by Greg Keyes
“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 to do.”
“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 the 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—cottonwood 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 conversat
ion 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—”