The Blackgod

Of course, he had never mentioned the red-gold and black chickens poking about the yard, the dogs sleeping on the threshold of the damakuta, the curious and dirt-smudged children who played, more or less naked, amongst the chickens.

But Perkar was right; for all of that, it was certainly grander than a Mang yekt.

The “lord” approached and said something to Perkar that Hezhi did not understand. Perkar looked tired; the seams on his brow were deep with trouble, and whatever response he gave to the other man seemed uneasily given. He added something, as an afterthought, and then waved her and the rest to his side. Hezhi complied with a reluctance she didn't entirely understand. There was some quality about the tall man's eyes she found disquieting. When they arrived, however, he bowed to them slightly.

“Pardon the thickness of Mang speech on my tongue,” he told them. “It has been more than a day since I have spoken it.”

To Hezhi's ear there was nothing wrong with his Mang at all. Probably Brother Horse and Yuu'han could tell he was no native speaker, but she could not.

“In any event, I am known as Sheldu Kar Kwereshkan, and welcome to my damakuta. Its rooms, its wine, its food are yours for the taking, and if aught else calls a need to you, do not hesitate to pass that request on to me or mine.” He turned to her. ”Princess, I am told you have traveled far and far to be here. Be welcome.” His amber eyes lingered on her uncomfortably, but Hezhi smiled and nodded. It was probably, after all, only the alien color of his orbs that distracted her. “Brother Horse, once known as Yushnene, your name is well known to my family. You and your nephew understand that you are under our protection here, and no harm shall come to you.”

“Very generous,” Brother Horse replied, perhaps a bit stiffly.

The tall lord greeted everyone else. Hezhi gazed back around the compound, wondering what the building might be like inside. She wondered if there might be a bath.

SHE sighed, ladling more water onto the steaming rocks. The liquid danced frenetically on the porous, glowing stones, and the next breath she drew was almost unbearably hot, though delicious. Heat gripped through her muscles to her bone, and soreness seemed to ooze out of her with her sweat.

It was like no bath she had ever known, but it would certainly serve.

Several other women shared the sauna with her; unclothed they were more ghostly than ever, white as alabaster tinged here and there with pink. They were polite, but Hezhi suspected that they were inspecting her with the same bemused regard. Men used a separate steamhouse, she was told, and likely that was where Tsem and the rest were. Perkar and the lord had gone off to talk alone; Hezhi suspected that he would ask for more men to escort them to the mountain.

The mountain. She'leng. She closed her eyes against the heat as another steam tornado writhed into the air. She drew up the images of her journey through the lake to that other She'leng, which she understood was in most ways the same as the one she was moving so steadily toward.

Why must she go there corporeally? She had already been there as a spirit, but Karak insisted that she must make the journey in the flesh. She ran her finger over her scale absently. It was quiet, untroubled, and yet still it had the power to trouble her. Someone was not telling her something. She hoped it was not Perkar, and even at that thought her heart sank, a tightening in otherwise relaxed muscles. Perkar had been so good to her these past few days. She still did not know what she felt for him, exactly, but his arms around her that night had been good, comfortable. Not disgusting as with Wezh, not full of trembling, silly excitement as with Yen, but quiet, and warm, and good. If Perkar were betraying her, too…

Unfortunately, she was forced to admit, he might be—if he thought his reason was good enough. She remembered her conversation with Ngangata. But that was before—well, she knew Perkar had some sort of feelings for her.

Or he wanted something, very badly indeed.

She frowned and threw more water on the rocks, reveling this time more in the sting of pain from the cloudy effervescence than in its more soothing results. No, she wouldn't think that way. She would trust Perkar, as much as she could. She had to trust someone.

And if Perkar were plotting against her, what chance did she have?

What a silly thought that was, she admonished herself. As if she were without power. She had never been in the habit of trusting those around her with her life; why should she start now, when she had more resources within her than ever before? Had refusing her heritage from the River broken some self- reliant part of her? These past months she had counted on people more than she ever had in her life. Yet back in Nhol, when her very existence had been in danger, it had been she who found the answers in the library, in the tunnels beneath the city. Ghan and Tsem had helped, but it been her own initiative and hunger that saved her. Her only moment of weakness had been in summoning Perkar, in wishing for a hero. She had not known that her blood would mingle with the River and bring that about. She had not consciously been at fault. But her sin had been in wishing for someone else to help her, when real experience proved again and again that she could rely only on herself, in the end.

But Perkar had saved her then. Without him, Yen would have murdered her.

She tried to relax back into the steam, reclaim her peace in long-deserved luxury, but it was gone. Once again, she did not know enough about her own destiny. In Nhol, the library had given her the key to surviving, a golden key of information better than any lockpick.

Here books were of no use to her, but tonight she would invoke other ways of learning. She would have some answers before taking another step toward She'leng.

WHEN they were alone, Perkar waited an instant, clenching and unclenching his fist—to calm down, to manage his temper, to let memory counsel him rather than stir him to useless stupidity.

“I know you, Karak,” he snapped at last. “You cannot fool me, hiding behind the skin of a relative.”

The seeming of Sheldu Kar Kwereshkan merely smiled and gestured for him to sit. Nearby, ajar of woti sat in a warm pot of water; for the first time in over a year, Perkar's nostrils and lungs were pleasured by its sweet scent, and his throat ached to feel the warm drink coursing down it. He almost salivated when his host poured two cups and handed one to him.

“Piraku,” the man said simply, raising his cup. Perkar raised his own, brought the fuming drink below his nostrils, and let the warm scent of fermented barley linger there. It was woti kera, black woti, the finest and most expensive form of the beverage.

“Please, drink,” his host insisted. “Why do you only inhale it? Drink!”

Perkar regarded the dark fluid once more and then carefully put the cup on the floor. “I am like a ghost, Karak,” he said. “You have made me like a ghost. The things of my people are no longer real to me, only shadows that I do not deserve. Woti is the drink of a man and a warrior, and I deserve only what a ghost enjoys of woti; its vapor. Only that for the man I might have been. I will never drink woti again, not until I have corrected my past mistakes.”

The man sighed, sipped his own woti, and sighed again. “It is a drink, Perkar,” he said. ”A thing to be savored, enjoyed—not agonized over.”

“It is a drink for those with Piraku, and I have none. Nor, I suspect, have you.”

“Pretty thing, I was winging through the skies above this mountain long before any thought had been given to Piraku—or to your kind at all. I probably invented woti, though I don't remember for certain.”

“You are Karak.”

The man took another sip of woti before answering. “If you accused the real Sheldu of having no Piraku, the two of you would be stabbing at one another with swords by now. Yes, yes, I have come to point your way. It is more than I thought would be allowed, but less than I had hoped for.”

Perkar sucked in a retort, and when he had the control, asked, as humbly as he could, “Will you tell me now how the Changeling can be destroyed by Hezhi?”

Karak cocked his head appraisingly. “You are learning, pretty thing. Perhaps my despair over you has been unwarranted. What an irony that would be, since it has kept me sleepless.”

Perkar worried that he would grit his teeth into grains of salt. His anger was dissolving—or at least mixing with a bottomless terror as he remembered that Raven gone white, holding him