Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “As are you.”

  “Which means,” he said, “that either we’re slow when it comes to killing, or we’re on the same side.”

  I nodded. “That could prove useful, what with a revolution brewing.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about that?”

  I shrugged. “The same as everyone else. Paintings dashed up on the statues and bridges. The kind of painting that has a way of getting people killed and whole huge chunks of the city burned down.” I smiled. “I’m here to stop it.”

  “I thought that was my job.”

  “It ought to be. There are those, however, who have developed the opinion that you don’t seem to be doing that job.”

  Ruc snorted. “Back-room second-guessers. A bunch of clean-fingered bureaucrats who’ve never set foot outside Annur.”

  “I can’t comment on the cleanliness of their fingers, but some of the second-guessers rise well above the level of ‘bureaucrat.’ The Kettral don’t take orders from bureaucrats.”

  I winked, stepped back, took my pants from the bench, and slid into them, forcing myself to patience as I waited for his response to the lie.

  I’d thought hard, during the long slog to Dombâng, about what kind of life to invent for myself. Finding Ruc Lan Lac was, after all, only the first step. Once I found him, he would have questions, and while I’d managed to side-step most of those six years earlier, I had a nagging worry that he would prove less trusting the second time around. My new identity needed to be unassailable, utterly unfalsifiable, even by someone as smart and tenacious as Ruc. Just as important, the tale I told needed to be relevant. If I was going to fall in love with him, I had to give Ruc a reason to talk to me, to work with me, to keep me close.

  It took me weeks to come up with the Kettral cover—strange, given that it wasn’t just the perfect story, it was about the only one to fit the bill. For starters, Ruc could never check on my lies. The Kettral, elite warrior-assassins of the Annurian empire, were notoriously secretive. They lived, according to rumor, on an archipelago of hidden islands—the Qirins—the location of which was known only to themselves, a handful of merchant captains with military clearance, and the ocean’s bolder and more desperate pirates. Ruc had no way to reach the Kettral, no way to follow up on a story about a young woman, such-and-such a height, so many years of age.…

  Even better, the Kettral backstory gave me a reason to work with the Greenshirts. Ruc himself, of course, had been tasked with crushing any rebellion inside Dombâng. The legions provided the muscle. It seemed only natural, however, that Annur would have a contingency plan, another set of eyes and knives keeping watch, not just on the city, but on the city watchmen. For all I knew, the story was actually true. Somewhere in Dombâng there could have been one or two Wings of Kettral, the empire’s greatest soldiers posing as fishermen or barkeeps. It was plausible, at the very least, and even better—it explained my unlikely abilities. Servants of Ananshael are trained to be discreet, and I’d certainly managed to hide the bulk of my training from Ruc the last time we crossed paths. Even the little he’d seen, however, was enough to raise eyebrows, a level of martial ability completely unbelievable from most of the world’s professions.

  The Kettral provided me with the perfect lie, one he couldn’t not believe.…

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, voice flat.

  I raised an eyebrow, sucked a slow breath in between my lips, tried to find a way to strike back. “How many other people do you know who could go toe-to-toe with you in a bare-knuckle fight?”

  He drummed a thumb absently over his ribs, just the spot where I used to hammer him in the ring.

  “Of those,” I went on before he could respond, “how many weigh forty pounds less than you? How many are nineteen-year-old women?”

  “If you’re Kettral,” he asked slowly, “then what in ’Shael’s name were you doing in Sia?”

  I shrugged. “Work.”

  “Where was the rest of your Wing?”

  “We don’t always work in Wings.”

  I had no idea if that was true or not, but I was betting he didn’t either.

  “What was the mission?”

  “Everyone off the Qirins who knew the answer to that is dead. I wouldn’t suggest joining them.”

  “And your mission here, in Dombâng?”

  “Meeting the Neck, for starters.”

  “Not off to a great start.”

  “Just means we have to do things the hard way.”

  He studied me a moment. “We?”

  I nodded. “The rest of my Wing.”

  “You just said you didn’t work with a Wing.”

  “That was last time. Different mission. Different parameters.”

  “And this mission, beyond chatting with a dead man?”

  “Under normal circumstances,” I said slowly, “I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “When are the circumstances ever normal?”

  “A valid point,” I conceded.

  “Let me see if I can guess the rest,” he said, appraising me with that unfairly green gaze.

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”

  “You’re Kettral, or so you claim. You’re here in Dombâng because the city’s sedition seems to be rolling to a boil all over again. Annur put me in charge of the Greenshirts, loaned me a few legions to keep the peace, but something happened back in the capital, and someone there doesn’t trust me as much as they used to. So they sent you to watch me.” He raised an eyebrow. “How’s my narrative sense now?”

  “Improving.” I patted him on the cheek. “We’re here to watch you. If your loyalties haven’t shifted, we stay in the shadows, let you do your work, then we clean up whatever mess you leave behind.”

  “So, I’m either a traitor or an idiot.”

  “I assured them you weren’t either.”

  He eyed me. “And yet, here you are.”

  I shrugged. “I go where I’m told.”

  “Why you?”

  I pursed my lips. “Maybe you are an idiot after all.”

  “Fine,” he snorted. “You’re from Dombâng. You know the city.…”

  “… And I know you.”

  He tapped absently at the handle of his belt knife. “Is that it? You’re supposed to drag me to bed, fuck the suspicion out of me, get at all my secrets?”

  I frowned, put my hands on my hips. “Did we not just discuss some of the ways in which my skills extend beyond the spreading of my legs?”

  Ruc ran his eyes the length of my body, but I couldn’t read his gaze. Was that a sliver of lust? Or just the steel glint of a fighter sizing up another fighter?

  I tried to imagine I was Ela, a woman well versed in the ways of the world, as comfortable moving from one man to the next as she was changing her dresses. I pictured her brown eyes as she raised her wineglass, the way they brimmed with lamplight, seeming to laugh even when she didn’t move. I leaned back against the wooden wall, trying to find something like her languid pose, that way her limbs fell that whispered readiness and relaxation at the same time.

  Maybe I managed it. It was impossible to tell from Ruc’s face. In truth, my palms were damp, my mouth dry.

  “Of course,” I went on, reaching for Ela’s easy, throaty voice, “Kettral need to be prepared for all contingencies. I’m certain, if it becomes absolutely necessary, that I could find the willingness to bed you for the sake of our great empire.”

  The line was supposed to be coy, enticing. Ruc didn’t look enticed. In fact, he looked as though he hadn’t heard me at all. Instead, he was gazing past my shoulder, down the length of the narrow room. He’d barely moved, just a small shift of his weight, a slight dropping and angling of the shoulders, but I recognized the posture at once. I’d seen it dozens of times in Sia, and each time it meant the same thing—he was about to hurt someone, probably quite badly.

  * * *

  “The woman in the gray is the Asp,” he murmured as we stepped out of the bathho
use into the hot Dombâng night.

  It took me a moment to find her again—a short, middle-aged woman with a pockmarked face and a slight limp. No one I would have looked at twice. She made her way slowly through the dozens of people crowding the wide bathhouse steps, moving aside for knots of revelers, bowing almost reflexively when someone jostled her, eyes downcast the entire time.

  “Doesn’t look like the kind of person to name herself after a venomous snake,” I said.

  “She didn’t. It’s the name we’ve been using for her.”

  “Her own wasn’t exciting enough?”

  Ruc shook his head grimly. “I haven’t been able to learn it.”

  He started down the steps, slicing fluidly through the crowd as I followed half a step behind.

  “Why are we so excited to see her?”

  “Not just her,” Ruc said, “but the person she’s with.”

  I squinted. Dozens of red-scale lanterns flanked the steps, but they cast shifting, inconsistent shadows as they swayed with the night breeze.

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Not there,” Ruc muttered, increasing the pace. “Down at the canal. Third boat back, the one with the black awning. The man approaching it.”

  It took me a moment to find him, a tall, slender figure in a calf-length noc and black vest. He glanced over his shoulder before stepping into the vessel; I was able to catch a glimpse of a long face, high forehead, hatchet nose.

  “They don’t seem to be together,” I observed.

  Ruc nodded. “That’s the point. There’s a reason I haven’t been able to dig out the roots of this priesthood, even after five years.”

  “So they’re priests.”

  “The one in black is. The Asp works for Lady Quen, although we didn’t know that until a few months ago.”

  “Is Quen a name that should have been in my briefing?”

  “Depends on how good your briefing was. She’s one of the richest people in the city, an outspoken critic of Annurian policy, but so far I haven’t been able to tie her to anything that might survive a trial.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got hundreds of Greenshirts and I don’t know how many legions under your command. Who needs a trial?”

  “You don’t understand Dombâng,” Ruc replied. “This city’s balanced on a blade. Most of the citizens appreciate Annur—the empire’s laws, her trade, her prosperity—but the quarter that don’t could turn the place upside down in half a day. Whenever I take a person down I need proof, I need bodies, I need piles of stolen loot, and even then there’s a risk that the whole thing turns into a riot.”

  “Maybe you should have stuck with the boxing after all.”

  “You have no idea how often I think that.”

  The man in black—the priest—had disappeared beneath the boat’s canopy. The Asp paused at one of the stalls lining the bottom of the bathhouse steps, spent a few copper flames on a leaf filled with crushed ice and honey, then crossed to the edge of the canal where she picked at the dessert with a bamboo spoon while looking out over the water.

  “If they’re trying to keep secret,” I asked, “what are they doing meeting here, in the largest bathhouse in Dombâng?”

  “It’s harder to keep track of them that way. We watch Lady Quen’s mansion day and night, but she knows that. She’d gut any priest who came within a hundred paces of her doors or docks. So they do it this way: surrogates, discreet signs, public places. Could be here, any of the markets, the harbors, the taverns. Different priests have different circuits. It’s always changing.”

  “What is the it?” I asked, although a sick dread churning in my stomach suggested I already knew.

  Ruc looked over, met my eyes. “Sacrifice,” he replied quietly. He nodded toward the Asp. “Come on.”

  The woman finished the last of her honeyed ice, tossed the leaf into the canal, watched it bob away, a diminutive little ship, then strolled the length of the dock to the same boat the priest had boarded earlier. The bathhouse docks were a hive of activity: slim swallowtail boats, opulent pleasure barges, snub-nosed wearies shouldering through the press of hulls to deliver passengers or pick them up. There was nothing remarkable about the vessel with the black canopy. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, if Ruc hadn’t pointed it out. The Asp stepped lightly from the dock onto the rocking hull without even a glance back, just one of the thousands of people who would pass over the same decking each day. She murmured something to the oarsman, then ducked under the canopy and disappeared.

  I glanced over at Ruc. “Should we kill them?”

  He shook his head. “If I wanted the priest, I could have taken him months ago. I want Lady Quen.”

  “I suppose it would be too simple to assume she’s waiting quietly in that boat.”

  “The good lady is anything but simple. It’s the Asp’s job to make contact, to bring the priest to Quen, and to make sure she’s not followed.”

  “So we need to be sneaky.”

  “I hope you’ve stayed fit,” Ruc said, running his eyes over me once more.

  “How fit do I need to be to lie in the bottom of a boat while we trail them?”

  “We’re not going in a boat. They’d spot us.”

  “Please tell me we’re not swimming.”

  “We’re not swimming.”

  I studied him. “We’re swimming.”

  He nodded. “Of course we’re swimming.”

  “Sweet Intarra’s light.”

  “I thought Kettral were good swimmers.”

  “We are,” I replied. “But I prefer water that isn’t an open sewer.”

  “Lucky for you, we’re at the clean end of town.”

  “How lucky.”

  The Asp’s oarsman had shoved off from the docks, was poling his way through the press of vessels, bellowing abuse at the owners of the other boats.

  “Let’s get messy,” Ruc said, striding into the crowd.

  I took a deep breath, checked my knives, and followed him.

  Dombâng is a city unlike any other I’ve seen. Most of the streets aren’t streets at all, but canals, winding waterways that thread between blocks built up out of the mud on thick, tarry stilts. Causeways and wide promenades front some of those canals, running for miles alongside the slow-moving current. We started out along one of those, keeping to the densest part of the crowd, following the black-canopied boat at a safe distance. If we’d been able to do that all night, the job would have been easy. Unfortunately, the Asp knew her work well enough not to make things easy.

  After the quarter mile, the boat turned from the main channel into a narrow canal branching off to the north, leaving us on the wrong side. As the boat slipped out of sight, I glanced over to find Ruc stripping his vest, shucking his boots, then his pants. Passersby slowed to look him up and down with obvious amusement. A few, seeing me watching, made lewd suggestions that Ruc ignored.

  “Swim in your shirt if you want,” he said, “but if you fall behind, I’m not waiting.”

  As I watched, he vaulted the railing. His splash bloomed like a flower in the dark water. With a muttered curse, I tugged my shirt over my head, dropped my own pants and sandals, and followed him into the water. The last waves of the boat’s low wake were already fading.

  “Far dock,” Ruc said, pointing to a private landing directly across the channel, then fell into a strong, steady stroke. After all the lying and verbal sparring in the bathhouse, it felt good to swim, to throw my body into a simple, physical task requiring no finesse or second-guessing. It had been a long time since I’d swum hard for more than a few dozen paces—the largest pools in the Ancaz are little bigger than bathtubs—but the motions of my childhood came back to me in moments, carrying me forward though my arms and shoulders burned.

  I reached the dock a few paces behind Ruc, who had already hauled himself out of the water.

  He reached down to pull me out, and my wet body slid over his as he straightened. When I looked up, his face was inches from mi
ne. For a moment he didn’t let go of my wrist.

  “Weren’t we chasing some evil-doers?” I asked, pursing my lips.

  I could feel his chest shake with his chuckle. “Just giving you a breather.”

  “Oh, I’m just getting warmed up.”

  The side canal into which the boat had disappeared stretched away into the darkness. It was obvious why we’d climbed clear—two swimmers splashing their way up the narrow waterway would be even more noticeable than a boat. Unfortunately, there was no other way to follow. This was a residential canal—no walkways or promenades, just a handful of docks, some illuminated by lanterns, protruding at regular intervals into the current.

  “How long do you want to wait?” I asked.

  Ruc shook his head. “I don’t.”

  Before I could respond, he crossed the narrow dock to the door, tested it, found it locked, then kicked it in with his bare foot.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “They go around the blocks,” he said. “We go through them.”

  “And if the owners of the houses object?”

  “We go through them, too.”

  That first block couldn’t have stretched more than two hundred paces from one end to the other. In that space we broke down fourteen doors and two windows, climbed two brick walls—one to get into a gorgeous flowering courtyard, one to get out—threatened one angry man with a knife, knocked out another with the bottle from which he’d been drinking, burst through a white-curtained bedchamber—the massive wrought-iron bed at the center of which held at least four naked bodies—knocked out a screamer with a candlestick, told the others to shut up, rammed through a wooden gate into yet another garden, then found ourselves peering over a low wall onto the moon-lapped water beyond, where the narrow canal we had been flanking drained into a small basin. The Asp’s boat was halfway across, angling toward the gap beneath a low, delicate bridge.

  I glanced over at Ruc. He was soaked with sweat, and his chest heaved with the effort, but his eyes, when he met mine, were bright.

  “That was easier than I expected,” he said.

  I was doubled over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. “I thought you were the one in charge of keeping the city’s peace.”