The Blackgod

“Hello, Yen,” she said very seriously.

“Princess.”

“I need your help.”

Ghe noticed for the first time that there were other figures behind Hezhi. They all stood in the little courtyard above Nhol, where Hezhi had taken him once to look down at the ships. But he understood that could not be where they were as his memories—what little remained of them—returned.

“I've failed you,” he said, feeling hot, unaccustomed tears start in his eye, remembering the Blackgod carving him with a knife of living thunder.

“Not yet. There is still time,” Ghan said from behind Hezhi. The third figure was the stream demon, the woman—she sat sullenly on the bench by the cottonwood tree. Near her, looking old and defeated, stood the ancient Nholish lord he had captured in the Water Temple. Lengnata was fat, his eyes piggish little dots.

“Where are we, really?” he asked Hezhi.

“In your mansion. The place where you keep the souls you capture.”

“How did you get here?”

“I came to see you, Ghe. Because there is something you can do to save me.”

“Anything.”

“You must slay the River to do it.”

Ghe's limbs began to quake. He shuddered violently. “I can't do that. You have to know I can't do that. Even if I had the power—”

Anger wrote itself on her features. “You owe me,” she declared. “You made me think you liked me, maybe more than liked me. You owe me.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I don't know what that means,” she retorted, but softening. “But I know that I need your help.”

“I cannot slay the River!”

Ghan interrupted him. “Have you forgotten Li again, Ghe? We found bits of her in you, in your memory, hidden away and dimmed from your waking mind. The River tried to clean them out of you. He made you kill her, Ghe, because he would not give you what few memories you cherished.”

Hezhi held something out to him—not something physical, but fragments of his mind, like a shattered mirror. Images of an old woman, her love for him, the care that only she had ever lavished upon him. A day long ago, on the levee of the River…

“He did steal her from me, didn't he? Why did he do that?”

Hezhi reached up and brushed the hair from his eyes. “To keep you from being distracted. A real man—one with his own thoughts and motives and loves—a real man makes a poor weapon for the River. The River hates us because he will never really understand us, no matter that he wants our bodies as vessels. He hates you, Ghe, hates me, simply because he needs us. I know what it's like, to have him in me. I do.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. ”But Ghe, he made you from a man. Part of you is still a man. And despite what you did to me, you don't deserve what he has done to you. Neither of us deserves it. I am dying, Ghe. Only you can save me.”

An inchoate anger was growing in him, but still he persisted. “I… He made me so. I cannot but serve him.”

“No,” Hezhi said. “No, if you love me, you can serve me. You once told Ghan that whatever I wanted—”

“I lied! Ghan knows that.”

“You thought you lied,” Ghan said. “But I believed you because it was a deeper truth than you knew. It was the man in you, rather than the Riverghost.”

Ghe stilled his trembling, braiding his anger and his love. He reached into the secret, cold place that had helped him kill, back when he had been merely Human, when a misstep meant his own death, when compassion was a deadly thing. He wove that into the fibers, too, a warp to lay the weft through. lama blade of silver, I am a sickle of ice, he whispered, and finally, once again, he was.

“What must I do?” he heard himself say.

Hezhi leaned up and kissed the scar on his chin, the first wound he ever received. “I'm sorry,” she said. “But what you have to do is die. But we will help you.” And she gestured to the stream demon.

“Die,” he considered. “I have to die.” He focused on her again, on the exquisite shape of her face. “Will you forgive me then?”

“I already forgive you, Ghe.”

“Call me Yen.” She smiled. “Yen.”

IT took three pulls to remove the sword, each more painful than the last, and the final heave was followed by a gout of blood that he knew must surely have drained him. Nevertheless, though his legs felt like wood, he struggled to stand.

Nearby, another huge figure stood over Hezhi, which Perkar recognized as Tsem. The Giant interposed himself between the girl and the god.

“This is getting tiresome,” Karak said. “Perkar, lay down and die. Tsem … oh, never mind.” He raised his hand.

A scorpion stinger as thick as a Human leg struck the god as a nightmare jumble of limbs and plates suddenly crawled back into motion. Karak rolled his eyes—not in pain but in irritation—and struck the thing away with his hand. “And you!” he snapped. The monster with the face of the assassin from Nhol rose unsteadily on several spiderlike legs. It should have been dead—Perkar could see the hole in it, how burnt and charred it was. Only its head remained Human, and it was the Human eyes that held Perkar, not the monstrous body.

“Perkar,” the thing croaked.

He was so weak. His knees shook. He didn't even know what he imagined he would do with the sword he had just pulled from himself. Strike Karak one more useless blow? But here was this thing, the thing that had eaten the Stream Goddess …

He raised his sword, though the earth sought to drag it from his hand.

He carried his weight into the swing, knowing that if he missed it wouldn't matter anyway, he would never stand to attack again. He wondered dully why the Tiskawa tilted its head back, as if inviting the blow.

The Blackgod was perhaps more injured than he let on, for though he lunged to place himself between Perkar and the River-thing, he was too slow to avoid Tsem's broken club, which struck him in the shoulder blade and caused him to stumble. Then it was too late, and the sword Perkar's father had given him—the sword forged by the little Steel God Ko—bit deeply.

For the second time, Perkar watched Ghe's head leave its body. It was strange that the final expression to grace the assassin's face seemed to reflect victory rather than defeat.

XXXVIII Horse Mother

BLOOD geysered into the cavern, spewing from the stump of the River-thing's neck. It fell toward the lake and gouted liquid into the water, and the water burned. It caught like dry leaves in high autumn, like pitch. Glorious light of many colors gyred and capered madly in the cavern, and Perkar sank back to his knees beneath the rainbow dance of the River's death—and his own. And though wonder should have been shocked out of him, he still laughed and wept tears of joy when he saw, amongst those flames, a lithe form he had once loved, the Goddess of the Stream, hair coursing opalescent as she skated across the surface of the dying god.

“What have you done?” Karak shrieked. “What have you done?”

“Slain the River, I think,” Perkar answered, dropping his blade so he could lower himself to the floor with one hand and clutch his belly with the other. It was starting to hurt now, a slow burning that he knew would consume him for a long time before finally killing him. “Not as I planned, pretty thing,” Karak snarled. “Nevertheless, I think he is dead.” “Perhaps,” Karak said. “I don't see how, but—” “It is true; you know it. I have done it for you.” “It is not as I wished it to be,” Karak complained, his voice becoming a trifle petty.

“Karak, please. I know you can heal Hezhi and Ngangata, if they are not dead. Please. We did what you wanted. The Changeling is no more.”

“But what is in his place?” Karak snarled. “That I do not know. Perhaps he will be as bad as the Brother.”