The Blackgod

by Greg Keyes

  “How did you know that was what they sought?” Ghe asked.

  The gaan shook his head. “I did not. I gambled. I still could be wrong, but I don’t think so, not anymore.”

  “Then let us go,” Ghe said softly. “Hezhi awaits us.”

  The host in the forest regarded them but did not advance, and for fifty heartbeats, no words were spoken or moves made. Karak sat his horse impassively, and Perkar had no sense of what his reaction was. A wind sighed across the hill, and in the distance the calls of the Mang came closer with each moment.

  Perkar drew Harka. He knew whose horde this was, having been once slain by it.

  “Can you see the Huntress?” he asked the weapon.

  “No. But that is her host. And yet I sense no danger from them.”

  “No danger?”

  “I do not believe they are hunting you.”

  “Who then, the Mang?”

  “Wait,” Harka said, and then, “there.”

  Perkar let his eyes be drawn, and then he saw her, emerging from the massed might of her Hunt. When last he saw the Huntress, she had been in the aspect of a black-furred Alwa woman with antlers and the teeth of a cat. She had ridden a lioness, which he had managed to slay before she speared him.

  Her aspect had changed, but there was no mistaking her. The Goddess of the Stream had once explained to him that the gods took their appearance from contact with Human Beings, especially from their blood. The Huntress, Perkar knew, had tasted much blood, Human, Alwa, and otherwise. Her present guise was Human, more or less, a pale, lithe woman with thick black hair in a single braid that fell to the backs of her knees. Her eyes were slivers of deep brown with no whites, which gave her the appearance of a statue rather than a living creature. She was naked, and in her hand bore the same spear that had once pierced his throat. As before, antlers grew from her proudly held head, these backswept like those of a fallow deer.

  “Well, what a pretty host,” she sighed, and it was the same voice, the same cruel set of the mouth that Perkar remembered. She gazed on him and her smile broadened. “Few there are who escape me,” she told him. “You will not do so again, if I hunt you. I know Harka now, recall his virtue. Remember that, little one.” She walked farther from her beasts and wolf-warriors, her eyes straying to Karak and a silver laugh coming up from her throat. But she said nothing to him, instead advancing toward where Hezhi sat behind Yuu’han, watching her dully.

  “Well, child, are you ready? The final race is at hand now.”

  “They killed Ghan,” Hezhi said, and even as she spoke, Perkar could hear her voice awaking, transforming from shocked to fierce. “They killed my teacher.”

  Tsem dismounted and interposed himself between the Huntress and Hezhi, but the goddess merely stood there, nodding at Hezhi’s answer.

  “There will be no final moment,” Karak said, agitated, “if we are not on our way.”

  “As you say, Lord—Sheldu, is it? As you say.”

  “I did not expect you,” Karak went on.

  “I’m hurt,” she replied. “Hurt to think you would not invite me to such a hunt as this.”

  Karak did not reply. What was going on? What sort of games were these gods playing at? But then the goddess was approaching him again, and his skin prickled, remembering the languid glee with which she had once slaughtered him.

  “Well, sweet boy,” she asked, when he was close enough to see that she bore fangs like a cat and that her tongue was black, “will you ride with me or not?”

  “Ride with you?”

  “Against them,” she said, indicating the sounds of the Mang approaching behind them. “Someone must stop them, or your friends will never reach the source of the Changeling. But I will need help, I think—and I seem to remember your love for the hue and cry of the charge.”

  “I have never cared for it,” he muttered back.

  “You rode against me once, and you killed my mount, whom I loved. Now I give you a chance to ride with the Hunt. Few mortal men are accorded that pleasure—fewer still have ridden on both ends of the spear.”

  Perkar gazed around at his companions. Ngangata’s eyes clearly warned him no, but Karak was nodding urgently. Hezhi—he saw many things in her eyes, but was sure of none of them.

  “Very well,” he said. “Yes, very well. If you promise me the Tiskawa.”

  “You will find him no easy foe,” the Huntress replied. “But as you wish.”

  “Wait, then, just a moment,” Perkar said. He urged T’esh over to Hezhi and gazed levelly into her eyes. She met his regard fully, and he saw that she was indeed past her shock, eyes clear and intelligent.

  “If I don’t see you again,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t go,” she said faintly. “Stay with me.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I have to do this. But, Hezhi—” He sidled T’esh closer and leaned in until his lips were nearly on her ear. “Watch Sheldu,” he breathed. “He is Karak, under a glamour. He knows what must be done to destroy the Changeling—but don’t trust him. And be careful.” And then he lightly kissed her cheek and rode to join the Huntress.

  “Come,” Karak grated, and the company started off as the host of the Huntress began to move, parting around them, opening their ranks so that the Raven and those who followed him could pass through. Only Ngangata remained with Perkar.

  “You have to go with them,” Perkar said. “You are the only one I can trust to watch after Hezhi. Only you know enough about gods and Balat to guess what must be done.”

  “That may be,” Ngangata said, “but I don’t want you to die alone.”

  “I have no intention of dying,” Perkar replied. “I’ve outgrown that. And I ride with the Huntress! What can stop us?”

  “Then you will not mind me joining you,” Ngangata persisted.

  Perkar laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I want you with me,” he admitted. “I’ve never told you this, because I’m ashamed of the way I treated you at first. But there is no one I would rather have at my side than you, no friend or brother I could value more. But what I said was true. I fear for Hezhi, and I need you there, with her. Believe it or not, I somehow feel you will be in more danger there than here. I’m sorry. But I’m begging you to go with Hezhi.”

  Ngangata’s normally placid face twisted in frustration, and Perkar thought that the halfling was going to shout at him again, as he had done back on the plains. But instead he reached his hand out.

  Perkar gripped it in his own. “Piraku with you, below you, about you,” he told his strange, pale friend.

  Ngangata smiled thinly. “You know my kind accumulate no Piraku,” he replied.

  “Then no one does,” Perkar said. “No one.”

  The Huntress—far ahead now—sounded her horn, and Perkar released his grip on Ngangata’s hand and turned T’esh to ride with the host.

  “And afterward, you must take me to see the lands beyond Balat!” he shouted back. Ngangata raised his hand in salute, but he only nodded, and then he, too, turned and rode to join Hezhi and the rest.

  Perkar urged T’esh to a gallop. Wolves paced him, great black beasts the size of horses, as did fierce packs of rutkirul, bear gods wearing the shapes of feral men. A few moments at full gallop brought him beside the Huntress, who was now mounted upon a dagger-toothed panther. She nodded imperiously and then grinned a fierce, delighted grin. Despite himself—despite all of his doubts and fears—Perkar felt a bit of her joy, and the boy in him—the boy he had thought to be dead—that boy wondered what songs might be sung of this, of riding with the Goddess of the Hunt.

  And as the sounds of the foe drew nearer, he surrendered himself to a whoop to match the howls rising from all around him. They breasted one hill and then the next—and the air was suddenly thick with black Mang shafts. One glanced from his hauberk, and his belly clenched; but then he saw, in the fore of the vast array of Mang, the face of his enemy, the one who had slain his love, and a red veil descended over hi
s eyes, fury washed away his doubts and most of his humanity.

  For the second time, Perkar Kar Barku raised Harka against the creature who had once been called Ghe, and pounding hooves closed the gap between them.

  XXXV

  Shamans

  Hezhi clenched her jaw as the horses hurtled madly down the hillside. The sounds behind them were lost—the Huntress and her Hunt, the Mang, and Perkar—swallowed by the forest and the gorge they were descending into. All that existed now were rocks skittering down sharp, sometimes vertical slopes as their mounts struggled to retain footing. Even as Dark recovered from a stumble, one of Sheldu’s men shouted as his stallion fell, rolling over him twice before smashing into a tree. The rider, hopelessly tangled in his stirrups, cried out again, more weakly as he and his mount reached a steeper gradient and vanished down it.

  “Tsem!” Hezhi called back over her shoulder. “You dismount and walk!” The Giant was well behind them, his overlarge beast clearly unwilling to negotiate the vertiginous path. Tsem nodded reluctantly and got off, stroking the mare’s massive head. He reached to unstrap his packs.

  “Leave them!” Sheldu shouted. “We are near enough now as to have no need of that!”

  Tsem, looking relieved, pulled out his club, threw his shield onto his back, and started down the hillside, puffing and panting.

  “How much farther?” Hezhi snapped at the strange man who had somehow—she failed to understand how—become the leader of her expedition. Mindful of Perkar’s assertion about him, she watched him carefully.

  “No distance at all, as the crow flies,” Sheldu replied bitterly. “On foot, however—it will take some little while. But when we reach the bottom of this gorge, we can ride more freely.”

  “Tsem cannot.”

  “He can keep up; we won’t be able to run, and even if we could, the horses would never manage it.”

  Hezhi nodded, but her heart sank; she knew how quickly Tsem’s massive bulk tired him.

  True to Sheldu’s promise, however, they soon reached the narrow bottom of the gorge. A stream coursed swiftly down it, and the air itself seemed cool and wet, smelled of stream. It raised her spirits somewhat, and Tsem, though round-eyed with exertion, seemed able enough to keep up with them on the soft, level earth. Hezhi let Dark lag so that she could stay beside him.

  “Will you make it?” she asked worriedly.

  “I will,” Tsem vowed.

  “If you can’t—”

  “I’m fine, Princess. I know what you think of me, but I’m done complaining about how useless I am.”

  “You were never useless, Tsem.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Now I know that I can contribute to this battle. Even if my strength to run fails I can turn and defend you against any enemies that might follow us.”

  “Tsem, Ghan is already dead.”

  “You don’t know that, Princess. It couldn’t have been Ghan. It must have been someone who resembled him.”

  “I’m going to find out. Do you recognize either of those two?” She gestured at the man and woman who rode beside Sheldu.

  “Yes. The woman is named Qwen-something-or-other. The man is a minor lord, Bone Eel.”

  “A lord and lady from Nhol, here. Then it was Ghan, wasn’t it?”

  Tsem nodded reluctantly, but they discussed it no further.

  Not much later, Sheldu called a halt when another horse collapsed. They stopped and let the animals drink.

  “Perkar and the Huntress are doing their work, I hope,” Sheldu said. “I don’t hear any pursuit.”

  “You won’t,” Ngangata pointed out. “This gorge seals out sound from beyond itself. We won’t hear them until almost they are upon us.”

  “We have to rest, if just for a moment,” Brother Horse said. “Sheldu is right about that.”

  Hezhi made certain that Tsem drank some water, and then she walked across the thick carpet of leaves to where Qwen Shen and Bone Eel sat against a tree bole.

  When she approached, both quickly came to their feet and bowed.

  “Princess,” Bone Eel said. “We are your humble servants. Forgive us for not introducing ourselves until now.”

  “I have two questions, and no time for courtly protocol,” Hezhi snapped. “The first question is, why are you here?”

  Qwen Shen bowed again. “Your father sent us, Princess, to save you from the agents of the priesthood.”

  “My father? The priesthood?”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  Hezhi blew out a puff of air. “You can tell me more of that later. When you joined us, another man rode with you, a man who tumbled from his horse. Who was he?”

  Bone Eel lowered his head. “I believe you knew him,” he said. “That was Ghan, the librarian. It was he who convinced the emperor of the need for our expedition. He was—we shall miss him. I’m sorry.”

  Qwen Shen was nodding, and Hezhi thought she caught the sparkle of a tear in the woman’s eye. She swallowed the tightness in her own throat.

  “Ghan himself—why?”

  “He learned of a plot to find you and kill you, or return you to the River. It was commanded by a young Jik, whom I believe you also knew.”

  “I knew him in Nhol, and I have seen him more recently in a vision,” Hezhi muttered. “But he is dead. I saw him killed.”

  “The priesthood has great power,” Bone Eel told her. “They can create sorcerous creatures. This ‘Ghe’ is not the man you knew.”

  “The man I knew is not the man I knew,” she nearly snarled.

  “Mount up!” Sheldu shouted. “We must continue.”

  Hezhi leveled a cold gaze at the two. “I will hear more of this later, and I will know, too, how you came to be acquainted with this man Sheldu.”

  “Ah,” Bone Eel began. “He is well traveled, an agent of sorts—”

  “Later,” she repeated sharply. “I’m confused enough as it is.

  Much of what you say makes no sense. Just tell me this, quickly. You know what our mission is, here?”

  Bone Eel nodded solemnly. “You seek to slay the River.”

  “If you interfere, my friends will slay you, do you understand?”

  “Indeed, Princess. We have no wish to interfere. It is what Ghan and the emperor agreed upon.”

  Hezhi tried to keep her face neutral as she returned to Dark. They were lying, lying, lying, and she knew it. But how much of their talk was false?

  Once back in the saddle, she leaned over to Tsem. “If those two do anything even slightly suspicious when we reach this place we are going,” she said softly, “I want you to kill them. Can you pass that along to Brother Horse and Yuu’han?”

  Tsem’s eyes widened in surprise. “Princess?”

  “I mean it, Tsem. We’ve been through too much to allow agents of my father—or whomever they work for—to interfere. I don’t trust them; they act as if they were friends of Ghan, but he would never be friends with such as they.” She paused and almost told him of Perkar’s warning about Sheldu, but then she decided that it was best to give Tsem only one thing at a time to worry over.

  They resumed, beneath a sky that had begun to don a cloak of dusky clouds. She thought that the rest had done the horses scant good, but the Mang and “Sheldu” probably had greater understanding of the needs of the beasts. Dark’s flanks heaved and white foam matted her hair, and Hezhi worried; Dark was her first horse, a beautiful creature, and she did not want to see her die.

  She regarded Sheldu as they rode along, searching for some sign of Karak in him. Could Perkar have been right? Was that what he was hiding from her? She tried to think back to what he said, but it was all confusion—at the time, her mind had been trying to understand about Ghan falling.

  It had been he, but she couldn’t dwell on that. Couldn’t. She need only keep it back, away from her heart, for another day before allowing it to overwhelm her. She could do that. Now she had pressing things to puzzle over, important things.

  She had glanced back up
at “Sheldu,” intent on understanding what connection could exist between a Crow God and two nobles from Nhol, when the stream before them suddenly erupted into a fountain of sludge and spray. The nearest riders—Sheldu’s vanguard—were bowled over by the explosion, and Sheldu himself was thrown from his rearing mount. Hezhi simply watched, gape-mouthed, at what took form.

  Its upper part was salamander, thickly wrinkled, grayish black, with knobby little eyes and branching gills sweeping back from the sides of its head like feathery antlers. But it sprang forward on hind legs not unlike a man’s, though the forelimbs were the stubby-fingered paws of an amphibian. Its toothless maw gaped open, easily wide enough to swallow a person.

  Ghe saw the Huntress first, felt the pulsing of power from the bizarre woman-thing. Her host was resonant with energy, too, and he realized now that Moss had not lied to him. Defeating this woman and her creatures would be no easy task. He gathered his own host within him, slashed his palm to release his black blood and potence, but even as it trailed along the ground and monsters of his making sprang up to challenge the wolves and savagely dressed men, he saw the demon descending on him.

  Perkar, Ghan had called him, but to Ghe that meant only death. Shrieking, his features set in a grimly insane mask, the bone-faced man charged toward him.

  Ghe wrapped himself in a cloak of wind, strengthened his living armor, knitted a shield of invisible fire for himself, and, devouring the flame of life in his horse, leapt from its back, flinging out his blood so that it formed into grass-bears and long-legged stalking things he had no name for. Let them deal with that blade, those iron-colored eyes. He himself flew like a spear toward the Huntress, certain that if he could devour her, nothing on earth could possibly stop him—not even his old death.

  Perkar screamed in frustration as the beasts spurted up around him and surrendered his rage to the song Harka sang as the sword directed his arm. He snarled with brutal satisfaction as a bear’s head sprang from its massive shoulders and a gout of hot black blood struck him across the face even as Harka turned and swept like a scythe through a thin, skeletal abomination that resembled a praying mantis.