“Speaking of whom,” I said, turning to study the deck once more. “Still think it was your insurgents who did this?”
Even by the forgiving measures of Rassambur, the deck was a mess. The transport was a good-sized vessel, wide and double-decked, almost a barge, with just enough oars to make progress against the delta currents. A single Annurian legion comprised a hundred men, at least two-thirds of whom lay scattered across the wide planks of the upper deck, their flesh already festering in the heat. And the Annurians were not alone. As many or more of their attackers sprawled dead in the chaos, natives of Dombâng, judging by their hair and skin, by the light delta spears some still clutched in their hands. Thousands of dusk beetles crawled over the corpses, the iridescent shimmering of their folded wings bright with the late sun, furiously alive against the dull brown of the dead.
I knelt by the nearest of those corpses. The beetles buzzed angrily when I flicked them away, hovered above the body in a glittering cloud, then dispersed. The soldier had been young, barely into his third decade from the look of it. He had the pale skin and flame-red hair of Breata, more than a thousand miles away. I wondered how long Ananshael had been following him, how many miles, how many years, before choosing this moment to do his quick, inimitable work. The young man had managed to draw his sword—his fingers were still clenched around the handle—but the blade was unbloodied, while his own throat had been hacked open; the windpipe and esophagus dangled obscenely from the ruin, both of them snapped.
“Whatever he was swinging at,” Ruc observed, “he didn’t hit it.”
“Strange,” I replied, leaning closer to scrub away the blood.
“He can’t be what … twenty? Someone better with a blade—”
“He wasn’t killed with a blade.” I pointed to the four punctures at the edge of the wound, laid the tips of my own fingers into those gouges. “Someone tore out his throat by hand.”
Ruc squatted down beside me, ran a finger along the ragged end of the windpipe, then whistled slowly. “Not cut.”
“You see a lot of that kind of thing in the city?”
He studied the wound a moment longer, as though it were a mathematical problem, or a vexing phrase in a language he’d never learned to read, met my eyes, then shook his head. “No.” He glanced back at the dead soldier appraisingly. “I didn’t even realize that was possible.”
“For most people, it’s not.” I straightened up, unsure how much to explain. Some of my brothers and sisters were fast and strong enough to tear out a throat. As a child, I’d watched old blind Rong Lap plunge his gnarled, stiffened hand into the body of a sheep and come out holding the creature’s still-beating heart. I’d never seen anyone else do that though, not in the rest of my years at Rassambur, and Rong Lap was a decade dead and more.
“Here!” One of Ruc’s men was scrubbing vomit from his chin while waving us toward the stern. “The helmsman.”
As we threaded our way through the litter of corpses, a flock of winebeaks passed overhead, dark wings spread wide, casting quick, fleeting shadows over the deck below. When they’d passed out of sight, the sky seemed suddenly still, like a great, leaden weight pressing down on the delta.
“He still has a neck,” Ruc observed, when we reached the helmsman.
“Not doing him much good,” I replied.
Unlike the bodies strewn everywhere else on the transport—bodies torn apart in dozens of different ways, bodies missing throats or arms, bodies with the slick ropes of the intestines ripped free of their guts—the helmsman didn’t even look hurt. He lay on his back, head propped up slightly against the inside of the hull, glazed eyes staring at the sky. For some reason, the glittering dusk beetles had not alighted on the corpse, though they swarmed everywhere else on the transport.
“Maybe he’s not dead,” one of the Greenshirts murmured.
“He’s dead,” Ruc said flatly, then narrowed his eyes. “What is that?”
He squatted beside the body, took the man’s jaw in his hands, and forced open the mouth. Something slick and black dangled between the teeth. I took it for the helmsman’s tongue, at first. Strangulation can have that effect, but there was no sign that the man had been strangled, no bruising on his throat or purpling of his lips. Then, too, that black bit of flesh was too narrow, too pointed for a human tongue.
It twitched.
The soldier beside me jerked back, blurted out something halfway between a scream and a shout. Ruc, however, just dropped a hand to his belt knife, growled at his man to lean closer, studied that strange, black not-tongue for a moment, then drew his blade. When he prodded the thing with the steel’s shining tip, it moved again.
“Soul snake,” he said grimly.
I blinked. The Greenshirt beside me gasped. Ruc considered the situation a moment longer. Then, with a single deft movement, drove his knife through the snake’s tail, skewering it. The helmsman’s throat spasmed, as though he were still alive, were trying to swallow over and over. Of course, he was finished swallowing. The motion came from the snake trying to writhe deeper into the lungs of its host.
Ruc had it, however, and slowly, pulling with the back of his blade against that rigid tail, inch by glistening inch, he drew the creature out. It was longer than I expected, almost two feet long. Most of it must have been coiled inside the helmsman’s chest, feeding. When the snake’s head finally came free, the creature whirled on Ruc, yellow eyes blazing in that scaled midnight face, fanged jaws agape.
The soldier stumbled back, crying out in dismay, but Ruc just waited for the creature to strike, then caught it neatly beneath the head with his free hand. He examined the snake, as though trying to read something in that ravenous, alien gaze, then pulled his knife free of the tail and cut the head from the body.
The deck of the transport was silent for a moment, the only sound the splash of water against the hull, the twittering of blue throats in the rushes. Then one of the Greenshirts dropped to his knees, face gone gray.
“‘I saw the vipers of the waters rise up to feed.’” He murmured the words as though caught in a trance. “‘Saw them gorge on the hearts of foreign soldiers.’”
Ruc turned to face the soldier. People had been hanged for reciting Chong Mi’s prophecy, but though it was Ruc’s job to do the hanging, he didn’t threaten the soldier, didn’t even chastise him. Instead, he reached down, helped the man to his feet, then held out the snake’s severed head. The soldier tried to draw back, but Ruc held him in place.
“Look,” he said, rolling the grisly trophy around his palm. “It’s just a snake.”
“It’s a soul snake,” the man protested.
Ruc nodded. “The delta is filled with them. Do you know what they do when people aren’t around?”
The man shook his head, mute.
“They crawl down the gullets of sick or dying animals, creatures too close to death to move.”
“They are the delta’s vengeance,” the soldier managed.
Ruc shook his head. “They’re trying to stay alive, just like every other beast out here. Just like us. The corpse provides food and hiding until it rots.”
The Greenshirt stared at him unsteadily. Ruc held the stare.
“They’re not some kind of divine scourge,” he said quietly. “They’re just snakes.”
To punctuate the point, he tossed the head overboard. Ripples spread outward from the spot where it struck. A moment later, I caught a flash of silver-white just under the surface—some fish braving the razor-beaks of the delta birds to seize its prize.
“If the gods were here,” Ruc went on, gesturing toward the lazily spreading ripples, “do you think they would choose such puny messengers?”
The Greenshirt shook his head hesitantly, his eyes still fixed on the water.
“Go,” Ruc said, pointing. “Help Truc’s team.”
The soldier trembled, as though shaking himself awake, then finally turned to make his way down the deck.
“Just a snake?” I aske
d when Ruc and I had the stern to ourselves.
“Scales, triangular head, no legs—fits the description.”
I sighed. “I understand that you don’t want your men to panic. I understand you don’t want rumors started in the city.” I patted him gently on the shoulder. “But I’m not one of your men. I’m not going to start any rumors. You brought me out here to help, but I can’t help if you won’t talk to me as though I’m a grown woman with her own two eyes and a working brain sitting right behind them.”
Ruc glanced down at the hand I’d left on his shoulder. My gesture had felt natural at first, casual, but faced with those bottomless green eyes, lost in the stretching silence, I began to feel awkward, then foolish, a girl who once again didn’t know what to do with her body. I let the hand drop.
“Someone put that snake down the helmsman’s throat,” I said, tossing the words into the silence between us as though they might plug the gap. “You know it and so do I.”
“Soul snakes crawl down throats all the time. It’s what they do.”
“They crawl down the throats of creatures that are sleeping. I doubt the helmsman slept through a pitched battle in the middle of his deck.”
“He could have been dead.”
I shook my head. “Soul snakes are called soul snakes because they feed on the living.”
Ruc grimaced, looked past me down the deck to where the Greenshirts were still poring over the carnage. “If you want to see Dombâng burn,” he growled, “keep talking.”
“I don’t really think I’m the problem here.”
“As long as you keep talking, you are.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You think if I keep my mouth shut your men will take this for a simple ambush?”
“Nothing simple about an ambush.”
“Especially not an ambush with three different sides.”
Ruc put a hand on my shoulder, turned me away from the deck to look out over the transom. Half of me wanted to knock that hand away, or to break his wrist. The other half hoped he would leave it there. I liked the weight of it, the strength, even as I loathed being led. To even the score, I leaned in, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek as I murmured into his ear.
“Are we being sneaky now?”
He dropped his hand, pulled back. “My men are watching.”
“Your men are puking all over their uniforms.”
“That won’t stop them noticing your tongue in my ear.”
“If they notice that, I think they’ll notice there was a third faction that came to this party. A faction that killed a lot of people, then departed.”
“My men aren’t Kettral. They don’t have your training reading a battle.”
“They don’t need to be Kettral,” I exclaimed. “The Annurians are carrying swords. The men who attacked them are carrying knives and spears. But half the men on this deck were killed with someone’s bare hands.”
“If a soldier loses his weapon, he’ll fight with his hands.”
I gave him a flat stare. “Save the shit for your men. You know as well as I do that there was someone else here, someone fighting both sides.”
Ruc studied my face, then nodded fractionally. “You think you can avoid announcing that to my entire crew?”
“Strange strategy—relying on the dimwittedness of your own troops.”
“They’re not dimwitted; they’re young. This”—he gestured to the deck—“is a language no one taught them to read.”
“Fortunately,” I replied, “you and I are literate. The question is: What story are we reading?”
Ruc started to reply when a shout from one of his men cut him off. A group of them had gathered at the starboard rail, pointing toward the shore. It took a moment after joining them to see what had kicked up all the fuss. Over on the bank, just a few paces away, someone had arranged fifteen or twenty severed heads, pressing them into the mud so that they stared into the sky. They would have stared, that is, if someone hadn’t scooped out their eyes. Instead of the lifeless gaze one tends to expect from severed heads, the sockets had been emptied out, then packed with dirt, faces turned into makeshift planters, from each of which grew the graceful stalk of a swamp violet, slender purple flowers dipping and nodding with the breeze.
I was alone, evidently, in finding the sight strangely beautiful.
Half the Greenshirts were cursing, vowing revenge—implausibly, it seemed to me, given how little we knew about whoever had attacked the transport—spluttering their impotent outrage. The other half seemed more frightened than angry. Hands drifted toward the hilts of swords once more, despite Ruc’s orders, and several of the men were muttering prayers, old wards against the ancient anger of the delta, prayers begging the mercy of old gods, gods that, according to Annur, had never existed in the first place.
Ruc rounded on the soldier nearest him, a middle-aged man, his face marred, probably in childhood, by the ravages of the whispering sickness. He was muttering a refrain I half remembered from my life before I left Dombâng:
Spare us, O lord of serpents,
Spare us, O lord of storm,
Lady of flood and fury,
Spare us your—
“Enough.” Ruc’s voice was a knife of pitted iron sliced across the prayer.
The soldier stopped, stared at Ruc as though baffled, then turned to point in mute appeal at the eyeless, flowering skulls, as though the simple fact of their presence there changed everything. The rest of the men grew silent, too, scanning the banks as though they expected their own deaths to leap screaming from the reeds.
The delta met our sudden silence with a silence of its own. The wind fell still. The reeds unbowed, straightening their razor-sharp spines. The bright-winged birds that had been darting through the thickets disappeared between one instant and the next, ducked into their hidden nests or winged off somewhere else. Only the water moved, patient, silent, laving the transport’s hull, as though trying to persuade it of some secret. Without the breeze the day was unbearably hot, the air thick and heavy, the sky like a damp pillow pressed down over our mouths. It seemed impossible that an entire city waited somewhere to our west, that people had managed somehow to defy the delta, to carve their own channels, to hold back the death that gathered on every side. It seemed, standing on the deck of the transport, that we had come to some alien, inhuman place, a sky-vaulted temple purged by flood and storm, sanctified with blood. I suddenly understood the desire of Ruc’s baffled soldier to pray, to beg the mercy of some unseen powers.
Ruc was having none of it.
“Those are skulls,” he said, pointing. “Just like the skulls inside your own heads.”
By way of illustration, he rapped one of his men on the brow with his knuckles, then turned to the deck. “Those are bodies. That’s blood. This is a ship. That, right there, is the bank of mud where the ship got stuck. That’s the sky. Those are some reeds.”
He hammered down on those blunt monosyllables as though each one were an iron nail, as though he intended, through the force of language alone, to affix this strange, silent, inhuman world back onto something we all knew.
“We’re here,” he went on, “because some cowardly bastards lured the transport out here and attacked it.”
“But the soul snakes,” one of the Greenshirts protested. “The skulls. The dead men…”
Ruc turned to face the man. “What about them?”
The soldier shook his head, baffled and aghast. “Something tore out their throats.”
I knew how fast Ruc could move, and even I was surprised when he lashed out, seizing the man by the neck. The muscles in his shoulder knotted as he half lifted his own soldier from the deck. The soldier’s face darkened, his eyes bulged, but he made no move to fight back. Ruc looked past him to the rest of the Greenshirts, meeting their horrified stares with the trackless jungle of his own.
“Anyone,” he said, the surfaces of the word planed perfectly smooth, “can tear out a throat.”
The soldier
managed a sort of strangled gargle.
“It is a matter of squeezing, then pulling.” He turned his attention back to the man who had started to twitch in his grasp, shook his head, then let him drop. As the Greenshirt gasped on the deck, Ruc waved a hand at the skulls. “A child can scrape away skin, gouge an eye from a socket. A grandmother can plant flowers.”
“But why?” someone managed.
“Because this is how they win,” Ruc replied grimly. “The attack is the least of it. The murder of a hundred Annurians, good men, just like you, just coming to do a job—that is the least of it. This is a trap, but these poor fools weren’t the prey.” His swept his stare across the assembled men as though it were a scythe. “They were the bait.”
A few of the Greenshirts glanced nervously over their shoulders, as though they expected something horrible to burst blood-toothed and howling from the leaves.
“No,” Ruc went on, addressing the unasked question. “They don’t want to attack us. The men—and they were men, not monsters, not the sneaking gods from the stories your parents whispered to you when you were kids—the men who did this don’t want a single one of you hurt. They want you alive and terrified. What they want is for you to go back to the city and spread this ridiculous story. They want you to tell your friends, your brothers, your mothers that some thing was here, that the delta itself rose up against these soldiers.”
He shook his head, disgusted, gesturing to the deck.
“All of this is fake. It is posed.”
“Except the dead part,” I couldn’t help interjecting. “They are actually quite dead.”
“But the violets,” protested one of the men. His uniform was damp with his own vomit. “The soul snakes. In all stories, those are the marks of the gods. In the myths—”
Ruc silenced the man with a glance.
“Anyone who grew up in Dombâng knows the myths,” he growled. “We’ve all heard them. Half of your parents probably still have the old idols hidden away somewhere. Your grandparents probably still mutter the old prayers. And do you know why?”
He raised a brow, studying one man after another.
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