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 in a distant sky, the black one on the horizon. Snow thunder, Perkar's father called it—rare and unnatural. A sign that gods were playing games with the heavens. Perkar nearly remarked on the sound—to show that he knew at least something of such signs and portents—but they had both heard it, and it seemed silly to point out so obvious a thing to a hunter and tracker of Ngangata's skill. Instead, he listened alertly for further noises. The distance, however, was quiet thereafter, as if the heavens had only a single word to speak before returning to stubborn, sullen silence.
The quiet itched at Perkar. His lungs seemed crowded with the necessity of speaking. He cast about for something to say and finally settled upon the obvious. “It's good to have you along,” he told Ngangata.
The halfling nodded. “I'm eager to meet this goddess, this maker of heroes,” he answered.
Perkar wondered if he should take offense at that—he knew Ngangata's opinion of heroes—but when he glanced over at his companion, there was no hint of malice on the broad, pale face.
“I don't know that she will show herself to you. Or to me, for that matter,” he said.
“Then we will have wasted a trip,” Ngangata answered simply.
“No. No, whether she manifests or not, she will hear me. That is all I want, to tell her a few things. To apologize.”
“In my experience,” Ngangata remarked, “gods have little use for Human apologies.”
“Perhaps,” Perkar said. “But she will hear one from me.”
Ngangata nodded as the wind gusted from the north, straight into their faces, numbing their lips into wooden clappers only vaguely capable of shaping speech. Perkar reached to lace his elkskin hood tighter and draw a thick woolen kerchief over his nose, so that only his squinting eyes were visible.
“Something odd in those clouds, ” said a voice in his ear, just as his face was warming.
“So Ngangata tells me,” Perkar mumbled.
“Eh?” Ngangata queried, catching his muffled speech.
“It's Harka,” Perkar explained, and Ngangata pursed his lips and urged his mount on up ahead. He knew that Perkar disliked talking to his sword when others were near.
“Odd, ” Harka repeated. “Too far away to see more. ”
“Let me know when you can say something useful.”
“Still bitter? At least you answered me this time. It is difficult for me to understand your attitude. One would think you would be grateful. I've saved your life many times. ”
“So you've told me before. And I should be, I admit. But my body remembers what has been done to it, knows that it has died several times now. There is a peculiar ache to that, Harka.”
“An ache I can feel well enough, ” the sword answered. “Find some way to free me, and both our problems will be solved. ”
“If I can find a way to do so, I will,” Perkar promised the blade. “If nothing else, I will return you to the Forest Lord.”
“How far will you go to make amends, Perkar? The Forest Lord will snap you down like a toad swallowing a bug. As Ngan-gata said, gods have precious little use for Human sentiment. I should know. ”
“It doesn't matter to me what the gods do or do not value,” Perkar remarked, very softly indeed. “I know what my father taught me: Piraku, the code of honor and glory. I have walked away from the path of my father for too long now.”