Her heart stopped for a moment, restarted with a painful jerk. She snapped her eyes open. The voice was strange, watery, tortured sounding. It came from beyond the grating.
"Who… ?" she began, and then stopped, still afraid of waking the monster she sat upon. She heard water stirring.
"Whoever you are, you are in a very bad place," the voice told her. A shadow was gliding in the ebon pool, beyond the light of her lamp.
"And where did you get that light?" it snarled. "Put that out. You'll have no need of that."
"Who are you?" Hezhi asked, holding the lamp higher, trying to see.
"Put that down, I say."
She set the lamp down but made no move to put it out. Nevertheless, the shadow swam closer. She caught a glimpse of it then: coils of scales glittering in the light, bony plates, a host of centipede legs—they did not congeal, form anything unified in her head.
"Who are you?" she repeated, her voice close to shrieking again.
"I don't understand how you got from the Darkness Stair to here without my seeing you," the thing complained. "But if you hadn't been so intent on slipping by me, I would have warned you about old Nu there. If she wakes up, you'll warm her belly."
"I didn't come down the Darkness Stair," she whispered, trying to keep her voice steady. "I came in through the ducts."
"The ducts? The ducts?" The thing swirled about crazily in the water. "You weren't brought down here, were you?"
"Let me see you," Hezhi pleaded. "What are you?"
A head suddenly moved into her circle of vision. It was Human, basically, though gills branched like feathery horns from its neck. It had no hair, either. The back of its head devolved into a rubbery, spiky mass that seemed to be constantly writhing.
"What am I?" the abomination repeated. "Why, my dear, don't you recognize a prince when you see one?"
"Prince? Prince?"
"Prince L'ekezh Yehd Cha'dune, at your service."
"That isn't possible," she managed to choke out, though she already knew that it was. "Who was your father?"
"Why, the Great Lord Yuzhnata, of course."
"Oh, oh," Hezhi gasped, still not quite able to grasp; but the puzzle was solving itself in her head again, the pieces rearranging themselves.
"That makes you my father's brother," she quavered faintly.
There was a moment of silence from the thing.
"Well," it said. "Well, I have a niece. Welcome, niece, to the Chambers of the Blessed. Now, you should trust your uncle and do what he says. Climb off Nu and swim through the grate. I'll protect you."
"I don't want to get in the water," she moaned.
"Well, you don't have much choice about that," L'ekezh replied. "Embrace it, let it fill you up. Become accustomed to it."
"Why?"
"Because you will never leave here, that's why."
"I will," Hezhi insisted.
"You say you came here by the ducts. On purpose. Why did you do that?" L'ekezh seemed to be becoming more accustomed to the light. He swam nearer, put his in-Human face up to the grating. She saw that his teeth were sharp and long, ivory needles.
"I wanted to know… where we go when they take us off."
L'ekezh laughed with a kind of bubbling delight, though it sounded more like someone choking.
"How bright you must be!" he remarked. "That's too bad for you, though I'll doubtless enjoy our conversations. Then again, the bright ones go mad the most quickly. I think I've stayed sane for so long because I'm a bit thick. Tell me…" His voice dropped low, became an exaggeration of the "conspiratorial" tone used in theater. "Tell me. Do the priests know yet? Have you begun to manifest?"
"Manifest?"
"With me," L'ekezh offered, "the power came first. She'lu— your father—was so jealous. Even when his power came, mine was always stronger. The Blessed are strong, girl. But then the priests came and they found—it's always a little thing, something you haven't really noticed—one of my toes had changed color. So, of course, they brought me here."
"I don't… why?"
"Why? Why? Look at me. Look at Nu, there. Could anyone stand to see us on the throne? Dancing about the court, with lords and ladies on our arms? And, of course, there is our power. They fear that the most."
"Power," she repeated dully.
"We are the Blessed," L'ekezh snarled. "I have more power in one of my eyes than the Chakunge and all of his court."
"Then why do you stay down here?" Hezhi asked.
"Because," L'ekezh began, and then stopped, his eyes staring at her with awful intensity. "Are you real?" he whispered. "Did I create you?"
"I am real," Hezhi assured him.
"I will go mad, one day, you know," L'ekezh confided.
"Why don't you leave?" she asked once again. "If you have such power?"
"Because the River drinks it," he replied woodenly. "When they first put me here, I raged. I tried to pull down the foundations of the damned palace around me, kill them all. I could have done it up there, but they drugged me, of course. Down here, when the drug wore off—well, however powerful the Blessed are, nothing is as powerful as the River. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!" He finished by shrieking. Then he stared at her silently, his face writhing like a nest of stinging worms.
"You really shouldn't be on her back," he said again, after a time.
"How many… how many of you are there?"
"How many Blessed?"
"Yes."
"Alive? Still in flesh?"
Hezhi nodded.
"Oh, just a few. Five."
"Where are they?"
"Oh… around here somewhere. Your light frightens them. Anyway, I'm lord here, now that Nu sleeps most of the time. It's my responsibility to welcome the new ones. I still don't see how I didn't notice them bringing you down the stair."
"I told you, I didn't come that way."
"Well. So you did," L'ekezh muttered, perhaps more to himself than to her.
"I wonder…" she began. "Is there one named D'en among you?"
"D'en? Of course, D'en," the once-prince answered.
"I came to see him," Hezhi said.
"Oh? Came all the way to see D'en. Well. Wait here."
The head ducked beneath the black water and ripples marked his passage away.
She waited a long while, and it began to occur to her that she had been forgotten. L'ekezh seemed to have trouble remembering things. But just as she was despairing, as the fear of the sleeping thing upon which she sat began to overwhelm her, the water stirred again.
It was not L'ekezh. It was, to her eyes, a Human man, with long stringy black hair. His eyes, however, protruded on stalks and the hands that came up to grip the steel bars were clawlike, chitinous. One still possessed five fingers but the other had become like a pincer, the thumb grossly exaggerated and the other fingers melted together.
"D'en," she whispered. "Oh, D'en."
The thing looked at her with its crablike eyes. It croaked, like a frog. It croaked again, more insistently, and Hezhi thought she recognized her name.
"D'en? Can you talk?" She suddenly knew that she was going to be sick. Her stomach expelled the bread she had eaten before waking Tsem and continued heaving long after nothing remained in it. D'en watched her impassively.
"D'en doesn't talk much," L'ekezh told her, surfacing a few spans away. "He did at first, talked all the time. Usually our bodies change the fastest, then our heads. D'en—he changed inside first."
"Why… why do you change?" she managed, faintly. As if knowing would help.
L'ekezh smiled, a rubbery arc that might have been amusing to a madman. "He fills us up," he said, voice confidential. "A mere Human body cannot contain his full power."