The Blackgod

was about than she did.

“I've seen him with worse wounds and still capable of walking and talking,” she commented. “Worse looking, anyway.”

“As have I,” Ngangata agreed, and Hezhi thought she caught a deep worry in his burring voice. He did not, however, offer anything further.

Tsem wiped Perkar's face, and the young man hacked again, moaning a bit.

“Did he find what he went looking for?” she asked.

“I suppose. I think he learned much. We learned about the war, at any rate.”

“From this goddess of his?”

“And from another god. From Karak, the Raven.”

Hezhi pursed her lips. “Perkar told me of that one. It was he who set you and Brother Horse to watching for us, when we fled the city.”

“Yes. It was also he who tricked Perkar and his friends into betraying our king. He is a strange, willful god.”

Hezhi sighed and shook her head. “I know nothing of these gods. They are all strange to me.” Monsters, she finished inwardly.

“I don't know everything he learned from Karak,” Ngangata went on. He seemed to want to tell her something, but was trying to work to it carefully.

“Weren't you there?”

“I didn't hear the conversation. But afterward, Perkar was eager to return here, to find you. I think Karak told him something about you, something important.”

“Oh?”

Tsem growled low in his throat. “I like this not at all, Princess,” he muttered. “Too much, happening too fast. Too many people wanting you again.”

“I know, Tsem.”

“What do you mean?” Ngangata queried. “What is this?”

“Those Mang who met me in the desert. They acted as if they wanted something from me, too.”

“And they found you in the cliffs, though no trail from the west passes near. That means they were looking for you.”

Hezhi tried to deny that with a little shake of her head. “They might have seen me run into the cliffs.” But they hadn't. She knew that, somehow. “No, you're right, Ngangata. They were looking for me. And Brother Horse put me in this yekt, as soon as we returned, and set his nephews to guard me. He could tell something was wrong.” She did not add that she was worried even about Brother Horse's intentions. No one who could not see into him would understand, would merely think she had become mad with paranoia.

Ngangata nodded slowly. “Something with big feet is walking,” he muttered. “We were attacked by Mang, as well, up at the stream. They were looking for us. They said that a prophet had seen us in a vision. Perhaps he saw you, too.”

“But Perkar knows more.”

“He does, but he was tight-lipped with me. Whatever he learned worried him.” Ngangata chewed his lip, and then went on. “I did hear Karak say that there was some connection between this gaan and the Changeling.”

A sudden bright chill crawled along Hezhi's spine. “The Changeling? The Riverr

“Call him what you will.”

“I thought he could not reach this far.”

“Not with his own fingers, perhaps,” Ngangata answered. “But perhaps with the hands of a Mang shaman he can.”

Hezhi heard her voice tremble. “He wants me back, doesn't he? He will have me back.” And she realized that, once again, the scale on her arm was itching dully. She reached to touch it.

And gasped; the room seemed to turn around, sidewise, so that she could see it all from a different angle. Tsem and Ngangata appeared hollowed out, skeletal, and the fire in its hearth was a dancing blade with laughing eyes. Perkar…

Perkar was hardly there at all. His skin glowed translucent, and at his side there lay a god. She could not look at it, at that nightmare jumble of wings and claws and keen, sharp edges. It hurt her, scratched at her inside as if there were a man in her head with a sword, swinging it. She lifted up her sight, tried to tear it away entirely, but Perkar himself riveted her attention.

On his chest crouched a blackness, a crawling, shuddering blackness. As she watched, long hairs as thick as wheatstraw grew from it, wrapped sluggishly around Perkar, and reached inside of him to seize his bones.

The blackness opened a yellow eye and stared at her, and she screamed. She screamed and ran, tripped, sprawled, and scrambled back up. Even when Tsem caught her she kept trying to run, kicking at his shins and wailing, eyes closed, shuddering.

When finally she opened them again, the room was as it had been before.

But she knew now. She had seen it.

“Tsem, go get Brother Horse,” she choked out. “Go and hurry. And let me sit outside.”

SHE flinched away from Brother Horse when he arrived, fearful that her sight would return and reveal him for what he was. She should not trust him with Perkar—she knew that—but she could think of no alternative. She did not know what to do for him, and something was wrong, terribly wrong. Brother Horse regarded her sadly for an instant and then entered the yekt. Hezhi remained on the stoop, and Tsem joined her.

“That's a big fire,” he noticed, after a moment.

Hezhi regarded the enormous bonfire from the corner of her eye, unwilling even to risk seeing the Fire Goddess. For some time, the Mang had been carrying in fuel from all directions, and flames and black smoke rose in a thick column skyward.

“I wonder where they found all of the wood,” Tsem went on when she did not answer.

Hezhi shrugged to let him know she had no idea. “I think it's for the Horse God Homesending. A ceremony they perform tonight.”

“What sort of ceremony? Have you written of it in your letter to Ghan?”

Good old Tsem, trying to distract her. “I think Ghan will never get any letter from me. Whatever we thought, these people are not our friends.”

“They needn't be our enemies, either,” Tsem pointed out. “They are like everyone, concerned for themselves and their kin before all else. You and I don't threaten them; Perkar does.”

“Does he? Perhaps his people do. I don't know. We are lost here, Tsem.”

“I know, Princess,” he replied softly. “Tell me about this ceremony.”

She hesitated a moment, closing her eyes. The village did not vanish as she hoped it might; it was still there in the vivid scent of burning wood, in the shouts of children and the wild cries of adults, the yapping of dogs. It would not go away merely because she willed it thus.

“They believe that they and their mounts are kin,” she began. Who had told her that, so long ago? Yen, of course, when he gave her the statuette. He had told her something like that anyway, and it had not been—like everything else he told her—a lie. Yen, who at least had taught her the folly of trusting anyone.

Tsem's silence suggested that he was waiting for her to finish. “You know that by now,” she murmured apologetically. “They believe that they and their mounts are descended from a single goddess, the Horse Mother. Now and then the Horse Mother herself is born into one of these horses. More often one of her immediate children is, a sort of minor god or goddess. When this happens, the Mang shamans can tell, and the horse is treated with added respect.”

“That would be hard to imagine,” Tsem noted. “They already treat their mounts with more kindness than any servant in the palace is shown.”

“The horse is never ridden. It is fed only the best grains. And then they kill it.”

“Kill it?” Tsem muttered. “That doesn't sound like a very good thing to do to a god.”

“They kill it to send it home, to be with its mother. They treat it well, and when it goes home it tells the other gods that the Mang still treat their brothers and sisters—the other horses—well.”