Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “I’m also in charge of protecting the innocent. Sometimes the two don’t mix.”

  When I’d gulped enough air into my lungs to stand up straight, the bow of the boat was just slipping beneath the bridge.

  “You know,” I managed finally, “Kettral usually go a little heavier on the planning.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “Want to share it?”

  “Keep going.”

  He leapt up onto the low wall, then dove into the water below.

  We must have traversed several miles that way, busting down doors, swimming across channels, sprinting through narrow alleys. Four or five times I thought we’d lost the boat, but in each case Ruc was able to come up with a shortcut, a leap of faith, an educated guess that led us back to our quarry, sometimes a few paces ahead, looking down from a window or balcony, often quite a bit behind. The Asp was both fantastically careful and staggeringly paranoid, her watery path wandering in great loops, doubling back on itself three times to shadowy alcoves where she could watch unseen for pursuit. As Ruc predicted, however, she was watching the water, not the insides of the houses. Not the fucking roofs.

  In the end, evidently satisfied, she charted a more direct path southeast, finally arriving in Old Harbor. Centuries earlier, the harbor had been the city’s heart, the one basin deep enough to accommodate the draft of the oceangoing vessels that brought trade from as far away as the Bend and Anthera. As Dombâng grew, however, as more and more ships came to dock and trade, the harbor became overburdened. When Anho the Bald completed the massive dredging project that became New Harbor, the old port fell into disuse. Warehouses began to rot, then crumble. Ships damaged by storm and abandoned at the dock by destitute owners slowly settled into the mud as the river silted up the neglected basin. It made a surreal sight. What had once been an open body of water five hundred paces across had become a wide mud flat divided by a few narrow channels and punctuated by the hulks of stranded ships.

  The boat we’d been trailing and another of similar make and coloring were tied up alongside the shadowy hull of one of the largest wrecks, a huge schooner, three of the four masts snapped off or chopped down, the one remaining stabbed up into the belly of the night sky, shreds of rotten rope that hadn’t been scavenged twisting idly in the breeze. I could just make out the name in faded gilt up near the prow: Heqet’s Roar. A ladder of much newer rope hung from the rail of the listing vessel thirty feet above, where two guards stood watch. I could make out the outlines of flatbows in the moonlight, the bulky shape of armor, the swords strapped to their hips, but nothing of their faces.

  “Quen’s men,” Ruc murmured, laying a hand on my shoulder, then pointing.

  The two of us had fetched up a few dozen paces away, behind a pile of waterlogged roots and branches, detritus washed down the Shirvian from the north, dragged out of the canals by the maintenance crews, and dumped here to be burned later. My legs ached from the chase, and my shoulders screamed, ready to rip from their sockets after so much swimming. At the same time, I felt bright in the darkness, warmed by the chase, alive. I couldn’t tell if my heart’s hammering came from Ruc’s momentary touch or my own exhaustion. Maybe both. Whatever the case, it felt good to be close to him, to be hunting. Amazing how fast an old intimacy can come back. When I first set out from Rassambur, I hadn’t dared to hope for so much.

  But is it love? I wondered, sliding my gaze along his moonlit skin.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

  I hauled my mind back to the work at hand, wiped a smear of blood from his shoulder—we were both covered with a dozen minor grazes and cuts.

  “Just making sure you’re not about to collapse on me. You hit some of those doors pretty hard.”

  “The doors didn’t have flatbows,” he said, then gestured to the ship once more. “They do.”

  “Where’s Lady Quen?”

  “Down below, I’d guess. Somewhere in the hold.” He shook his head. “It’s a son of a bitch to sneak up on.”

  I nodded slowly, studying the scene. The only approaches were over the open mud or up the canal. The gibbous moon gleamed like silver on the wet flats. Anyone trying to cross might as well carry a lantern and bang a drum. There was no subtle way to do it.

  “The far side?” I asked.

  “She’s not an idiot. She’ll have someone posted there, too.”

  “We’ll have to float in.” I gestured to the logs in front of us. “There’s more of this back around the last bend, out of sight. If we drag a few branches into the water, we can drift in behind them.”

  “It’s going to be ugly,” Ruc said, “but if we come in on this side, we could cut free the boats, hope to create some commotion. Maybe lure them down the ladder. We’ll be in the shadows, and the bastards won’t have much of an angle.”

  The bastards in question hadn’t moved since we first arrived. They weren’t talking, or pacing, or sitting down.

  “They’re vexingly disciplined,” I pointed out. “Not exactly the type to go chasing off after the nearest distraction.”

  “If you’ve got another way inside that hull, I’m listening.”

  I tapped the knives strapped to my thighs as I contemplated the situation. Then, I smiled.

  “Let’s get floating.”

  * * *

  It was all a question of angles and rot.

  If the planking of the ship was too steep or too sound, I wouldn’t be able to drive the knives in far enough. If, on the other hand, the boards were too rotten, they wouldn’t hold my weight, let alone Ruc’s. The curve of the ship’s hull shielded us from the guards above, but I moved slowly all the same, testing a few different places before driving my blade into the chink where the planking had sprung loose. It flexed when I pulled on it, but held. Slowly, I slipped another knife from its sheath, pulled myself up on the first, so that only the lower half of my body remained in the water, reached up as high as I could with my free hand, and slid the second blade into the wood. From there, it was easy enough to get a foot on the first knife, stand up, slip a third from the sheath at my waist, and place it half my body height higher than the last.

  Back at Rassambur some of my brothers and sisters had teased me about carrying so many blades—Giving people to the god is a great devotion, Pyrre, but you don’t need to give them all at once. Four knives, however, had always struck me as a reasonable number: one on my belt where everyone could see it, one on each thigh, and one strapped high on my arm.

  I vowed, after that night scaling the ship’s hull with Ruc, to carry more, as soon as I could return to Rassambur and have them made.

  We climbed the hull, angling for the ship’s prow, on a shifting ladder of four knives. As soon as Ruc’s weight was off of the lowest, he would stretch down into the darkness, yank it from between the planks, straighten, then hand it up to me. It was slow work, especially as we were trying to be quiet. In one way, at least, the guards’ vigilance was working for us. They assumed any attack would come up the ladder, which meant they didn’t budge from that spot. They couldn’t have expected to find us inching up the glistening hull.

  None of which made our job any easier. If I drove the knives in all the way to the hilt, Ruc had trouble pulling them out again. On the other hand, he was heavier than me. Whenever he would reach up to grab the handle of the blade on which I was standing, I could feel it flex beneath my bare feet, threatening to tear free of the soggy wood altogether. I had no doubt that we could survive the fall, but Quen’s guards weren’t likely to ignore the loud smack of bare skin against wet mud, mud that would hold us motionless while they filled us with crossbow bolts. I had no objection to dying in Ruc’s arms, but I wanted to survive long enough to fall in love with him, to pass my Trial.

  When I was finally able to toss a hand over the ship’s top rail, I let out a long, quiet breath, then pulled myself up slowly. The deck was a wreckage of smashed crates, downed spars, the remnants of what might have been long-aband
oned tents, canvas rotted and shredded by the wind. Lady Quen’s guards were well out of sight behind the piled trash. I pulled myself over the rail carefully, then reached back down for Ruc.

  He was bent double, prying the lowest knife out of the wood. When he had it in hand, he passed it to me, stepped up onto the next knife, caught my hand, then tried to hurl me headfirst over the ship’s rail and into the mud below.

  That was what it felt like, anyway.

  It took me half a heartbeat to realize that the knife beneath his foot had torn free, that he was dangling in the darkness, one hand wrapped around the handle of the last remaining blade, the other caught in my grip. The fallen knife landed with a quiet thunk in the muck below. For a few moments I didn’t move. I was bent halfway over the rail, the wood grinding into my ribs, my breath searing my lungs. Sweat dripped the length of my arm, weakening my grip on Ruc’s hand. I reached down with the other arm, caught his wrist, and tried to haul him in.

  He grimaced, then gave a tiny shake of his head.

  Somewhere off to my right, I could hear the guards talking to each other, grumbling in the way men with a boring post are wont to grumble. I tried to breathe even more quietly.

  “Just hold,” Ruc mouthed.

  I nodded, redoubled my grip.

  His eyes locked on mine, he let go of the last blade, caught my wrist, and for a moment all his weight was on me. To my shock, he smiled. Then he tossed his foot up onto the handle of the remaining knife, shifted his weight over it, and he was up. I didn’t let go of him until he’d stepped over the rail.

  “It’s a good thing,” I whispered, “that I brought a lot of knives on this mission.”

  He leaned in so close I could feel his lips as he murmured in my ear. “And how does this compare to your other missions?”

  I squelched a wild urge to laugh, turned my head, slid my lips over his cheek’s stubble to his ear. “Sort of boring, actually.”

  He pulled back just enough to look in my eyes. “I’ll have to find some other way to keep you entertained.”

  A delicious ache opened inside me.

  Yes, I thought, meeting his shadowed eyes. Yes, you will.

  * * *

  Whatever thrill had come over me on the ship’s deck evaporated inside the hold.

  We’d managed to drop down to the first level through a dilapidated hatch near the bow. I’d expected near-perfect darkness, but a bloody light seeped up through the cracks in the boards beneath our feet. It was easy enough to follow it half the length of the hold—moving slowly to avoid tripping over the shattered lathes of broken barrels, the dusty remnants of various nests, all the rest of the garbage littering the inside of the ship—to another hatch, this one with a ladder sticking up from below.

  I put an eye to a gap in the decking and peered down.

  The narrow chamber beneath was illuminated by candles, dozens of them, far more than necessary to light the small space, some standing on the floor, others perched on the wooden stays running between the ship’s ribs. Blinking against the sudden light, it took me a few moments to understand what I was seeing.

  Six bodies lay across the wooden floor, each bound at the wrists and ankles. Black hoods obscured their faces, but it was obvious enough from the sizes that two were children, maybe eight or ten years old, while the others were adults. Regardless of age, the clothes they wore bordered on rags—scraps of cast-off cloth tied at the waist and shoulders mostly, bits of sail canvas repurposed into pants or vests. Only one of the six wore shoes, and those were little more than decomposing sandals.

  Beside me Ruc made a low sound in his throat, almost a growl.

  At the far end of that low-ceilinged compartment stood the Asp, two guards, the priest we’d followed from the bathhouse, and a graceful swirl of a woman who could only have been Lady Quen. Like her servants, the lady had made some effort to be nondescript. Unlike them, she had failed. Her gray silk cloak might have blended into the night’s shadows well enough, but by the light of the candles it was obviously cut from cloth that only Dombâng’s richest could afford, tailored to her form in such a way as to draw the eye rather than avoid it. She was striking, even regal, and stood like a woman enduring the supplication of a suitor she knew to be beneath her, dark eyes sharp, hawklike; black hair streaked with gray, drawn back from her temples, and held with a silver clasp; her lips pressed together in silent disapproval.

  “Lady,” the priest said, bowing low. “It is a great offering you make.”

  “I did not expect to be making it so late,” she snapped. “The sun will be up by the time this is done.”

  “Apologies, lady,” the Asp murmured, staring deferentially at the floor. “Annurian eyes are everywhere. I wanted to be certain we were not followed.”

  Quen bared her teeth, gave a quiet hiss of vexation. “A day will come when they will no longer dare.”

  “Indeed, lady,” the priest said, nodding his head sagely. “Indeed. But it is we who must hasten that day through our struggle and our sacrifice.”

  “I’ve been hastening it my entire life. For all the good that’s done.”

  “Have faith,” the man replied, his eyes aflame with reflected light. “Red hands have risen to pull the city down. The day of the prophecy is at hand.”

  One of the figures on the floor, one of the children, twitched, then began to thrash.

  Quen shook her head, rounded on the guards. “They were supposed to be sedated.”

  The man bowed almost to the ground. “Apologies, lady. Deepest apologies. The child is small. I did not want her to die before her time.”

  Memory lashed me: memory of a rope binding my hands, of my face pressed against the hull of a boat, of mud, blood, terror. A memory of eyes slitted like a cat’s, but belonging to no cat, of a woman stronger than any woman.

  “Your man is right, Lady Quen,” the priest murmured, crossing to the child. “She is no good to our gods already dead.”

  Slowly, almost lovingly, he peeled back the hood to reveal a girl’s filthy face, mud-streaked and smudged with tears, green eyes wide, horrified. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the priest produced a rag from somewhere in his noc, stuffed it in her mouth, then turned to Lady Quen, smiling beneficently. “The child is strong. The Three will be pleased.”

  “And I would be pleased,” Quen responded, “if we could complete this ceremony before we all grow old.”

  “Of course,” the priest said, ignoring the thrashing child as he rose. From a shelf beside one of the candles, he lifted a wide, short, double-bladed knife, its handle the yellow of old ivory, the blade of cast bronze. Crossing the room, he stepped carefully over the bodies, then passed the weapon to Lady Quen.

  For the first time, the distaste faded from her eyes. Veneration replaced vexation as she closed her hand around the knife, then turned it back and forth, admiring it in the light. When she turned back to the priest, I could hear a new fever in her voice.

  “They will rise soon,” she murmured. “They must.”

  The priest nodded eagerly. “It is we who forsook the Three. They have been waiting to return, waiting all this time for us to prove our worth. Your sacrifice,” he said, indicating the prisoners, “will show the gods we have not forgotten, that we are still willing, in our faith and our obedience, to give up that which is most precious to us.”

  The captives tied on the floor didn’t look precious to anyone. Unless things had changed in Dombâng, Lady Quen had ordered her henchmen to round up a few drunks and orphan children too weak or stupid to run. According to the stories, when Dombâng was founded, only the greatest warriors went into the delta to face their gods, to offer their own bodies as sacrifice. We had fallen a long way, however, from the stories.

  “My lady,” the Asp murmured. “As you say, it is late.…”

  For a moment, Quen seemed not to have heard her. She was gazing, rapt, at the knife in her hand, deaf to the whimpering of the girl who had awoken. Then, as though jolted from some beautif
ul vision by the rude hand of an ugly world, she turned to the nearest body—a man, judging by his size and shape—pulled down the front of his filthy shirt, and dragged the tip of the blade across his chest, deep enough to cut, to bleed, but not so deep as to give a serious wound. It was all part of the theater. The priest would bring the prisoners into the delta. The priest would abandon them to die. To reap the favor of the gods, however, Lady Quen needed to draw the first blood.

  The man groaned slightly in his stupor, rolled onto his side, then fell still.

  Ruc touched me gently on the shoulder, put his lips to my ear.

  “She’ll cut them,” he whispered, “and then she’ll go. She’ll leave the others to get the bodies out. We’ll take her at the top of the ladder. You kill the guards.”

  I’d known, of course, that it would come to this. We hadn’t tracked the Asp and the priest halfway across the city just to sit down together over a bottle of quey. The trouble was, I couldn’t kill them, not without violating the rules of my Trial. If one of them fit the song, of course, I could give them to the god, but the odds didn’t look good. No one in the room below looked pregnant. None of them seemed to be singing. Of course, there are ways to incapacitate a man without killing him. Silently, I slid one of my knives back into its sheath, switched my grip on the other, then shifted into the shadows just above the hatch.

  I waited to strike until the second guard had stepped off the ladder, brought the heavy pommel of my blade down across the crown of his head, then pivoted, slammed the second man in the stomach with my fist, caught him by the throat, squeezed the arteries along the side of his neck as he flailed for his sword and then went slack, collapsing onto the deck in a clatter of steel.

  “What’s going on?” Lady Quen demanded from below.

  I ignored her, focusing instead on the two guardsmen. My attacks wouldn’t leave them unconscious for long—I couldn’t risk killing them—which meant I needed them incapacitated before they woke. It was grim work slitting the tendons of their wrists and ankles, the sort of thing I’d never thought to do as a priestess of Ananshael, and I felt filthy when it was over. There is a beauty, a terrible nobility to a fast, clean death. What I’d just done felt more like torture, like a version of what was happening in that hot, cramped room below.