left off, a paragraph or so below the bold caption that read, in the ancient hand:

On the Nature and Composition of Dragons.

XXV Falling Skye

THE shadow surprised Perkar when it settled upon him. Not because he hadn't heard the methodical progress of someone climbing up the broken, stony face of the mesa; he had known for some time someone was coming up, presumably to see him. What amazed him was that the abundant silhouette could be cast only by Tsem, even with the cooperation of the westering light to lengthen it. Tsem, or perhaps some gigantic beast—but then, Harka would warn him of the latter.

Then again, remembering that Harka had been less than perfectly reliable of late, he turned to see from what shoulders the dark umbra fell.

It was, in fact, Tsem. Perkar's face must have registered his amazement, for Tsem held out a hand signaling that, once he ceased wheezing and panting, he would explain what he wanted.

That took a few moments. Despite the coolness of the afternoon, the half Giant was sweating profusely; a faint breeze mingled pungent man-smell with the desiccated tang of juniper, sage, and yarrow.

“My mother's people,” the half Giant finally managed to gasp, “Giants must live on soft, flat land. Surely we were not made for climbing up and down mountains.”

Perkar stretched his lips in a grin he did not feel. He had volunteered for the watch up on the mesa to be alone; he had much thinking to do, and he knew he was poor company. Still, he had a guarded respect—admiration even—for the half Giant, although time and circumstances had allowed them only the most cursory of relationships. If this were some overture on Tsem's part, it couldn't hurt to appear a bit brighter, though he would much prefer to sulk. His father always said that a friendship missed was like an important trail passed by, and Perkar felt that he had already passed by many such trails in his short life. Of late, his friends had shown a tendency to die, and he was left, really, with only Ngangata and perhaps Hezhi, neither of whom seemed to be speaking to him at the moment—with reason. He could use another friend.

So he smiled his difficult smile and waved at the mesa edge, and said, to be social, “This isn't much of a mountain, either. Really just a ridge.” He turned his gesture beyond, jabbing an index finger toward a high line of peaks to the northeast. 'Those are mountains. Be happy we skirted around them.”

“I am,” Tsem assured him, mopping his brow and looking around. “Nice up here, though. It reminds me of a place Hezhi and I used to go.”

“It does?” Perkar could hardly imagine that. What he had seen of Nhol had been impressive, and from a sufficient distance its hills and high walls of stone had a certain recondite beauty; but there was nothing of the Nhol he had seen that suggested the crumbling stone slope of the plateau they sat upon or the verdant, stream-etched plain five hundred paces below where Hezhi and the others were camped.

“In a way,” Tsem clarified. “It's like being up on the roof of the palace, looking out over the city. The way the light shines, the smell. And there was a courtyard with flowers like this.” He waved a sausage-fingered hand at the white yarrow that blazed over the plateau, blushed pink by the sunset—an ethereal carpet of blossoms ruffling knee-high in an imperceptible breeze. They shone in vivid contrast to the stark black skeletons of ancient hills that bounded the tableland on its south and west.

“I never saw any sights like that in Nhol,” Perkar confessed. “My time there was short.”

“And spent mostly on the docks. I know.” Tsem's massive features crushed themselves into a thoughtful frown. “I came up to ask you a favor,” he blurted suddenly.

“Ask,” Perkar said. “Although at the moment, I wonder what use I can be to you.”

“Oh, but you can,” Tsem said. He stopped, grinned. “It is so good that you ken my language. Even Hezhi speaks it only when we are alone, and lately not even then. She wants me to learn Mang.” He looked embarrassed. ”I'm not very good at it.”

Perkar nodded understanding. “Neither am I, friend. I speak your language because the River taught it to me somehow. Or maybe Hezhi did, without knowing. But my Mang is at least as bad as yours.”

“Me bet we talk to each other good in Mang,” Tsem stammered in his broken version of the tongue.

“Yes. We speak good together,” Perkar answered in kind, and they both smiled. Perkar felt, once again, a warmness for the Giant that was difficult to explain; Tsem had threatened his life when they first met and had been at best brusque since then. But something about the quality of his loyalty to Hezhi, his genuine selfless love, demanded affection from Perkar. When the River transformed her, only Tsem had prevented Perkar from killing Hezhi, not by stopping him physically but merely by being there, by protecting her with his own wounded body. To kill Hezhi, Perkar would have had to kill Tsem—and he had been unable to do it. Perhaps because, in so many ways, the Giant was like Ngangata. Not just because they were both only half Human, but because they shared fiercely good hearts.

He had never gotten to know Tsem, though. Injured in the escape from Nhol, the half Giant had been unable to accompany the Mang to the high country for autumn and winter hunting. And of course Perkar himself had been injured immediately on his return to the lowland camp.

“You almost made me laugh,” he said, still grinning from their exchange of garbled Mang. “That's more than anyone else has done for my mood lately. Ask your favor.”

“I think you should know something first,” Tsem said solemnly, and the smile fled from his face. “Something that shames me. When you were ill, I advised Hezhi to let you be, to give you up for dead.”

Perkar nodded slowly, narrowing his eyes, but did not interrupt as Tsem pushed on with his admission, eyes focused firmly on a yarrow plant two handspans away.

“She's already been through so much,” he explained. “I understood that she would have to do this thing with the drum—this thing I don't understand, only I understand how dangerous it is. I couldn't bear the thought that she would—”

“I understand,” Perkar said. “You have nothing to explain. She didn't owe me anything.”

“She thinks she does. Maybe she does. But that's beside the point, because I owe you. You saved her when I couldn't. You saved us both.” He frowned again, chewed his lip. ”That really made me mad.”

Perkar did chuckle then, though it was a bitter humor. “I think I understand that, too.”

“I haven't said the worst,” the half Giant growled. “After I got hurt, I just lay there, surrounded by these people speaking nonsense. I guess I had fun with a few of the women—” He shrugged. “That's nothing. But Hezhi left, went off with you. I thought T can't save her anymore and I can't keep her company.' And I figured you two would get married and that it would only get worse. And I couldn't tell Hezhi any of this, you see?”

“Married?” Perkar said, incredulous. “Whatever gave you the idea we were courting?”

Tsem shrugged his mammoth shoulders helplessly. “I don't know. Nothing. But she cares for you, the way she has never cared for anyone except me and Qey and Ghan. It scared me. And when I thought she might risk her life for you, that scared me more than anything.”

“Because you love her.”

“No, that's the worst thing—the very worst. Because I thought 'What will I do out here without herT Not 'What will she do without meT ”

Perkar regarded the Giant's agonized face for a long moment. “Does she know any of this?” he asked quietly.

“She knows I'm useless out here. She thinks I'm pathetic. She tries hard to talk her way around it, but she does. She looks to the rest of you for help and strength, but for me she only feels pity. And she's right. I am no use to any of you out here. Anywhere but in Nhol—in the palace. Such a little place; it was easy to be strong there, Perkar.”

Perkar honestly did not believe he had ever seen such a doleful expression. Like everything about him, the Giant's sorrow was huge.

“And so what can I do for you, my friend?” Perkar asked gently.

“Teach me to fight with something other than my fists. Teach me to be useful again. Teach me about this country.”

“What? I don't know this country. It isn't my home. And I'm no great warrior.”

“I've seen you fight,” Tsem said. “If you don't want to help…”

“Wait, wait, I just want you to understand. I fight well because I carry a godblade, not because of my own skill.”

“I don't understand. It's your hands that carry it.”

“True enough. But Harka cuts through ordinary steel, helps me know where to strike—and if I make a mistake and get stabbed, Harka heals me.”

“But you know how to use a sword, or none of that would do you much good.”

“True enough. I'm not a bad swordsman, Tsem, just not as good as you think. And as a teacher … well, I've never done that at all”

“But you could teach me,” Tsem persevered.

“Why me?” Perkar asked, suddenly suspicious. “Why me and not Ngangata, Yuu'han, or Raincaster? Because I'm the killer! Because Perkar is the one you just point toward the enemy and say 'kill that,' like some kind oïhoundV He tried to keep his frustration in check, but it was spilling out. Tsem thought of himself as useless. Was that better than being thought of as having only one use? And what good to be a killer if one were suddenly afraid of even that?

Tsem didn't answer the outburst, but his brows rose high on his forehead.

“Answer me,” Perkar demanded again. “Why me?”

Tsem made a strange face—Perkar could not tell whether it was anger, frustration, or hopelessness—but then the wide lips parted from champed white teeth in what seemed a furious snarl. But it wasn't; Tsem was urgently suppressing a smile. A giggle! Perkar's anger evaporated as quickly as it had come.

“What? What are you laughing at?”

“I shouldn't laugh,” Tsem said, hand across his chest, trying to hold in a series of deep, growling snickers. “But you looked so serious …”

Perkar watched him in absolute befuddlement, but the Giant's laughter, however inexplicable, made him feel foolish, and more, he found himself smiling, as well. “What?” he demanded again.

“Well, it's only that I chose you because you speak Nholish, that's all.” And then he interrupted himself with a real guffaw. It sounded ridiculous coming from the man-mountain, and then Perkar could help himself no longer, joining Tsem in his laughter.

“WELL, a sword isn't for you,” Perkar said later, when they began discussing the matter again.

“No?”

“No. First of all, we don't have one to spare, certainly not one that would fit your grip. Second, with your strength, you would probably break any blade you used. No, you would be an axe-man.”

“My mother carried an axe.”

“Your mother was a warrior?”

“She was one of the emperor's guards. He usually has full-blooded Giants in his elite.”

“But you weren't trained to fight?”

“Just with my hands. Wrestling and boxing. I think they were afraid to teach me to use steel.”

“I can see why. I would hate to have a slave three times my size that was armed.”

“No, that wasn't it. My mother was larger than I, and the men of her people are larger still. But they aren't… they aren't very bright. It would never occur to them to try to fight or run away, as long as they are well fed and treated with some respect. But I was an experiment. The emperor ordered my mother to mate with a Human man. I'm told that it had been done fairly often, but that I was the first successful cross. The emperor thought I might be more intelligent than my mother's folk, and so he never had me trained in weapons. He kept me at court for many years, as a curiosity, but then I suppose he grew bored with me and sent me to guard his daughter.”

“They crossed your parents like cattle? That's disgusting.”

Tsem looked thoughtful. “It's no different from an arranged marriage, is it? Your folk do that, I'm told.”

“Well, occasionally, but that's different,” Perkar said, taken aback by the comparison.

“Why?”

“Well, because marriages are arranged for property, inheritance, or alliance. Not to create hybrid stock!”

Tsem grunted. “I am not as smart as a full-blooded Human, so you will pardon me if I don't see an enormous difference. Anyway, in Nhol, marriages are arranged to concentrate the Blood Royal.”

“I…” Perkar frowned, shook his head. “Anyway, to get back to our real problem: we don't have an axe, either. No, I think for someone with your size and strength, and given our situation, we shall have to find a club for you.”

“You mean a big stick?”

“I mean a wooden mace. A good, heavy branch or sapling with a solid, hard knot on one end. We can work it down with a knife until it's right.” He nodded thoughtfully. ”We could make a spear, too. And a shield!”

“Do I really need a shield?”

Perkar reached over and poked him in the ugly scar across his belly, where the assassin's sword had nearly gutted him. “Yes. You can hold the shield in front of you thus—” He hopped to his feet and turned so that only his left side faced Tsem, left arm crooked as if bearing a shield. “—and you strike over it, thus” And he cocked an imaginary club back to his shoulder, then swung it down past his ear and over the equally fictitious shield. “With your reach, no one could get close enough to you to fight around your shield or through it. With a shield and a club, you will be more than a match for most warriors, even without a lot of training.”

“But you will train me?”

Perkar nodded, oddly elated. “Yes.”

“Good. I will never counsel Hezhi to leave you for dead again. When do we make my club?”

“First we have to find one. I think I know what to look for.”

“Can we look now?”

Perkar shook his head. “Too late. We should either start a fire up here or go down. There are wolves in this country.”

“You can start a fire?”

“Sure. Go collect firewood for me. We'll keep watch together.”

He watched the Giant lumber off, happy to see him enthusiastic about something—he had never seen that in Tsem before. This development did nothing to solve his own problem, but neither did thinking about it. The distraction was welcome.

“WHO is that singing, Heen?“ Hezhi whispered, reaching to scratch the yellow-and-brown mutt where he lay near her feet, nestled against the sprawling cedar she rested upon. Above, a few stars glittered, jewels in a murky sea. Heen nuzzled her hand indifferently. Whatever the chanting was, it did not worry him. Curious, Hezhi smoothed her riding coat and stood. Though the days were warmer now, nights were still murderously cold, and even in the tents they all slept fully clothed—she never took the heavy wool garment off. She felt a fleeting worry for Tsem; she had seen him climbing up the mesa and wondered what business her former servant could have with Perkar. Whatever it was, the two of them were likely to spend the night together up on the plateau—it would soon be too dark and chill to descend safely.

Her soft boots made little sound as she walked around the steep projection of the slope to where she heard the faint music—a man's voice, a lovely tenor lilting in a haunting minor mode. It suddenly occurred to her that she might be going into danger; gaan were also known as huuneli, “singers.” What if this were her enemy, the Mang shaman, following more closely than any of them realized, even now invoking some god against her?

A hushed padding alerted her that Heen was accompanying her, and though she wasn't certain what such a tired old dog might do in her defense, it gave her the courage she needed to round the prominence.

The singer knelt on a flat stone, eyes closed, face rapt. Nearby stood his mount, a familiar tawny mare. The song itself was in Mang, and she caught the sense of a single verse before the young man opened his eyes and noticed her.

“Hard Wind

Sister with iron hooves

Together we shall travel steppes

That no man nor mount has seen

Courage will be my saddle

And your bridle shall be my faith in you …”

That was when Raincaster became aware of her and stopped, his dark blush visible even in the twilight.

“I'm sorry to interrupt you,” she apologized. “That was beautiful.”

“Ah,” he murmured, looking down at the sand. “Thank you.”

“I have heard your people sing to their mounts before, but never with such silvery throats.”

“You flatter me,” Raincaster demurred.

Hezhi lifted her hand in farewell. “I will leave you,” she said.

“No—please, I was finished.”

“I just heard you singing and wondered who it was, that's all.”

Raincaster nodded again, and Hezhi hesitantly took that as an invitation to stay for a moment.

“I still do not fully understand the bond between you and your mounts,” she went on cautiously. “I love Dark; she is a wonderful horse, but I can't say that I feel she is kin.”

“That's because she isn't,” Raincaster told her. “She can't be.” She knew immediately he meant no offense but was only stating a simple fact. Still, she pursued it.

“Could you explain?”

He shrugged. “In the beginning the Horse Mother gave birth to two children, a horse and a man. Both were Mang, and neither of us ever forgets. Our lines have been separate, of course, but the kinship is always reckoned, always kept track of. We share our souls; in some lives we are born as horses and in others as Humans. But inside we are the same.” He looked at her curiously. “Do you not feel kinship with the goddess who dwells within you?”

Hezhi remembered the wild ride back from the mountain, the sensation of being joined to the mare. “Yes,” she admitted. “But I still do not think it is the same.”

“No,” Raincaster said, his voice very soft. “The old people say that when the perfect rider and mount are joined, they are not reborn amongst us. They go on to another place, where they become a single being. That must be more what you feel.” His voice had a wistful tone.

“Maybe,” Hezhi allowed. “We are as one at times, but mostly I do not notice her.”

“It is a rare gift, to be a gaan. You should be proud.”

“I am,” Hezhi assured him. “Have you never considered—” She paused. “You are such a fine singer. Are you not a gaan?”

Raincaster turned to his mount and began brushing at her coat. “There are two sorts of singers. There are two sorts of songs. I do not have the sort of mansion that gods can live in.” He could not hide the disappointment in his tone.

“Oh.” She searched for something else to say. “You have the gift to make beauty,” she offered finally.

“It is a small gift,” he replied, still not facing her.

“No, it isn't. I may have power—I may be a gaan—but it seems that all I ever do is destroy, never create. I could never sing so wonderfully as you.” And then she did stop, for she had embarrassed herself.

Raincaster turned toward her then, and a faint smile graced his handsome face. “Songs need not reach the ear to be heard and understood. Such music is not made, it simply is.” Then he turned back to Hard Wind, his horse. Hezhi waited another moment, then turned quietly to leave.

“But thank you for your praise,” Raincaster called after her. “It is important to me, though it shames me to show it.”

The night was growing colder, so Hezhi made her way back to the fire, though her heart felt warmer already. Finally, she seemed to have said the right thing to someone.

THREE days later, Perkar found Tsem's war club when they stopped to hunt. It was nearly perfect without finishing, a natural cudgel of black gum that rose almost to Perkar's waist when stood on end. That night, around the fire, he showed the half Giant how to shape wood by charring it in the fire and scraping off the burnt part.

“It hardens the wood, as well,” Ngangata put in, watching over their shoulders. He had just returned from hunting, and instead of a piece of wood, he had returned with an antelope. Tsem nodded at them both. It was just dark, and the wolves Perkar had warned of were singing in the distance, accompanied by the occasional skirl of a tiger owl. The sky was cloudless, the air crisp enough that the fire felt good. A pattering of twin drums a hundred steps or so from camp were Brother Horse and Hezhi, teacher and pupil at their arcane studies, Perkar gathered that Hezhi was making rapid progress in her study of the world of gods—not surprising, since the blood of the most powerful god on earth flowed in her veins.

Tsem scraped enthusiastically at his club. He was clumsy, but the wood and the method of working it were forgiving. A simple but deadly weapon was taking shape in his hands.

“I remember my first sword,” Perkar told them. He felt quiet tonight. Not happy, but not crushed by the weight of the world, either. For once, he felt no older than his age. “Oh, I crowed about it. It was such a beautiful thing.”

“What became of it?” Tsem inquired.

“I … traded it for Harka.” He didn't mention that the blade his father gave him, the blade made by the little Steel God Ko, now lay near the corpse of the first person he was responsible for killing. But at least his father's blade had never itself been sullied by murder.

Perkar looked up in time to catch the warning glance Ngangata shot Tsem. Ngangata, trying to protect him again. Did they all think him so fragile?

Why shouldn't they? His tantrums and sulking had given them ample cause to think so. He resolved to be stronger, take a more forceful role in the journey. After all, it was him the Crow God entrusted with the knowledge of what should be done.

“How much longer, Ngangata? Until we reach the mountain?”

Ngangata considered that. “If we keep this pace, don't lose any horses, and all else goes well—two more months.”

“Two months!” Tsem asked incredulously, looking up from his work. “Won't we walk off the edge of the world?”

Perkar and Ngangata grinned at that. “No. We could ride another ninety days beyond the mountain and still not find the end of the world.”

“What would we find?”

“I don't know. Ngangata?”

“Balat, for many of those days. Balat is a very large forest indeed. Beyond that—Mor, the sweet-water sea. Mountains, forest, plains—finally, I hear, the great ocean. Beyond that, perhaps, the edge of the world, I don't know.”

“How far have you been that way? I never asked.” Perkar drew his knife and began helping Ngangata dress his kill. The hard knot of anger in the half Alwa seemed to have smoothed somewhat. He seemed willing to speak casually to Perkar again, which had not been the case since his “raid” on the Mang camp.

“I've been to Mor, no farther.”

“I should like to see that someday,” Perkar said.

Ngangata didn't look up from his task; his hands were bloody to the wrist as his knife worked efficiently at the carcass. “I would like to see Mor again,” he agreed, and Perkar smiled as the strain between them loosened further.

“Such a large world.” Tsem sighed.

“Yes, but two months gives us plenty of time to teach you how to be a warrior in it.”

“Two months until what!” Tsem asked suspiciously.

Perkar stopped what he was doing, raised his eyes to meet those of the Giant. “I… well, until we reach the mountain.”

“And we will have to fight there?”

Perkar spread his hands. “I honestly don't know. But probably.”

“Why?”

Perkar felt a bit of his old confidence return, so that his words seemed only somewhat ridiculous rather than absolutely absurd.

“Well, Tsem, we're going to kill a god, and they rarely take that lightly.”

Tsem's enormous jaw worked furiously for a moment before he suddenly threw down the club and gazed fiercely at them. “Why haven't I heard about this? What are you talking about? I thought we were trying to reach your people, Perkar, that we might live with them. I have heard nothing of slaying gods.”

Perkar realized his mistake, realized also that he needed badly to speak with Hezhi. Since his illness, he had been so occupied with his own fears and desires he had completely lost touch with the status of the group. Perhaps plans had even changed since he and Hezhi last talked; she was more firmly in charge than he was, more aware in some ways of what was going on. Perhaps the plans should change. Trusting Karak was a perilous thing, and though he had been convinced, at first, that what the Raven had laid out for them was possible, he was now skeptical again. Furthermore, what he had told no one—not even Ngangata—was that Hezhi was the essential ingredient in the scheme. At the headwaters of the Changeling, she—and only she—could slay the god: that was all he knew. But Karak had made it seem a simple thing, easily accomplished. All they had to do was get there.

That still wouldn't be easy. The high plateau and mountains were dangerous, prowled by Mang and even more dangerous predators. And ahead of them was the war, where his own people fought and died against those of Brother Horse. How would the old man and his nephews react when they reached that point?

And Hezhi was willful. She might not agree to help, once he explained. But the longer he put off his explanation, the angrier she would be that he had kept it from her.

And there was Tsem, glaring at him, the consequence of his talking without thinking, of another stupid blunder.

“We haven't talked this over yet, Tsem. Hezhi and I haven't really discussed it, so as far as she knows, what she told you is true.”

“No. No, I remember her saying something about a mountain now, back in the yekt. That she chose that destination because of something you said. Yet she told me nothing about why”

“She doesn't know, perhaps.”

“I think she does,” Tsem muttered. “I think she's trying to protect me again.”

Before Perkar could protest further, Ngangata softly replied. “Probably. These two have a habit of 'protecting' us, don't they?”

“If you mean leaving us in the dark about their intentions, yes,” Tsem agreed. “Though that's never made me feel very safe.”

Ngangata snorted and coughed a bitter chuckle. “No, me, either. Perkar, maybe you should talk to her. You are, after all, her kind.”

Perkar flushed scarlet. “You don't have to remind me of how I once treated you. You know my opinion of the Alwat has changed.”

“We aren't talking about that,” Tsem said softly. “You are two of a kind because you both think you bear the world on your shoulders.”

“You're a fine one to talk about that.”

“No, I've never borne the world on my shoulders. Only Hezhi. That was the only burden I ever wanted, and I want it back.”

Ngangata had never looked up from what he was doing. Perkar understood what the Giant was saying—he had heard Ngangata say the same thing in different words. And Ngangata had steered the conversation on this bent. To remind him? Perkar resolved that he would tell Ngangata, at least, the whole truth as he knew it, next time he had a chance.

“I will talk to her,” Perkar said. “Together we'll decide what todo.”

“I worry about decisions the two of you make.”

“By together I meant all of us,” Perkar clarified. ”But I must speak to her first. Meanwhile, finish that club! No matter what we do, trouble seems to find us, and now that you've brought it up, I want to see you armed. Some enemies will flee us just at the sight of you, mark my words.”

He shot a glance at Moss when he said that and realized with a bare shock that their captive was awake, hearing everything they said. How long had he been awake? Had he heard Perkar's ill-considered remark about godslaying?

Probably. The more reason not to let him go. When they reached the pastures of his people, they could give Moss into the keeping of someone else. Perhaps he could be traded to the Mang for captives. But he must not be allowed to return to the Mang gaan who sought Hezhi and report what he knew. Perkar would kill him first.

Moss smiled thinly, as if he understood that thought. Perhaps he saw something in Perkar's eyes; but rather than fear, the smile held a hint of mockery.

“I'm going on watch,” Perkar said softly. “I'll see the two of you in the morning.” Then, in Nholish, to Tsem: “Watch this prisoner, Giant. I don't know what Hezhi has told you of him, but he is a terrible threat to her.”

“I know he sought her,” Tsem growled darkly. “I think I should blood my club on him when I'm done making it.”

“No.” Perkar sighed. “We've killed more than enough, and we'll probably kill more before it's done. No reason to do so when it isn't really necessary.”

“I suppose.”

“Good night, Tsem. Be careful not to let the fire eat too deeply.”

Tsem looked up, black eyes caging bits of flame. “Just deep enough, I hope,” he replied.

PERKAR put off his talk with Hezhi until the next morning. They were ascending onto the high plains the Mang named the Falling Sky, and the going alternated between troublesome and dangerous; not a good time for what might become a heated discussion. When questioned about the name, Brother Horse explained how legend held that a chunk of heaven had cracked loose and plunged to earth. If so, their horses now climbed the eroded edges of that shard, beveled by time and wind into a stepped slope of banded sandstone. The going was easiest in the trenched furrows dug by long-dead streams, but it was midday before they found one of these broad enough and long enough to ease the constant upward stumbling into some semblance of normal traveling. Brother Horse explained that there were other, more established paths farther north but that they would risk meeting other Mang traveling there, especially now that news of the war was widespread; young, unproven warriors from every part of the Mang country would be streaming to earn honors for themselves in the mountains.

So they clattered up the dry streambed for another few leagues, until it broadened to vanishing, until dense black soil crept to cover the stone again, and they entered onto the spacious back of the Falling Sky.

“We will never be out of the shadows of mountains now,” Brother Horse told them, and it was true; they could see mighty ones on the north and west. Behind them a few trailed off, but it was the vastness of the lower steppes that struck Perkar. Though the last few days of their travel had been in hills, distance and scale crushed die most rugged of them into the imperial, awesome flatness that sheeted out and beyond the horizon, where sky and earth met in a confused haze of blue-green and brown.

Brother Horse reined his mount to a halt. “We'll offer at this cairn to the lord of the Falling Sky,” he told them. Perkar nodded as he took in the vista they had just arrived upon. Despite the bordering giants, the high plains were, if anything, flatter than anywhere below them. It seemed not so much a piece of the sky as a place where the sky had lain for a time and crushed everything level. In fact, going back over what Brother Horse told him, that might have been what the old man meant. He had not lied to Tsem in claiming his Mang was less than perfect.

Brother Horse began chanting behind him, and pungent incense seasoned the wind. He thought about joining, but he didn't know the song or the gods of this country. But soon! Despite it all, despite the dread he felt at facing his people with his crimes against them, the thought of his father's pasture and the little, unambitious gods he knew—knew the songs for, the lineages of—sixty days, and he could be there. He would not be; actually going by his father's damakuta would put them many days later getting to the mountain, days he somehow believed they could not afford. Still, the thought stirred him, not only with trepidation and sadness but also with joy.

He noticed that Hezhi had ridden out away from the rest, had her eye fixed somewhere westward. He urged T'esh toward her. To his vast surprise, Sharp Tiger followed. Since the time Perkar had adopted him, the horse had shown him, at best, disdain. When Yuu'han or Brother Horse led him, he would follow, but none was able to get upon his back. But now, as he trotted to join Hezhi, there was Sharp Tiger, two horse lengths behind—as if he wanted to hear what the two of them would say. Perkar wondered himself.

“What is that?” Hezhi asked, arm thrust out toward where the wind whipped a wall of dust along before it.

“That's wind coming down from the mountains. It may have some rain in it. See the darkness behind?”

“I don't like it,” Hezhi murmured. “It seems …” She trailed off. “Well. You rode over here for a reason, I know. You haven't spoken to me in days.”

“I know. I've been thinking a lot, feeling sorry for myself.”

“What a surprise. You feeling sorry for yourself.”

“You're angry.”

She flung her hair back over her shoulder and set her little mouth in a scowl. “What do you think you are doing with Tsem?”

“Tsem? He asked me to teach him—”

“How to fight, I know. But you shouldn't have done it without asking me.”

“And why is that, Princess! It seems to me that you told Tsem he was no longer your servant. That he was free.”

“Maybe I did. I did. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't have anything to say about him. I've known him since I was born. You barely know him at all.”

“I'm only doing what he asked. He wants to feel useful, Princess. He knows that you pity him, and it eats at his heart. Do you want to stop him from doing the one thing that might give him a sense of worth?”

“He said that? He thinks I pity him?”

“You say you have known him since you were born. What do you think? That he is so stupid he can't sense disdain?”

She looked down at her saddle pommel. “I didn't know it was so obvious,” she said. “I just don't want him to get killed.”

“Out here, he'll get killed a lot faster if he is unarmed than if he has some kind of weapon. And you saw him carrying his club today. Couldn't you see the pride in his shoulders?”

“It's false confidence,” she hissed. “We both know that branch is nothing more than a toy.”

“Princess, that—”

“Stop calling me that. You only call me that when you think I'm being stupid.”

“That's true, Princess,” Perkar snapped. “What do you know of fighting? That 'toy' of his is capable of being a very deadly weapon indeed. A weapon doesn't need an edge when it's wielded by a man the size and strength of Tsem. One blow from that thing would crush a man in full armor. Hauberks are made to turn edges, but they are no defense at all against impact. Do you honestly think I would trick him into thinking he had a real weapon when he didn't?”

Hezhi looked away unhappily. He thought she was about to reply when he heard the sudden thuttering of hooves. For a moment he paid them no mind, thinking them to be Yuu'han or Raincaster, stretching his horse's legs on the welcome flat. But then a shout went up from Yuu'han, and it did not sound like a shout of jubilation but instead one of warning. In the same instant, Heen began barking frantically.

Jump! Harka fairly shrieked in his ear, and so he did, rolling from T'esh's back as something whistled past his face. He hit the ground and rolled, coming up in time to see the collision of three horses. Sharp Tiger was not one of them; he danced nimbly aside as Moss and his mount barreled into T'esh and Dark. Hezhi shrieked and fell from Dark's back, but Moss, completely in control of his mount, caught her neatly in the crook of his arm. With an earsplitting shriek of triumph, he tore out across the plain toward the fast-approaching wind and its skirt of dust.

Harka was already in his hand. The something that sped by was returning, and he was forced to gaze at it. He had the urge to blink, but Harka wouldn't let him.

It was a black thing, like a bird, larger than most. Even at first glance, he knew it wasn't a raven—or any other normal, living creature. In Harka's vision it was yellowed bones wrapped in a tarry blackness. It whirred past Perkar, who shouted a warning. Raincaster, just mounting to chase Moss, looked up too late. Caught weaponless and with no time to dismount, he attacked in the only way possible, by punching at the thing. It struck him and he snapped back in the saddle, his face and neck drenched scarlet. The bird banked and began another pass.

An arrow intersected its flight but sailed on, though a second shaft from Ngangata hit something solid—probably a bone—and the thing rolled, missed several beats before recovering, and then dove right at Perkar. He could see a pair of immortal heartstrings, iron-colored, and Harka swept out, eager to meet them.

XXVI Demons

SLICKED in sweat, Ghe clutched at his damp bedsheets, feeling as if a hundred wasps had entered his lungs, his mouth, his very organs. He gazed at Qwen Shen beside him, knew a momentary pleasure at the faint, satisfied curve of her thick, sensuous lips. But his brain was afire, sputtering and popping like hot grease. He sat up, clutching his skull, but that was no help. Except that he suddenly understood what was wrong.

The agony emanated in stinging threads from the scar on his neck. His heart pulsed sluggishly, haltingly, and the pulling of his lungs became more difficult with each breath. But those pains were spatters of blood near a torn jugular; the source of his illness was hunger.

“Qwen Shen,” he gasped. “Get out. Leave, now!”

“What? Why? Bone Eel will be busy for some time.” The urgency in his voice seemed to have jolted her from languor but not frightened her yet. He wished she were frightened.

“No!” He struggled to form more words, an explanation, but even if his thick, clay tongue could frame it there was no time—not if she was going to survive. Within her, he could see life working, hear it, smell it.

“Quickly, go, and send someone to my cabin. Someone unimportant.”

“But—”

“Now!” His voice was actually shaking, and Qwen Shen no longer questioned his urgency. She quickly dressed and left his cabin.

He tried to stand but fell from the bed and lay clawing at the floor. What had happened? He hadn't felt hunger in…

He knew what was wrong, but he couldn't form the thoughts. His body kept asking why why why without giving his brain time for a reasonable answer. He tried to ignore the enticing fragrance of life from down the hall—Ghan—but after a short time, he simply could not. He could taste him anyway, and then do what Qwen Shen had been urging him to, capture his ghost for the information it held. He had resisted that, but now, for the life of him, he couldn't understand why.

He was crawling toward the door when there came a knock at it.

“Come in,” he gasped. The door opened and the soldier who stood thus framed in it had time only to widen his eyes before Ghe was upon him.

When it was over, moments later, Ghe gazed dully about the room, the arabesque pattern of blood and brains on the floor and bed.

I never did that before, he thought. Why did I do that? It had seemed as if just taking the life he needed wasn't enough. The beast in him had become a brute with no reason at all, not understanding that it could eat without eating. Revolted now, Ghe spat out the taste of iron that remained in his mouth, approaching nausea but never quite arriving there.

“And I will have to clean this up myself,” he muttered, irate, blinking owlishly at the mess. After another pause, he went about the task of doing just that, before the blood had time to saturate and stain any more than it already had. His linens were certainly ruined.

AFTER a bit of careful consideration, Ghan decided that the best place to be was abovedeck—though his hope was that no place would be particularly safe. He went to the afterdeck, where his chances of being alone were maximized, taking with him the journal he kept and brush and ink to add to it. Once settled, he contemplated the landscape that surrounded him and tried not to shake—tried not to think about the possibility that these could be his last moments in life.

They had traveled perhaps two leagues up the tributary, and the vegetation had thickened a bit, at least near the watercourse. The majority of trees were familiar—cotton wood and juniper—the former leafless, of course, for the climate was cooler here than it was in Nhol. Thick, tenacious trees he suspected of being stone oak shouldered amongst their more elegant cousins. The banks of the stream rose steeply from the water and went on uphill to the plains; there were no low, wet lands. That was all for the better, Ghan speculated. It meant that the water here was not of the River, was not him backed up into a swampy tributary. This stream flowed swift and sure down from the mountain valleys of the west.

Now and then the barge hesitated against a snag, and each time Ghan closed his eyes, clenched tight the muscles of his belly. After the first few such incidents he made a deliberate effort to compose himself by readying his pen and mixing the powdered ink with its mate, water. It was, for him, an old ritual and usually calming to his mind.

Predictably, Ghe joined him before he had a chance to write anything of note. Next to Qwen Shen, he seemed to be the only member of the expedition Ghe cared to talk to, and Ghan certainly could not discourage that. The more Ghe told him, the more clues he had to work with. He might still need such clues, if his current suppositions were wrong. Another worry struck him as he glanced at Ghe's handsome but pallid face. How would being away from the waters of the River affect a ghoul?

Probably not in any positive way.

Ghe settled near Ghan on crossed legs, reminding Ghe again of a large spider curling about a meal. As usual, Ghe began their conversation with a question.

“What do you know of gods and ghosts beyond the River?” the ghoul asked him. Odd, Ghan thought, how they had settled into a sort of pupil-teacher dialogue—with Ghe at least pretending to be the pupil. Was this some tactic of his to make Ghan feel at ease, afford him some illusory measure of control?

“Beyond the River? What do you mean?”

“I mean outside of the River's influence,” Ghe snapped. “Where he is powerless. You have mentioned them before, as did the governor at Wun. Remember? He spoke of the 'gods of the Mang.' As if there are gods, other than the River.”

“Ah. Well, some, I suppose, though what I have to go on is mostly superstitions gathered from the people who live out here, like the Mang.”

“What about that barbarian, Perkar? Did he tell you nothing about his gods?”

Ghan shook his head. “He and I had scant time for pleasantries.”

“You told me once that his folk live near the headwaters of the River.”

“Yes.”

“But they do not worship him?”

“Not from what I have read.” Ghan furrowed his brow. He had to make this interesting, stay on this tangent of thought, on the oddities of foreign gods. “Actually, as I understand it, they do not 'worship' gods at all. They treat with them, strike deals with them, even develop friendships and mate with them. But they don't worship them, build temples dedicated to them, and so forth.”

“Neither do we in Nhol,” Ghe muttered. “Our temples are not to worship him but to chain him.”

“Ah,” Ghan remarked, “but that was not originally true. And despite what you say, most people in Nhol do worship the River, make offerings to him. It is only—if I am to understand what you have told me—the priesthood that doesn't worship him. The temple, whatever its true function, is a symbol of that worship.”

“Agreed,” Ghe conceded, obviously restless on the topic. “True enough. But we've strayed from the subject. Out here, beyond his reach—”

“Do we know that we are beyond his reach?” Ghan interrupted.

Ghe nodded slightly but intensely. “I assure you,” he whispered, “I can tell.”

“I suppose you can,” Ghan responded, wishing to pursue how Ghe knew that but aware that he shouldn't. “Please go on with what you were saying.”

“You say that here in the hinterlands there are many gods, but they are not worshipped. They sound like petty, powerless creatures.”

“Compared to the River, I'm certain they are.”

“More like ghosts,” Ghe speculated. “Or myself.”

Ghan took a controlled breath. This was not where he wished for the conversation to go.

“I suppose,” Ghan allowed, hoping that a half truth would not ring in Ghe's dead senses as a lie. “I suppose,” he went on, “that they are something like that, save that they did not start out as people.”

“Where did they come from, then?”

“I don't know,” Ghan replied. “Where did anything come from?”

Ghe stared at him in surprise. “What a strange thing for you to say. You, who always seek to know the cause of everything.”

“Only when there is some evidence to support speculation,” Ghan answered. “On this topic there is naught but frail imaginings and millennia-old rumors.”

“Well, then,” Ghe accused, “your assertion that they do not begin as Human is without foundation, as well. Why couldn 't they be ghosts? Without the River nearby to absorb them when they died, might not they continue to exist and finally claim god-hood, when all who knew them in life had passed on?”

“That's possible,” Ghan admitted, but what he thought was How can you not see? See that ghosts, like you, are created by the River? Like… No, shove that thought away.

“Why all of this concern about gods that you do not believe are gods?”

Ghe shrugged. “Partly curiosity. That was the wonderful thing about Hezhi; she wanted to know everything, just to know it. I think I apprehended a bit of that from her. But more practically, though I may not believe them gods, I admit that there may be powerful and outlandish creatures in these cursed lands beyond the waters of the god. I wish to know the nature of my enemy. I think I may have met one of them already, perhaps two.”

“Really? Do you care to elaborate?”

“I think your Perkar was a demon or some such. Even you must have heard about his fight at the docks. I myself, with my living hands, impaled his heart with a poisoned blade. He merely laughed at me—much as I laugh at those who stab me now.”

Ghan's memory stirred. He did know of Perkar's fight; the strange outlander had claimed that his sword held a god, but perhaps Ghe was correct, and that was a lie. What sort of creature might he have sent Hezhi off with?

But she had dreamed him.

“And the other?” Ghan asked.

Ghe ticked his finger against his palm. “The guardian of the Water Temple.”

“Why him?”

“The priests don't have power as such; they are like darknesses resistant to light. But he was filled with life and flame, and it was not the life and flame of the River.”

“You don't know that,” Ghan interpolated. ”He may have some way of siphoning the River's strength through the temple. Perhaps ¿hat is why he remains there.”

Ghe regarded Ghan with what appeared to be respect. “I see you have been thinking about that, too.”

“Indeed,” Ghan said. “It's an intriguing mystery.”

“A crime” Ghe corrected.

“If you will, then,” Ghan agreed. “A crime, but one committed a thousand years ago, when Nhol was young. When a person the old texts name the Ebon Priest came to our city.”

“Yes, I read the record of it, in the book you showed me.”

“But that account is a he, of course,” Ghan continued, pausing just an instant for emphasis. “Because it says that the River sent the Ebon Priest, and clearly the River would not send someone to bind him.”

“No, wait,” Ghe corrected. 'The Codex Obsidian stated only that the Ebon Priest claimed to have been sent by the River.”

Ghan wagged his finger. “You should have become a scholar rather than a Jik. You have sense for detail, and that's important.”

“Important for a Jik, too,” Ghe observed.

“I suppose so,” Ghan conceded. “As a Jik then, someone familiar with crime—”

“I did not know I was committing crimes,” Ghe snapped. “I believed I was working for the empire.”

“Very well,” Ghan soothed. “I meant no insult, nor did I mean that. But the Jik and the Ahw'en also solve crimes, punish criminals. The people you executed, for the most part, were criminals against the state.” Or helpless children, committing no greater crime than continuing to breathe, intruded bitterly.

“That makes you angry,” Ghe said.

“I'm sorry,” Ghan lied and, continuing to lie, explained. “My own clan was declared outlaw, you must understand. Exiled. I had to disavow them.”

“I knew the first, of course. But disavow them? Why?”

“To remain in the library,” Ghan answered. The library from which you have taken me at last, despite everything. But let him feel the anger of that; Ghe would confuse it with the fury at injustices done his clan.

“Ah,” Ghe said, perhaps sympathetically. “Now I understand why the emperor told me to threaten you with sealing the library. You could have joined your family in exile.”

Ghan waved that aside, tried to wave his outrage aside with it. “No matter. The point is only this: when someone commits a crime, how do you discover who committed it?”

“I was a Jik, not an Ahw'en.”

“Yes, but you have enough intelligence to know where to begin an investigation.”

“With motive, I suppose,” Ghe suggested after a moment. “If you know why the crime was committed, you might make some guess as to who did it.”

“Exactly,” Ghan said. “Yet in this case, we know the criminal—the so-called Ebon Priest—but we have no idea what his motive was.”

“I see,” Ghe said thoughtfully. “And you have no possible motive in mind? It seems to me—”

At that moment, the barge bumped into another snag, and Ghan's heart skipped a beat. Ghe glanced at him sharply, opened his mouth to ask what was wrong—

And the barge leapt straight up from the water at least the height of a man, lifted and dropped. Weight left Ghan's body, replaced by a peculiar fluttery sensation in his gut—and then stunning pain as the deck slapped against him. Timbers protested, and from somewhere came a shrieking. Ghan bounced on the hardwood like a stone rattling in a jar, and he wished, belatedly, that he had remained in his cabin, on the bed. Then something kicked again from below, and Ghan fetched against the brass rails as the nose of the barge tilted up to point straight at the noonday sun. It poised thus, the entire mass of the barge above him, Ghan wondering dully why his end hadn't been pushed under by the weight, whether the craft would choose to fall back the way it had come or continue over, to bury him and all of his enemies against the muddy bottom of the stream.

Good-bye, Hezhi, he thought. I would have liked to have seen you again.

GHE scooped up Ghan and leapt as far out into the stream as he could. If the barge flipped over on them…

The water felt dead around him, as if he were bathing in a corpse. Rather than giving him stamina, the frigid water actually seemed to leach it away. He stroked furiously with his free arm, keeping Ghan's head out of the water. Fortunately the old man did not struggle; he was either unconscious or too smart to fight—probably the latter.

A roar and trembling shook the very water as the barge struck it again, mixed with the sound of splintering wood and the piteous shrieks of men and panicked horses. The great vessel had not capsized but had landed seam down and split up the middle.

Through the wreckage, dragons arose.

They were as Ghe remembered them, quickened water and spirit, slick and scintillating skins like oil lying on water, eel bodies and the heads of flat and whiskered catfish. When Bone Eel had summoned—or created—them, they had seemed powerful but tame, awesome without being terrifying. Now the twin serpents lashed heavenward, their toothless maws gaping trumpets of insentient fury and agony. The life in them shuddered, boiling out of them in such blinding rage and heat that Ghe could sort nothing, understand nothing, but that what died in the dragons was the River's seed in them, his dream that they existed. And even in that moment of understanding, something cracked, and live steam writhed skyward, clouds in search of their place while godstuff shrieked south, thinning and vanishing. The dragons with their color and august dread were gone, leaving no bones but flotsam and no sound save the stillness of a hurricane's heart.

Ghe reached the bank and dragged himself and Ghan onto it. Already small fragments of the wreckage drifted by, seeking downstream toward the River, messengers of failure and destruction. The first lifeless corpse of many washed past, eyes staring sightlessly at the bottom of the stream.

Ghe shook his head, uncomprehending. What had happened?

He was not given time to contemplate or theorize. The water before him erupted, a spray of foam that almost instantly thickened. It became a demon, while all he could do was gape like a speared fish.

Her skin was the color of sun-bleached bone, her alien eyes winking fiery gold. Her hair hung dark and lank as that of a drowned corpse. She was naked, magnificent, and terrifying. Leveling an accusing finger at him, the demon strode imperiously across the surface of the water, cracked out words to him as if her tongue were a whip lashing silver chimes.

“How many years have I waited for you to make a blunder of this sort?” she demanded. “Oh, how many ages? I never dreamed you would be so stupid as to give me something to hurt, to pay you back in even the smallest way.”

She was less than an arm's reach from him now, hating him with those impossible eyes. He could see the power gathered about her, how it reached away, up- and downstream, for as far as vision reached; how her white flesh trembled to contain her puissance and her fury. Ghe shook, as well, shivered as mad fear pranced along his bones. This was the second demon he had known, and the first had killed him. He caught the vaguest glimpse of Ghan nearby, raising himself to a sitting position. Behind her lithe form, more wreckage drifted past.

“It is your arrogance,” she hissed, sibilant and venomous, “always your arrogance. You think you may go anywhere with impunity. You think because you devour me day by day, you can violate me upstream, as well.” Her eyes constricted to bare slits, and her orbs darted beneath the lids, as if searching there for a lost dream. Then she leaned close, like a sated lover, and sighed into his ear, ”But here, Devourer, I am goddess. I fed your silly snakes to lure you farther in, to see how far your haughtiness would bring you. And it brought you too far.”

Ghe opened his mouth to reply—perhaps to ask her what she meant—but her hand struck for his throat, faster than even he could move. He gasped as the windpipe crumpled in and she knotted ivory fingers into his hair, lifted and swung him like a ragdoll through the air. He plunged into the water, felt again the shock of its sterility. But now he understood that it was not empty of power—it had that in plenty—it was simply power that he had not the slightest claim on. Thrashing, his feet seeking purchase on the bottom, he desperately fought to ready himself for her next attack, to chain his overwhelming panic because she was like the one Ghan named Perkar, his killer. Because nothing could be as powerful as this except the River.

She caught him by the hair again; she seemed to have doubled in size.

“Swallow me, old man,” she snarled. “Swallow!” And he gagged and bit as she forced her hand relentlessly through his mouth, pushing it down his throat into his gut. The flesh at the edges of his mouth tore like the skin of an overripe fruit, but she was doing far worse things inside of him. “Eat me up.” She laughed, and then, abruptly, he was beneath the surface of the water, shoved there by monstrously powerful hands.

How can she hate me so? his mind screamed. He tried to draw in a breath and then realized that his ability to survive without air existed only in the waters of the River. Darkness crept over everything, and he knew that he was fading. It was over; Hezhi was lost to him.

As the sights and sensations of the outer world faded, he became more aware of his “guests,” the boy and the ancient lord. They both seemed to be shouting at him, but their words made little sense. Perhaps they, too, were remonstrating with him for sins he did not understand or remember committing.

“Reach up,” one of them was saying. “Can't you feel it?”

He puzzled at that, but even the voices were fading.

“Reach it for me,” he muttered. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Know you nothing of power? Give me your leave.”

“You have it,” Ghe said, chuckling at the absurdity of this conversation of ghosts.

That was when flame shrieked through him like a destroying wind. At first, he believed that it was simply the end; Death had returned to claim him, to force him to pay with pain for eluding her the first time. But the flame raced into his heart, and rather than consuming him, it filled him, expanded him, sent his arms and feet and fingers racing up and down the stream. He shuddered and burst from beneath the water, lungs heaving, slapping his demon opponent in the chest with sudden potence. She staggered back from him, arm glistening with gore, her gaze puzzling at him.

“What…” she gasped, and then stretched out to wrap him up again.

At first Ghe wished that the lightning channeling into him would quit, for the pain was nigh-on unbearable, but whatever the ancient lord had done would not stop. He could see it now. One of his strands was fused to the core of her, as if one of his veins had been grafted to an artery, and her lifeblood was all pumping into him now.

She struck out again, but he deflected her blows, confidence growing even as the pain did, his own nameless fury soaring to match her own. He did not speak at all, but took her lovely throat in his grip and squeezed until her flesh dissolved away into water. Even then he did not, could not stop, as the vastness of her body shrank, distilled, burned brighter and fiercer until he found a place, a strongbox in his heart and locked her there. Then he staggered to the bank and, after three lurching steps, sank to his knees. Ghan moved to help him, but he did not remain kneeling, for suddenly his body seemed as light as air and he had the unaccountable urge to laugh aloud. And so he did, for not even on the River himself had he felt so powerful, so filled with flame and purpose. The demon was in him now, but he had caught her; she was his, in the same way as the blind boy and the lord. Now he was four, but the emperor was still himself, still Ghe.

He swept his gaze around, at the debris, the nearby plains, and at Ghan's openmouthed gaze.

“What happened?” The old man gaped. “Where did she go? What happened?”

“I believe,” Ghe said, grinning at the peals of triumph ringing in his own words, “that I have just eaten a goddess.”

GHAN was too numbed by the torrent of events to feel either triumph or despair, though he had good reason to feel both. His unspoken suspicion that the dragons were mere distillations of the River and not “real” had been borne out spectacularly, and all of his subtle and overt urging that the barge be taken up the tributary had, as he intended, crippled the expedition. Of the soldiers, only twenty-five were well enough to travel. The majority of the provisions were ruined or missing, as were all of his own books and maps. Most devastating of all, the horses were all dead. Without them for mounts and pack animals, the future effectiveness of the expedition would be severely limited. And incredibly, he had not spent his own life in achieving this. Yet.

But Ghe was still alive, and neither Qwen Shen nor Bone Eel numbered among the dead. Ghe was more powerful than ever, and his will to find Hezhi was fundamental. Ghan had hoped that as they departed the influence of the River, the ghoul would lose some of his sense of purpose, but the River had built him well, selecting only those parts of him that remembered and liked Hezhi, leaving other parts of him out. He wondered if Ghe understood that, the nature of his poor memory.

They passed the night in crude shelters, cold and damp. Some blankets and tarps had been salvaged but they were soaked through.

They ate horsemeat that night and the next day. Qwen Shen pointed out that the meat would spoil sooner than the retrieved rations. Some of the surviving soldiers argued for burying the dead, but Ghe, Qwen Shen, and Bone Eel dismissed that as a waste of effort. Instead, they moved upstream, away from the stench that would soon pollute the air.

After the move, as the men were working upon new shelters, Ghe came to speak to him for the first time since the catastrophe.

“Well, old man,” he began, squatting next to where Ghan slouched against a tree. “Shall I make the coming journey easier by carrying you inside of me?”

“Do what you will,” Ghan told him dully. “I care not.”

“Maybe you don't,” Ghe replied. “But I do. And I think I would rather see you walk on those frail old legs.”

Ghan shrugged indifferently.

“Because you knew” Ghe went on. “You knew that would happen.”

“No,” Ghan corrected. “I only hoped it would.”

“Well, you got your wish. But nothing can stop me, old man. I've eaten one of these 'gods' and I'll eat more. I'll send them out to serve me and bring them back in. If I tire of one, I will feast on him entirely.”

Ghan set his jaw stubbornly, about to retort, when a shout went up from the soldier watching the plains. Both men turned at the cry.

The horizon was dark with riders, savagely dressed and bristling with spears, swords, and bows.

“Well,” Ghan remarked. “I told you I would bring you to the Mang. Here they are.”

XXVII Stormherd

As Harka struck the bird, violent numbness raced up Perkar's arm, an agonizing tingling that chattered his teeth and jerked his heart weirdly in his breast. He caught a sharp whiff of decay and something burnt as the demon bird shrilled and clacked its cruel beak; Harka had severed one of its immortal strands. It climbed into the air and circled once; Perkar braced to meet the dive, only dimly cognizant of the blood oozing from his scalp.

It did not dive. Instead, it lifted a wing as if to salute the east and flew off toward the approaching storm.

Something in the storm, too, Harka told him. Perkar ignored the sword, scrambling for T'esh. Moss and his captive were already dwindling figures. Raincaster was down, Yuu'han at his side, and Brother Horse was still watching everything with mouth wide open. Ngangata had stayed to shoot at the demon bird, but as Perkar bounded onto T'esh, the halfling was already dug into his saddle, his mount at full gallop.

What did Moss think he was doing? Weighed down like that—fighting Hezhi—he could see her kicking and squirming furiously, even at this distance—how could he hope to outdistance them for long?

Perkar realized that was the least important question. A much more pertinent one was how Moss had managed to free his bonds without anyone noticing. Even more pressing was the matter of the demon bird and its origins. Had it been sent to aid Moss, or had he merely noticed it about to attack and snatched his opportunity? If Moss had one supernatural ally, did he have more?

It was obvious that Moss hoped to reach the approaching cloud of obscuring dust, use it to confuse them, and thus escape; but Ngangata was closing the gap at such a rate that it was clear Moss would be caught before entering his hoped-for refuge, though only by moments.

But Harka was buzzing in his ear, frantically trying to tell him something.

“What?” he snarled, over the rush of wind on his face.

“Look. Just look, will you? ”

And then he saw, and wished he had not. Behind the dust storm indeed followed rain, boiling black clouds torn by lightning skating over the rims of the mountains. But while it might be the windy edge of the tempest that was swirling the black dust about in the air, it was hooves kicking it up. The wonder was that he only now felt the earth tremoring up through T'esh, thunder burrowing underground.

Ahead, Ngangata waved his hand and pointed; he, too, had seen. It was a wall, not of air and dust, but of wild cattle, charging almost shoulder to shoulder. They ran in bleak, eerie silence. Though the ground trembled, there was no bellowing, no chill cries of calves going down, overrun. Perkar redoubled his speed; surely Moss did not intend to fly into the face of that monstrous herd? If so, his hope must be to kill Hezhi, even if it meant his own life. The shape of the lead bull emerged as Perkar raced toward the herd, and he suddenly beheld the spectacle with a new, razor-edged lucidity. In his chest, comprehension rapidly gave birth to a nest of stinging worms that immediately attacked his heart.

The gargantuan shoulders of the bull bunched and pulled a tall man's height from his hooves. He was black, blacker than charcoal, but for his eyes, which were hollows of yellow fire. His black horns were bent earthward, and if the bull were to stumble, the twin furrows he dug would be more than a horse length apart. There was no flesh on his skull.

“Harka, what is that? What is it?“ T'esh fought to turn aside, and though his mount did not outright refuse to continue forward, Perkar knew that soon even this Mang-bred stallion would balk at racing into the horns of that.

“A god. It is certainly a god. ”

“Do you know him, recognize him?”

“Something familiar' not one of the Mountain Gods, like Karak …”

“What can we do?”

“Ride the other way. Quickly. ”

“Moss is trying to kill her. He's riding straight into them.” He realized that they might catch Moss in time, but never with enough leisure to escape the hooved death bearing down upon them. All four of them were going to die.

The squirming panic had gnawed deeply into his heart by now; how could Moss do this? And then T'esh suddenly took his own nose, turned sidewise to the beasts. Perkar realized that he had slackened his control without even thinking, as if hoping his horse would balk. Grimly he cinched up on the reins. Ngangata hadn't slowed in the least.

His resolve wasn't firm enough, and T'esh knew it. The stallion made a frantic attempt to wheel about at full gallop as Perkar hauled with all of his might on the reins. The result was a sickening lurch as the steed lost his footing, and then both of them slammed to earth. T'esh rolled over him, and Perkar felt his leg twist oddly. The horse was heavy.

Somehow he kept hold of the reins and, though his blood hammered so violently in his temples that he feared his skull would burst, he struggled to remount while T'esh reared, his eyes rolling with madness. Across the plain, tiny figures were limned against the unearthly stampede, and though he knew he should be fighting T'esh back into control, he watched them helplessly instead. Ngangata stood in his saddle, bow in hand. Moss was crouched low in his, avoiding the halfling's shafts. Hezhi—where was Hezhi?

He saw her then, a tiny, colorful creature in her red-and-black skirt and yellow blouse. Her black hair streamed with the wind running before the lead bull as she stood to face him. Grimly Perkar doubled his fists into T'esh's reins and yanked down on them.

“Hey!” he shrieked. “Stop it. Stop it!” The stallion quit rearing, but his eyes were still frantic. Perkar took the horse's head into the crook of his arm. “Come on, boy,” he whispered. “Never forget that you are Mang! Don't forget that. Your ancestors are watching.”

T'esh was still trembling when Perkar remounted. “Come on,” he said, and then shouted, the closest approximation of a Mang war cry he could produce. The stallion spurted forward then, and when Perkar shrieked again, he put his heart into the charge, though it took him to the horns of the bull. A Mang horse, Perkar knew in his heart, would never balk if its rider was brave.

He still was not brave, but his old fatalism had seized him; his path was set, and to his knowledge there was only one way to go. Without Hezhi, all of his trails came to an end. Without Ngangata…

But it was far, far too late. Cowardice had already betrayed hope. His only ambition now was to reach them in time to die with them.

HEZHI looked up dully at the approaching mass of beasts. Her sight already told her that they were not what they seemed; stripped of the god who animated them, they were nothing more than bones. That meant nothing to her; bones could crush her as easily as real flesh and blood. She was still stunned from her fall. Moss had never had a secure hold on her, and despite his superior strength, he had also had to concentrate to keep his balking horse pointed into the stampede. The two goals had proven incompatible when Hezhi managed to swing her legs around and kick him in the face. Now she realized that she had been fortunate not to break her neck or shatter her skull in the fall.

Moss wheeled, a look of terrible distress on his face, but two arrow shafts whizzed by him, and he grimly turned instead into the skeletal cattle.

What could she do? Running was pointless. Ngangata would reach her too late, and Perkar was farther back still. If she crouched, might they run around her?

It was amazing how calm she felt. It was as if the coolness of the otherworld, the lake, had come over her. But she did not have her drum, and so that was impossible.

She frowned. Perhaps when the otherworld was manifest, already in front of her, she did not need a drum. She had a few instants to find out. Searching herself, she found no fear, but there was certainly waking anger, and there was her mare.

Help me, she said, and then she clapped her hands, once, twice, thrice. The lead bull was so close she could make out the cracked nostrils of his skull, the architecture of his skeleton beneath manifested flesh. She could see him, inside, a furnace burning gold and black. A web flowed out from him, and she knew in that instant that there were not thousands of beasts bearing down on her but only one, this one, whose horns lifted toward her.

Vaguely she saw Moss ride into the herd, uttering a shrill, ululating cry. She expected him to fall instantly, but he did not, miraculously dodging the first few beasts. Then she lost sight of him, and her universe became only one thing: the god before her. The world seemed mired in torpor, captive to inertia. Ngangata had arrived, was leaning from his saddle to scoop her up in one long arm. The bull churned toward them, black dirt spraying up from his hooves, yellow flames waxing in hollow sockets. Hezhi slapped her hands together again, and the air shattered; when she spread them apart, the lake opened between them, and the mare charged through, galloping on the surge of force from her throbbing arm. The Horse God struck the bull in the heart once and he broke stride, stumbled. Twice, and he suddenly fell. At the same instant, Hezhi reached through and tore at the strands supporting the other cattle. They shredded easily. Hezhi shouted, triumphant, as Ngangata swung her up into his lap. He pivoted his mount, and then the wall of bones struck them. Mare and riders fell, but Hezhi was laughing as they hit the earth, darkly delighted.

PERKAR saw through Harka's eyes and through his own, and he understood neither set of senses. He beheld Hezhi, standing directly before the bull, solemnly clapping her hands, as if playing some child's game. He saw the bull, bones articulated by heartstrands of black and gold, a net of such strands cast out from him to the other revenant cattle. Then something erupting from Hezhi's chest like a bolt of lightning, an erratic brilliance that struck into the bull. Ngangata reached her, lifted her up—and the herd came apart. Skulls separated from vertebrae that themselves spun out into falling streams of disks. Legs un-jointed, and ribs flew apart like rotten cages. But the bones lost none of their momentum, and so as they collapsed, still they hurtled forward, a crashing wave of black bone and dust. The wave smacked into his two friends, and they went down beneath the leading edge of it. Shouting hoarsely, Perkar bore down on T'esh, urged him ever faster toward the bizarre scene.

In the lake of bones that remained, only one set remained standing: the bull himself, stock-still.

By the time Perkar reached them, it was obvious that Hezhi and Ngangata had survived the impact. They were both on their feet, as was Ngangata's mount. Perkar dismounted, Harka drawn, and with two bounds placed himself between his companions and the Bull God.

Only then did he realize that Hezhi was chuckling. Ngangata looked dazed.

“How are you two?” Perkar asked frantically. “Are either of you hurt?”

“No,” Ngangata clipped out.

“I'm fine,” Hezhi answered, laughter subsiding. “Leave the bull to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's mine now,” she replied. She walked around him toward the thing. It stood shorn of the illusion of flesh, a beast of black bones and fire.

“Hezhi, don't,” Perkar commanded, moving to keep himself between the girl and the monster.

“She knows what she's doing, ” Harka said. “Though I would never have believed this. ”

“Believed what?”

Hezhi walked confidently up to the thing. She tapped it in the center of its skull, the horns reaching around her like the gathering arms of some handless giant. The skeleton collapsed, and the air shivered with flame which was quickly gone.

“What happened?” he asked Harka softly.

“She swallowed him, ” the blade answered. “Took him in. She has two gods in her damakuta now. ”

Hezhi turned to them, an insuppressible grin of triumph on her face. Behind her, the river of bones stretched off, empty of life.

Ngangata was the first to break that strange and uncomfortable moment with words.

“Where is Moss?” he asked.

RAINCASTER was dead, an artery in his neck severed by the wicked curve of the demon bird's beak. They left him on a natural table of stone for the predators to find, as was the Mang way.

Of Moss they never found any trace.

“He got away,” Perkar finally admitted. “How?”

Hezhi crinkled her forehead in thought. “I saw him ride into them and not fall.”

“It's clear enough,” Brother Horse said. “The bird, that herd—they must have been sent by the gaan, the one who dreams for the Changeling. Probably he sent Moss a dream last night, telling him what to do.” He shook his head. ”This is a powerful man, with powerful spirits at his beck.”

“One of them is now at mine” Hezhi reminded him. Brother Horse could not cloak the wonder from his eyes. He plainly believed her. A worry awoke in Perkar. He remembered her, back in Nhol, filled with power. She had laughed then, too. It had sounded much like her laugh earlier today, when she stopped the god and his ghost herd. Wasn't her power supposed to be diminished, away from the River? Was it diminished, or merely no longer under the Changeling's command? He would have to watch her even more closely than before.

But after that moment of sardonic glee, she seemed to return to being Hezhi.

“I don't see any point in tracking him,” Ngangata said, apparently in response to a suggestion by Yuu'han that Perkar had missed. “He'll be returning to the gaan, probably, and probably with more aid of the sort we just saw.”

Perkar nodded. “Right. We have to go on.”

“He knows where we're going,” Hezhi said. “He heard our talk about the mountain. He may not know why, but he knows that is our destination.”

“Is it?” Tsem asked. “I heard of this only recently, Princess.”

Hezhi shrugged. “Perkar and the Blackgod both insist we should go. I'm not afraid to now.”

Brother Horse cocked his head at that. “Princess,” he said, “what we have just seen is astonishing. You stopped and tamed a powerful god. But as powerful as he is, he is still nothing compared to the gods of the mountain, less still to the Changeling. The Changeling could swallow both of your guardians like small morsels and still have plenty of hunger for us.”

“Nevertheless, I won't spend the rest of my life being chased and hounded by the likes of Moss. Perkar is right; whether we like this or not, he and I must see this through to the end.”

“Raincaster won't be seeing it through to the end,” Tsem observed.

Perkar felt a familiar lump rise in his throat, and Hezhi's face twisted in anguish. In an odd way, that was comforting, to see this girl who had just defeated a god mourn a Human Being. To know that, at least to that extent, she was what she appeared to be—a thirteen-year-old girl. Perkar cleared his throat into the silence following Tsem's remark. “You all see what faces us now,” he said. “The skein of this destiny was wound from Hezhi and myself. The rest of you may have entered the tapestry knowingly or unknowingly. Either way, none of you needs face another god, another gaan, or another battle. Raincaster died for us, and others have done the same. I wouldn't blame any of you or think you lacking in Piraku if you were to leave us now. In fact, I even ask that of you.” He glanced at Hezhi, and she nodded in agreement, her little mouth set and certain. In that instant, he wanted to place his arm about her, stand with her as if they were a single tree. But he did not—or could not.

The others watched them blankly for a moment, all but Tsem, who looked as if he would erupt at any time. It was Brother Horse who answered Perkar, however. Except that he spoke not to Perkar but to Ngangata. “How long do you think these two would last on their own, halfling?” He cleared some dust from his throat and spat it out on the dry earth.

Ngangata seemed to consider that. “Well, let's see,” he considered heavily. “Between them they have a gods word, a shaman's drum, and two guardian godlets—have I left anything out?”

“Three Mang horses, including Sharp Tiger,” Brother Horse added.

“Yes, I should have mentioned them. I don't know; they might make it seven or eight days with all of that.”

Brother Horse shook his head in disagreement. “No. I think they would either be so busy arguing or avoiding each other or just prancing along in self-satisfaction that they would ride right off a cliff without noticing—in the first day or so.”

Ngangata nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I withdraw my estimate.”

After that, both men sat their horses and just smiled thinly at Hezhi and him.

Perkar glanced over at the girl. “This ought to make us mad,” he said.

“It does make me mad,” she snapped. ”But I suppose they've made their point?“ She bailed her fists on her hips and stared up at the others expectantly.

Tsem finally sighed hollowly. “If we're going, shouldn't we go? Before Moss can go tell every other monster or god or whatever where we are?”

“I have to sing a dirge for Raincaster,” Yuu'han insisted softly. “Then we can go.”

“Yuu'han …” Brother Horse began, but his nephew flashed dagger-eyes at him.

“We can go,” Yuu'han repeated, and then walked over to the corpse of his cousin. Presently they heard singing, and Hezhi began to weep. Perkar felt salt sting his own eyes.

Soon after that, they started out across the high plains.

INTERLUDE: A Letter to Ghan

Ghan, it has been long since I have written. Two moons have waxed and waned as we travel across the wildlands, since we were driven from the village of the Mang. Too much has happened for a pen to capture, and I must be brief for one cannot write in the saddle, and that is where the most of my days are spent.

The world is stranger and more varied than I ever believed possible. Living in the palace, ¡knew that I was confined, that my world was small—cut off from even the city—but a part of me never really understood what a tiny universe that was. It may be that the part of me that is River—that can only comprehend himself and never understand what lies beyond his banks—was stronger in me than I thought.

Now I have traveled far from the palace, far from Nhol, mercifully far from the River. Fifty days I have ridden with my companions across vast plains, through jagged mountains, through forests that I am told are green even in the harshest weather. In leaving Nhol, I have lost my greatest love—the library—but here, in a sense, I find compensation: discovery, at least, and as one of my friends put it, mystery.

My new calling is shrouded in both of these, and it terrifies me as often as it elates me, I must admit but I am coming to accept it. I have become what the Mang call a gaan, a person who talks with ghosts and gods, who cajoles them into doing favors and occasionally whips them to it. It is power, and until recently I thought I was happy to leave power back with the River. The strength that he offered was infinitely more potent than what I have acquired on the shaman's path, but the price that came along with the Rivers strength was more than I will ever be willing to pay. The cost of becoming a gaan is much lower, and one I believe I can afford. I strike bargains, most often, with my servants; all but one of them serves me because they wish, rather than because they must. Three gods dwell with me now—I acquired my latest tenant only a half-score of days ago. The first who came to live in my “mansion ”—this is what they call the place within us where the gods rest—was the ghost of a horse, and the story of that is too long to tell here, and not very typical of how a gaan normally works. The second case is even more extraordinary: that one was a strong, passionate spirit sent to attack us, and him I took by force. When I did that, Ghan, my power did fee I like that moment by the River, for it gave me the ability to command. I liked it; when that dread god knelt before me and sullenly entered into my service it made me feel like the princess I should have been. However, I shall not use force again, for now that he is there, within me, I fear him. I do not fear him so much as the things he offers; he coaxes me, promising that with his aid, no spirit can escape my power to bind, swears that I can become a shaman such as the world has not seen in a thousand years. I feel that this is true—I believe him—and so am tempted, for with enough power I could crush all of my enemies and the dangers to my friends, as well. I am tired of running, of battles, of death. And so when Hukwosha—that is the name of the Bull God—when he offers me such power, I want it. But I fear it, because it is merely another path back to what I avoided when I left the River. Ultimately my power comes from him, even this power I have to be a gaan; it is not my wish to become like him, an eater of gods. It is not my desire to become lost in dreams of conquest. I only want to live, to be free, to be left alone.

Forgive me when I digress, but writing of my feelings helps me to comprehend them.

This hstgodlhave acquired as a companion is—according to my teacher, Brother Horse—a more typical shaman's helper than the other two. This one I call Swan, because that is how she appeared to me. I found her in a lonely valley of ghosts, guarding their tombs. How long ago she was set there to ward them, I cannot say, and she had little sense of passing time; but all of the ghosts had departed, and Swan had nothing left to do—and yet could not herself depart. In this case there was no battle, no danger, and no desperation—only a lonely god. I offered her a place in my mansion, explaining what sort of service I would expect from her, and she agreed more than readily. After the capture of the bull, it was a great relief, and though the swan is not a powerful or ferocious helper, she comforts me in a way the others do not.

Tsem became a warrior three days ago; he is very proud. Perkar and the others have fashioned him an enormous wooden mace and a shield with a wooden frame covered in elkhide. We were set upon by creatures Perkar names Lemeyi, which are half god and half something else. These three had the appearance of long-legged wolves. They paced us for a day before attacking, shouting with Human speech. I could have taken one—as I did the bull—but the thought repelled me. Instead I sent out the mare to attack, and she dispensed with one. Perkar dispatched a second, but it was Tsem who broke the spine of the third. It writhed and cursed at him in Nholish, scored deep claw marks into his shield, but he hit it again and again, until it did not move.

I protested when Perkar began teaching Tsem to fight with weapons, but now I admit that he was right to do so. The Lemeyi was trying to reach me, and Tsem would have interposed himself in any case, armed or not. These creatures had claws like sickles and fangs like daggers. He would have died. As it is, he came to my rescue. He knows it, too, and walks more proudly, makes jokes readily for the first time since leaving Nhol.

The encounter with the Lemeyi affected Perkar more than the rest of us. He has brooded almost without words since that fight. Ngangata says that Perkar was once tricked by the Blackgod in the guise of a Lemeyi. This is yet another instance that makes me wonder how much I can trust either Perkar or the Blackgod whom he names Karak.

We began this journey in the southern Mang country, a place where only the skeletons of mountains remain. Now we are in places where mountains are in the prime of life, mountains such as I never dreamed could be. It astonishes me that a peak more magnificent than those I have seen can exist, and yet I know that it can, for ahead of us, in a forest Perkar calls Balat, She'leng awaits. I have seen it before, in the otherworld of the lake, but the memory of that place fades like a dream; the colors and shapes are difficult to remember—exactly like a dream, in fact, since Brother Horse calls dreaming “floating on the surface of the lake. ” We shamans do not merely float—we dive—but those deeper dreams are often as nonsensical as the ones at the water's edge.

My fourteenth birthday is four moons away, and I wonder often if I shall ever see it. I think that I won't. Just as my blood moved the River to pull Perkar and me together, something is moving us all again. It seems as if instead of a mountain, She'leng must be a vast pit—an ant-lion trap. For months we liave been skittering down the widest, least sloping part of that funnel, digging in our heels sometimes, now rushing down in great leaps. The Blackgod told Perkar that what awaits us at that bottom place is the death of the River, the end of a war. Perkar believes that the war which will end will be that of his fathers people against the Mang. That may be. But it seems to me that a larger conflict rages, and neither side much cares about us save in how we might be used.

I wish you were here. An enemy lately taunted me with the possibility of your presence. It was the only thing he offered that held temptation for me. It may be that he was telling the truth about you, and in that case lam sorry, for you have been drawn into this deepening pit with us. Perhaps we will have a chance to meet again and talk, before we reach the bottom.

PART THREE

THE GODS OF SHE'LENG

XXVIII The Drum Scout

A few ravens took to the air as Ngangata led the way into the field, but most remained where they were, glutting themselves on the corpses that lay broken on the rough ground.

“Harka?” Perkar murmured.

“All dead. No one hiding in the woods. ”

Nevertheless, Perkar joined the others in scanning the far tree line. It kept his gaze from touching the hollow regard of the dead, and, in any event, survivors of the battle could not be far distant, for the ruins of two yekts still smoldered nearby.

Brother Horse and Yuu'han rode out impatiently, studying the dead and muttering to one another the names of their clans.

Two bodies belonged to no Mang clan at all. They were clad in hauberk and helms like his own folk, and from beneath their steel caps bushed hair the color of wheatstraw. Perkar sighed heavily and dismounted.

Studying their ruined faces, he felt a selfish relief in not knowing either of the men, though the bloodied embroidery on their shirts identified them as being of the Kar Herita or some closely affiliated clan.

How often had he imagined this moment, when he would first see one of his own people again? From before the start of the journey home, of course, but in the last few days his every waking moment seemed plagued by visions of this first encounter. In his dreams—sleeping and waking—it was the broken body of his father or his younger brother he found first. For once, at least, his imaginings were more painful than the reality.

“Six dead in all,” Ngangata told him, after making a circuit of the meadow.

“The rest Mang?”

“Yes.” Ngangata nodded. “Four Mang and two Cattle People.”

“This is much deeper into Mang territory than I thought my people would ever come,” Perkar muttered, kicking at a stone. “This is such poor pasture for men to fight and die over.” He glanced up at the half man. “How are Brother Horse and Yu-u'han taking this?”

The two Mang were riding over to inspect the ravaged yekts. Ngangata followed them with his gaze. “We all knew that it would come to this eventually.”

“I've tried to talk them into turning back.”

“Yes. But this war concerns them, too. They wish to see it ended as much as we.”

“What if we come upon a battle in progress, Ngangata? I won't be able to watch my people fight without helping them, and neither will they.”

“Then we must avoid any such battles.”

“How?” Perkar asked irritably, aware that Hezhi and Tsem were approaching. Tsem's eyes were watchful, darting here and there, and his massive club was cocked back on one shoulder, ready.

“I can help, I think,” Hezhi offered.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I didn't think of this before because I didn't really understand what you meant by war. I didn't expect it to be like this.”

“What did you expect?”

“Well, the only wars I've read about were those fought by the empire. I always had the impression of enormous numbers of men all lined up and marching toward one another.”

Perkar nodded. “That happens sometimes.”

“I mean thousands and thousands of men,” Hezhi clarified.

“Oh. I see what you mean,” Perkar said. “I have heard tales of armies that numbered as high as a thousand, but that was long ago.”

“Exactly. And so I imagined that when we reached the borders of your country we would encounter a sort of line of soldiers, going on for miles, fighting each other. That probably sounds silly to you.”

“It does,” Perkar admitted. “You might find a damakuta like that, surrounded by men fighting or under siege. But our country is much too large for the Mang to encircle. Most of the battles will be like this, fights over homesteads or damakutat. The heaviest fighting is probably in the Ekasagata Valley, where the best land is. There we probably would see camped armies. But that is the way we have avoided all along.”

“Then it should be simple to avoid battles like this.”

“No. The country is vast, but as you see, from here on it's a land of valleys and passes, narrow places. Raiding parties like the one that came here must be wandering around everywhere, seeking revenge, looking for some likely settlement to attack. We can never know where they will be.”

“Of course we can. I can send out some of my spirits to check our path ahead.”

“You can do that?”

“I'm certain Brother Horse has been doing it. Remember when he counseled this trail over the last at the fork a day ago? I think he saw a battle ahead of us.”

Perkar mulled that over. “If you can do that, at no danger to yourself, it would be best. I'd hate to have to put our friendship with those two to the test. I usually fare poorly in tests like that.”

“Well and truly said,” Ngangata remarked, dryly but with no apparent malice.

Perkar took a heavy breath. “Still, if we manage to get through the frontier unscathed, it will actually be more difficult to proceed through the pastures unnoticed. My people are watching carefully, I'm certain, and the thought of skulking about in my own country pains me.” He thought secretly, too, how desperately he longed to hear his own language spoken, taste woti again, see a face familiar from childhood.

“Why must we take such care there?” Hezhi asked.

“Because I cannot guarantee how any of us would be treated,” Perkar muttered. “Not by any but my own close kin. Passions are probably high against the Mang—which they will assume you to be, as well, Princess.”

“But it's they who have invaded Mang lands, not the other way around,” Hezhi protested, indicating the burned yekts where Brother Horse and Yuu'han had begun chanting.

“I know,” Perkar said. “But people die on both sides, and if a relative of yours is slain, it matters not to you who began the battle. It matters only that you avenge him.” He gestured at the dead men. “You can be sure that this man's clan will not remember that he led a raid into land not his own. They will only remember that he was slain by the Mang, and for that reason it is good to slay Mang in turn.”

THE party traveled sullenly for the remainder of the day, the two Mang riding somewhat apart with their grief from the rest. They camped for the night in a small, high valley, the sort that made poor pasture for horses or cattle and was thus generally unsettled by both Mang and Perkar's folk. Perkar also hoped that it would give them a good view of the trail they hoped to pursue the next day.

Before sundown, Hezhi followed Perkar up a narrow trail in the hillside; Tsem was convinced with some difficulty to stay behind, but he could see as plainly as anyone else what a difficult way it would be for someone of his size to tread.

Hezhi admired the ease with which Perkar negotiated the ascent, which often became a climb, requiring the use of hands as well as feet. She always seemed to be just a bit too short to reach the next handhold with ease, her fingers a little too small to grip the same knob of stone with as much tenacity as Perkar did. And he was much stronger and tired less quickly. He often glanced back at her, a tacit question about her well-being in his eyes that both annoyed her by its implicit condescension and warmed her with its concern. It was a mélange of feeling she had come to associate with Perkar: irritation and fondness.

At last they reached a high point, the balded peak of a ridge, and from there the folded, crumpled land spread out and away in all directions. There was no distance anywhere unserrated by mountains, and for an instant, Hezhi felt that she stood on the same mountain as she had with Karak, watching the souls of the dead drift skyward to She'leng.

But here she saw no ghosts, only deep troughs filled with shadow and bloody sunset.

Perkar edged toward the sheer western face of the ridge and extended his finger northwest. “There,” he said. “Can you see up this vale? Is there battle there tomorrow?”

Hezhi considered the vista for a moment. “Where does your country begin?” she asked.

“I'm not sure,” he answered. “Not far, surely. Here in the Spines there are few people of any sort, only mountain people of no nation, wild creatures.” He turned to her. “How long will this take?”

“I'm not certain,” she answered.

“Be quick if you can. I misjudged the distance and the light. Soon it may be too dark to go back down.”

She nodded and removed her drum from its bag and, after just a moment of preparation, began a measured tapping, as Brother Horse had shown her. The drumming of the skin head quickly became ripples upon the surface of the otherworld, and she turned her vision inward and saw her companions. The mare welcomed her with a shake of her head; the bull lowered his deadly horns sullenly. The most recently acquired god—now in the appearance of a white swan—regarded her solemnly.

“Which of you will go?” she inquired of them.

The bull gazed up at her. In here, he was no skeletal creature animated by flame; he was magnificent, auburn with great shoulders cloaked in darker, longer hair, the eyes between his gleaming horns huge and brown, full of intelligence.

“Take me, ” he said. “We shall thunder across the plains, we shall gore the lion, and trample the wolf pack. Too long have you kept me in this peaceful place. ”

Hezhi's fear of the beast, as well as the passion and power he offered, clung to her even beneath the cold waters of the lake, but she shook her head. “Not today, not now. I only need a messenger, not a warrior. I send you, Swan.”

She sent the swan out through the doorway, her vision carried in her eyes.

PERKAR sat impatiently, watching as Hezhi's eyes glazed over and she tapped away on her drum. She was gone, not in her body at all, and that woke in him a faintly sick feeling, perhaps a buried memory of his own time in the otherworld.

“It's still not settled,” he told Harka, while he waited. “I still don't know what will happen when I face combat again.”

“It will be fine, ” the sword answered. “You are braver than you think. ”

“I flinched in the face of the bull. If it hadn't been for Hezhi, we would all be dead.”

“That would be true whether you flinched or not. Learn from your mistake, don't dwell on it. ”

“A mistake is something you do on purpose that turns out to be wrong. That's not what happened with the bull. I was afraid. I didn't do that on purpose.”

“ You've been afraid before. ”

“This is different.”

“I know. But courage exists only if fear does, too. The greater the fear overcome, the greater the courage. Fearlessness is only another name for stupidity. ”

“Has no one ever carried you who was fearless?”

“Of course. And he was as stupid as a stone. ”

“What was his name?”

“Perkar. ”

Perkar furrowed his brow in annoyance and refused to provoke any more conversation from the sword. Instead, he set about gathering scraps of juniper and twist pine; it was clear that night would settle down before Hezhi was done, and it would be cold, this high.

Sparks were dancing up when the drumming ceased; the only remnant of the day was a languid red rim on the western peaks.

Hezhi shook her head sluggishly as her eyes seemed to awaken to him and the rest of her surroundings.

“It's cold,” she sighed.

“Come over here, let the Fire Goddess warm you,” he said. She nodded, picked up her drum, and padded along the ridge to sit across the flames from him. She rubbed her hands, working the fire's heat into her chilled flesh. Perkar fought his impatience, knowing she would speak eventually.

And eventually she did.

“Men are dying up there,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Cold fingers reached out of the night and prodded at his heart. “Many?”

“I ¿link so. More than fifty, more than I could count. They've stopped for the night, but I believe that in the morning they will begin again.”

Perkar's lips drew into a thin line.

“My father could be among them,” he muttered. “My brother.”

“I'm sorry.”

Perkar saw that she really was sorry. Her eyes were rimmed with wetness.

“It's hard to cry over there,” she said. “Everything I feel is different, flatter. But now—” Her little shoulders began to quake. “They were just dying. Arrows in their throats, big holes in them—“ She stuttered off, wiping at her face.

“Perkar …” she began, but he stood stiffly and walked around the fire, feeling foolish. He settled next to her and drew her against him, expecting her to stiffen, fearing she would.

She didn't. Instead she seemed to melt into his side, her head nestling against his chest, where she sobbed quietly for a while. Her tears were contagious, and a salty trickle began from the corner of his own eyes. Almost unconsciously, he rocked back and forth, stroking her thick black hair.

After a time, he had to rise and add wood to the fire, and he realized how reluctant he was to release her. When he returned, he felt awkward, uncertain whether he should hold her again or not. He finally reached for her tentatively.

“I'm all right now,” she said. He withdrew his arm, embarrassed, and they sat there for a few moments in an uncomfortable silence.

“What I mean is,” Hezhi began again, “you don't have to do that. You don't have to feel sorry for me.”

Perkar snorted softly. “You know me well enough to know that I only feel sorry for myself,” he answered.

“I don't believe that,” she said. “Ngangata thinks you ache for the whole world.”

“Ngangata is the kindest man I've ever known. He flatters me. Still, he has never been shy about numbering my faults, especially my selfishness. Nor have you, for that matter.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Perkar glanced at her in surprise. “That's the third time you've said that tonight,” he remarked.

“No, I am. A few months ago, when we were in the hills with the Mang, before all of this started, I thought we were going to be friends. But since then, I've been terrible to you. To everyone, really, and especially to Tsem. You think you're selfish—”

Perkar smiled and began tossing twigs into the flames, where they stirred little cyclones of sparks to life. “The fact is,” he told her, “Brother Horse and Ngangata are right about us. We both see the world wheeling around our noses. We both think that the rising of the sun and the Pale Queen hinges upon us.”

“It's hard not to,” Hezhi muttered. “So many people fighting and dying, and even the gods say we are the cause.”

“No. Make no mistake, Hezhi. The gods are the ones who began this. You and I—”

“I don't want to talk about this tonight,” Hezhi said suddenly. “It's all I think about, all you think about.”

Perkar hesitated. He had been about to tell her, was right on the verge of telling her all of what Karak said—that she was the one who had the power to slay the Changeling. But he could tell her that later, tomorrow. There was time enough, now that he had decided to do it.

“Well, then, what do you want to talk about?”

“I don't know. I don't knowl” she lamented, helplessly frustrated. “What would we talk about, if we were just two people, with no godswords, no spirit drums, no mission, no war?”

“Nothing. We would never have met.”

“I'm serious. What would we talk about? What would you tell me if I were one of your people and we were alone here?”

He chuckled. “I don't know, either.”

“Well, try,” she demanded, crossly.

“Yes, Princess.”

“And don't call me that. Not now.”

Perkar reached out, without thinking really, and stroked her hair again. “Now I'm sorry,” he said. ”I really am.” He realized what he was doing suddenly and pulled his hand away as if her head were a hot stone. She rolled her eyes at that, reached up with her tiny fingers and took hold of his, draped his arm back around her.

“I changed my mind,” she grumbled. “I'm cold.”

“Ah …” Perkar felt his face burning, but he pulled her close again. After a moment's thought, he unrolled a blanket and settled it over both of their shoulders. He took her hand in his and was gratified when she squeezed back.

“Thanks again for saving my life,” he murmured.

“Shut up. This is exactly what I'm talking about,” she cried, beating his chest with her palm. “Just tell me something, something of no importance at all.”

Perkar thought for a long moment before he finally said, “I know a story about a cow with two heads.”

“What?”

“A head on each end. My mother used to tell me that story. There was a fox who owned a cow with two heads—”

“Tell it, don't summarize it,” Hezhi insisted.

“It's a silly story.”

“Tell it, I command thee.”

“Your wish I grant, Princ—Lady Hezhi,” Perkar amended. “It seems that in the long ago, in the days when people and animals often spoke, and the cooking pots had opinions, and the fence-rails often complained of boredom, there was a fox who had no cows. And he asked himself, 'Now, how might I gather a fine herd and Piraku—' ”

“Is this a long story?” she interrupted.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

And for a time they pushed away death and destiny, and Hezhi grinned at the antics of the fox and his magical cow, and in the end they fell asleep, curled together.

HEZHI awoke first, uncertain of where she was. Her arm was asleep, and something warm was next to her.

She remembered then and extricated her arm with great care from where it lay beneath Perkar's back. He was still sleeping, and she gazed at his face, astonished and confused by her feelings.

It was nice, the way sleep smoothed away his pains so that she could see the face of the boy he had been, once, before their destinies became bound. The boy he might have been. How old was he? Twenty at most.

And what did he feel for her? Pity? Protectiveness?

She wasn't certain, but there was something in the way he held her, after she stopped crying, that seemed like neither of those things. It had seemed somehow desperate. And the oddest thing was that she understood that desperation, felt something akin to it. It was as if she had been growing a skin of stone, as if her face and fingers could no longer feel, any more than a piece of wood could. It was deeper than numbness. How long had it been since anyone held her, touched her? Even Tsem had been distant from her since the night they fled from Brother Horse's camp. She had not even realized how much she missed her contact with the Giant. She was hungry for any touch.

But Perkar's touch was something else again, something special. It was more akin to what she felt when Yen held her, but it wasn't even that. Yen's touch had been exciting, forbidden, and sweet. This was something that caught in her throat, and usually it came out as anger or spite. But last night it manifested as something else entirely, something with deeper roots. She wondered what she would have done had he kissed her. Had he even thought about it? She had feared that he would kiss her, last night, force her to decide what she felt or retreat from it. Now she wished the decision had been forced, for the one thing she did not need right now was this powerful new uncertainty.

What would she do when he woke? How should she react? She lay back and closed her eyes again, a mischievous smile on her face. Let him make that decision.

XXIX Forward-Falling Ghost

THE first day, Ghan was sure that he would die. By the second, he wished he would. No torturer of the Ahw'en could have developed a more fiendish device for torment than the hard Mang saddle and the horse beneath it. Trotting rubbed his thighs and calves raw; the middle pace shook pain into his entire frame. It was only the extremes—walking and full gallop—that did not immediately pain him, but in the next day he realized that the death grip he kept on the beast when it ran had to be paid for with cramping muscles and febrile pain along his bones. Thrice the meat and tendons of his leg knotting into a bunch near his ankle had sent him sliding to the ground, cursing and shedding tears of pain.

They did not stop for sleep, and as he had never been on a horse before, Ghan was entirely unable to doze in the saddle as did the rough barbarians around him. When he did drift off, it was only to awake, heartbeats later, in terror of falling. By the end of the second day he was haggard and speechless.

He did not understand the Mang language, though it contained vague echoes of the ancient tongue of Nhol, and many words were similar. But Ghe could speak with them somehow, perhaps through the same agency by which Perkar had “learned” the speech of Nhol.

Ghan gathered, before he became unable to take in new information, that the troop of horsemen had been searching for them, apparently at the behest of the man Ghe dreamed about, who was some sort of chief.

The only other thing that Ghan knew was that they were riding to meet this dream man. And, of course, that he would never live to do so.

To distract himself, he made an attempt to observe the men around him—if such creatures deserved to be called men. It did not help much. They all looked much the same, with their red-plumed helms, lacquered armor, and long black or brown coats. They all smelled much the same: like horses. They all jabbered tersely in an ugly language, and they all laughed at him, an old man who couldn't even sit a horse without considerable aid. His only comfort came from one of the surviving Nholish soldiers, a young fellow named Kanzhu, who stayed near him, caught him when he was near falling, and gave him water. Kanzhu was a cavalryman himself and knew well how to ride.

Ghe did not speak to him at all, but rode ahead with Qwen Shen and Bone Eel, both of whom seemed to have at least some facility with horses.

On the third day, he awoke to find himself lying in short grass. Someone was spattering water in his face, and a large locust sat on his chest.

“Master Ghan? Can you move?” It was Kanzhu. Ghan sipped gratefully at the water.

“I guess I fell asleep,” he conceded.

“Come on. You will ride with me for a while.”

“They won't allow that.”

“They'll have to, or leave you, and then they'll have to leave me. I won't abandon a subject of the emperor alone in these lands.”

A few of the Mang jabbered something at Kanzhu when he got Ghan up behind him in his saddle, but they eventually relented. The main body of riders was far ahead anyway, and they did not want to be left behind arguing.

“Don't they ever sleep?” Ghan growled weakly into the boy's back. The hard young muscles felt firm, secure, as if his arms were wrapped around a tree trunk. Had he ever been thus?

Probably not.

“This is some kind of forced march,” Kanzhu explained. “Lord Bone Eel, Lady Qwen Shen, and Master Yen seem to have struck a bargain with the leader of these barbarians, though no word has come back to us about where we are going—but I've heard a few of these men mention someplace named Tseba. If that's where we're going, they mean to get thereof. Even the Mang would never push their horses like this unless there was some dire need.”

“How do you know Tseba is a place, and not a person or a thing? Do you speak any of their language?” Ghan asked.

The boy nodded uncertainly. “Not much. I was stationed at Getshan, on their border, for a few months. I learned how to say 'hello' and a few other things. That's about all. But a lot of their places start with 'tse.' I think it means 'rock,' like in Nholish.”

“Can you ask how many more days to this place?”

“I can try,” Kanzhu answered. He thought for a moment and then hollered at the nearest Mang, “Duhan zhben Tseba? ”

The barbarian screwed up his face in puzzlement. Kanzhu rephrased the question in slightly different syllables. After a moment, comprehension dawned on the man's face, and he grimly held up three fingers.

“Three more days?” Ghan groaned. But then he gritted his teeth. He wouldn't complain anymore; barbarians and soldiers hated the weak, and while he could do nothing about the infirmity of his body, he could certainly stop whining.

“Three days then,” he restated, trying to sound positive.

MIRACULOUSLY, the next day was not quite as bad. Ghan speculated that most of his body had resigned itself to death and so no longer troubled him with pain.

Kanzhu trotted up that morning. He looked worried. “Something happened to Wat last night.”

“Who?”

“One of the soldiers, a friend of mine.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” Kanzhu stated simply.

Ghan nodded dumbly. Of course. What else but death would rate notice here, now?

After a few moments, Kanzhu cut his eyes back toward Ghan furtively.

“He wasn't stabbed or anything; I saw his corpse. He was just dead”

“Oh.” Ghan lifted his brows but offered nothing. What good would it do Kanzhu to know? It would only put him in danger. Two more soldiers vanished that night. Kanzhu said their bodies weren't found and confided to Ghan that he hoped they had deserted, though it was clear that he didn't believe they had. Ghan offered his sympathy, but his own worries were growing. This was a bad sign; Ghe was losing control. Though he had consistently avoided Ghan since the Mang had found them, he had ridden near lately, his face a frozen mask, his eyes like hard, black iron. It was as if the humanity in him were sleeping, or strained beyond reason.

Ghan tried to think it through, to understand what was happening to the ghoul. Though terrible pain still housed itself in his shoulders, his thighs—and weirdly enough, the muscles of his abdomen—it was no longer agony, and he had managed to drop into sleep during periods of walking, which were signaled, like the other paces, by a horn trumpet. This meant it was actually possible for him to think again.

Ghe was a dead man animated by the River. His body had the signs of life, it was alive in most ways—save one. The spirit, the ghost inside his skin was not that of a man, was not held together by the same stuff of life that held a man together. It was not self-contained. Neither was a living person self-contained; it needed food and water, and in time, despite it all, the essence of a person's life came unmoored from its flesh. But whatever Ghe was, his life came always from outside. Near the River, where the flow of vital energy was constant, what left through his eyes and mouth and every action was merely replaced. Out here—life had to be found elsewhere. And he had more mouths to feed than his own, if Ghan understood his nature correctly. One of them was a goddess.

The old texts had called creatures like Ghe Life-Eaters, but in the ancient tongue they had also been named “forward-falling ghosts.” That name made sense to Ghan now; Ghe must be like a man trying to run down a hill when his head is moving more quickly than his feet. He cannot stop, for he would fall. He can only run faster and in the end fall faster.

This was the creature who hungered for Hezhi. He had to be stopped, but Ghan was out of ideas. He was tired, and he wanted real sleep.

He cast a hopeful look at Kanzhu. Maybe something more could be done. Maybe he could convince Kanzhu to help him flee.

But that night Kanzhu vanished, and Ghan never saw him again.

THE next day brought a wonder that cut briefly through all of Ghan's pain and trepidation. The horn to trot had just sounded, and the horses stepped down from running. Ghan was disappointed; now that he was able to stay on the back of his mount without straining every muscle, running was the gait he most preferred—next to walking, of course—because it was the smoothest. Kanzhu had taught him how to survive trotting, as well, but it involved bouncing in the stirrups, using his frail, worn-out legs to absorb the constant jolts. It was more work.

After only a moment of trotting, however, the signal came to slow to a walk, which was unusual; the shifts in speed were not usually done in such brief intervals. Soon, however, the reason for slowing became obvious. Mountains walked on the horizon.

The Mang named them nunetuk, but that word seemed somehow too short—or too long—to capture them in sound. Four legs built like the pillars of a hall supported their impossibly massive frames. From their heads snakelike appendages protruded, and to either side of that, sabers of bone—no, it must be ivory—curved up menacingly. They were shaggy, hair ranging from reddish brown to black. Fifteen or so stood in a clump, near a distant line of spruce, grazing in the tall grass. At first there were only the trees to give them scale; but with a sudden chorus of shrieks, a detachment of seven Mang tore off across the prairie toward the monsters and put them in firmer perspective: even mounted, the men scarcely reached to the bellies of the monsters.

“What are they doing?” Ghan asked incredulously. But none of the Mang answered him—and Kanzhu was gone.

Still shrieking, the warriors raced up to the now-wary beasts. Some of the larger nunetuk had formed a defensive ring about the smaller ones and the very small ones—only about the size of a horse—which Ghan took to be calves. The men had drawn swords and brandished them in the faces of the beasts; they appeared to be attempting to get close enough to cut them.

Wouldn't lances be better? he thought, but then he understood that the Mang were not trying to kill the huge animals; they were merely trying to touch them.

Though that seemed insane, the longer Ghan watched, the more apparent it became that it was true. Deftly avoiding the lunges of the beasts, the massive white tusks that slashed at them and their mounts, the Mang were leaning in to spank the gigantic creatures. The Mang who were still in ranks cheered and shrieked, and for the first time in several days the whole troop clopped to a halt for something other than water or to graze the horses.

It was a short break; apparently satisfied, the seven men came hurtling back through the grass, waving their weapons. Another group detached and seemed ready to go, but someone ahead barked a string of orders, and, after some brief argument, the seven fell back into line, grumbling. Ghan was watching them, rather than the returning riders, when the yelling and screaming of the Mang redoubled and took on another, more frantic pitch.

Ghan jerked his face back around toward the approaching horsemen, wondering what had happened. Six of them were wheeling about in confusion and one could not be seen, apparently down in the chest-high growth. His horse's head bobbed up, however, shrilling a sound that Ghan was unaware horses could make, a chilling scream that grated along the bones of his back. The horse disappeared again, hidden by the grass.

Two of the six riders had lost control of their mounts; one, a handsome beast that was nearly solid black, pawed wildly at the air. Something rose from the grass swiftly, implacably. It disemboweled the horse with a single blow of its huge, blood-soaked paw and lunged for the next rider.

From the corner of his eye, Ghan saw someone converging on the bloody scene. It was Ghe.

GHE sensed the beast in the grass before the riders were attacked by it, and with a snarl he urged his mount forward. The mare was used to a more practiced rider, but it responded to his inexpert touch promptly, and he left Qwen Shen and the Mang headman, Chuk, behind him, with only a bemused chuckle from the headman, probably at his poor riding form.

Ghe cared not for the men who were about to die, but he was hungry, and it was inconvenient to take soldiers during the day. Since noon, he had been able to think about little but feeding, and to be surrounded by the Mang and their horses was like sitting starving in a banquet hall. A smaller part of him also knew that it could not hurt to earn the respect of these wild men. Riding over to the huge nunetuk would have only seemed silly, and it would have been suspicious beyond belief if one of the giant beasts folded up with death as he approached. The Nholish soldiers would certainly guess what had become of their dead comrades then.

But this thing in the grass, he could pretend to kill.

By the time he reached it, three men and two horses were already dead or dying. He snatched what he could of their essences, but it wasn't much. The demon he had swallowed gave him great power, but it took much energy to control her, as well. Since taking her, he was always hungry.

His horse panicked, reared, and threw him, but it seemed to happen incredibly slowly, his senses racing far ahead of motion, and so he easily turned in the air, landed cat-deft on the prairie, and like a cat, he leapt low and fast. Knife in hand, Ghe met the thing in its element, beneath the waving tufts of the grass.

In that surreal quickening of his senses, he had leisure to inspect the creature in detail. It seemed low and thick, but that was an illusion of its proportions; it would actually stand well clear of the grass if it were not crouching. More than anything else, it resembled a mastiff, a savage dog with an almost square skull and very little snout. Its gore-covered paws, however, were short and thicker than his leg, supporting at least as much mass as a horse, if not more. It was tawny with coffee-brown stripes. Muscles bunched in an ugly hump behind its head.

Its open maw could easily receive Ghe's head, and that was clearly the intention to be read in the monster's beady black eyes. Were it not for his own power, the thing would be blindingly swift, much faster than a horse, at least in short spurts.

Ghe hardened himself, sank roots of power into the prairie, pulled density and substance to himself the way the demon had from her river.

Beast and ghoul cracked together. Despite all of his strength, the impact was staggering, but the monster was more surprised than he. Having just batted a horse from its path like a flea, it had not expected this slight man-creature to withstand. Still, he toppled beneath the claws, at the same time thrusting his knife up through the beast's lower jaw. With the maw open before his face, Ghe saw his bloody steel erupt through the tongue, pass into the upper skull, and emerge in the center of the head. That didn't kill it, he knew; if he were an ordinary warrior, the dog-thing would certainly have enough life and anger to finish him before succumbing to a cloven brain; but in the same instant Ghe took its ghost, drank it down in great, satisfying gulps. For good measure he kept the remnants of its spirit, as well, joined it to the others in his heart.

So now I am five, he thought as the stinking body collapsed upon him. He let it, smiling at the impacts that shook the great body thereafter as the warriors, belatedly, attacked its corpse.

He let them pull him from beneath the thing, drenched in its blood, and the cheer that went up then was more than gratifying. He waved his bloody knife in the air, and the cheer redoubled. Walking back to the column of horses, he let one of the warriors chase down his mount, knowing he would appear more dignified on foot than in the saddle.

The headman rode out and dismounted, which Ghe knew to be an honor, and clapped his bloody hand savagely.

“I have never seen such a feat,” he said, clearly trying to restrain his admiration a bit and failing. ”The gaan was right about you. He said you would be a lion, and only a lion could have hoped to match a shezhnes.”

“Shezhnes?” Ghe repeated, inquiring.

“A grass bear. He must have been stalking the nunetuk when our warriors had the bad fortune to ride upon him.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Is that a godblade?” he asked, indicating his poignard.

Ghe frowned in puzzlement. “A what?”

The Mang slapped him on the back. “That answers my question, I think.”

“But it doesn't answer mine,” Ghe said. “What is a godbladel”

The headman looked bemused. “A weapon with a god in it. I've heard of them but know little enough about them. I'll be happy to tell you what I do know, though.”

“I would appreciate that,” he said. In his mind he traced the bitter image of Perkar's sword arcing toward his, how his own River-blessed blade had shivered and nearly shattered when the strange green metal met it. Godblade.

“The gaan can tell you more.”

“When will I meet him?” Ghe asked a bit distractedly, waving to the still-shouting crowd.

“He meets us tomorrow, at White Rock,” the headman said. Ghe nodded, turned to wink at Qwen Shen, whose own eyes held an interesting mixture of fear and relief. He felt renewed affection for her; she was an amazing woman and had given him much. When he was at last rejoined with Hezhi, his true love, he would be as gentle as possible in ending her life.

TSEBA, Ghan discovered, meant “White Rock,” and the place seemed aptly named, a low-walled canyon of chalky stone that led more or less north into a range of high country. In the last day of the journey, they had been joined by more and more riders; over a hundred sets of hooves clattered into Tseba.

A single rider awaited them there.

Ghan wasn't sure what he expected of a Mang chief, but he certainly thought the man would have at least a few retainers, perhaps musicians to herald his coming. The rider was some distance away, but from what Ghan could make out, he wore no regalia—indeed, he seemed worn and bedraggled, as if he had ridden harder and longer than they. He would have doubted this man's identity, save that every Mang present dismounted before him, as did he and most of the Nholish soldiers when they realized what was going on.

Ghe, Qwen Shen, and Bone Eel were led before the chief by the headman, and the group of them began speaking. Voices carried far in the canyon, but so did the whickering of horses and the stamping of restless hooves, and even though Ghan could hear them speaking, he could make out none of what they said.

But after a moment, Ghe left and strode back into the army of men and horses. He came like a titan, men moving deferentially from his path, and it was clear he came for Ghan. Ghan gathered his strength and awaited him.

“Hello, Ghan,” Ghe said when he arrived. “I see that you fared well enough on our journey.”

“Well enough.”

“Would you come with me?”

Ghan quirked a faint half smile. “Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Why, then, I will be more than happy to come.” He dusted the horse hair from his legs, and when he took his first steps they nearly wobbled from under him.

“Let me help you, there,” Ghe said, and took a firm—even painful—grip beneath his arm and began escorting him toward the fore of the party.

“I must admit, Ghan, I've been angry with you,” Ghe confided as they walked along. “Though that isn't precisely why I have avoided you these past days.”

“Oh? Have you avoided me?”

Ghe tsked. “You betrayed me, Ghan, and betrayed Hezhi, too, though I'm sure you pigheadedly thought you were helping her. I have avoided you to save your life, however. Every time I look at you, I desire to empty your withered shell of its spirit. And yet I thought some use might still exist for you. And, as it proves out, there ¿s.”

They were almost to the other leaders now, and Ghe slowed a bit—perhaps so that he would not appear to be dragging him. Ghan opened his mouth to ask Ghe what use he might have, but then they were there, the Mang chieftain watching him with bright eyes.

He was weary-looking, clad in the same manner as any of the Mang around him: long black coat, breeks. The only marked difference was that he wore no helmet. The most astonishing thing was his age; he couldn't be more than sixteen.

“You are the one named Ghan,” he said in heavily accented but comprehensible Nholish.

“That is what I am called.”

“You and I have much to talk about, along with these others,” he said, indicating Ghe and the rest. “You may be happy to know that Hezhi is still alive and well.”

Ghan blinked as the words sorted into sense, and with comprehension came a flood of sudden emotion, cracking the levees which had so long held it in place.

“How do you know?” Ghan asked.

The chieftain tapped his chest. “I see her, in here. Not long ago I rode with her.” He placed his hand on Ghan's shoulder. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am shaman and war prophet of the Four Spruces Clan, and also by the will of the River and heaven, the chieftain of the three northwestern bands.” He swept his hands to encompass all of the men and horses who stood dismounted in the valley, awaiting his command.

“But you, my friend, may call me Moss.”

XXX The Roadmark

PERKAR drew a sharp breath and stiffened when Harka suddenly hailed.

“What?”

“Fifteen men at least in the rocks ahead, ” the weapon replied.

“Within earshot?” he whispered.

“Shouring, I would think. ”

“Mang?”

“How should I know? I only know they haven't certainly decided to attack you. They are waiting for someone or perhaps guarding something. ”

Perkar noticed Hezhi staring at him. He flashed her a little smile.

“Just pretend we're talking about something innocuous,” he said softly.

“I thought we were,” Hezhi answered, recalling the conversation Harka had interrupted, about the merits of red cattle as opposed to brown ones.

“There are warriors up ahead of us.”

“They weren't there last night,” she assured him.

“Well, now they are. Ngangata, do you hear all of this?”

“Yes. I say we go back the way we came.”

“Too late for that,” Perkar said. “They surely know we're here. When I give the word, all of you bolt for the cover of those trees. I don't think we're in line-of-sight for bows yet, anyway—”

“You aren't going to fight them all by yourself,” Hezhi hissed.

Perkar smiled weakly and reached over to touch her hand. “I don't intend to fight them at all, unless I have no choice. These are most likely my people, considering where we are. But in times of war, rash, unplanned things can happen. If they shoot too hastily at one of you, it might kill you. If they make the same mistake with me …”

He said this with confidence he certainly did not feel. They rode in a gorge so narrow that only the merest sliver of sky lay above them. Would he heal if a boulder were pushed onto him? What if his legs were broken by some snare and they simply hacked him to pieces?

“If they make the same mistake with me,” he went on, “the results won't be as dire. If they attack me, you can all feel free to come to my aid, though some of you should stay back to protect Hezhi.”

“I'm not helpless,” she reminded him, not quite sharply but with considerable insistence.

Since their time alone on the peak five days before, the two of them had gotten along well. Very well, in fact. And so he answered that with a little smile, leaning close, so that only she could easily hear him. “Is that the only stupid thing I've said lately?”

“More or less,” she replied. “In the last few days, at least.”

“Then you should be proud of me.”

“Oh, I am. And be careful.”

He nodded assurance of that, then looked over his shoulder at the others in time to catch Ngangata rolling his eyes.

“What?” he called back at the half man.

“They could decide to come this way at any moment. You two had better save your courting for some other time.”

Perkar clamped his mouth on an indignant protest and dismounted. Trying not to think about what he was doing, he strode forward. The others clopped quickly into the trees.

Despite his efforts, he felt as if he were walking through quicksand. Only the gentle pressure of his friends' surely watchful gazes kept the appearance of confidence and spring in his step.

Fifty paces he went before a rock clattered nearby. He slowed up.

“I've come to talk, not to fight,” he shouted.

A pause then, and he heard some whispering in the rocks above and to his right.

“Name yourself,” someone shouted—in his own language.

“I am Perkar of the Clan Barku,” he returned.

More scrambling then, and suddenly a stocky, auburn-haired man emerged from the fallen pile of rubble that leaned against the cliff face.

“Well, then, you've got some explaining to do, for you ought to be a ghost, from what I hear.” He shook his nearly round head, and it opened into a broad grin. ”Instead you've turned Mang, it seems.”

“You have the advantage on me,” Perkar answered. “Do I know you?”

“No, but I've heard tell of you. My name is Morama, of the Clan Kwereshkan.”

Perkar lifted his brows in amazement. “My mother's clan.”

“Indeed, if you are who you say you are. And even if you aren't—” He shrugged. “—you are certainly a Cattle Person, despite those clothes, so we will welcome you.”

“I have companions,” Perkar said.

“Them, too, then.”

“Two of them are Mang; the others are from farther off still.”

To his surprise, the man nodded easily. “If you are Perkar—and I believe you to be—then we were told to expect that. You have my word and Piraku that they will not be harmed unless they attack us first.”

“I'll bring your promise back to them, then.” He started to go but suddenly understood the full import of the man's remarks.

“What do you mean, you were ‘told to expect that’? Who told you?”

“My lord. He said to tell you, lama roadmark.' ” Perkar did turn back then, a faint chill troubling his spine. Karak.

HEZHI lifted her small shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I'm not sure what I pictured,” she told Perkar. “Something like this. It looks very nice.”

Perkar chewed his lip. She knew he was probably trying to suppress a scowl with a show of good humor. “I know it isn't your palace in Nhol. But it has to be better than a Mang yekt.” He said this last low enough that Brother Horse and Yuu'han wouldn't hear; the two warriors were nervously walking about the bare dirt of the compound.

“That is certainly true,” Hezhi said. “I'm anxious to see the inside.”

“That will be soon enough,” Perkar told her, dismounting. “Here comes the lord.”

The “lord” was a rough-seeming man, tall almost to the point of being gangly, dark-haired, and as fair-skinned as Perkar. Nothing in the way he dressed signified his station to Hezhi, but she reminded herself that these were strange people with strange ways.

Perkar's people. It was the weirdest thing to see so many men—and women—who looked like him. Though she had always understood that somewhere there were whole villages and towns full of his tribe, she had always imagined that Perkar himself was somehow extreme, the strangest of even his kind. The Mang, after all, were the only other foreign people she had met, and aside from their odd dress, they much resembled the people she had grown up among. Unconsciously, she had thought of Perkar as she thought of Tsem and Ngangata—as another singular aberration.

These implicit notions of hers now vanished. Amongst the people of this damakuta she saw hair the light brown of Perkar's and some as black as her own. But two people had hair the same shocking white color as Ngangata's, and another had strands of what looked to be spun copper growing from his scalp. Eyes could be blue, green, or even amber in the case of the “lord” and two others she noted.

The damakuta—well, Perkar was right; she was disappointed. When he spoke of it in Nholish, he called it a “hall.” And so she had imagined something like a hall, or a court, like the ones in the palace. But this damakuta—first of all, it was wooden. For a wooden structure it was undoubtedly grand, and it certainly had a primitive charm with its peaked roof, hand-hewn shingles, and weirdly carved posts. To be fair, she realized that Perkar had described all of this—her mind had merely translated it into her own conceptions.

Of course, he had never mentioned the red-gold and black chickens poking about the yard, the dogs sleeping on the threshold of the damakuta, the curious and dirt-smudged children who played, more or less naked, amongst the chickens.

But Perkar was right; for all of that, it was certainly grander than a Mang yekt.

The “lord” approached and said something to Perkar that Hezhi did not understand. Perkar looked tired; the seams on his brow were deep with trouble, and whatever response he gave to the other man seemed uneasily given. He added something, as an afterthought, and then waved her and the rest to his side. Hezhi complied with a reluctance she didn't entirely understand. There was some quality about the tall man's eyes she found disquieting. When they arrived, however, he bowed to them slightly.

“Pardon the thickness of Mang speech on my tongue,” he told them. “It has been more than a day since I have spoken it.”

To Hezhi's ear there was nothing wrong with his Mang at all. Probably Brother Horse and Yuu'han could tell he was no native speaker, but she could not.

“In any event, I am known as Sheldu Kar Kwereshkan, and welcome to my damakuta. Its rooms, its wine, its food are yours for the taking, and if aught else calls a need to you, do not hesitate to pass that request on to me or mine.” He turned to her. ”Princess, I am told you have traveled far and far to be here. Be welcome.” His amber eyes lingered on her uncomfortably, but Hezhi smiled and nodded. It was probably, after all, only the alien color of his orbs that distracted her. “Brother Horse, once known as Yushnene, your name is well known to my family. You and your nephew understand that you are under our protection here, and no harm shall come to you.”

“Very generous,” Brother Horse replied, perhaps a bit stiffly.

The tall lord greeted everyone else. Hezhi gazed back around the compound, wondering what the building might be like inside. She wondered if there might be a bath.

SHE sighed, ladling more water onto the steaming rocks. The liquid danced frenetically on the porous, glowing stones, and the next breath she drew was almost unbearably hot, though delicious. Heat gripped through her muscles to her bone, and soreness seemed to ooze out of her with her sweat.

It was like no bath she had ever known, but it would certainly serve.

Several other women shared the sauna with her; unclothed they were more ghostly than ever, white as alabaster tinged here and there with pink. They were polite, but Hezhi suspected that they were inspecting her with the same bemused regard. Men used a separate steamhouse, she was told, and likely that was where Tsem and the rest were. Perkar and the lord had gone off to talk alone; Hezhi suspected that he would ask for more men to escort them to the mountain.

The mountain. She'leng. She closed her eyes against the heat as another steam tornado writhed into the air. She drew up the images of her journey through the lake to that other She'leng, which she understood was in most ways the same as the one she was moving so steadily toward.

Why must she go there corporeally? She had already been there as a spirit, but Karak insisted that she must make the journey in the flesh. She ran her finger over her scale absently. It was quiet, untroubled, and yet still it had the power to trouble her. Someone was not telling her something. She hoped it was not Perkar, and even at that thought her heart sank, a tightening in otherwise relaxed muscles. Perkar had been so good to her these past few days. She still did not know what she felt for him, exactly, but his arms around her that night had been good, comfortable. Not disgusting as with Wezh, not full of trembling, silly excitement as with Yen, but quiet, and warm, and good. If Perkar were betraying her, too…

Unfortunately, she was forced to admit, he might be—if he thought his reason was good enough. She remembered her conversation with Ngangata. But that was before—well, she knew Perkar had some sort of feelings for her.

Or he wanted something, very badly indeed.

She frowned and threw more water on the rocks, reveling this time more in the sting of pain from the cloudy effervescence than in its more soothing results. No, she wouldn't think that way. She would trust Perkar, as much as she could. She had to trust someone.

And if Perkar were plotting against her, what chance did she have?

What a silly thought that was, she admonished herself. As if she were without power. She had never been in the habit of trusting those around her with her life; why should she start now, when she had more resources within her than ever before? Had refusing her heritage from the River broken some self-reliant part of her? These past months she had counted on people more than she ever had in her life. Yet back in Nhol, when her very existence had been in danger, it had been she who found the answers in the library, in the tunnels beneath the city. Ghan and Tsem had helped, but it been her own initiative and hunger that saved her. Her only moment of weakness had been in summoning Perkar, in wishing for a hero. She had not known that her blood would mingle with the River and bring that about. She had not consciously been at fault. But her sin had been in wishing for someone else to help her, when real experience proved again and again that she could rely only on herself, in the end.

But Perkar had saved her then. Without him, Yen would have murdered her.

She tried to relax back into the steam, reclaim her peace in long-deserved luxury, but it was gone. Once again, she did not know enough about her own destiny. In Nhol, the library had given her the key to surviving, a golden key of information better than any lockpick.

Here books were of no use to her, but tonight she would invoke other ways of learning. She would have some answers before taking another step toward She'leng.

WHEN they were alone, Perkar waited an instant, clenching and unclenching his fist—to calm down, to manage his temper, to let memory counsel him rather than stir him to useless stupidity.

“I know you, Karak,” he snapped at last. “You cannot fool me, hiding behind the skin of a relative.”

The seeming of Sheldu Kar Kwereshkan merely smiled and gestured for him to sit. Nearby, ajar of woti sat in a warm pot of water; for the first time in over a year, Perkar's nostrils and lungs were pleasured by its sweet scent, and his throat ached to feel the warm drink coursing down it. He almost salivated when his host poured two cups and handed one to him.

“Piraku,” the man said simply, raising his cup. Perkar raised his own, brought the fuming drink below his nostrils, and let the warm scent of fermented barley linger there. It was woti kera, black woti, the finest and most expensive form of the beverage.

“Please, drink,” his host insisted. “Why do you only inhale it? Drink!”

Perkar regarded the dark fluid once more and then carefully put the cup on the floor. “I am like a ghost, Karak,” he said. “You have made me like a ghost. The things of my people are no longer real to me, only shadows that I do not deserve. Woti is the drink of a man and a warrior, and I deserve only what a ghost enjoys of woti; its vapor. Only that for the man I might have been. I will never drink woti again, not until I have corrected my past mistakes.”

The man sighed, sipped his own woti, and sighed again. “It is a drink, Perkar,” he said. ”A thing to be savored, enjoyed—not agonized over.”

“It is a drink for those with Piraku, and I have none. Nor, I suspect, have you.”

“Pretty thing, I was winging through the skies above this mountain long before any thought had been given to Piraku—or to your kind at all. I probably invented woti, though I don't remember for certain.”

“You are Karak.”

The man took another sip of woti before answering. “If you accused the real Sheldu of having no Piraku, the two of you would be stabbing at one another with swords by now. Yes, yes, I have come to point your way. It is more than I thought would be allowed, but less than I had hoped for.”

Perkar sucked in a retort, and when he had the control, asked, as humbly as he could, “Will you tell me now how the Changeling can be destroyed by Hezhi?”

Karak cocked his head appraisingly. “You are learning, pretty thing. Perhaps my despair over you has been unwarranted. What an irony that would be, since it has kept me sleepless.”

Perkar worried that he would grit his teeth into grains of salt. His anger was dissolving—or at least mixing with a bottomless terror as he remembered that Raven gone white, holding him helpless off the ground. He wanted to retort, to singe the god with his words, but he could not. And he knew—as Karak seemed to know, from the mocking sarcasm in his tone—that it was fear and not wisdom that stayed his hand and tongue.

“Please,” he said. “We have come too far to fail. If you don't tell me what we should do—”

“Never fear, Perkar. Some of the burden I have lifted from your shoulders. The thing I foresaw marching out from Nhol has come, and it gathers power and terror about it. It is a demon of sorts, what your folk call a Tiskawa.”

“Life-Devourer,” Perkar muttered. “That lifts no burden from me, Karak. If such a thing stalks us—”

“Well, you trade for this and you get that,” Karak allowed. “When the time comes, I am confident that you and Harka can stand against such a creature. What eases your load is that because of this thing and the stink of Changeling about it, its power—I may now escort you to the mountain. With such a blemish crawling through Balat, the Forest Lord will scarce take notice of us, unless we give him excessive cause to. So you see, your fears that you will not know what to do once we reach his source are unfounded. I will be along, in this guise, to help you.” He leaned up, and his voice became lighter in tone but heavier with threat. ”And only you and I are to know this, of course. The others need only know that a distant kinsman of yours and thirty of his men will ride with you on your quest.

“What of Hezhi? She does not know that she is the crucial one. What if she refuses to go, fearing the Changeling as she does?”

“She will go,” Karak assured him.

“And what of my feelings on this matter?” he snarled, forcing strength into his voice despite the quivering in his limbs. “Suppose I will not help you lead her there without her consent?”

“You have had many months to tell her if you were going to. You have not; you will not. You, too, desperately wish to have your lost Piraku back, to end the war with the Mang, to set your part in your people's affairs to rights. And if that isn't enough—” He smiled. “Draw out your blade.”

Perkar hung his head. “I have made no move to do so. I have not threatened you.”

“You misunderstand me,” Karak said softly. “I said draw—out—your—blade.” His command was like knife thrusts through a silk shirt.

Numbly, Perkar took Harka out. He doesn't need me now to get her to the mountain, he realized. He can take my form. No one will know. He held his weapon up, saw with dismay the way the firelight quivered upon the metal—or, rather, the way the blade shivered in his grip.

Karak reached out laconically and pressed his palm against Harka's tip. He pressed until a faint, golden drop of blood started. Perkar felt sweat beading on his brow. What was the Blackgod doing?

“Close your eyes,” Karak intoned.

“If you are to kill me, I wish to die with them open,” he answered.

Karak rolled his own yellow orbs. “Stop being so melodramatic, you fool, and close your eyes. I only want to show you something.”

Perkar breathed deeply, captured a breath, and held it for an instant. As he released it, he allowed his lids to meet.

He saw a boat, broken by dying dragons. His vision was odd, as if he stood far away and high above the things he observed; yet they were all clear to him. Hiere was no doubt of what he saw. But what was happening? He watched in confusion as the great serpents became steam and vanished, as countless men and horses died in the water, from impact, from boiling alive.

Now he saw two men he knew. One was Ghan, the old man who had contracted with him to rescue Hezhi, back in Nhol. The other was familiar, sharply so, and yet he could not precisely place from where he knew that face. And where they were seemed familiar, as well, a small river…

Then she emerged. And as he watched what transpired then, he shrieked and he wept, and that night he did not sleep at all, but rode round and round on that same black nightmare, a mount with no mercy, that squeezed and squeezed his heart until anger crushed into fear, despair into hope, joy into pain. Crushed together until they became, at last, something different from all of those emotions, something that gleamed like the fangs of a beast or the edge of a butchers blade.

HEZHI lay awake in bed, muffled in the lush folds of a down-batted quilt, surrounded by the faint gleam of polished wood in moonlight from a half-slatted window. She felt, now, that she had misjudged the damakuta. It was, indeed, a place of comfort and, more to the point, a place of warmth. She shared her room with three other girls, all within a few years of her own age. Though they spoke no common language, they had been kind enough to her, saw that she had plenty to eat and warm covers, and gave her a long thick woolen shirt that, though it itched and scratched, kept away the mountain chill. The food was odd: bread boiled into dumplings, a thick stew of curd and pungent cheese, some kind of roasted bird—but it was cooked and filling and warm.

That and the sauna almost convinced her to put away her fears and sleep, and when she struggled out of the nightshirt and slipped into the enveloping softness of quilt and mattress, she very nearly surrendered. Almost asleep, drifting languidly from one terrace of cloud to the next…

And then she awoke, to a falling terror, to the call of some nightbird strange to her.

After that, her heart would not stop thudding, but instead picked up her earlier worries, pumped them round and round her body so that they pulsed in her throat, at her wrists, until finally she could bear it no longer and slipped from the bed into the cool night air. She paused at her shadow, cast by moonlight, turned slowly so that the Queen of Night could cast more angles of her on the floor. Her body had changed since leaving the River. Grown more … awkward, somehow. She could see the same thing in her roommates, before they fell asleep. Sisters, they were like images of each other at different ages—and in her own mind, of herself. The youngest was all smallness, limbs smooth and uniform, balanced and beautiful. The eldest girl—Numa? Perhaps fifteen years old, she looked like a woman; sweetly curved hips, breasts, symmetry. The middle girl, though, that was her. Feet, like a puppy's, too big for her body. Bumps that could not yet be called breasts but that ruined the younger harmony of her body.

And all of that happening without any interference from gods or spirits or anything else. She shook her head at the clumsy outline on the floor and wished she had a mirror.

And then she smiled at that. What a silly time to discover vanity.

She found her discarded nightshirt and donned it. Unpacking her drum, she took it by the rim and, with its beater, stepped softly through the wide vertical slats of the window onto the slope of the roof. There she took in her bearings with a breath of night breeze and turned to absorb the high beauty of moonlit mountain slopes and silver-chased clouds. She padded slowly and carefully up to the roofbeam, thinking how much the cedar shingles, in this darkness, resembled the baked clay tiles she had trod so often in Nhol. Except that they smelled better, like the sauna, like the woods.

The nightbird called again, sounding less alien now—Perkar had named it for her, a few nights ago: some sort of owl.

Sitting on the roofbeam, she tapped softly on her drum, on the rippling surface of the lake, and ripples parted upon darkness and night as she went first into the otherworld of her heart.

There they all awaited her: the mare, the swan, and the bull.

“This time, you all come with me,” she said. And the bull stamped and rolled his eyes.

TOGETHER they rushed beneath the surface of the lake, sometimes three and sometimes four figures limned in flame bruising the otherearth with the thunder of their passage. She rode with the mare, half horse as before, and she flew on the wings of the swan, and finally, when he offered for a third time, she joined the bull, felt the uncanny furnace that raged in his chest fill her with fury and unholy joy. She cackled with glee as stone shattered beneath their hooves, as they reached the edge of a precipice and flung out into space to write a line of lightning across the mauve sky.

The instinct of the beasts drove them toward She'leng; they were born there and returned there to be reclothed, and this near they were always able to find it. In the shadows of the air, Hezhi saw what she had not seen before: the dark forms like serpents and wolves that lay in wait for the unwary, for the weak; the thousand thousand jaws and eyes of the otherworld that dared not open to her and her companions. Beyond fear and worry, she knew only fierce elation at such power, at such untouchability. She only barely remembered the concerns that had driven her to seek the mountain with her ghost self, but they all seemed unimportant now.

Perhaps she would visit the River himself and see how he lay here. Perhaps she would challenge him here and now and have an ending to it all.

She understood, distantly, that these were the sentiments of the bull, but she did not care; it did not trouble her.

They struck back to earth from the sky, for solidity gave more pleasure to run upon; the mountain loomed and the lands rose, but it caused them no pause; there was no fatigue here.

But in the midst of seeming omnipotence, something shattered the earth; it twisted beneath them and dashed them, scattered them. A sharp jolt of ecstatic fear burnt through the quicksilver joy, and Hezhi scrambled back to her feet, the bull, mare, and swan forming a rank of protection before her as something dark rose looming.

A black lion, she was, whose mouth parted to reveal the shadows of dagger-teeth against the red soul that burned in her shell, that illumined her eyes from behind, as well, slits of flame with no pupils. A black lion the size of the bull. He lowered his horns to meet her.

“Call back your beast,” the lioness said. “The others will not aid you.”

Indeed, Hezhi saw with a thrill of dismay that the mare and the swan were kneeling, after their fashion. The bull himself trembled, trepidation mixed with fury.

“Who are you?” Hezhi asked, her godlike confidence quickly evaporating.

“We have met, you and I,” the lioness said, and she seemed to grin—at least she showed the full range of her teeth and switched her great tail behind. She spoke then, to the bull.

“Kneel down, Hukwosha. I know you, and you know me. You know I cannot be challenged here. Be wise for your new mistress.”

The bull regarded the lioness steadily, but Hezhi sensed a frustrated easing of muscles, as if the bull agreed, however reluctantly, with the pronouncement of the great clawed beast.

As easily as that, lam without protectors, she thought.

“You should remember me, and it pains me that you do not,” the lioness growled, padding closer, pausing to run her tongue on the fur of the mare—whether grooming or tasting, Hezhi could not tell. She advanced until the twin coals of her eyes were inches from Hezhi's own.

“Let me introduce myself,” the lioness went on. “I am Paker, Apa, Bari—I have many names, but most often I am called Huntress.”

XXXI The Lady of Bones

SENSATION crept along Ghe's skin, pleasure and darkling pain, and he bit into his lip until he found the iron tang of blood. A fountain of flame seemed to erupt from him, and white-hot stars fluoresced and faded in the heavens behind his eyelids. The woman caressing him stroked his face, and he looked up into her features. And remembered.

Hezhi's older face, Qwen Shen—both stared down at him. Fury and futility surged in the wake of gratification. How many times had she done this to him? How many times had he forgotten? Somehow he understood that he always forgot, remembered the passion but not the details, the woman but not the witchery. What was Qwen Shen doing to him? A wave of humiliation coursed through him as he answered himself: she controlled him. She held him taut on a leash, and he did not even realize that, save in these lucid instants after…

After what? What had he been thinking? Something annoying, but slipping from him. Something about Qwen Shensface, glowing above him, lips curled in a gentle, teasing expression.

And then, of a sudden, she was no longer Qwen Shen. He was suddenly straddled by a corpse, bones of black ice, the withered face of a mummy leering down at him. And then that horror was replaced by yet another woman, beautiful and dark, whom he had never seen before.

“Ah, sweet Ghe, ” she sighed as she stroked his face with a finger that was both a yellowed bone and supple, black skin. “Thy mother gave you unto me with thy birth. It is my womb you return to, and it aches for you. You and this godling cause me pain with this delay, sweet one. ”

“You, ” he gasped, frozen by terror or glamour, he knew not which. In his mind he suddenly beheld the little bone statuette that Li once kept, the forbidden image of a goddess the priests said did not exist. But the accursed of Southtown believed, down deep, in their ancient goddess—though he never had; for him the only god was the River, and the Lady just another tale to frighten children,

“Yes, of course you know me, ” the Lady said, and where she touched him, worms sprang from his flesh. “Come with me now, before you cause yourself more pain. He only tricks you, you know. You will never live beyond his wish. Much of you is already with me, if you would like to see it. ”

“What?” he asked.

“Everything you have lost—the most of you, sweet Ghe, lies corrupting in my house. It is all there, your childhood, memories of Li—whom you took from me, by the way. ”

“I did not—I never…”

She smiled, and her smile split back to her ears, as her black almond eyes were suddenly Hezhis. “All men are surprised by me, ” she assured him. “But few wish to resist. ”

“I will not go, ” Ghe snarled suddenly. “Not yet. ”

She looked down at him sadly, an old woman—Li, in fact. “ Why torment yourself? ”

Ghe reached out, then, intent on swallowing her—after all, a goddess was a goddess, and he had already swallowed one such. But what was in her eluded him; nothing was there to devour, only emptiness. She laughed.

“Even gods are living, ” she cackled. “But I am death. ”

“I will defeat you then, ” Ghe snarled. “I have taken many gods into myself these past days. I have dined on great powers, and they will sustain me until nothing lives or moves on the earth. ”

“For me, ” she replied sweetly, “even that space of time is nothing—save perhaps annoying. You don't want me to be annoyed when you come to suckle at my breast at last. ”

“Take me if you can, ” Ghe shot back. “And if you cannot, then leave me. ”

She nodded distantly. “Very well, ” she told him. “I gave you the chance, for Li, who loved me, who burned incense for me. I will not offer this again. ”

“ You offer me only death. ”

“Death is sweeter than anything you will know now, ” she answered, and was gone.

He awoke shuddering. Qwen Shen stroked him, consoled him with little words, with small kisses. She looked worried. He reached to touch her face, and for just an instant, a bare instant, he saw not her face but Hezhi's, and a sudden rage filled him, but try as he might, he could find no reason for the emotion. So, bit by bit, he allowed himself to be soothed, knowing that given time, he would discern his vision of the Lady to be only a lying dream, perhaps a false vision given him by one of his more willful vassals—for a few still fought for freedom. But now he was far too strong to be escaped or troubled by dreams; since meeting the Mang shaman, Moss, at White Rock, he had found the land rich in these so-called gods and now he was swollen with them, distended. Perhaps it was merely a sort of heartburn that plagued him.

“You are well now?” Qwen Shen asked, the first words she had spoken.

He nodded.

“Good, then. What was wrong?”

“Nothing,” he answered. “A sort of night terror.”

She clucked softly. “But you do not sleep, my love.”

“No, but it is always night to me, and even for me there is sometimes terror in the darkness.” He stopped, angry. Why would he show even Qwen Shen his weakness? No longer.

“I'm sorry for that,” she soothed. “But I must tell you something, something that terrifies me.'

“What is that?”

“I fear this shaman, this Moss. I worry that he plots against you.”

Ghe levered up on one elbow. Outside of the tent, cicadas sawed their shrill tunes, frogs croaked imprecations at the moon. It was the first night they had spent together since leaving the ruined barge—indeed, the first night not spent on horseback. Moss insisted that they must make great speed if Hezhi was to be found in time, before the demon Perkar and his conspirators harmed her. But the pace they kept had killed many horses, something the Mang loathed to do, so now they camped in a broad meadow while fresh horses could be found to replace bone-weary ones and new provisions could be hunted. A delay of a single day presented an opportunity Qwen Shen made certain he took—to “relax.”

“Why do you say this of Moss?”

“I mistrust him. I believe that he leads us to our doom. I have heard him speak of it to his men. He and the Mang are in league with this white demon of yours.”

“Moss is a servant of the River.”

Qwen Shen's eyes narrowed dramatically. I am a servant of the River, you are a servant of the River. Bone Eel carries his blood, though he is too insensible truly to serve. But these are barbarians, not people of Nhol. You cannot trust them.”

He sat up and rested his chin on his knees. “What have you heard? What have you heard the men saying?”

“They fear you. They will be glad to be quit of you. And they think that Moss is very clever in his plan to dispose of you.”

Ghe frowned. He knew the first two things, of course. His senses were keener than men thought; he could make out even distant conversations, if he cared to listen. They feared him because they suspected the men who disappeared were his prey—which, of course, they were. Since his killing of the grass-bear, his reputation had grown, but it was the reputation, he saw now, that one might credit to a feral beast, not to a man. He was respected because he was feared, and the Mang believed that their shaman could keep him in control.

They were wrong. Moss was indeed powerful; he kept many souls within him, as well, but his control over them was of a different nature, and he did not draw his sustenance from life the way Ghe did. His hunger was not a weapon. In a contest between Moss and Ghe, Moss would lose.

“I must think on this,” he muttered, arising and donning an elkskin robe. He pulled it so as to cover his naked body, drawing it up high around his neck and holding it bunched there with one hand. Without a backward glance at Qwen Shen he brushed through the tent flap and out onto the meadow. He stalked toward the tree line, a lean wraith in the night.

The “Lady” could have been sent to him by Moss. He knew Moss could send dreams, because he admitted sending them to him and to Hezhi, as well. But what purpose would such a dream serve the shaman, unless Qwen Shen were right, and Moss was trying to frighten or weaken him?

He thought back over the shaman's story; how he had been captured by Perkar and escaped by summoning one of his familiar demons, how he had held Hezhi in his very grasp and then lost her, fled here to meet him, and organized this forced march by contacting his captains in their dreams. His hope, he said, was to stop Hezhi before she reached the source of the River, where Perkar and some barbarian “god” were leading her. But now that he scrutinized that story, it made little sense. Perkar's aim had aways been to keep Hezhi away from the River, deny her heritage to her, probably to father some litter of white whelps on her in some squalid wilderness cottage. Why would he take her to the River's very source?

Maybe Moss was lying. Qwen Shen had a keen, incisive mind; the emperor had chosen her well for this expedition, and the River had chosen her well for his lover. She came thus highly recommended, and her advice until now had been good, very good. If he had listened more carefully to her all along, and less to Ghan, things would be very different now. And now that he thought of it, Moss treated Ghan well, brought him to ride beside him, lavished attention on the old man, as if they were old friends. He claimed that this was to honor Ghan because Hezhi loved him, but what if, somehow, the old man and the young Mang shaman were in league?

That made perfect sense. Ghan had led them into the trap of sailing upstream, knowing the dragons would not survive it. Ghan had made contact with the Mang before, even sent things to Hezhi through them. And when his plan to wreck the barge succeeded, was it not a suspicious coincidence for the Mang to be there, at that very spot, awaiting them? As if they had been informed of the scholar's plan? And to what purpose? Not to lead him to Hezhi, but to lead him as far from Hezhi as possible. While he journeyed to She'leng, she was racing away, farther away each moment.

He had reached the tree line now. He shuddered with self-fury at his stupidity. It was difficult to think sometimes, this far from the River. But that could be no excuse; he was Hezhi's only hope, the River's only hope. He could not betray them through weakness of mind, not when he was this strong otherwise.

Moss had been sent to confuse him and had done a good job. He could not outthink Moss in this state, and if he confronted him, challenged him to tell the truth, the Mang would merely spin some plausible web of lies—and he, dulled by distance from his lord, might succumb to deceptive, honeyed words. Better not to give him the chance; better to confront him only with death and be done with him. Then he could torture the truth from the shaman's soul, once he had captured it.