Waterborn

Gregory Keyes

Waterborn

PROLOGUE

Out of a Deep and Ancient Place

The mountain split open with the clap of a thousand thunders, and through the rupture a cyclone of living steam screamed skyward. Blazing, many-colored lightnings rode with the wind and water, the groping fingers of an angry god.

Another god, cloaked in the flesh of an argent bird winging frantically away, was snapped like a twig by the first shock, his wings broken, the flesh seared and then stripped from bones that themselves were blown apart. The pain was awful, the fiercest agony that the god had ever known, and in eternity he had felt much pain.

Knitting a new body of air and black smoke, he redoubled his efforts to outpace the main storm, the unthinkable reservoir of power he had loosed. He rode with the blooming edge of the tempest, disintegrated and recomposed a hundred times in the wind's teeth. Jagged wounds of mountains, the pooled, dried blood of plateaus hurled beneath him with hideous speed, as incomprehensible and lethal as the gaze of a basilisk.

The god felt real fear for the first time in his existence. Who could have known his Brother held such power, such anger? Behind him he could see the air chewing itself to pieces, flashes like lightning but brighter by far than the sun.

Pretty, he thought. But it will be my death if he catches me, a real, endless death. Perhaps—just perhaps—I have made a mistake.

He tightened the thick strands of his heart and flew, faster than anything save the wind had ever flown, until, like a steed run to death, his might was gone and he fell.

The storm swept by above him, smote a mountaintop, and shattered it.

The god struck the earth and lay there as above him the sky became soot, the sun dimming to a pale ocher eye and then gone altogether.

Now he finds me and I die, the god thought. I may not be as clever as I thought.

But then the earth swallowed him, folded him up beneath, hid him, kept him safe. Above, in time, the steam calmed into rain and soaked the bone-dry hills and desiccated plains for some score or so years.

Much more time passed, and he awoke. His flesh had grown back. He flexed his wings, felt the warmth of golden blood in his veins, pulled himself from his protective womb.

The world had changed, he saw. Thick boles of trees towered about him, a thousand living mortal things, just as he had seen in his vision, so long ago. Unleashing the Brother, he had unleashed life as well as death. He took to the air and flew above it all, until the new world was a carpet of green below, the blasted mountains now healed by time. In the midst of it, the Brother was still there, but he lay quietly now, no longer angry. He wound across the land, a serpent shimmering blue beneath the sky. A River. He was, the bird thought, quite pretty.

But I am no longer pretty, he thought, for he had changed, as well. He was black, every feather, his beautiful argent plumage replaced by charcoal.

But he forgot that soon enough. The world was new and strange, and surely in such a place there was much mischief to be about.

And in a wink or two of his yellow eye, five more millennia passed.

PART ONE

Royal Blood

I

The Princess and Perfect Darkness

Hezhi confronted the black depth, felt a wind blow up from it and envelop her like the breath of a vast beast. She was seized by a sudden sensation of falling, though she could still sense the wet clay beneath her feet, slick as the back of the salamander in her mother's garden pool. Hezhi trembled; she had never been troubled by such darkness before. In the three years since she discovered the tight, narrow tunnels of the old palace, she had never ventured beyond the upper stories, the places where the ceiling was a lacework of crumbled stone, recently added sewer grills, the dense and spreading roots of O'ay trees. A ceiling that therefore let at least scraps of light drop through to guide her wanderings. Her room in the palace was likewise never dark, but always illuminated, if only by the tiny lamps of the stars peering down through the open roof of the adjacent courtyard.

But what she faced now was chwengyu, the perfect darkness that she had only read about, darker than her own coal-black hair. Behind her, a faint gray light lapped at her heels, trying to call her back, like a loyal dog, knowing its mistress was heading into danger, straining at the end of its leash to reach her.

Hands against the damp, perspiring wall, Hezhi shuffled forward, her tiny bare feet squishing in the wet layer of clay. Her shoes—beautiful felted shoes—lay discarded two turnings back, where the broken stairway vanished beneath this layer of mud. How long had the lower palace been buried? She remembered the tales of the flood, but none of them really said when it had occurred. During the rule of Q'anata, she seemed to remember. One day she would find out just when that was. Q'anata.

She gasped as her feet slipped, and the darkness, again like a great maw, grinned to take her in. Hezhi recovered her balance, shaking. She could turn back now, as she always did. She should: Her fear was a cricket, chirping frantically beneath her breastbone. But this time she had gone farther than ever before. This time she had more than curiosity, she had a reason to push deeper into these tunnels. D'en. He was down here somewhere. The priests had taken him off, just like that. Hekes, D'en's little servant-girl, had told Hezhi as much. When the priests snatched one of the royal family, everyone knew where they took them. They took them down, down the staircase behind the throne room, down into the old palace, and even deeper, to where the River himself filled the hidden foundations of the city. After that, those taken were never seen again, and they were never spoken of, save with -nata added to their names, the suffix that denoted someone as a ghost.

D'enata, Hezhi thought, felt herself near tears. Ten years old, she had met her mother a dozen times, her father perhaps twice that. They were polite to her, but more distant than gods. D'en was three years older than she, her cousin, a kind, gentle boy. Her best friend, besides the servants who raised her. Her only friend in the royal family. D'en and she had spent every idle hour together, scampering about the vast empty areas of the palace, eluding their bodyguards and servants, spying on the adults. Now he was gone, taken from her.

I'll find you, she promised. She could not descend the Darkness Stair, where they had taken D'en, but she knew other routes into the underneath. There must be a way to reach her cousin, to see him again, to rescue him from whatever fate the priests had taken him off to.

Thirteen more steps she counted; the slope steepened and then leveled off flat. Her poor toes kicked against a few pieces of brick, cracked and tumbled down from above. Hezhi hugged the wall at her left, for support, for solidity. The darkness seemed infinite, though she knew the passage she was in was only an armspan across. She reached over with her right hand to confirm that.

She couldn't feel the other wall; the passage had evidently widened. Hezhi stepped over a few more feet, puzzled.

Her legs zipped out from under her as if she had been pushed. She fell roughly to the damp floor, flailing