He still didn't want to do that. She had meant something to him once, that much was clear. The only person who meant anything to him now was Hezhi…
That brought a frown. The priests might have been looking for him, but it must have been her they wanted to know about. To what lengths would the priesthood go to retrieve her? Had they already sent an expedition after her? Ghe knew that thought should have troubled him, stung him to action, but for the first time since his rebirth, he felt a heaviness, a pleasant weight across his forehead and eyes. The sun was warm, relaxing, and Li's voice floated soothingly as from far away.
“Now I cast the dice. Oh, see, they've fallen in the 'telling' pattern, the eye of the clouds …”
There was more, but he lost it, his eyes fluttering shut just for an instant.
When he opened them again blearily a moment later, the old woman was glaring at him, livid. He shook his head, uncomprehending. Why was he so tired? Why was the old woman so angry?
“You are not Ghe,” she hissed flatly. “I knew that you were not. You are nothing more than some ghoul who has swallowed him.”
No! Ghe wanted to say. No, see my neck? It is my body, my head, not some ghostly simulacrum. It is me … But he couldn't say it. He couldn't speak at all; his mouth and throat were numb, as were his extremities and his senses.
The incense! He should have recognized it, should have known. He sharpened his sight, and everything changed. Li faded to her little bundle of life, as did those on the street, vibrant strands in a transparent world. The incense was a spot of nothingness, of black beyond darkness, a hole sucking his strength into it. Snarling, he swept at it clumsily.
“No!” the old woman managed to choke out. She had clearly believed him weaker. She began muttering under her breath.
This time Ghe did not hesitate. He reached out, around the vacuum of the smoke, took hold of her life, and ate it.
It took only an instant; she writhed a moment, then was part of him. Gasping, he stumbled up, away from the burning cone, and the instant its fumes were no longer brushing him, feeling rushed back with a fierce, insistent tingling, as if his limbs had been momentarily deprived of blood.
Around him, the street continued to bustle, people hurrying hither and back. He struggled into the pedestrian stream and let it sweep him along. He glanced back once, saw Li lying as if asleep, her hat with its moon and stars fallen and lying across her bones.
“It's beautiful, ” he suddenly, sharply, remembered her saying once, long ago, of that hat. “The moons and stars seem to shimmer. Is the thread gold? ”
“I don't know, ” he had replied. I only knew that you would like it. ”
And though he remembered nothing more than that, he began to weep.
THAT night, he slept for the first time in seven days—since his rebirth. He slept and he dreamed.
Dreams were not as he remembered them. They were not vague, strange reiterations of his little fears or of days gone by, not shadow plays with little sense or substance. They were strong, clear, and simple. The colors were not right; they were too sharp, too bright, and without shading. Everything that was green was the same hue of viridian; all red was sanguine. These dreams had meaning, however, meaning that blared like the din of a cracked horn, rattled the frames of his dream images. The messages were loud, but they were not clear. Ghe imagined they were the sorts of things insects might hear if a man stooped and spoke to them.
He dreamed of being whole, knotted perfectly together, a vast and content serpent gnawing his own tail. It was an ancient feeling, barely remembered.
He remembered the Bright God coming, taunting him, cajoling him. In his dream, the Bright God was like a little sun, golden-feathered, light incarnate. He dreamed shame then, and anger, as the Bright God tricked him into uncoiling, into stretching himself out. Shame at being tricked, at being opened up. In revenge, he ate the Bright God's light, nearly killed him, but his foe escaped, though without his brilliance and beauty.
Now he rushed across the world, and his fear and shame began to fade; he coursed out for leagues, taking it all beneath him, cutting himself a bed, a comfortable place. And for a short time, he knew another kind of contentment, a wonderful hurtling joy. Time passed, and the earth changed, his bed shifting now and again, and he started to feel a hunger. At first it was merely discontent at no longer being whole. He was not a circle anymore, not a thing unto himself. The sky drank from him, plants took him up into their long, narrow bodies, and in the end he poured into a great emptiness, a gulf too vast for him to fill. He had become all motion, and nothing about him was still, nothing all his own. So the hunger began, a desire to take in the world about him, devour it, make it of himself until there was nothing without. Until, once again, he was within himself, a tightly coiled snake eating his tail. After a time, this hunger was all that mattered to him.
As ages passed, he found the limits of his reach. The other gods could see what he was about. His brother, the Forest Lord, sent the Bright God and the Huntress about, and boundaries were made. He paid them no mind, but his reach faltered nevertheless. He had dug himself into the world, and it would not let him out again.
Ages, again, and Ghe felt himself ache with need greater than he had ever known. He grew angrier with each decade.
At the height of his anger, Human Beings came to his banks. They were like the gods, in certain respects, though without the same sort of fire within them. Still, they were inventive, and in some ways they had great strength. He realized that these people were like vessels he might fill, feet that he might walk within, to leave his channel and devour the enemy gods.
So he set about filling them up. They were small, they could contain only a bit of him—but over time, he knew, the vessels of their bodies would be slowly perfected. That was another good thing about Humans; they were malleable rather than fixed, as gods were. All gods but himself, that is, for he could change. That was his chief strength, the thing that set him apart. It was also his agony.
He sent the little bits of himself out, patiently, and to his surprise the people built a city. They went out from his banks, and they slew the gods of the borderland, pushed his boundaries farther than ever he could have himself. This was good, and he continued to wait as generations passed and his people grew stronger and stronger, became more and more capable of carrying him in their bones and veins.
But then torpor overcame him, and he slept. He awoke only briefly after that, and thus it was a long time before he realized that something had been done to him, was making him sleep, robbing him of his sentience. It was a dull, muted frustration. He still did not know what had happened to him, though he could sense a dark well in the heart of his city, bleeding him, binding him somehow. He still had his children, born stronger with each generation, but they were distant from him. One was finally born who could contain him. Now she was gone.
GHE woke then. He woke and sat up on the pallet he had arranged. His little room was dark, but he could nevertheless see the spare walls, the small bundle of clothes and weapons that were his only possessions.
Hezhi, he thought. She was the one the River had waited for. He shuddered briefly. The thoughts and feelings in his dream were not human; he understood that they only seemed so because they had bent through his mind.
What the River felt for Hezhi, however, would not bend, would not settle upon any emotion Ghe had ever experienced, though it resembled lust in some ways. The old Ghe would not have understood it at all, but he was beginning to. That was why he shuddered.