“Shut up!” It exploded out of him before he knew what was happening. She sat astraddle him, and he struck her across the face. Her head snapped back, and she gasped, but instead of shrieking, she laughed. She gazed down at him with a broad, bloody grin.
“Say it,” she repeated.
“Hezhi!” he snarled, and struck her again.
And suddenly he came alive. A jagged bolt of sensation was born in his belly and roared out into his limbs, his groin. In that instant, Qwen Shen ceased to be Qwen Shen, and he recognized who she actually was.
She was Hezhi. Not the little girl he had known but the woman she would grow to be. She still had the same face, and he was amazed that he hadn't noticed before. The same pointed chin and bottomless black eyes. The breasts pressed so passionately against his own bare skin had been barely hinted at before, the curve of her hip deepened, thickened appropriately with the passage into womanhood. The legs were longer, almost as lean, but had more shape. It was Hezhi as she would be, his lover, his queen. Her flesh met his in ardent rhythm, and in rhythm he passed from passion into forgetftilness. He remembered Hezhi, gripping her lip in her teeth, a look of adoration in her eyes. Then he forgot that, too.
QWEN Shen was dressing as he awoke. He brushed at the fog that seemed to hang about his brow.
“What?” he sighed.
“Shhh. Quiet. You made enough noise earlier.”
“I don't …” He was naked, his body and the sheets drenched in sweat. Qwen Shen grinned faintly at him around her swollen lip.
“There, my sweet ghost. You rest.” She fingered her injury. “Next time you should not hit my face. I can explain it this once, but if you continue to leave marks, even Bone Eel may come to the obvious conclusion.” She bent, playfully nipped at his nose, then kissed him more fully on the lips. It seemed a distant thing, but his body still hummed with remembered passion. He could even recall the surge of volcanic pleasure …
He just couldn't remember doing it.
“Thank you,” he told her as she approached his door.
“Save your thanks for later,” she whispered. “There will be another time.” Then she was gone, a patter of footsteps outside of his room.
With her going, he continued to cool. An image hung tenaciously at the edge of his vision, a young woman's face, one he almost knew …
But he could not summon it in detail, could not call it into recognition. He felt a slight frustration. It was probably some old lover, called back to his mind by making love with Qwen Shen.
He had to have made love with her. It was the only thing that made sense. But he couldn't remember, and that meant that the River must still be making him forget things.
He felt—not quite resentment, but puzzlement at that. He had assumed all along that the memories he lost were parts of him that died before the River salvaged what was left of him and made him into a ghoul. He still felt certain that such was the case, because many of the things he had once known would have aided him in his mission. Not knowing the Jik back in Nhol, for instance; the necessity of killing him brought on by his forget-fulness had hastened the Ahw'en finding him. But if he could still forget things, new things … He shivered at that thought. How much of what he knew was real?
And floating around that memory was the one he had finally recalled. He knew who Li was, knew that he had loved her and trusted her more than any mortal creature. And in his ignorance, he had slain her. Why would the River allow that?
The pain of remembering who Li was had come closer to killing him than the sorcerous arrow that impaled his heart, but the remorse, like his passion, was cooled in him now. He wondered if it had cooled on its own, or if that, too, had been forgotten for him.
In the end it did not matter; all that mattered was finding Hezhi, the rest was mere distraction. His longing for her was almost frantic now, though he was not certain why. He must have her, his daughter, his bride …
This time, the strangeness of that thought troubled him not at all.
XXIII Deep Wounds
COWARD, coward, coward, T'esh's hooves seemed to beat on the sand of the gorge. Perkar bit down on his lip until he tasted blood.
“Where are we going? ” Harka asked.
“To get something that was stolen from me. To kill a thief.”
“That's a riddle, not an answer. ”
“You're my sword. I don't owe you any answers.”
“You just spent five days sleeping on the threshold of Deaths damakuta. Whatever you are about, you should wait until your head is clearer. ”
“I don't think my head is likely to get any clearer,” he snarled. “It's too much for me. I just want to be home, with my father, with my mother, tending cows. Why mel What did I do?”
“Loosed your blood in the Stream Goddess. Swore an oath. Killed Esharu, who guarded me. Betrayed the Kapaka and your people—”
“Stop, stop,” Perkar cried. Tears coursed down his face and streamed back toward his ears. “I know all that. I only meant…” He kicked T'esh harder, and the horse stumbled violently. Perkar's stiff legs almost failed to maintain their grip, as they jolted to a confused halt on recovery.
“Easy, ” Harka cautioned. I can help you see in the dark, but not your horse. ”
“She had a name!” Perkar gasped.
“Of course she had a name. ”
“And you know it?”
“She was my guardian. ”
“You never told me.”
“ You didn Y want to know. You still don Y. ”
“That's right,” Perkar whispered furiously. “I don't. Don't ever tell me anything else about her.”
Reluctantly, Perkar returned T'esh to a walk, at least until they were back to more open, level ground. Soon. The eastern sky was pinkening, as well, and so, shortly, T'esh would be able to see.
“ Where are we going? ”
Perkar collected himself before he answered. “I'm on some sort of edge,” he answered at last. “If I fall one way, I become an animal, hiding from the sun, afraid of everything. I have to fall the other way.”
“ Where do you fall if you fall the other way? ”
“I don't know. But if I let my terror overtake me, I'll be worthless for anything.”
“So, where are we going? ”
“It's death I'm terrified of. The last men to hurt me so, to defeat me, are down there following us. If I defeat them, I defeat my fear.”
“I doubt that. Many who bore me thought that by killing, they themselves could conquer Death. As if Death would be so pleased at them for feeding her that she would never swallow them. ”
“I didn't say I would defeat Death, only my fear of her.”
“This is not a rational decision. And you should know, because you made this same decision before, when you charged down upon the Huntress. You build up so much debt in your heart—and then try to discharge it by dying. But I won't let you die, and so it just builds up again. Anyway, you know that when a man dies in debt, his family must pay the balance. ”
“Shut up. Shut up.”