Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “Would you really have strangled me in my crib?” she asked. The words were warm, private, as though she’d forgotten I was there.

  “Would have been easier,” Kossal replied, letting her wrist go.

  “Easier than what?”

  The old priest just shook his head. “Snuff the candles when you’re done. A little light’s all well and good, but when the wax is gone, it’s gone.”

  Kossal stepped into the night, and the cedar door swung shut quietly behind him. Ela watched it for a while, lips pursed, as though she were about to whistle the first few bars of an old tune. She looked totally relaxed, but I could see her heartbeat testing the vessel in her neck; not fast, exactly, but faster than before. Her breath was faster, too, her chest rising and falling beneath her robe, whether from the short struggle with Kossal or from something else, I didn’t know.

  “He loves you?” I asked stupidly.

  Ela turned to me, then smiled. “That old fool doesn’t know the first thing about love.”

  “He must have, once.”

  “Once?” The priestess cocked her head to the side, then nodded. “Ah. His Trial.”

  “He passed. Which means he loved someone. He had to have.”

  “Perhaps,” Ela replied, then shrugged. “Enough about him. He’s half in Ananshael’s hand already. This is what you’re worried about, isn’t it? Making that last gift to the god?”

  I hesitated. The truth made me feel small.

  The priestess turned me until I faced her. She kept one hand on my shoulder, then lifted my chin with the other, until I was looking into her dark eyes. The fog of her hair caught the candlelight until it seemed to glow, while her face was lost in shadow. She was only a few inches taller, but in that moment I might have been a child all over again, wandering a warren of emotions barely known to me.

  “They’re always hard,” she said, “the song’s last lines. Even Ananshael’s priests forget, sometimes, that we belong to him. Love, meanwhile, is a sneaky, beguiling goddess. She makes you believe.”

  “Love…” I said, then trailed off, unable to manage more than the single syllable.

  Ela nodded. “Whoever it is, you think you can keep her. Or him.” She traced the line of my chin with her thumb. “You can’t.”

  Suddenly it was too much. I could only shake my head, the tears hot in my eyes, before pushing open the heavy cedar door and stepping out into the night’s chill, leaving behind the warm light of the twin candles for that other, older, colder light of the innumerable stars scattered overhead. All around me, the pale sandstone halls and houses of Rassambur glowed in the moonlight. Women and men moved between them alone, in pairs, or in small groups, chatting, laughing, silent. Shards of far-off song etched the darkness. I ignored it all, walking away until there was no more walking to be done, to the very edge of the mesa, where the only choice was between stopping and falling.

  From the cliff’s brink, I stared down into the great gulf that surrounded all of Rassambur. I’d been beyond that gulf, of course. I was born beyond it, raised to the age of ten beyond it, and in the fifteen years since, I had crossed dozens of times over the delicate sandstone span linking Rassambur to the mountains, to the rest of the world. For all the remoteness of our fortress, our devotion is evangelical, ecumenical, not monastic. Where there are people, there is our god, pacing silently in the marble corridors of power and the rankest alley alike, visiting the solitary cabin in its forest clearing, the bustling harbor, the camp aswarm with soldiers. His justice is equal and absolute, and so, as ministers of his justice, we must go out into the world. For every year in Rassambur, I had spent one year abroad, sometimes to the west of the Ancaz, sometimes to the east, always living among people, learning their ways, their hopes and fears, their needs. I had lived in Sia and Freeport, in the sprawling maze of Uvashi-Rama and a tiny town on the east bank of the Green Cataract. I had friends, acquaintances, and fondly remembered lovers scattered across two continents, and yet …

  I didn’t hear Ela approach, she moved too quietly for that, but I could smell her scent—jasmine and smoke—on the cool desert breeze. She stood half a pace behind me. When she spoke, her voice seemed to hang in the air all around.

  “You’d think I would be used to it by now,” she murmured. Her voice was warm with some humor I didn’t understand.

  “Used to what?”

  “My own obtuseness.”

  I shook my head but didn’t turn around. “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Ela replied. “You understand just fine, about your own interesting … predicament, at least. I didn’t see it.” She chuckled. “Our lives blind us, and I’ve always fallen in love so easily.”

  I blew out a long, uneven breath, stared down into the abyss. It was steadying, somehow, to know the drop was there just a step away, to look down into it. It was like seeing the marvelous, million-fingered hand of my god, patient and waiting.

  “How is it possible,” I asked, half to Ela, who stepped up quietly to my side, half to myself, “after all these years, that I haven’t … that I don’t…?”

  “Love anyone?”

  I nodded, dumb.

  “Perhaps you are more discriminating. Discrimination isn’t a bad thing, Pyrre—take it from me. I fell in love with a farmer from just outside Chubolo, once. He reeked of rutabaga. Had short, rough little fingers, like crusty sausages. If he ever said more than five words in a row, I never heard it.”

  I turned to stare at her, trying to imagine the lithe, smooth, deadly woman at my side with a rutabaga farmer. It was like trying to picture a lioness sliding her golden flank along an old pig’s bristly hide.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Ela laughed again. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Eira’s a goddess, and that makes her a tyrant, no matter what anyone tells you. Lady Love doesn’t explain her ways to me.”

  “But there must have been something.…”

  “I suppose. Maybe it was watching him move that stone.”

  I shook my head, baffled.

  “I was on the road,” she went on, her voice slipping into the rhythm of memory, “and he was clearing a field. There was a stone. Must have weighed ten times what he did, maybe twenty—I don’t know, I’ve never made a study of field clearing. The point is, it was huge, impossible to move. Or so I thought. He worked at it all day, digging it out with those stubby fingers of his, laying down the logs to roll it, shifting the weight a little at a time. I never saw anyone so slow, so patient, and I thought to myself, ‘He might not look like much, but a man who can move a stone like that is a man I need to get to know.’ I needed to see what he could do with all that slow, undeniable, relentless patience. I wanted to be that stone.”

  We both stared into the darkness. The sky overhead was clear, the stars excruciatingly sharp, but off to the north, a hundred miles distant, the spring winds had pinned a thunderstorm up against the higher peaks. Every few heartbeats, blue-white lightning shattered the cool bowl of the night, though we were too far away to hear the thunder.

  “So what did you do?” I asked, glancing over at Ela just as the next bolt hit, watching her face go from blackness to brilliance, then back again.

  “Spent six months with him. At his farm.”

  “Six months?” I tried to imagine it—noticing a strange man working his field, then deciding that very day, on no better information than his stone-shoving capacity, to pass half the year in his home. The whole story seemed like just that, a story, the kind of thing you might read in a book or hear over a campfire, the fabric of the tale spun half out of lies and half for laughs. Only, Ela wasn’t laughing, and I couldn’t think of a reason she might lie. I felt dizzy, suddenly, as though the flat top of the mesa were lifting by imperceptible degrees to tumble me into the abyss. Ela put a steadying hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.

  “How?” I asked, when I regained my balance.

  She shrugged. “It was easy enough to keep my eyes off his fingers, to b
reathe only through my mouth.”

  “Averted glances and mouth-breathing don’t seem like a sound foundation for love.”

  The older woman chuckled. “And just what do you think love is, Pyrre?”

  I shook my head stupidly.

  “As I said,” Ela continued after a pause, “it comes easier to some of us than others. The goddess makes us in endlessly different ways. Our struggles are no more the same than our faces.”

  It was impossible, when I replied, to scrub the bitterness from my voice. “And yet, Ananshael sets the same Trial for all of us.”

  “Anything less would be unjust.”

  I bit my lip so hard I could taste blood. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? All these years … I can kill a woman thirteen different ways with a wooden bowl. I’ve memorized poisons that no one has seen since the Csestriim wars, poisons as old as the Nevariim, if the Nevariim ever even really existed. I can hang upside down from a rafter for hours, or pop the glass pane from a window without making a sound. All the time I thought I was getting ready, and now … none of it matters.”

  Ela squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, it matters. You’ve got six other people to give to the god, all questions of love aside.”

  “But the questions of love aren’t aside. Even if I offer up everyone else on the first day, I’ll still fail.”

  “Not necessarily. You can take the place of that last sacrifice yourself. Kossal and I will see to it.”

  The words were level, even encouraging, but I couldn’t find any comfort in them. It wasn’t that I was afraid to die. Anyone raised in Rassambur comes to peace with the notion of her own unmaking. Ananshael’s mercy and justice extend even to us. Especially to us. A priestess unwilling to make an offering of herself is no priestess at all, but a mere murderer. I understood that even then. It wasn’t the prospect of my own death that bothered me, but of my failure. So much about Ananshael’s art had come to me so easily for so long; it seemed unfair that I should come up against such an abrupt, unexpected impossibility.

  “Who’s the judge?” I asked quietly.

  “Judge?”

  “Yes, the judge. About love. Who decides?”

  “Ah.” Ela turned from the immensity of the night to face me. “Kossal and I will decide in concert.”

  “And if I lie?”

  The priestess tsked. “Generally, we hope for a little more piety from those approaching the Trial.”

  “The piety will be the pile of bodies,” I replied grimly. “It’s something I’ve always admired about our god—he abides no lies. When the life goes from a woman, it is gone. Love, though…” I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “Anyone can fake it. Fakery is built into it.”

  “Spoken like a girl who has never been in love.”

  “How will you know?” I insisted. “If I find someone, if I say I’m in love, if I insist on it, how will you know?”

  “There is a shape to love, a pattern to the way it moves in us, through us. Between us.”

  “What are you? A priestess of death, or a ’Kent-kissing poet?”

  I regretted the words even as I spoke. Ela was only ten years older than me, only ten years clear of her own Trial, but she had already become half a legend in Rassambur. At the age of twenty-eight, following one of our god’s inscrutable commands, she had traveled to Badrikâs-Rama, found a way inside the ancient, unbroken walls of the Palace of Evening Waves, slipped past the Dusk Guards, and strangled the oldest Manjari prince. It was an act of devotion that many had deemed impossible. Then, the next night, she went back and killed his brother. This was the woman whose piety I had impugned; I half expected her to shove me from the ledge. Instead, she chuckled.

  “I’d like to think a woman can be both. She can be more. The nights I’ve spent tangled in someone else’s arms don’t diminish my devotion to the god. You can hold a knife to a woman’s throat…” she began, and then, in a motion so fast I could barely follow, her knife was free of its sheath and pressed against my skin. Her dark eyes sparkled starlight. “… And, if you were so inclined, you could kiss her at the same time.”

  For half a heartbeat I thought she intended to do just that. For half a heartbeat it felt as though we weren’t standing at the edge of the mesa but hanging just beyond it, buoyed up by the dark, or not buoyed at all, but already falling, the night air so soft against my skin that I hadn’t noticed. This is one of Ananshael’s truths—we are all dying, all the time. Being born is stepping from the cliff’s edge. The only question is what to do while falling.

  Ela’s eyes seemed to offer an answer, but it was one I couldn’t understand. Then, quick as it came, the knife was gone, slipped back into the sheath at her belt. She hadn’t stepped back, but she felt farther away, as though some bond between us was suddenly broken. I could have left it there, could have nodded and walked away.

  But I’ve never been good at walking away.

  “I’m not you,” I said quietly.

  Ela nodded. “Nor should you be.”

  “The thing that you call love might not be love to me at all.”

  “Your hands,” Ela said, taking my wrist, holding the hand up to the moonlight, “are not my hands, but they’re still hands. Your love won’t be mine. This doesn’t mean I can’t see it, know it.”

  “And if you’re wrong? What if I fall in love and you don’t even recognize it?”

  She took my other hand, then. We stood like lovers at the edge of the cliff, facing each other. I got the sense that she was making her face grave for my sake, the way an adult will feign attention for a furious child. “Then, when I come to kill you, Pyrre, you should fight back.”

  1

  The creatures of the Shirvian delta are fluent in the language of my lord. Even the smallest have not been made meek. A millipede coiled around a reed can kill a woman with a bite. So can the eye-spider, which is the size of my fingernail. Schools of steel-jawed qirna ply the channels, each fish more tooth than tail; I’ve watched people toss goats to them—an old offering to forbidden gods; it is like watching the animal dissolve into blood and froth. There are crocs in the delta half as old as the Annurian occupation, twenty-five-foot monsters that have lurked in the rushes for a hundred years or more, the most deadly with names passed down from generation to generation: Sweet Kim, Dancer, the Pet. The only thing in the delta that can kill a croc is a jaguar, a fact that might offer some solace if that great cat, too, didn’t feast on human flesh. There are ways to avoid crocs and qirna. Jaguars, though—it’s hopeless. Like trying to hide from a shadow.

  Ananshael’s first servants were the beasts. Long before we came, blood-hungry carnivores stalked the earth, each claw and tooth, every twisted sinew a living tool fashioned to the same absolute end. Before the first note of the first human song, there was music: a howl launched from some hungry throat, the rhythm of paws quick through the brush, over the hard-packed dirt, a bright, final squeal, then the silence without which all sound means nothing. The devotion of beasts is crude and unchosen but utterly undiluted.

  A fact of which I was reminded when the causeway over the delta, the causeway upon which we’d been walking for the better part of twenty miles, a causeway that had been safely suspended on wooden pilings fifteen feet above the rushes, groaned with a strong gust of wind. Until that moment, the day had been still as a painting, the bridge like bedrock beneath all the thousands of feet. When it shifted, the people around us—travelers and muleteers, tinkers and wagon drivers—glanced uneasily down at the swirling currents. A worried mutter sprang up like new fungus after a rain. Some people stopped in their tracks. Others moved faster, hurried unknowingly into Ananshael’s waiting arms.

  “Does it always do that?” Ela asked, turning to me. She didn’t look concerned. During the whole thousand-mile trek from Rassambur, she had not once looked concerned. Although we’d been marching down the causeway since dawn, she looked like a lady out for a summer stroll in her light sandals and bright silk ki-pan, a parasol of waxed red paper tossed
idly over her shoulder to keep the sun off. During the first days of our trip, her packing had struck me as impractical. Soon enough, however, I’d come to envy her sartorial choices—on hot days, those short dresses looked enviably cool; when storms came, the parasol kept her head and torso dry while the rain ran harmlessly down her long legs and off the sandals.

  “I don’t remember,” I confessed. “It’s been more than fifteen years since I was here.”

  The wind gusted again, raking the rushes, making the great, tar-soaked posts of the causeway creak. Beneath my feet, the wood shuddered.

  Kossal ignored it, just kept stomping along in his bare feet and gray robe exactly as he had every day since Rassambur, indifferent to rain or hail, washed-out sections of roadway, or even the immensity of the Shirvian delta spread silently beneath and before us as far as the eye could see.

  “These people,” Ela said, waggling a finger at the crowd around us, “look nervous.”

  She was right. A few paces in front of us, a basket-packer bent almost double beneath his load had quickened his pace, muttering something that sounded like a prayer. Beyond him, a woman was urging her husband to walk faster, pointing vaguely toward the east, where hot white clouds scraped over the sky. I felt my own pulse quicken, which was strange.

  I’d made peace, during the long years in Rassambur, with my own impermanence. My god’s mercy and his justice didn’t frighten me. I had learned to face the prospect of my own unmaking with equanimity, even with joy. At least, I thought I had. I discovered, standing on that pitching, swaying causeway, that coming back to the place where I was born had rekindled something inside me, some childhood instinct deeper than any epiphany. My mind might have been calm as the people around us mounted panic’s swaying ladder, but my body knew we had come back, my bones and blood recognized the thick reek of mud, the hot salt air.