Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “Three more above,” Ruc murmured, then dropped straight down through the hatch, ignoring the ladder.

  Just under my feet, I heard Lady Quen’s strangled curse, the priest’s screaming, but before I could glance down, the guards from the deck above were leaping through the hatch. The first of them almost landed on my head, but these—their eyes useless in the dimness—were even easier to dispatch than the first two. I reminded myself, as I went about hamstringing them and snipping the tendons in their wrists, that they were here as part of the sacrifice. They were complicit in the bodies lying bound in the hold below.

  It may seem strange that a worshipper of Ananshael would object to such a sacrifice. What was I doing in Dombâng, after all, but offering women and men into the nimble hands of my god? People have such a fear of death that they tend to conflate the two, to see fear and death as two sides of the same coin. It’s hard for most to imagine the annihilation offered by Ananshael without that attendant fear.

  In truth, however, my god abjures terror almost as much as he does pain. Both are antithetical to the peace he offers. The most perfect offering is one in which the sacrifice is dead before they feel the blade. It is, in other words, the opposite of the sacrifice that happens in Dombâng. In Dombâng, the terror of the victims is all part of the act. They’re supposed to struggle, to fight, to plumb the depths of dread—for days if possible—before they die. Under other circumstances it would have felt good to put a stop to such suffering, but bound by the rules of my Trial, I could only trade the misery of the victims below for that of the guards.

  The five of them thrashed on the deck, bellowing like mad bulls, unable to stand. One reached out to seize my ankle, but I had wrecked their hands as well, and his fingers slipped uselessly from my skin. He stared at his own hand, aghast, a ruined moan draining from his lips. I turned away from the carnage, sick to my stomach, and leapt through the hatch to join Ruc in the hold below.

  He had killed the Asp, shattered her neck with one curt blow, then backed both the priest and Lady Quen into the far corner.

  Quen stared at him, contempt resplendent in her eyes.

  “Ah,” she said. “The traitor, come to betray his own people once again.”

  Ruc gestured with his sword to the bodies lined up across the floor. “Why don’t we ask them who they think has betrayed them?”

  Quen snorted. “Backwater trash. Three drunks who wouldn’t have survived the year, the other three so starved they’re halfway dead already.”

  “Truly,” Ruc said, “a great sacrifice for your mythical gods.”

  The priest drew himself up. “The Three are real, and they will consume you. We will feed you to the serpent and storm. We will give your blood to the river.”

  “Actually,” Ruc cut in, “we’re going to do something different. We’re going to have a nice trial. Plenty of people to testify very publicly.” He nodded toward the captives still trussed on the floor. “Then, once we’ve squeezed out all your secrets, all the names in your seditious little cabal…” He shrugged. “I don’t know if Intarra is real or not, but I know you’ll feel the fire.”

  “Blasphemers,” hissed the priest, his voice a high, pinched whine. “The goddess will swallow you. She rises. She rises, her executioners at her side.”

  “This,” Ruc replied, “is the same song I heard the last time your ilk started splashing paint on the buildings. Maybe you remember how that turned out.”

  The priest sneered. “It is as it was in the first days. The waters seem to recede. The enemy, emboldened, enters, only to find himself swallowed at last by the righteous flood.”

  “Too bad for you, you won’t be here to see it.” Ruc turned to me, eyes hard as shards of jade. “Kill him.”

  I tensed. “What about squeezing the secrets, giving him to Intarra, all that?”

  “It’s her secrets I want,” Ruc said, nodding to Quen. “We’ve been following this idiot for months. I know everything I need to know about him.”

  “So why kill him now?”

  “Because I don’t know everything I need to know about you.” He cocked his head to the side. “Let’s just say killing him would provide further evidence that we’re actually on the same side.”

  “I’m not sure it would,” I replied, scrambling for some way out, some way around it. “He’s more dangerous to any insurrection as your prisoner than as a corpse. There’s always another secret he might reveal as long as he’s not dead.”

  “You’re right, obviously,” Ruc said, then narrowed his eyes. “But you’re also stalling.”

  My chest felt tight, my breathing pinched.

  He gestured to my blades, dripping blood in the candlelight.

  The priest, too, was staring at them, rapt. Suddenly, however, he ripped his gaze away.

  “Whatever you do to me,” he snarled, “they will come for you. The Three will come for you.”

  Then I saw the way.

  “Who the fuck are these Three everyone keeps yammering on about?”

  Quen was watching me in the way a raptor studies a piece of meat.

  “Kettral,” she said quietly. “So the empire’s most rabid dogs are finally here.”

  “It’s birds, actually,” I replied, glancing over at her. “The founder of our order briefly considered riding dogs, but decided on monstrous, man-slaughtering hawks instead.”

  The priest, lost in his own fervor or terror, didn’t seem to hear the exchange. He was nodding vigorously, almost rabidly, as though working himself up to something.

  “Sinn,” he hissed finally, the word halfway between a curse and an invocation. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh. They will avenge me. They will avenge all Dombâng’s fallen and oppressed. You can open my throat now but—”

  The names still wet on his tongue, there was no need to let him finish. I cut his throat with a backhand flick, wiped the knife against my leg as he collapsed, my mind carried back down the dark current of memory.

  Sinn, Hang Loc, Kem Anh.

  They were names I had not heard since my childhood, and even then, only in whispers. One of my young companions had shown me the forbidden icons of his family once, climbing into the reed-thatched rafters of his house to draw out three statues of crudely modeled clay, two men and a woman, hand-high, naked, muscular, cocks half as long as the arms, buttocks high and taut, shoulders wide, legs spread in readiness. I can’t remember the name of the young boy, but I remember the names he recited, voice and hand trembling as he touched each statue in turn. Sinn, bloodred, whip-thin; Hang Loc, larger and darker; Kem Anh, the goddess, the largest of the trio, her arms outstretched, eyes the product of some violence, jagged, as though someone had gouged them into the wet clay with the tip of a knife.

  It is the nature of names to come unmoored from the world. Down the centuries, the syllables grow remote, then incomprehensible, the language that birthed them lost, their only right to concrete things a right that we bestow. It is easy to forget that names, too, were words once, no more august than any other words. So, too, were these, in the ancient language of Dombâng: serpent, dark storm, river death.

  The ancient gods of my city were crueler, closer, hungrier than the bright, inscrutable goddess of Annur.

  Even so, the empire might have tolerated them. A part of the Annur’s brilliance was the willingness of its emperors to tolerate other faiths. The royal Malkeenian family worshipped Intarra, of course, but the capital hosted hundreds of temples, thousands, to deities beyond the Lady of Light, old gods and young rubbing shoulders in the same streets and plazas. A merchant might murmur a prayer of thanks to Intarra on the sun’s rising, leave an offering to Heqet—a bowl of rice, a strip of meat—on her household shrine, then stop midafternoon in the temple of Bedisa to pray for a pregnant daughter. Even the more obscure cults, discredited by the mouths of the gods themselves millennia before, persisted unmolested in the empire’s quieter corners. The Malkeenians had no desire to see newly conquered people rise up over some irrelevant theolo
gical grievance. Only in Dombâng had the empire set its shining boot on the throat of the old beliefs.

  The conflict lay in the nature of Dombâng’s gods. While the stone spirits of the Romsdals or the mythical fish-men of the Broken Bay posed no barrier to Annurian rule, our gods were both bloody and jealous. They were creatures, not of some celestial sphere, but of the delta itself. Their blood was the water, their flesh the mud, their screams the thunder of the summer storms. Their arrangement with the people of the city was both simple and cruel: sacrifice, and you will be protected. Make offering of your young, strong, and beautiful, and we will crush all those who come against you.

  A fine deal, until it collapsed straight into the shitter.

  When the Annurian legions attacked Dombâng, no deities erupted from the waters to stop them. The army took the city, put the leaders of the Greenshirts to the sword, tore down the main temples, all without the slightest divine opposition. A man proclaiming himself Hang Loc slathered his naked body with mud, then hurled himself bare-handed at an Annurian garrison. He was taken by the soldiers, castrated and decapitated beneath Goc My’s statue, then tossed into the canal. A week later, a woman claiming to be Kem Anh took to North Point in the midst of a great storm, exhorting the waters of the delta to rise and smother the Annurians. The waters rose, as they always did during a storm, then fell. The Annurians, in their methodical, unimaginative, brutal way, decapitated her as well, then tossed her into the canal. No further aspiring divinities came forth.

  The Annurian triumph was evidence to many that the gods of Dombâng had never existed at all. There was no place for them among the great pantheon laid down during the long wars with the Csestriim, when the young gods had walked the earth in human form. For centuries, traders from far-off lands had mocked our local superstition. That our gods did not, in the end, save us, was proof to many that they were no gods at all, just a set of dolls painted to remind us of the dangers—flood, serpent, storm—of the home chosen for us by our ancestors.

  Proof, I say, for many. Not for all. In the eyes of some, it was not the gods who had failed Dombâng, but the people of Dombâng who had failed the gods. To these, the presence of Annur was a call to a greater piety, a more severe observance of the old forms, a committed resistance to the foreign plague. That resistance failed. Annur was rich, ruthless, tireless. The legions rooted out the underground priests, beheaded them, threw still more bodies into the canal. For good measure, the tiny statues of our trinity, still balanced impotently on shrines outside each home, or carved into the tillers of boats, were smashed or sanded out, banned from the city they were supposed to protect. People were thrown in stocks for whistling the wrong tunes, and executed for singing the wrong words. The old holy books were burned, priests tortured. Like all occupations, it was ugly. Some thought the newfound peace and prosperity worth the price. Some did not. I might have hated the Annurians with the same fervor as Lady Quen were it not for my own experiences with our outlawed religion. Annur kept the old festivals, but changed the names. Kem Anh became Intarra; Sinn and Hang Loc, her servants, Heat and Fire. Even at this desecration, our gods did not rise up. The two centuries following proved enough time for many to forget them.

  Many. Not all.

  The priest dead at my feet, the bodies tied behind me, the haughty woman back against the wall were proof enough of that.

  “Kem Anh rises,” she sneered. “You will choke on her waters.”

  Ruc shook his head. “Do you know that you are the one hundred and forty-first prisoner to tell me that? Those exact words?”

  “Her truth,” Quen replied, baring her teeth, “will not be denied.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s been five years since I came back to this city.” He tapped at his throat with a finger. “No choking yet. I keep killing you, and yet the waters…” He paused, put a hand behind his ear as though listening, then shook his head again. “Nope. Not rising.”

  When he turned to me, his eyes were wary, searching.

  It was a triumph of sorts, and yet the bright hope with which I’d started the night, the thrill I’d had chasing with Ruc through the buildings of Dombâng, had drained away. I didn’t know what I felt in that moment, but it wasn’t love.

  “Dead,” I said, pointing to the priest.

  “Dead,” Ruc agreed.

  A giver of names, I told myself, my mind tracing the melody of Ananshael’s sacred song as I glanced down at the priest’s body one final time. I had given my god a giver of names, and ancient names at that.

  9

  Despite the late hour at which I finally returned to the inn, my sleep that night was fitful, stalked by a woman with a mane of black hair, her teeth dripping blood, pupils slitted like a cat’s.

  I woke with my heart pounding, half reached for my blades, then subsided onto the bed. Outside the window, in the predawn dark, the canals were already alive. Flame-fishers were rowing back in their narrow sculls, oars creaking at each stroke, the night’s catch piled in their bows. Men and women called greetings, taunts, and curses from the decks of the larger, flatter, ocean-bound vessels, while carts jolted over the ramps and walkways. In the room next to my own, someone with a limp was moving ponderously around. I heard the shutters clatter open, then a splash as the contents of the chamber pot hit the water. The thick, ever-present reek of the city rose up with the smoke of the morning fires: charred fish and sweet rice, mud, stagnant water, rotten wood, and, scraped over it all, the faintest lick of salt on the hot wind blowing in from the east: a promise of the unseen sea.

  My whole body ached from the previous night’s race through the city, and for a long time I lay still, reviewing everything from the meeting in the bathhouse to that final spasm of violence. We’d loaded Lady Quen on her own boat, along with her six prisoners, and rowed slowly back to the Shipwreck—the local name for the sprawling wooden fortress of the Greenshirts. I hadn’t talked to Ruc the entire way back. Partly that was because of the other ears in the boat, but mostly it was because I could think of nothing to say. My plan had moved faster than I dared expect. I’d managed to inveigle my way into Ruc’s confidence, had made myself a partner in his fight against the city’s insurgents. And yet that early success only reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: it might well prove easier to foment a full-scale revolution than to fall in love.

  I studied Ruc’s eyes in my mind, rehearsed our banter, felt all over again the various jolts of excitement as we charged through Dombâng, covering each other.

  What does it mean? I wondered, staring at the ceiling. What did I feel?

  Excitement, certainly. The double-flutter of lust and uncertainty. Giddiness. Elation. Almost all of love’s diminutive, trivial cousins—but love itself? I closed my eyes, delved down into myself, explored each organ, each part of my body in turn—heart, lungs, loins. My ribs ached. My chest was raw from so much running. I’d scraped the skin off the knuckles of both hands climbing the hull of the wrecked ship. They burned when I flexed them. All familiar sensations. Nothing I could identify, cut out, hold up to the light and say, This is love.

  Finally, driven partly by the twin needs to drink and piss, I rolled myself out of the bed, crossed to the window, and tossed open the shutters. The sun had risen high enough to peer blearily from beneath a low lid of cloud. Mornings in Dombâng are haze—cook-fire smoke mingling with river fog. It was already hot. After using the chamber pot and guzzling half the water from the clay ewer standing beside the bed, I strapped on my knives, slid into my light cotton pants and silk shirt, and went looking for food.

  I found Kossal seated at a table by the very edge of the inn’s deck. A cup of ta steamed into the morning mist on the table before him, but he ignored it, focusing instead on the wooden flute he held to his lips. Despite the fact that we’d both lived most of our lives in Rassambur, I’d only heard the priest play half a dozen times. He tended to explore his music alone, in the mountains, staying away from the fortress for days sometimes, his only companions that f
lute and a large crock filled with water. Coming across him here, on the deck of an inn in the middle of a city, men and women seated at the tables just a few paces distant, was a little like finding a wild crag cat perched on one of the benches, lapping milk from a wineglass.

  The other patrons of the inn up early enough to take their breakfast at the dawn hour seemed to feel the same way. They couldn’t know that Kossal was a priest, of course, but their eyes kept flicking to him, then nervously away, then back again, as though they understood that this old man was a creature unlike anyone they knew, something strange and perhaps dangerous, despite the beauty of his music. Kossal himself seemed not to notice the attention at all. He played with his eyes closed, coaxing the smoke-thin notes from his flute as though he were alone atop a sandstone cliff in the high Ancaz. At first I didn’t recognize the song, then realized it was an old, local dance tune, but played at a far slower tempo, until the silences between the notes seemed as much a part of the music as the notes themselves.

  When he finished, he laid down the flute, but kept his eyes closed. A few tables away, a man and a woman started to clap. The old priest’s face tightened.

  “I will confess that I am tempted,” he murmured, barely loudly enough for me to hear, “whenever someone claps, to give them to the god.”

  I studied him, the lines inscribed into his face, then glanced over his shoulder to the applauding couple. I gave them a smile that I hope intimated something other than the possibility of their immediate slaughter at the hands of a priest of Ananshael.

  “They appreciate the music,” I suggested quietly.

  “If they appreciated it, they’d stop making that racket.”

  “But the song is over.”

  Oars slapped the water below us. A dozen paces upstream, at the inn’s docks, hawsers creaked. Seabirds screamed their tiny furies.