Kossal opened his eyes. “How do you know?”
“You played the last note. You put the flute down.”
He raised his bushy brows. “And if I picked it up again?” He lifted the instrument, flicked a tongue between his lips, then began playing once more, pouring his breath into the polished wooden tube, listening to it emerge as music. It was the same dance figure as before, but inverted this time, as though the original song had been a cry flung into the world, and this newer, transmuted music the long-delayed response.
“Be careful,” he said, when he finally laid the flute down again, “about saying something is over.”
Whatever that meant.
The nearby couple started clapping again. Kossal ground his teeth, lifted his steaming cup to his lips, and drank.
“I made my fourth offering last night,” I said.
“The Giver of Names. Ela told me.”
I stared. “How did she know?”
“She is your Witness. Said it was quite a night.”
I tried to imagine it. We’d been so focused on trailing the slender boat that I hadn’t spent much time looking behind me. It was just possible that we’d been followed.
“Where is she now?” I asked.
“Sleeping, I would assume. That woman sleeps like a drunk pig. Have you heard—”
A new voice, Ela’s, cut him off. “I take issue with that characterization.” I turned to find the priestess sauntering toward the table. She wore a new ki-pan—jade green slashed with black, fine silk slit even higher up the side than the one I’d last seen her wearing. She seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, despite the fact that she’d carried only a small pack on the trek from Rassambur. If she was buying them here, she’d already spent what would have been a year’s wages for one of the local fishermen. “I’m quite certain,” she went on, sliding into one of the seats, waving over one of the servingmen with a manicured hand, “that when I sleep, it is as a graceful dove tucked quietly among gossamer.” She ignored Kossal’s dismissive snort, turning to me instead. “I say when I sleep, because lately I haven’t had the chance, busy as I’ve been following our impetuous young charge all around this lovely city.” She flicked open a filigreed paper fan, began to fan herself with it. “Quite exhausting, really.”
I studied her. She didn’t look exhausted. She looked like she’d spent the still hours before dawn bathing, then applying makeup, then oiling her skin until it glowed a warm, smooth brown. Her tight, cascading curls were still wet. She smelled of lilac and lavender.
“How did you follow us?” I asked, regretting the stupidity of the question even as it left my lips.
Ela glanced at Kossal, lowered her voice, as though feigning concern. “The poor thing is pretty, but I’m afraid she’s not very bright, is she?”
Kossal didn’t bother with a reply, and a moment later one of the young men approached the table, a steaming copper pot of ta in one hand. Like the rest of them, he had evidently been chosen for the perfection of his shoulders and chest, and Ela appraised him frankly as he poured, running her tongue over her lips, making a sound, half growl, half purr, deep inside her throat. He met her eyes, found, to his obvious surprise, that he couldn’t hold that gaze, and looked away, flustered.
Ela leaned over to me when he had gone, her voice a delicious whisper. “I like making them flinch.”
I opened my mouth, found no words inside, and closed it again.
“Of course,” she went on, as though she hadn’t noticed my awkwardness, “it’s easy with these. That man of yours, though—Ruc Lan Lac…” She lingered over the syllables of his name. “He’s not so easy to spook, is he?”
I shook my head, finding my language finally. “No. No, he is not.”
Ela leaned in. “Tell me more,” she murmured. “As I recall, you left off recounting the story just at the point where you’d chased a beautiful, bleeding, green-eyed man out of a concert and into the street. There was something about a fight he needed to get to.…”
* * *
Rishinira’s Rage was so packed with human bodies that there didn’t seem room for a pair of arm-wrestlers, let alone for two bare-knuckle fighters and the ring to put them in. People packed the main floor—men, mostly, lake sailors and canal boat hands, judging from their bare feet—bellowing to be heard by companions standing half a pace away. The sound was a wall, and the hot, sweet reek of sweat and spilled plum wine almost choked me. After the dry, open air of the Ancaz Mountains, even a crowded city square could feel tight. Walking into Rishinira’s Rage was like shoving my way down the gullet of some house-huge, fetid beast. I felt as though the place were digesting me.
My companion didn’t seem to be having the same problem. Despite the fact that he’d been ready to beat me bloody outside the temple just a little earlier, he seemed to have forgotten all about me as we made our way through Sia’s winding streets. He didn’t appear to have much regard for anyone else either, walking straight past the four cudgel-bearing louts at the tavern door. When we hit the press of bodies inside, he didn’t bother to raise his hands, didn’t bother to slide past or push people out of the way. He just walked straight ahead, leading with his chest. He wasn’t a very big man, but when he bumped into people he just kept walking, like someone striding through a dense field of wheat, deaf or indifferent to the curses that he kept jolting free. Sailors would round on him, sloshed wine forgotten, fists half raised until they saw his face. Then, eyes wide with sudden recognition, they’d take a step back, hands falling to their sides. The young man ignored them all. He might have been alone.
My passage through the room wasn’t quite as effortless. I was smaller, for one thing, and I was a woman moving through a room of loud, drunken men. I broke the hand of the first idiot who reached for me, then stepped past him as he howled. As I slid on into the crowd, the sounds of other conversation closed over his bellows. By the time I caught up with my bruised, music-loving fighter, I’d shattered two ankles and twisted one idiot’s scrotum so tight he couldn’t stand. If there had been fewer people, the scene could have turned ugly for me; even Ananshael’s most studied priestesses can’t stand against dozens of men at once. The crush and press actually protected me. Each time I tended to a would-be suitor, I had only to move away, move forward, to lose myself in the crowd.
Despite the unwanted attentions, I was almost enjoying things. Ever since arriving in Sia, I’d been trying to be circumspect. Ministers of my god aren’t generally encouraged to embark on campaigns of indiscriminate slaughter. Those of us still in training leave Rassambur mostly to learn the ways of the world, to start to understand the minds and manners of the uninitiate. Certainly, I was required to make a number of offerings during my year-long sojourn in the city, but for the most part I was there to study, to learn. It felt good to use my body again as I’d been trained. I’d even managed to slide a cup of wine from the hand of one man as he fell, and I was sipping happily from the chipped rim when I almost ran into my own young fighter, who had stopped abruptly in front of me.
It took me a moment to understand what was happening. The press of human bodies gave way to a large open space at the center of the room, a square cordoned off with a waist-high rope. When I stood on my toes to look over my companion’s shoulder, I realized that the floor fell away, marching down in graduated benches to a dirt ring several paces below. Most of those seats were already filled, and, judging from the clothes and comportment of the men and women sitting there, filled by people who had more money than the ripe-smelling sailors crammed into the room above. A dozen brutes with cudgels—hired muscle, evidently—kept back the throng.
At first, no one seemed to notice the young man standing at the rope. Then one or two people glanced up, pointed, exclaimed. A moment later, a massive woman who had been sitting in the lowest rank of benches rose from her seat, turned to face us, then smiled a wide, gap-toothed grin. When she spoke, her voice was a gong, crashing through the surrounding tumult.
“
Ruc Lan Lac!” she declared, staring at my battered fighter. “I was starting to think you had gone soft at last.”
That was the first time I heard his name. Ruc Lan Lac.
I’d suspected from the moment I saw him that he wasn’t from Sia. Not many people in the city had his shade of skin, that glossy black hair, the same tilt of the eyes. Either his parents were foreign, or he’d come from somewhere to the south, Channary, probably, maybe even Dombâng. His name all but confirmed it. Lan Lac was an old name in the city of my birth, a noble one once, though long fallen from grace.
The crowd behind had pressed me almost up against him, but I shifted to the side, putting space between the two of us, lifted the cup of plum wine and drank deep. The joy of moments ago had evaporated, though what it was I felt in its place, I couldn’t say; something brighter, but barbed.
At the sound of Ruc’s name, the clamor inside the tavern ground slowly to quiet. Shouted arguments settled into heated debates, cooled to murmurs, then faded, finally, into silence. It took a little time—Rishinira’s Rage was a large place—and I used that time to turn my attention forcibly from Ruc to study the woman who had spoken his name. She stood at the center of that pit now, a giant, half again as tall as me, her chest like a barrel. She must have been nearly forty, but there was no softness to her. The muscles in her arms and shoulders rolled lazily over one another when she moved. When she smiled that jagged smile, the tendons in her neck stood out like ropes. Someone had torn away half of one ear years earlier, and her crooked nose had obviously been broken and reset half a dozen times. No one would have declared her a beautiful woman, but there was an irresistible vitality to her, a joyous strength in the way she moved, a humor in that broken smile, that almost erased her body’s many breakages. I found myself wanting to know her, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her gray eyes were fixed on Ruc Lan Lac.
“You look like you’ve been kicked by an ox,” she exclaimed.
Her voice was a bronze bell; his the ring of good steel hammered on an anvil.
“Hello, Nayat,” he replied. “I was starting to suspect that bastard you had me fight last night wasn’t fully human.”
The crack brought laughs from the crowd. The huge woman, Nayat, smiled wider, but there was something keen and calculating in those gray eyes.
“And yet here you are again, one night later.”
Ruc spread his hands, that same empty invitation to embrace that he’d given me in the street earlier.
“What can I say? I missed your smile.”
Nayat raised her bushy brows. “There are people calling you a fool. Most men would rest a week or two. Spend some of that money you just won. Have a few drinks. Find someone to fuck.”
“Sadly, I don’t get paid to fuck.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Body like yours? I think there’d be some crossover.”
Ruc cocked his head to the side. “So cross on over, Nayat. You’re the one paying. For ten golden suns, I’ll do whatever you want.”
That brought a chorus of hoots and bawdy cheers from the crowd. Nayat’s eyes narrowed. She waited until the clamor died down to respond.
“Tempting, but my patrons came for a show.”
Ruc just shrugged. “For ten golden suns, you can fuck me right here in the ring. Easier way to make the coin than letting those oxen you call men hammer me in the gut.” He shrugged out of his light cotton shirt, tossed it aside. The muscles of his back and shoulders shifted with the motion. He was lean, obviously strong, but bruises purpled his ribs, and his lower back trickled blood where something sharp had gouged out a fingernail-sized scrap of skin. “Honestly,” he went on, turning so the crowd could see him even as he spoke, “I’d welcome the change of pace.” He put a hand to his leather belt, as though to unbuckle it. The hooting from the crowd rose even higher. “I promise I’ll be gentle as a lamb with you, Nayat. I get my coin, you have your fun, and these assholes get their show. Just give the word.”
Nayat smiled that broken-toothed smile and shook her head slowly, almost regretfully, as she waited for the noise from the crowd to subside. I edged backward, putting even more space between Ruc and me. I was still hoping, at that point at least, to remain unnoticed.
“I appreciate your offer,” Nayat said finally, “and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I prefer…” She looked down at her own body, raised her brows as though surprised by the size of it, the obvious strength, then nodded approvingly. “I prefer a lover with a little more heft.”
No one would call Ruc small, but Nayat was at least a hand taller, and obviously outweighed him. The man put his shrug to use once again. “Then I guess I’ll be fighting after all.”
Nayat studied him. “You could wait. Heal up. Come back in a week. People came here to see you punch, not to watch you bleed, stumble around, and fall down.”
Ruc smiled genially.
“The thing about fighting,” he said, “is that there’s usually a little bit of both.”
* * *
As it turned out, there was almost none of either.
Nayat had found a man even larger than she was to go up against Ruc, a scarred, broken-nosed, hump-shouldered giant with the pale skin of a Nishan or Breatan. He roared when he entered the pit, spread his arms, flexed in quick succession the muscles of his shoulders, arms, and chest, then began punching the air, running through half a dozen basic combinations. He was huge, and he was fast, but he was sloppy. He didn’t bother tucking his chin when he jabbed, and his cross—which looked vicious enough to knock a barn door off its hinges—left him badly off-balance. Men that big tend to ignore the little things. They’re used to fighting people who are too short to get inside their reach, or too weak to do much damage if they do sneak past.
Ruc was neither.
Instead of raising his own fists, he stepped forward, hands loose at his sides. He cocked his head as though gauging the distance, then stepped inside the giant’s reach. The blond beast took the bait, roared as he swung, carved an arc through empty air with his meaty fist, stumbled slightly when he didn’t hit what he expected to hit, then met Ruc’s fist, which was coming up in a quick, efficient uppercut, driven by the full force of his legs and uncoiling torso. The big man took half a step backward, extended a hand as though searching for a friend or a railing. Whatever he was looking for, he failed to find it, stood stupefied a moment, then tumbled backward to the dirt.
Ruc studied him a moment, shrugged once more, then turned his attention to his knuckles, opening and closing his fist as though testing to see that it still worked. The crowd inside Rishinira’s Rage, which had started heckling and hollering as soon as the fight began, went sickeningly silent as the blond man fell, then, when it realized the fight was over, that there would be no more entertainment, erupted. Half of them seemed to be cursing the giant for his idiocy, while half vented their fury on Ruc, who ignored them entirely. A man beside me had hurled his tankard of ale down toward the pit, and was shouting, “Rigged! Rigged!” over and over.
The blond fighter’s friends had vaulted into the ring. One was trying to help the huge man sit up, while the other stalked back and forth, alternating between glaring at Ruc and hurling insults back at the crowd. A moment later, Nayat stepped into the ring. She looked less than pleased as she raised a hand for quiet.
Slowly, reluctantly, the huge room began to fall still. The most strident voices kept on for a while, demanding a rematch, or a reckoning, or their own coin back in their hands, but Nayat just stood there waiting until they, too, gave up, if only momentarily.
“It seems,” she said, turning to Ruc, “that I was wasting my time worrying about you.”
He smiled. “You have no idea how your concern warms my heart.”
She frowned. “Maybe I should have paid you to fuck after all. We would’ve had a longer show, at least. You’ve left me with a room of deeply unsatisfied customers.”
“You pay me to fight, not to satisfy.”
“I had hoped that t
he two might go hand in hand.”
“I hope for a lot of things.”
Nayat raised her brows. “Do you?”
The fighter seemed to consider the question, then shook his head. “No, I guess not.” He glanced around the packed room. “You want me to fight someone else?”
“You’d do that?” Nayat asked, wrapping a thick arm around his shoulders. Standing side by side with her, he really did look small. “For me?”
Ruc shook his head, but made no move to extricate himself. “No. I’d do it for another ten suns.”
The offer detonated a round of wild cheers from the crowd. Behind me, some of those patrons not fortunate enough to enjoy a seat in the stepped benches had climbed up onto the tables instead, partly to see the action, partly to bellow their own encouragement. The crowd stiffened at my back, pressed forward, and I had an unusual moment of panic.
Rassambur is a fortress of air and light and open space; a woman might go to the god there, but she will do so on the broad stone beneath the wide sky. The memories of my childhood, on the other hand, were all of hot, cramped spaces. Our teak shack stood packed so tightly against those on either side that it seemed the only thing keeping it from tumbling forward on its rotten stilts was the weight of those other sorry dwellings pressing in. When my father came home from the docks, when he slammed the door behind him, there was nowhere inside that tiny cube to go, nowhere to hide. Even those times when I escaped, slipping beneath his clumsy, drunken grasp, there was only the warren of Dombâng’s tight, twisting canals, the precarious planks and walkways laid between piers and makeshift houses, the cramped, reeking hulls of the spear-fish boats.
Rishinira’s Rage was a long way from Dombâng, but the irresistible press of bodies, the smell of too many people packed in too small a place, the way the heat and anger had nowhere to escape—it all reminded me of home, my first home, before I found my way to Rassambur. It made me want to shove back, to turn and fight my way free, but the loose mass of men through which we had moved on the way in had hardened into a wall. Sweating, suddenly, gritting my teeth, I turned back to the scene playing out below.
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