The Blackgod

that dreaming was the blow to his neck, over and over again, his head falling into the muck, a weird glimpse of his own legs buckling, the fountain of iridescence rising. Now he was here, with the Blessed. Was he trapped, as they were?

Ghe blew out a long breath, steeled himself, and reached fingers up to his throat, stroking lightly from the base of his ear down. There: a raised ridge of flesh. He followed it around, found that it ringed him, a necklace of scar tissue.

“What does it mean?” he demanded, of no one in particular. But after a moment he nodded, answered himself. “I know what it means. The River remade me, put me back together, so that I might find his child and return her to him.” He reached his hand out before him, marveling at the touch of his fingertips against one another. ”Not dead,” he whispered. ”But not exactly alive either, I'll wager. Not exactly alive.” And he remembered his hunger, like the hunger of fire for more wood, and felt a little thrill of fright.

“I wish I knew more.” But he wanted more than that. He wanted to see someone, talk to someone, prove to himself that he was alive and not in some lonely afterworld. He wanted to understand why he could open the doors to certain memories so easily, while other rooms in his mind were swept clean or drowned in chill, deep water.

It seemed that there was someone—an image came to him: an old woman, dark, hunched over a cloth, casting bone dice. But there was no name, no place, nothing. His mother? But no, that felt wrong.

Whom did he know? He remembered several priests, but even in this state he did not want to see them. No, he remembered only Hezhi very clearly, he remembered everything about her, he remembered her friends—the giant, Tsem; the old man, Ghan; and that little idiot, Wezh, who courted her.

Well, Hezhi was not in Nhol; that was why he was still alive. Tsem was probably dead, for Ghe remembered stabbing him—though, of course, he had stabbed the white demon swordsman and he had not died. But if Tsem wasn't dead, he was gone with Hezhi. Ghan …

He considered Ghan, the librarian. The old man had helped Hezhi escape; Ghe had followed him and divined his plans. But Ghan himself had not planned to leave Nhol. Furthermore, Ghe had never told the priesthood of Ghan's identity; he had been saving that for later, to tell the high priest himself so no lower-order theurg could claim to have discovered the traitors. That meant the priesthood might not know about him, might not have tortured him to death.

That pleased Ghe for more than one reason. He remembered, vaguely, that he admired the old man for his willingness to help the girl. He had considered never reporting him at all…

Ghe shook his thoughts back into line. Ghan might still be alive and well in the library. And Ghan knew him only in his disguise as Yen, a young engineer who engaged in harmless flirtation with Hezhi. If he were Yen, Ghan might speak to him. He must speak to me, he thought, again feeling the scar and wondering why there was no revulsion.

Yes, he could be Yen again, couldn't he?

Of course, first he had to leave the underpalace, and the only way out he knew was by the Darkness Stair. He was not yet ready to risk the stair and its guardians—who knew what effect the priestly wards might have on him? Yet the thing in the water seemed to intimate that there were other ways out, one way, in fact, that Hezhi herself had braved. Ghe smiled and shook his head at the thought. His estimation of Hezhi continued to rise. Certainly he had been a fool to try to kill her; she was worth the whole priesthood and the aristocracy, too. He imagined the sweetness of her lips once more, that warm forbidden thing.

Yes, she was a marvelous creature. If she should reduce Nhol to rubble when he brought her back, why should he care? He was now, in his own way, a child of the River, too.

But out, he reminded himself. He must have come down from the sewers, somehow. His memory of it was of no use: he had been blind, a worm crawling down, waterward. Now he was a man again, and so he would have to use his mind, his hands, his eyes—though his eyes were no longer human, nor, he suspected, were his mind and hands.

He used those eyes to find the water duct that emptied into the chamber, though no light at all existed to aid him. Well, he thought, a place to begin.

He rose up from the throne.

HE made many false turns in the strange, twisted ways beneath the city, but eventually, he found a clean breath of air and followed it. Its source was a sewer grate, peering down at him from above, the air sweet, smelling of smoke and roasted meat. He shuddered in relief, for he had begun to suspect that his resurrection was merely some terrible joke played out by the River God, a punishment for failing—a curse to wander the beneath forever. But the air and its scents were real, because he could not have remembered them sharply enough to imagine them.

No light fell through the grate, and so he judged it to be night. This was fortuitous; he had no desire to emerge onto a crowded, daylit street. He realized that he had no idea what he looked like, though he knew his form was much as it had been. He was not, like the Blessed, a distorted monster. Still, it would be safer to see himself before another saw him—there might be surprises more evident than his scarred neck. He knew his clothes would attract attention, for they were rotted; they stank, though he only now took note of that. He would have to do something about them. As he thought this, he shook his head in wonder. His clothes were rotted. How long had he been beneath the city? Perhaps Ghan and everyone he knew was dead, Hezhi an old woman. There were old stories about such things, men thought drowned in the River who emerged after generations …

Best not to think about that anymore. Best to learn the truth, since it lay just above him. He found the foothold spikes in the stone wall and climbed up them. The grate, cast iron, shifted easily—too easily, and he began to wonder how different he was now. He could see in the dark, he was stronger, much stronger…

He was something like a ghost, but not a ghost. A memory tickled at him. There were stories of things like that, as well. He could hear the voice of an old woman talking, almost chanting. He could not see her face, nor could he remember the words, or again, her name.

He pulled himself out onto the street. A wind swept over him, channeled by the walls of the buildings on either side. Above, dense layers of smoke and perhaps clouds as well obscured the stars, but he could see a faint, pale luminescence seeping through them that might be the moon.

He was in a long, narrow courtyard. A fountain gurgled not far away. He could hear a baby crying.

This was, he realized, no street in Nhol. He had emerged, been reborn to the world, in the Chakunge's palace, the very heart of the empire.

As it should be, he thought. As it should always have been.

III Snow Thunder

PERKAR eyed the sky dubiously. “I wonder if we should make camp now” he muttered.

Ngangata surveyed the ominous black billows edging in from the western horizon. “All bluff,” he opined. “It doesn't smell like a storm to me. Though …”

“Though what?” Perkar grunted.

“It has a strangeness about it.”

“Oh.” Perkar regarded the skyline once more, straining to sense whatever it was that Ngangata could feel. Nothing unusual came to him: the stormheads remained, to him, mere clouds.

“Sometimes I wonder if you say things like that just to be mysterious,” he grumbled.

“No. Unfortunately, life is already mysterious without any help from me,” Ngangata answered.

Sighing, Perkar leaned forward and patted his mount. “What do you think, T'esh?“ The charcoal-and-gray-striped stallion spared him a laconic sidewise glance before returning his full attention to tearing at the clump of grass protruding through the slowly melting snow. As far as he could tell, T'esh had no opinion on the matter.

“I'll assume you agree with Ngangata,” Perkar decided. “We'll push on.”

He urged T'esh to a walk, and Ngangata, abreast, clucked to his own mount in the weird, unhuman language of his father's folk. An eerie banging punctuated whatever he said, like a god hammering a moon-size sheet of tin—but