“This is some kind of forced march,” Kanzhu explained. “Lord Bone Eel, Lady Qwen Shen, and Master Yen seem to have struck a bargain with the leader of these barbarians, though no word has come back to us about where we are going—but I've heard a few of these men mention someplace named Tseba. If that's where we're going, they mean to get thereof. Even the Mang would never push their horses like this unless there was some dire need.”
“How do you know Tseba is a place, and not a person or a thing? Do you speak any of their language?” Ghan asked.
The boy nodded uncertainly. “Not much. I was stationed at Getshan, on their border, for a few months. I learned how to say 'hello' and a few other things. That's about all. But a lot of their places start with 'tse.' I think it means 'rock,' like in Nholish.”
“Can you ask how many more days to this place?”
“I can try,” Kanzhu answered. He thought for a moment and then hollered at the nearest Mang, “Duhan zhben Tseba? ”
The barbarian screwed up his face in puzzlement. Kanzhu rephrased the question in slightly different syllables. After a moment, comprehension dawned on the man's face, and he grimly held up three fingers.
“Three more days?” Ghan groaned. But then he gritted his teeth. He wouldn't complain anymore; barbarians and soldiers hated the weak, and while he could do nothing about the infirmity of his body, he could certainly stop whining.
“Three days then,” he restated, trying to sound positive.
MIRACULOUSLY, the next day was not quite as bad. Ghan speculated that most of his body had resigned itself to death and so no longer troubled him with pain.
Kanzhu trotted up that morning. He looked worried. “Something happened to Wat last night.”
“Who?”
“One of the soldiers, a friend of mine.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died,” Kanzhu stated simply.
Ghan nodded dumbly. Of course. What else but death would rate notice here, now?
After a few moments, Kanzhu cut his eyes back toward Ghan furtively.
“He wasn't stabbed or anything; I saw his corpse. He was just dead”
“Oh.” Ghan lifted his brows but offered nothing. What good would it do Kanzhu to know? It would only put him in danger. Two more soldiers vanished that night. Kanzhu said their bodies weren't found and confided to Ghan that he hoped they had deserted, though it was clear that he didn't believe they had. Ghan offered his sympathy, but his own worries were growing. This was a bad sign; Ghe was losing control. Though he had consistently avoided Ghan since the Mang had found them, he had ridden near lately, his face a frozen mask, his eyes like hard, black iron. It was as if the humanity in him were sleeping, or strained beyond reason.
Ghan tried to think it through, to understand what was happening to the ghoul. Though terrible pain still housed itself in his shoulders, his thighs—and weirdly enough, the muscles of his abdomen—it was no longer agony, and he had managed to drop into sleep during periods of walking, which were signaled, like the other paces, by a horn trumpet. This meant it was actually possible for him to think again.
Ghe was a dead man animated by the River. His body had the signs of life, it was alive in most ways—save one. The spirit, the ghost inside his skin was not that of a man, was not held together by the same stuff of life that held a man together. It was not self-contained. Neither was a living person self-contained; it needed food and water, and in time, despite it all, the essence of a person's life came unmoored from its flesh. But whatever Ghe was, his life came always from outside. Near the River, where the flow of vital energy was constant, what left through his eyes and mouth and every action was merely replaced. Out here—life had to be found elsewhere. And he had more mouths to feed than his own, if Ghan understood his nature correctly. One of them was a goddess.
The old texts had called creatures like Ghe Life-Eaters, but in the ancient tongue they had also been named “forward-falling ghosts.” That name made sense to Ghan now; Ghe must be like a man trying to run down a hill when his head is moving more quickly than his feet. He cannot stop, for he would fall. He can only run faster and in the end fall faster.
This was the creature who hungered for Hezhi. He had to be stopped, but Ghan was out of ideas. He was tired, and he wanted real sleep.
He cast a hopeful look at Kanzhu. Maybe something more could be done. Maybe he could convince Kanzhu to help him flee.
But that night Kanzhu vanished, and Ghan never saw him again.
THE next day brought a wonder that cut briefly through all of Ghan's pain and trepidation. The horn to trot had just sounded, and the horses stepped down from running. Ghan was disappointed; now that he was able to stay on the back of his mount without straining every muscle, running was the gait he most preferred—next to walking, of course—because it was the smoothest. Kanzhu had taught him how to survive trotting, as well, but it involved bouncing in the stirrups, using his frail, worn-out legs to absorb the constant jolts. It was more work.
After only a moment of trotting, however, the signal came to slow to a walk, which was unusual; the shifts in speed were not usually done in such brief intervals. Soon, however, the reason for slowing became obvious. Mountains walked on the horizon.
The Mang named them nunetuk, but that word seemed somehow too short—or too long—to capture them in sound. Four legs built like the pillars of a hall supported their impossibly massive frames. From their heads snakelike appendages protruded, and to either side of that, sabers of bone—no, it must be ivory—curved up menacingly. They were shaggy, hair ranging from reddish brown to black. Fifteen or so stood in a clump, near a distant line of spruce, grazing in the tall grass. At first there were only the trees to give them scale; but with a sudden chorus of shrieks, a detachment of seven Mang tore off across the prairie toward the monsters and put them in firmer perspective: even mounted, the men scarcely reached to the bellies of the monsters.
“What are they doing?” Ghan asked incredulously. But none of the Mang answered him—and Kanzhu was gone.
Still shrieking, the warriors raced up to the now-wary beasts. Some of the larger nunetuk had formed a defensive ring about the smaller ones and the very small ones—only about the size of a horse—which Ghan took to be calves. The men had drawn swords and brandished them in the faces of the beasts; they appeared to be attempting to get close enough to cut them.
Wouldn't lances be better? he thought, but then he understood that the Mang were not trying to kill the huge animals; they were merely trying to touch them.
Though that seemed insane, the longer Ghan watched, the more apparent it became that it was true. Deftly avoiding the lunges of the beasts, the massive white tusks that slashed at them and their mounts, the Mang were leaning in to spank the gigantic creatures. The Mang who were still in ranks cheered and shrieked, and for the first time in several days the whole troop clopped to a halt for something other than water or to graze the horses.
It was a short break; apparently satisfied, the seven men came hurtling back through the grass, waving their weapons. Another group detached and seemed ready to go, but someone ahead barked a string of orders, and, after some brief argument, the seven fell back into line, grumbling. Ghan was watching them, rather than the returning riders, when the yelling and screaming of the Mang redoubled and took on another, more frantic pitch.
Ghan jerked his face back around toward the approaching horsemen, wondering what had happened. Six of them were wheeling about in confusion and one could not be seen, apparently down in the chest-high growth. His horse's head bobbed up, however, shrilling a sound that Ghan was unaware horses could make, a chilling scream that grated along the bones of his back. The horse disappeared again, hidden by the grass.
Two of the six riders had lost control of their mounts; one, a handsome beast that was nearly solid black, pawed wildly at the air. Something rose from the grass swiftly, implacably. It disemboweled the horse with a single blow of its huge, blood-soaked paw and lunged for the next rider.
From the corner of his eye, Ghan saw someone converging on the bloody scene. It was Ghe.
GHE sensed the beast in the grass before the riders were attacked by it, and with a snarl he urged his mount forward. The mare was used to a more practiced rider, but it responded to his inexpert touch promptly, and he left Qwen Shen and the Mang headman, Chuk, behind him, with only a bemused chuckle from the headman, probably at his poor riding form.
Ghe cared not for the men who were about to die, but he was hungry, and it was inconvenient to take soldiers during the day. Since noon, he had been able to think about little but feeding, and to be surrounded by the Mang and their horses was like sitting starving in a banquet hall. A smaller part of him also knew that it could not hurt to earn the respect of these wild men. Riding over to the huge nunetuk would have only seemed silly, and it would have been suspicious beyond belief if one of the giant beasts folded up with death as he approached. The Nholish soldiers would certainly guess what had become of their dead comrades then.
But this thing in the grass, he could pretend to kill.
By the time he reached it, three men and two horses were already dead or dying. He snatched what he could of their essences, but it wasn't much. The demon he had swallowed gave him great power, but it took much energy to control her, as well. Since taking her, he was always hungry.
His horse panicked, reared, and threw him, but it seemed to happen incredibly slowly, his senses racing far ahead of motion, and so he easily turned in the air, landed cat-deft on the prairie, and like a cat, he leapt low and fast. Knife in hand, Ghe met the thing in its element, beneath the waving tufts of the grass.
In that surreal quickening of his senses, he had leisure to inspect the creature in detail. It seemed low and thick, but that was an illusion of its proportions; it would actually stand well clear of the grass if it were not crouching. More than anything else, it resembled a mastiff, a savage dog with an almost square skull and very little snout. Its gore-covered paws, however, were short and thicker than his leg, supporting at least as much mass as a horse, if not more. It was tawny with coffee-brown stripes. Muscles bunched in an ugly hump behind its head.
Its open maw could easily receive Ghe's head, and that was clearly the intention to be read in the monster's beady black eyes. Were it not for his own power, the thing would be blindingly swift, much faster than a horse, at least in short spurts.
Ghe hardened himself, sank roots of power into the prairie, pulled density and substance to himself the way the demon had from her river.
Beast and ghoul cracked together. Despite all of his strength, the impact was staggering, but the monster was more surprised than he. Having just batted a horse from its path like a flea, it had not expected this slight man-creature to withstand. Still, he toppled beneath the claws, at the same time thrusting his knife up through the beast's lower jaw. With the maw open before his face, Ghe saw his bloody steel erupt through the tongue, pass into the upper skull, and emerge in the center of the head. That didn't kill it, he knew; if he were an ordinary warrior, the dog-thing would certainly have enough life and anger to finish him before succumbing to a cloven brain; but in the same instant Ghe took its ghost, drank it down in great, satisfying gulps. For good measure he kept the remnants of its spirit, as well, joined it to the others in his heart.
So now I am five, he thought as the stinking body collapsed upon him. He let it, smiling at the impacts that shook the great body thereafter as the warriors, belatedly, attacked its corpse.
He let them pull him from beneath the thing, drenched in its blood, and the cheer that went up then was more than gratifying. He waved his bloody knife in the air, and the cheer redoubled. Walking back to the column of horses, he let one of the warriors chase down his mount, knowing he would appear more dignified on foot than in the saddle.
The headman rode out and dismounted, which Ghe knew to be an honor, and clapped his bloody hand savagely.
“I have never seen such a feat,” he said, clearly trying to restrain his admiration a bit and failing. ”The gaan was right about you. He said you would be a lion, and only a lion could have hoped to match a shezhnes.”
“Shezhnes?” Ghe repeated, inquiring.