“Ah, so it is not you, not Hezhi.” The head sniffed. ”Not of the Royal Blood at all, but like the Royal Blood. How did you kill Nu?”
“I ate him, I think.”
“Her,” the creature corrected pettishly.
“Her,” Ghe amended. “Tell me, where am I?”
“Well,” the thing answered, now swimming—or possibly pacing—back and forth at the grate. “Well. So many visitors lately.”
“Answer me,” Ghe commanded.
“So many visitors coming in the back door, not down the stair at all.”
“The stair?” Ghe frowned. He remembered a stair, remembered himself and others carrying someone down it, long ago, down it into a black place. “The Darkness Stair? We are below the Darkness Stair?”
“The chambers of the Blessed.” The thing in the water sneered. “Don't you feel blessed?”
“But I didn't come down the stair?”
“ You fell in, through the duct, the one Hezhi crawled through. We thought you were dead, all except Nu. I think she thought you were her child, something stupid like that.” The creature laughed. ”Now I guess she doesn't think anything. Lucky Nu, eh?”
Ghe felt his annoyance growing. Still, he tried to keep hold of his anger, control it, as he always had. “How long? How long ago?”
The head suddenly burst into a gurgling parody of laughter. That went on for some time, as Ghe gripped the armrest of the throne more and more tightly. When at last the creature lapsed into quiet sobs of mirth—or sorrow—it was difficult to tell—he repeated his question.
“I'm sorry,” the creature said. “I'm afraid I lost track of the suns passing overhead, the phases of the moon. Careless of me, eh?”
“Long time? Short time?”
“All time is long,” the thing returned, and retreated beneath the water.
GHE remained on the alabaster throne, ordering his thoughts, watching the distant swirl of the creatures. They were the Blessed, of course, the sort of things Hezhi would have become; creatures so filled with the River's power that they became distorted and inhuman. Here the priesthood trapped them, where their power was nullified by the essence of the River itself. The water in the hall was barely wet at all; it was She'ned, smoke-water, a powerful, numbing substance.
Why am I alive? The thought bloomed like a black rose, always there, never fully opened before. He had thought and dreamed and remembered for what seemed like an eternity; but at the root of that dreaming was the blow to his neck, over and over again, his head falling into the muck, a weird glimpse of his own legs buckling, the fountain of iridescence rising. Now he was here, with the Blessed. Was he trapped, as they were?
Ghe blew out a long breath, steeled himself, and reached fingers up to his throat, stroking lightly from the base of his ear down. There: a raised ridge of flesh. He followed it around, found that it ringed him, a necklace of scar tissue.
“What does it mean?” he demanded, of no one in particular. But after a moment he nodded, answered himself. “I know what it means. The River remade me, put me back together, so that I might find his child and return her to him.” He reached his hand out before him, marveling at the touch of his fingertips against one another. ”Not dead,” he whispered. ”But not exactly alive either, I'll wager. Not exactly alive.” And he remembered his hunger, like the hunger of fire for more wood, and felt a little thrill of fright.
“I wish I knew more.” But he wanted more than that. He wanted to see someone, talk to someone, prove to himself that he was alive and not in some lonely afterworld. He wanted to understand why he could open the doors to certain memories so easily, while other rooms in his mind were swept clean or drowned in chill, deep water.
It seemed that there was someone—an image came to him: an old woman, dark, hunched over a cloth, casting bone dice. But there was no name, no place, nothing. His mother? But no, that felt wrong.
Whom did he know? He remembered several priests, but even in this state he did not want to see them. No, he remembered only Hezhi very clearly, he remembered everything about her, he remembered her friends—the giant, Tsem; the old man, Ghan; and that little idiot, Wezh, who courted her.
Well, Hezhi was not in Nhol; that was why he was still alive. Tsem was probably dead, for Ghe remembered stabbing him—though, of course, he had stabbed the white demon swordsman and he had not died. But if Tsem wasn't dead, he was gone with Hezhi. Ghan …
He considered Ghan, the librarian. The old man had helped Hezhi escape; Ghe had followed him and divined his plans. But Ghan himself had not planned to leave Nhol. Furthermore, Ghe had never told the priesthood of Ghan's identity; he had been saving that for later, to tell the high priest himself so no lower-order theurg could claim to have discovered the traitors. That meant the priesthood might not know about him, might not have tortured him to death.
That pleased Ghe for more than one reason. He remembered, vaguely, that he admired the old man for his willingness to help the girl. He had considered never reporting him at all…
Ghe shook his thoughts back into line. Ghan might still be alive and well in the library. And Ghan knew him only in his disguise as Yen, a young engineer who engaged in harmless flirtation with Hezhi. If he were Yen, Ghan might speak to him. He must speak to me, he thought, again feeling the scar and wondering why there was no revulsion.
Yes, he could be Yen again, couldn't he?
Of course, first he had to leave the underpalace, and the only way out he knew was by the Darkness Stair. He was not yet ready to risk the stair and its guardians—who knew what effect the priestly wards might have on him? Yet the thing in the water seemed to intimate that there were other ways out, one way, in fact, that Hezhi herself had braved. Ghe smiled and shook his head at the thought. His estimation of Hezhi continued to rise. Certainly he had been a fool to try to kill her; she was worth the whole priesthood and the aristocracy, too. He imagined the sweetness of her lips once more, that warm forbidden thing.
Yes, she was a marvelous creature. If she should reduce Nhol to rubble when he brought her back, why should he care? He was now, in his own way, a child of the River, too.
But out, he reminded himself. He must have come down from the sewers, somehow. His memory of it was of no use: he had been blind, a worm crawling down, waterward. Now he was a man again, and so he would have to use his mind, his hands, his eyes—though his eyes were no longer human, nor, he suspected, were his mind and hands.
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 …