"It's beautiful," she said. "The moons and stars on it seem to shimmer. Is the thread gold?"

Ghe shrugged. "I don't know; I only knew that you would like it."

"You're very sweet to an old woman."

"Without this old woman, I'd still be slitting throats for copper soldiers on Lung Street," he replied.

"So now you slit them for the priesthood, eh?" Li's eyes sparkled dangerously, revealing the hardness sleeping in her. He didn't blush, but he did touch her hand. The two had once dispensed with hardness between them, and seeing it again in her eyes felt like a little knife in his ribs.

"I'm sorry, Li," he said. "I meant to tell you."

She softened. "That's all right, duh. It's a difficult thing the priests have chosen for you."

Ghe shrugged. "It was that or nothing, I think. They were only interested in me because of certain… skills I have. And, Li, I have learned much. I can use a sword—a sword!—better than any soldier you will ever meet. They taught me tricks of fighting with my hands that I never imagined."

"Have you yet been set to a task?"

He nodded. "I can't talk about that, Li, not in any detail. I have been Forbidden. But twice now I have been sent out, and twice returned with blood on my hands. The priesthood is most pleased with me."

"As they should be." Li smiled, squeezed his hand. "And the enemies of Nhol will fear you, though they know not your name. Didn't I tell you that, those many years ago?"

"You did. But I think the prophecy came true through the prophet. You helped me when I needed help, taught me how to speak to the priests, introduced me to the admittance council."

Li shook her head in disagreement. "You were never meant to rot in Southtown, fathering brats and eating shit. You were meant for better things, and anyone with a brain in their skull could see that. I knew the priests would understand it as soon as they met you."

"You saw it first," he reminded her.

"So I did," she agreed. "But tell me, how is life in the palace?"

"Very good, as I said."

"And the Riverborn? What is it like living amongst them?"

The two of them had been conversing in low tones amidst the babble of the street; Ghe felt perfectly comfortable speaking secrets here, for no word would travel more than an armspan farther than Li's ear. Still, he lowered his voice even more. "They are idiots," he confided. "I would never have imagined it. If it weren't for the priesthood, the city would collapse under their stupidity."

"So I've often suspected," Li said.

"Oh, the Riverborn have power, there is no doubt of that. But their minds are like the minds of very young children. Even some of the priests are like that, I suppose. But many of the priests are like me, not of noble birth."

"Are none of the Riverborn capable?" Li asked.

"There are a few," Ghe replied thoughtfully. "There is one girl I have been watching. She seems very bright indeed." He smiled and cracked his knuckles. "It will be a shame if I have to kill her."

PART THREE

Changeling

I

On the Hungry Water

Perkar had long since relinquished the troublesome task of numbering days and their dark complements. Singly or bundled together like so many reeds, they held no sense for him; his sense was all the River. Not that the River was outside of time, for he remembered earlier and later times upon it. Earlier, when the boat thrashed through the rapids in clouds of argent spray, pitching like a child's toy. He remembered the sickening grinding of stone against wood, the vague wonder that even a godboat did not splinter and join the spume in ecstatic flight up and away from the rocks. Still early, after the frantic water, when he had made his first real attempt to bring the boat aground on an inviting shore in a gentle, forested valley, he recalled the bitter helplessness as the willful boat continued on in the channel, despite exertion at the tiller that left him with blistered palms and aching muscles. He knew that even if his arms had been stronger he could have pulled until his heart burst with no more effect.

"The River has us," Ngangata told him once, when he was free of fever. "He will never let us go."

Perkar had ceased doubting that. Twice the boat had allowed them to make landfall, both times on islands in the channel. In each instance, he attempted to swim to shore, and always the current seized him and brought him, exhausted, back to the boat. On those occasions he had carried a rope with him, tied to the bow; he had no intention of leaving Ngangata.

It was later now. The mountains and even the hills were far behind them. They were more days than he could number—if he still counted them—from his home. A few times he had seen Human Beings; not his own folk, but dark, hard-faced men and women astride horses worth killing for. Many of the steeds were marked like his poor, dead Mang, striped with the hue of dried blood. The dark people and their horses watched him curiously as he drifted by. That had been later, when the River was no longer hurried, no longer gnashing through soil and stone with invisible teeth. Grassland rolled gently away from level banks thick with willow, tamarisk, and cottonwood. The sun was harsh, inescapable, burning their skin and then stripping it from them. Warning them to return to their softer land and then punishing them for not heeding the warning. Ngangata suffered the most. Though Perkar eventually stopped burning, his skin tanning a light coppery brown, Ngangata continued to be seared. His worst wounds had healed, and yet he never seemed much improved; he was weak, listless, spent much of his time in fevered sleep.

Perkar watched the halfling now as he turned uneasily, eyes closed but in constant motion behind swollen lids.

"It is the River eating him," Perkar's sword told him.

"Why doesn't it eat me?" he asked.

"It does. I heal you, though not so much as I could if we were away from him. I have restored all hut two of your heartstrings, but it is a struggle. He is trying to eat me, as well, but that is one advantage to being enclosed in this form. It is like a seed too hard for him to digest. If you were to drop me into him, he could consume me, but even that would take time." The sword seemed to hesitate, then went on. "There is something else. The River seems to know you, somehow. Not the way you would know a person, or even understand something. He knows you as you might know a taste, a scent. I think even without me, he would not eat you yet."

He nodded dumbly. The goddess had tried to warn him of this, told him that the River knew him, through her. He wondered if the blood he had loosed into the rivulet at Bangaka's damakuta had also gone to him, but of course it had. For the first time, he realized that his dreams—the dreams that now made it nearly impossible to sleep—the dreams had begun a handful of days after his sacrifice. Had they begun when his blood reached the River? It seemed likely.

Almost from habit, Perkar examined his crimes. They had hardened in his time on the River. They no longer raged in him, diffuse, but lay sharp and cruel, like odd crystals that he could turn over and over in the palm of his mind, seeing each terrible, glittering surface, each stupid mistake. He could easily see the first blunder, the root from which all the others grew. From the moment he had loosed that blood, he had not done a single right thing. Even killing the Kapaka had not been enough for him, had not nearly been the end of it. Now he had doomed even Ngangata.

Doomed the only one who knows what you did, the most evil part of him whispered, now and then.