Chosen of the Changeling

by Greg Keyes

  Perkar sucked in a retort, and when he had the control, asked, as humbly as he could, “Will you tell me now how the Changeling can be destroyed by Hezhi?”

  Karak cocked his head appraisingly. “You are learning, pretty thing. Perhaps my despair over you has been unwarranted. What an irony that would be, since it has kept me sleepless.”

  Perkar worried that he would grit his teeth into grains of salt. His anger was dissolving—or at least mixing with a bottomless terror as he remembered that Raven gone white, holding him helpless off the ground. He wanted to retort, to singe the god with his words, but he could not. And he knew—as Karak seemed to know, from the mocking sarcasm in his tone—that it was fear and not wisdom that stayed his hand and tongue.

  “Please,” he said. “We have come too far to fail. If you don’t tell me what we should do—”

  “Never fear, Perkar. Some of the burden I have lifted from your shoulders. The thing I foresaw marching out from Nhol has come, and it gathers power and terror about it. It is a demon of sorts, what your folk call a Tiskawa.”

  “Life-Devourer,” Perkar muttered. “That lifts no burden from me, Karak. If such a thing stalks us—”

  “Well, you trade for this and you get that,” Karak allowed. “When the time comes, I am confident that you and Harka can stand against such a creature. What eases your load is that because of this thing and the stink of Changeling about it, its power—I may now escort you to the mountain. With such a blemish crawling through Balat, the Forest Lord will scarce take notice of us, unless we give him excessive cause to. So you see, your fears that you will not know what to do once we reach his source are unfounded. I will be along, in this guise, to help you.” He leaned up, and his voice became lighter in tone but heavier with threat. “And only you and I are to know this, of course. The others need only know that a distant kinsman of yours and thirty of his men will ride with you on your quest.

  “What of Hezhi? She does not know that she is the crucial one. What if she refuses to go, fearing the Changeling as she does?”

  “She will go,” Karak assured him.

  “And what of my feelings on this matter?” he snarled, forcing strength into his voice despite the quivering in his limbs. “Suppose I will not help you lead her there without her consent?”

  “You have had many months to tell her if you were going to. You have not; you will not. You, too, desperately wish to have your lost Piraku back, to end the war with the Mang, to set your part in your people’s affairs to rights. And if that isn’t enough—” He smiled. “Draw out your blade.”

  Perkar hung his head. “I have made no move to do so. I have not threatened you.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Karak said softly. “I said draw—out—your—blade.” His command was like knife thrusts through a silk shirt.

  Numbly, Perkar took Harka out. He doesn’t need me now to get her to the mountain, he realized. He can take my form. No one will know. He held his weapon up, saw with dismay the way the firelight quivered upon the metal—or, rather, the way the blade shivered in his grip.

  Karak reached out laconically and pressed his palm against Harka’s tip. He pressed until a faint, golden drop of blood started. Perkar felt sweat beading on his brow. What was the Blackgod doing?

  “Close your eyes,” Karak intoned.

  “If you are to kill me, I wish to die with them open,” he answered.

  Karak rolled his own yellow orbs. “Stop being so melodramatic, you fool, and close your eyes. I only want to show you something.”

  Perkar breathed deeply, captured a breath, and held it for an instant. As he released it, he allowed his lids to meet.

  He saw a boat, broken by dying dragons. His vision was odd, as if he stood far away and high above the things he observed; yet they were all clear to him. There was no doubt of what he saw. But what was happening? He watched in confusion as the great serpents became steam and vanished, as countless men and horses died in the water, from impact, from boiling alive.

  Now he saw two men he knew. One was Ghan, the old man who had contracted with him to rescue Hezhi, back in Nhol. The other was familiar, sharply so, and yet he could not precisely place from where he knew that face. And where they were seemed familiar, as well, a small river …

  Then she emerged. And as he watched what transpired then, he shrieked and he wept, and that night he did not sleep at all, but rode round and round on that same black nightmare, a mount with no mercy, that squeezed and squeezed his heart until anger crushed into fear, despair into hope, joy into pain. Crushed together until they became, at last, something different from all of those emotions, something that gleamed like the fangs of a beast or the edge of a butcher’s blade.

  Hezhi lay awake in bed, muffled in the lush folds of a down-batted quilt, surrounded by the faint gleam of polished wood in moonlight from a half-slatted window. She felt, now, that she had misjudged the damakuta. It was, indeed, a place of comfort and, more to the point, a place of warmth. She shared her room with three other girls, all within a few years of her own age. Though they spoke no common language, they had been kind enough to her, saw that she had plenty to eat and warm covers, and gave her a long thick woolen shirt that, though it itched and scratched, kept away the mountain chill. The food was odd: bread boiled into dumplings, a thick stew of curd and pungent cheese, some kind of roasted bird—but it was cooked and filling and warm.

  That and the sauna almost convinced her to put away her fears and sleep, and when she struggled out of the nightshirt and slipped into the enveloping softness of quilt and mattress, she very nearly surrendered. Almost asleep, drifting languidly from one terrace of cloud to the next …

  And then she awoke, to a falling terror, to the call of some nightbird strange to her.

  After that, her heart would not stop thudding, but instead picked up her earlier worries, pumped them round and round her body so that they pulsed in her throat, at her wrists, until finally she could bear it no longer and slipped from the bed into the cool night air. She paused at her shadow, cast by moonlight, turned slowly so that the Queen of Night could cast more angles of her on the floor. Her body had changed since leaving the River. Grown more … awkward, somehow. She could see the same thing in her roommates, before they fell asleep. Sisters, they were like images of each other at different ages—and in her own mind, of herself. The youngest was all smallness, limbs smooth and uniform, balanced and beautiful. The eldest girl—Numa? Perhaps fifteen years old, she looked like a woman; sweetly curved hips, breasts, symmetry. The middle girl, though, that was her. Feet, like a puppy’s, too big for her body. Bumps that could not yet be called breasts but that ruined the younger harmony of her body.

  And all of that happening without any interference from gods or spirits or anything else. She shook her head at the clumsy outline on the floor and wished she had a mirror.

  And then she smiled at that. What a silly time to discover vanity.

  She found her discarded nightshirt and donned it. Unpacking her drum, she took it by the rim and, with its beater, stepped softly through the wide vertical slats of the window onto the slope of the roof. There she took in her bearings with a breath of night breeze and turned to absorb the high beauty of moonlit mountain slopes and silver-chased clouds. She padded slowly and carefully up to the roofbeam, thinking how much the cedar shingles, in this darkness, resembled the baked clay tiles she had trod so often in Nhol. Except that they smelled better, like the sauna, like the woods.

  The nightbird called again, sounding less alien now—Perkar had named it for her, a few nights ago: some sort of owl.

  Sitting on the roofbeam, she tapped softly on her drum, on the rippling surface of the lake, and ripples parted upon darkness and night as she went first into the otherworld of her heart.

  There they all awaited her: the mare, the swan, and the bull.

  “This time, you all come with me,” she said. And the bull stamped and rolled his eyes.

  Together they rushe
d beneath the surface of the lake, sometimes three and sometimes four figures limned in flame bruising the otherearth with the thunder of their passage. She rode with the mare, half horse as before, and she flew on the wings of the swan, and finally, when he offered for a third time, she joined the bull, felt the uncanny furnace that raged in his chest fill her with fury and unholy joy. She cackled with glee as stone shattered beneath their hooves, as they reached the edge of a precipice and flung out into space to write a line of lightning across the mauve sky.

  The instinct of the beasts drove them toward She’leng; they were born there and returned there to be reclothed, and this near they were always able to find it. In the shadows of the air, Hezhi saw what she had not seen before: the dark forms like serpents and wolves that lay in wait for the unwary, for the weak; the thousand thousand jaws and eyes of the otherworld that dared not open to her and her companions. Beyond fear and worry, she knew only fierce elation at such power, at such untouchability. She only barely remembered the concerns that had driven her to seek the mountain with her ghost self, but they all seemed unimportant now.

  Perhaps she would visit the River himself and see how he lay here. Perhaps she would challenge him here and now and have an ending to it all.

  She understood, distantly, that these were the sentiments of the bull, but she did not care; it did not trouble her.

  They struck back to earth from the sky, for solidity gave more pleasure to run upon; the mountain loomed and the lands rose, but it caused them no pause; there was no fatigue here.

  But in the midst of seeming omnipotence, something shattered the earth; it twisted beneath them and dashed them, scattered them. A sharp jolt of ecstatic fear burnt through the quicksilver joy, and Hezhi scrambled back to her feet, the bull, mare, and swan forming a rank of protection before her as something dark rose looming.

  A black lion, she was, whose mouth parted to reveal the shadows of dagger-teeth against the red soul that burned in her shell, that illumined her eyes from behind, as well, slits of flame with no pupils. A black lion the size of the bull. He lowered his horns to meet her.

  “Call back your beast,” the lioness said. “The others will not aid you.”

  Indeed, Hezhi saw with a thrill of dismay that the mare and the swan were kneeling, after their fashion. The bull himself trembled, trepidation mixed with fury.

  “Who are you?” Hezhi asked, her godlike confidence quickly evaporating.

  “We have met, you and I,” the lioness said, and she seemed to grin—at least she showed the full range of her teeth and switched her great tail behind. She spoke then, to the bull.

  “Kneel down, Hukwosha. I know you, and you know me. You know I cannot be challenged here. Be wise for your new mistress.”

  The bull regarded the lioness steadily, but Hezhi sensed a frustrated easing of muscles, as if the bull agreed, however reluctantly, with the pronouncement of the great clawed beast.

  As easily as that, I am without protectors, she thought.

  “You should remember me, and it pains me that you do not,” the lioness growled, padding closer, pausing to run her tongue on the fur of the mare—whether grooming or tasting, Hezhi could not tell. She advanced until the twin coals of her eyes were inches from Hezhi’s own.

  “Let me introduce myself,” the lioness went on. “I am Paker, Apa, Bari—I have many names, but most often I am called Huntress.”

  XXXI

  The Lady of Bones

  Sensation crept along Ghe’s skin, pleasure and darkling pain, and he bit into his lip until he found the iron tang of blood A fountain of flame seemed to erupt from him, and white-hot stars fluoresced and faded in the heavens behind his eyelids. The woman caressing him stroked his face, and he looked up into her features. And remembered.

  Hezhi’s older face, Qwen Shen—both stared down at him. Fury and futility surged in the wake of gratification. How many times had she done this to him? How many times had he forgotten? Somehow he understood that he always forgot, remembered the passion but not the details, the woman but not the witchery. What was Qwen Shen doing to him? A wave of humiliation coursed through him as he answered himself: she controlled him. She held him taut on a leash, and he did not even realize that, save in these lucid instants after …

  After what? What had he been thinking? Something annoying, but slipping from him. Something about Qwen Shen’s face, glowing above him, lips curled in a gentle, teasing expression.

  And then, of a sudden, she was no longer Qwen Shen. He was suddenly straddled by a corpse, bones of black ice, the withered face of a mummy leering down at him. And then that horror was replaced by yet another woman, beautiful and dark, whom he had never seen before.

  “Ah, sweet Ghe,” she sighed as she stroked his face with a finger that was both a yellowed bone and supple, black skin. “Thy mother gave you unto me with thy birth. It is my womb you return to, and it aches for you. You and this godling cause me pain with this delay, sweet one.”

  “You,” he gasped, frozen by terror or glamour, he knew not which. In his mind he suddenly beheld the little bone statuette that Li once kept, the forbidden image of a goddess the priests said did not exist. But the accursed of Southtown believed, down deep, in their ancient goddess—though he never had; for him the only god was the River, and the Lady just another tale to frighten children.

  “Yes, of course you know me,” the Lady said, and where she touched him, worms sprang from his flesh. “Come with me now, before you cause yourself more pain. He only tricks you, you know. You will never live beyond his wish. Much of you is already with me, if you would like to see it.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Everything you have lost—the most of you, sweet Ghe, lies corrupting in my house. It is all there, your childhood, memories of Li—whom you took from me, by the way.”

  “I did not—I never …”

  She smiled, and her smile split back to her ears, as her black almond eyes were suddenly Hezhi’s. “All men are surprised by me,” she assured him. “But few wish to resist.”

  “I will not go,” Ghe snarled suddenly. “Not yet.”

  She looked down at him sadly, an old woman—Li, in fact. “Why torment yourself?”

  Ghe reached out, then, intent on swallowing her—after all, a goddess was a goddess, and he had already swallowed one such. But what was in her eluded him; nothing was there to devour, only emptiness. She laughed.

  “Even gods are living,” she cackled. “But I am death.”

  “I will defeat you then,” Ghe snarled. “I have taken many gods into myself these past days. I have dined on great powers, and they will sustain me until nothing lives or moves on the earth.”

  “For me,” she replied sweetly, “even that space of time is nothing—save perhaps annoying. You don’t want me to be annoyed when you come to suckle at my breast at last.”

  “Take me if you can,” Ghe shot back. “And if you cannot, then leave me.”

  She nodded distantly. “Very well,” she told him. “I gave you the chance, for Li, who loved me, who burned incense for me. I will not offer this again.”

  “You offer me only death.”

  “Death is sweeter than anything you will know now,” she answered, and was gone.

  He awoke shuddering. Qwen Shen stroked him, consoled him with little words, with small kisses. She looked worried. He reached to touch her face, and for just an instant, a bare instant, he saw not her face but Hezhi’s, and a sudden rage filled him, but try as he might, he could find no reason for the emotion. So, bit by bit, he allowed himself to be soothed, knowing that given time, he would discern his vision of the Lady to be only a lying dream, perhaps a false vision given him by one of his more willful vassals—for a few still fought for freedom. But now he was far too strong to be escaped or troubled by dreams; since meeting the Mang shaman, Moss, at White Rock, he had found the land rich in these so-called gods and now he was swollen with them, distended. Perhaps it was merely a sort of heartburn th
at plagued him.

  “You are well now?” Qwen Shen asked, the first words she had spoken.

  He nodded.

  “Good, then. What was wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he answered. “A sort of night terror.”

  She clucked softly. “But you do not sleep, my love.”

  “No, but it is always night to me, and even for me there is sometimes terror in the darkness.” He stopped, angry. Why would he show even Qwen Shen his weakness? No longer.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she soothed. “But I must tell you something, something that terrifies me.”

  “What is that?”

  “I fear this shaman, this Moss. I worry that he plots against you.”

  Ghe levered up on one elbow. Outside of the tent, cicadas sawed their shrill tunes, frogs croaked imprecations at the moon. It was the first night they had spent together since leaving the ruined barge—indeed, the first night not spent on horseback. Moss insisted that they must make great speed if Hezhi was to be found in time, before the demon Perkar and his conspirators harmed her. But the pace they kept had killed many horses, something the Mang loathed to do, so now they camped in a broad meadow while fresh horses could be found to replace bone-weary ones and new provisions could be hunted. A delay of a single day presented an opportunity Qwen Shen made certain he took—to “relax.”

  “Why do you say this of Moss?”

  “I mistrust him. I believe that he leads us to our doom. I have heard him speak of it to his men. He and the Mang are in league with this white demon of yours.”

  “Moss is a servant of the River.”

  Qwen Shen’s eyes narrowed dramatically. “I am a servant of the River, you are a servant of the River. Bone Eel carries his blood, though he is too insensible truly to serve. But these are barbarians, not people of Nhol. You cannot trust them.”