The Blackgod

by Greg Keyes

  Hezhi looked to Tsem and Ngangata for support; the halfling nodded to himself, but Tsem appeared confused, perhaps not following the entire conversation. Neither of them gave her any clue as to how she should respond to Yuu’han. “Why do you tell me this now?” she finally asked.

  “So that if my unc—” Yuu’han paused and began again. “So that if Brother Horse and I are both slain, you will know how to sing to our ghosts. In death I may be spoken of as his son.” He smiled wryly. “Understand me, this is no demand. My sword is yours, because Brother Horse is with you. I merely request this of you.”

  “I would rather promise that you will not be slain,” Hezhi remarked.

  “Do not promise me what is not in your power,” Yuu’han warned. “Do not insult me.”

  “I will not insult you, cousin,” Hezhi assured him. “If you are both slain, I shall do as you ask—provided I survive.”

  “I say the same,” Ngangata assured him.

  “Thank you. It is good.” Seemingly content, Yuu’han dropped back to where Brother Horse rode.

  Shortly they began climbing again, but it was to be a brief ascent. They mounted up out of the valley, and Hezhi realized then just how high they were; She’leng walled off most of the sky—they had scarcely begun ascending it—but even the valley they rode in was lofty, overlooking the folded layers of forest marching off from them.

  Karak stood in his saddle. “Follow now,” he said. “I grow impatient, and one more obstacle remains.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some fifty Mang warriors await at the entrance to Erikwer, the place we seek.”

  “Fifty Mang?” Ngangata said, taking in the remaining warriors. “That is no small threat.”

  “For you, perhaps. For me, if I try to maintain my disguise. But my Lord Balat is slow to waken, and I am certain now that he sleeps.” He turned to them, and his eyes were blazing now.

  Many of the men who followed him seemed taken a bit aback, uncertain.

  “Know all of you who did not that I am Karak, the Raven, who made the earth and stole the sun to light it. This and many other things have I done for Humankind, for you are my adopted children. Many malign my intentions—” He paused and looked significantly at Ngangata. “—but you will find no tale of me that does not ultimately speak of my love and service to your kind, even in defiance of my Lord. You have all ridden with me, some knowing me, some not, to this place. You have fought and died so that I might preserve my identity until the time came to strike; that time is now, but we must hurry. I fly ahead to dispose of the brave but misguided warriors who yet stand before us; no more of you need die. But when I uncloak, when my power stands revealed, my Lord Balati will begin to wake from slumber. We must slay his Brother before that happens. Slaying him we free the land from a terrible burden and an even more terrible threat.”

  “And you from a great guilt!” Brother Horse bellowed.

  Karak leveled his yellow gaze at the Mang. “I freely admit my fault in the matter. Even such as I can make a mistake.”

  “It was no mistake,” Brother Horse shouted heatedly. “It was caprice, like most of what you do.”

  Karak regarded the old man silently for a long moment.

  “Were you there?” he asked softly. “Were any of you there, when the Changeling was unleashed, or do you just repeat the rumors my enemies have circulated for five millennia?” He glared around at them. “Well?”

  “Enough!” Hezhi shouted. “Do what you must, Blackgod, and I will follow. Do you need any of the rest of them?”

  Karak was still glaring angrily. “No,” he answered.

  “Then go.”

  For an instant longer, he remained Sheldu; and then, like a cloak turned inside out, he was suddenly a bird. At that instant, the wind rose. He beat his black wings up to a heaven now thick with gray clouds. When he was a speck, the trees began to shudder with the force of the wind.

  Some hesitated, but when Hezhi kneed Dark forward, Ngangata and Tsem came after. Qwen Shen and Bone Eel followed closely, and after a moment’s hesitation, all the rest.

  In the middle distance, lightning began to strike and thunder to sound, a noise like the air itself shearing in halves. First one strike, then another, and then a crashing and flickering of blue light that raged continuously.

  When they broke from the forest into the vast meadow, the thunder had ceased. They found the great black bird standing on a blackened corpse, pecking at its eyes. The meadow was littered with burnt and broken men. A few horses raced about aimlessly, eyes rolling.

  As horrific as the sight was, Hezhi had become numb to death; what drew her attention and held it was not the corpses but the hole. It gaped in the center of the meadow like the very mouth of the earth itself, a nearly perfectly round pit that even a powerful bowshot might not cross the diameter of.

  The Raven became a man, a black-cloaked man with pale skin.

  “That is Erikwer,” he said. “That is the source of the Changeling, his birth—and his death.” His birdlike eyes sparkled with unconcealed glee.

  “What do we do?” Hezhi asked, her heart suddenly thumping despite all of her earlier bluster and confidence.

  “Why, we must descend, of course,” Karak said.

  Perkar ran desperately, Harka flapping in a sheath on his back. Without the Huntress to direct them, the host was slowly dispersing, returning to whatever haunts or fell places they issued from. They didn’t bother him; she must have set some sign upon him they recognized.

  But he would never reach Hezhi and the others in time, and that drove him madder each moment, each heartbeat he had to understand what Moss told him.

  “Can you give me more strength, help me run faster?” he asked Harka.

  “No. That is not the nature of my glamour, as you should know by now.”

  “Yes, you only keep me alive so that I can properly appreciate my mistakes.”

  “What you run toward now could very well end that little problem of yours.”

  “So be it.”

  “I thought you had learned fear.”

  “I have. Learned it and relearned it. It makes no difference now.”

  “The Blackgod will do you no harm unless you attack him.”

  “It’s moot, Harka, if we don’t get there in time.”

  A movement caught his attention in the wood, something large and four-legged coming toward him. He whirled, blade bared in an instant.

  “Not an enemy,” Harka said.

  Perkar saw that it was not. It was a stallion, and more precisely, it was Sharp Tiger.

  The stallion paced up to him and stopped, an arm’s length away.

  “Hello, brother,” Perkar said softly. “Let me make you a deal. You let me ride you, and I will slay he who killed your cousin.”

  The horse stared at him impassively. Perkar approached, sheathed Harka, and took a deep breath. The beast was unsaddled; Perkar had long ago given up trying to ride him. Neither, in fact, did he have a bridle, but if the animal would accept him on its back, he could find a bridle and saddle from one of the dead beasts being devoured by the Hunt.

  He blew out the breath and leapt upon Sharp Tiger’s back, knotted his fist into the thick hair of the stallion’s mane.

  Nothing happened. Sharp Tiger didn’t react.

  “Good, my cousin,” Perkar said, after a few instants went by. “You understand. Then let me find a bridle—”

  Sharp Tiger reared and pawed the air, and Perkar hung on with his legs and fists with all of the strength in him, preparing for the inevitable, bracing for being thrown. But when the fore-hooves drove to earth, the Mang horse plunged straight into a gallop so swift that the wind sang in Perkar’s ears, racing in amongst the trees and cornering so tightly that Perkar lay on the stallion’s neck and wrapped his arms to keep from falling.

  As the horse hurtled down a steep grade, leaping and stamping hooves, slipping but almost never slowing, Perkar gasped. “I hope you know where you are going, S
harp Tiger!”

  For he had not the slightest control over the beast.

  The path into Erikwer wound down the side of the hole, a vast helix carved into the living basalt of the mountainside. Hezhi tried to imagine why such a hole might exist, a black tunnel bored straight down into the bosom of the world. She traced her gaze back up the way she had come; traveling single file, the entire party still did not complete the circumference of the pit. They had been once around, and in that time the steep path had dropped them into shadow. Sunlight still dappled the walls a bit above her, and bushes and scraggly juniper trees clung in crevasses and along the side of the trail, feeding on the light. At the rim a few Human heads were limned against the sky—Karak had left most of his men to guard against any remnants of the Mang who might yet arrive. Down, she could see nothing, save a vague glimmer in her godsight, the feel and smell of water rising to greet her.

  Even here, even after all this time, she could recognize the River. Images danced before her on the black rock, on Tsem’s back as he strode in front of her, and behind her lids when she blinked. The sun-drenched rooftops of Nhol, the Water Temple shining as if cut from white cloud, and beyond them the River, all majesty and puissance. In her heart she had never really feared him, but only herself. In her heart, he was still Lord, still Father, still Grandfather.

  But there were other images, other sensations. The monstrous ghost chasing her in the Hall of Moments, seeking the blood signaling her womanhood. Soldiers fighting and dying to stop it. D’en, her beloved cousin, twisted and mindless and imprisoned beneath the deep labyrinth of the underpalace. The scale on her arm pulsing. She knew what she must do, but entering into the place of his beginning, she could not feel outrage or anger—and only faintly could she feel purpose. What she did feel was what a daughter might, entering the bedroom where her father slept, scissors tight in her hands and murder in her heart, despite what that father had done and would continue to do.

  It was more of a relief than anything else to know that matters were out of her hands. The strange and alien presence of the Blackgod was now a comfort. Back in the yekt, she had first felt the burden of guiding herself and her friends, of choosing one path of many, all dangerous. For months she had shouldered that burden, until Perkar came out of his depression and began making decisions—and now, finally, with Perkar gone, someone had stepped in to fill his place. It was good, for she had no strength for it. It was not something she was meant for; a princess did not make decisions; she only married well and then let her husband serve those needs. Ghan had tried to bring her up to it, but that had turned out badly all around, especially for Ghan. No, she only wanted to be alone again, by herself, with no one wanting her or needing her, no decisions to make beyond when and what to eat.

  After such furious action, it was odd that the very last leg of their journey should be so slow, so measured. They had left their mounts above; even the most trustworthy steed would be a danger here, and their horses were ridden nearly to death, could barely stand. All those climbing down were silent, as if the majesty and presence of Erikwer physically forbade speech. She had leisure—for the first time—to realize that Perkar might be dead, to remember the few moments of tenderness that had passed between them since they met. It was a strange, braided thing they felt for one another, she thought; so like love, so like hate, implacable and fragile at the same time. She tried to summon some anger at Perkar for his deception, for drawing her close and then coldly thrusting her away, but she could not find it; not when he might already be a wraith, winging up to the mountain summit and the merciless gods who dwelt there. Whether he lived or died, he and the Huntress had done what they set out to do, played their part in her destiny: stopped Moss and Ghe and the army of Mang who sought to return her to the bosom of the River.

  Instead she would go to his head and stab a spike into his brain. But how? Only Karak knew.

  And as they descended, the air sank past them in a faint breeze, as if the hole were eternally inhaling. The breeze grew cooler as the light dimmed, as eventually the hole above them shrank and dimmed as night fell over it as well, at which point Karak’s men—the ten who accompanied them down—lit torches. The god’s breath fattened the flames and caused them to lick downward now and then. Before it was entirely dark, she heard water, a sort of shushing that increased in volume. Soon it filled everything, hummed gently both inside and outside of her skull. Water.

  And then, with no ceremony whatsoever, the shaft opened into a vaster place on all sides save the one the path continued on. That descended to a shingle of a black beach, and the yellow flowers of the torches were caught and reflected by a vast, restless sea that stretched out into the darkness. A roof of stone hung over it, vaulting up but always low, and the feeling was an eerie combination of claustrophobia and infinity. The last of them—some of Karak’s men—stepped onto the shingle, where the underground sea lapped up and down against the rounded black pebbles that stretched out from the mounds of talus fallen from above. Hezhi gazed up, hoping to see a star, but there was nothing—save for perhaps a vague clattering, high above.

  “Now, come here, child,” Karak breathed. He still wore Human shape, but his nose was thin and beaklike, and in the torchlight his eyes gleamed with fierce triumph and anticipation.

  “Come here, and we shall slay him.”

  Trembling, Hezhi moved to comply.

  XXXVII

  Changeling Blood

  Water again, his comfort and womb. Life again, too, but this time he did not emerge into light and air. The River took Ghe and dragged him through the cold and dark.

  He was different. The parts of him charred and torn by the Huntress had grown back, but not as Human flesh. Bony plates compassed him, and he propelled himself with limbs more like flippers or fins than arms, kicked something—not legs—that he feared even to think about.

  His eyes saw the River bottom and the rippling mirror of the surface, and the bare, sterile stone over which he flowed. But another eye—a deeper one—saw something far, far ahead of him.

  He searched through his servants and found a few still there. The stream demon, the stalker, and the ghosts of Ghan and the blind boy. The old lord—Lengnata—was there, too, though he was weakened or perhaps terrified into an almost unthinking state. Others—the many that he had bound on the journey across the plain with Moss—were part of him no longer, destroyed or released in his battle with the Huntress. As for that one—the Beast Goddess—the River had eaten her. She was gone, utterly and without a trace.

  And now he was no longer Ghe the ghoul, but Ghe the fish, the serpent, the thing. Not Ghe at all, though he knew he had never been that, not since Perkar took his head. If only he had, at least, the satisfaction of knowing for certain that the pale man was dead, too…

  You are Ghe, Ghan disagreed, a disembodied voice sharing his prison of plates, stings, and spines. Despite all that the River has done, part of you is Ghe. I know that now.

  Shut up, old man, Ghe thought. He did not need the scholar’s lies and advice anymore. His only reason for existence was to serve the River’s will.

  If he could enforce his will himself, he would, Ghan insisted. You saw what he did to the Huntress, how invincible he is in his own domain. If he resorts to making ghouls of dead men, it is to go places where he cannot go himself. But that means that in those places, he does not control you. You can do what is right rather than what he wills.

  “What he wills is what is right,” Ghe answered angrily. “I am not capable of doubting that. You should understand by now. If you cut up a tree, and make it from a tree into a boat, it is a boat, whether you are there to sail it or not. The River made me to find Hezhi. It is the only thing I am capable of!”

  If a ghost could vent an exasperated, impatient sigh, Ghan’s did. I’ll give you a different metaphor, my friend. If a smith makes a sword, he has no assurance that the weapon he has forged cannot be turned back upon him. You have my memories and knowledge, but I can see
yours, as well. I believe you can be turned, Ghan pressed. Not by me, but by yourself. I know what I know.

  “You know that the Blackgod and the Ebon Priest are the same. I never saw that.” It was too hard to think the way Ghan was asking him to think.

  I was going to tell you. Qwen Shen and Bone Eel took me before I could.

  “I know that, too,” Ghe replied. Overhead, the light filtering through the water abruptly darkened. We are underground now, he suddenly understood.

  I think Bone Eel may be the dangerous one, Ghan persisted.

  “I agree,” Ghe returned. “And I think I know who he may be. But what will they do with Hezhi? What is their plan? How can the River be killed?”

  I don’t know, Ghan answered. But I believe Hezhi is in great danger, or I would never willingly aid you.

  I know that, too.

  It grew even darker, and as it did so, his other sight began to fade. It was like being beneath the Water Temple, his senses fading as his potence grew. His surety and his direction vanished, and to his enormous frustration, he felt himself becoming confused. Again.

  He finally stopped swimming; the water about him was barely moving.

  What do I do now? But neither Ghan nor any other part of him knew the answer to that.

  And then, in the darkness, a beacon flared, one that seared him with pain, one that struck like a bolt into the River himself. Ghe turned and strained his body to swim as fast as he could, gathering his strength as he went.

  The Blackgod took her gently by the hand and led her to the edge of the water. Her trembling worsened, for suddenly she could feel the power there, latent in the pool. It lay quietly, stupidly, unlike the River she knew, but it was he, without doubt. If she wanted the power she need only reach for it, but it would not enter her against her will, not like before. She would become a goddess only by choice and if she had not chosen it before, she would certainly not choose it now.