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.
Nearby, another huge figure stood over Hezhi, which Perkar recognized as Tsem. The Giant interposed himself between the girl and the god.
“This is getting tiresome,” Karak said. “Perkar, lay down and die. Tsem … oh, never mind.” He raised his hand.
A scorpion stinger as thick as a Human leg struck the god as a nightmare jumble of limbs and plates suddenly crawled back into motion. Karak rolled his eyes—not in pain but in irritation—and struck the thing away with his hand. “And you!” he snapped. The monster with the face of the assassin from Nhol rose unsteadily on several spiderlike legs. It should have been dead—Perkar could see the hole in it, how burnt and charred it was. Only its head remained Human, and it was the Human eyes that held Perkar, not the monstrous body.
“Perkar,” the thing croaked.
He was so weak. His knees shook. He didn't even know what he imagined he would do with the sword he had just pulled from himself. Strike Karak one more useless blow? But here was this thing, the thing that had eaten the Stream Goddess …