The Blessed
The Grand Chamber, she knew, was at the locus of four great halls. The ground plan of the original palace was a series of rectangles, one within the other. This court was the center of that concentricity. She could see that all of the halls were intact—not filled in here. They were, however, sealed by huge iron grates. The dais was built in the corner of the room, reflecting a First-Dynasty preference for angles as focal points. The corner was considered the most prominent part of a rectangle. The halls were thus in the midpoints of the long walls. To reach most of them she would have to swim—something she had learned a bit about but which she wished to avoid—or wade, perhaps, if she was lucky and the water not as deep as it appeared. The gate immediately to the right of the dais, however, could be reached more easily; a dark bar of debris butted up against the wall and stretched nearly to the hall itself. After a moment, Hezhi chose this path. She might have to swim once she reached the hall, but the longer she could put that off the better; she doubted that she could stay afloat and keep the lamp lit at the same time.
Stepping down toward the debris, she slipped on the alabaster steps, flailed with one arm wildly to keep from falling or dropping the lamp. One of her feet sank into the water at the foot of the dais. Pain erupted instantly, like flame lapping straight up her leg, into her belly, flaring toward her head. Choking off a little cry, she jerked her foot out; her vision blurred and swam, and she quickly sat down on the stepped dais for fear that she would collapse if she didn't. She reached down to stroke her foot, but already the strange sensation was fading. Though more intense and brief, she recognized the sensations, the taste of the water on her skin. It was the same as that when the priests sprinkled her during the Test of the Body.
"The River," she muttered. The ruined court was not filled with water from the storm drains and sewers. This was the River, crept up under the palace. The lower palace had sunk down into him. This was where sacred water was drawn.
Her foot wasn't even wet. The court was flooded not merely with water, but with She'ned, Smokewater, the lifeblood of the River. As ghosts were the spirits of Human Beings, She'ned was the ghost of water, the spirit remaining when the substance departed.
The burning passed, but a deep, involuntary shudder rippled through Hezhi's body, and the thing in her—what the priests had tried to force into revealing itself—stirred. Unmistakably. Overcome, she remained on the steps, weeping.
She stopped her weeping when she heard a soft whispering. At least, she believed it to be whispering; she could not make out any words; it was merely the hiss one hears at a distance when people confide secrets.
I have to do something, she resolved. I have to try to find D'en..
The map had taken her this far, but now she had no clear idea of where to search. Her research had discovered the center of the old palace as the place to which the Darkness Stair descended. It had found her a path by which she might reach it. But her map did not have a point marked "D'en" on it.
Not that it mattered anymore. Hezhi now believed that she would not find him. It seemed to her that immersion in the Smokewater would dissolve a body, draw the spirit essence from it. Perhaps that was where ghosts came from. Those ghosts her father had summoned—the fish and the other things—they had all died in the River. It must be that when royalty died—no, when they were killed—it must be done in the River, so that he could reclaim their essence, the part of them that was him. That was what she felt inside of her, she realized. Part of her was River. She suddenly recalled her conversation with Tsem, nearly three years before. She had said something about the "Royal Blood" working in her, and Tsem had become absolutely solemn, almost fearful, had told her to never say such a thing. Perhaps that had been as much as he could say, Forbidden. To warn her about her blood.
That was it! It was all coming clear, deadly clear. If the Royal Blood worked right, if the River surfaced in one in the right way—whatever that was—then the child became like her father, her mother. Powerful, able to summon the River's puissance to do sorcery. A ruler. By using the part of the River that was in them. But if it went wrong, somehow, if it was… she still didn't know that, how it went awry. But it could go wrong, that was clear, and when it did those so "Blessed" were brought here and executed, returned to the River. Here, in the dark, where the people of the Empire would not know, would never see nobles die.
She reflected that many—like Wezh, for instance—might have noble blood but no waking power in them at all, destined neither to rule nor to die. Hezhi understood that she was not one of those.
Still she heard the whispering. She stood again and, more carefully this time, stepped out onto the rubble. She was vaguely sur-prised that it did not crunch beneath her feet; it must have settled through the centuries, become compacted. Moving as quietly as possible, she worked her way toward the gate.
She reached it easily enough and was soon peering through the steel bars. Beyond, the hall extended farther than she could see. There was something odd about the corridor, though she could not place for certain what it was for an instant. Then she understood. The water in it was moving—not flowing, but stirring about, as if something were swimming in it. The whispering was down that hall; it was a bit clearer now, and she could almost make out a word, now and then.
She knelt on the pile, set her little lamp down, and, shading her eyes from the flame, tried to see as far as she could; the brightness of the flame itself tended to blind her.
She wobbled on her haunches and put down one hand to steady herself. Doing so, she realized that whatever she was squatting on, it was neither rubble nor sand. Puzzled, she studied it more closely. She believed, at first, that the stone or whatever was covered with moss or even fungus, but the texture was unlike that, as well. It was actually rather smooth, slick but not slimy, bumpy. Like the skin of her mother's salamander.
As she was thinking that, an eye blinked open, no more than an armspan from her. It wasn't there and then it was, an eye staring at her, a perfectly Human eye. Beneath her, whatever she was squatting on tremored. It moved, shifted in place.
Hezhi tried to suppress her shriek of terror, but it leapt free of her throat and soared away, a bright bird of sound in a dark place, flapping around and around before the underpalace ate it up. She crouched, shuddering, not knowing what to do. The eye stared at her, then slowly closed again.
Shaking, she looked up and down the length and breadth of the thing with entirely new eyes. She was on the back of something alive. It might be, she realized, rather like those fish in her father's summoning. Or like the ghost that had come after her. Yet this was no ghost; this thing was substantial in a way that a ghost could never be, at least according to everything she had read—which was admittedly not that much, when it came to ghosts. It was real, alive, sleeping, even though she was on its back.
She noticed other things, now that she was looking. It helped her to study, detached her from her fear, from the fact that she was on the back of some alien thing. A stubby projection on the "bar" was some sort of fin. Or tentacle. And there, that lump… She shuddered and closed her eyes, detachment failing, not wanting to see more, wanting only to be somewhere else, alone, with Qey, with anyone, but very far from where she was. Because the lump was not a lump. Pale, like a fingered mushroom, a Human hand sprouted from the creature's back.
I have to open my eyes, she thought crazily. I can't leave unless I open them. But as much as she wanted at that moment to be gone, the thought of looking at the thing, of discovering some new horror was too terrible to face. Even less did she want to move. What if she woke it up?
"How did you get here?"