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For Jo,
who shows me the notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I’m tremendously grateful to all the people who contributed to this book in ways large and small, general and particular. It takes a village to tell a story, and I worry that if I started listing the villagers I would never stop. There are, however, five people who have read the manuscript all the way through, several times over in each case. Suzanne Baker and Gavin Baker are a formidable mother/son team, absolutely indefatigable in reading draft after draft, generous in their praise, keen and unflinching in their criticism. I’ve always thought it’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m about the luckiest writer alive to have Hannah Bowman as my agent and Marco Palmieri as my editor. Finally, this book, like all the others, wouldn’t exist without Johanna Staveley, who believed in it and me more powerfully than I did.
PROLOGUE
This is a story I never intended to tell. I thought, when I finally walked away from you all those years ago, that I was taking the tale with me. I thought, because it happened to me, because I seemed to stand at the center of everything, that it was my story—but that’s not how stories work. A tale belongs only partly to the teller—even the wildest fabrication needs a listener, and this is no fabrication. It is the truth—or as close to the truth as I can come, so many years later—and there are other characters in it. This story is theirs as much as it is mine, but since they are dead, the telling falls to me. You were there, of course, the only other person who survived straight through to the end, but you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t. I should have told you a long time ago, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized this story is yours, too. It’s late, but I’m telling you now.
I went to Dombâng for love.
And yes, to kill seven people in fourteen days, sure, but I wasn’t worried about the killing. I grew up in a place where women wear vests ribbed with stilettos, where each priest has a dozen knives, steel traps, needles so fine you can slide them beside the eye into the brain and out again without leaving a mark. I watched my fellow priests die by fire and iron, sometimes quickly, leaping from the tops of the sandstone cliffs, or slowly, by dehydration’s intimate degrees. By my fifteenth year, I had set to memory a thousand ways to offer a woman or man to my god’s sure unmaking. I wasn’t concerned about my piety or my ability to make the sacrifice.
Love, though. Love was tricky. By the time I turned twenty-five, I’d had lovers and laughter, long nights in the high desert peaks learning the ways of my own body, alone or in the hot clutch of another. And yet love had eluded me.
To the uninitiate, this will not seem strange. How can love, you might demand, take root in the stony heart of a Skullsworn? How can Ananshael’s knives know love?
I’m not offended. For most people, my god—like the death he brings—is all mystery and terror. You have not been to Rassambur, have not heard our choruses beneath the new moon, have not enjoyed the sweet fruit of the trees espaliered against our sandstone walls. How could you know the first thing about the men and women you call Skullsworn? How could you know if I don’t tell you?
Maybe we could start with the word itself. It’s wrong.
I don’t swear on skulls, not on them, not to them, not around them. I haven’t seen a skull for years, in fact. A bit of blood-smeared bone through a torn-open scalp, perhaps, but an actual skull, wide-eyed and jawless? What in the god’s name would I be doing with a skull?
“Drinking the blood of innocent children,” seems to be a common notion, so I’ll set that little misconception to rest, too: I do not drink the blood of children, either guilty or innocent. I do not drink the blood of humans or beasts. I did have a blood sausage in Sia once, a thick black slab perched on a mountain of rice, but I ate it off of a normal plate, not out of a skull, and everyone else there seemed to be eating the same thing.
I should also clarify that I do not bathe in cauldrons of blood. I get bloody enough going out into the world to do the work of the god. The whole point of the bath is to scrub the blood off. The priests of the God of Death bathe in hot water, just like every other sane person on either side of the Ancaz. Back in Rassambur, I sift a little jasmine and ground sage into the boiling water. I like to be clean.
A few other clarifications, in no particular order:
I have no garments made of human skin. I prefer silk, although it tends to be easier to scrub the blood out of wool.
I have never fucked a dead person. I’m not sure who’s going around sizing up the erections of the hanged, but I can promise you, it’s not me. Most men are confused enough in bed already without the added disadvantage of death to slow them down. I like my lovers like I like my baths—warm, clean, and, if at all possible, good-smelling, although I’m willing to compromise on the last two.
I understand, of course, how people make these mistakes. If you’re seeing a skull, or a barrel full of blood, chances are good that my god has come, unmade a creature, then disappeared. Surely as a strong dawn wind kicks up dust and bends the branches of the trees, Ananshael leaves blood and skulls in the wake of his passage, but blood and skulls are not death any more than a bent branch is the wind.
Death resists all comparison and simile. This is something I learned in my first year at Rassambur. To say death is like a land beyond the sea or like an endless scream is to miss the point. Death is not like anything. There is no craft analogous to Ananshael’s work. The truest response to his mystery and majesty is silence.
On the other hand, to remain silent is to encourage the fantasies of the uninitiate—skulls brimming with blood, graveyard orgies, infants dangling like impractical chandeliers from the ceilings of candlelit caverns—and so maybe an imperfect analogy is better than none at all.
Take a grape.
The purple skin is muted, as if by mist or fog. Polish it, or not, then pop it into your mouth. The flesh is firm beneath the cool, smooth skin. If you find yourself becoming aroused, stop. Start your imagining over. The grape is a grape. Imagine it properly, or this will not work.
Now. What does the grape taste like?
A grape tastes like a grape? Of course not. Until you bite the grape, it has no taste. It might as well be a stone lifted from the cold current of some river in autumn: a smooth, chill orb, reticent, flavorless. You could hold it trapped between your palate and tongue forever, with only the faintest hint of juice at the tiny breach where it was plucked from the stem.
You are like that grape—plump with slick, rich sweetness, with wet purple life. The truth of life is the grape’s truth: only when jaws bite down, when the skin splits, when the sun-cold flesh explodes onto the tongue does it matter. Witho
ut the moment of its own destruction, the grape is just a smooth, colorful stone. Without the foreknowledge of the woman who holds it in her hand, her anticipation, before it even passes her lips, of the mangled skin and the sweet life draining over the tongue, the grape would hold no savor.
The Csestriim and the Nevariim were like this, if the chronicles are true—immortal, unbroken stones, incapable of joy, either the feeling or the bringing. Of course, my god was young when they walked the world, his strength more meager in the age when they were made, meager enough that for thousands of years and longer they escaped his touch. They might have continued forever that way—immortal save in those rare cases when the body was so broken by violence that my god could finally slide his fingers inside—but the Csestriim overreached. In their dust-dry desire to catalogue the world, to know it so they could bend it to their will, they pushed the Nevariim too far, and finally, the Nevariim pushed back.
They lost; the Csestriim wiped them from the world, but my god learned much in the conflict, and in the long millennia that followed, he grew stronger, strong enough that when we came—humans, women and men wandering the unforgiving earth—he could end us with a flick of his infinite fingers. He never learned the trick with the Csestriim, but it didn’t matter. We were there to help him, to pry open that immortal flesh with our bronze and let him in. The Csestriim were stones, but we shattered them, scrubbed them out as they had scrubbed out the Nevariim.
We are not stones. Our human skin is thin, the life inside us bright. And death? The god I serve? He is the jaw locked around us, the promise of a sweet purple destruction without which we would be no more than so much polished rock.
My brothers and sisters in the faith understand this better than most. We devote our lives to this truth. And so, within the walls of Rassambur there is no shortage of joy, of delight, of music, and yes, of love. I have watched old couples step hand in hand from the bloodred cliffs, linked even in the moment of their unmaking. I have seen wives pour the poisoned tea for their husbands, hold the clay cup to the feeble lips themselves, offer the final release when the pain of one disease or another grew too great. I have witnessed the glee on the faces of younger couples as they sneak away, even felt a hint of it myself, a little shiver of ecstatic bliss when my lips met other lips.
But not love.
Not that it bothered me. I was young, strong, alight with my own devotion and the fellowship of my sisters and brothers. Love was a pleasant afterthought, something I could experience later, more slowly, when I was finished being young.
Then came the Trial, and with the Trial, the song.
My god is a great lover of music. Not the still, finished forms of painting or sculpture, but music. Music is inextricable from its own unmaking. Each note is predicated on the death of those before. Try to hold them all, and you have madness, cacophony, noise. A song, like a life, is all in the letting go, in the knowing, the moment you begin, that it will end. And of all music’s variegated forms—fiddle and drum, harp and horn, plangent or joyous—Ananshael loves the human voice, the sound of the instrument giving song to the knowledge of its own impermanence.
It was no surprise that the test concluding all my training would begin with a song, but of all the melodies I’d heard at Rassambur, this one had been kept from me, as it was from all the acolytes, until just before the Trial. Listen, and you will understand the fierceness of my sudden need to love:
One who is right, and one who is wrong,
A singer snared in a web of song—
Deliver them, deliver them
Into his million-fingered hands.
Deliver to him a dealer of death,
Severed from life, shorn of breath.
Deliver a mother, ripe with new life.
Find the kindness in the sharpest knife.
Deliver to him a giver of names;
There are no words in his domain.
When these are safe inside his hands,
One more remains,
One more remains—
Give to the god the one who makes your mind
And body sing with love
Who will not come again.
I don’t know who composed the music, but it is perfect, polyphonic, one melody the naked blade, the other the warm skin in the moment before it parts. Ela and Kossal sang it for me—it fell to them as my Witnesses in the Hall of All Endings, a vault-roofed, windowless sandstone cube just a dozen paces across. Not so much a hall as a room, really. Twin candles lit the space, ivory pillars as thick as my thigh set into sconces in the wall. There were no altars. Their singing bodies were the altars, their music the offering, brimming in the lambent space until it seemed almost liquid, her voice throaty, rich; his spare and unadorned as old iron. I cried, listening to them, cried first for the sheer beauty of the thing, and then again, a moment after, when my mind moved from the music to the words, and I realized what it meant: I was going to fail. I had already failed, fallen short of my great exercise of devotion even before it truly began.
The song is a list, obviously, a list of those that each acolyte must give to the god before becoming a full priest of Ananshael. From the first offering to the last, the would-be priestess is allowed fourteen days. Fourteen days for seven offerings. Not such a daunting task—not for one raised and trained in Rassambur—but an impossible one for someone, like me, who had never been in love.
The words trembled in my mind even after the singing was over: Give to the god the one who makes your mind and body sing with love.
Ela saw my shock first, but she misunderstood it.
“I know,” she said, sliding a strong, gentle hand over my shoulders. Her fingers were warm in the cool night air. Even without the notes, her voice still sounded like song. “I know.”
Kossal had already turned to the candles. Those twin flames gave the room its only light, but he was halfway to snuffing them, reaching for the first wick with his calloused fingers, ready to pinch the flame.
“Give her a moment, you old goat,” Ela said.
The priest paused, turned. Despite his age, he didn’t stoop. He carried himself—that whole tall, sinewy frame—like a man forty years younger, though his face—olive beneath the graying stubble—looked like something carved, each line and wrinkle scored into the flesh. Candlelight glinted, needle-bright, in each eye.
“She can have all the moments she wants. In the dark.”
“And what if she wants a little light?”
Kossal shifted his eyes from Ela, whistling tunelessly through a gap in his teeth as he studied me. “She wants to be a priestess, she ought to get acquainted with a little darkness. Besides, we’re wasting wax.”
“We’ve wasted worse than wax,” Ela replied. “I’ll snuff the candles when we leave.”
The old man watched me a heartbeat longer, looked back to the candles as though there were some answer there, then shook his head. “That you and I keep working together, Ela Timarna, is a mystery I cannot fathom.”
Ela’s laugh was a silver bell. I’d seen her put a fist through a thick block of sun-baked clay, watched her take a dying goat by the horns and snap its neck, but she carried her strength lightly. The muscle and sinew knitted beneath her brown skin looked built for leaping or lounging, not slaughter. Everything about her seemed light: her hair—a tumble of tight black ringlets—seemed to bounce with every movement; her hands were forever floating up as she gestured about one point or another; even her lips were always on the verge of turning up into a smile.
“We keep working together,” she replied, shooting me a wink as she answered the priest, “because you have a weakness for young women.”
Kossal grunted. “Funny thing about people: you give ’em enough years, and they stop being young.”
“And how many years,” Ela asked, spreading her arms as though offering an embrace or inviting the older priest to hazard a punch, “do you figure that takes?” She cocked her head to the side, smiling, her teeth bright in the candlelig
ht. “Have I stopped being young yet?” She turned in a slow circle, graceful as a dancer, pausing fractionally when her back was to him, then completing the rotation.
Kossal kept his eyes on her. His gaze was frank, open, appraising, but utterly uncovetous, utterly scrubbed of lust’s sticky need. I found myself wanting someone to look at me that way: not just to look at me, but to see me. The priest’s eyes, however, were only for the older woman.
“Not yet,” he conceded finally.
Ela smiled. Both of them stood still, but a draft tugged at the candles, making their shadows shiver. “I’m glad. I can’t tell you how demoralizing it would be if you were younger at seventy than I am at thirty-five.”
Kossal shook his head. “I quit being young a long way back. Never did suit me.”
“I’ll be the judge of what suits you.”
The old priest grunted again, then turned to me. “I’ll give you a piece of advice, kid. Might come in handy if I don’t have to kill you at the end of your Trial.”
Ela draped an arm over my shoulder, gave me a conspiratorial squeeze, then leaned close to mock-whisper in my ear. “Pretend like you’re listening. His advice is terrible, but it makes him happy to give it.”
Kossal ignored the gibe. “When you give the god the one who makes your mind and body sing with love, make sure you get it right. Otherwise,” he went on, nodding to Ela without breaking eye contact with me, “she’ll be there to bother you the rest of your life.”
“As I said,” Ela murmured, still loud enough for Kossal to hear, “his advice is terrible. I was ten years unborn when he had his Trial.”
“Should have waited,” he said, half to himself, shaking his head, then moving toward the door.
In a movement so fast I didn’t understand it until after, Ela twisted away from me and pivoted toward the older priest, aiming a sparring blow low between his ribs. She was fast, as fast as any priestess I’d seen at Rassambur, but it wasn’t her speed I marveled at later, over and over, but the perfect ease with which Kossal blocked the blow, catching her wrist, holding those stiffened fingers inches from his side. Ela glanced down at her hand, shook her head ruefully, smiled, then leaned in to kiss him lightly on the brow.
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