Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “Then why did you kill them?” the woman wailed. She looked even worse than I did, her flimsy clothes soaked, shredded. Blood washed half her face, carving runnels through the drying mud.

  I shook my head, spread my hands. “I don’t know why you keep saying that.”

  Ela draped a comforting arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Sometimes there is no one to blame,” she murmured, stroking her hair. “Sometimes people just die. Sanni,” she said, nodding toward me, “did everything she could. We all did.”

  The woman stared, eyes blank as the sky.

  The man stepped toward me, lips drawn back in a rictus.

  “I know what I saw.”

  The Greenshirt looked from the man to me, then back again. “What did you see?”

  “She threw her knives! She murdered Bin and Vo.”

  I turned to confront the soldier myself. “I did throw the knives, but not at his friends. I was in the mud, fighting for my life. Why would I kill the woman who was helping to hold back the crocs?”

  “She threw her knives at the croc,” Ela confirmed.

  The Greenshirt grimaced, obviously searching for a way out of the situation. “Maybe you missed? Hit his friends by accident?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been throwing knives since I was five. The croc was the size of a boat and three paces away. I didn’t miss.”

  The mud-smeared man leveled a finger at my face. “You’re a murderer.”

  He kept saying that, as though all other thoughts had escaped him.

  Ela interposed herself, laid a comforting hand on his chest. He knocked it away, but suddenly I understood.

  I turned back to the Greenshirt. “Look. It’s madness out here. There are still people stuck in the delta who need help.”

  “She’s trying to get away,” the woman insisted.

  I shook my head again. “We’ll wait right here. Leave someone to watch us, but for the love of Intarra, send the rest of your men north. This tragedy isn’t finished.”

  The soldier studied me for a moment, jaw tight, then nodded abruptly. “Von, Thun, Quon. Keep them here. I don’t want anyone moving until I’m back. If they move, kill them. When I get back, we’ll bring them to the Shipwreck and figure it out there.”

  “What did we do?” demanded the mud-spattered man. “They’re the fucking killers!”

  “And if they are,” the Greenshirt snapped, “then they’ll face Annur’s justice when this is all finished.”

  Ela raised a conciliatory hand. “I, for one, am happy to wait.” She settled on the railing, oblivious to the drop at her back. “Kossal,” she said, motioning toward him imperiously. “Get over here.” As the old priest stomped down the causeway toward us, she stripped the gloves from her hands, laid them carefully on the railing. “So much death,” she said, shaking her head regretfully. “So much senseless death.”

  * * *

  The sun had barely budged in the sky before Thun collapsed. The soldier, who had been watching us fastidiously, suddenly lowered his sword, put a hand to his chest, winced, then fell over. Von knelt beside him, gave him a confused shove, then, when the man didn’t respond, put down his sword, tried to revive him with increasingly desperate entreaties, then slumped to the boards himself, pained puzzlement traced across his features. The rest were dead within a hundred heartbeats.

  “Well,” Ela said brightly, getting to her feet. “I guess that settles that.”

  “Itiriol?” I asked, studying the corpses.

  She smiled. “And here everyone in Rassambur told me you were only good with your blades.”

  I glanced over at the calfskin gloves. “The powder doesn’t soak through the leather?”

  “Eventually.” She shrugged. “It’s not a good idea to dawdle.”

  Kossal straightened up irritably. “There were faster ways to do that.”

  “More obvious ways,” Ela countered. “Ways that would be remembered.” She nodded toward the people swarming over the causeway. A few glanced in our direction, but by this point the wooden bridge was packed with the bleeding and terrified, the exhausted and distraught. A few people lying down by the railing were hardly worth noticing. “This way we can still stay in a nice inn,” she added, “instead of holed up in an attic with the bats.” She looked at me appraisingly for a moment, rummaged in her pack, then tossed me a tightly rolled ki-pan. “As much as I appreciate the legs-and-knives look, maybe you should wear something a little less conspicuous, at least until we get into the city.”

  * * *

  We reached Mad Trent’s Mountain after dark. Like the causeway itself, the massive elevated platform was a legacy of the Annurian invasion. A quarter mile from Dombâng’s northwestern edge, the wooden road, which had run spear-straight and dead flat for so many miles, began to climb gradually, the pilings growing longer, the scaffolding more complex as the delta dropped away below. The huge structure is comprehensively misnamed: a wooden scaffold (many times repaired and replaced over the decades) is hardly a mountain, and General Trent hadn’t been remotely mad. Two hundred years earlier, Annurian trebuchets had pounded the northern quarter of the city into flaming oblivion from that manufactured height.

  Dombâng was still burning, although the flames had been long since contained, tamed, caged in ten thousand stoves, torches, lanterns, the fire a servant once more. From atop the mountain, the whole labyrinthine expanse sprawled before us like a muddier, nearer echo of the stars. I found myself dizzy looking down at it, dizzy in a way I’d never been atop Rassambur’s vertiginous cliffs. It felt as though I wasn’t just looking down, but also looking back across the abyss of years into my own past.

  Hidden City, Goc My’s Marvel, Labyrinth of Lanterns—the city bore a dozen names, each one true in the right light, each one a lie. The maze of canals, barges, and floating markets had, indeed, remained hidden for centuries, millennia, but it was hidden no longer, the bonds of causeway and channel shackling her to the world. Goc My had, in fact, worked a marvel centuries earlier, starting the transformation of a small fishing hamlet into the greatest city of the south. On the other hand, Goc My was long dead, and his city had fallen to a greater, less miraculous power two hundred years earlier. The truest name was the last: Dombâng was still a labyrinth—a place of canals and causeways, bridges and barges, passing ropes strung between the tops of buildings, ladders everywhere, ten thousand alleys and backwaters where a woman could get lost, where she could lose herself.

  “Ahh,” Ela purred, pausing to take in the sight, “I could fall in love here.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Truly a city of romance.”

  Kossal grunted. “If you think a whole town built on an open sewer and peopled by angry political schismatics is romantic.”

  “Look at those lanterns,” Ela protested. “There weren’t so many the last time I was here.”

  Red and amber lanterns hung from the bows of ships, candles flickered in open windows, open flames blazed at the base of wooden statues hewn in the postures of the gods—the Annurian gods, Intarra foremost among them. Even at this distance, I could hear hints of music, both the bawdy banging of drinking songs and the softer thread of wooden flutes laid across the night’s hot breath.

  “What’ve lanterns got to do with anything?” Kossal demanded.

  Ela ignored him, turning to me instead and raising a playful eyebrow. “Good choice, Pyrre. How could you not fall in love with so many lanterns?”

  “They’re fish,” I said, shaking my head. “All those lanterns are made of fish skin. Red snapper or ploutfish. They gut them, stretch the skin over a frame, then slide the wick and the whale oil inside.”

  “I take it from your tone,” Ela said, cocking her head to the side as she studied me, “that something about the fishiness dims the romance for you.”

  “The smell, for starters,” Kossal replied.

  I shook my head slowly. “They don’t smell. Not if they’re made properly.”

  The memory filled me, dredged from t
he silt of my childhood. I was squatting on a narrow dock between piles of snapper. The fish were still, dead, cool in the morning heat, stupid eyes fixed on the sky. It was my job to gut and clean them, to salt, then hang the filets, then to scrape the skins until they were paper thin, ready to be sold to the old lantern-maker down the street. The fish were fresh enough that they never reeked. It was only later, at night, when people started to light those ruddy lanterns, that I smelled the thick stench soaked into my skin, no matter how much I scrubbed.

  “Your problem, Kossal,” Ela said, turning to face the older priest, “is that you don’t understand romance.”

  “I’ll cut a creature open,” he replied. “I’ll take out what’s inside. I’ll hang the carcass up to dry. All part of our devotion. Just don’t see where the romance comes into it.”

  Ela shook her head, then turned to me and rolled her eyes. “Hopeless,” she said, lowering her voice, as though in confidence. “He’s hopeless. Always has been.” Then, turning back to him, extending her arm and unfolding a hand, as though the whole city were a web of jewels and hers to offer up, she said, “Forget the romance. Can’t you just admit that it looks beautiful?”

  “In the dark. From a distance.” He shook his head. “Stand half a mile off and a pile of steaming shit looks pretty in the moonlight.”

  “Kossal,” Ela demanded, “is there any place in this wide world that you actually like?”

  “Rassambur.” He raised a finger as though prepared to enumerate further possibilities, seemed to consider his options, then put the hand down. “Just Rassambur. Quiet. Not so ’Kent-kissing humid.”

  “If you love Rassambur so much,” I asked him, “then why are you here?”

  He didn’t bother looking at me. Instead he scowled at the marvel of light and water that was Dombâng. “Because I love my god more.”

  I shook my head. “The god is everywhere. Someone else could have taken your place as my Witness.”

  “There may be other work than witnessing to be done here.”

  Ela raised her brows, surprised for the first time. “Let a lady in on the secret.”

  For a while he didn’t respond, glaring down silently at the city. Finally, he looked over at us.

  “Something that needs killing.”

  “And so you had to come all this way?” Ela swatted him. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it would have died on its own.”

  “Maybe,” Kossal replied. “Maybe not.”

  * * *

  Well before we reached the city proper, we began to pass clusters of flat-bottomed barges tethered together on either side of the final stretch of causeway, ranks of lean, long delta skiffs tied rail to rail. Each had a small tent thrown up in the center—just a scrap of canvas to keep off the worst of the mosquitoes, really—but no one seemed to be asleep. Red lanterns hung from the stern of each boat, pushing back the night, bloodying the water’s black. On each makeshift, tenuously tethered island, the boats’ owners tended to congregate on a single deck, where they could spend the hot evening drinking with their neighbors. The thick smell of smoke and grilling fish and reedfruit hung in the air. Despite the hour, even the children were up, clambering between the hulls, laughing and screaming. Every so often one of them tumbled into the water with a splash. The rest would jeer and shout and then haul their companion from the current and the game would resume.

  The ease with which those children climbed free of the water reminded me of the woman earlier in the day who hadn’t, of the way she’d screamed as she tried to escape the mud, as the qirna closed in to feast on her legs. Most of the delta’s most dangerous creatures wouldn’t venture this close to the city; the water was too filthy, the air too loud. The children were safe enough, as safe as children anywhere. I’d spent countless days in Dombâng’s waters myself, and yet it was impossible not to look at that slick, black surface without imagining some unseen menace lurking beneath, razor-toothed and patient.

  The music distracted from the water’s implacable silence. In Dombâng there was always music. That, too, I remembered from my childhood, flutes and drums, mostly, the former made from the thick-walled spear rushes of the delta. Those flutes were built for slow, haunting melodies, but the measures of Dombâng were anything but—raucous tunes for rowing or dancing, quick, heavy drums always urging the song on and on, louder and larger.

  “I plan to dance,” Ela said, pausing to listen to one particularly lively tune, tapping her folded parasol against her heel, “until my feet bleed.”

  For just a moment, I heard the music through her ears, clear and unsullied. For just a moment, and then, all over again, it was impossible not to hear that music as I’d heard it years ago, not the night’s carefree focus, but a mask, a racket drowning the quieter, more intimate sounds of violence. More movement, and darker than dancing, had always waited on that music.

  For all the laughter and lanterns, Kossal was right. As we moved into the city proper, I remembered the truth: Dombâng was uglier close up. Lanterns and lights hung from the carved teak of the high-peaked roofs, blousy women leaned from the balconies, men in their bright evening finery—vests over bare chests, long sashes at the waist—called out greetings to one another, but below, in the shadows where the light never reached, rot gnawed constantly at the pitch-soaked pilings. The gutted carcasses of fish, flensed of their soft flesh until only the spines, fins, and heads remained, clogged the backwaters. Where the current was strong, the water ran clear and fast and dark, but in the thousands of eddies where the wide weirs trapped the flow, strange shapes rose slow, awful, dreamlike from the dark, revolved lazily a moment in the light, then disappeared. Rassambur had taught me much about death, but this wasn’t death. It was dying. Even as a child I had sensed this. Especially as a child.

  I was so lost remembering the rhythms of the city that I almost walked directly into Ela when she stopped.

  “Lady and gentleman,” she announced theatrically, “I give you Anho’s Dance.”

  With a flourish of her arm, she indicated a tall, wide-windowed building to our left. A narrow canal separated it from the causeway itself, and a small but elegantly carved bridge spanned the water, arcing from the causeway to a broad deck fronting the structure, a deck packed with tables and patrons.

  Kossal grimaced. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “You are not surprised,” Ela proclaimed, “because I promised when we left Rassambur to bring us to the liveliest inn in the city, the establishment with the best music, finest wine, and the most shapely patrons. Which I have, in fact, done.”

  I wasn’t in a position to judge Dombâng’s finest establishments—I’d passed most of my childhood in the warren of toppling stilt shacks at the east end of the city, where the water was foulest—but I’d spent enough time in other cities later to see that Ela’s claim was more than plausible. A six-person band—two drummers, two flautists, and a pair of singers, the man in an open vest, the woman in ki-pan slit on both sides all the way to the hip—dominated the center of the deck. Their music was better than anything we’d heard on the long walk in: loud and excited, full of overflowing life, but still intricate, tight. A score of finely attired dancers moved through the quick steps of one of Dombâng’s classics in the open space before them, while to either side the rest of the patrons kept time by clapping.

  Bare-chested servingmen—hired, obviously, on the twin strengths of their grace and beauty—threaded their way through the crowd with wide trays held above their heads. Women in flowing, low-cut tops worked the bars at either end, spinning glasses in the torchlight, catching them behind their backs, pouring glittering liquor in graceful streams from tall bottles.

  “When we left Rassambur,” Kossal said, “did you not hear me say that I’d prefer somewhere small, quiet, and dark?”

  Ela pursed her lips, looked up into the star-studded night speculatively, then shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear you say that.”

  “You understand,” Kossal ground out, “that I coul
d give you to the god at any point. You would make a great offering.”

  “You won’t.”

  “That kind of certainty gets people killed.”

  “I won’t be as pretty dead.”

  “Quite the contrary. You will make a gorgeous corpse.”

  “If you’re going to come for me,” Ela said, “you’d best do it soon. You’re not getting any faster as you get older.”

  “I thought you said, just before we left Rassambur, that I was still young.”

  Ela slid a hand around his waist, snugging him close for a moment. He didn’t resist as she leaned over to purr in his ear. “That was before we left Rassambur.”

  Kossal glared at her hard, then pulled free. “I’m getting a room, then going to sleep.” He turned to me. “I suggest you do the same.”

  “It’s not even midnight,” Ela exclaimed.

  “You might be here on a whim,” he said to the priestess grimly, “but the girl has work to do tomorrow. Her Trial has already begun. It began the moment she put a knife through that miserable woman’s neck. Which means she has fourteen days to finish. A little less, now. Doesn’t leave many evenings for drinking and dancing.”

  “I don’t know,” Ela replied, letting him go, twining her slender arm around my waist instead, “I’ve always found drinking and dancing have a way of clarifying the mind.”

  Then, before I could object, she led me over a narrow bridge onto the deck of the inn, then to one of the tables nearest the music.

  * * *

  “So,” Ela said, leaning back in her chair, arching her back as she stretched her arms above her head. “Are you ever planning to tell me?”

  A carafe of blown glass filled with plum wine sat on the table between us, the third of the night, this one still almost full. The priestess reached out, poured a measure into my glass, set it down, then licked the vessel’s beaded sweat from her fingers. She reminded me of a cat, deliberate and indifferent all at once.

  “Tell you what?”