Waterborn

Unmistakably. Overcome, she remained on the steps, weeping.

 

 

She stopped her weeping when she heard a soft whispering. At least, she believed it to be whispering; she could not make out any words; it was merely the hiss one hears at a distance when people confide secrets.

I have to do something, she resolved. I have to try to find D'en..

The map had taken her this far, but now she had no clear idea of where to search. Her research had discovered the center of the old palace as the place to which the Darkness Stair descended. It had found her a path by which she might reach it. But her map did not have a point marked 'D'en' on it.

Not that it mattered anymore. Hezhi now believed that she would not find him. It seemed to her that immersion in the Smokewater would dissolve a body, draw the spirit essence from it. Perhaps that was where ghosts came from. Those ghosts her father had summoned—the fish and the other things—they had all died in the River. It must be that when royalty died—no, when they were killed—it must be done in the River, so that he could reclaim their essence, the part of them that was him. That was what she felt inside of her, she realized. Part of her was River. She suddenly recalled her conversation with Tsem, nearly three years before. She had said something about the 'Royal Blood' working in her, and Tsem had become absolutely solemn, almost fearful, had told her to never say such a thing. Perhaps that had been as much as he could say, Forbidden. To warn her about her blood.

That was it! It was all coming clear, deadly clear. If the Royal Blood worked right, if the River surfaced in one in the right way—whatever that was—then the child became like her father, her mother. Powerful, able to summon the River's puissance to do sorcery. A ruler. By using the part of the River that was in them. But if it went wrong, somehow, if it was… she still didn't know that, how it went awry. But it could go wrong, that was clear, and when it did those so 'Blessed' were brought here and executed, returned to the River. Here, in the dark, where the people of the Empire would not know, would never see nobles die.

She reflected that many—like Wezh, for instance—might have noble blood but no waking power in them at all, destined neither to rule nor to die. Hezhi understood that she was not one of those.

Still she heard the whispering. She stood again and, more carefully this time, stepped out onto the rubble. She was vaguely sur-prised that it did not crunch beneath her feet; it must have settled through the centuries, become compacted. Moving as quietly as possible, she worked her way toward the gate.

She reached it easily enough and was soon peering through the steel bars. Beyond, the hall extended farther than she could see. There was something odd about the corridor, though she could not place for certain what it was for an instant. Then she understood. The water in it was moving—not flowing, but stirring about, as if something were swimming in it. The whispering was down that hall; it was a bit clearer now, and she could almost make out a word, now and then.

She knelt on the pile, set her little lamp down, and, shading her eyes from the flame, tried to see as far as she could; the brightness of the flame itself tended to blind her.

She wobbled on her haunches and put down one hand to steady herself. Doing so, she realized that whatever she was squatting on, it was neither rubble nor sand. Puzzled, she studied it more closely. She believed, at first, that the stone or whatever was covered with moss or even fungus, but the texture was unlike that, as well. It was actually rather smooth, slick but not slimy, bumpy. Like the skin of her mother's salamander.

As she was thinking that, an eye blinked open, no more than an armspan from her. It wasn't there and then it was, an eye staring at her, a perfectly Human eye. Beneath her, whatever she was squatting on tremored. It moved, shifted in place.

Hezhi tried to suppress her shriek of terror, but it leapt free of her throat and soared away, a bright bird of sound in a dark place, flapping around and around before the underpalace ate it up. She crouched, shuddering, not knowing what to do. The eye stared at her, then slowly closed again.

Shaking, she looked up and down the length and breadth of the thing with entirely new eyes. She was on the back of something alive. It might be, she realized, rather like those fish in her father's summoning. Or like the ghost that had come after her. Yet this was no ghost; this thing was substantial in a way that a ghost could never be, at least according to everything she had read—which was admittedly not that much, when it came to ghosts. It was real, alive, sleeping, even though she was on its back.

She noticed other things, now that she was looking. It helped her to study, detached her from her fear, from the fact that she was on the back of some alien thing. A stubby projection on the 'bar' was some sort of fin. Or tentacle. And there, that lump… She shuddered and closed her eyes, detachment failing, not wanting to see more, wanting only to be somewhere else, alone, with Qey, with anyone, but very far from where she was. Because the lump was not a lump. Pale, like a fingered mushroom, a Human hand sprouted from the creature's back.

I have to open my eyes, she thought crazily. I can't leave unless I open them. But as much as she wanted at that moment to be gone, the thought of looking at the thing, of discovering some new horror was too terrible to face. Even less did she want to move. What if she woke it up?

'How did you get here?'

Her heart stopped for a moment, restarted with a painful jerk. She snapped her eyes open. The voice was strange, watery, tortured sounding. It came from beyond the grating.

'Who… ?' she began, and then stopped, still afraid of waking the monster she sat upon. She heard water stirring.

'Whoever you are, you are in a very bad place,' the voice told her. A shadow was gliding in the ebon pool, beyond the light of her lamp.

'And where did you get that light?' it snarled. 'Put that out. You'll have no need of that.'

'Who are you?' Hezhi asked, holding the lamp higher, trying to see.

'Put that down, I say.'

She set the lamp down but made no move to put it out. Nevertheless, the shadow swam closer. She caught a glimpse of it then: coils of scales glittering in the light, bony plates, a host of centipede legs—they did not congeal, form anything unified in her head.

'Who are you?' she repeated, her voice close to shrieking again.

'I don't understand how you got from the Darkness Stair to here without my seeing you,' the thing complained. 'But if you hadn't been so intent on slipping by me, I would have warned you about old Nu there. If she wakes up, you'll warm her belly.'

'I didn't come down the Darkness Stair,' she whispered, trying to keep her voice steady. 'I came in through the ducts.'

'The ducts? The ducts?' The thing swirled about crazily in the water. 'You weren't brought down here, were you?'

'Let me see you,' Hezhi pleaded. 'What are you?'

A head suddenly moved into her circle of vision. It was Human, basically, though gills branched like feathery horns from its neck. It had no hair, either. The back of its head devolved into a rubbery, spiky mass that seemed to be constantly writhing.

'What am I?' the abomination repeated. 'Why, my dear, don't you recognize a prince when you see one?'

'Prince? Prince?'

'Prince L'ekezh Yehd Cha'dune, at your service.'

'That isn't possible,' she managed to choke out, though she already knew that it was. 'Who was your father?'

'Why, the Great Lord Yuzhnata, of course.'

'Oh, oh,' Hezhi gasped, still not quite able to grasp; but the puzzle was solving itself in her head again, the pieces rearranging themselves.

'That makes you my father's brother,' she quavered faintly.

There was a moment of silence from the thing.