by Greg Keyes
“Hezhi,” a voice muttered from very near. She turned to see Brother Horse, clutching a drum in one hand.
“Grandfather,” she whispered back.
“Can you see it? Can you see what you need?”
“Brother Horse, I’m dying.”
“Listen to me,” he snarled angrily. “I told you I wouldn’t let you do that. Won’t let you die! Listen to me…” But his eyes fluttered and he spat blood.
“What?” she asked, though she hardly felt concerned anymore—instead she felt strangely serene, light-headed.
“There.” He pointed at the thing that might have once been Ghe. “See, beneath the lake. Look beneath the lake.”
She looked. It was easy, for death was dragging her beneath anyway. She first saw Brother Horse, a fading warmth, his ghost already coming unmoored.
I can take him in, she thought. Like a god, keep him in my breast. She reached to do so.
But above the lake, his hand clutched hers. “No,” he barely whispered. “You don’t have the strength for that. You need me like this.” His eyes gleamed with laughter, love, and comfort as he gripped her hand more tightly. “Tell Heen I said farewell,” he murmured. “Heen tells me he loves you…” Then his eyes lost their light as a flame surged into her, filled her with new strength.
And Brother Horse was gone, his hand already cooling, no trace of his heartstrands remaining.
Look beneath the lake, he had said, and, trembling, she did so, afraid to waste his last gift on anguish.
The “waters” closed over her. I am dying, she realized again. The Blackgod stabbed me. And, finally, she understood Karak’s words, saw the use her blood would be put to, the results it would bring. She had to stop that somehow—and Brother Horse had seen how she could do it, seen some weapon she might use. He had pointed at Ghe.
She saw Karak still—a black thing of feathers and blue fire in the otherworld. She saw Ghe, too, knew him instantly. He still resembled some sort of inky net, with the scintillating bulbs of stolen souls bound to him like jeweled weights. But the net was rent, the pattern of his body in disarray. A few souls still glimmered there, however, and she reached, featherlight, to touch them.
Her swan and mare were still with her, though injured as she was. The swan guided her and the mare held her up, and together they brushed her fingers through the shattered remains of Ghe. One of the souls responded to her tentative inquiry, produced a voice that floated thinly to her.
“Hezhi?” it said. “Hezhi?”
She paused. She knew that voice. “Ghan?”
“Indeed,” he answered, gathering a bit of strength.
“Ghan, how did you—”
“I died. He captured my ghost—a fairly simple matter for him.”
“Ghan, I have so much to tell you,” she began. An image of him formed in her mind, his parchmentlike face, the knowing twinkle in his black eyes that could so often glare with irritation. She had lost Brother Horse, but here Ghan was back.
He laughed. “No time for that. No time for that at all.”
“No time for anything, I think,” she said.
“No, you are wrong. Ghe is stronger than the Blackgod knows, and I think if we can win his help, there is yet something we can do. But Hezhi, we must hurry.”
“Tell me what to do then.”
He told her.
Harka slashed down as Karak’s blade rose to meet it, and the two came together in a shower of sparks. In Perkar’s ear, Harka shrieked piteously. He had never known the weapon could feel pain or fear, but now both shuddered through him, as if the blade had become his own arm, skin removed and nerves laid bare.
Karak hammered down a second blow, and Perkar raised his blade to meet it.
“No!” Harka screamed; then steel clashed and the godblade burst into a thousand bits. The hilt leapt from his hand, and in his ear, Harka’s dying cry faded into nothing. Perkar swayed, weaponless, in the following silence.
“Now,” Karak said, “that silliness is over with.” He bent toward Hezhi’s body.
An arrow shaft appeared in his eye. Karak shrilled and straightened, seeking his new attacker. Ngangata stood less than a score of paces away. Half of his body was soaked in red Human blood, but he raised his bow for a second shot. Karak darted forward, faster than a mortal eye could follow, and in that eyeblink his sword plunged into the halfling’s chest. Ngangata snarled and yet tried to raise his weapon, but Karak twisted the blade, and Ngangata’s eyes turned to Perkar. They brimmed with tears of agony, but his gaze held no self-pity or even fear—it conveyed apology. Apology—for having failed him. Perkar leapt once again, shrieking inarticulately, still unarmed, bent upon tearing the Crow God apart with his bare hands. With a flashed look of utter disdain, Karak turned and ran him through, as well, the blade sliding into his navel and out his back. He knew no shock at being impaled, because in the past year he had taken more than one such wound. But before, he might have fought up the blade, or at least quickly disengaged himself. Now he merely glared at his murderer, still refusing to admit it was over.
Karak held him up with the blade for an instant, yellow eyes bright with contempt. “See how you like that without a magic sword to heal you,” he spat.
“Ah,” Perkar moaned. Karak released the hilt. Sword still in his belly, Perkar felt his knees wobble and give way, and he sat down roughly.
He almost fell on Ngangata. The halfling was still alive, though just barely so. Karak regarded them for just a moment, then stepped toward Hezhi.
“I-I’m sorry,” Ngangata managed to stammer.
“Shut up, you dumb Brush-Man,” Perkar whispered. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I could have… I could have…” Ngangata seemed confused, unable to think of what he might have done.
Trembling, Perkar leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I’m the one who is sorry, brother. Piraku with you and about you.” He patted the dying halfling on the shoulder. “I’ve got just one more thing to do,” he said, feeling a little giddy but otherwise surprisingly well, considering. “Then I’ll come join you here.”
Ngangata nodded but said nothing.
Perkar put both hands on the sword hilt, closed his eyes, and pulled.
Ghe brushed his lips upon Hezhi’s and felt triumph. He, a gutter scorp from Southtown, had kissed a princess. He stepped back from her, wanting to see her lovely eyes, hoping to see love there.
What he saw instead was urgency.
“Hello, Yen,” she said very seriously.
“Princess.”
“I need your help.”
Ghe noticed for the first time that there were other figures behind Hezhi. They all stood in the little courtyard above Nhol, where Hezhi had taken him once to look down at the ships. But he understood that could not be where they were as his memories—what little remained of them—returned.
“I’ve failed you,” he said, feeling hot, unaccustomed tears start in his eye, remembering the Blackgod carving him with a knife of living thunder.
“Not yet. There is still time,” Ghan said from behind Hezhi. The third figure was the stream demon, the woman—she sat sullenly on the bench by the cottonwood tree. Near her, looking old and defeated, stood the ancient Nholish lord he had captured in the Water Temple. Lengnata was fat, his eyes piggish little dots.
“Where are we, really?” he asked Hezhi.
“In your mansion. The place where you keep the souls you capture.”
“How did you get here?”
“I came to see you, Ghe. Because there is something you can do to save me.”
“Anything.”
“You must slay the River to do it.”
Ghe’s limbs began to quake. He shuddered violently. “I can’t do that. You have to know I can’t do that. Even if I had the power—”
Anger wrote itself on her features. “You owe me,” she declared. “You made me think you liked me, maybe more than liked me. You owe me.”
“I love y
ou,” he whispered.
“I don’t know what that means,” she retorted, but softening. “But I know that I need your help.”
“I cannot slay the River!”
Ghan interrupted him. “Have you forgotten Li again, Ghe? We found bits of her in you, in your memory, hidden away and dimmed from your waking mind. The River tried to clean them out of you. He made you kill her, Ghe, because he would not give you what few memories you cherished.”
Hezhi held something out to him—not something physical, but fragments of his mind, like a shattered mirror. Images of an old woman, her love for him, the care that only she had ever lavished upon him. A day long ago, on the levee of the River…
“He did steal her from me, didn’t he? Why did he do that?”
Hezhi reached up and brushed the hair from his eyes. “To keep you from being distracted. A real man—one with his own thoughts and motives and loves—a real man makes a poor weapon for the River. The River hates us because he will never really understand us, no matter that he wants our bodies as vessels. He hates you, Ghe, hates me, simply because he needs us. I know what it’s like, to have him in me. I do.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “But Ghe, he made you from a man. Part of you is still a man. And despite what you did to me, you don’t deserve what he has done to you. Neither of us deserves it. I am dying, Ghe. Only you can save me.”
An inchoate anger was growing in him, but still he persisted. “I… He made me so. I cannot but serve him.”
“No,” Hezhi said. “No, if you love me, you can serve me. You once told Ghan that whatever I wanted—”
“I lied! Ghan knows that.”
“You thought you lied,” Ghan said. “But I believed you because it was a deeper truth than you knew. It was the man in you, rather than the Riverghost.”
Ghe stilled his trembling, braiding his anger and his love. He reached into the secret, cold place that had helped him kill, back when he had been merely Human, when a misstep meant his own death, when compassion was a deadly thing. He wove that into the fibers, too, a warp to lay the weft through. I am a blade of silver, I am a sickle of ice, he whispered, and finally, once again, he was.
“What must I do?” he heard himself say.
Hezhi leaned up and kissed the scar on his chin, the first wound he ever received. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But what you have to do is die. But we will help you.” And she gestured to the stream demon.
“Die,” he considered. “I have to die.” He focused on her again, on the exquisite shape of her face. “Will you forgive me then?”
“I already forgive you, Ghe.”
“Call me Yen.”
She smiled. “Yen.”
It took three pulls to remove the sword, each more painful than the last, and the final heave was followed by a gout of blood that he knew must surely have drained him. Nevertheless, though his legs felt like wood, he struggled to stand.
Nearby, another huge figure stood over Hezhi, which Perkar recognized as Tsem. The Giant interposed himself between the girl and the god.
“This is getting tiresome,” Karak said. “Perkar, lay down and die. Tsem… oh, never mind.” He raised his hand.
A scorpion stinger as thick as a Human leg struck the god as a nightmare jumble of limbs and plates suddenly crawled back into motion. Karak rolled his eyes—not in pain but in irritation—and struck the thing away with his hand. “And you!” he snapped. The monster with the face of the assassin from Nhol rose unsteadily on several spiderlike legs. It should have been dead—Perkar could see the hole in it, how burnt and charred it was. Only its head remained Human, and it was the Human eyes that held Perkar, not the monstrous body.
“Perkar,” the thing croaked.
He was so weak. His knees shook. He didn’t even know what he imagined he would do with the sword he had just pulled from himself. Strike Karak one more useless blow? But here was this thing, the thing that had eaten the Stream Goddess…
He raised his sword, though the earth sought to drag it from his hand.
He carried his weight into the swing, knowing that if he missed it wouldn’t matter anyway, he would never stand to attack again. He wondered dully why the Tiskawa tilted its head back, as if inviting the blow.
The Blackgod was perhaps more injured than he let on, for though he lunged to place himself between Perkar and the River-thing, he was too slow to avoid Tsem’s broken club, which struck him in the shoulder blade and caused him to stumble. Then it was too late, and the sword Perkar’s father had given him—the sword forged by the little Steel God Ko—bit deeply.
For the second time, Perkar watched Ghe’s head leave its body. It was strange that the final expression to grace the assassin’s face seemed to reflect victory rather than defeat.
XXXVIII
Horse Mother
Blood geysered into the cavern, spewing from the stump of the River-thing’s neck. It fell toward the lake and gouted liquid into the water, and the water burned. It caught like dry leaves in high autumn, like pitch. Glorious light of many colors gyred and capered madly in the cavern, and Perkar sank back to his knees beneath the rainbow dance of the River’s death—and his own. And though wonder should have been shocked out of him, he still laughed and wept tears of joy when he saw, amongst those flames, a lithe form he had once loved, the Goddess of the Stream, hair coursing opalescent as she skated across the surface of the dying god.
“What have you done?” Karak shrieked. “What have you done?”
“Slain the River, I think,” Perkar answered, dropping his blade so he could lower himself to the floor with one hand and clutch his belly with the other. It was starting to hurt now, a slow burning that he knew would consume him for a long time before finally killing him.
“Not as I planned, pretty thing,” Karak snarled.
“Nevertheless, I think he is dead.”
“Perhaps,” Karak said. “I don’t see how, but—”
“It is true; you know it. I have done it for you.”
“It is not as I wished it to be,” Karak complained, his voice becoming a trifle petty.
“Karak, please. I know you can heal Hezhi and Ngangata, if they are not dead. Please. We did what you wanted. The Changeling is no more.”
“But what is in his place?” Karak snarled. “That I do not know. Perhaps he will be as bad as the Brother.”
That seemed wrong to Perkar, but it was just a feeling. And it was too much trouble to argue. “Save them,” he repeated instead.
“What of you, pretty thing? You don’t want to die, do you?”
“No,” he answered, knowing at last that it was the truth. “No, I don’t. But they should come first.”
“How sweet. But seeing as how you acted contrary to my wishes, I will heal none of you.”
“As if you ever acted in accord with anyone’s wishes,” a voice boomed, shuddering the very stone beneath their feet. “As if you ever accomplished the goal without twisting the intent.”
Karak and Perkar turned as one at the low, grating voice, a voice nearly below Perkar’s hearing.
“Balati,” Karak said, almost a groan, almost an imprecation.
It was, indeed, the Forest Lord. His single black eye reflected the glimmering flames upon the water, but the rest of him seemed to drink in the light, a mass of fur and shadow and antlers that were really, Perkar could see now, trees that reached up and up, never ceasing to rise and branch. Near him stood a mare with a coat of gold and rust, the most magnificent mare Perkar had ever beheld. As Balati spoke again, the horse turned and sniffed first at the still form of Sharp Tiger, then at Hezhi.
“You have played a merry prank on me, Crow,” Balati muttered, his voice as solid and unyielding as stone. “You have killed my Brother.”
“He was dangerous,” Karak hissed. “In another thousand years—when it was far too late, and he was eating you—you would have understood that yourself.”
“That is what you are for, Karak,” Balati said. “That is m
y use for you, and you have performed it well. My Brother was ill—dead even. He was the ghost of a god, envying the living.”
“Ah!” Karak brightened. “It is well then—you do understand. In that case, perhaps I should fly and see precisely what has been wrought here. The new River God, like the old, has no sentience in Erikwer, but when he emerges from the cavern—”
“Oh, no, I think not,” Balati said, almost gently. “You need humbling, I believe, and I need you with me for a time, so that I can quicken enough to understand all of this.”
“Lord,” Karak said, “there is much I need to be about, much to be done in the world as it shall become.”
“Yes, I’m sure. But we will let mortals do it for a while, and the little gods of the land.”
Karak suddenly transformed into a crow and took wing, but as he flew, he shrank, and the Forest Lord reached out a massive paw and closed it upon him. Perkar heard a single, pitiful grawk and then saw no more of the Raven.
“L-Lord Balati—” Perkar stammered.
“I know you,” Balati said. “You slew my guardian, stole my things.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “But I—and I alone of these here, and of my people—” Perkar groaned through thickening pain. “I was to blame, no one else.”
Balati cocked his head slowly to one side. Unlike the Raven, unlike the Huntress or indeed any other god Perkar had known, there was nothing Human in the gaze of Balati. He was the world before men or Alwat, the forest and the land before the forest came alive. There was no mercy, no compassion—nor hatred nor envy nor greed—to be understood in that nebulous single orb. “You wanted something before,” he rumbled. “What was it?”
Perkar blinked. “Before… ?”
“When you stole my things.”
A year ago, Perkar realized, when Apad and Eruka and the Kapaka and the Alwat all died. “We… we came to request more land for pasture, so that we need not fight the Mang.”
