“I know.”
“Well. This brings me, I think, to the point of my visit. I have decided to aid you.”
“You have?” Hezhi asked, hope kindling but kept carefully low. She did not ask why.
“Yes, as I said, I am fond of Perkar and, by extension, his friends. Actually, what you just told me clinches my decision. If he is ill in the way that you say, it will take a shaman to save him.” He changed then, went from being a bird to a tall, handsome man, though his eyes remained yellow. “Grasp my cloak and follow.”
Hezhi stared at him helplessly for a moment, but whatever he had planned for her could be no worse than remaining in this glass room for eternity. Karak had helped her once, in the past, or at least she had been told he had. Reluctantly she took hold of his long, black-feathered cape. Karak gave a little grak, became once again a bird, but this time the size of a horse, and she, she was knitted like a feather to his back. He rose effortlessly up the tube, spiraling higher and higher, until at last she saw a glimmer of light.
Karak emerged from the hole and alighted on a mountain peak, became a man again, and Hezhi was able to step away from him. If she had had breath, she would have been without it, for she had never been upon a mountain, never gazed down from the roof of the world onto it. Clouds lay out below her, like tattered carpets on a far vaster floor; they hardly obscured her vision of the surrounding peaks, marching away to the edge of the world, snowcapped, clothed in verdure elsewhere, revealing their handsome granite bones now and then. Farther down still, blue with mist, were the bowls and gashes of valleys.
She saw no streams save one: a bright, silver strand winding from the base of the mountain.
“Your kin,” Karak said, gesturing at the River.
“Then this is She'leng,” Hezhi breathed. ”Where he flows from.”
“Indeed, your people call it that. We merely call it home.”
“You keep calling him your brother. Are you kin to him, as well?”
“Indeed. I suppose that would make you a sort of niece, wouldn't it?”
“I—” But Karak was laughing, not taking himself seriously at all.
“What are those?” Hezhi asked, waving her hand.
Small lights, like fireflies, were drifting up from the valleys. From most places there were only a few, but from one direction—she was not sure of her cardinal points here—a thick stream of them wound.
“Ghosts, like yourself, coming to be reclothed. Some Human, some beast, some other sorts of gods.”
“That thick stream? Where do they come from?”
“Ah! That is the war, of course. Many are losing their clothing there.”
Losing their clothing. Hezhi had seen men die; they never seemed to her as if they were merely undressing.
“Can't you stop the war?”
“Who, me?”
“The gods,” Hezhi clarified.
“I don't know,” Karak said thoughtfully. “I doubt it. I suppose the Huntress could come down from the mountain with her beasts and her wotiru bear-men and join one side or the other; that would, I think, bring the war to an end more quickly. But I can't think of anything that would prompt her to do that—nor, I suspect, is that solution the one you were suggesting.”
“No,” Hezhi replied. “It wasn't.”
“Well, then, you have your answer.”
Hezhi nodded out at the vastness. “What of me, then? You said you were going to help me.”
“Yes, and I will. But I want you to remember something.”
“What?”
“Trust Perkar. He knows what should be done.”
“He said that I should come to the mountain. I am here.”
Karak cocked his head speculatively. “This is not what he meant. You must come here in the flesh.”
“Why?”
“I may not say, here and now. Perkar knows.”
“Perkar is very ill.”
“Ah, but you will save him, shamaness.”
“I am no—” Hezhi broke off and turned at a sound behind them.
The Horse Mother stood there, and the ghost of the horse.
“Is this the only way, Karak?” the Horse Mother asked. Hezhi could hear the suspicion in her voice.
Karak—huge crow once more—ruffed his feathers, picked with his beak at them. “Can you think of another?”
“No. But I am loath to give my child like this.”
“You have many children, clothed in flesh. And it is only for a time.”
Horse Mother nodded. “I know. Still, if I discover there is some trick here …”
“All of these years, and you still cannot tell the Crow from the Raven.”
She snorted, and it sounded like a horse. “No one can.”
Hezhi followed the exchange in puzzlement. She wanted to ask what they meant, but felt she had already been too bold around such strange and powerful creatures.
The Horse Mother turned to her. “Swear that you will care for my child.”
“What do you mean?”
The woman glanced hard at Karak. “She doesn't understand.”
Karak stared at Hezhi with both yellow eyes. “To return, you must have a spirit helper. The Horse Mother proposes to give you her child, since the Huntress will part with none, nor will Balati. Your only other choice is to wait here until you die and then be reclothed in the body of some man or beast, bereft of your memories, your power,”