"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."
She tried to understand, while D'en—or what D'en had become—cocked his head, as if regarding her from another angle would offer him something new. It may have, for slowly, tenta-tively, he reached the hand that was most Human through the bars.
She reached over and, after hesitating briefly, touched the hand. The fingers flexed but made no other movement. It felt cold, hard, not at all like the hand she remembered, the one she had held as they ran, laughing, across the rooftops. Now that hand clutched vaguely, not remembering how to hold another. It was a mercy when D'en suddenly snatched his hand away, croaked once again. His horrible eyes swayed on their stalks, and then he sank, quickly, beneath the water.
"He recognized you," L'ekezh told her. "I can tell. That was more than I expected."
"D'en," Hezhi mouthed softly. Beneath her, the rubbery flesh trembled again.
"Quickly," L'ekezh cried. "If you care for your life. Nu is awaking. If you really came through the ducts, go now. The River might yet let you."
Hezhi rose shakily to her feet.
"Good-bye," she said.
"I'll see you again soon enough," L'ekezh said. "See if they will let you bring me some wine. Though, of course, they won't."
He sank away, vanished. She took up her lamp and stumbled across Nu's back. As she reached the dais, the monster was beginning to twitch and, before she had mounted it, began heaving. She hurried to the shaft, spared a glance back and saw Nu rising up. There was nothing recognizably Human about Nu at all; she was all fish and scorpion, her long, pointed tail lashing now at the water. More quickly than Hezhi could have ever imagined, the creature turned and lunged up onto the dais, flopped there, heaved and flopped again. Reflexively, she hurled her lamp; it shattered on the damp stone, and fire splattered among the shards. Nu hesitated at that, faceted, insect eyes flinching away from the light. Hezhi scrambled into the dark tube and began to crawl frantically, gasping with fear. She clawed at the stone, trying to propel herself more quickly into the darkness, tore nails to the quick without even noticing the pain. She didn't even begin to calm down until she saw the pale illumination up ahead of her, where Tsem was waiting.
She was sobbing uncontrollably when the half Giant lifted her gently from the tube. He cradled her tenderly in his massive arms, stroking her wet, slimy hair, and made soft, comforting noises. Then, carrying her in the crook of one arm and the lantern in his other hand, he waded across the room and began ascending the stairs, back toward light and home.
INTERLUDE
On Red Gar Street
Ghe fingered the scar on his chin and breathed deeply, filling his lungs and nostrils with the smells of his childhood. Savory meat grilling at streetside stands, carts of fish just beginning to stink in the afternoon sun, the sharp, prickly scent of J'ewe incense; those were the best of them. When the wind shifted, shifted up from Southtown on the River, he got the worst. Garbage, mostly. The excrement of people and dogs, half-rotted food, stagnant, marshy pools where the River crept in. Here, on Red Gar Street, there was no trash to be seen, of course, but Red Gar cut the line between the sparkling center of Nhol, where the prosperous classes—the store owners, the boat captains, the merchants, the relatives of the relatives of nobility—met the much vaster realm of Southtown, where lived the Hwe-gangyu, the lowest of the low. Ghe remembered well which side of the street he had come from. He would never cross there again save to kill someone at the command of the priesthood, and it was singularly unlikely that anyone in Southtown could possibly attract the attention of the priesthood. No, he would never willingly enter Southtown again, for he had risen above it and it was wrong ever to step backward. Here, though, on Red Gar Street, he had spent the best moments of his youth. Here, the child he had been could briefly forget the squalid hut he lived in, the mother he had killed by being born, the aunt who beat him and made him sleep with the dogs. On the street, he could see the best Nhol had to offer side by side with the worst, and he could plan his escape from Southtown. An escape he had now accomplished.
Ghe idly flipped a coin toward a boy watching the crowd with hawklike eyes. The boy snatched the glittering treasure from the very air, grinning and nodding at Ghe. Ghe nodded back and went on down the street, humming to himself. The wind shifted again, blew down from the palace and the clean side of town. A flock of Rivergulls went chattering overhead.