Skullsworn

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Skullsworn Page 19

by Brian Staveley


  “Sometimes,” Ela agreed mildly. “I’d try, personally, to discourage the ear scenario, but we all have our peccadilloes.” My words seemed to have found no more blood than my knives. “There’s a reason,” she went on, “that lovers tend to speak with their bodies. It can be easier to see the space between two people when you’re dealing with flesh, to apprehend the shape of it, to believe.” She tapped a finger against her lips, as though caught by a momentary thought or a memory. “A warm tongue tracing the right circles has a way of … confirming one’s faith.”

  “Meaning you can’t be in love unless you’re fucking.”

  Ela laughed, a long, breathy sound. “You would have liked Thurian,” she said, then narrowed her eyes. “I hope you haven’t quit trying to kill me. I didn’t take you for a quitter.”

  I took a long breath, shifted right, trying to box her into a corner of the small deck. She moved with me, smooth as a dancer, sliding around until she stood just at the railing, back to the canal, the whole city to the east spread out behind her. A hot, thick wind was blowing in off the ocean, scraping green-black clouds over the delta, blotting the sun.

  “Who was Thurian?” I asked, only half listening for the answer.

  “A priestess,” Ela replied. “Very serious.” She waggled a finger. “Like you.”

  This time I threw the knife, a quick, underhand flick that sent the steel spinning toward her gut. Ela barely moved. She’d been holding her clay cup in front of her, two fingers slipped through the handle. As I threw, she let the vessel slip, pivot around her fingers, so that where the blade should have plunged into her stomach, it met the inside of the cup instead, steel grinding against the hardened clay, then clattering to the deck in a splash of spilled ta. It had been so slight, that movement that saved her life, an afterthought, an accident.

  She righted the cup, peered inside, then shook her head. “I was enjoying that.”

  The rain dropped around us like a cage, drumming its furious cadence on all the surfaces of Dombâng, ten million silver fingers testing the roof tiles, the deck, stippling the water, staining the silk of Ela’s dress, running in streams down her face. She licked it off her lips as though it weren’t just a summer squall, but the wine that had spilled so recently from her cup. I glanced at my fallen knife where it lay between us. Ela had moved effortlessly enough so far, but she wore high wooden clogs, while I was still in my bare feet. I’d be faster on the newly slick deck, more nimble.

  I dove for the blade, caught it in my left hand, rolled to my feet, used the momentum to bring both knives down in a sweeping, overhand attack. Ela turned sideways, narrowing the target, but I felt the knives bite home hard all the same, the shock of impact shuddering up through my arms and shoulders. The priestess smiled. It took my mind a quarter moment to realize that both blades had swept past her, missing her flesh, plunging into the railing instead, the front one so close that it caught the torn flap of her ki-pan, pinning it to the wood. It was a strange almost-embrace, my fists still wrapped tight around the knives to either side of her, and Ela stepped into it, kissing me lightly on the forehead as she slammed a fist into my stomach.

  I sprawled backward across the deck, blades torn from my grip.

  “Of course, Thurian was a heretic,” she continued amiably.

  I managed a noise somewhere between a cough and a groan, wondered if the other woman had crushed anything crucial inside of me.

  “She believed that we are something other than this.…” As the priestess stepped away from the railing, a long swath of her dress tore away. She touched her bare stomach, the skin soaked with rain. “Thurian believed that a woman—or a man, for that matter—is something other than her body. Separate from it.”

  I tried to stand, felt one of my ribs grind unsteadily inside me, then subsided back onto the deck. The rain had dissolved the world. I couldn’t see the buildings across the canal anymore, or any of the river craft in the canal itself. The outlines of our own inn were barely visible above me, looming through the sheeting rain. Ela and I might have come untethered from the mortal world. The wood beneath our feet might have been the deck of a ship suspended in the storm, caught between something too dark to be day, too green-gray-bright for night.

  “I had to kill her, of course,” Ela went on.

  I tried once more to shove myself upright, managing, this time around, to sit.

  “You killed another priestess because she wasn’t obsessed with her own body?”

  Ela watched me a while through the rain’s sodden veil, then let out a long, ostentatious sigh.

  “I had hoped to spend more time buying dresses and less time lecturing.”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  “I suppose not,” she mused. “Just my overdeveloped sense of duty.” The word should have seemed ludicrous on her lips, but she managed to say it without cracking a smile. She shrugged, then continued. “Poor little Thurian thought there was something inside her, something that was more her than all the parts she could see and feel.”

  Ela crossed the deck, extended a hand to me. I took it warily. She was stronger than she looked, and hauled me to my feet easily, then set a hand on my shoulder as I steadied myself. I tried to ignore the pain lancing through my side while planning the next attack.

  “She wanted to be more than her heart,” Ela said, touching my chest with a finger. “More than her face. More than all those adorable organs hidden beneath her skin.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why. She had a beautiful face—wide brown eyes, delicious lips. I took her heart out of her body to look at it; you’ve never seen such a sweet little heart.”

  “Maybe…” I managed, twisting slightly in the priestess’s grip, “you should have left it inside her a while longer.”

  I shifted my hips as I said the last word, seized the hand she had set on my shoulder, twisted at the waist, then hurled her across the deck. She landed on her back, and then I was on her. My side felt like someone had buried a knife in it, but for just a moment I seemed to have the advantage, and I didn’t intend to let it go. I made hammers of my fists, then went for her face. Ela caught me by the wrists.

  “She was a heretic,” she said, as though we were sitting casually across from each other in some bureaucrat’s office rather than fighting in the middle of the driving rain.

  “Because she believed there was more to her than bone and blood?”

  “Exactly. What would you be, Pyrre, without your blood?” She lifted her head incrementally from the deck to nod toward my neck. “I can see it beating in your veins right now. What would this fight be without blood and bone? What would it mean? If you deny all this,” by which she seemed to mean everything—the blood-warm rain, the purple-gray bruise of the sky, our two bodies straining against each other, “then you deny life itself.”

  “We’re not priestesses of life.”

  “You are not a priestess at all,” Ela pointed out. “If, however, you manage to pass your Trial, you will come away knowing one thing: there is no death without life.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be teaching me about love.”

  Soaked through by the rain, Ela’s grip was loosening on my wrist. I took a deep breath, rolled to the side, twisted, felt free for half a moment, then realized my mistake: if my hand was free, that meant that Ela, too, had an extra hand, one she used to seize my hair, then, as she rolled aside, to slam my face into the wood. I managed to twist away, but eel-quick she was on top of me, legs scissored around my waist, a tiny knife she had pulled from somewhere in her shredded dress pressed against my throat. All I could see was the slick wood inches from my face.

  “What I am teaching you is this,” she purred in my ear. “We are our bodies. What we do with them is what we are. This position…” she tapped the blade against my neck, “is almost killing.…”

  Then, in a heartbeat, the knife was gone. She slid a hand along the side of my chin, pressed her soaking cheek against mine. “This is almost loving.…” H
er hand shifted, taking my chin in a grip I knew all too well, one quick twist away from breaking my neck, “Almost killing again.…” I went slack against her grip, ready for the last, absolute blackness. She let me go, rose fluidly to her feet, crossed to the railing to stare out into the rain. I managed to prop myself halfway up to stare at her back. When she spoke again she hadn’t really shed her lazy, playful voice, but there was another voice beneath it now, or inside it, something normally hidden or drowned out, a note almost beyond all hearing, felt mostly in the bones.

  “Love is like killing,” she said. “You do it with every part of you, or not at all.”

  11

  Night’s last mud-dark weight still sat hot and quiet on the city when someone began hammering furiously on my door. I went for my knives first, shoving aside the light sheet, snatching the blades off the bedside table, then rolling to the floor. The floor isn’t generally a coveted position from which to enter a fight, but I wasn’t in the fight yet, and I’d spent too much time studying the “Knock, Wait, Stab” approach to killing to go near the door with my head held high for the convenience of my adversary.

  Be where you shouldn’t—an old Rassambur aphorism.

  The frantic hammering paused for a moment, replaced by a man’s voice: “Pyrre!”

  I was still bleary-eyed from sleep and aching from Ela’s drubbing, but I wasn’t about to give away my position. After a moment, the drumming started up again, so violently it seemed he wasn’t knocking so much as trying to beat down the door. With the tip of one knife, I silently lifted the hooked steel lock.

  “Pyrre,” he growled again. “The commander sent me.”

  This time, just as the pounding resumed, I lifted the latch, then yanked the door inward. Carried forward by the force of his own urgency, a young man stumbled into the room. I tripped him with an outstretched ankle, then leapt on top, setting the tip of my knife against his throat. The position reminded me uncomfortably of Ela’s lecture the night before. I could hear her voice murmuring in my ear: It’s the space between the bodies that matters. I glanced down at the man’s mud-spattered tunic, the short sword belted at his side, at my own bare legs pinning his shoulders to the floor, then grimaced. Somehow, in trying to create the About to Kill space, I’d stumbled into something … else.

  The young Greenshirt—he was wearing one of the standard uniforms—didn’t seem to notice my nakedness. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the hilt of the blade I’d laid against his throat, eyes nearly crossed with the effort, as though he could keep the length of steel from plunging through his neck with the power of his stare. He seemed an unlikely assassin.

  “I’m going to get up,” I said, trying to speak in a voice slow and calm enough not to panic him, “and I am going to put on some clothes. Please don’t try to kill me.”

  His lips moved in some silent prayer, but he seemed unable to respond. I shifted the tip of my knife from his neck, but his stricken gaze followed the blade.

  “Hey,” I said, slapping him on the cheek until he met my eyes. “Are you going to kill me?”

  He shook his head stupidly, slowly. “No. The commander sent me. I’m here with a message.…”

  “Save the message,” I said, rising to my feet, “until I’m wearing pants.”

  When I went to close the door, I found Ela leaning against the casement. She’d had time, I noted irritably, to slip into a loose silk bed shirt. Or maybe she’d been sleeping in it. Or maybe she hadn’t been sleeping at all. Whatever the case, the priestess looked relaxed and amused.

  “When I suggested you pay more attention to your body, I didn’t mean you had to go at it hammer and tongs right away.”

  “He’s a messenger,” I growled.

  Ela just shrugged. “That’s what I like about you, Pyrre. You never pass up a chance to learn.”

  The Greenshirt was getting unsteadily to his feet behind me. “Who is she?” he managed.

  “No one,” I said, slamming the door with my foot. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Anho,” he managed.

  I suppressed a frown. It had always seemed a unique form of cruelty, naming children after famous women and men. As though the burden of one’s own proper name, one’s own unlived life, were not weight enough already to crush a person. I’d almost forgotten that about Dombâng, how so many people were named for the city’s founders and protectors: Goc My, Anho, Chua, Thum, Voc. It was, I suppose, one of the only ways left for the parents of the city to hold on to some of the history that the Annurians had denied them.

  He stared at me, momentarily wordless, as I snatched my pants off the back of the chair, slammed my legs into them, then pulled a loose, sleeveless tunic over my head. I flicked aside the curtain to the room’s single window. Off to the east, night’s indigo dye was fading into dawn. “What does Ruc want so bad he can’t wait till the sun’s up, Anho?”

  I couldn’t hear Ela’s footsteps retreating down the hallway, but that didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t heard her approach, either. Not that it mattered. It was my conversations with Ela that I needed to hide from Ruc and the Greenshirts, not the other way around.

  “You have to come,” he said, reaching for my wrist, intending, evidently, to drag me out of the room. Not too bright, this one. By this time, though, I’d woken up thoroughly enough not to kill him. I knocked his hand away, took him by the throat, and pulled him close. His artery throbbed in my grip, and his warm eyes went wide, but he made no move to pull away. He couldn’t have been far into his twenties, just one more kid in Ruc’s dilapidated army. I let up on the pressure slightly, tried to make my voice friendly, even cheerful.

  “Anho,” I said, speaking slowly. “Stop pounding on things and shouting and trying to drag me out the door. Just tell me Ruc’s message.”

  His brown face was purpling toward plum. When I let him go, his words splashed out all in a single gasp.

  “They hit a transport.”

  I frowned. “They, I assume, being the local insurgency, and the transport being a ship carrying more legionaries from Annur?”

  His head yanked up and down in a puppet’s nod.

  I tried to imagine the scene. Any transport would have been carrying at least a full legion, maybe two, over a hundred armed solders, almost certainly veterans, if they’d been sent to Dombâng. This, against a rabble of idolatrous zealots. Hardly seemed like a fair fight.

  “How many prisoners did you take?”

  The young soldier gaped at me. I slapped him gently on the cheek. “How many?”

  He shook his head in a mute, bovine denial, wandered his own mind a while before finding the words. “None. They’re all dead.”

  I whistled. “No prisoners? Ruc must be less than pleased. I wouldn’t want to be the legionary commander when Ruc catches up with him.”

  Anho stared at me. “He’s dead.”

  I frowned. “The commander?”

  “All of them. The legionaries, the insurgents. Everyone. They’re all dead. Someone massacred them all.”

  * * *

  I spent most of the morning sulking, standing at the rail of the ship, staring down into the murky water as it slid past.

  The sudden, unexpected arrival of Ruc’s messenger had filled me with excitement. Whatever was happening, Ruc had sent for me. It meant my plan was working. He wanted my perspective, my advice, and maybe he wanted me around for something more. The thrill of the night’s chase through the canals of Dombâng came back to me as I followed the messenger over the causeways, then in through the iron gates of the Shipwreck—the huge, haphazard wooden fortress of the Greenshirts.

  I’d given Ruc his space when we loaded up—his men didn’t know me, and I didn’t want to get in the way of his command. I’d stayed well out of the way as the sun rose grudgingly above the rushes and the ship fell into the creaking rhythm of oars and grumbled orders. Since casting off the hawsers, however, he’d barely glanced at me. His indifference, in fact, was so absolute that I might have stumbled ont
o the boat entirely by accident, an irrelevant, extra passenger fetched up on the deck.

  Sick and prickly with my own disappointment, I retreated to the rail, tried on a look that seemed appropriately military and aloof, and remained there most of the morning, watching the deadly creatures of the delta slide silently past.

  I’d been surprised to discover, when I first set foot outside Dombâng, that everyone else on the continent seemed to view the Shirvian River with a kind of complacent indifference. For the majority of its great arc across Eridroa, the current is easily navigable—sinuous and swift above Lake Baku, wide and strong below, broken by only two cataracts. To the people of Sia or Ghan, the river is little more than a benign, undying mule, one that can be relied on, season after season, to patiently bear the people and property of half a dozen atrepies on its broad, glistening back. Everywhere above the delta, the river is a servant.

  In the delta itself, however, in the thousand braided channels that constantly threaten to strangle Dombâng, the river is a god, and not a gentle one.

  Maps are almost useless. The delta is always changing and growing in unpredictable ways. Deep channels will silt up in months, become suddenly impassible. Islands that might have made reliable points of reference sink into the murk almost overnight, swallowed in mud and reeds, leaving no sign of their passage. New mounds of clotted earth are constantly cropping up where there had been nothing more than silently swirling water. Only the city’s fishers, who ply the waters with their nets every single day, can stay ahead of the constantly shifting labyrinth, and even they fall prey to the delta.

  Of course, Dombâng would never have grown to its current size if no one had done anything to drive the watery labyrinth back. Among Goc My’s many achievements was the establishment of a corps of engineers charged with building and maintaining a reliable channel, deep enough for heavy seagoing vessels, linking the upper course of the Shirvian to the sea. The city doubled in size in a single generation, then doubled again, and again. Even as gold and silver flooded in, however, borne in the hands and hulls of foreigners from a dozen nations, there were those who whispered that Goc My had betrayed his city and her gods. In all these years, it is the delta that has kept us safe, they whispered, and he has profaned the delta. He has had the hubris to try to tame it.

 

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