Now four women with spears emerged from the crowd, and Hezhi felt her throat tighten; but they did not move toward the mare, instead joining in the dance.

Hezhi glanced at Tsem, noticed that he was rapt, riveted by the spectacle. For no reason she could explain, she removed her own drum from its case. In watching the ceremony, in not thinking, she had completed her decision. From her skinning kit, a little leather purse dangling at her side, she removed a bone awl.

The dancing became more furious, the thrumming of the drums joining into a kind of breathless rushing with no space between their beats. Hezhi gripped the awl in her right hand and pressed it to her finger, felt the sharp point and tried to force it forward.

It hurt, and the thought of drawing her own blood suddenly sickened her; she bit her lip in frustration, wishing she had more courage. Why can yt I do it? She pressed a bit harder, still not hard enough to draw blood.

Then the night seemed to rupture; the drums and beaters crashed with a terrible furor and then died away; Hezhi gasped and started in surprise, pricking the bone awl into her finger. Her gasp turned into a little hiss of pain, as, in the same instant, the women plunged their spears into the mare.

The horse shrieked, screamed in a thoroughly inhuman and yet horribly Human way. She seemed almost to fly forward and flail at one of her attackers, catching one of the women in the shoulder with a sharp hoof, and Human blood joined the spectacle. The other spearwomen scrambled away, and the crowd was hushed as the mare started after one of them, stumbled, blood pouring from four wounds, three of the spears remaining in her. Her front legs buckled and she sank as if bowing, worked for a moment to regain all four feet, and then, as if suddenly resigned, slumped to the dark earth, rolling onto one side, flank heaving.

The dancers ran to her. One took the dying beast's head in her lap, another laid one hand on the mare's breast and stretched the other high. Hezhi watched, her own pricked finger forgotten.

The kneeling woman began moving her raised hand, beating a slow rhythm in the firelight. Tentatively the smallest drum began taking up that beat, and then the others joined, a slow, faltering rhythm, throoom, throoom, throoom, throoom.

“It's her heartbeat!” Hezhi told Tsem, and he but nodded. In her hand, Hezhi's drum was shivering again, shaken by the very air. People began emerging from the crowd, laying presents about the dying horse, gifts of food, incense, beer and fermented mare's milk, jewelry. Brother Horse had told Hezhi of this part; each Mang was whispering prayers for the Horse God to take home, back to the mountain. The mountain? She'leng!

Hezhi was dizzied by the sudden revelation. The River and the greatest gods of the Mang issued from the same place! It had to be true. There could be only one such place, one such mountain.

The drumbeat slowed, faltered under the direction of the woman pressing near the mare's heart. A final beat shuddered into the night, and then profound silence. Hezhi took in a quivering breath, wishing she understood. The pain in her finger reminded her of what she had done, and she glanced down. She dully realized that several drops of her blood had found their way onto the rawhide drumhead.

Well, that is done, she thought. Perhaps doing it at such an auspicious moment would lend her more power later, though she doubted it.

The drums boomed, shivered the earth, and Hezhi looked up, startled. They struck again and again, irregular at first, then gaining speed. Hezhi stared wildly, not understanding, and a peculiar panic seized her. She felt the hammering of her own heart, wildly fast, out of time with the increasing frequency of the percussion. If the drums had been the mare's dying heartbeats, then what was this? The quickening of the god, the ghost, the spirit?

And, all of a sudden, the drumming matched her own thudding heartbeat, and the little instrument in her hand suddenly came alive, not merely humming in harmony with the ceremony but awake, speaking in the same tones as her heartbeat as if actually drummed by the blood in her veins. The itch of her scale became a searing, livid pain and Hezhi turned into fire, a cyclone. The drum opened up a doorway into utter nothingness. Tsem was reaching for her, mouth agape, but he seemed to move slowly, so very slowly, as, like a storm seeking a vacuum to fill, she rushed through the doorway, screaming.

XV Beneath the Temple

THE sudden weakness did not pass, but neither did it worsen, and Ghe smiled grimly. He had been reborn to go where the River could not, and it seemed that this held true, even here, in the heart of his impotency. His vision remained viable, but only just so, and he relied more heavily than ever on the ghost of the dead boy, straining for sound, the touch of air moving on his skin—the senses of the blind.

The tunnel he traveled in debouched into a large chamber, devoid of furnishings but thrumming faintly, faintly. Ghe knew that he must be feeling the water being drawn up the great central well of the temple, further evidence that he approached his destination. By feel and faint sight he found a passageway, cemented shut with bricks. Though he was weak, still he was not as weak as a mere Human Being, and the ancient bricks were rotten, returning to the mud from which they were formed. Wishing now that he had at least a blade or bar of metal, he set to work pushing, tearing, prizing them apart. When the first hole appeared, an appalling stateness breathed through the aperture; whatever space he was digging into was sealed, as well.

He widened the hole enough to crawl through and slithered in, lubricated by the coating of muck on his body. He lowered himself gently to the stone floor, having already made more sound than he wished, wondering what wards this place held, if he had already triggered some alarm.

He had dug into a hall, its floor marbled, but with a low, vaulted roof. He could stand upright in it, but reaching fingers could touch the ceiling. The hall was wide, however, twenty paces or more, and the walls were stuccoed with faint images. He approached and tried to make them out, but his vision was too dim, his sense of color gone entirely. Shrugging, he passed on, removing his shoes, for they squeaked and squished with the moisture in them. The stone beneath his toes was smooth, cool, and still he could feel the hum of rushing water somewhere ahead.

The hall soon widened and deepened, the floor sloping away from him, and he saw that he was entering a chamber filled with water; at least its paths were, for what he saw resembled a city of canals, each building isolated from the others by a trail of water less than a full step wide. These miniature buildings were also of stone—most seemed to be composed of marble, granite, or striated sandstone. Ghe had learned each of these and their properties as a Jik, that he might know how each might be climbed, which were easiest to drive spikes into, and so forth. Puzzled, he moved on, until his toes encountered the still water, and then a sudden tingle rushed up his leg, much like what he felt bathing in the River, but somehow stronger, more forceful. He bent and touched the surface, and his fingers came away dry.

Smokewater, he thought. The Ghost of the River.

He recalled the hall where he had been reborn, the sunken place where the Blessed were placed. The smokewater contained them there, but it had not contained him, only given him puissance. He felt the raw power thicken in him as he waded into the dry fluid, but his vision improved only a fraction. The River's power was here but not his sentience.

If smokewater was a prison for the Blessed, then what was imprisoned here! But he believed he knew, both from memory and from hints in the Codex Obsidian. He approached one of the islanded structures and took the handle of its brass door.