by Greg Keyes
The yekt flap bulged slightly outward.
“It’s okay, Tsem, he’s gone,” she said, and the flap relaxed.
“And thank you, Tsem,” she finished. He, at least, was always there for her, because he loved her, and not for some mysterious thing she might be able to do.
She took the drum back up and stared at it, her fingers still trembling. She looked out toward the fire, where the Horse God was going home.
“Tsem, come on out here,” she called back into the yekt.
Tsem’s huge head emerged immediately. “Yes, Princess?”
“Do you think that the roof of this yekt will bear our weight?”
He considered that. “I have seen many people sitting on them before. You weigh nothing, and I weigh as much as three men, but I think they can bear more weight than that.”
Hezhi nodded, remembering the thick beams that held up the roofs.
“Help me up onto the roof, then,” she said. “I want to watch this.”
“As you command, O Princess,” Tsem said, “if you will explain your conversation with that barbarian to me. I could not follow all of it.”
“I will explain, I promise,” she said. “But later.”
Tsem nodded and came outside. Together they walked around to the back of the house, where the outside beams formed a rough ladder. Tsem boosted her up and then followed, more laboriously. Hezhi expected the roof to at least creak beneath the half Giant’s weight, but it held firm without protest.
She stood and peered out toward the assembled Mang.
She could indeed see better. The huge bonfire lit an encircling inner ring of excited faces, more dimly the next, until the crowd became a jumble of shadows and then darkness. The space cleared about the fire was perhaps twelve or thirteen paces in any direction. Seven drummers hammered away on drums from the size of her own to one monstrous instrument that stood as tall as the man striking it; it seemed, as well, that everyone in the crowd had some kind of noisemaker, a rattle, a string of bells, something. The drums, however, washed over these and engulfed them with thunder.
In the circle, masked dancers capered, wearing hoods or carved wooden masks that reminded her eerily of the masks the priests had worn when they came to test her. She shivered a bit, glad that they were distant from her. One dancer stood out, a madly prancing figure in bright colors who seemed to be making fun of the other dancers, like a clown or jester in her father’s court. He wore a gaudy green shirt of Nholish satin, pantaloon breeks of some bright red cloth. His mask bore a ridiculous grin puckered out almost into a beak, and rather than hair the mask was furnished with a ruff of black feathers. The oddest thing about this dancer was his feet, which Hezhi could just make out; he wore shoes that somehow created the precise illusion that he danced upon a bird’s three-clawed feet.
The Horse God stood nearby, and in Hezhi’s vision she shimmered, a striking mare of the rare sort the Mang named w’uzdas, the gray of a thunderstorm streaked with jagged white bolts of lightning. Bedecked in fine harness, silver and gold bells, plumes of feather and long strips of ermine woven into her tail, she coursed in and among the dancers proudly but nervously, shying from the crowd.
“Barbaric,” Tsem muttered.
Hezhi agreed but thought that there was a strange beauty to the spectacle, as well.
The capering clown suddenly leapt at the mare, landed astride her, and in an instant she arched her spine, pawing at the sky with silver-shod front hooves and then reversing, planting front feet solidly and bucking her rump high into the air. The momentary rider was pitched head over heels, struck the ground, and rolled smoothly to his feet, to the appreciative roar of the crowd. The mare, furious, began to snap and paw at the other dancers and the crowd; she tore into one part of the circle, and Hezhi saw at least one person fall beneath the flashing hooves before the clown distracted her by swatting her rump. She turned to pursue him but stopped, puzzled by all of the sound and motion.
Now four women with spears emerged from the crowd, and Hezhi felt her throat tighten; but they did not move toward the mare, instead joining in the dance.
Hezhi glanced at Tsem, noticed that he was rapt, riveted by the spectacle. For no reason she could explain, she removed her own drum from its case. In watching the ceremony, in not thinking, she had completed her decision. From her skinning kit, a little leather purse dangling at her side, she removed a bone awl.
The dancing became more furious, the thrumming of the drums joining into a kind of breathless rushing with no space between their beats. Hezhi gripped the awl in her right hand and pressed it to her finger, felt the sharp point and tried to force it forward.
It hurt, and the thought of drawing her own blood suddenly sickened her; she bit her lip in frustration, wishing she had more courage. Why can’t I do it? She pressed a bit harder, still not hard enough to draw blood.
Then the night seemed to rupture; the drums and beaters crashed with a terrible furor and then died away; Hezhi gasped and started in surprise, pricking the bone awl into her finger. Her gasp turned into a little hiss of pain, as, in the same instant, the women plunged their spears into the mare.
The horse shrieked, screamed in a thoroughly inhuman and yet horribly Human way. She seemed almost to fly forward and flail at one of her attackers, catching one of the women in the shoulder with a sharp hoof, and Human blood joined the spectacle. The other spearwomen scrambled away, and the crowd was hushed as the mare started after one of them, stumbled, blood pouring from four wounds, three of the spears remaining in her. Her front legs buckled and she sank as if bowing, worked for a moment to regain all four feet, and then, as if suddenly resigned, slumped to the dark earth, rolling onto one side, flank heaving.
The dancers ran to her. One took the dying beast’s head in her lap, another laid one hand on the mare’s breast and stretched the other high. Hezhi watched, her own pricked finger forgotten.
The kneeling woman began moving her raised hand, beating a slow rhythm in the firelight. Tentatively the smallest drum began taking up that beat, and then the others joined, a slow, faltering rhythm, throoom, throoom, throoom, throoom.
“It’s her heartbeat!” Hezhi told Tsem, and he but nodded. In her hand, Hezhi’s drum was shivering again, shaken by the very air. People began emerging from the crowd, laying presents about the dying horse, gifts of food, incense, beer and fermented mare’s milk, jewelry. Brother Horse had told Hezhi of this part; each Mang was whispering prayers for the Horse God to take home, back to the mountain. The mountain? She’leng!
Hezhi was dizzied by the sudden revelation. The River and the greatest gods of the Mang issued from the same place! It had to be true. There could be only one such place, one such mountain. The drumbeat slowed, faltered under the direction of the woman pressing near the mare’s heart. A final beat shuddered into the night, and then profound silence. Hezhi took in a quivering breath, wishing she understood. The pain in her finger reminded her of what she had done, and she glanced down. She dully realized that several drops of her blood had found their way onto the rawhide drumhead.
Well, that is done, she thought. Perhaps doing it at such an auspicious moment would lend her more power later, though she doubted it.
The drums boomed, shivered the earth, and Hezhi looked up, startled. They struck again and again, irregular at first, then gaining speed. Hezhi stared wildly, not understanding, and a peculiar panic seized her. She felt the hammering of her own heart, wildly fast, out of time with the increasing frequency of the percussion. If the drums had been the mare’s dying heartbeats, then what was this? The quickening of the god, the ghost, the spirit?
And, all of a sudden, the drumming matched her own thudding heartbeat, and the little instrument in her hand suddenly came alive, not merely humming in harmony with the ceremony but awake, speaking in the same tones as her heartbeat as if actually drummed by the blood in her veins. The itch of her scale became a searing, livid pain and Hezhi turned into fire, a cyclone. The drum opened up a
doorway into utter nothingness. Tsem was reaching for her, mouth agape, but he seemed to move slowly, so very slowly, as, like a storm seeking a vacuum to fill, she rushed through the doorway, screaming.
XV
Beneath the Temple
The sudden weakness did not pass, but neither did it worsen, and Ghe smiled grimly. He had been reborn to go where the River could not, and it seemed that this held true, even here, in the heart of his impotency. His vision remained viable, but only just so, and he relied more heavily than ever on the ghost of the dead boy, straining for sound, the touch of air moving on his skin—the senses of the blind.
The tunnel he traveled in debouched into a large chamber, devoid of furnishings but thrumming faintly, faintly. Ghe knew that he must be feeling the water being drawn up the great central well of the temple, further evidence that he approached his destination. By feel and faint sight he found a passageway, cemented shut with bricks. Though he was weak, still he was not as weak as a mere Human Being, and the ancient bricks were rotten, returning to the mud from which they were formed. Wishing now that he had at least a blade or bar of metal, he set to work pushing, tearing, prizing them apart. When the first hole appeared, an appalling staleness breathed through the aperture; whatever space he was digging into was sealed, as well.
He widened the hole enough to crawl through and slithered in, lubricated by the coating of muck on his body. He lowered himself gently to the stone floor, having already made more sound than he wished, wondering what wards this place held, if he had already triggered some alarm.
He had dug into a hall, its floor marbled, but with a low, vaulted roof. He could stand upright in it, but reaching fingers could touch the ceiling. The hall was wide, however, twenty paces or more, and the walls were stuccoed with faint images. He approached and tried to make them out, but his vision was too dim, his sense of color gone entirely. Shrugging, he passed on, removing his shoes, for they squeaked and squished with the moisture in them. The stone beneath his toes was smooth, cool, and still he could feel the hum of rushing water somewhere ahead.
The hall soon widened and deepened, the floor sloping away from him, and he saw that he was entering a chamber filled with water; at least its paths were, for what he saw resembled a city of canals, each building isolated from the others by a trail of water less than a full step wide. These miniature buildings were also of stone—most seemed to be composed of marble, granite, or striated sandstone. Ghe had learned each of these and their properties as a Jik, that he might know how each might be climbed, which were easiest to drive spikes into, and so forth. Puzzled, he moved on, until his toes encountered the still water, and then a sudden tingle rushed up his leg, much like what he felt bathing in the River, but somehow stronger, more forceful. He bent and touched the surface, and his fingers came away dry.
Smokewater, he thought. The Ghost of the River.
He recalled the hall where he had been reborn, the sunken place where the Blessed were placed. The smokewater contained them there, but it had not contained him, only given him puissance. He felt the raw power thicken in him as he waded into the dry fluid, but his vision improved only a fraction. The River’s power was here but not his sentience.
If smokewater was a prison for the Blessed, then what was imprisoned here! But he believed he knew, both from memory and from hints in the Codex Obsidian. He approached one of the islanded structures and took the handle of its brass door.
The door opened easily, never protesting, and Ghe peered inside.
A man rested in the small space, or, at least, what remained of one. His bones lay jutting through rotten finery, a rusted iron scepter ringed by the disarticulated finger joints that had once held it. Ghe stared at the remains curiously. What king was this? Hezhi might know, would probably be able to read the ancient glyphs that patterned the tomb, recount some of the man’s deeds. None of this really mattered to him, however, and with a small bow, he stepped back to close the door.
The bones shivered, blurred, and he realized suddenly that a nearly invisible shroud lay over the skeleton, a translucent film. This was now oscillating, wavering like the air above a stove or a fire. A tendril reached out tentatively to touch him, and he let it, wondering what it would do. A thin pain, a burning, started on his flesh where it touched him, and the shroud suddenly scintillated, glowed, tremors of color running through it. The bones themselves remained still.
He stepped farther back, brushing away the mist that touched him, and when that did not work, he disengaged it with his power. He could now see the simply knotted heartstrings, glowing above the dead king, the sort he had come to associate with ghosts. It had been clear, drained, and yet now with just a hint of his own power, it lived faintly.
These are not tombs for their bodies, he understood suddenly, but for their ghosts.
To trap them. To keep them from wandering or returning to their source. If the River could give him such power, what might it not do with a body and soul made to contain his will, the body of an emperor? This was the priesthood’s way of making certain that such would never occur. The River’s anger at that was distant from him, and so he did not fly into a rage as he had in the library. But what he saw confirmed his growing certainty that the priesthood worked against the River, not for him, and that they had been doing so for a very long time.
Staring at the fading ghost, it occurred to him that it could be tethered to him, just as the boy was. He could take the knowledge of an ancient king with him on this quest, use it to read the old hand and thus the enigmatic inscriptions all around him. Indeed, perhaps the solutions to all of the mysteries he sought to unravel lay here, in these tombs. But a strong instinct argued against that. The smokewater had so weakened these souls that to bring one to full sentience might drain him of power. Its touch had been so supremely hungry—what if it became the master of his body? A runner could usually gauge how far he could run, a jumper how far he could jump, and the same sense of ability made Ghe suspect that devouring the ghosts of these ancient Waterborn might be more than he was presently capable of.
So he moved on, brushing the tombs of kings with his hands, wading thigh-deep in water that did not dampen him. All here were dead: men, ghosts, River. As he advanced, he wondered what had brought him to this place. Understanding, surely, but understanding of what? What exactly did he seek? He hoped that the answer would be evident when he found it, that it did not lie in one of the many tombs. If it did, how would he discover it, by searching each and every one?
Perhaps he sought the priestly library, but he was certain most of those books were in hands he could not decipher easily or quickly. Of course, Ghan could, if he took one away. But how would he even know which one to take? In the end, he might have to gamble with a dead king anyway.
Perhaps he sought something more basic than books. The River wanted Hezhi back, but more, he wanted free of his shackles. Was there some way for him to overthrow the temple itself, compromise its power? That would be worth seeking, if he only knew what that might be, what valve he might adjust. It seemed unlikely that such a thing existed; more probably the entire structuration of the temple was responsible for its function; the bits of architecture he had read in preparing to converse with Hezhi had suggested as much. Certainly the fountain was involved, the flow of water up and into the temple, cascading down its stepped façade. And the Codex had suggested that the temple was in some way like She’leng, whence the River flowed. No, this was all too complicated for him. Still, he had to know what was here. Perhaps the River could sort some sense into it when he left the stultifying effects of the temple.
The hall of the dead ended at last, steep steps rising from the smokewater, and he set foot to their treads, padding upward carefully. He could hear the water now, not merely feel it and, at last, a few moments later, see it as he emerged into a grand hall, lit by a dim phosphorescence. As feeble as the light was, however, the walls and high ceiling picked up every bit of it and turned it back to his eye; for
every surface of the room was mirrored with cut glass. The mere presence of his form awoke a million eyes that fluttered and blinked, his reflection passing through each facet.
And of course, the water. It rushed in a solid column from floor to ceiling, and he knew that it continued up through the many tiers of the temple until at last it emerged from its summit and streamed down the four sides like the water at the four corners of the world. He stared awestruck, despite himself. It had the appearance of a column of jet and silver, there was no spray, no spume; each drop went where directed, up and farther up still, like blood pumping through an artery. If he could sever such an artery—
“Who is this?” came a voice, but Ghe could not see from what throat it issued; he knotted his muscles, prepared to spring in any direction, but a long moment passed and still he saw nothing, scanning what he could see of the room again and again. It was a high voice, the voice of a priest, certainly. Slowly, very cautiously, Ghe sidestepped to his left, moving around the room’s fountain core, until he saw the speaker at last. It was a boy, perhaps thirteen, perhaps younger or older by a year. He wore a black robe and his head was shaven. In his hand, limply, he held a golden chain, and a shadow was bunched at the end of it, a quivering murkiness.
“Who is this?” the boy repeated. Ghe pinched his mouth, wondering what to do: strike instantly or stay his hand, see what he might learn? Reluctantly he decided on the latter. It would give him a chance to close the intervening space, and surely there was more here than it seemed. He trod carefully, wary about placing his weight without first testing for a pit or some other trap; he had heard stories of the many ways in which the priesthood guarded its treasures. The Jik would plan such traps, and when it came to death, the Jik were inventive.