by Greg Keyes
“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 conversation with a question.
“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 godhood, 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 that 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 lie, 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 hard wood 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.