Chosen of the Changeling

by Greg Keyes

  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 coul
d 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.

  Around him, the armies came together, and the forest was suddenly a garden of death, the Mang skirling and the gods of the host venting unrecognizable sounds. From the corners of his eyes he noticed a rider and horse go down beneath the fangs and claws of a wolf; he saw a bear-man, blinded by two arrow shafts, wander into the decapitating edge of a curved Mang sword.

  Claws raked against his hauberk and rings snapped with the force, and suddenly T’esh was shrieking and down; he leapt clear, and though he sought with Harka’s edge to dispatch his foes, he searched with each free instant his eyes had for the Life-Eater. He finally saw him, as he stepped from the path of a dying bear; the Nholish man was a blur of flame and motion near the Huntress. Her spear had pierced him, but he strove up it, sliding the shaft through his own belly, and something like lightning cracked between them. His throat nearly raw with shouting, Perkar fought that way, and whatever came between him and the Tiskawa died.

  Ghe reached the Huntress before Perkar fought his way through, however, and something like sunlight bloomed where they touched. The Huntress screamed, shrill and carrying. Perkar continued to fight, half blind, as his foes redoubled in number and ferocity, and when he again saw clearly, it was to behold the Tiskawa fight savagely from beneath a pile of rutkirul and wolves. As Perkar watched, however, these minions of the Huntress fell away, twitching, and the Tiskawa stood amongst their corpses.

  Perkar recognized him now, though his glimpse of the man—when he still was a man—had been brief, in the shadows beneath the streets of Nhol. He had been a worthy enough swordsman—without Harka, in fact, Perkar would never have beaten him.

  His face aside, there was much about the Tiskawa that no longer seemed Human. Most of his clothing hung in shreds upon him, so the weird colors of his flesh and the bony unnatural lines of his torso and shoulders were revealed. His eyes held a kind of black fire as he pushed up through the slain beasts and gods to confront him. Perkar wondered where the Huntress was, and then forgot worry as he remembered this thing devouring the Stream Goddess. He howled and leapt.

  Much faster moved the Tiskawa, fading away from the blow, even though he rose from an awkward position.

  “You!” it snarled. “This time you cannot have my head.”

  Perkar didn’t answer. He kept Harka in a guard position. When the monster suddenly lunged, darting forward and slashing down with hooked talons, even Harka had difficulty moving his arm quickly enough. He struck for the neck, but an upflung arm interposed itself. Unbelievably, the godblade did not bite but slid instead down the forearm, skinning the flesh from it and revealing the yellow plate beneath. He twisted Harka and stumbled back, carried the blow on into the ribs of the Life-Eater, and there the edge finally parted flesh and bone, cut from the lowest rib through the spine, down to the pelvis. Then the claws swiped across his face and he felt sudden numbness at the same moment that a furious heat seemed to consume him. Like a child burnt by a coal, he shrieked and leapt backward. The Tiskawa tried to follow, but its body sagged crazily as the legs understood the spine that animated them was severed.

  Scrambling back farther, Perkar put his hand to his own neck and felt a jet of warm fluid, realized that one of the arteries there had been torn, but even as he did so, the flow diminished as Harka closed his wound.

  That was nearly it, the blade said. He dug into our heartstrings, too.

  Snarling, Perkar started forward again, but at that moment a horse slammed into him, battering him to the ground, and he had to raise Harka quickly to meet a Mang warrior’s attack. The god-blade flicked out deftly and impaled the man as he leapt down. When Perkar returned to his feet, he saw the earth itself rise in a column, form quickly into the Huntress, now massive, bearing the black antlers of an elk on the snarling head of a lion. The Tiskawa had just risen into the air, wind rushing furiously about him, his lower body hanging limp, when she gored him on her horns. The Life-Eater shrieked, but he also reached around her neck with both arms, and—incredibly—lifted the Huntress off the ground. Together they flew into the air, blown up like leaves in the curled fist of an autumn wind. Perkar saw the Huntress transform again into some sort of dark-pinioned bird, and then the two of them disappeared into the dense opaque vastness of the canopy, gone.

  Gripping Harka even more tightly, he thought to follow—somehow—but at that moment his body sprouted a pair of arrows; his hauberk stopped their heads, but Harka drew him relentlessly to face his mortal opponents.

  “You cannot kill the Tiskawa if you let these Mang hack you into pieces.”

  Grimly Perkar turned to his work, ashamed that, in his heart of hearts, he was relieved.

  For the Tiskawa, he knew, would have killed him, and he wondered if he could face it again. Something that could give the Huntress such a battle …

  Then there was no more time to think.

  Sheldu’s men attacked the thing, but Hezhi did not need to see the first of them die to understand that what they faced was a god of no mean strength; she had seen him instantly, knew that he formed from the water and dirt rather than emerged from it. She did not even reach for her drum, but as when she had captured the bull, Hukwosha, she merely slapped her palms together and opened the lake.

  This time she did not hesitate; she called on Hukwosha, and the bull bolted gleefully to the task.

  But we must manifest, the bull said. We cannot fight only beneath the lake.

  “I don’t know how to do that,” Hezhi told him.

  Give me your leave.

  She hesitated only a moment; Tsem was rushing forward with his club, certainly to his death—despite his size, strength, and recently acquired skills. “You have it!” she cried. Might surged into her limbs, and she took in a breath that went on and on. Blood surged in her as her body thickened and distorted with agony that was so exquisite as almost to be pleasure; even before the change was done she was pounding across the earth on
four cloven hooves. The colors of the world had faded to shadow, but her nostrils brought a new realm of sensation that she had never imagined and had little time to appreciate. She could smell Tsem, the acrid taint of his fear nearly masked by a sour anger. One of Sheldu’s men had soiled himself, and Sheldu himself had no scent whatsoever. The leaf mold and the crisp freshness of the forest faded before the corruption of the attacking god and its sudden fear, stinking like a rotten corpse. Then he was on her horn, and she tossed him, gored him again, and slammed him into a tree. The dull salamander eyes glared at her feebly.

  “Hezhi,” it groaned—not from its froglike mouth, but from somewhere inside. “Hezhi, listen to me.”

  Hukwosha stepped back and hooked the monster anew on his horns and began to run joyfully.

  “Listen!” Its eyes were fading.

  “Talk, then,” Hezhi bellowed. “You haven’t long.”

  “Beware the Blackgod, he—”

  Hezhi suddenly recognized the voice. “Moss? Moss, is that you?”

  “Yes,” the voice answered feebly.

  “Hukwosha, stop,” she commanded, but the bull continued to run, and sudden panic mingled with her elation.

  Free, Hukwosha roared. Free me.

  “No!” She wrenched at him then, grappled him back into her mansion, though it felt as if her body had burst into flame. She knew her body was changing again, and as that happened she sank into the unreal haze of the lake. The dying god shimmered, and she saw him—whoever he was. But linked to him she saw Moss, and he was impaled as plainly as the Salamander God.

  “You’ve killed me,” Moss sighed. “I was only trying to … I wouldn’t have hurt you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she answered, and even in the flat cold of the otherworld she was.

  “No matter,” he gritted out. “I—” Then his eyes widened, and he vanished as if he had never been. An instant later she blinked and the sight was gone. She was Hezhi, a little girl, lying on the leafy floor of the forest. Nearby, the corpse of the Salamander God blubbered out a final breath, and then its spirit departed.