The Blackgod

sword held a god, but perhaps Ghe was correct, and that was a lie. What sort of creature might he have sent Hezhi off with?

But she had dreamed him.

“And the other?” Ghan asked.

Ghe ticked his finger against his palm. “The guardian of the Water Temple.”

“Why him?”

“The priests don't have power as such; they are like darknesses resistant to light. But he was filled with life and flame, and it was not the life and flame of the River.”

“You don't know that,” Ghan interpolated. ”He may have some way of siphoning the River's strength through the temple. Perhaps ?hat is why he remains there.”

Ghe regarded Ghan with what appeared to be respect. “I see you have been thinking about that, too.”

“Indeed,” Ghan said. “It's an intriguing mystery.”

“A crime” Ghe corrected.

“If you will, then,” Ghan agreed. “A crime, but one committed a thousand years ago, when Nhol was young. When a person the old texts name the Ebon Priest came to our city.”

“Yes, I read the record of it, in the book you showed me.”

“But that account is a he, of course,” Ghan continued, pausing just an instant for emphasis. “Because it says that the River sent the Ebon Priest, and clearly the River would not send someone to bind him.”

“No, wait,” Ghe corrected. 'The Codex Obsidian stated only that the Ebon Priest claimed to have been sent by the River.”

Ghan wagged his finger. “You should have become a scholar rather than a Jik. You have sense for detail, and that's important.”

“Important for a Jik, too,” Ghe observed.

“I suppose so,” Ghan conceded. “As a Jik then, someone familiar with crime—”

“I did not know I was committing crimes,” Ghe snapped. “I believed I was working for the empire.”

“Very well,” Ghan soothed. “I meant no insult, nor did I mean that. But the Jik and the Ahw'en also solve crimes, punish criminals. The people you executed, for the most part, were criminals against the state.” Or helpless children, committing no greater crime than continuing to breathe, intruded bitterly.

“That makes you angry,” Ghe said.

“I'm sorry,” Ghan lied and, continuing to lie, explained. “My own clan was declared outlaw, you must understand. Exiled. I had to disavow them.”

“I knew the first, of course. But disavow them? Why?”

“To remain in the library,” Ghan answered. The library from which you have taken me at last, despite everything. But let him feel the anger of that; Ghe would confuse it with the fury at injustices done his clan.

“Ah,” Ghe said, perhaps sympathetically. “Now I understand why the emperor told me to threaten you with sealing the library. You could have joined your family in exile.”

Ghan waved that aside, tried to wave his outrage aside with it. “No matter. The point is only this: when someone commits a crime, how do you discover who committed it?”

“I was a Jik, not an Ahw'en.”

“Yes, but you have enough intelligence to know where to begin an investigation.”

“With motive, I suppose,” Ghe suggested after a moment. “If you know why the crime was committed, you might make some guess as to who did it.”

“Exactly,” Ghan said. “Yet in this case, we know the criminal—the so-called Ebon Priest—but we have no idea what his motive was.”

“I see,” Ghe said thoughtfully. “And you have no possible motive in mind? It seems to me—”

At that moment, the barge bumped into another snag, and Ghan's heart skipped a beat. Ghe glanced at him sharply, opened his mouth to ask what was wrong—

And the barge leapt straight up from the water at least the height of a man, lifted and dropped. Weight left Ghan's body, replaced by a peculiar fluttery sensation in his gut—and then stunning pain as the deck slapped against him. Timbers protested, and from somewhere came a shrieking. Ghan bounced on the hardwood like a stone rattling in a jar, and he wished, belatedly, that he had remained in his cabin, on the bed. Then something kicked again from below, and Ghan fetched against the brass rails as the nose of the barge tilted up to point straight at the noonday sun. It poised thus, the entire mass of the barge above him, Ghan wondering dully why his end hadn't been pushed under by the weight, whether the craft would choose to fall back the way it had come or continue over, to bury him and all of his enemies against the muddy bottom of the stream.

Good-bye, Hezhi, he thought. I would have liked to have seen you again.

GHE scooped up Ghan and leapt as far out into the stream as he could. If the barge flipped over on them…

The water felt dead around him, as if he were bathing in a corpse. Rather than giving him stamina, the frigid water actually seemed to leach it away. He stroked furiously with his free arm, keeping Ghan's head out of the water. Fortunately the old man did not struggle; he was either unconscious or too smart to fight—probably the latter.

A roar and trembling shook the very water as the barge struck it again, mixed with the sound of splintering wood and the piteous shrieks of men and panicked horses. The great vessel had not capsized but had landed seam down and split up the middle.

Through the wreckage, dragons arose.

They were as Ghe remembered them, quickened water and spirit, slick and scintillating skins like oil lying on water, eel bodies and the heads of flat and whiskered catfish. When Bone Eel had summoned—or created—them, they had seemed powerful but tame, awesome without being terrifying. Now the twin serpents lashed heavenward, their toothless maws gaping trumpets of insentient fury and agony. The life in them shuddered, boiling out of them in such blinding rage and heat that Ghe could sort nothing, understand nothing, but that what died in the dragons was the River's seed in them, his dream that they existed. And even in that moment of understanding, something cracked, and live steam writhed skyward, clouds in search of their place while godstuff shrieked south, thinning and vanishing. The dragons with their color and august dread were gone, leaving no bones but flotsam and no sound save the stillness of a hurricane's heart.

Ghe reached the bank and dragged himself and Ghan onto it. Already small fragments of the wreckage drifted by, seeking downstream toward the River, messengers of failure and destruction. The first lifeless corpse of many washed past, eyes staring sightlessly at the bottom of the stream.

Ghe shook his head, uncomprehending. What had happened?

He was not given time to contemplate or theorize. The water before him erupted, a spray of foam that almost instantly thickened. It became a demon, while all he could do was gape like a speared fish.

Her skin was the color of sun-bleached bone, her alien eyes winking fiery gold. Her hair hung dark and lank as that of a drowned corpse. She was naked, magnificent, and terrifying. Leveling an accusing finger at him, the demon strode imperiously across the surface of the water, cracked out words to him as if her tongue were a whip lashing silver chimes.

“How many years have I waited for you to make a blunder of this sort?” she demanded. “Oh, how many ages? I never dreamed you would be so stupid as to give me something to hurt, to pay you back in even the smallest way.”

She was less than an arm's reach from him now, hating him with those impossible eyes. He could see the power gathered about her, how it reached away, up- and downstream, for as far as vision reached; how her white flesh trembled to contain her puissance and her fury. Ghe shook, as well, shivered as mad fear pranced along his bones. This was the second demon he had known, and the first had killed him. He caught the vaguest glimpse of Ghan nearby, raising himself to a sitting position. Behind her lithe form, more wreckage drifted past.

“It is your arrogance,” she hissed, sibilant and venomous, “always your arrogance. You think you may go anywhere with impunity. You think because you devour me day by day, you can violate