Ghe raised his palms in a small gesture of helplessness. “He was killed by a Dehshe shaft just after wounding me. Not the death I would have invented for him, but at least he is no longer a danger.”
“You don't see the great convenience in that? In his dying before you could question him?”
“Enough of this,” Ghe snapped in annoyance. “We were discussing your decision to tell me where Hezhi is.”
Ghan sighed. “My life has recently taken a turn for the worse, but I'm still selfish enough to value it. I will take you to her.”
“Old man, if I were going to kill you, I already would have.”
“I know that. It isn't your killing me that I fear.” Which was not entirely true. Ghe inspired both fear and revulsion in him. And something was different about him these past few days, unpredictable since he and Qwen Shen had begun their liaison.
Ghe's lip curled, half protest, half snarl. “I told you—”
“I know what you think of her. But I am not sleeping with Qwen Shen—and I don't trust her. You just as much as said she's trying to convince you to swallow up my soul, or whatever it is you do.”
Ghe gazed straight at him then, his eyes like glass, the unwinking regard of a serpent. He clucked thrice with his tongue, as if chastising a baby. “You don't understand about her,” he said. He leaned close, and his voice became confidential. “I know we can trust Qwen Shen because she is the River's gift to me.”
“What?”
“For serving him.” Ghe lowered his voice further, and his murderer's eyes focused on the vast horizon. “Since I was reborn, I've never forgotten that I was dead,” he explained. “When I was a Jik, I used to say ‘I am a blade of silver, I am a sickle of ice.’ That was to remind me that I was merely a weapon, something the priesthood might wield against its foes. I was content with that. When I was reborn, I knew that I was still a tool, but this time my lord was higher, my purpose grander. But still a tool, to be discarded when the job was finished.”
A sickly grin writhed upon his lips. “Do you know what it is to live in nightmare? In my world, Ghan, food has no taste, wine no intoxication. The River has large, but simple appetites, and the small things Human Beings enjoy are beneath his notice. Nightmare, where nothing is as it should be. You bite into the sweetmeat and find it full of maggots. You shake your mother to wake her—and find her dead. That's what it's like, if you want to write it down. Yet now, now, the River has given me Qwen Shen. You can't possibly comprehend what that means.”
“You love this woman?”
“Love her? You understand nothing. She is a gateway. She prepares me.”
“Prepares you for what?”
Ghe stared at him as if he were insane. “Why, for Hezhi, of course.”
Ghan bit back a reply, but as it sunk in, he shuddered again at the sheer dementia of that claim. He very much wanted to leave the afterdeck and go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. Ghe asked if he understood living with nightmare, and he wanted to reply that he did. The entire barge seemed like a floor ankle-deep in broken glass, and him without shoes: no place to tread safely. His hopes of misleading Ghe and the others grew slimmer with each moment; if the self-styled “ghoul” ever suspected that Ghan was lying to him, he would merely devour him. It would probably be best for him to drown himself now, before they got what they wanted from him one way or the other. But even that might be pointless, if Ghe really was linked with some Mang ally of the River. In fact, since the Mang were nomadic, Hezhi was more than likely not where Ghan had known her last to be. This dream man of Ghe's probably had more current information on lier whereabouts than Ghan did.
So killing himself would probably not help Hezhi significantly, and it would remove the only real ally she had. No, as long as a chance existed for him to help her, he would not remove himself from this game of Na. He might not be an important counter, but he was a counter. Even the lowest such could eclipse and remove any other marker on the board.
“Tell me more about the Mang,” Ghe said, abruptly interrupting his thoughts.
Ghan motioned at the surrounding plain. “You see where they live. They travel and fight mostly on horseback. They live in skin tents and small houses of stone and wood.”
“That passage you quoted, about walking mountains. What did that mean?”
“The plains are home to many large creatures. The Mang hunt them to survive.”
“What creature is as large as a mountain?”
Ghan cracked a faint smile. “That was Saffron Court literature. Literature from that court is prone to hyperbole.”
“Hyperbole?”
“Exaggeration.”
“But what were they exaggerating?”
Ghan shrugged. “We shall see for ourselves, soon enough.”
“That's true,” Ghe murmured. “I'm looking forward to it.” He gestured once again at the alien landscape. “I never understood how big the world was, how strange.”
“I would settle for a smaller one at the moment,” Ghan admitted. “My own rooms, my library.”
“The sooner we find her, the sooner we can get you back there,” Ghe reminded him.
“Of course,” Ghan muttered. “Of course.”
SLEEP eluded Ghan for most of the afternoon, but he was near finding it through a dark thicket of half thoughts and full fears when he heard shouting. In that realm of semislumber, it seemed like a bell, clanging, and an image erupted from his sleeping memory into vivid life; the alarm ringing in his clan compound, himself just turned sixteen, the grim-faced soldiers filling his father's court like oddly colored ants, the look of terrible despair on his father's face.
“Hezhi!” The bell rang, and Ghan came entirely awake. The noise was from Ghe's cabin, along with the now-familiar rhythmic thumping of his bed. Ghan's mouth felt dry, and he reached a trembling hand to the stoppered jug near his bed and took a drink. The water was warm, nearly hot, and it failed to soothe him as it might. He wished it were wine.
Twice now he had heard Ghe shout Hezhi's name in the heat of his passion, and he shuddered to think what it meant. He forced himself to, however, because there was something crucial happening to Ghe, something the ghoul himself wasn't aware of—something Qwen Shen was doing to him. Ghan could see the consequence, but he didn't understand the cause.
The effect was that Ghe was becoming stupid. In earlier conversations—both as Yen and Ghe—Ghan had not been unimpressed by the young man's native intelligence. Despite a clear lack of formal education, he was still able to comport himself better than most nobles and to discuss topics of which he had no knowledge with fair dexterity once he had been supplied with basic items of information. Now, suddenly, he was unable to make obvious connections. His memory seemed worse than ever, erratic.
The manifest probability was that Qwen Shen had somehow ensorcelled him. That made it likely that Ghe's earlier—now stupidly discarded—guess that she was somehow connected with the priesthood was correct. He had seen but never read the forbidden books in the Water Temple, texts on necromancy and water magic. The references he had found to what lay inside those covers suggested that there were ways to turn the power of even a god against itself.
He remembered Ghe's tale of what lay beneath the Water Temple, the things he had learned. Many would have thought that account the insane ravings of a mad beast, but he had always had his own suspicions about the priesthood. How had Ghe explained the power of the temple to stupefy the River? It had to do with the resemblance between the temple and She'leng, the source of the god. The River sought, ultimately, to return to his source, and a part of him was tricked into believing he had found it, into forming a circle.
Ghan sat up in bed, fists clenched on his chin. What if Qwen Shen had somehow done the same thing to Ghe? His purpose in existing was to find Hezhi. Whatever Human emotions he confused with that purpose, it came ultimately from the River. What if Qwen Shen somehow convinced a part of Ghe that he had found her? Did Ghe somehow suppose he was making love to Hezhi?
Well, clearly he either thought that or fantasized it.
And this was making him stupid. Controllable.
That wasn't necessarily bad. Ghe was a dangerous creature, an eater of life, a ghost in flesh. Whatever motives Qwen Shen had, they were bound to be more Human in origin and scope. But what were they? Unfortunately, though, he knew little of her motives, but he knew at least one of her aims: his death. That in itself was incentive enough for him to find some way of freeing Ghe from her influence. If she ever managed to convince him that Ghan was worth more as a ghost than as a man, he was doomed.
He was probably doomed no matter what, he thought, and with that optimistic assessment, he lay back down and sought sleep once more, hoping that his own dreams might provide, if not answers, solace.
“How can we be assured this is the right stream?“ Ghe demanded, making certain that Ghan caught his suspicious tone.
The old scholar blinked like an owl in the brilliant noonday sun. He pointed vaguely at the River mouth. A sandbar trailed downstream from it, and the banks were verdant with bamboo and other plants whose names were unknown to Ghe.
“It's the first one wide enough on this side—since going upstream of Wun,” he answered, somehow managing to make those dry facts sound like grumbling, a sharp retort. Ghe considered chastising him, but Bone Eel and Qwen Shen both stood nearby, and appearances had to be maintained.
He turned to Bone Eel, who was gazing at the stream mouth unhappily. “Can we navigate that?” Ghe asked. Bone Eel knew little else, but he did know more about boat travel than Ghe.
Bone Eel waved his arms theatrically. “Not far, I suspect. That sandbar is a bad sign. Makes me think the whole tributary might be fairly silty.” He turned to Ghan, hands now balled on his hips. “Does your book make any mention of depth?”
Ghan looked cross and consulted the volume he had reluctantly dragged from his room to the Tiller Pavilion. It lay on a mahogany desk usually reserved for charts.