Gregory Keyes - The Blackgod

“Tell me what to do then.”

He told her.

HARKA slashed down as Karak's blade rose to meet it, and the two came together in a shower of sparks. In Perkar's ear, Harka shrieked piteously. He had never known the weapon could feel pain or fear, but now both shuddered through him, as if the blade had become his own arm, skin removed and nerves laid bare.

Karak hammered down a second blow, and Perkar raised his blade to meet it.

“No!” Harka screamed; then steel clashed and the godblade burst into a thousand bits. The hilt leapt from his hand, and in his ear, Harka's dying cry faded into nothing. Perkar swayed, weaponless, in the following silence.

“Now,” Karak said, “that silliness is over with.” He bent toward Hezhi's body.

An arrow shaft appeared in his eye. Karak shrilled and straightened, seeking his new attacker. Ngangata stood less than a score of paces away. Half of his body was soaked in red Human blood, but he raised his bow for a second shot. Karak darted forward, faster than a mortal eye could follow, and in that eye-blink his sword plunged into the halfling's chest. Ngangata snarled and yet tried to raise his weapon, but Karak twisted the blade, and Ngangata's eyes turned to Perkar. They brimmed with tears of agony, but his gaze held no self-pity or even fear—it conveyed apology. Apology—for having failed him. Perkar leapt once again, shrieking inarticulately, still unarmed, bent upon tearing the Crow God apart with his bare hands. With a flashed look of utter disdain, Karak turned and ran him through, as well, the blade sliding into his navel and out his back. He knew no shock at being impaled, because in the past year he had taken more than one such wound. But before, he might have fought up the blade, or at least quickly disengaged himself. Now he merely glared at his murderer, still refusing to admit it was over.

Karak held him up with the blade for an instant, yellow eyes bright with contempt. “See how you like that without a magic sword to heal you,” he spat.

“Ah,” Perkar moaned. Karak released the hilt. Sword still in his belly, Perkar felt his knees wobble and give way, and he sat down roughly.

He almost fell on Ngangata. The halfling was still alive, though just barely so. Karak regarded them for just a moment, then stepped toward Hezhi.

“I-I'm sorry,” Ngangata managed to stammer.

“Shut up, you dumb Brush-Man,” Perkar whispered. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

“I could have … I could have …” Ngangata seemed confused, unable to think of what he might have done.

Trembling, Perkar leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “ I'm the one who is sorry, brother. Piraku with you and about you.” He patted the dying halfling on the shoulder. “I've got just one more thing to do,” he said, feeling a little giddy but otherwise surprisingly well, considering. “Then I'll come join you here.”

Ngangata nodded but said nothing.

Perkar put both hands on the sword hilt, closed his eyes, and pulled.

GHE brushed his hps upon Hezhi's and felt triumph. He, a gutter scorp from Southtown, had kissed a princess. He stepped back from her, wanting to see her lovely eyes, hoping to see love there.

What he saw instead was urgency.

“Hello, Yen,” she said very seriously.

“Princess.”

“I need your help.”

Ghe noticed for the first time that there were other figures behind Hezhi. They all stood in the little courtyard above Nhol, where Hezhi had taken him once to look down at the ships. But he understood that could not be where they were as his memories—what little remained of them—returned.

“I've failed you,” he said, feeling hot, unaccustomed tears start in his eye, remembering the Blackgod carving him with a knife of living thunder.

“Not yet. There is still time,” Ghan said from behind Hezhi. The third figure was the stream demon, the woman—she sat sullenly on the bench by the cottonwood tree. Near her, looking old and defeated, stood the ancient Nholish lord he had captured in the Water Temple. Lengnata was fat, his eyes piggish little dots.

“Where are we, really?” he asked Hezhi.

“In your mansion. The place where you keep the souls you capture.”

“How did you get here?”

“I came to see you, Ghe. Because there is something you can do to save me.”

“Anything.”

“You must slay the River to do it.”

Ghe's limbs began to quake. He shuddered violently. “I can't do that. You have to know I can't do that. Even if I had the power—”

Anger wrote itself on her features. “You owe me,” she declared. “You made me think you liked me, maybe more than liked me. You owe me.”

“ I love you,” he whispered.

“I don't know what that means,” she retorted, but softening. “But I know that I need your help.”

“I cannot slay the River!”

Ghan interrupted him. “Have you forgotten Li again, Ghe? We found bits of her in you, in your memory, hidden away and dimmed from your waking mind. The River tried to clean them out of you. He made you kill her, Ghe, because he would not give you what few memories you cherished.”

Hezhi held something out to him—not something physical, but fragments of his mind, like a shattered mirror. Images of an old woman, her love for him, the care that only she had ever lavished upon him. A day long ago, on the levee of the River…

“He did steal her from me, didn't he? Why did he do that?”

Hezhi reached up and brushed the hair from his eyes. “To keep you from being distracted. A real man—one with his own thoughts and motives and loves—a real man makes a poor weapon for the River. The River hates us because he will never really understand us, no matter that he wants our bodies as vessels. He hates you, Ghe, hates me, simply because he needs us. I know what it's like, to have him in me. I do.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. ”But Ghe, he made you from a man. Part of you is still a man. And despite what you did to me, you don't deserve what he has done to you. Neither of us deserves it. I am dying, Ghe. Only you can save me.”

An inchoate anger was growing in him, but still he persisted. “I… He made me so. I cannot but serve him.”

“No,” Hezhi said. “No, if you love me, you can serve me. You once told Ghan that whatever I wanted—”

“I lied! Ghan knows that.”

“You thought you lied,” Ghan said. “But I believed you because it was a deeper truth than you knew. It was the man in you, rather than the Riverghost.”

Ghe stilled his trembling, braiding his anger and his love. He reached into the secret, cold place that had helped him kill, back when he had been merely Human, when a misstep meant his own death, when compassion was a deadly thing. He wove that into the fibers, too, a warp to lay the weft through. lama blade of silver, I am a sickle of ice, he whispered, and finally, once again, he was.

“What must I do?” he heard himself say.

Hezhi leaned up and kissed the scar on his chin, the first wound he ever received. “I'm sorry,” she said. “But what you have to do is die. But we will help you.” And she gestured to the stream demon.

“Die,” he considered. “I have to die.” He focused on her again, on the exquisite shape of her face. “Will you forgive me then?”

“I already forgive you, Ghe.”

“Call me Yen.” She smiled. “Yen.”

IT took three pulls to remove the sword, each more painful than the last, and the final heave was followed by a gout of blood that he knew must surely have drained him. Nevertheless, though his legs felt like wood, he struggled to stand.