Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  He was still ten paces off when he spoke, his voice low and level. “You owe me a bottle of quey.”

  Six years. Six years since I’d walked out on him in the middle of the night, slipping away from the room we shared without warning or explanation—six years in which, for all I knew, he could have thought I was dead—and instead of any shock, any expression of surprise or disbelief, this was what he had to say.

  “I suppose,” he went on, drawing closer to me, “you didn’t bring it with you.”

  “As I recall,” I replied, matching his lazy drawl, “the bottle was already half empty when I finished it. We split the first half before you unchivalrously fell asleep.”

  “Half a bottle of quey then.”

  I smiled. “I’d be happy to. Name the place and time.”

  “Here,” he replied. “Now.”

  “You just got here.”

  “And I already found what I’m looking for. How exceptionally fortunate.”

  This was the tricky part. Ruc had come to the baths because of the note he found on the Neck, a note indicating a rendezvous with an unknown contact. It was my note, obviously. I wrote it; I was the contact. According to the rules of my own fiction, however, I was supposed to be expecting the Neck. Which meant I ought to look confused. Confused, but not baffled. I needed to exude an air of competent improvisation, to let him see that I was improvising without letting him see that I was letting him see it. And it wouldn’t hurt if I looked a little bit glamorous into the bargain.

  I pulled my shoulders back a fraction, brushed my wet hair from my eyes, tried to look lush and languorous. Rassambur hadn’t afforded much practice when it came to looking lush and languorous.

  “Someone break your nose again?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “You ought to quit letting people hit you. Your face is nice, but it gets a little uglier each time someone breaks it.”

  That last wasn’t exactly true. I liked that slightly crooked nose, those faint smooth scars marring his skin.

  “If I remember right,” he replied, “you’re responsible for some of the breaking.”

  I shook my head, took a couple strokes toward him, paused when I was an arm’s span away, then raised a hand to his face, touched the scars on his chin, his right cheekbone. My stupid heart was thudding away in my chest, far faster and more violently than it had been in the moments before I killed the Neck. I supposed that seemed promising, in a very uncomfortable way. Thudding hearts and stupidity seemed to be hallmarks of love. On the other hand, the incessant hammering made it difficult to concentrate. I’d forgotten what it was like to be close to him. The hot steam folded around us, blotting out the rest of the pool, the rest of the world.

  Ruc made no move to block my hand. He stood chest deep in the water, still but ready—he always looked ready, even when he slept—watching me the way a boxer watches an opponent’s first moves in the opening moments of a match. I dropped my hand, took a step back.

  “If you’d been faster,” I said, “I might have hit you less.”

  He snorted. “How are your ribs?”

  My hand searched out the spot under the surface of the water. I could still feel the ridge where they’d mended.

  “Better than Bedisa made them.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “A couple months. Well worth the lesson.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Which was?”

  “Keep the elbow tucked until the hook’s already in motion.”

  “Kid’s mistake.”

  “I was a kid.”

  “You were pretty fucking vicious for a kid.”

  “Emphasis on pretty, fucking, or vicious?”

  “High marks on all three.”

  I winked at him. “I love getting high marks.”

  My breathing was hot and fast, the way it always was before a fight, and my heart kept hammering away, as though it were a bell hung above some outpost town, and a sentry were pounding the alarm. He ran his eyes over my shoulders, down the front of my body.

  “Some new scars.”

  I nodded toward a patch of puckered skin on his shoulder, the remnant of a nasty puncture wound, one he hadn’t had in Sia. “I’m not the only one.”

  He shrugged. “I keep telling myself I’m going to stop fighting. Take up pottery or something. Somehow I never get around to it.”

  “We’re made how we’re made.”

  “Not a philosophy,” he observed, “that leaves a lot of room for personal growth.”

  “Pythons don’t mature into lily roses.”

  Ruc studied me for a while, then shook his head. Coming from someone else, the motion might have indicated some sort of capitulation. Ruc, however, was not one to capitulate. “What are you doing here, Pyrre?”

  I glanced over my shoulder, as though looking for the Neck, then turned back to him. If anything, he was more muscular than I remembered, not just stronger, but harder, like a statue dropped in the middle of the baths and abandoned.

  “The same thing as you, would be my guess.”

  “Then your guess is wrong, unless you pulled a note out of a dead man’s vest.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I try to stay out of the clothing of dead men.”

  “An admirable trait, but not always practical in my line of work.”

  “So it’s true. Annur gave you command of the Greenshirts.”

  He nodded. “I should have kept boxing in Sia. More honest.”

  I glanced around the bathhouse again. “City seems to be thriving under your watch.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough to see that it’s not on fire.”

  “Don’t read too much into that. It’s tough to burn down a city built in the middle of a fucking river.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Far overhead, lost in the gloom and steam, the bathhouse gong began tolling the evening hour, the hour indicated on the note I’d left inside the Neck’s vest. The deep bass trembled inside my chest. Ruc waited until it was over, then shook his head.

  “He’s not coming.”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Who’s not?”

  “The man you’re hoping to meet.”

  “How do you know it’s a man?” I asked, pursing my lips. “Have you been keeping tabs on my bathhouse assignations?”

  “I know it’s a man,” Ruc replied, “because he was found in the privy of The Bronze Croc with his throat slit, bleeding through the shitter into the canal. He had a letter,” Ruc tapped his bare chest, just where I’d tucked the note, “details for a meeting. That meeting is here.” He patted the water in front of him gently. “Now.”

  “Ah.” I gave the syllable time to breathe. “And you think it has something to do with me.”

  “Here you are.”

  I cast an eye around the huge open space.

  “Lots of people here.”

  “Not with your history.”

  “You don’t know my history.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I tried to find you, six years ago. I’m good at finding people. It’s what I did in the legions, when I wasn’t killing people. It’s the reason the Annurian kenarang put me in charge of the Greenshirts. When you disappeared, I looked for you, and do you know what I found?”

  I tapped a finger against my lips. “Nothing?”

  “A truly remarkable amount of nothing. A woman who fights as well as I do, probably better than I do, if you give her a knife, appears out of nowhere, dominates, alongside me of course, the bare-knuckle boxing scene in one of Annur’s largest cities for months, then disappears. No one knows her. No one trained her or trained with her. No one saw her before she appeared, evidently out of thin air, and no one saw her after.” He moved closer to me as he spoke, slowly but inevitably as the rising tide, until he stood just inches away. “And now, after six years in occultation, she appears here, at the precise point wher
e a murdered Annurian legionary—not just a legionary, but the commander of an entire legion—was supposed to arrive for a secret meeting, and at the precise time.”

  I wet my lips. “Imagine your surprise.”

  He shook his head. “Quite the contrary: I feel an old wound finally beginning to mend, the rent of a long-standing mystery starting to stitch itself whole.”

  “Well, you don’t need me if the mystery is stitching itself.”

  I took a step back, silently praying that he would follow.

  He raised his brows. “Retreating? Not like the Pyrre I remember.”

  “Just giving you some space.”

  “You gave me six years’ worth.”

  “So another few days won’t hurt.”

  “No.”

  “No,” I said, testing out the syllable. “Hard to know what that means without a little more context.”

  “It means that until this is finished, you’re not going to disappear again.”

  I tried to look cool despite the sweat beading on my face. The meeting had gone just as I hoped: Ruc knew I was in the city, was curious about why, and intended to keep me close, at least for a while longer. He had taken the bait; all that was left was to set the hook.

  So why, I asked myself as I watched him watching me, do I feel like the one caught?

  8

  “I figure there are two possibilities,” Ruc said.

  I’d followed him out of the pool, into the warren of benches and cubbyholes, wooden trunks, hooks hung with robes, and ranks of narrow closets running the length of the long northern wall. He’d been studying me silently as we toweled ourselves dry. My skin was still flushed with the water’s heat, a fact for which I was both irritated and grateful. I didn’t want him to think I was blushing; on the other hand, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.

  It’s amazing how easy it is to be naked around someone who doesn’t interest you; bodies are simple, straightforward, no more worth noticing than the walls. Add attraction, however, and all that cool composure goes to shit. As Ruc twisted and stretched to dry the difficult spots, I couldn’t figure out where to put my eyes. Whenever I looked away, I felt like a cloistered milkmaid, but whenever I let my gaze linger—on his ass, on that perfect joint where his leg met his hip—I felt the blush burning up through my cheeks.

  He didn’t seem to share my dilemma. His skin was darker than mine, which gave him an advantage in the blushing game, but I suspected that even if he’d been pale as the moon my nakedness wouldn’t have fazed him. He’d been watching me with such frank curiosity as we dried then dressed that when he finally spoke, the words were a relief.

  “You were working with the Neck,” he went on, pausing with his pants half buttoned to gauge my response. “Working with him or about to start. The note I found on his body was from you. That’s why you’re here.”

  “That’s one possibility,” I conceded.

  “The question is what kind of work you hoped to accomplish. That’s where we get to the possibilities.”

  I glanced casually over my shoulder. A knot of women occupied the far end of the bench, laughing, chatting, and getting dressed, but they were a few paces away and paid us no mind.

  “Either,” Ruc said, raising a finger, “you’re working for Annur, which puts us on the same side. Or you’re working with Dombâng’s seditious priests, in which case things start looking a lot less rosy for the two of us.”

  “I’d tell you the answer,” I said, “but I can see you’re having so much fun figuring it out all on your own.”

  Ruc flashed me a smile. “Why don’t I tell you a story,” he suggested. “There was a woman, born in Dombâng, who wanted nothing more than to drive Annur from her city—”

  “Lousy start.”

  “I thought,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “you were going to let me work it out on my own.”

  “It’s the storytelling I’m objecting to. Don’t tell the listener everything in the first sentence. You’ll spoil the mystery.”

  He picked up his sheathed belt knife, slapped it contemplatively against his palm a few times, then threaded it through his belt. “I find you can skip the mystery as long as there’s enough screaming and blood.”

  “Nothing like playing to a crowd’s finer sensibilities.”

  “And sex,” Ruc added, winking at me without cracking a smile. “Let’s not leave out the sex.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. If we can’t have decent storytelling, at least we can enjoy the violence and fornication.”

  Ruc pursed his lips. “A pretty sound approach, I’d say.”

  “So…” I bent to strap my own knives to my thighs. “According to this tawdry tale of concupiscence and blood…”

  “Our protagonist,” he said, nodding to me, “this daughter of Dombâng, tailed me six years ago.”

  “For the sex,” I asked, straightening up, “or the blood?”

  “The one was a means to the other. She tried to enlist me in the city’s uprising, plying me with all her feminine wiles. When she failed, she vanished. Now here she is again, reappearing just days after someone has begun spanking my city bloody with red-painted palms.”

  I felt less exposed with the weight of my blades strapped to my thighs. Less exposed but still naked. I started to pick up my pants, then left them where they lay. This whole thing—the story, the indifferent pace at which he was getting dressed, the tapping of his knife against his palm—it was all the circling and feinting before a fight, and I’d be fucked if I let him see me flinch. Instead, I stepped closer, put a hand on his bare chest, traced a line down his stomach to his belt, then tucked a finger in behind the leather and the cloth beneath. He was still warm from the water. Not just warm—hot.

  “I’m waiting to hear why this woman, one of Dombâng’s chief conspirators, was planning to meet with the Neck, the Annurian legionary responsible for dismantling her carefully planned revolution.”

  Ruc glanced down at my hand, made no effort to move it, then met my gaze. “For the same reason she found me six years earlier: she hoped to seduce the Neck into some kind of collusion.”

  “Your grasp of female characters leaves something to be desired.”

  “Oh?”

  “For starters, the woman in question, this revolutionary genius, seems to rely somewhat single-mindedly on her vagina.”

  “I shouldn’t have made her sound so simple,” Ruc conceded. “She also excels at punching.”

  I smiled. “Let me tell you a story. I call it Betrayal of a Native Son.”

  “Lighthearted.”

  “You’ll die laughing.”

  “The title seems to give away the mystery.”

  “Not if you don’t know who’s going to be betrayed.” I ran my finger back up his stomach and chest, up to his neck, lifting his chin. “The fun is in seeing it play out.”

  “Sure that fun is the right word?”

  “Oh, the most vicious stories can be the best—provided you’re not the one living them. Are you going to listen or keep interrupting?”

  Ruc put a hand on my bare hip. “I’m listening.”

  It was hard to concentrate with him so close. It was all just part of the sparring, each of us trying to knock the other off guard, but I could still feel the heat in his hands, his breath tangling in my hair, his smooth chest brushing for just half a moment against my own. Memory’s delicious ministrations slid over me: those warm Si’ite nights, the breeze through the open window tangling my hair, his hands on my hips, the small of my back, gliding up in the insides of my thighs, his eyes deep as the jungle and every bit as easy to get lost in. My heart bucked like a paddocked horse eager to be free. With an effort, I shackled all that recollected passion, forced myself to focus on the story.

  “There was a young man,” I began, “a scion of his city, heir to a proud but dilapidated legacy. He might have been expected to lead his people—these centuries enslaved—to a long-awaited freedom.”

  Ruc chuckled. “Expected b
y whom?”

  “Those who know the truth—that he is descended from Goc My, the greatest of the Greenshirts—”

  He raised an eyebrow. “The same Greenshirts that quit mattering two centuries ago, when Annur conquered the city?”

  I shook my head. “The past never quits mattering. Dombâng’s silent priesthood was only waiting for the right moment, the right man—”

  “This legionary?” Ruc asked. “Someone who served the empire for eight years rooting savages out of the Waist? Doesn’t seem as though you’ve thought through your characters, their motivations.”

  “Haven’t I? Who better than this legionary, one trusted by the decadent minds of the empire, one well versed in their ways and wiles, to bring Annur to its knees? Who better than the son of Goc My—”

  “All Goc My’s sons are centuries dead.”

  “The spiritual son of Goc My, then. Who better, as I was saying, than this prince of Dombâng to see the Greenshirts and the priesthood returned to their former glory?”

  “Someone should have told him he was a prince. He would have quit boxing, saved himself some bruises and broken bones.”

  I met his eyes, traced the scar running up the edge of his jaw. “No, he wouldn’t have.”

  “Not everyone needs to fight.”

  “He does,” I murmured.

  “Let me see if I can guess how it ends. At long last, this prince heeds the call of his downtrodden people. He begins murdering the very Annurians charged with helping him keep order in the city, starting with a legionary known—quite colorfully, I might add—as the Neck.”

  “We knew the betrayal was coming.…”

  “Then he goes to the baths to find the legionary’s secret ally and murder her as well.”

  I nodded, never taking my eyes from his. “An audience likes betrayal. They like a story that ends with everyone drenched in blood.”

  Ruc slid his hand up from my waist, brushing my breast, coming to rest gently against my throat. “It’s an exciting story,” he said. “Compelling. The trouble with it is—and I’m sure you’ve noticed this—you’re still alive.”