Nothing happened. Sharp Tiger didn't react.
“Good, my cousin,” Perkar said, after a few instants went by. “You understand. Then let me find a bridle—”
Sharp Tiger reared and pawed the air, and Perkar hung on with his legs and fists with all of the strength in him, preparing for the inevitable, bracing for being thrown. But when the fore-hooves drove to earth, the Mang horse plunged straight into a gallop so swift that the wind sang in Perkar's ears, racing in amongst the trees and cornering so tightly that Perkar lay on the stallion's neck and wrapped his arms to keep from falling.
As the horse hurtled down a steep grade, leaping and stamping hooves, slipping but almost never slowing, Perkar gasped. “I hope you know where you are going, Sharp Tiger!”
For he had not the slightest control over the beast.
* * *
THE path into Erikwer wound down the side of the hole, a vast helix carved into the living basalt of the mountainside. Hezhi tried to imagine why such a hole might exist, a black tunnel bored straight down into the bosom of the world. She traced her gaze back up the way she had come; traveling single file, the entire party still did not complete the circumference of the pit. They had been once around, and in that time the steep path had dropped them into shadow. Sunlight still dappled the walls a bit above her, and bushes and scraggly juniper trees clung in crevasses and along the side of the trail, feeding on the light. At the rim a few Human heads were limned against the sky—Karak had left most of his men to guard against any remnants of the Mang who might yet arrive. Down, she could see nothing, save a vague glimmer in her godsight, the feel and smell of water rising to greet her.
Even here, even after all this time, she could recognize the River. Images danced before her on the black rock, on Tsem's back as he strode in front of her, and behind her lids when she blinked. The sun-drenched rooftops of Nhol, the Water Temple shining as if cut from white cloud, and beyond them the River, all majesty and puissance. In her heart she had never really feared him, but only herself. In her heart, he was still Lord, still Father, still Grandfather.
But there were other images, other sensations. The monstrous ghost chasing her in the Hall of Moments, seeking the blood signaling her womanhood. Soldiers fighting and dying to stop it. D'en, her beloved cousin, twisted and mindless and imprisoned beneath the deep labyrinth of the underpalace. The scale on her arm pulsing. She knew what she must do, but entering into the place of his beginning, she could not feel outrage or anger—and only faintly could she feel purpose. What she did feel was what a daughter might, entering the bedroom where her father slept, scissors tight in her hands and murder in her heart, despite what that father had done and would continue to do.
It was more of a relief than anything else to know that matters were out of her hands. The strange and alien presence of the Blackgod was now a comfort. Back in the yekt, she had first felt the burden of guiding herself and her friends, of choosing one path of many, all dangerous. For months she had shouldered that burden, until Perkar came out of his depression and began making decisions—and now, finally, with Perkar gone, someone had stepped in to fill his place. It was good, for she had no strength for it. It was not something she was meant for; a princess did not make decisions; she only married well and then let her husband serve those needs. Ghan had tried to bring her up to it, but that had turned out badly all around, especially for Ghan. No, she only wanted to be alone again, by herself, with no one wanting her or needing her, no decisions to make beyond when and what to eat.
After such furious action, it was odd that the very last leg of their journey should be so slow, so measured. They had left their mounts above; even the most trustworthy steed would be a danger here, and their horses were ridden nearly to death, could barely stand. All those climbing down were silent, as if the majesty and presence of Erikwer physically forbade speech. She had leisure—for the first time—to realize that Perkar might be dead, to remember the few moments of tenderness that had passed between them since they met. It was a strange, braided thing they felt for one another, she thought; so like love, so like hate, implacable and fragile at the same time. She tried to summon some anger at Perkar for his deception, for drawing her close and then coldly thrusting her away, but she could not find it; not when he might already be a wraith, winging up to the mountain summit and the merciless gods who dwelt there. Whether he lived or died, he and the Huntress had done what they set out to do, played their part in her destiny: stopped Moss and Ghe and the army of Mang who sought to return her to the bosom of the River.
Instead she would go to his head and stab a spike into his brain. But how? Only Karak knew.
And as they descended, the air sank past them in a faint breeze, as if the hole were eternally inhaling. The breeze grew cooler as the light dimmed, as eventually the hole above them shrank and dimmed as night fell over it as well, at which point Karak's men—the ten who accompanied them down—lit torches. The god's breath fattened the flames and caused them to lick downward now and then. Before it was entirely dark, she heard water, a sort of shushing that increased in volume. Soon it filled everything, hummed gently both inside and outside of her skull Water.
And then, with no ceremony whatsoever, the shaft opened into a vaster place on all sides save the one the path continued on. That descended to a shingle of a black beach, and the yellow flowers of the torches were caught and reflected by a vast, restless sea that stretched out into the darkness. A roof of stone hung over it, vaulting up but always low, and the feeling was an eerie combination of claustrophobia and infinity. The last of them—some of Karak's men—stepped onto the shingle, where the underground sea lapped up and down against the rounded black pebbles that stretched out from the mounds of talus fallen from above. Hezhi gazed up, hoping to see a star, but there was nothing—save for perhaps a vague clattering, high above.
“Now, come here, child,” Karak breathed. He still wore Human shape, but his nose was thin and beaklike, and in the torchlight his eyes gleamed with fierce triumph and anticipation.
“Come here, and we shall slay him.”
Trembling, Hezhi moved to comply.
XXXVII Changeling Blood
WATER again, his comfort and womb. Life again, too, but this time he did not emerge into light and air. The River took Ghe and dragged him through the cold and dark.
He was different. The parts of him charred and torn by the Huntress had grown back, but not as Human flesh. Bony plates compassed him, and he propelled himself with limbs more like flippers or fins than arms, kicked something—not legs—that he feared even to think about.
His eyes saw the River bottom and the rippling mirror of the surface, and the bare, sterile stone over which he flowed. But another eye—a deeper one—saw something far, far ahead of him.
He searched through his servants and found a few still there. The stream demon, the stalker, and the ghosts of Ghan and the blind boy. The old lord—Lengnata—was there, too, though he was weakened or perhaps terrified into an almost unthinking state. Others—the many that he had bound on the journey across the plain with Moss—were part of him no longer, destroyed or released in his battle with the Huntress. As for that one—the Beast Goddess—the River had eaten her. She was gone, utterly and without a trace.
And now he was no longer Ghe the ghoul, but Ghe the fish, the serpent, the thing. Not Ghe at all, though he knew he had never been that, not since Perkar took his head. If only he had, at least, the satisfaction of knowing for certain that the pale man was dead, too…
You are Ghe, Ghan disagreed, a disembodied voice sharing his prison of plates, stings, and spines. Despite all that the River has done, part of you is Ghe. I know that now.