by Greg Keyes
Ghe did not ask about the pet, remembering that he was supposed to be unsighted, nor did he ask about the books, the weapons, the skulls.
“Are those all of your questions?”
“I don’t know what else to ask.”
“Perhaps you would prefer to speak to someone else?”
“Someone else?”
“Why, yes. One of my companions, perhaps.”
Ghe studied the room carefully. He saw no “companions” save for the “pet”—whatever it was.
“I listen for the Sound of Falling Water,” he said, the standard acceptance of a master’s wisdom by the pupil. He realized, even before the boy had uttered his short, barking laugh, how ludicrous the phrase now seemed.
“Well, then, who shall we speak to?” The boy stood and walked over to the skulls, rubbed their smooth craniums with his palms.
“Su’ta’znata? Nungeznata? No! You would want to speak to Lengnata. Here.” He lifted up one of the skulls and brought it over, sat with it on his lap.
“There, Lengnata. Speak to your loyal subject Yen.”
The boy was certainly mad, Ghe thought. Quite mad indeed.
“Thou mockest me,” Ghe heard himself say suddenly, harshly. He clutched at his throat. “Leave me to sleep. I have no subjects, nor ever did I.” He heard himself go on. His voice, speaking from his throat, without his command.
“No! Stop! Make it stop!” Ghe cried, this time of his own volition. He could feel nothing, no intruding presence. It was not as if someone were forcing him to speak; it just … happened.
The boy tittered, as Ghe answered himself. “Slay him, if thou canst, and if not, escape from here. If thou ever wert a subject of the Chakunge …” Ghe concentrated furiously, trying to make it stop, but it would not; the words kept vomiting from his mouth. He barely noticed how, at the mention of the Chakunge, the boy nearly doubled over in laughter.
Stop, stop, Ghe thought, as Lengnata muttered on madly in Ghe’s voice. Desperately he reached out with the tendril of his power, searching for a way to make the babbling cease, to kill the source of the utterances. He felt into the skull and found it there, the ghost knot, and frantically seized it, closed the fist of his mind on it, and squeezed. The babbling suddenly did cease then, and almost instinctively Ghe pulled the ghost of Lengnata into himself and tethered it with the blind boy. It was a weak, starved creature, easier to manage than he had guessed.
He realized suddenly that his knees must have given up holding him; he was on his hands and knees facing the floor, shuddering heavily.
“Give that back,” the boy said slowly, deliberately. He no longer seemed amused at all.
“No,” Ghe managed. “No, I don’t think I will.” And he struck like a snake, reached for the bunched strings of the guardian’s life.
Fire hollowed Ghe out, burst from his eyes and mouth, and, as if physically struck, his body arched back and slammed to the stone floor, writhing. He kicked away madly, aware of his own shrieking but unable to do anything to stop it. A small part of his mind remained intact, trying to ride the crest of the agony, understand what had happened to him. He had reached out toward the boy and encountered something, a venom that struck up through him like a sword. He waited for the next blow, the one that would finish him, but something stayed it. Surely not him, though he felt a hard kernel of power in him, still untouched. He kept that near as, trembling, he turned back to the boy.
The boy had a nasty grin on his face. His “pet” had risen up, and Ghe saw that it now wore Human form; a tall, striking man with enormous, fishlike eyes, a nose almost beaklike in its angularity. He wore armor made of some gigantic crustacean, and he carried an aquamarine blade. Within his bulging eyes were empty hollows in which danced darkness and white sparks. His hair hung long, jet, lank, bound by the golden circlet of a king.
“Bow down, Yen,” the boy spat. “Rise, but only to your knees so that thy emperor may receive you.”
Ghe still felt on fire, but the pain seemed to have been mostly illusion, or at least nonphysical. It had been as if his eyes and flesh actually melted, but he was still whole …
What was the guardian talking about? The apparition whose chain he held was not the emperor; he had seen the August One many times. No, this was some ghost, or demon.
“I see you do not recognize him, the First Emperor, the Riverson.”
Ghe parted his lips to retort but could not find the air. It couldn’t be, he knew. Couldn’t be not a Chakunge but the Chakunge. If such were true, the power of this boy must be hideous … But now he could see the boy’s power revealed, the fire and lightning raging in his heart, a cyclone of fight. What had he done, what had he wakened?
“Now. Give me back what you took.”
I return to death regardless, Ghe understood. And so he ran, striking out with the force in him rather than reaching to take.
Four steps he flew and felt his blow deflected, drained away, but then he was leaping, hurtling through the air. The boy shrieked in fury when he saw Ghe’s target, and Ghe felt a thousand hot needles of brass piercing his spine. The ghost of the Chakunge moved as quickly as a dark lightning crackling across the floor, chips spalling from the stone where his feet touched. In the same instant Ghe struck the roaring column of water and it struck him, a giant’s fist with no mercy or care. Light and thought vanished into thunder and then void.
XVI
Gaan
The sound of drums faded, replaced by an enveloping silence that included not even her heartbeat. Hezhi had a sense of rushing, but there was no confirming wind on her face. The terrible fear that gripped her faded, however, receding like the drums and her own heartbeat, and with some startlement she understood that her eyes were shut tightly. She opened them.
Something was hurtling by beneath her, a broad, endless something that could only be landscape, seen from high in the air. It was a dark terrain, the bunched masses of hills indigo, the plains mauve, wriggling strips of ebony that must be streams or rivers. The brightest color surrounded her; she was wreathed in clouds of sparks, exactly like the sky-seeking flashes from the bonfire, and with a shock she realized that the sparks were not merely following her but emitting from her; her body glowed like a red-hot brand.
What have I become? She wondered. But she still felt like herself.
Ahead of her, matching the pace of her flight, was a second brand, trailing flame like the comets she had read of, nearly white at its center, nimbused in orange and yellow, the faintest tail of the torch swirling away into turquoise, jade, and at last, violet. It was more than merely astonishing but beautiful, and she found that while her fear seemed to have been cut from her like a lock of hair, her wonder had not.
What had happened? She struggled to understand as her speed increased, the weird landscape sheeting beneath like an inconstantly choppy sea.
She had passed through the drum, the bun. She must be in that otherworld Brother Horse described, and she realized that she had never believed him, despite her experience with things arcane. Ghosts and the power of the River made sense to her; this land of gods and demons and worlds within worlds did not, and deep down she had always thought it to be some Mang superstition. That assumption had led her to be incautious, to meddle with something she understood not at all. It could be that she was dead, she thought. She must resemble a ghost quite strongly, a ghost such as the one that had attacked her in the Hall of Moments. Had her body been stripped from her like the peel of a fruit? Was Tsem even now holding her lifeless corpse, weeping?
She turned back, attempting to see more of her “body,” but only flame was revealed to her, a coruscating skirt billowing into nothingness.
If she were a ghost, then what flew ahead of her? But she thought she knew that, too. It must be the spirit of the horse, running back to its mother, the Horse Goddess. It was certainly dead, and that led Hezhi to suspect that she was, as well.
The land below grew rougher, and her flight swooped and climbed to follow t
he rising contours of it. She wondered, vaguely, if there was any way to control her flight, but after a certain amount of experimentation—willing herself to turn, waving her ethereal arms—she gave up. It was as if she were borne along on a swift stream, perhaps one that the Mang ritual had created to send the horse home. She was going farther and farther from her drum, then, which was probably her only way back to the world of the living—if that world even existed for her now.
Ahead, something bright shone, a brilliant eye with lids of rainbow arcing about it. It grew larger and nearer with immeasurable rapidity. She felt certain that this was their destination, for the shooting star ahead of her turned subtly to intersect it, weaving through the sawtooth silhouettes of mountain peaks, and she followed. The whiteness grew, expanded to fill the horizon. She had a sense of enormity, of a mountain larger than any mountain in the world and a tree with branches in the nether stars before the light enveloped her, and, shuddering, she came to a halt.
She first became aware of voices, muttering in a tongue she did not understand. She could pick out four, possibly five distinct speakers: two women, two men, what might be a girl or young boy. Around her, the light was fading, becoming red spots on her eyes.
Finally, magnificence replaced the spots.
She stood in the grandest hall she had ever known; no court in Nhol could even begin to match it for size. Its splendor was stunning, as well, but it was of an alien sort to Hezhi, resembling more the natural beauty of the cliffs and mountains than it did the refined—though often decadent—architecture of the palace. Still, in its vastness there was a simplicity that matched certain Nholish ideals.
The walls—those that she could see—were curtains of basalt, flowing to the floor and rising beyond vision above, though the hall was well lit by the barbaric guttering of perhaps a hundred torches. The floor was polished red marble, and by that she knew that some hand had crafted this place; otherwise she might have thought it a purely natural cavity. The floor was mostly empty, like a vast dance theater, and by comparison the part of it she stood upon was cluttered, for nearby were a throne, carved from a column of basalt, the dais that it sat upon, a vast table, and its attendant benches. None of these was occupied.
The other occupants of the room stood on the open floor, some forty paces from her, and they held her attention much more than the room. Foremost was a creature completely beyond her identification, a vast monster that resembled a bear but also resembled Tsem. He?—it had a single eye, a black orb filmed with faint rainbow. Perched on his shoulder was a raven the size of a goat, and still the bird seemed insignificant, so large was the bear-thing. A pace from both of these was a woman, naked, her flesh cloaked only in soft black fur. That and her pointed teeth reminded Hezhi of some sort of cat, save that horns grew from her head and tangled hair fell in a mass almost to her waist. A second woman seemed most familiar of them all; matronly, strong-limbed with thick, long straight hair, she appeared to be a Mang—or even a Nholish—woman. In fact, Hezhi was reminded of Qey.
Kneeling before them was the wavering, ghostly apparition of a horse. Hezhi held her own hands out before her and saw only bones swathed in shifting patterns of light and smoke.
“Well, well,” the cat-woman said, her voice barely a sigh and yet perfectly audible in the great hall. “And who have we here?”
“You know her,” the Raven clattered harshly, his voice just slightly more intelligible than the cawing of one of his smaller brethren.
“I don’t,” the Mang woman said, stepping up to stroke her hand upon the horse’s fiery mane. “How has this child come with my child?”
“I would say she did something very foolish,” the cat-woman said, walking toward Hezhi with fluid, padding steps. “You may speak to us, girl.”
“I … I don’t know what—” These were gods. They must be. What could she tell them?
“You haven’t come here to be clothed in flesh, that much is certain, for you still have the stink of flesh about you. You are no goddess, though you think yourself one, and you are no beast.”
“She smells of my brother,” the giant rumbled, in tones so low that Hezhi first mistook them for mere growling.
“Why, we should eat her, then,” the cat-woman opined, flashing her smile full of needle-teeth. “Yes, we have not dined on mortal flesh in some time.”
“Hush,” the Raven croaked. “You know what becomes of you when you dine on Human flesh.”
“Do I? I can never remember.”
“Exactly. Exactly!” the Raven cackled.
“What about you, girl? Do you wish to be eaten?”
“No,” Hezhi said, anger beginning to slice through her awe. “No, not at all. I only want to understand what has happened.”
“Well, you flew through a lake, I suppose, and came to the mountain. That would mean either that you are dead—which you are not—or that you are a great shaman …”
“Which she is not,” the black bird finished.
“No,” Hezhi agreed. “I don’t think I am either of those.”
“You followed my child,” the other woman—who could only be the Horse Mother—said. “What do you want of my child?”
“Nothing!” Hezhi cried. “I only want to go back. I made a mistake.”
“Imagine that,” the Raven said. “But I say when one visits the mountain, one never goes away the same. Look at her, my kindred. A girl who flies about like a shaman, and yet she has no servants in her mansion.” He tapped his breast with his beak.
“What concern is that to us?” the cat-woman asked. “What does it concern us that this Changeling brat has no helpmates?” She looked suspiciously at the bird. “Is this some trickery of yours, Karak? Some part of your silly machinations?”
“I know her only by reputation,” the Raven said. “She caused something of a stir down the Brother’s course.”
“I cannot see there,” the monster with one eye rumbled. “He has closed that to me.”
“Then it might not hurt to have an ally there, even a mortal one. Give the child what she came for.” The bird winked at Hezhi.
“I didn’t come for anything,” Hezhi insisted.
“Everyone who travels to the mountain comes for something,” the cat-woman snarled. “I’ll give her none of mine; she hasn’t earned them.”
“Be reasonable, Huntress. I could only give her a crow, not really the sort of helper that would do her much good.”
The “Huntress” snorted. “No, I should think not. Silly, willful creatures, always cawing in alarm at the slightest scent of danger.”
“I won’t argue,” Karak said agreeably. “That is why I suggest you give her something. A tiger, perhaps, or even a ferret.”
“A tiger? No, I think not. I’ll have none of this.”
The Horse Mother looked up from her child. “Did you come for a helper? You must know it was foolish to come to the mountain for such a thing. Without one, you can never return.”
“I didn’t mean to come here,” Hezhi said, helplessness—and thus anger—swelling in her.
“Life often ends with a mistake,” the Huntress remarked.
“Huntress—” the Raven began.
“No! Enough of you, Karak. Balati, judge!”
The giant blinked his eye slowly. “Hold her until her body dies,” he said. “Then we will reclothe her in something. You decide, Huntress.”
“Lord—” the bird began, but then his beak seemed to seal shut; and though he struggled to speak further, only muffled grunts escaped him.
“Fine,” the Huntress said, smiling. She waved toward Hezhi, and she lost consciousness.
She awoke in a chamber of obsidian, if “awoke” was the right word to describe her passage back to consciousness. Her “body” no longer sparked and flashed; it had faded to a faint translucence through which she could see the shadows of her bones, her organs, the faintly pulsing lines of her heart. The scale on her arm showed as a searing white spot, however, and from it whirls of
color traced up her nonexistent arm, making it seem much more real than the rest of her.
“Hello!” she shrieked, but she expected no reply and got none. She wondered, dully, if the altered appearance of her ghost meant that her body had died or if it reflected some other change in quality about which she knew absolutely nothing.
She had met gods now, not just the little gods in Brother Horse and the landscape, but the Emperor of Gods, Balati, the Huntress, Karak the Raven, and the Horse Mother. Perkar had described all of them save the Horse Mother. It still seemed worse than unreal to Hezhi; it seemed like the cusp of nightmare and waking, her mind insisting that it was all illusion and night terror, assuring her that she need only keep hold of her fear until morning. How could this be real?
But the Blessed beneath the palace were real; the River was real. In a world that held those things, why not gods with antlers? Because she thought they were silly, or barbaric, or unlikely? They would kill her, no matter what she thought.
She set about exploring her prison. It was less a chamber than a glassy tube, traveling roughly upward. She wondered if she could fly, as she had before, travel up along it. She tried, but nothing happened. She attempted climbing and had better success. Her ghost body seemed to have little if any weight. The slightest purchase of her fingers was enough. Unfortunately, there was little enough purchase of any kind in her prison, and she never gained more than thrice her own height, climbing.
She was still trying, however, when a voice spoke from behind her.
“Such a determined child. The Changeling chose well when he chose you.”
She turned, lost her tenuous hold on the wall, and plummeted. She fell with a normal sort of speed, but the impact hurt her not at all.
“Who are you?”
“You should know me. Perhaps Perkar has spoken of me.”
She peered into the darkness, made out a pair of yellow eyes. “Karak?” she asked, the alien name croaking clumsily from her mouth.