Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “The local mythology took deeper root here because the citizens of Dombâng never witnessed the truth.”

  “Lots of truths floating around. Which one are you talking about?”

  “The truth about the gods. Dombâng’s first settlers fled here thousands of years ago, during the wars against the Csestriim. They came to the delta because it was a place they could hide, one of the only places the Csestriim couldn’t follow them.”

  Kossal snorted. “If Annur could conquer Dombâng, you can bet your ass the Csestriim could have managed it.”

  “And maybe they would have, in time. But they didn’t have time. The young gods came down, took human form, and helped to turn the tide of the war.” I shook my head. “But the people of Dombâng didn’t know any of that.”

  “Too busy hiding.”

  I nodded. “Word of the young gods spread across Vash and Eridroa, but it didn’t spread here. Not until much later, when the war was millennia over and the city finally opened to trade. By that point, the local stories were entrenched and the stories that might have replaced them too far back in history to make much of an impression.”

  Kossal tapped thoughtfully at the side of his mug, then looked back at me. “And yet, you seem to have escaped the local penchant for superstition.”

  I took a long, steadying breath. The hot morning air smelled of lemongrass, sweet-reed, smoked fish. It smelled like home, like a place I thought I’d never come back to.

  “A greater god liberated me.”

  “Not yet, he hasn’t,” Kossal replied.

  “He will. Ananshael leaves his mark on the world each day. Unlike the so-called gods of the delta.”

  “Which you think are just stories?”

  “If it’s between stories and real immortal deities creeping around in the rushes, I’ll go with stories.”

  The priest explored the recesses of his cheek with his tongue while he studied me.

  “Not everything immortal is a god.”

  It took me a moment to make sense of the statement. “You’re talking about the Csestriim,” I managed finally. “Or the Nevariim.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “The Nevariim really are a myth.”

  “So are the Csestriim,” I replied, “at least by this point. We destroyed them in the wars.”

  Kossal frowned, picked up his flute, fingered a few notes without raising it to his lips. “Not all of them.”

  I stared. “You think that some survived? That they escaped?”

  “I know they did.” His fingers ran through a quick arpeggio.

  “How?”

  “I’ve spent most of my life hunting them.”

  “Hunting isn’t finding,” I replied.

  “I’ve found two. I gave both of them to the god.”

  The delivery of those last words was so indifferent, so offhand, that he might have been talking about slaughtering sheep or gutting fish rather than finding and killing the last remnants of an immortal race. He raised the flute to his lips, played a few notes to a dance tune we’d heard while walking into the city, switched the melody to a minor key, inverted it, slowed it down, and suddenly it was a dirge.

  “Why would Csestriim be hiding in the delta?” I asked, not quite believing the words even as they left my lips.

  Kossal played a few more bars, then lowered the flute. “They have to hide somewhere. It is the kind of thing they do.”

  “Sulk in the mud?”

  It didn’t seem to fit with the descriptions from the histories. The Csestriim in the chronicles were soulless but brilliant, builders and inventors, masters of lost knowledge beyond all human imagining.

  “Become gods,” the priest replied. “Twist human credulity to their own end. Dombâng could be their project, their experiment.”

  “The first people came here to escape the Csestriim,” I insisted.

  Kossal raised an eyebrow. “What if they failed?”

  It was almost too much to imagine: Dombâng, thousands of years of history, a city of hundreds of thousands—the toy of a few immortals.

  “You think they’re here?”

  The priest shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve stopped making guesses.”

  “And if they are?”

  “Then they are long overdue for a meeting with our lord.”

  He tapped the flute against his palm as though testing the heft of the instrument or trying to dislodge any sound left stuck inside, then raised it to his lips once more.

  5

  I woke to find early evening smeared across the sky. Though I hadn’t used my knives since the causeway, I slid them from their sheaths, ran an oiled cloth over the blades, then strapped them to my thighs once more. After fifteen years, I felt more naked without those knives than I did without my clothes, which I slipped into next: loose-fitting delta pants and a dry vest. When I emerged onto the main deck, I found Ela seated at a small table close to the bar, a carafe of chilled plum wine before her.

  “Pyrre!” she exclaimed brightly, waving me over, then gesturing to one of the bare-chested servingmen to bring another glass. She studied the sculpted muscle of his shoulders and torso with open admiration as he poured for me, then slipped him a silver coin. He raised an eyebrow at the extravagance, then nodded his thanks. Ela cocked her head to the side and smiled.

  “You could have bought another bottle for that,” I observed after he left the table.

  Ela laughed gaily. “It’s not the bottle I’m after.” She pursed her lips, sipped her wine, then shrugged. “Or, not just the bottle. How was your night? I’ve been listening to the talk here on the deck,” she purred, leaning closer. “You got up to some mischief, didn’t you?”

  I forced myself to sit normally, not to glance over my shoulder.

  Ela just smiled wider. “How clandestine. Tell me everything.”

  I lowered my voice.

  “I did a little painting.…”

  The priestess waved an impatient hand. “Skip all the tedious preamble about inciting revolution.”

  I stared at her. “You’re not interested in eleven men dead in the middle of a city square?”

  “People die all the time, Pyrre. I’ve seen enough corpses to last a lifetime. Get to the good stuff.”

  “The good stuff?”

  “This delicious man,” she replied, brown eyes flashing, “to incite whose favor you’ve been … redecorating the entire city.”

  I sucked breath nervously between my teeth. Everyone on the deck seemed to be holding a whispered conversation. Everyone had a wary eye for the other tables. We don’t look any different, I told myself, though that wasn’t exactly right. Of all the people gathered on the deck, only Ela seemed entirely at ease. She leaned on one elbow, fingering the rim of her wineglass as she studied me. And, of course, of all the people gathered on the deck, I was the only one who had spent the previous night fulfilling prophecy all over the ’Kent-kissing city.

  “You saw him, didn’t you?” Ela demanded, eyes narrowed.

  “I saw him,” I admitted, then paused, uncertain how to continue.

  “Pyrre,” Ela said finally, “I have given women to the god for less frustration than you are causing me right now.” She upended the carafe of wine into my glass, gestured impatiently, then waited for me to drink. “Did you talk to him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  Ela frowned. “This story is getting less interesting by the moment. You’ll just have to tell me the other one.”

  I stared at her. “What other one?”

  “How you met.”

  I looked away, out over the narrow canal. “How do you know there’s a story?”

  “Oh, my sweet girl. There is always a story.”

  * * *

  I was nineteen when I first laid eyes on Ruc Lan Lac. This was in Sia, the Flooded Quarter of the old city, hundreds of miles from Dombâng. I wasn’t looking for him that night, wasn’t looking for anyone. I’d left
my tiny, lakeside room in search of music. I’d been in Sia almost eight months, and though the city, like any city, has music—rough-voiced men belting out shanties from upturned barrels in taverns down by the docks, elegant trios in fine mansions, playing close enough to the open windows that I could stop in the street outside to catch a few bars—I missed the music of Rassambur.

  Ananshael’s faithful are taught to sing long before we learn to hold a bow or blade. Children of ten, sitting on the mesa’s edge, tossing stones into the emptiness below, will make their way merrily through polyphonic pieces beyond the range of most professional bards. I liked Sia, liked the spicy food and the sunrise over the lake, but I missed Rassambur’s music. When I heard that Lady Aslim’s Singers—a legendary choir sustained by the old woman at great personal expense—would be singing outside the cloistered walls of the lady’s piazza, I had to go. When I learned they would be performing Antreem’s Hymn for the Forgotten, nothing could have kept me away.

  That’s what I thought, anyway, before I encountered Ruc.

  I arrived early to the old temple in Sia’s Flooded Quarter. The concert was open to all, an act of Lady Aslim’s civic devotion to help commemorate the eight hundredth anniversary of Sia’s founding. I expected to find the old stone space brimming with people, but an hour before the performance half of the long wooden pews remained empty.

  It made a sad kind of sense, I suppose. Due to the anniversary, the streets outside the temple were packed with jugglers and fire-eaters, acrobats and fruit vendors. On the walk over, I’d been unable to make my way through Adib’s Square because the Brotherhood of the Steel Flesh was putting on its macabre act, threading hooks through the muscles of their chests and backs, then suspending themselves above the flagstones to the horror and excitement of all. Lady Aslim’s Singers may have been famous in certain circles, but Antreem’s Mass was a long, reticent, stubborn piece of music, not ideally suited for drunken celebration. Judging from the relative crowds, most of Sia’s citizens preferred large-breasted, sword-swallowing women to ancient choral music.

  Which was fine with me.

  Though I’d come to Sia as part of my training to serve the god—to do our work, Ananshael’s faithful need to move confidently, fluidly through all manner of situation—though I’d spent the better part of a year living and working in the densely packed limestone warrens of the old town, crowds still made me nervous. The press of people reminded me too much of my childhood in Dombâng, not enough of the huge sky of the Ancaz. I was willing to brave a crowd to listen to Antreem, but I was even happier to slide onto an empty bench at the very back of the temple, a dozen feet away from the next person.

  And I was less than pleased when someone joined me on that bench, despite the ubiquity of other, better options.

  I shifted down a foot or so, until my shoulder touched the stone wall at the pew’s end, then glanced over in irritation. My new companion—a young man in his mid-twenties—didn’t seem to notice me at all. Which was unsurprising, given that his right eye—haloed with the sick, shiny purple of a new bruise—had swollen entirely shut. The eye, in fact, was the least of it. His nose had been recently broken, then reset, and even as I watched, a drop of blood slid down his upper lip. He wiped it away absently with the back of a sleeve, leaving a smear of red across his teeth. His ear, too, had been viciously ripped near the bottom, as though someone had tried to tear it off with his teeth. Another trickle of blood snaked from the clotting wound down into the collar of his shirt. Part of a uniform, I realized—Annurian legion—though my understanding of the legions suggested he’d have been thrown in the stocks for half a week if he showed up to duty looking like he did.

  A drunk, I thought at first, wandered in off the street looking for a place to sleep it off.

  I considered dragging him outside, tossing him in some alley where he wouldn’t interrupt the Mass. On the other hand, he outweighed me and he obviously hadn’t come by that busted face avoiding fights. I could give him to the god, cut his throat where he sat, but if anyone noticed blood pooling on the ancient stones, the chaos would get in the way of the singing.

  I sat there in irritated silence, shooting him glances while pondering the vexing question long enough that I realized, finally, he wasn’t drunk after all. He had closed his other eye, the unswollen one, but he wasn’t asleep—not judging from his breath and the set of his head. In fact, with his eyes closed he seemed more attentive, even reverent—the word climbed unbidden into my mind—than most of the concertgoers in the pews closer to the nave. While they whispered and gossiped, buzzing their impatience, he just waited, hands folded in his lap. Those hands, too, were bleeding, half the knuckles split open.

  He made no move to applaud when the thirteen men and women of Aslim’s choir, all robed in black, finally filed through a low stone door to take their places at the temple’s nave. He didn’t twitch or open his eyes, but something in his posture shifted marginally, almost imperceptibly, as though he were an iron filing and somewhere on the far side of the city someone had nudged a magnet.

  Irritation sizzled inside me. I had come to lose myself in Antreem’s Hymn. I had been waiting weeks. I had imagined a warm Si’ite evening brimming with lamplight, the whole night trembling with a piece of music dating back to the Atmani, and me lost in it. Instead, I found myself sharing a pew with this bruised, bleeding idiot, and worse than that, for some reason, even as the song began, I found my mind kept wandering back to him, wondering.

  Should have killed him when he first walked in, I thought. There were other ways than opening his throat, more subtle ways, things I could have done quickly without jeopardizing the performance. Now that the music had begun, however, I was loath to slide over and wrap my scarf around his neck.

  I tried to forget him, closing my own eyes as the singers began, abandoning myself to the music. The first moments of the Hymn sketch the central motif, a dissonant figure in a minor key wound tightly on itself, the structure incomplete, as though certain notes are missing, forgotten or torn away. When the second voice threads in beside the first, the ear aches for those lost tones. The counterpoint promises wholeness, then denies it. Finally, with eyes closed, I was able to wander the music’s broken ways. I forgot the bleeding man at my side.

  When the first movement came to an agonizing close, however, when I opened my eyes, he was still there. He’d stopped bleeding, but started silently crying, which was worse. His fists trembled in his lap, the skin drawn tight over the scabbed, bloody knuckles. My own hands were still—they teach you that in Rassambur—but I recognized that trembling as something done to him by the music. Sometimes it seems the only way to survive Antreem’s Hymn is to make it to the end, but the man beside me didn’t wait. As the singers gathered themselves for the second movement, he opened his eyes, stared at nothing, shook his head as though to clear it, and then, to my absolute amazement, stood up. He met my gaze for just a moment, then turned away toward the temple door and the night beyond.

  * * *

  “You followed him,” Ela said. It wasn’t a question.

  I finished my wine, then nodded wearily. The sun had long since dropped into the western haze. Red-scale lanterns illuminated the deck, swaying in the warm breeze as the flames danced inside. The servingman Ela had been flirting with all night brought over another carafe of wine. This time he lingered, a hand on her bare shoulder.

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  Ela shooed him away with a playful hand. “Later, Triem. Later.”

  I eyed the brimming carafe dubiously. “I think I’ve had enough.”

  “Nonsense,” Ela said, suddenly businesslike as she filled my glass. “I can’t get a good story out of you unless I pour you full of wine first. That’s becoming obvious.” She filled her own glass, then set the carafe to the side. “So. You followed him.”

  “I followed him,” I agreed warily.

  Ela studied me. “Why?”

  It was a question I had already asked m
yself a hundred times. One that had no good answer.

  “His eyes,” I replied.

  “I thought you could only see the one. The other was swollen.”

  “Fine. His eye.”

  “Care to describe it?”

  I hesitated. I’d left that part out, evidently, in relating the morning’s events around the statue.

  “Moss green,” I admitted finally.

  Ela smiled. “I like green eyes.”

  * * *

  I was just sliding free of my pew when the second movement of the Mass began, all thirteen voices at once, half song, half scream, a single blurred note slammed between the mind and all other thought. I’d known it was coming, and even still, it almost left my legs unstrung. For a moment I hovered there, my hand on the back of the pew. The music almost dragged me back. I almost subsided onto the bench to hear the rest, but something in the young man’s bloody face proved equal to the Mass; something in that one green eye had reflected back the music’s strength, and grace, and rage, and so instead of letting him go, I followed him into the warm, Si’ite night.

  When the heavy doors swung shut behind me, the music cut off abruptly. I imagined pillows slipped over the mouths of the singers, held there while they fought and struggled in silence, breath and sound alike lost in that unyielding softness. It becomes a habit, among those raised in Rassambur, to think of all endings as absolute. The song went on, of course, pouring from those thirteen throats, but for me, on that night, it was finished. I was angry suddenly, and surprised at my anger.

  “It’s not for everyone.”

  I turned at the sound of the words to find the young man standing in the middle of the cobbled street, his back to me. He hadn’t looked over when he spoke, just stared straight ahead, as though he were studying the torches lining the street. For a heartbeat, I thought he wasn’t talking to me at all, that he’d run into some acquaintance, but the truth was there in his posture, legible to anyone who’d spent her life learning to read the human body. He knew I was there, he expected me to come after him, and more than that: he was ready.