The Blackgod

unless you have changed your feelings about me.”

“About what?”

“More than once you cursed me for healing you. You asked me to let you die. Do you still want that?”

“You aren't my sword anymore.”

The bird lifted its wings to the wind. “No, but I could do one last favor for a friend, if he wanted.”

Perkar chuckled. “Fine, Harka. I take it all back. I'm glad you never let me die.”

“Does that mean you'll take my help, or would you rather expire as a hero, before you can make another mistake and start things all over again?”

Perkar shook his head ruefully, “I think I will take that chance, if your offer is genuine.”

“Of course it is.”

“Then I accept, and I wish you well in your travels, Harka. You were my only companion at times, and I was ungrateful more often than not—certainly more than I should have been.”

“Indeed you were,” Harka said. “Now, close your eyes.”

He closed them, and when he opened them, it was to Hezhi and Ngangata kneeling over him, each of his hands held by one of them.

The pain was gone.

“Perkar?” Hezhi asked.

“Hello,” he said. He turned to Ngangata. “Hello,” he repeated, wanting to say more, to explain to each of them what he felt, but the sheer joy of seeing them both alive and whole—and knowing that he himself would live—was more than he could contain. His words came out as sobs, and when Tsem joined them—he had been only a few paces away—they all clasped in a knot, wordless, gripping hands and shoulders and bloody chests. Behind them, Yuu'han watched—apart, his face expressionless.

It was finally Tsem who stated the obvious, after a few long moments.

“We should all bathe now,” he mumbled, and it could hardly be doubted that he was right. Hezhi laughed at that, and they all joined her. It was perhaps not the healthiest of laughter—more than tinged with hysteria—but it served.

When their chuckles faded off into strained silence, Perkar dizzily found his feet, and with Tsem's help struggled over to where Brother Horse lay. Heen licked the old man's face, clearly puzzled as to why his master refused to awaken.

“Brother Horse said to tell you good-bye, Heen,” Hezhi explained, from behind Perkar. The dog looked up at his name, but then turned his attention back to the old man.

“Good-bye, Shutsebe,” Perkar said.

THE next few hours were something of a blur, and later none of them remembered very much about them. They carried Brother Horse's body up and out of Erikwer and found that Karak's men had vanished, presumably fled. Perkar could hardly blame them, if they had witnessed even the smallest part of what transpired below.

At Yuu'han's direction they laid the body out, and sang the songs, and burned a flame for offerings, though they had little enough to give. Yuu'han had cut an ear from the corpse of Bone Eel, and he offered that to be taken to his uncle by the goddess in the flame. When Yuu'han sang his personal grief, Hezhi happened to hear, though she stayed a respectful distance away. One line stayed with her to the end of her days.

When they number the horses When they count the sires and foals Father, we shall know each other …

When Yuu'han was done, he departed, and then Hezhi went there. The old man's face had fallen into its most accustomed lines, so that she seemed to read a smile upon it. Heen already lay with him, his head propped on Brother Horse's feet, eyes puzzled. Hezhi knelt down and stroked the ancient dog's coarse, dirty fur.

“He said to tell you,” Hezhi murmured to Heen. “But you already know.”

But she told him anyway, and Heen licked her hand, and together they sat there for a time.

Night came, and they built a larger fire to huddle about. Unwilling to bathe in Erikwer, they still reeked of blood and sweat and other, more offensive scents. Perkar passed the night restlessly, barely sleeping, suspecting that the others rested at least as poorly.

He napped briefly, before dawn, and when he awoke, he knew why his rest had been so uneasy.

“I don't believe it,” he confessed to Hezhi. “I don't believe that the Changeling is dead, even after all of this, all of our sacrifices.”

“I felt him die,” Hezhi answered, “but I don't believe it either.”

“Then there is one more thing we must do, before leaving Balat.”

Hezhi nodded reluctantly. “Yes. One last thing.”

XXXIX The Goddess

PERKAR placed his feet carefully on the broken red stone, though the way down into the chasm was neither steep nor particularly dangerous seeming. But after all that they had been through—and after searching for the better part of a day for a safe way down the mostly sheer cliffs of the ravine—it would be ridiculous and embarrassing to trip and break his arm or neck.

Below them the river churned spray into the air that the bright sun rendered into a million shattering diamonds and that imparted a wonderful cool dampness to the ordinarily dry atmosphere.

“It's true,” Perkar said, speaking up to his companions still perched on the rim. ”It is true. This is not the same Changeling I once knew.”

“Not at all,” Ngangata agreed.

Hezhi felt her own trepidation melt away. The scale on her arm reacted to the presence of the river not at all, nor did any part of her. This was just water, flowing through a narrow canyon of red and yellow stone. “It's hard to believe that this narrow stream is really the river,” she said.

“This is where I first saw him,” Perkar answered. “This is where my journey to you began— our journey,” he corrected as Ngangata came level to him on the trail. He patted the half Alwa on the shoulder.

“Well,” he called back up to Hezhi. “Come on down.”

“Wouldn't you rather I stayed up here?” she asked.

“No. I would rather have you with me,” he answered, offering his hand to steady her for the next step.

With only a little slipping and sliding, they all reached the bottom of the gorge easily—even Tsem, though Hezhi noticed the half Giant kept casting uneasy glances back up, probably dreading the return climb to the top.

“Before you could feel his coldness, his hunger,” Perkar explained. ”Now…”

“Now it feels like something living,” Ngangata finished for him.

Perkar nodded and shuffled his feet on the narrow stone beach, suddenly nervous. Nevertheless, he reached into a small sack at his waist and produced a handful of flower petals, which he sprinkled into the quieter eddies near shore. He cleared his throat and sang—tentatively, but gradually with more confidence and volume:

“Stream Goddess I

Long hair curling down from the hills

Long arms reaching down the valley

Reposing in my watery dwelling

On and on go I

In the same manner, from year to year…”

Perkar sang on, the song of the Stream Goddess as she had taught it to his father's father, many years past. When he had sung it before, it had been to a quiet stream in his clan's pasture, a little stream he could almost leap across. Here, the crash of the rapids almost seemed to add a rhythm to his words, and then new words entirely, so that seamlessly, he was singing verses to the Song of the Stream Goddess that had never been before. And then, almost without him noticing, he was not singing at all, but the song continued, and from the nearest eddy, a head rose, long black hair swirling in the agitated water, ancient, amber eyes in the face of a young woman gazing up at them with what appeared to be humor.

“… then came a mortal man,” she sang.

“His mother named him for the oak

For the spot where his caul was buried

In the very place I flowed

He grew like a weed