“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.