Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “Because they’re scared. You’ll notice the gods of our delta aren’t gentle. Our myths are filled with storm and blood, poison and flood. We don’t have any stories of the gods walking among us curing disease or bringing food in a time of famine. In Dombâng, people worship the old gods because they’re terrified of what will happen if they stop.”

  “The gods protected the city,” murmured one of the men. “When we forgot them, the Annurians came, conquered us.”

  “And when Annur conquered the city,” Ruc asked quietly, “what happened then?”

  He spread his hands, waiting. He hadn’t even glanced at me, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from him. I’d never seen him like this before. Back in Sia, he’d been a bare-knuckle fighter with a love for music. I knew he could hold the attention of a room, knew he could trade barbs as quick as anyone, both in the ring and out of it, but this …

  Standing astride the deck of that bloody transport, I realized for the first time just why Annur had made him a commander, and his speed with his fists was the least of it. He was—and I realize the word sounds slightly ridiculous when applied to a sweating soldier with his vest hanging open, his irritation scribbled across his face—but he was regal. Another leader would have coddled his men or belittled them.

  Ruc, however, just met their eyes and set his will against the rising flood of their fear. And they believed him. I could see that clearly enough in the dozens of gazes. They were willing to forget everything they’d been told as children, all the myths they’d heard whispered of Kem Anh and her might, at least as long as Ruc kept talking. There was something thrilling about the sight.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” he went on, “after Annur conquered the city: it became larger, richer, and safer.” He paused a moment, waiting for someone to object. No one did. “You can walk through one of Dombâng’s markets and find goods from two dozen cities. If you’re robbed while you’re there, you can appeal to one of the Annurian courts for redress. If a block of the city burns, it’s rebuilt faster than it would have been two hundred years ago. So why do people keep whispering myths of the old gods?

  “Fear.

  “That’s what those myths are for, to scare people. And who benefits from that fear?” He shook his head. “Not you or me, obviously. Not the fishers or the merchants. Not the kids swimming in the canals. I’ll tell you who benefits: the priests, the men and women who used to offer sacrifice to those imaginary gods, who lived in the finest temples, took first catch from the nets, who were able to seize our very children from our homes … all in the name of those myths. Annur defeated them, but they never forgot what they lost.

  “This,” he went on, indicating the carnage on the deck, the skulls with the violets planted in the empty sockets, “is their work, their attempt to take it all back. They don’t have argument or policy or military might on their side. All that they have is the old stories, stories of snakes in throats and violets in eyes—those stories are their only weapon, and stories are only weapons if you repeat them.”

  He studied his men one at a time. Late-afternoon gusts tugged at his vest, his clothes. He met my eyes for a moment, then looked away.

  “What happened here,” he said quietly, “was treason and it was murder. It was not the work of some invisible gods.”

  Which all sounded reasonable, of course. The world is wide and filled with competing pantheons of gods. Every backwater town and mountain village has its own tales, its own stories, some of them even older than those of the Annurians. Not all of them can be true. If Kem Anh and her consorts really did rule the delta, where were they? Where had they been when Annur conquered the city two hundred years earlier? Were we really supposed to believe that they were still out there, lurking in the mud and reeds, enduring this centuries-long occultation simply because the people of Dombâng had failed in their worship? The whole tale, seen through Ruc’s eyes, looked ridiculous, almost childish.

  But then, there were those bodies on the deck to consider. I ran an eye over the slaughter once more, the arms torn free of their sockets, the heads wrested from the necks as if by sheer brute force. I didn’t know much about the gods of the city of my birth, but I knew something of death, and whatever had made those men dead, it was something faster, stronger, altogether better than a group of greedy, dissatisfied priests.

  * * *

  We burned the transport. Ruc’s men slopped the deck with pitch, then, when we were safe on our own boat, set the entire vessel alight. Hot, sluggish gusts smeared the smoke low and thick across the sky. Ash fell on our deck like snow. The Greenshirts brushed it away as though it could still burn them; covered their mouths as though they expected to choke.

  “Seems like a waste,” I pointed out. “The men are dead, but the transport was still good.”

  Ruc shook his head. “The other choice was tossing the bodies overboard, giving them to the crocs and the qirna.”

  I shrugged. “So give them to the crocs and qirna. The beasts have to eat, too.”

  I’ve never understood the human fascination with burial practices. Death itself is a great mystery, of course, the moment when my god’s finger touches the world. But after Ananshael’s work is done, the person is gone, replaced by a heap of bone, gristle, and meat. I understand, of course, the impulse to respect the dead, but I can’t quite follow the argument when people start associating so much carrion with the vanished person. In Sia, for instance, they dress the slabs of decomposing meat in the absent person’s finest clothes, then bury the whole ridiculous puppet under ten feet of dirt. You can see the mourners at the grave’s edge, staring down into that dark well, as though they might still catch a glimpse of the person they’d loved, as though it makes sense to call that skin bag filled with bone and puddled blood father, mother, brother. In Rassambur, when someone goes to the god, we heave the leftovers off the edge of the mesa and have done with it.

  “Is that how the Kettral honor their dead?” Ruc asked, studying me narrowly through the smoke.

  I felt the old, familiar thrill blaze through me at the question, the sudden, absolute focus that comes in the moment you realize an opponent has slipped inside your guard.

  “We tend to put more emphasis on staying alive,” I replied blandly, trying to sound bored by the whole conversation while scouring my memory for any scrap on the Kettral view of death.

  “Even Kettral die,” Ruc pressed.

  “If we can get them back to the Islands,” I replied, “we burn them.”

  He shook his head. “I heard there was a burial ground. Something about a huge, black tree filled with bats.”

  Which was more than I’d ever heard about the Kettral or their dead, and with an alarming degree of specificity. Backpedaling, however, had never worked against Ruc. He could taste hesitation.

  “You heard wrong,” I said, turning away.

  In the end, the crocs and the qirna had their feast after all. The transport burned unevenly, listed hard to port as the starboard side went up in flame, then tipped, dumping its mortal cargo into the channel. Bloated with the sun, the bodies stayed up, bobbing on the surface, some charred, some miraculously unburned, looking almost placid. The crocs, for all their ungainly weight on shore, moved through the water fast as spilled shadow, great jaws opening silently, closing around an arm, a leg, then dragging the unstruggling body down. They managed to take three or four before the qirna arrived, a riot of iridescent scales and teeth churning the river so violently that it seemed to boil, rendering the corpses to their constituent parts, illustrating with absolute clarity the final, undeniable point: what had once been men were men no more, just blood to stain the water red, gobbets of wet flesh, the occasional bright flash of bone.

  “Sweet Intarra’s light,” murmured one of the Greenshirts, transfixed by the scene.

  A little farther on, one of his companions shook his head grimly. “Whatever happened here, Intarra’s got nothing to do with it.”

  13

  The la
nterns were already lit by the time we returned to Dombâng. Our vessel slid silently past Rat Island, through the Water Gate, beneath Bald Bridge, then up Cao’s Channel toward the Shipwreck. I felt like a stranger in the city all over again as the tall teak buildings loomed above us. Threads of song twisted out from the windows and alleys to tangle in the wind, then fall apart. We’d been gone barely a day, hadn’t left the delta, and yet the channel where we burned the Annurian transport might have been in a different time or a different world altogether. The hot, bright silence of that lost backwater shared nothing with the human shapes and rhythms of the city. It seemed a miracle, suddenly, that we had gone there and returned.

  As our pilot leapt onto the dock, Ruc turned from the rail to face the Greenshirts on the deck. The men looked exhausted, even those who hadn’t been rowing, as though the horror at what they’d witnessed were a weight they’d been carrying all day, the hot heft of it bowing their shoulders, weakening their knees. They studied their commander warily in the light of the dock lanterns.

  “Anyone who speaks of what we saw today,” Ruc said quietly, “will be executed. If that seems extreme, consider this: our city is on the brink of civil war. An Annurian commander was found murdered in an outhouse, and someone has been slapping bloody hands on every building in sight. The legion charged with helping to keep the peace is the same legion we just found massacred in the delta.

  “At this point, most commanders would try to reassure you. They would tell you that everything is under control, that we have nothing to fear. I am not going to tell you that. Dombâng is in danger. Everyone you love is in danger. Not from some mythical triad of gods. The gods, if they exist at all, don’t trouble themselves with our affairs. We are in danger from the very citizens we’ve sworn to protect. If there are riots, people will die. If there are fires, people will burn.”

  He slid his gaze over the assembled soldiers.

  “It is your job to see that there are no riots or fires. You will do what you swore to do, which is to protect this city, and you will keep your mouths shut while you’re doing it. If you’re tempted to whisper something to your wives about what you saw today, to your friends, remember this: that whisper could kill them as surely as a knife in the eye. Continue the normal schedule of patrols. Continue to guard Dombâng as you have done since you joined this order. Uphold your oaths. I know you’ll do this, because you are Greenshirts.” He paused. “Are there any questions?”

  After a moment, one soldier raised an unsteady hand. “What are we going to do? About what happened out there. About what we saw.”

  Ruc smiled. “Leave that to me.”

  I waited until all the men had filed off the boat to approach him. I couldn’t quite make out his eyes in the darkness, but I could see the planes of his face reflected in the light of the dock’s swaying lanterns.

  “And just what are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Talk to some people.”

  “Which people?”

  He shook his head, then started to turn away. When I took him by the arm, I could feel his body shift, dropping toward a crouch, getting ready to throw me or to strike out. Then he caught himself, and it was over. Anticipation drained out of me, leaving behind a dry, dull disappointment.

  “What do you want, Pyrre?” he asked quietly.

  “I want to do the job I came here to do,” I replied. His skin was warm beneath my hand. “I want to help you.”

  “Why do you think I brought you out to the transport?”

  “The transport was the start of this, not the end.”

  Ruc shook his head slowly. “This started a long time before the transport. Whoever hit that boat, they might have been acting out scenes from the bloody delta ballads no one’s allowed to sing anymore. The soul snakes, the fucking violets in the eyes…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  “So who are you going to talk to?”

  He scrubbed his face with a weary hand. “We have prisoners. Men and women instrumental to the insurgency.”

  “The insurgency,” I pointed out, “was one of the two teams that got slaughtered out there.”

  Ruc turned away from the dock and the lanterns, away from me, back toward the black water running silently past. The corded muscle of his forearms flexed as he gripped the rail of the vessel.

  “Obviously, it is more complex than I realized. Multiple factions.”

  The vision of a woman with serpent’s eyes blazed across my mind, then vanished, leaving me blinking in the darkness.

  “You think it’s just people,” I murmured quietly.

  “Of course it’s fucking people,” Ruc growled. “Don’t tell me the Kettral sent you here to dig up a handful of missing gods.”

  I stared at the back of the man I had come to Dombâng to love, to kill. The reason Ruc made a good military commander was that he didn’t succumb to the shibboleths and superstitions of most soldiers. If someone hit him in the face, it wasn’t because the day was unlucky or he ate the wrong thing or forgot to bathe the right way; it was because he made a mistake, and once he identified that mistake, he never made it again. A fight, a battle, a city on the verge of chaos—to Ruc, they were all the same: problems to be solved, problems that sprang ultimately from people. If he could see the person, find the weakness, he could win.

  I wasn’t sure, however, that whatever killed the legionaries was a person.

  I’d spent so much of my life in Rassambur, where men and women talked to a god daily, where they gave themselves willingly, happily into his infinite embrace. I didn’t believe the old gods stalked the delta beyond Dombâng, but the thought that there might be something out there, something I didn’t understand, something beyond the ken of mortal women and men—the notion, at least, was something I’d been raised to entertain.

  Kossal had come all this way for the same reason. The old priest could be gruff and elusive, but if he believed there were Csestriim hiding in the delta, maybe he was right.

  “The Vuo Ton,” Ruc said finally.

  I looked over at him, yanking my mind from my own thoughts.

  “What about them?”

  “They could have done it.”

  “The Vuo Ton haven’t meddled with Dombâng since they abandoned it.”

  “Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past.”

  I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. “I’ve been short on prognosticating pigs.”

  “Life is perfect for a pig,” Ruc said. “Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals.”

  “And in this vivid analogy,” I concluded, “Dombâng is the pig.”

  “The fact that my head’s still attached at my neck doesn’t mean no one’s sharpening a knife.”

  I watched the bloody light of the lanterns play off the water as I tried to think through the idea. The thought that after more than a millennium out of sight the Vuo Ton would suddenly attack Dombâng seemed implausible. But then, everything about the Vuo Ton was implausible. Someone had murdered the soldiers and the priests scattered over the transport deck, someone fast and dangerous, someone capable of melting back into the delta without leaving a trace. I thought again of the man who had followed me through the city, the black slashes inked across his face, the way he’d smiled when I finally noticed him.

  “We need to find Chua Two-Net,” I said finally.

  Ruc turned. “Who is Chua Two-Net?”

  “A fisher, although she quit fishing before I left Dombâng. She must be fifty years old by now.”

  “Why do we need an elderly fisher?”

  “She knows the delta.”

  “A thousand people know the delta,” Ruc replied, shaking his head. He gestured across the canal to where a flotilla of boats were tied up for the night, bobbing quietly with the small waves, creaking against each other.
“There are fishers right over there.”

  I shook my head. “Not like Chua. She was raised by the Vuo Ton.”

  “Chua Two-Net.” Ruc narrowed his eyes. “I think I have heard of her, actually.”

  “She spent two weeks alone in the delta without a boat. Came out alive.”

  “Happened while I was down in the Waist with the legions,” Ruc said. “Sounded made up.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was there when she came back.”

  Ruc studied me, then nodded. “I can’t leave the Shipwreck now. I’m going to be up half the night trying to contain this mess.”

  I wanted to grab him, to drag him with me into the night in search of Chua, but Ruc had never been one to be dragged.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll come here mid morning.”

  He nodded again. “Tomorrow.”

  * * *

  All rivers flow toward an ocean. Which means that everything people toss in a river—all the piss and shit and rotten slop—also flows toward an ocean. If you look closely, you can see the channels of Dombâng grow fouler and murkier as you move east, but there’s no need to look at the water. If you want to know what direction you’re going, it’s easier to take note of the buildings. All the sprawling teak palaces and bathhouses stand on Dombâng’s far western end, where the channels run quick and clear. East of New Harbor the dwellings crowd together, stacked into three-story tenements that overhang the canals. Still farther east, at the city’s last fringe, the tenements give way to warrens of shacks tacked up on rickety stilts, rotting docks bobbing on the water, a patchwork of permanently tethered barges. Instead of causeways, narrow planks span the gaps between platforms.

  On maps, this end of the city is called Sunrise. Everyone who lives there thinks the name is a joke. You can never see the sunrise. There’s too much smoke from the cook fires and not enough wind to blow it away. Clearly, the idiot responsible for the maps never visited. The people who live there call it the Weir, which sounds almost picturesque until you realize that weir is just another word for trap.