He simply nodded at that. “The emperor explained our true mission?”
She solemnly returned his nod, and her voice husked lower still. “His daughter,” she all but mouthed.
Ghe nodded. “You've said enough.” But his brow stayed bunched in consternation.
“Don't worry,” Qwen Shen soothed. “This is a charade I am accustomed to. You and I will captain this vessel quite efficiently.”
“An honor,” Ghe said, but what he thought was that he was at this woman's mercy and a bit of his earlier elation faded. A gull cried in the darkness, and far out across the River's supine majesty, Ghe could see another, smaller barge moving with the current. He wondered if it, too, had dragons leashed beneath its bow—or if it moved at the behest of more mundane forces.
“Bone Eel does not know?”
“As I told you,” she answered. “Nor anyone else save the old man. You must tell him to watch his tongue.”
Ghe flashed her an evil little smile. “No one has to tell him to keep his mouth darkened. He usually only opens it to insult or argue. But I will make certain he understands our situation, anyway. Just so long as you understand that he is not to know I have any real role in this expedition. He believes me to be an engineer with some love for Hezhi, that is all.”
He was aware of her regard spidering about him as they spoke, walking delicately here and there. Often it touched lightly on his throat. He kept his own gaze studiously out and away. When he did glance at her, the intensity of her inspection disturbed him.
“What of you, Lady? What do you think me to be?”
She was silent, and the boat glided on for a time, before she turned to him frankly and answered that question by asking her own.
“May I touch your flesh?”
“What?”
“Your hand. I wish to touch your hand.”
“Why?”
“I want to see if it is cold.”
“It is not,” he assured her. “It is the temperature of flesh.”
“But I want to touch it,” she insisted. “I want to know …”
“You want to know how the flesh of a ghoul feels?” he hissed.
She did not flinch from him. “Yes.”
He darted his hand out, swiftly, so that she would understand that he was more than Human as well as less, and he gripped her hand in his with enough strength to hurt her. She gasped but, other than that, did not complain.
“That is how my flesh feels.” He grinned savagely.
She closed her eyes but did not jerk away as he thought she might. “You were wrong,” she told him instead, and he suddenly felt her other hand, the free one, tracing along his knuckles. “Your flesh is warmer than that of a man.”
He released her hand with a dismissive thrust. “Does that satisfy your curiosity, madam?”
She rubbed her abused hand absently with her other. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. My curiosity is just beginning to awaken.”
And she favored him with her own sardonic smile as she retraced her path to the colorful pavilion beneath which her husband slept.
Ghe, for his part, stood rooted where he was long after sunup, nursing his astonishment into anger, the anger into rage. If Qwen Shen were going to play games with him, she would regret it. He planned a number of inventive ways to make her do so, and then, as more sailors began to move about the deck, checking the depth with long poles, casting out nets, or merely watching the River and shore for dangers, Ghe went below to speak with Ghan.
“SHE is not near the River, you can be certain of that,” Ghan told him—a bit warily, Ghe thought.
“Why is that?”
“I am Forbidden, so I will not delve in great detail into the subject. Suffice to say that she fled not Nhol so much as she fled the River, and to return to him would thwart all of her hopes.”
“Then we shall not return her,” Ghe assured him. “We will find her and warn her of the priesthood and its plans.”
“I don't see how the priesthood can find her.”
“They have ways.”
“And you know that the temple's expedition goes up-River rather than overland? That is why the emperor outfitted a barge for our journey?”
In fact, Ghe had not thought much about why he requested a barge; it had seemed the natural thing, at the time. Now he realized that he might have let the River God betray himself; the River could only conceive of up-River and down-River, and so naturally Hezhi must be in one of those directions. Ghe's sense was that she was up-River, but now it dawned on him that the River's belief in this matter—even filtered through him—was not trustworthy. The River did not know where she was.
His only clues were visions the River had been sending him in the past few days. Unlike the first—which had been about the River himself—these pictured a man, a dark, wild man on a striped horse who rode with companions dressed, like himself, in barbaric costumes. It seemed to Ghe—in this dream—that the wild man knew where Hezhi was, was somehow like himself: an extension of the River's purpose into places where he could not flow. But the River gave him precious little information otherwise. And he needed information, something to make Ghan think he knew more than he did.
The man on the horse reminded him, almost against his will, of the little statuette he had given Hezhi, the half-woman, half-horse creature from Mang fantasy. If the man in his dreams was Mang, then perhaps—but all barbarians looked alike.
No, that wasn't true. Some of them were as white as albinos with eyes like pale gray glass. Mang, at least, looked like people.
If he did not take the chance now, before Ghan said something, then Ghan would control all of the information. The old man could tell him anything, and Ghe's arcane senses were not keen enough to identify subtle falsehoods. Ghan had to believe in the fictitious temple expedition, had to believe that the priesthood knew where she was.
And so, mustering all of his confidence, he asserted the only thing he could think of. “We—and the priesthood—know only that she is among the Mang.” Then he fought to suppress a triumphant smile, for he smelled Ghan's chagrin, a bitter, salty scent. He had been right! Or partly right. Now Ghan would have to be careful what he said when he lied, for he could no longer be certain of what Ghe did and did not know. He could see the struggle in the old man, the hope of formulating a lie, the desire to fashion one as close to the truth as it needed to be to be believed. He nodded inwardly; yes, Ghan would deceive him, if he thought he could get away with it. Where would the scholar have led them, if he no longer believed the priesthood to be a threat to Hezhi? Then he would conclude that the only possible threat was from this expedition. But now he had evidence that the priests knew where she was, and that would motivate him to tell at least part of the truth.
“She is among the Mang,” Ghan finally agreed, and Ghe clenched his fists in victory. “That much is true. The priesthood must have been watching me more closely than I thought, must have known when I got word from her.”
“I have seen maps,” Ghe said. “The Mang Wastes are enormous. Knowing she is in them does not narrow our search significantly.”
“Yes,” Ghan said quietly. “But I know where she is to a much finer degree.”
“Must we travel overland? What is our course?”
Ghan sighed and lifted up a tube of bamboo and brass from beside his desk. He pulled a chart from it and spread it across the flat surface.
“Here is Nhol,” he explained, and Ghe recognized the spot easily enough. The River was represented by three waving lines, parallel to one another. Nhol was a drawing of the Water Temple, a stepped pyramid. Ghe felt a bit of familiar anger at that—that the city of the River should be represented by his nemesis.
“These are the wastes,” Ghan went on, gesturing at a vast area that lacked any real detail—save for the figure of a man on horseback, sword raised. The River cut right along the edge of those lands. The other side of the River was labeled “Dehshe,” which Ghe knew to be another barbarian tribe.
“We might as well stay on the River until we reach this point here,” Ghan said, indicating a single waving line that intersected the River.
“What's that?”