That and the sauna almost convinced her to put away her fears and sleep, and when she struggled out of the nightshirt and slipped into the enveloping softness of quilt and mattress, she very nearly surrendered. Almost asleep, drifting languidly from one terrace of cloud to the next…

And then she awoke, to a falling terror, to the call of some nightbird strange to her.

After that, her heart would not stop thudding, but instead picked up her earlier worries, pumped them round and round her body so that they pulsed in her throat, at her wrists, until finally she could bear it no longer and slipped from the bed into the cool night air. She paused at her shadow, cast by moonlight, turned slowly so that the Queen of Night could cast more angles of her on the floor. Her body had changed since leaving the River. Grown more … awkward, somehow. She could see the same thing in her roommates, before they fell asleep. Sisters, they were like images of each other at different ages—and in her own mind, of herself. The youngest was all smallness, limbs smooth and uniform, balanced and beautiful. The eldest girl—Numa? Perhaps fifteen years old, she looked like a woman; sweetly curved hips, breasts, symmetry. The middle girl, though, that was her. Feet, like a puppy's, too big for her body. Bumps that could not yet be called breasts but that ruined the younger harmony of her body.

And all of that happening without any interference from gods or spirits or anything else. She shook her head at the clumsy outline on the floor and wished she had a mirror.

And then she smiled at that. What a silly time to discover vanity.

She found her discarded nightshirt and donned it. Unpacking her drum, she took it by the rim and, with its beater, stepped softly through the wide vertical slats of the window onto the slope of the roof. There she took in her bearings with a breath of night breeze and turned to absorb the high beauty of moonlit mountain slopes and silver-chased clouds. She padded slowly and carefully up to the roofbeam, thinking how much the cedar shingles, in this darkness, resembled the baked clay tiles she had trod so often in Nhol. Except that they smelled better, like the sauna, like the woods.

The nightbird called again, sounding less alien now—Perkar had named it for her, a few nights ago: some sort of owl.

Sitting on the roofbeam, she tapped softly on her drum, on the rippling surface of the lake, and ripples parted upon darkness and night as she went first into the otherworld of her heart.

There they all awaited her: the mare, the swan, and the bull.

“This time, you all come with me,” she said. And the bull stamped and rolled his eyes.

TOGETHER they rushed beneath the surface of the lake, sometimes three and sometimes four figures limned in flame bruising the otherearth with the thunder of their passage. She rode with the mare, half horse as before, and she flew on the wings of the swan, and finally, when he offered for a third time, she joined the bull, felt the uncanny furnace that raged in his chest fill her with fury and unholy joy. She cackled with glee as stone shattered beneath their hooves, as they reached the edge of a precipice and flung out into space to write a line of lightning across the mauve sky.

The instinct of the beasts drove them toward She'leng; they were born there and returned there to be reclothed, and this near they were always able to find it. In the shadows of the air, Hezhi saw what she had not seen before: the dark forms like serpents and wolves that lay in wait for the unwary, for the weak; the thousand thousand jaws and eyes of the otherworld that dared not open to her and her companions. Beyond fear and worry, she knew only fierce elation at such power, at such untouchability. She only barely remembered the concerns that had driven her to seek the mountain with her ghost self, but they all seemed unimportant now.

Perhaps she would visit the River himself and see how he lay here. Perhaps she would challenge him here and now and have an ending to it all.

She understood, distantly, that these were the sentiments of the bull, but she did not care; it did not trouble her.

They struck back to earth from the sky, for solidity gave more pleasure to run upon; the mountain loomed and the lands rose, but it caused them no pause; there was no fatigue here.

But in the midst of seeming omnipotence, something shattered the earth; it twisted beneath them and dashed them, scattered them. A sharp jolt of ecstatic fear burnt through the quicksilver joy, and Hezhi scrambled back to her feet, the bull, mare, and swan forming a rank of protection before her as something dark rose looming.

A black lion, she was, whose mouth parted to reveal the shadows of dagger-teeth against the red soul that burned in her shell, that illumined her eyes from behind, as well, slits of flame with no pupils. A black lion the size of the bull. He lowered his horns to meet her.

“Call back your beast,” the lioness said. “The others will not aid you.”

Indeed, Hezhi saw with a thrill of dismay that the mare and the swan were kneeling, after their fashion. The bull himself trembled, trepidation mixed with fury.

“Who are you?” Hezhi asked, her godlike confidence quickly evaporating.

“We have met, you and I,” the lioness said, and she seemed to grin—at least she showed the full range of her teeth and switched her great tail behind. She spoke then, to the bull.

“Kneel down, Hukwosha. I know you, and you know me. You know I cannot be challenged here. Be wise for your new mistress.”

The bull regarded the lioness steadily, but Hezhi sensed a frustrated easing of muscles, as if the bull agreed, however reluctantly, with the pronouncement of the great clawed beast.

As easily as that, lam without protectors, she thought.

“You should remember me, and it pains me that you do not,” the lioness growled, padding closer, pausing to run her tongue on the fur of the mare—whether grooming or tasting, Hezhi could not tell. She advanced until the twin coals of her eyes were inches from Hezhi's own.

“Let me introduce myself,” the lioness went on. “I am Paker, Apa, Bari—I have many names, but most often I am called Huntress.”

XXXI The Lady of Bones

SENSATION crept along Ghe's skin, pleasure and darkling pain, and he bit into his lip until he found the iron tang of blood. A fountain of flame seemed to erupt from him, and white-hot stars fluoresced and faded in the heavens behind his eyelids. The woman caressing him stroked his face, and he looked up into her features. And remembered.

Hezhi's older face, Qwen Shen—both stared down at him. Fury and futility surged in the wake of gratification. How many times had she done this to him? How many times had he forgotten? Somehow he understood that he always forgot, remembered the passion but not the details, the woman but not the witchery. What was Qwen Shen doing to him? A wave of humiliation coursed through him as he answered himself: she controlled him. She held him taut on a leash, and he did not even realize that, save in these lucid instants after…

After what? What had he been thinking? Something annoying, but slipping from him. Something about Qwen Shensface, glowing above him, lips curled in a gentle, teasing expression.

And then, of a sudden, she was no longer Qwen Shen. He was suddenly straddled by a corpse, bones of black ice, the withered face of a mummy leering down at him. And then that horror was replaced by yet another woman, beautiful and dark, whom he had never seen before.

“Ah, sweet Ghe, ” she sighed as she stroked his face with a finger that was both a yellowed bone and supple, black skin. “Thy mother gave you unto me with thy birth. It is my womb you return to, and it aches for you. You and this godling cause me pain with this delay, sweet one. ”