by Greg Keyes
“I ate him, I think.”
“Her,” the creature corrected pettishly.
“Her,” Ghe amended. “Tell me, where am I?”
“Well,” the thing answered, now swimming—or possibly pacing—back and forth at the grate. “Well. So many visitors lately.”
“Answer me,” Ghe commanded.
“So many visitors coming in the back door, not down the stair at all.”
“The stair?” Ghe frowned. He remembered a stair, remembered himself and others carrying someone down it, long ago, down it into a black place. “The Darkness Stair? We are below the Darkness Stair?”
“The chambers of the Blessed.” The thing in the water sneered. “Don’t you feel blessed?”
“But I didn’t come down the stair?”
“You fell in, through the duct, the one Hezhi crawled through. We thought you were dead, all except Nu. I think she thought you were her child, something stupid like that.” The creature laughed. “Now I guess she doesn’t think anything. Lucky Nu, eh?”
Ghe felt his annoyance growing. Still, he tried to keep hold of his anger, control it, as he always had. “How long? How long ago?”
The head suddenly burst into a gurgling parody of laughter. That went on for some time, as Ghe gripped the armrest of the throne more and more tightly. When at last the creature lapsed into quiet sobs of mirth—or sorrow—it was difficult to tell—he repeated his question.
“I’m sorry,” the creature said. “I’m afraid I lost track of the suns passing overhead, the phases of the moon. Careless of me, eh?”
“Long time? Short time?”
“All time is long,” the thing returned, and retreated beneath the water.
Ghe remained on the alabaster throne, ordering his thoughts, watching the distant swirl of the creatures. They were the Blessed, of course, the sort of things Hezhi would have become; creatures so filled with the River’s power that they became distorted and inhuman. Here the priesthood trapped them, where their power was nullified by the essence of the River itself. The water in the hall was barely wet at all; it was She’ned, smoke-water, a powerful, numbing substance.
Why am I alive? The thought bloomed like a black rose, always there, never fully opened before. He had thought and dreamed and remembered for what seemed like an eternity; but at the root of that dreaming was the blow to his neck, over and over again, his head falling into the muck, a weird glimpse of his own legs buckling, the fountain of iridescence rising. Now he was here, with the Blessed. Was he trapped, as they were?
Ghe blew out a long breath, steeled himself, and reached fingers up to his throat, stroking lightly from the base of his ear down. There: a raised ridge of flesh. He followed it around, found that it ringed him, a necklace of scar tissue.
“What does it mean?” he demanded, of no one in particular. But after a moment he nodded, answered himself. “I know what it means. The River remade me, put me back together, so that I might find his child and return her to him.” He reached his hand out before him, marveling at the touch of his fingertips against one another. “Not dead,” he whispered. “But not exactly alive either, I’ll wager. Not exactly alive.” And he remembered his hunger, like the hunger of fire for more wood, and felt a little thrill of fright.
“I wish I knew more.” But he wanted more than that. He wanted to see someone, talk to someone, prove to himself that he was alive and not in some lonely afterworld. He wanted to understand why he could open the doors to certain memories so easily, while other rooms in his mind were swept clean or drowned in chill, deep water.
It seemed that there was someone—an image came to him: an old woman, dark, hunched over a cloth, casting bone dice. But there was no name, no place, nothing. His mother? But no, that felt wrong.
Whom did he know? He remembered several priests, but even in this state he did not want to see them. No, he remembered only Hezhi very clearly, he remembered everything about her, he remembered her friends—the giant, Tsem; the old man, Ghan; and that little idiot, Wezh, who courted her.
Well, Hezhi was not in Nhol; that was why he was still alive. Tsem was probably dead, for Ghe remembered stabbing him—though, of course, he had stabbed the white demon swordsman and he had not died. But if Tsem wasn’t dead, he was gone with Hezhi. Ghan…
He considered Ghan, the librarian. The old man had helped Hezhi escape; Ghe had followed him and divined his plans. But Ghan himself had not planned to leave Nhol. Furthermore, Ghe had never told the priesthood of Ghan’s identity; he had been saving that for later, to tell the high priest himself so no lower-order theurg could claim to have discovered the traitors. That meant the priesthood might not know about him, might not have tortured him to death.
That pleased Ghe for more than one reason. He remembered, vaguely, that he admired the old man for his willingness to help the girl. He had considered never reporting him at all…
Ghe shook his thoughts back into line. Ghan might still be alive and well in the library. And Ghan knew him only in his disguise as Yen, a young engineer who engaged in harmless flirtation with Hezhi. If he were Yen, Ghan might speak to him. He must speak to me, he thought, again feeling the scar and wondering why there was no revulsion.
Yes, he could be Yen again, couldn’t he?
Of course, first he had to leave the underpalace, and the only way out he knew was by the Darkness Stair. He was not yet ready to risk the stair and its guardians—who knew what effect the priestly wards might have on him? Yet the thing in the water seemed to intimate that there were other ways out, one way, in fact, that Hezhi herself had braved. Ghe smiled and shook his head at the thought. His estimation of Hezhi continued to rise. Certainly he had been a fool to try to kill her; she was worth the whole priesthood and the aristocracy, too. He imagined the sweetness of her lips once more, that warm forbidden thing.
Yes, she was a marvelous creature. If she should reduce Nhol to rubble when he brought her back, why should he care? He was now, in his own way, a child of the River, too.
But out, he reminded himself. He must have come down from the sewers, somehow. His memory of it was of no use: he had been blind, a worm crawling down, waterward. Now he was a man again, and so he would have to use his mind, his hands, his eyes—though his eyes were no longer human, nor, he suspected, were his mind and hands.
He used those eyes to find the water duct that emptied into the chamber, though no light at all existed to aid him. Well, he thought, a place to begin.
He rose up from the throne.
He made many false turns in the strange, twisted ways beneath the city, but eventually, he found a clean breath of air and followed it. Its source was a sewer grate, peering down at him from above, the air sweet, smelling of smoke and roasted meat. He shuddered in relief, for he had begun to suspect that his resurrection was merely some terrible joke played out by the River God, a punishment for failing—a curse to wander the beneath forever. But the air and its scents were real, because he could not have remembered them sharply enough to imagine them.
No light fell through the grate, and so he judged it to be night. This was fortuitous; he had no desire to emerge onto a crowded, daylit street. He realized that he had no idea what he looked like, though he knew his form was much as it had been. He was not, like the Blessed, a distorted monster. Still, it would be safer to see himself before another saw him—there might be surprises more evident than his scarred neck. He knew his clothes would attract attention, for they were rotted; they stank, though he only now took note of that. He would have to do something about them. As he thought this, he shook his head in wonder. His clothes were rotted. How long had he been beneath the city? Perhaps Ghan and everyone he knew was dead, Hezhi an old woman. There were old stories about such things, men thought drowned in the River who emerged after generations…
Best not to think about that anymore. Best to learn the truth, since it lay just above him. He found the foothold spikes in the stone wall and climbed up them. The grate, cast iron, shifted easily—to
o easily, and he began to wonder how different he was now. He could see in the dark, he was stronger, much stronger…
He was something like a ghost, but not a ghost. A memory tickled at him. There were stories of things like that, as well. He could hear the voice of an old woman talking, almost chanting. He could not see her face, nor could he remember the words, or again, her name.
He pulled himself out onto the street. A wind swept over him, channeled by the walls of the buildings on either side. Above, dense layers of smoke and perhaps clouds as well obscured the stars, but he could see a faint, pale luminescence seeping through them that might be the moon.
He was in a long, narrow courtyard. A fountain gurgled not far away. He could hear a baby crying.
This was, he realized, no street in Nhol. He had emerged, been reborn to the world, in the Chakunge’s palace, the very heart of the empire.
As it should be, he thought. As it should always have been.
III
Snow Thunder
Perkar eyed the sky dubiously. “I wonder if we should make camp now,” he muttered.
Ngangata surveyed the ominous black billows edging in from the western horizon. “All bluff,” he opined. “It doesn’t smell like a storm to me. Though…”
“Though what?” Perkar grunted.
“It has a strangeness about it.”
“Oh.” Perkar regarded the skyline once more, straining to sense whatever it was that Ngangata could feel. Nothing unusual came to him: the stormheads remained, to him, mere clouds.
“Sometimes I wonder if you say things like that just to be mysterious,” he grumbled.
“No. Unfortunately, life is already mysterious without any help from me,” Ngangata answered.
Sighing, Perkar leaned forward and patted his mount. “What do you think, T’esh?” The charcoal-and-gray-striped stallion spared him a laconic sidewise glance before returning his full attention to tearing at the clump of grass protruding through the slowly melting snow. As far as he could tell, T’esh had no opinion on the matter.
“I’ll assume you agree with Ngangata,” Perkar decided. “We’ll push on.”
He urged T’esh to a walk, and Ngangata, abreast, clucked to his own mount in the weird, unhuman language of his father’s folk. An eerie banging punctuated whatever he said, like a god hammering a moon-size sheet of tin—but in a distant sky, the black one on the horizon. Snow thunder, Perkar’s father called it—rare and unnatural. A sign that gods were playing games with the heavens. Perkar nearly remarked on the sound—to show that he knew at least something of such signs and portents—but they had both heard it, and it seemed silly to point out so obvious a thing to a hunter and tracker of Ngangata’s skill. Instead, he listened alertly for further noises. The distance, however, was quiet thereafter, as if the heavens had only a single word to speak before returning to stubborn, sullen silence.
The quiet itched at Perkar. His lungs seemed crowded with the necessity of speaking. He cast about for something to say and finally settled upon the obvious. “It’s good to have you along,” he told Ngangata.
The halfling nodded. “I’m eager to meet this goddess, this maker of heroes,” he answered.
Perkar wondered if he should take offense at that—he knew Ngangata’s opinion of heroes—but when he glanced over at his companion, there was no hint of malice on the broad, pale face.
“I don’t know that she will show herself to you. Or to me, for that matter,” he said.
“Then we will have wasted a trip,” Ngangata answered simply.
“No. No, whether she manifests or not, she will hear me. That is all I want, to tell her a few things. To apologize.”
“In my experience,” Ngangata remarked, “gods have little use for Human apologies.”
“Perhaps,” Perkar said. “But she will hear one from me.”
Ngangata nodded as the wind gusted from the north, straight into their faces, numbing their lips into wooden clappers only vaguely capable of shaping speech. Perkar reached to lace his elkskin hood tighter and draw a thick woolen kerchief over his nose, so that only his squinting eyes were visible.
“Something odd in those clouds,” said a voice in his ear, just as his face was warming.
“So Ngangata tells me,” Perkar mumbled.
“Eh?” Ngangata queried, catching his muffled speech.
“It’s Harka,” Perkar explained, and Ngangata pursed his lips and urged his mount on up ahead. He knew that Perkar disliked talking to his sword when others were near.
“Odd,” Harka repeated. “Too far away to see more.”
“Let me know when you can say something useful.”
“Still bitter? At least you answered me this time. It is difficult for me to understand your attitude. One would think you would be grateful. I’ve saved your life many times.”
“So you’ve told me before. And I should be, I admit. But my body remembers what has been done to it, knows that it has died several times now. There is a peculiar ache to that, Harka.”
“An ache I can feel well enough,” the sword answered. “Find some way to free me, and both our problems will be solved.”
“If I can find a way to do so, I will,” Perkar promised the blade. “If nothing else, I will return you to the Forest Lord.”
“How far will you go to make amends, Perkar? The Forest Lord will snap you down like a toad swallowing a bug. As Ngangata said, gods have precious little use for Human sentiment. I should know.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what the gods do or do not value,” Perkar remarked, very softly indeed. “I know what my father taught me: Piraku, the code of honor and glory. I have walked away from the path of my father for too long now.”
“You always command such endearing platitudes,” Harka replied. “Don’t you ever tire of them?”
“Perhaps they are all I have,” Perkar rejoined. “Now let me ride in peace, until such time as you sense danger.”
“Very well,” the voice in his ear conceded, and was thereafter silent.
The dark clouds boiled and spread eastward; Perkar could sense the sleet in their bellies, feel the cold sucking at him from that quarter of the world. Yet, as Ngangata predicted, they did not advance, and by the time evening came, the sky had nearly frozen clear, indigo veined with copper and crimson where a few high, attenuated clouds still clung. When the first star winked brightly at them, Perkar and Ngangata stopped to make camp. They worked silently at erecting the small horsehide tent Brother Horse had lent them. Perkar searched out a few scraps of withered wood in the dying light as his companion tightened the straps of their shelter.
When he returned, Ngangata was chanting over his bow, thanking the god of the tree from which it was made. Perkar considered following his example, but his sword, Harka, was a god, and as they had argued that day, it would be disingenuous to chant a song of thanks to him. Still, he had bragged that he was returning to the path of Piraku, and so after a few moments, he sang the one song that seemed appropriate, though it was alien. He chanted “Thanking the Horse Mother,” what little he knew of it, to show proper respect to their tent, made as it was from the mortal remains of a stallion named Snakeskin. All Mang tents were made of horsehide, and so each had a name. The song he had learned by listening carefully to the Mang as they made and broke camp.
He and Ngangata finished their chanting at roughly the same time. They met back in front of the tent. In the ruddy remains of sunset his companion’s face seemed more alien than usual, stripped of its Human heritage. His dark sunken eyes and low, sloping forehead recalled the deep, awesome forest of Balat where the Alwat dwelt. Perkar remembered the broken bodies of Digger and her family, the Alwat who perished because he offended the Forest Lord, and wondered what he could do for their kin, what solace he could offer, what apology?
“Ngangata,” he asked, staring out at the darkening rim of the world, “did you know the names of those Alwat who died in Balat?”
“I know their names,”
Ngangata answered, and Perkar noticed, as he often did not, the faint burr in his voice that no Human Being had.
“I would like you to teach them to me someday.”
“Someday,” the other replied, “but only in Balat. Their names should be spoken only there.”
“Ah.” Perkar felt the cold eating into his legs, but he did not yet desire to enter the tent and start a fire. “The sky seems to drink me up here,” he confided instead. He turned to take it all in, noticed the bone bow of the Pale Queen climbing in the east
“I prefer more crowded land myself,” Ngangata admitted. “Like you, my Human mother was kin to pasture, to hills, to mountains. Her blood was fast-running streams, red bulls, and snowmelt. The Alwat, my father’s people, are kin to the trees; they despise to leave them. You and I will both lose our minds if we live long beneath this sort of sky.” He gestured at the heavens with the blade of his hand and half grinned to show that he half joked.
“The Mang live here,” Perkar pointed out. “Surely other men can do it.”
“But the Mang have the blood of horses coursing in their veins. They are horses, in some ways. Without this sky, they would die of suffocation.”
“So they say,” Perkar acknowledged, recalling Brother Horse’s similar claim.
“You seem very thoughtful tonight,” Ngangata observed. “I believe you should take the first watch. Give yourself more time to think.”
Perkar accepted that with a faint chuckle. “Fair enough,” he replied.
Morning was still clear, and Perkar conceded, once again, that Ngangata understood the sky better than he. They rode out without much talking, though at one point Perkar attempted a song. It fell with the rising wind however, and Perkar glumly reflected that he missed Eruka, who would have sung right on into a gale. Eruka, whose voice and laughter were now bleached bones without even a proper burial.
So much to do.
Just past midday, Harka spoke to him again, and even as he did, Perkar caught himself scrutinizing a certain point on the horizon. He was unaware, at first, that his attention was a product of the strange power his sword had to compel him to “see” danger. But then Harka said, “Comes something strong.”