The Blackgod

helpless off the ground. He wanted to retort, to singe the god with his words, but he could not. And he knew—as Karak seemed to know, from the mocking sarcasm in his tone—that it was fear and not wisdom that stayed his hand and tongue.

“Please,” he said. “We have come too far to fail. If you don't tell me what we should do—”

“Never fear, Perkar. Some of the burden I have lifted from your shoulders. The thing I foresaw marching out from Nhol has come, and it gathers power and terror about it. It is a demon of sorts, what your folk call a Tiskawa.”

“Life-Devourer,” Perkar muttered. “That lifts no burden from me, Karak. If such a thing stalks us—”

“Well, you trade for this and you get that,” Karak allowed. “When the time comes, I am confident that you and Harka can stand against such a creature. What eases your load is that because of this thing and the stink of Changeling about it, its power—I may now escort you to the mountain. With such a blemish crawling through Balat, the Forest Lord will scarce take notice of us, unless we give him excessive cause to. So you see, your fears that you will not know what to do once we reach his source are unfounded. I will be along, in this guise, to help you.” He leaned up, and his voice became lighter in tone but heavier with threat. ”And only you and I are to know this, of course. The others need only know that a distant kinsman of yours and thirty of his men will ride with you on your quest.

“What of Hezhi? She does not know that she is the crucial one. What if she refuses to go, fearing the Changeling as she does?”

“She will go,” Karak assured him.

“And what of my feelings on this matter?” he snarled, forcing strength into his voice despite the quivering in his limbs. “Suppose I will not help you lead her there without her consent?”

“You have had many months to tell her if you were going to. You have not; you will not. You, too, desperately wish to have your lost Piraku back, to end the war with the Mang, to set your part in your people's affairs to rights. And if that isn't enough—” He smiled. “Draw out your blade.”

Perkar hung his head. “I have made no move to do so. I have not threatened you.”

“You misunderstand me,” Karak said softly. “I said draw— out—your—blade.” His command was like knife thrusts through a silk shirt.

Numbly, Perkar took Harka out. He doesn't need me now to get her to the mountain, he realized. He can take my form. No one will know. He held his weapon up, saw with dismay the way the firelight quivered upon the metal—or, rather, the way the blade shivered in his grip.

Karak reached out laconically and pressed his palm against Harka's tip. He pressed until a faint, golden drop of blood started. Perkar felt sweat beading on his brow. What was the Blackgod doing?

“Close your eyes,” Karak intoned.

“If you are to kill me, I wish to die with them open,” he answered.

Karak rolled his own yellow orbs. “Stop being so melodramatic, you fool, and close your eyes. I only want to show you something.”

Perkar breathed deeply, captured a breath, and held it for an instant. As he released it, he allowed his lids to meet.

He saw a boat, broken by dying dragons. His vision was odd, as if he stood far away and high above the things he observed; yet they were all clear to him. Hiere was no doubt of what he saw. But what was happening? He watched in confusion as the great serpents became steam and vanished, as countless men and horses died in the water, from impact, from boiling alive.

Now he saw two men he knew. One was Ghan, the old man who had contracted with him to rescue Hezhi, back in Nhol. The other was familiar, sharply so, and yet he could not precisely place from where he knew that face. And where they were seemed familiar, as well, a small river…

Then she emerged. And as he watched what transpired then, he shrieked and he wept, and that night he did not sleep at all, but rode round and round on that same black nightmare, a mount with no mercy, that squeezed and squeezed his heart until anger crushed into fear, despair into hope, joy into pain. Crushed together until they became, at last, something different from all of those emotions, something that gleamed like the fangs of a beast or the edge of a butchers blade.

HEZHI lay awake in bed, muffled in the lush folds of a down-batted quilt, surrounded by the faint gleam of polished wood in moonlight from a half-slatted window. She felt, now, that she had misjudged the damakuta. It was, indeed, a place of comfort and, more to the point, a place of warmth. She shared her room with three other girls, all within a few years of her own age. Though they spoke no common language, they had been kind enough to her, saw that she had plenty to eat and warm covers, and gave her a long thick woolen shirt that, though it itched and scratched, kept away the mountain chill. The food was odd: bread boiled into dumplings, a thick stew of curd and pungent cheese, some kind of roasted bird—but it was cooked and filling and warm.

That and the sauna almost convinced her to put away her fears and sleep, and when she struggled out of the nightshirt and slipped into the enveloping softness of quilt and mattress, she very nearly surrendered. Almost asleep, drifting languidly from one terrace of cloud to the next…

And then she awoke, to a falling terror, to the call of some nightbird strange to her.

After that, her heart would not stop thudding, but instead picked up her earlier worries, pumped them round and round her body so that they pulsed in her throat, at her wrists, until finally she could bear it no longer and slipped from the bed into the cool night air. She paused at her shadow, cast by moonlight, turned slowly so that the Queen of Night could cast more angles of her on the floor. Her body had changed since leaving the River. Grown more … awkward, somehow. She could see the same thing in her roommates, before they fell asleep. Sisters, they were like images of each other at different ages—and in her own mind, of herself. The youngest was all smallness, limbs smooth and uniform, balanced and beautiful. The eldest girl—Numa? Perhaps fifteen years old, she looked like a woman; sweetly curved hips, breasts, symmetry. The middle girl, though, that was her. Feet, like a puppy's, too big for her body. Bumps that could not yet be called breasts but that ruined the younger harmony of her body.

And all of that happening without any interference from gods or spirits or anything else. She shook her head at the clumsy outline on the floor and wished she had a mirror.

And then she smiled at that. What a silly time to discover vanity.

She found her discarded nightshirt and donned it. Unpacking her drum, she took it by the rim and, with its beater, stepped softly through the wide vertical slats of the window onto the slope of the roof. There she took in her bearings with a breath of night breeze and turned to absorb the high beauty of moonlit mountain slopes and silver-chased clouds. She padded slowly and carefully up to the roofbeam, thinking how much the cedar shingles, in this darkness, resembled the baked clay tiles she had trod so often in Nhol. Except that they smelled better, like the sauna, like the woods.

The nightbird called again, sounding less alien now—Perkar had named it for her, a few nights ago: some sort of owl.

Sitting on the roofbeam, she tapped softly on her drum, on the rippling surface of the lake, and ripples parted upon darkness and night as she went first into the otherworld of her heart.

There they all awaited her: the mare, the swan, and the bull.

“This time, you all come with me,” she said. And the bull stamped and rolled his eyes.

TOGETHER they rushed beneath the surface of the lake, sometimes three and sometimes four figures limned in flame bruising the otherearth with the thunder of their passage. She rode with the mare, half horse as before, and she flew on the wings of the swan, and finally, when he offered for a third time, she joined the bull, felt the uncanny furnace that raged in his chest fill her with fury and unholy joy. She cackled with glee as stone shattered beneath their hooves, as they reached the edge of a precipice and flung out into space to write a line of lightning across the mauve sky.

The instinct of the beasts drove them toward She'leng; they were born there and returned there to be reclothed, and this near they were always able to find it. In the shadows of the air, Hezhi saw what she had not seen before: the dark forms like serpents and wolves that lay in wait for the unwary, for the weak; the thousand thousand jaws and eyes of the otherworld that dared not open to her and her companions. Beyond fear and worry, she knew only fierce elation at such power, at such untouchability. She only barely remembered the concerns that had driven her to seek the mountain with her ghost self, but they all seemed unimportant now.