For My Mother Nancy Ridout Landrum

PROLOGUE Death

GHE plunged his steel into the pale man's belly, watched the alien gray eyes widen in shock, then narrow with terrible satisfaction. He yanked to withdraw his blade and, in that flicker of an instant, realized his mistake. The enemy edge, unimpressed by its wielder's impalement, swept down toward his exposed neck.

Li, think kindly of my ghost, he had time to think, before his head fell into the dirty water. Even then, for just a moment, he thought he saw something strange; a column of flame, leaping out of the muck, towering over Hezhi. Then something inexorable swallowed him up.

Death swallowed him and took him into her belly. Dark there, and wet, he swirled about, felt that last, bright blow like a line of ice laid through his neck flutter again and again and again, hummingbird-wings of pain. It was most of what remained of him, though not all. The little spaces between the memory of that blade stroke were like a doorway into nothing, opening and closing with greater and greater speed, and through that portal danced images, dreams, remembered pleasures—danced through and were gone. Soon all would gambol away like fickle ladies at a ball, and he would be complete again, just the memory of his death, and then not even that.

But then it seemed as if the sword shattered, raced up and down his spine like rivers of crystal shards; and the belly of death was no longer dark, but alive with light, charged with heat and lightning, burning, pouring in through that doorway. The light he recognized; he had seen its colors blossoming from the water as his head parted from his body. The doorway gaped and wrapped around him, bringing not darkness, not oblivion, but remembrance.

Remembrance carried hatred, bitterness, but most of all hunger. Hunger.

Ghe remembered also a word, as strands met and were torturously yanked into crude knots within him, tied hurriedly, without care.

No, he remembered. Ah, no!

No, and he fought to hands and knees he could suddenly feel again, though they felt like wood, though they jerked and quivered with unfamiliar weakness. He could see nothing but color, but he remembered where he wanted to go and had no need of vision. Down, he knew, and so he crawled, blind, whimpering, hungrier by the moment.

Down for he knew not how long, but after a time he fell, slid, fell again, and then plunged into water that scalded so terribly that it must have been boiling.

For a while, he could think of nothing but boiling water, for pain had returned to him, as well.

No. The pain went into him like a seed, grew, spread roots, sent limbs out through his eyes and mouth, shoots from his fingers, and then, very suddenly, ceased to be pain. He sighed, sank down into the water, which now enfolded him like a womb, utterly comforting and utterly without compassion; just a womb, a thing for him to grow in, but no mother or love wrapped around that. There he waited, content for a while, and after he was sure the pain was gone, he looked about for what had not blown through that dark doorway into nothingness—what remained of him.

He was Ghe, the Jik, one of the elite assassin-priests who served the River and the River's Children. Born in Southtown, the lowest of the low, he had risen—the memory stirred!—he had kissed aprincessl Ghe clenched and unclenched his unseen hands as he felt the ghost of his lips brushing hers. He realized, dully, that he had kissed many women, but that the only actual, particular kiss he could remember was hers.

Why was that? Why Hezhi?

They had sent him to kill her, of course, because she was one of the Blessed. His task had been to kill her, and he had failed. Yet he had kissed her…

Abruptly his memory offered mirror-sharp images, a scene from his past—how long ago? But though his mind's sight was keen, the voices floated to him as if from far away, and though he saw through his own eyes, it was as if he watched strangers dance a dance to which he knew only a few steps.

He was in the Great Water Temple, in the interior chamber. Plastered white, the immense corbeled vault above him seemed to drink up the pale lamplight in the center of the room. More real, somehow, was the illumination washing down from the four corridors that met in the chamber, though it was dimmer still than the flame. He knew it for daylight, rippling through sheets of falling water that cascaded down the four sides of the ancient ziggurat in whose heart they stood, curtains of thunder concealing the doorways of the temple. In that coruscating aquamarine and the flickering of the lamp, the priest before him seemed less real than his many shadows, for they constantly moved as he stood still.

On his knees, Ghe yet remembered thinking of the priest standing over him, You shall bow to me one day.

“There are things you must know now,” the priest told him, in his soft, little-boy voice; like all full priests, he had been castrated young.

“I listen for the fall of water,” Ghe acknowledged.

“You know that our emperor and his family are descended from the River.”

Ghe suppressed an urge to rise up and strike the fool down. They think because I am from Southtown I know nothing, not even that. They think I am no more than a throat-slitter from the gutter, with the brains of a knife! But he held that inside. To betray his feeling was to betray himself, and betraying himself would betray Li—Ghe-in-the-water wondered who Li was.

“Know,” the priest went on, “that because they carry his water in their veins, the River is a part of them. He can live through them, if he chooses. The power of the Waterborn has but one source, and that is the River.”

Then why do you hate them so? Ghe wondered. Because they are part of the River, as you will never be? Because they need not have their balls cut off to serve him?

The priest wandered over to a bench and sat down, taking his quivering shadows with him. He did not sign for Ghe to arise, and so he remained there, prostrate, listening.

“Some of the Waterborn are blessed with more,” the man went on. 'They are born with rather more of the River in them than others. Unfortunately, the Human body can contain only a certain amount of power. After that…”

The priest's voice dropped to a whisper, and Ghe suddenly realized that this was no mere rote litany any longer. This was something real to the priest, something that frightened him.

“After that,” he went on, sounding like nothing so much as an eight-year-old boy confiding some terrible childhood discovery, “after that, they change.”

“Change?” Ghe asked, from the floor. Here was something he did not know, at last.

“They are distorted by their blood, lose Human form. They become creatures wholly of the River.”

“I don't understand,” Ghe replied.

“You will. You will see” he answered, his voice rising to a firmer, more dissertative pitch. “When they change—the signs are discovered in childhood, usually by the age of thirteen—when they change, we take them to dwell below, in the ancient palace of our ancestors.”

For a moment, Ghe wondered if this was some silly euphemism for murder, but then he remembered the maps of the palace, the dark underways beneath it, the chambers at the base of the Darkness Stair behind the throne. Ghe suddenly felt a chill. What things dwelt there, below his feet? What horror would disturb a priest merely to discuss it?