“Very good,” Ghe softly commanded. “A trick I didn't know.”
“You are Ghe,” the man said. ”Quicker, maybe, stronger. But his moves, his techniques. What happened to you?”
In answer, Ghe skipped forward, feinted with a lunging punch far short of its target, followed it with a rear foot sweep. Almost, but not quite, his enemy avoided the low, vicious kick to his ankle; but Ghe clipped a heel, and the other man grunted as he stumbled back, off balance. Ghe leapt forward, committing to a dangerous lunging kick, hoping that the man actually was off balance and not feigning. He was rewarded with a harsh gasp as the ball of his foot splintered the man's sternum. He fell heavily against the courtyard wall, glaring at Ghe and spitting flecks of blood.
Ghe paused, not quite knowing why. Had this man been his friend? Probably not; he felt that he had few friends. But he was certainly a Jik, and perhaps a fond acquaintance.
Though clearly injured, the other lashed out with the back of his hand, but Ghe knew it for a feint and so sidestepped the stronger punch from the opposing fist, cracked his own knuckles along the man's spine. The Jik dropped and did not move until Ghe retrieved the fallen knife; then he made one feeble attempt to sweep Ghe's feet. Ghe was never convinced his opponent was really unconscious, however, and easily avoided the attack. He finished him with a quick thrust under the jaw, up into the brain case, watched the eyes roll and then set themselves, senseless, to watching the sky.
“I wonder what your name was,” Ghe whispered to the dead man, and panting, sat against the wall, hand still on the knife hilt.
He watched, fascinated, as the colored strands inside of the man began to unravel. He was not hungry, not at the moment, and so he just watched, curious to see how men died.
The strands fell away. The ones extending into limbs and organs withered, vanished, were sucked up by the dimming knot in the heart. The knot, untied into slender filaments, now braided into a thick strand, and as Ghe watched, it retied itself in a new pattern, dimming further still, until almost he could not see it. It lay there for a time and then stirred, like a feather touched by the merest breeze. Curious, Ghe reached to touch it, not with his hand but with the something he used when he fed. The little bundle shivered, fluttered, moved to him. Ghe took hold of it gently, felt its rhythmic pulse, like a bird's heartbeat.
What is this? it said. Just like a voice, but a voice that spoke in the hollows of his bones, in the beat of his own heart. What has happened?
It was the dead man. Qan Yazhwu, son of Wenli, the netmaker—images flickered in Ghe's mind: childhood, a woman, the first terrified moment when learning to swim…
Shuddering, he thrust it away, and the voice was gone. The ghost-seed tumbled away from him and then once again chose a direction, floating purposefully down the hall. When it met with a wall it passed on through it effortlessly. Ghe understood where it was going. Downstream, to the River.
“Farewell, Qan Yazhwunata,” he whispered, and then turned back to the body, considering its disposal.
VII Surrounded by Monsters
HEZHI leaned against the wind-smoothed stone, steadied herself, and caught her breath. Already the terror of what she had seen was fading, but the strangeness of it remained, the shock. Brother Horse had seemed to her, in the short time she had known him, the most Human of creatures: earthy, affectionate, and easygoing. He had comforted her from the first, from the moment they met, lifting her onto his horse, wrapping her tight in his arms as they thundered away from Nhol, from her birthplace and her doom.
But he was most certainly not Human, or at least not completely so. Human Beings did not have creatures living inside of them.
At least, she did not think they did.
“I can't trust anyone,” she said aloud. “Only Tsem.”
And perhaps Perkar. It was odd, that thought. She had known Perkar for no more than a day longer than she had known Brother Horse, and she had seen the ugliness he was capable of, the slaughtered bodies of her father's ehte guard, the decapitation of Yen. But Perkar and she were twisted together in some way, braided by their own desires—not for each other, perhaps, but bonded in some inextricable fashion. It was not love—she loved Tsem, she loved Ghan, loved Qey. What bound her and Perkar was not that, nor was it the awkward, restless desire that Yen had inspired. It was something less compelling but more powerful.
But that was her belly talking. Her brain was learning to trust itself, and it told her that even Perkar was not to be counted on.
The cliffs behind her soared as high as three-story buildings and were often as sheer as city walls. She had regarded them from afar, from the village, and they had seemed mysterious, intriguing. Like a city, yet not a city. Spires, walls, caverns like halls—she had imagined them all. Crinkling her brow, rebellious, she strode back into them, following a crooked canyon floor, trying not to think about the things in Brother Horse, the god of the cairn, about gods and demons everywhere.
She was suddenly struck by an odd memory. The stone rising about her seemed to form a vast hall, and save for the lack of buttresses and a real ceiling, she was suddenly, powerfully reminded of the Leng Court, where her father often held ceremonies and audiences. When last she had been in the court she had seen a drama, a representation of the legend of her family. It told of the People, surrounded on all sides by monsters, unable to save themselves, and of how Chakunge, the son of Gau—a chieftain's daughter—and the River destroyed them all.
Surrounded by monsters: that was what the Mang were, surrounded by monsters, in every stone—maybe more than surrounded, maybe even penetrated, if all were like Brother Horse. In Nhol, the River had changed that, at least, killed these things that infested the land the way termites infested wood or maggots old meat. Maybe that was what these cliffs were, a place where these “gods” had burrowed, like insects, through the land, tried in some crude fashion to form a city comparable to Nhol.
It dawned on her that her people might not have been all that different from the Mang at one time. The girl in the story, Gau: she had been the daughter of a “chieftain”—a very old word, one not used anymore except to refer to the leaders of barbarian tribes. But Hezhi's own people had once had chieftains, very long ago. Before becoming a part of the River, before escaping from these visions…
The wind hummed and shuddered through the stone corridors, and Hezhi felt fright creeping back upon her. What if her “godsight” came now, and she saw whatever thing made that noise? What if the cliffs suddenly came alive around her?
They could most easily enter her through her eyes, Brother Horse claimed. Despairing, she sank down to her knees, then sat, shut her eyes, and imagined a cool breeze across rooftops, Qey in the kitchen, fussing over an evening meal of braised chicken with garlic, black rice, and fish dumplings.
In Nhol she had learned to fear darkness; now she found solace in it.
I wish Perkar were here, she thought, clenching and unclenching fistfuls of the grainy sand. There was no snow here, though she had noticed drifts piled against the south canyon wall. Still, it was cold. It would get colder at night. Where would she go? Back to the camp, where Brother Horse and those creatures in him waited? Where everyone was a relative of the old man and no one trusted her at all?
Yes, she needed Perkar.
As she thought this a second time she suddenly realized what she was doing and snarled in sudden self-fury. Perkar was right not to trust her! Once she had called him from across the world, from his home and family, and for what? So that he could slaughter men in the streets of Nhol that she might escape her destiny. And now, here she was, in the midst of that new destiny he had sacrificed so much to help her create, and she was wishing for him to come save her again, to bring his bloody blade and make carrion of her problems.