Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  No one cried out. No one leveled an angry finger. No one raised the alarm. Women and men crossed the bridge as they had been crossing it all night, oblivious to what I had wrought in their midst. Destruction is like that, sometimes. The cracked cup might take days to finally break. You can stab a man so fast that he doesn’t realize until moments later, when the blood starts leaking out. A city, of course, is bigger than a cup, more complex than a man. If I was going to break Dombâng, break it thoroughly enough to serve my purposes, I had more work to do.

  From Cao’s Bridge I went south, then west over the pollen-stained causeways of the Flower Market. Ten thousand dropped petals dappled the still, dark water between the piers. I left the red mark of my palm on the wall of the central guardhouse while the Greenshirts were distracted harassing some poor merchant about his papers. I left it on each end of the Spring Bridge as I crossed onto First Island, and then again at the base of the huge statue of Goc My that presided over the island’s central square. He stared down at me with blank stone eyes. I slipped away while the paint was still dripping, across the open cobbles, into the darkness of one of the side streets, then paused, turning back to study the statue, wondering what he’d make of my night’s activity.

  Goc My had spent his life in the service of Dombâng, leading the Greenshirts when the Greenshirts were still strong, independent. It was Goc My who had the widest channels of the delta dredged, opening up Dombâng to the trade of deep-keeled ocean vessels, and Goc My, at the same time, who built a canny series of traps and fortifications—underwater chains and fake reefs, guardhouses hidden in the reeds ready to lob crocks of liquid flame at would-be invaders—to protect his city even as he worked to reveal it to the world. Goc My had devoted his life to the safeguarding of Dombâng, but Goc My was a thousand years dead, and Dombâng was no longer the city he knew. Would he curse me for cracking his city’s tenuous peace? Or would he be grateful that someone was stirring up hatred of the empire that had forced the yoke on that city’s shoulders?

  As I watched the still, stone form, half a dozen revelers, listing like boats in an invisible squall, stumbled into the square. At first I thought they planned to cross without stopping, but then the tallest, a muscular, unattractive man with his vest hanging open, lost his footing and lurched abruptly sideways into Goc My’s plinth. His companions erupted into a chorus of jeers and encouragement, but the youth cut them off with a theatrically raised hand.

  “I stand for such treatment,” he announced, stabbing an unsteady finger up at the statue, “from no man!”

  Then, after a moment fumbling with his belt, he dropped his pants around his ankles and began pissing on the statue’s base.

  If the night had been a little darker, or the pisser had been a little drunker, things might have turned out differently. He might have finished urinating, hauled up his tangled pants, followed his friends out of the square and into the night, into the rest of his life. The square, however, was hung with lanterns, and the young man had kept just enough wits about him that when he finally raised his eyes from his cock, he saw in front of him the print of my bloody hand, still wet and glistening.

  If he’d been sober, he might still have saved himself, might have turned and walked quietly away. Even during my childhood the red hands of prophecy had a way of cropping up in Dombâng, a few here, half a dozen there, futile gestures of defiance, useless attempts to kindle in the people of the city a righteous uprising. Waist-high children knew enough not to be seen by the Greenshirts near one of those bloody prints. Annur hadn’t become the world’s most powerful empire by chuckling at sedition. It was worth your life, especially if you were an urchin from the east end of the city, to be accused of fomenting rebellion. If you saw a red hand, you made sure no one thought you put it there.

  Evidently, this idiot had never learned that particular lesson. Still holding his cock in one hand, he stretched out the other with the inexplicable determination of drunks everywhere, to lay it over the print. The motion was slow, deliberate, almost reverent. It was also exquisitely timed. Just as he took his hand away, staring in perplexity at the red paint staining his palm, a patrol of Greenshirts entered the plaza.

  I wondered if Goc My would have recognized the order he once commanded. During the long years of Dombâng’s independence, while priests claimed the highest offices, it was the Greenshirts who were the city’s true rulers. The Greenshirts saw to the dredging of channels and the building of causeways and bridges; the Greenshirts ran the courts and collected taxes; they decided which nations to favor with trade and which to punish with embargoes; it was the Greenshirts who protected the priests—an imbalance of power that was lost on no one—and so when the priests spoke, it was with the voice of the Greenshirts; and the Greenshirts were able to do all this because it was they who guarded the city with boats and blades.

  Then Annur came and killed them all.

  They were replaced, of course. The empire is canny enough to understand that it is easier to keep an office and replace the person holding it than it is to change the political structure altogether. Names have power; it can take people a long time to realize they’ve stopped meaning what they used to mean. In the case of the Greenshirts, the city’s invincible defenders became a second-rate constabulary charged with putting down brawls by the harbor and hauling the most obvious dissidents before imperial courts. The former lords of Dombâng became lackeys, but even lackeys can be dangerous if they carry spears and flatbows and have the weight of an empire behind them.

  The men who entered the square were a standard patrol—four soldiers, customary green tabards over their shirts of mail. The soldiers had obviously gone to some effort to keep their armor polished, but Dombâng’s relentless wet salt heat had left a thin patina of rust over the rings, rust that streaked the faded green cloth of the uniforms until it looked as though each man had been bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds for weeks. Still, they were more composed, more professional than the Greenshirts from my childhood—Ruc’s influence, I assumed—and professional or not, it was tough to miss the figure of the pantsless man urinating on the statue of one of the city’s founders.

  “Citizen!” shouted the patrol leader. He was large, middle-aged, slabs of muscle deteriorating slowly into fat.

  The drunk pisser didn’t notice. He was still staring at his own red hand.

  “Citizen!” the Greenshirt shouted again. His men fell in behind him as he quickened his pace.

  The other revelers saw the coming disaster, tried to pull their friend away from the statue, but trapped by his tangled pants and baffled by drunkenness all he did was to raise his slick palm to show them.

  “The red hand,” he muttered. Then, disastrously, he quoted from Chong Mi: “‘I saw hands of blood, ten thousand bloody hands, reach up from the waters to tear the city down.’”

  The leader of the Greenshirts stiffened—the words might have been an arrow lodged in his chest. After a heartbeat’s shock, he leveled his spear, barked an order. The two men with flatbows dropped to a knee, taking aim on the hapless fool.

  I watched the scene from the shadows, amazed that my night’s painting could turn so quickly to violence. The red hands were only the first step in my plan. I’d half expected them to go unnoticed. What were a few smears of paint, after all, dabbed up in the riot of color that was Dombâng? If I had scripted the evening’s events, I couldn’t have written a more perfect coincidence. It was almost as though the old gods of the delta were watching after all, standing grim-eyed and silent in the darkness behind me, dragging the city that had betrayed them toward chaos.

  One of the pisser’s friends, more sober than the rest despite having lost his vest earlier in the night, stepped forward, his hands raised. “No,” he said. “It’s not … We’re not…”

  “On the ground,” the captain barked, gesturing with his spear. “All of you. Get on the ground.”

  The bare-chested man took another step forward, evidently propelled by the conviction
that if he could just get close enough, just get the words out, the whole misunderstanding could be avoided. He walked like a man in a dream, slowly but implacably, his hands raised, while behind him the pisser, finally understanding the danger, struggled to drag his pants up around his waist. The rest of the group stood still as Goc My himself, eyes wide, red with the reflected light of the square’s lanterns.

  “Listen,” the bare-chested man said. “Just listen…”

  When he had almost reached the captain, he stretched out one tentative hand toward the man’s spear, as though to defend himself. A mistake, as it turned out. When the soldier yanked his weapon back, one of the soldiers beside him twitched. Such a small motion: a jerk of the head, stiffening of the shoulders, sudden spasm of the hands as they tried to close momentarily into fists and found the flatbow’s trigger. The bolt took the closest man in the gut—an inexplicably bad shot at such close range. He gaped in horror, stared at his own ruined stomach, touched the end of the rudely protruding bolt. Ananshael held him in his hands already—I could see it in the angle of the wound and the bleak sheen of the man’s eyes—but the body is stubborn. It can take a long time to die. In the space that remained to him, the dying man lurched forward, arms outstretched, and then my god descended, invisible and unerring, come among us once again to unstring his trembling mortal instruments.

  I’ve watched my share of brawls. Most don’t go much further than a few busted fists and broken noses. Most people don’t want to die, and they seem to know, instinctively, that the best way to keep from getting dead is to keep a leash on the fight. Most brawls are governed by an unspoken, universal set of rules: leave the fallen where they drop, avoid the eyes, fight with chairs and bottles, not bricks or stones. In the event that someone draws a knife, there’s almost always a pause, a choreographed moment in which everyone takes stock.

  Those rules don’t apply after someone takes a flatbow bolt to the stomach.

  It all happened fast, as though the violence had been there all along, penned and waiting to be released. The dying man seized the spear with his final, awful strength. The other soldier fired his flatbow. Some revelers fled, some charged forward, screaming their rage. Spears met flesh. Fingers closed on throats. Lips drew back. Teeth, bleeding. More screaming. Bodies pressed lover-tight. Steel twisted in viscera. Blood splashed on the stones. Vicious kicking and stabbing over and over and then, like the end of a great musical crescendo, it was over.

  “The god’s mercy upon you,” I murmured quietly.

  He was already gone, of course. Ananshael is never one to linger after claiming his due. Only the bodies remained: eleven dead, sprawled on the cobbles beneath Goc My’s inscrutable gaze—seven of the men who had spent the evening drinking and singing, and all four Greenshirts. I’ve always thought there’s something beautiful in that final stillness, the way the dead find rest in even the most awful postures.

  The remaining revelers—there were four of them, including, improbably, the man who had pissed on the statue in the first place—didn’t share that peace. They stared at the scene, chests heaving, mouths agape, as though in just a few moments the world had become an illegible text, all language dissolved into blood and wrecked flesh.

  Finally, one of them seized another by the shoulder. Wordlessly, they stumbled away, the soles of their sandals slapping against the stones, echoing through the night. I knew the world was fragile, but I hadn’t figured on just how fragile. When I finally turned away, Goc My remained, gazing over the plaza with blank, stone eyes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until just before dawn that I realized I was being followed.

  I spent hours quartering the city, slapping my handprint wherever I could find a free space. From First Island I made my way past Old Harbor—the anchorage long since silted up and given over to a maze of rotting hulls; then Little Basc, where most inhabitants had coal-dark skin and spoke a complex tongue somewhere between Annurian and the language of their old island; and on to The Heights, whose eight-foot banks were high only in comparison to the rest of Dombâng’s low-lying islands. I spent a few extra moments in the markets fronting New Harbor, studying the huge ships swaying at anchor, wondering if I ought to swim out to leave some paint on their hulls, then decided against it. Though I grew up half a fish in the canals of Dombâng, my skills had soured in the dry, desert mountains of Rassambur, and I wasn’t sure about my ability to swim and keep the paint clear of the water.

  By the time the unrisen sun had smudged the eastern sky pink, I’d refilled my clay crock with paint a dozen times and left hundreds of bloody palms scattered throughout the city. The prophecy said ten thousand, but I figured no one was likely to be counting. Before returning to the inn, however, I decided to go back to First Island, to see what had become of the violence there. Crossing one of the low, hanging bridges, I glanced behind me, caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure just stepping onto the span, then half turned away before I realized I’d seen the person before, several times over the course of the night, always in the middle distance—across a canal, or several aisles away in the market, face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat and streaked with shadow.

  My heart bucked inside me, but I kept walking, cleaving to the casual, unhurried pace I’d been using all evening.

  Kossal, I thought. The figure was tall and lanky, like the priest, and of course it was Kossal’s task to follow me wherever I went. The marvel was I hadn’t noticed him earlier.

  When I reached the next corner, however, and looked back casually over my shoulder, I realized it wasn’t Kossal after all. Not Kossal or Ela or anyone I’d ever seen. The person following me was a stranger, and yet, as he moved through the light of a swaying lantern, I realized with a frigid thrill that I recognized the garb—tight snakeskin pants, black scales glittering red in the lamplight, snakeskin jerkin laced across the chest, bracers of croc hide running from wrist to elbow—and I recognized the tattoo slashed across his face. What I had taken for shadow in the night’s darkness was ink, long black lines like rushes streaked across the brown skin from neck to hairline. I knew those tattoos. Everyone who grew up in Dombâng knew them. They were the mark of the Vuo Ton.

  For most people, Dombâng was the delta’s only safe haven. To stray on foot beyond the city’s bounds, or the causeway linking it to the rest of the world, was to die. Even the city’s fishers refused to ply the channels much more than a few miles outside the safety of Dombâng’s domesticated wildness. No one could survive out there. Everyone knew that. No one except the Vuo Ton.

  According to the stories, they’d once been citizens of Dombâng itself, descendants of the same few hundred terrified humans who had first taken refuge in the delta. As Dombâng grew, however, from a collection of shacks to a village, from a village to a town, from a town to a city, there were those who claimed that success had made the people of that city soft. The delta had been driven back too far, they insisted; too much security had made people weak. They tried for a while to bring the city back to the old ways, and then, when that failed, they left, several hundred of them slipping into the delta to establish their own settlement, a place where they could live closer to danger, where they could remember the lessons the delta had taught to its first inhabitants. To a place where they could more properly remember their gods.

  People from Dombâng had tried to find that settlement over the years. They had failed. Failed so thoroughly, in fact, that it would have been tempting to believe the Vuo Ton had all perished, except for the fact that they showed up in the city occasionally, one or two of them, dressed in the skins of boa and anaconda, faces inked to blend with the reeds. Usually they came to trade, bartering for iron or steel or glass, the few things they needed but couldn’t make themselves. They rarely stayed more than a day or two, slipping back into the delta in their snake-thin boats, disappearing among the rushes, despite the occasional effort to follow them. I knew of only one who had chosen to stay.

  There had been a woman in my neighb
orhood when I was growing up—Chua Two-Net. Two-Net was a legend. She’d been raised in the delta by the Vuo Ton, then quit her people to come to Dombâng for love. Not that the love seemed to have softened her any. Her arms and shoulders were steel-strong after half a lifetime paddling and hauling nets. She’d won the small boat race through the city’s main canal three years running, despite—she insisted it was because of—drinking a full bottle of quey before each contest. She’d strangled a ten-foot keel slider with her bare hands once, then stitched the snake’s black skin into a vest that glistened like midnight water wherever she walked. She could swim faster than anyone I’d ever seen, woman or man. She was also the only person I knew who had ever capsized in the delta and survived.

  We’d thought her lost when her old canoe fetched up in an empty tangle of roots just west of the city, and after a night of low voices hissing their own fear and recriminations, a group of her fellow fishers took up the search. But how do you search a place that won’t take a track, where each footprint is instantly swallowed in the mud, where each afternoon a storm’s fury washes away any scent? Chua’s friends set out looking, not because they hoped to find her, but because the thought of abandoning anyone to the delta was too awful to contemplate, because all of them secretly feared that one day it might be their canoe that capsized in a storm, because they could imagine wandering that watery maze alone, and because they hoped that if that happened someone would come looking for them.