Chosen of the Changeling

by Greg Keyes

  I am a blade of silver, a sickle of ice. Ghe sighed, intoning his old assassin’s mantra, hurtling across the space between two rooftops. He bounded up and over a ridgebeam, fell uncontrolled down the steep, opposite side as new fire entered his wounds. Fetching up against a parapet, he grasped the shaft protruding from his chest and yanked it out. The arrow squirmed in his hand, and he saw it as a line of darkness, like burning incense. Just holding it stung his hand, and he tossed it away, wondering if he had ever known of such weapons before this day.

  He ran on across the rooftops, feet slapping on roof tiles, the black scales of the sleeping night dragon. When he was certain his pursuit was outdistanced, he stopped to withdraw the second dart from his leg; this was easy enough, for the missile had somehow eaten a nearly fist-size hole in his thigh.

  He continued to weaken, even with the arrows removed. By the time he reached the wall surrounding the palace, he was dizzy, stumbling. He heard a surprised shout from one of the imperial sentinels, and then he was over, plummeting toward the street. He struck it clumsily, one leg twisting horribly beneath him. Had he been merely Human, he knew he would never have survived the fall at all, but even so, he felt things tearing.

  Sobbing in frustration, he struggled to hands and knees and began to crawl.

  No! he snarled inwardly, and then “No!” forced from his panting mouth. “No crawling.” He staggered up again and sagged against a wall. There were several shouts from atop the looming darkness of the palace, and so, gritting, he stumbled off down the street.

  On the next corner, he met a woman, perhaps sixteen, and he took her life immediately, greedily. Her eyes never even registered shock, glazing over whatever thoughts she had been entertaining, the faint smile on her lips frozen as well. Ghe proceeded across the city like that, feeding as he went, leaving a score of dead behind him. It was like trying to fill a cracked pot; the new strength leaked from him as soon as it entered, and he knew he was leaving a trail of corpses any fool could follow.

  Worse, he realized that he didn’t know where he was. He had allowed some animal part of him to rule, and that was stupid, stupid, for any animal, no matter how strong, could be hunted and killed by the weakest man, so long as he was clever. The Ahw’en and the Jik were more than clever. He reeled about on the night-dark street, searching for some clue to his whereabouts. His wounds ached, and the life of his latest victim leaked from his yawning mouth. He leaned against a stoop to gather in his breath.

  “What is wrong with you?” a small voice asked. Ghe turned in surprise, and his hunger urged him to reach to where the voice was and take sustenance. Ghe fought the impulse, focusing his sharp eyes instead. A child sat on the stoop, gazing at him with large, ebony eyes.

  “Hezhi?” he gasped.

  “No,” the child answered. “That isn’t my name.”

  It wasn’t she, of course. In fact, it was a boy, and some years younger than Hezhi.

  “Boy,” he whispered, “how can you see me in this darkness?”

  “I can’t see anything,” the boy replied. “I’ve never seen anything. But I can hear you.”

  “Oh.” It was difficult, fighting the urge to kill. But he had questions to ask. “Perhaps you can tell me,” he managed. “Where am I?”

  “You sound hurt,” the boy said. “You smell funny.”

  “Please. Just tell me.”

  “This is Southtown, just along Levee Way. The River is behind me. Can’t you smell him?”

  Ghe closed eyes. He could. Of course he could.

  “I can smell him. I can hear him, too.”

  “Hear him?”

  “He sings to me. He woke me up tonight.”

  “Did he?” Ghe was growing impatient, but something stayed his hand yet.

  “And I dreamed. I dreamed of vision. I dreamed I could see.”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” the boy went on. “I dreamed some beast ate me, but he did not chew me up. He just swallowed me whole, and I could see through his animal eyes.”

  Ghe had heard enough. He could no longer concentrate on the boy’s words. He reached out hungrily, tore the pulsing strands of light from their fragile moorings. The boy gave a little cry, a shudder, and fell forward into the street.

  He did not chew me up, the boy’s words seemed to repeat themselves, and Ghe, despite his furious need, paused.

  What would happen to these little bundles if he did not devour them? He remembered the Jik he had killed, days ago, how the heartstrands had drifted off, a seed that might become a ghost, but which more likely the River devoured. As he considered this, the boy’s life began to tug toward the River, and Ghe followed.

  It wasn’t long before he could feel the water, his lord. This part of Southtown was mostly abandoned because the marsh had invaded it, and the mud streets were filled with standing water. He sloshed through the quagmire and instantly felt strength returning, hunger abating somewhat. His thoughts sharpened, cut from his brain through the flesh of the beast.

  The little ghost was still tugging at its leash, trying to bleed into the River water, but Ghe kept hold, considering. The River had sent him this child; for what purpose? Experimentally, he pulled the knot of spirit into him, but not to the furnace in his heart. Instead he discovered a sort of empty space, one that he had not known existed. The ghost settled in there, tied itself to his own strands and, though it faded, remained. Ghe felt, then, a new sort of strength. Incremental, to be sure, but it was a strength he knew would not fade. The boy’s memories were there, too, for him to use. He leafed through them as through a book, the years of darkness in Southtown, a hunger of its own sort. Memories to replace his own lost ones. And he felt the fear, the surprise of death, though it was retreating, replaced by awe and wonder. For what was left of the boy was part of Ghe, and Ghe could see.

  Ghe reached the levee and strode over it, found the vastness of his lord beyond, waded in until he was submerged. In the water of the River, he had no need of breath, and as his wounds finally healed, he considered what he had done, what it meant.

  What if he had not eaten that first monster, there beneath the Darkness Stair? Would its strength be slave to him now, bound to him as this boy was? How stupid he had been! The River meant for him to bind, not merely to feed. He could be not one, but legion, fill himself with a whole court, and he would be their emperor. That was where his real strength lay. Still he would be cautious, still the priesthood might find some way to kill him. But now he was more than he had been, and he would be much more still. Content for the moment, he rested, knowing his lord would hide him, even from those who followed.

  Before dawn he found an abandoned house, nearly consumed by the fringe of the Yellow-Haired Swamp. He watched the dawn flush the waving, waist-high grasses that spread out south for as far as he could see, bordered only by the River on his left and a string of huts trailing its western fringe. Someone had told him—he could not, of course, remember who—that before he was born, this part of the swamp had been a checkered expanse of rice paddies, and in those days Southtown had enjoyed a certain mild prosperity, its inhabitants working the fields and keeping some measure of the crop for themselves. The River had flooded, however, not hugely but enough to silt up the fine network of paddies, and whatever lord owned it had decided the rice wasn’t worth his trouble, not with cheaper rice coming up-river by the ton on barges from the Swamp Kingdoms. The swamp had been allowed to have the fields.

  The house that now sheltered him reflected that earlier, more affluent year. It had been raised on sturdy cypress posts, and its floor had once been polished, traces of smooth sheen still noticeable in a few places. It had two stories, though now the roof was gone and birds nested in the upper story, whose rafters were gently collapsing in like the ribs of a corpse. The posts had shifted and begun to sink, and the floor sloped at a noticeable angle, bird droppings covering most of the once beautiful planks. Such, in sum, was Southtown.

  Even this early in the morning, Ghe cou
ld make out a few bobbing heads scaring up the cranes and blackbirds; men and women wading through the muck with gigs and nets, searching for the almost inedible mudfish, salamanders, and eels that lived beneath the grasses. More than one would probably cut his feet or calves on the spines of the mudfish. He could remember an old man he once knew, his foot and finally his whole leg distended, blue and purple, rotting even while he was still alive. The boy he had gathered remembered more, his father dying from such an infection, the unbearable sweet scent of it. Terrible grief.

  There was food in the Yellow-Haired Swamp, but there was more danger. Most in Southtown preferred a life of begging or thievery to the dangers of the mud, though a few still cultivated pitiful patches of rice here and there.

  Wading in the swamp had never been for him, he was certain, though he remembered hunting frogs at its edge, recalled the stink of it more than well enough. As a Jik, he had learned the reason for the stink he had been accustomed to for most of his life: the central sewage ducts from the palace emptied there.

  Still, the swamp had a certain beauty, he could see that now, and with the wind blowing at his back, bending the grass away from Nhol, the stench wasn’t so bad. He found himself wishing the fishers luck, when before he had only thought them stupid.

  He could afford to be generous with such sentiments; he was strong now, his injuries entirely healed. Only the oldest wound, the ridged scar encircling his neck, tingled a bit uncomfortably, and he suspected that he knew the meaning of that. The River was becoming, in his way, impatient. Things must be happening elsewhere, with Hezhi, with her demon swordsman. Now that he understood what kind of strength he had, it was time to put it to use; before the Ahw’en and the Jik found him once more and made a better job of ending his existence.

  He fingered the scar and wondered, absently, when it had ceased to repel him, when he had ceased to be at least inwardly horrified at his state. His lack of memories still troubled him, but now he had those of the boy—smell, touch, and taste anyway—to fill in the blank spaces of his childhood. An odd comfort, and he knew he would once have been disgusted by that, as well, but that had been a different, somewhat stupider Ghe.

  And what would the smarter, stronger Ghe do today? He would invade the Great Water Temple, though on the surface that hardly testified to intelligence. But it was now or not at all, he felt sure of that.

  And so, after watching the sunrise, Ghe rose up from the floor that creaked beneath him, and he thought of how he might best enter the most holy place of the priesthood, the sanctum of those who hunted him so persistently.

  The answer gurgled and spluttered no more than a stone’s throw from the dilapidated hut: a sewer duct, emptying into the swamp. Wide enough to crawl through, but only just barely. Ghe allowed himself a bit of a smile. Hezhi would have crawled into such a tube, if she thought knowledge lay through it. Could he do any less?

  He found the sewer firmly sealed by a heavy iron grate, but for him, at the peak of his power, that was no deterrent. The pins that held it in place were newer—much newer—than the rotten ones that had torn beneath his weight back at “his” apartments, but they protested no longer when he exerted himself. He peered up into the darkness, aware of the almost unbelievable stench but unconcerned by it. Even the old Ghe would have been able to deal with that, and he, the ghoul, cared far less about such temporary discomforts. He paused only a moment before entering, to check his weapons, a reflex so thoroughly ingrained in him from his training as an assassin that it was not a matter of thought. When he realized what he was doing, he chuckled aloud, for, of course, he had no weapons of steel. But still he had the jwed, the way of darting hands, and he had his power. They had nearly failed him back in the palace, but a weapon would have helped him not at all. His hands, his power, his cunning must serve him, or nothing would.

  And so he crawled into the tube.

  Only the faintest tingle of claustrophobia and a hint of boredom betrayed his Human origins; otherwise he slithered up the tube like a snake. When the sediment on the floor of the duct had settled too thickly, he could not move forward at all, and he would stop to patiently claw at the offending matter until he could squeeze through. When the tube dipped and filled with water for a time, he was just as unconcerned.

  How long this took, he could not say and only vaguely cared. After some interminable period, he reached another grate, this one of steel, and though it resisted him a bit longer, it soon opened before him, too, allowing him to enter into a larger way, one that he could stand in, albeit hunched.

  He twisted through the labyrinth, the complex overlapping of sewers, flood drains, and, finally, sacred water tubes that he knew Hezhi had mapped. He, however, did not have need of such a map, for in him was the River’s strange awareness of flowing, his own expertise with the underways, and even an added tactile sense from the ghost of the boy that was tethered to his heart. The River’s unspecified “map” of himself was somehow filtered through the boy’s sense of space without sight, and though Ghe would not have needed this added advantage to find the temple, it helped. And when he reached the temple itself, the River in him would be blind, would it not? He wondered, then, how much of his power he would retain, in those dark precincts below the great fountains and the alabaster steps. Perhaps, once again, his head would merely roll from his shoulders, and he would be undone, a corpse made puppet and then corpse again as its strings were severed.

  He did not believe that would happen, but no matter. This was the path to serving the River, and it was the way that led, finally, to Hezhi. And he was no mere puppet, not some silly creature on a string.

  And that was what he was thinking when his vision blurred, grayed, and doubt renewed itself as, at last, he crouched beneath the Great Water Temple.

  XIV

  Horse God Homesending

  Hezhi sat on the stoop, contemplating her drum, as Brother Horse, with a pat meant to be reassuring, rose and went back to his duties. The sun set and stars scattered across the dome of the sky, obscured only by a few tatters of indigo velvet clouds that quickly faded to mist. The Mang kept up their chanting, and the very air seemed to hum with some secret presence.

  Tsem went in to get some more water, and when he returned, he said in a worried voice, “Something is happening to him.”

  Hezhi turned fearfully back to the yekt, reluctantly stood, and walked inside.

  Ngangata watched Perkar, his thick features cast in a worried mold. His forehead—what little there was of it—bunched like columns of caterpillars, his eyebrows their furry sovereigns.

  Perkar moaned, then thrashed a bit. He opened his mouth and a few syllables bubbled forth, nothing she understood. Ngangata, however, nodded. “Here,” he answered in Mang, then switched to another language. With his right hand he beckoned her.

  To her horror, Perkar’s eyes slitted open, and the orbs beneath were glazed a peculiar blue, like those of a fish several days dead.

  “Hezhi,” he muttered, barely audible.

  “I am here,” she answered. She thought of taking his hand from Ngangata, but the idea repelled her; she knew what was crouched on his chest, what she would touch if she touched him.

  “You must … shikena kadakatita …” His tongue stuttered off into something she didn’t understand, as if his River-given command of Nholish were failing. She looked to Ngangata.

  “You have to go to the mountain,” Ngangata translated reluctantly.

  “Balatata.” Perkar gasped.

  “Yes, I know,” Ngangata assured him.

  “What? What does he mean?”

  “He is perhaps delirious.”

  “Tell me what he said,” Hezhi insisted, and then to Perkar, in Nholish: “Perkar! Tell me.”

  Perkar’s eyes opened wider, but his voice dropped away.

  “He seeks you,” the faint breath from his mouth said. “The River seeks you. You must go to She’leng, the mountain. Look for signs …” His mouth kept working, but even the semblance of
sound failed.

  “His body seems a bit stronger,” Ngangata remarked after a moment. “But he should be well now. What did Brother Horse tell you?”

  “That he has had a witching placed on him.”

  “No more?”

  “More,” Hezhi admitted, “but I must think on it.”

  “Think quickly, then,” the half man urged, “if there is anything you can do.”

  Behind her, Tsem growled. “Have a care, creature,” he said, the Mang thudding clumsily, like stones from his mouth.

  Ngangata frowned but did not reply. Nor did he relinquish the hold of his gaze on her for several more heartbeats.

  “I will think quickly,” she said, and left the tent. Tsem followed her, but not without casting a hard glance back.

  “Thank you, Tsem,” she told him once they were outside, “but Ngangata is right. I can’t let him die.”

  “You could. It might save us a lot of trouble.”

  “No, Tsem, you know I can’t.”

  He grumbled incoherently and shrugged a bit.

  “Ngangata is like you, you know.”