“Hush, beloved,” Bone Eel said, a cord of command strung through the words. “Giving this one knowledge is like giving an assassin weapons. Or perhaps like giving broken glass to a small child, I am not certain which. In any case, he needs to know little enough.”
“I know that you are servant of the Blackgod, who in Nhol we name the Ebon Priest,” Ghan snapped.
“Do you?” Bone Eel said easily. “Well, I must admit I would be sorely disappointed in you if you had not reasoned at least that much. Tell me more, prince of words and books.”
“The whole priesthood serves this Blackgod. But you are not priests. She is a woman and you are not castrated.”
“Right again. You are indeed clever, Master Ghan. Perhaps we were wrong in urging Ghe to swallow you up.”
“No,” Qwen Shen snapped. “We would still control the ghoul if we had persuaded that. What I endured from him, and then you render it all for naught!”
“Now, beloved,” Bone Eel sighed, wagging his finger at her. “You know that you enjoyed him well. Lie not to me.”
Qwen Shen opened her mouth to protest but when she met her husband's gaze, a devilish look flashed upon her features. “Well, after all, my lord, on the River you were less than your usual self.”
“Hush, I said,” Bone Eel snapped, and this time Ghan caught real anger in his tone.
Qwen Shen obeyed, and the three rode in sullen silence for a bit.
“May I ask where we are going?” Ghan asked.
“You may, and I may even answer,” Bone Eel replied.
“Well?”
“We go to rendezvous with Hezhi and her retinue,” he answered.
“At best, you can only hope to reach them hours before Ghe and Moss. Less, if Ghe takes to the air. He can fly now, you know.”
“I know. Well, you can thank yourself for this mess. The balance was easily tipped in our favor when we had some control of Ghe. Now we have none, and the outcome of this shall be messy, at best. I seek the advice of someone wiser and more powerful than myself. Leaving Nhol, I left much of my power and wisdom behind,” Bone Eel confided.
“You seek Perkar, who rides with Hezhi?”
“Perkar? The barbarian dolt? No. Actually, you will be pleased to meet him in person, since you have thought so hard upon him.”
“The Blackgod?” Ghan grunted. “You're telling me that Hezhi rides in the company of a god?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. I can only barely see them. But I would bet my last copper soldier that he is near if he is not among them.” He shrugged. “Either way, in a day or so you will witness a battle such as this world has not seen in many, many ages. The rotten stump has been kicked, and termites pour out!” He laughed, genuinely and loudly, and the peals of it rang weirdly in the vast roof of the forest.
BY the afternoon, he was no longer laughing. They entered a high, narrow valley and began hurrying their exhausted mounts up one slope of it. It was steep, very steep, and none of them was an accomplished horseman. Below, the lean shapes of mounted Mang began to appear, outriders or actual pursuit, it did not matter, for they clearly understood who rode ahead of them—whoops of discovery and triumph echoed through the vale. Perhaps Qwen Shen and Bone Eel had some priestly trick for muddling Ghe's and Moss' supernatural senses, but they could not fool the keen eyes of born hunters and warriors.
Cursing, Bone Eel brayed at his horse for more speed as Ghan noticed a strange hissing sound.
Something brushed through the forest to his right, moving much faster than a bird, and a black shaft appeared in a tree trunk.
“They're shooting at us,” Ghan shouted.
“I know that, you fool,” Bone Eel snapped back.
“He is coming. He is near,” Qwen Shen added.
“I know that, too. The two of you darken your mouths and ride, if you've nothing useful to say.”
A few more arrows hissed by, but they must be at extreme range—or the Mang would not be missing them.
It took all of Ghan's strength and recently acquired riding skills to remain in the saddle; the way twined tortuously through trees, rising and falling, though in the main it rose. He kept his hands clenched in his mount's mane and his head buried there, as well, above the heaving neck, and more often than not his eyes were clenched shut, too. They were closed when the angle of flight changed sickeningly, as if his beast's head were pointed straight at the sky. A different horse—not his own—suddenly shrieked. He opened his eyes to find that they were scrambling up an incline so steep that Qwen Shen and her mount had fallen and were sliding. Cursing, she managed to remount. Bone Eel paid her no mind, but urged his own beast the more.
These are horses, not mountain goats, Ghan thought, heart thudding madly. But then the trail became just less steep enough that the horse could find a gait, a tortured trot often broken by stumbles. The trees around them thinned and were gone, unable to find purchase on the rocky slope.
When he looked down, a few moments later, he wished he hadn't. The path his horse continued to slip upon seemed less than a handspan wide, and it wound up the side of a mountain—the mountain, he supposed—so that to the right was a nearly sheer cliff rising to greet the sky and to the left—to the left was a steep plunge that left him dizzy. Below that, the valley was filling with Mang, and from them lifted scores of black missiles, clattering into the hillside around them.
“There!” he heard Bone Eel shout furiously. Ghan looked about wildly and then saw them: a trio of horsemen above, blocking the way up.
“Surrender,” Ghan hissed. “We're doomed otherwise.”
“No! Look!” And Bone Eel pointed again at the men above.
Ghan did see, then. They were not Mang; beneath their helms, pallid faces gleamed, and the cut of their clothing and armor was strange. They were—had to be—Perkar's people.
His horse slipped, and a stone flew from beneath its hooves, out and down. Ghan hoped it struck one of their pursuers on his helmeted head. He glanced up again. Would they make it? It was so steep, so far…
Beyond the three riders was a fourth, very small, not dressed in armor at all but in some sort of yellow skirt. The distance was too great for him to make out any features, only the delicate brown wedge of her face. But he knew. He knewl
“Hezhi!” he shouted with all of the strength in his lungs, and he heard his voice repeating in the hollows of the mountain. The rider paused, but as her name began to come back to him, she suddenly spurred back into action, plunging dangerously down the trail toward them. “Hezhi!” he shouted again, clapping his beast's flanks with real force now, his old heart suddenly new with fierce determination. He was here now, she was alive, and even with an army below them there was hope; he knew it as surely as he knew her.
He felt a twinge of pain in his back, wondered why his old joints had protested no more than this up until now. He could make out her eyes now, though the light seemed to be fading. Were there clouds blocking the sun?
The pain in his back was worse, and an odd numbness spread through his limbs, dizziness. He reached back and felt the stickiness of blood, the wooden shaft sunken into his kidneys.
“Bone Eel …” he began. He wanted to tell someone how surprising it was, to have something in you. He had always imagined the pain would be greater.
The mountain wheeled around him, as if his mount had begun to fly and roll about in the air. It seemed to him that he should cling tightly to something, but his hands had lost their ability to grip. The whirling became floating, and he watched, astonished, as his horse, Bone Eel, Qwen Shen, and the other riders seemed to fly away from him, and only then did he guess that he had fallen, that he was plummeting down the mountainside.
Then he struck something unyielding, and light vanished. Oddly he could still hear a sort of grinding and snapping, a vague and distant pummeling, and then that faded away, as well.
XXXIV The Teeth of the Host
“GHAN isn't dead,” Hezhi explained to herself in a hushed voice. ”Ghan is in the library, with his books. Nothing could ever compel him to leave them.”
Then who was it she had seen? Whose toylike figure had pitched almost comically off of the trail, bounced thrice on the rough slope before vanishing into the growth of the lower valley?
Not Ghan, that was certain, though she heard someone mention his name—one of the newcomers, dressed in Nholish fashion—gibbering like everyone else in some incoherent tongue.
Why don't you all learn to speak? she thought bitterly. They probably weren't even saying Ghan. It was probably gan or gaan or kan or ghun. Who cared, anyway? They kept saying “Mang” a lot, too, but that was unambiguous; she saw Mang warriors clustering at the base of the slope, heard their far-off whoops of challenge.
One of the white men took her gently from her horse and placed her up on his. She let him; she was too busy thinking to ride, and it seemed that they were in a hurry. Thinking about who that could have been, who so resembled her teacher. Because he was safe in Nhol.
“Is she wounded? What's wrong?” Perkar shouted, when he saw Hezhi's blank expression, and that she was mounted not on Dark but up behind one of Karak's people.