by Greg Keyes
“Leave,” she repeated.
Perkar took a deep breath and began to back out of the cave. He kept the blade in guard position, ready at any moment if the old woman should transform into some fierce beast. She did not; rather, she sighed and shook her head.
Near the entrance to the treasure cave, Perkar laid the sword down and walked out. After only a step or two he frowned, then turned furiously. He bent to pick the weapon up again, but as soon as he did he set it back down. Seven times he tried to carry the sword from the room; each time he ended by depositing it back where it rested.
“How are you doing that?” he demanded, finally.
“I’m not doing it,” she said. “The weapons are bound to my blood. They will not leave me.”
“That is a lie,” Apad hissed from behind him. “Perkar, she is a sorceress. Can’t you feel the spell on you?”
Perkar certainly knew the spell was there; the overwhelming compulsion to lay the sword down did not come from any part of himself, that was certain. But it somehow seemed wrong to suspect the woman of casting the spell.
“You try to take it,” Perkar told Apad. He watched the woman closely as Apad tried, without success, to remove the sword from the room. She made no move at all. Frustrated, Perkar picked up the sword and strode toward—rather than away from—the woman. He thought he saw something in her eyes then—fear? Resignation?
“You are going to kill me,” she said. “You will kill me for your vendetta against this god?”
“I have no quarrel with you, lady,” Perkar maintained. “If you will just tell me how I might take these weapons, I will leave you in peace.”
She sighed. “You would have to kill me,” she said.
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Perkar!” Apad warned, from behind him. “Watch yourself! Watch her witchery!”
Perkar turned to Apad. “I think the witchery here is from the Forest Lord, not her.”
“Do not mistake her for a Human Being, Perkar,” Eruka called from outside. Apad was edging farther into the room. “The Lemeyi has warned us of her illusions.”
“Are you a Human woman?” Perkar demanded. “Or are you a goddess?”
“Which answer will save my life?” she asked.
“Perkar!” Apad cautioned again, as Perkar moved closer.
“I’ve said I mean you no harm,” Perkar said, anger mounting in his chest. “But I do want the weapons. With which of these did the Forest Lord arm himself against his Brother?”
“His Brother?” she said, staring at Perkar in horror. It was the most passion Perkar had seen in her. “The Changeling!”
“Which sword?”
Apad was at the weapons now, touching this one, that one. It made Perkar nervous. “What are you talking about, Perkar? We care nothing for any brother. We need weapons that will harm the Forest Lord himself. Ask her about that.”
“You think he would keep his own death here?” the woman asked mockingly. “Who is your stupid friend, Oak-Boy?”
Apad turned slowly from the weapons, eyes revealing dangerous fires in his heart. “What do you want from us, witch-goddess? We are losing patience.”
“I am not a goddess,” she said, her voice low, betraying a hint of concern. “Don’t kill me.”
“I warn you,” Apad cried. “We have fought gods before, and without such swords as these, eh, Perkar?”
“Wait. Just wait a moment, Apad.”
“Wait for what? What’s wrong with you, Perkar? Can’t you see her for what she is? She is toying with us, waiting for her friends to come, waiting to pounce.”
“I would give you the weapons if I could,” the woman swore. “Please. I have only a short time to go—a few more months. I have been here for so long.” She blinked, and to Perkar’s vast surprise, a small tear formed in the corner of one eye and ran slowly down her face.
“No,” Perkar said, stepping forward. “There is no need to cry.” He reached to touch her shoulder.
“Perkar!” Apad shrieked. Perkar felt a hard, desperate shove from behind. It threw him off balance, and with the unaccustomed weight of his armor he toppled awkwardly, dropping the godsword and throwing out his hands to break the fall. He was half successful, managed to get one hand under him and take most of the impact on his other shoulder. Puzzled and angry, he scrambled back to his knees, a demand for an explanation already on his lips. Something spattered onto his face, his chest, his armor. It was red, salty, tasted of iron.
Apad was swaying above him, likewise spattered with blood. His eyes were wide, shocked. He dropped the sword he had been wielding and backed away, his mouth working. None of this made any sense to Perkar. It was all too fast, too strange.
The lady had blood on her, too. She trembled in her chair. He was kneeling almost at her knees, and as he watched, blood drizzled off the end of her shift, began pooling on the floor.
“I thought … I …” Apad mumbled, behind him.
Suddenly it did all make sense. The woman’s neck was half severed, blood gushing from the gash in it. The slash ran between clavicle and throat, down through her chest nearly to the sternum. Her eyes were glazed, her mouth working wordlessly as she slumped forward into Perkar’s arms. The blood was red, bright Human red, not gold or black like the blood of gods.
“Don’t,” she said in his ear. “Don’t.”
Outside, the Lemeyi began to snicker.
“Why? Apad?” Perkar gasped in anguish. He felt warm blood completely soaking the upper half of his gambeson. He wondered wildly what they could do for her, what sort of bandage might suffice. He tried to lay her back, and her head all but fell off, lolling to the side so that the cut in her neck and breast yawned open. Perkar began vomiting then, great heaving retches, and he ground his head against the cave floor. When he was done, she was dead. Apad was still backed against the cave wall.
“I didn’t know … I thought she …” he mumbled. The Lemeyi was hooting and gibbering.
“There is no need to cry,” he screeched, imitating Perkar’s low country accent. It was suddenly too much for Perkar. He snatched up the godsword.
“You did this, you stinking beast,” he snarled, and leapt out toward the half god, hardly noticing how easily the sword left the chamber now. The Lemeyi may not have expected him to move so quickly. He knew he saw a flicker of fear in the Lemeyi’s eye as the sword cut at him. Still, the Lemeyi had more than enough time to avoid the blow, dancing backward, if a bit clumsy from haste.
“Now, now,” the Lemeyi chided. “After all, you got what you wanted.”
That only made Perkar angrier. He chased after the halfling. Abruptly he was chasing it in total darkness.
“If you were to hit me with that thing, I wouldn’t like it,” the Lemeyi informed him reasonably, from somewhere out in the black.
“Apad! Eruka!” Perkar yelled. “Light your torches!” He took a few more swings with the blade, but the Lemeyi was certainly somewhere out of reach. He gave that up and knelt, putting his knees on the sword, took out one of his reed torches, flint, and steel, and a few shards of lighter knot. He began striking sparks.
He almost had the tinder going when sudden brightness flared behind him.
“There,” he heard Eruka say.
“Good,” Perkar replied. He looked quickly around, hoping to see the Lemeyi, but he was not within the torch’s small circle of illumination.
“Here, light yours, too,” Eruka said.
“No. Just one going at a time; we may need them all to get out of here.”
“Oh,” Eruka said. “Good thinking.”
Apad was still in the treasure room, head between his knees, retching as Perkar had been only moments before. His vomit reeked of woti.
“Get up, Apad,” Perkar growled. “Thanks to you, we have no more time for this. We have to get out of here now!” He shouted the last word, and it seemed to sink through to Apad’s consciousness. He staggered to his feet.
Trying not to look at t
he corpse, Perkar strode over to the weapons. “Bring the torch, Eruka,” he commanded, and the singer obeyed.
“Which one?” Perkar muttered. Perhaps any would do, even the one he held. He gnawed his lip, knowing he had no time.
“Each of you take one,” he enjoined. “Leave your own weapons here. We’ll have to run, I’m sure.” He made his own decision, took up a long, slender weapon with a blade the color of jade. It reminded him of water. As soon as he touched the hilt, he felt a tingle, as when he grasped the last, but this felt stronger, somehow. He hesitated, when he unbuckled the sword Ko had made, the sword his father had given him to make him a man. He hesitated but left it, anyway. It would be too heavy to carry both of them, and his own sword could not slay gods, of that he was certain. Perhaps this one could. He dropped the sword and its scabbard, only after he did so realizing that he had dropped it into the slowly spreading pool of blood. In an instant, the scabbard was stained, the appliqué pattern his mother had made ruined. Near it lay the woman’s needlework, doubly red with blood and torchlight. Perkar was transfixed for an instant, understanding in a sudden flash how deep the roots of ruin could burrow, once a single seed was germinated, began growing. The instant passed; he would outrun what ruin he could.
Eruka selected a weapon without much dithering, and when Apad just stared blankly, Perkar thrust one into his hands. Apad nodded numbly and took it. He kept looking at the dead woman, a puzzled expression on his face.
“We go,” Perkar said, shaking him roughly. “We go.” He belted on the new sword, thrust his unlit torch into his belt, took the burning one from Eruka. A significant portion of it was already gone. Without waiting to see if his companions were following, Perkar left the treasure room, retracing their steps. In the torchlight, the cavern winked at him with bloody eyes, a million ruby accusations.
The first torch was burned down nearly to Perkar’s hand; he lit his reed bundle without stopping.
“We have to move faster,” he told Apad and Eruka. “If we run out of torches, we might as well start our death chants.”
“Is this the right way? Are you sure?” Eruka asked.
“As sure as I can be,” Perkar admitted. “I think I remember how we came.”
“If we get lost …”
“Then that will be that,” Perkar said. “Save your strength for running.”
They could not, in fact, actually run. The tunnel floor was too uneven. In the tightest places, crawling seemed nightmarishly slow, and Perkar feared that at any moment the Lemeyi would reappear to work further mischief. He was certain that he occasionally heard the half god cackling, but the way sound traveled in the caves, the creature could be almost anywhere. Worse things than the Lemeyi could find them, as well, things bent on vengeance rather than cruel amusement. Perkar had no idea whether the woman had any relatives here—it seemed plain enough now that she was a Human Being or at least mostly Human. Perkar clenched his teeth on another eruption of bile; he had no time to be sick; let that come later. He swore silently that he would burn offerings to the woman’s spirit, but he knew this was empty, for he did not even know her name, much less her lineage. The memory of her dull, glazed eyes and that terrible wound stayed with him, mocking him, and he understood that even if his offerings found her spirit, she would know them for what they were: a pale attempt to appease his own guilt. And though he was angry with Apad, Perkar knew the fault did lie with himself. Apad and Eruka, for all of their talk, would never have entered the cave at all if he had not forced the issue by running off to do it alone; he had challenged their manhood, allowed their fear of missing out on fame and glory to overcome their growing reluctance to implement their grandiose scheme to wrestle land from Balati. And it was fear—fear, not rage or anger or even greed—that had killed the old woman. How many songs told of seemingly harmless creatures discovered by the hero to be dragons or monsters in disguise? Apad’s failure in the fight with the Wild God must have gnawed at him; he must have planned night and day what he would do next time they encountered danger. And then the evil Lemeyi whispering in his ear, cajoling him.
But he wouldn’t have come in without me. If I had paid more attention to him, I could have stopped him.
Of course, then they would not have the weapons, the jadelike sword that rattled and flapped on his thigh.
I will avenge her, too. When I slay the Changeling, I will make her death worth something, turn it into Piraku for the whole world.
But that rang hollow, too. He had a vivid vision of the Stream Goddess, fury in her eyes—or weeping—knowing the things he was doing in her name.
The reed torch seemed to last longer than the heart pine, but it constantly threatened to go out, guttering to almost an ember at times. Perkar had to nurse it as they went along, and that slowed them further. When he lit the third torch, it was with a growing sense of despair. He did not know how far they had to go, but he knew it was much farther than their torches would light the way for them. After that it would be fumbling at the walls, the darkness surrounding them, the Lemeyi standing an arm’s breadth away, laughing, fully able to see them but invisible to the Humans.
The blood beneath his armor was beginning to dry, to stiffen, and the gambeson began to rub his skin raw. It stank, too, a thick, sweet scent that the smoke from the torch could not cover. To that unpleasantness was added another; behind them, to their sides, the Humans began to hear noises. Slithering and scraping, faint chittering, a clicking like a hundred hard rods rapping against stone. In the larger spaces, the ones that the torch did not fully illumine, they caught glimpses of things just at the edge of the torchlight. Eyes, mostly, blinking green, yellow, or red. Once Perkar saw something large, irregular, shaped nothing like a man, retreating from the light on many spidery black legs. Perkar remembered that the Lemeyi had warned them that light in the tunnels would be noticed. Perkar could only hope that the unaccustomed glare would also deter whatever lurked about them—followed them.
Soon, though, it was the last torch that was nearly scorching his hand. He wondered wildly if there was anything else to burn; the noises—especially those behind them—were growing in volume; they could not be dismissed as imagination, and fear took hold in their minds. Perkar wondered how long they would last, fighting in the dark.
“My father will never know what happened to me,” Apad groaned—the first coherent words he had uttered since their flight began.
“Our spirits will wander here without gifts, without even woti. I have killed us all.”
“There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Perkar said. “If it hadn’t been for me, we wouldn’t have even come in here. Without Eruka, that thrice-damned Lemeyi would not have been our guide and we would have neither found the weapons nor been tricked into slaying their keeper. We’ve all been fools, but we can’t make up for that dead.”
“It was like cutting butter,” Apad said, his voice rising hysterically. “These swords are terrible things. It just slid through. I thought it would be like fighting the Wild God, hacking and hacking almost without cutting at all. I thought we had to attack first, before she could change … Her blood was red!”
“Shut up. Shut up, Apad!” Perkar shrieked, and from behind them there was not a single laugh, but a chorus of them, and one clear voice, high and joyful.
“Her blood was red!”
The torch was singeing Perkar’s hand now, and if he thought his fingers might burst into flame and light their way for another few moments, he would have held it still. Instead he set it down. In the few flickers of light that remained for them, he motioned his companions against the wall.
“Apad,” he said, “you get in the center, against the wall. Feel our way for us. Eruka, you go in front of him, I’ll be rearguard. If anything touches you, anything at all, strike it. But don’t panic, Eruka. Keep one hand on Apad. We have to stay together!”
The two arranged themselves as he said. The tunnel was narrow here, and it was easy enough to do. Perkar drew the god
sword as the torch went out. They stood for a moment, waiting, and for an instant there was total, calm silence. Then the noises began again, the sounds of a summer evening made harsh and strange, a susurrus of little sounds, each menacing but together utterly terrifying.
“Go. Apad, Eruka, go!” Perkar commanded. And slowly they commenced moving up the tunnel, blind.
Something scuttled up to Perkar, a sound like many legs with small, naked feet of bone. He thrust grimly with his sword and was rewarded by the shock of contact with something that wriggled away. He brought the sword back, rapidly sliced at the same spot—the sword scraped the cave floor and struck sparks. Eruka, ahead of him, suddenly shrieked, and there was a similar clang.
“Keep your head,” Perkar yelled. Something feathery brushed his face. A jolt of surprise and disgust raced from his heart to his arm, and he cut out flat with the weapon, a stroke horizontal to the ground and about waist high. He hit something thin, like a piece of cane, and it seemed to sever easily. Something else hissed, and then a paralyzing pain stabbed him in the shoulder—a long thin weapon—like a needle—piercing him.
As with the Wild God, his fear was suddenly gone. Furious, he leapt at the darkness, hacking out a downstroke that would have cut into a man’s neck and cleaved groinward. He hit something, hit it again, felt fluid spurt onto him.
“Come on!” he shrieked. “Come all of you, stinking demons! Fight the blind man, if you have the courage!” He swung twice more, encountered nothing but the cave wall. He panted into the silence that followed—but of course, the chittering began again.
“You wish to see?” someone asked. Perkar’s rage mounted higher. It was the Lemeyi taunting him.
“Come here, you stinking beast,” Perkar shouted. “I don’t need to see to kill you!”
“If you wish to see, you may,” the voice calmly responded. Perkar suddenly did not believe it to be the Lemeyi at all. The voice seemed to be just inside of his ear—it did not echo through the cave like his own, or the Lemeyi’s laughter.
“Yes, yes, of course I wish to see,” he muttered.