The Blackgod

As they had been speaking, the boy's strange speech had gradually altered, until now he spoke with Ghe's own soft dialect. That was somehow much more unnerving than hearing him speak in the ancient, incantive tongue.

“You have been here since the First Dynasty?”

The boy shrugged. “Now and then I sleep. I was sleeping when you arrived, but my pet, here, awakened me.” He tugged playfully on the golden leash, and the darkness quivered a bit.

Ghe did not ask about the pet, remembering that he was supposed to be unsighted, nor did he ask about the books, the weapons, the skulls.

“Are those all of your questions?”

“I don't know what else to ask.”

“Perhaps you would prefer to speak to someone else?”

“Someone else?”

“Why, yes. One of my companions, perhaps.”

Ghe studied the room carefully. He saw no “companions” save for the “pet”—whatever it was.

“I listen for the Sound of Falling Water,” he said, the standard acceptance of a master's wisdom by the pupil. He realized, even before the boy had uttered his short, barking laugh, how ludicrous the phrase now seemed.

“Well, then, who shall we speak to?” The boy stood and walked over to the skulls, rubbed their smooth craniums with his palms.

“Su'ta'znata? Nungeznata? No! You would want to speak to Lengnata. Here.” He lifted up one of the skulls and brought it over, sat with it on his lap.

“There, Lengnata. Speak to your loyal subject Yen.”

The boy was certainly mad, Ghe thought. Quite mad indeed.

“Thou mockest me,” Ghe heard himself say suddenly, harshly. He clutched at his throat. “Leave me to sleep. I have no subjects, nor ever did I.” He heard himself go on. His voice, speaking from his throat, without his command.

“No! Stop! Make it stop!” Ghe cried, this time of his own volition. He could feel nothing, no intruding presence. It was not as if someone were forcing him to speak; it just… happened.

The boy tittered, as Ghe answered himself. “Slay him, if thou canst, and if not, escape from here. If thou ever wert a subject of the Chakunge…” Ghe concentrated furiously, trying to make it stop, but it would not; the words kept vomiting from his mouth. He barely noticed how, at the mention of the Chakunge, the boy nearly doubled over in laughter.

Stop, stop, Ghe thought, as Lengnata muttered on madly in Ghe's voice. Desperately he reached out with the tendril of his power, searching for a way to make the babbling cease, to kill the source of the utterances. He felt into the skull and found it there, the ghost knot, and frantically seized it, closed the fist of his mind on it, and squeezed. The babbling suddenly did cease then, and almost instinctively Ghe pulled the ghost of Lengnata into himself and tethered it with the bund boy. It was a weak, starved creature, easier to manage than he had guessed.

He realized suddenly that his knees must have given up holding him; he was on his hands and knees facing the floor, shuddering heavily.

“Give that back, ” the boy said slowly, deliberately. He no longer seemed amused at all.

“No,” Ghe managed. “No, I don't think I will.” And he struck like a snake, reached for the bunched strings of the guardian's life.

Fire hollowed Ghe out, burst from his eyes and mouth, and, as if physically struck, his body arched back and slammed to the stone floor, writhing. He kicked away madly, aware of his own shrieking but unable to do anything to stop it. A small part of his mind remained intact, trying to ride the crest of the agony, understand what had happened to him. He had reached out toward the boy and encountered something, a venom that struck up through him like a sword. He waited for the next blow, the one that would finish him, but something stayed it. Surely not him, though he felt a hard kernel of power in him, still untouched. He kept that near as, trembling, he turned back to the boy.

The boy had a nasty grin on his face. His “pet” had risen up, and Ghe saw that it now wore Human form; a tall, striking man with enormous, fishlike eyes, a nose almost beaklike in its angularity. He wore armor made of some gigantic crustacean, and he carried an aquamarine blade. Within his bulging eyes were empty hollows in which danced darkness and white sparks. His hair hung long, jet, lank, bound by the golden circlet of a king.

“Bow down, Yen,” the boy spat. “Rise, but only to your knees so that thy emperor may receive you.”

Ghe still felt on fire, but the pain seemed to have been mostly illusion, or at least nonphysical. It had been as if his eyes and flesh actually melted, but he was still whole …

What was the guardian talking about? The apparition whose chain he held was not the emperor; he had seen the August One many times. No, this was some ghost, or demon.

“I see you do not recognize him, the First Emperor, the Riverson.”

Ghe parted his lips to retort but could not find the air. It couldn't be, he knew. Couldn't be not a Chakunge but the Chakunge. If such were true, the power of this boy must be hideous … But now he could see the boy's power revealed, the fire and lightning raging in his heart, a cyclone of light. What had he done, what had he wakened?

“Now. Give me back what you took.”

I return to death regardless, Ghe understood. And so he ran, striking out with the force in him rather than reaching to take.

Four steps he flew and felt his blow deflected, drained away, but then he was leaping, hurtling through the air. The boy shrieked in fury when he saw Ghe's target, and Ghe felt a thousand hot needles of brass piercing his spine. The ghost of the Chakunge moved as quickly as a dark lightning crackling across the floor, chips spalling from the stone where his feet touched. In the same instant Ghe struck the roaring column of water and it struck him, a giant's fist with no mercy or care. Light and thought vanished into thunder and then void.

XVI Gaan

THE sound of drums faded, replaced by an enveloping silence that included not even her heartbeat. Hezhi had a sense of rushing, but there was no confirming wind on her face. The terrible fear that gripped her faded, however, receding like the drums and her own heartbeat, and with some startlement she understood that her eyes were shut tightly. She opened them.

Something was hurtling by beneath her, a broad, endless something that could only be landscape, seen from high in the air. It was a dark landscape, the bunched masses of hills indigo, the plains mauve, wriggling strips of ebony that must be streams or rivers. The brightest color surrounded her; she was wreathed in clouds of sparks, exactly like the sky-seeking flashes from the bonfire, and with a shock she realized that the sparks were not merely following her but emitting from her; her body glowed like a red-hot brand.

What have I become? she wondered. But she still felt like herself.

Ahead of her, matching the pace of her flight, was a second brand, trailing flame like the comets she had read of, nearly white at its center, nimbused in orange and yellow, the faintest tail of the torch swirling away into turquoise, jade, and at last, violet. It was more than merely astonishing but beautiful, and she found that while her fear seemed to have been cut from her like a lock of hair, her wonder had not.

What had happened? She struggled to understand as her speed increased, the weird landscape sheeting beneath like an inconstantly choppy sea.

She had passed through the drum, the bun. She must be in that otherworld Brother Horse described, and she realized that she had never believed him, despite her experience with things arcane. Ghosts and the power of the River made sense to her; this land of gods and demons and worlds within worlds did not, and deep down she had always thought it to be some Mang superstition. That assumption had led her to be incautious, to meddle with something she understood not at all. It could be that she was dead, she thought. She must resemble a ghost quite strongly, a ghost such as the one that had attacked her in the Hall of Moments. Had her body been stripped from her like the peel of a fruit? Was Tsem even now holding her lifeless corpse, weeping?

She turned back, attempting to see more of her “body,” but only flame was revealed to her, a coruscating skirt billowing into nothingness.