“You’re going to see things here,” I said, turning to Ruc as we crossed one of the wobbly bridges into the quarter, “that offend your notions of order and law.”
He snorted. “I grew up in Dombâng. I’ve been commanding the Greenshirts for years. We send patrols into the Weir all the time.”
“We’re not a patrol,” I pointed out. “We’re not here to bring the bright light of Annurian justice. We’re here to find one particular woman, ask her some questions, then get out without killing anyone.”
I took a deep breath, then immediately regretted it. The Weir reeked of sewage and offal, smoldering cook-fire smoke, thick fish soup, and the hot delta peppers people mixed in with everything to disguise the taste. That smell was my childhood, and I realized, standing on the swaying wooden span of the bridge, that I was not eager to go back.
“I won’t kill anyone if you don’t,” Ruc said.
“No promises,” I replied. It was in the Weir, after all, that I’d first discovered the might and silent mercy of my god.
He shrugged. “How do we find her?”
From the top of the bridge’s arc, the Weir seemed to stretch away forever, all crooked wooden roofs, dogleg canals, and shoulder-wide alleys hazy with smoke. A woman could spend a day wandering around down there and not find her way out—and that was if no one put a knife between her ribs for something she said, for something she had.
“Chua used to live on the water,” I said. “She and her husband slept on their boat down in the Pot.”
“I know where it is. Let’s go.”
I shook my head. “After she came back, she didn’t have the boat anymore. Or the husband. She went as far from the water as she could get.”
Ruc considered the web of brown canals stretched out below us. “Which is just how far, in the Weir? About a dozen feet?”
“A dozen feet can mean the difference between watching the crocs and feeding them.”
“I thought she was too fast for the crocs.”
“Everyone gets slow, if they live long enough.”
“That an argument for dying young?”
“Argue all you want; death comes when it comes.”
“How philosophical.”
I glanced over at him, then nodded toward the warren ahead. “You grow up down there, you either become a philosopher, a corpse, or a madwoman.”
“I’m glad you didn’t decide on corpse.”
“Who says I got to decide?”
The Weir closed around us like a net. After twenty paces, it was impossible to look back and find the bridge we’d crossed. The stained walls of the shacks threatened to shove us from the narrow walkways into the sluggish water below, and though I’d grown up swimming in those same channels, almost oblivious to all but the worst filth, my standards had changed. I’d forgotten just how vile everything was. There were no bathhouses in the Weir, no real ways to get clean. Fishers washed in the river outside the city; everyone else just lived with the stench until their noses went dead.
Almost worse than the smell was the chaos, the racket. People lived right on top of one another. Voices and bodies, entire lives spilled out of perpetually open doorways. Cook fires burned in wide clay bowls in the center of the walks. If you wanted to get anywhere, you had to step over people, around them, had to elbow garrulous mothers with children on their hips out of the path and skirt the small circles of gamblers squatting in the alleys. It was the opposite of Rassambur. Where the mountain fastness of my god was all emptiness, stone cliff, knife-edged shadow, and the stark sun, carving its perfect arc across the sky, the Weir was sweat and rot and life, ten thousand voices, ten thousand hands, all so close they seemed to press against your flesh.
By the time we reached Rat Island, I was ready to stab someone in the eye just to make a little space. The island, fortunately—the only true island in the whole quarter—was less crowded than the canals surrounding it, and for obvious reason.
There are no burials in Dombâng—there isn’t enough dirt to bury anyone. According to the stories, the city’s earliest inhabitants laid their dead in slender canoes, set them alight, then shoved them out in the current. It sounds like a beautiful practice. As Dombâng grew, however, the tradition became impractical. There would have been an armada of burning canoes blazing through the channels every night, getting hung up on docks, setting the wooden homes alight. The city wouldn’t have lasted a week. Instead, the dead are cremated, the very rich in broad plazas inside their homes, everyone else on Rat Island.
Unlike literally every other structure in the Weir, the crematorium sat all by itself, ringed by a firebreak of ten paces on every side. Four stone walls—some of the only stone walls in Dombâng—delimited a wide courtyard. The walls were high enough to block the sight of what happened inside, but not so high that we couldn’t see the flickering tips of the fires. I’d climbed those walls once as a child—part of a dare—and I could still remember the sight: five long troughs carved in the dirt, each one filled with dozens of bodies, bundles of rushes piled under and over the corpses. I’d watched, horrified, mesmerized, as workers doused the pits with oil, then set them alight. Not so different from cooking, I’d thought, my stomach twisting. Ash settled over the whole island, white and silent. You could see your footsteps in it each morning. When I first saw snow, years later, my first thought was that it looked like the ashes of my city’s dead.
“She lives here?” Ruc asked.
I pointed to a small shack just at the edge of the firebreak. “Like I said, she doesn’t like the water.”
“There are places to get farther from the water. Even in Dombâng.”
“Not if you’re a fisher who’s quit fishing.”
Unlike most of the structures in the Weir, the door to the shack was closed and latched from the inside. Maybe to keep out the ash.
I knocked. No reply.
“How long ago did you leave the city?” Ruc asked after a moment.
I grimaced. “Fifteen years.”
“She could be dead by now, gone somewhere else.”
“She said she meant never to go near the water again.”
“People change their minds.”
I knocked again, louder this time, then tried the door once more. The stench of the crematorium clogged my nostrils, coated the back of my throat, but I caught a whiff of fish congee from inside the hut. A moment later, through the crack between the door and the frame, I glimpsed someone moving.
“Chua Two-Net,” I called out. “We need to talk to you. It’s worth a full Annurian sun if you open the door.”
Ruc shot me a glance. “Who’s supplying the gold?”
“You are.”
“Not the Kettral?”
“You’re the one in charge of keeping the city from going up in flames. I’m just here to help.” I turned back to the door, “Chua—”
The spear slid through a chink in the wall fast as a striking viper. I saw it at the last minute, knocked it aside, caught the shaft with one hand just below the head—a fishing spear, I realized, with a barbed fork rather than a leaf blade—then twisted. Usually, that would have been enough to get the person on the other end to drop the weapon, but in this case the person on the other end was strong as an ox; I managed to yank the spear a few inches out through the gap and then it was being hauled back. I wrapped my other hand around the shaft—I didn’t intend to give the weapon back until I knew no one was going to stab me with it—and after a momentary struggle we settled into a stalemate.
“Well, you may be stupid,” a woman’s voice drawled through the wall, low and ragged, “but you’re fast. I’ll give you that.”
“Chua,” I replied. Even after sixteen years, I remembered that voice. “You want the gold, or you want to keep trying to stab me?”
“I was planning to do both.”
“Time for another plan. Can we come in?”
“Let go of my spear.”
“So you can stick me with it when I walk through the do
or?”
“Don’t be an idiot. Spear’s no good in here. If I’m going to come after you, I’ll use the gutting knife.”
I found myself smiling. “You’ve got a strange notion of hospitality.”
“You’ve got a strange notion of the Weir,” she spat back, “if you think pounding on strangers’ doors bragging about all the money you got is a good way to stay alive.”
“I don’t have the money,” I said, then nodded toward Ruc. “He does.”
“Who the fuck’s he?”
“Ruc Lan Lac. The commander of the Greenshirts.”
Ruc had taken a step back when the spear snaked through the wall, but aside from that he remained still, those inscrutable green eyes of his wary, ready.
“Long way from home, Greenshirt,” Chua said after a pause.
Ruc shrugged. “The Weir was part of Dombâng last time I checked.”
“When was that? Don’t see too many green shirts this far east.”
“I imagine you don’t see much of anything,” Ruc replied evenly, “if you insist on talking to everyone through the wall.”
“I like to know a person before I invite them into my home.”
Ruc spread his arms. “Now you know me.”
The spear twitched in my hands. “And you? You got the delta accent, but it’s strange.”
“I’ve been away.”
“Away. Lucky for you. Why’d you come back?”
I glanced over at Ruc. “Dombâng is in trouble.”
“Dombâng,” Chua replied, “is a rotting cesspool sinking slowly into the delta, and one dumb girl isn’t going to change that. I don’t care how quick you are.”
“The rotting and the sinking aren’t really my concern,” I said. “I’m more interested in the slaughter.”
“Slaughter is a mite more interesting than rot,” Chua conceded.
“Especially for people in my line of work.”
“Which is what? Grilled meat?”
“Fighting.”
“You don’t look like a soldier.”
“Kettral,” I said quietly.
It was getting easier, each time I said it, as though simple repetition could transmute the most basic lie into truth. I wondered briefly if the same thing could work with love. I glanced at Ruc. If I just said it over and over—I love him, I love him, I love him—would the bare words flower into actual emotion? It might have been easier to imagine if we’d been somewhere else, anywhere else. Outside the ramshackle door, however, a spear shaft clutched in my hands, ash from burning bodies falling softly on my hair, love seemed as distant as the sky.
“Kettral and Greenshirts,” Chua said after a long pause. “It might be fish shit, but it’s not boring—I’ll give you that.” I felt her let go of the spear. There was a clattering and scratching, as of multiple latches being undone, and then the door swung open.
When I’d left Dombâng, Chua Two-Net had been somewhere in her middle thirties, which put her around fifty now. The woman I remembered had been black-haired, brown-skinned, brown-eyed, like most people native to the delta. The resemblance to her fellows ended there. Where most citizens of Dombâng wore their hair long and glossy, Chua kept hers shaved to a dark stubble. She’d caught me once watching her as she dragged a long knife again and again over her oiled scalp. You want to stay alive out there, she’d said, you don’t want hair. Just another place for the spiders to hide, another thing to tangle in the net.
Coiled around her shoulders and arms—her body was muscled like the ropes used to tether ships in New Harbor—someone had inked dozens of serpents, red and green and black, all writhing upward, ringing her throat with a necklace of slit eyes and bared fangs, each tattooed viper arrested in the attempt to reach her face. According to the stories, she inked another every time she killed a snake, a claim that, judging from the species, meant she should have been dead a dozen times over. Chua, however, had always been defiantly alive, a character too large for the narrow alleys of the Weir, like one of the heroes who stepped straight out of the songs the old folks sang nightly around the embers of cook fires, someone as fierce and terrifying and glorious as the gods we had forsaken.
She looked like a god no longer. I recognized the snakes, of course, still hissing silently at her neck, but she’d grown her hair halfway down her back and her wide shoulders were slumped, the muscle cording her arms half melted away. The old scars from when she fought her way free of the delta raked her skin into puckered welts. Half of her face was badly discolored, a red stain spreading beneath the brown—the reminder of a fang spider bite that would have killed someone weaker. Aside from her eyes, she looked like an old woman who might have trouble on the city’s more rickety walkways. Those eyes, however—bright, defiant—were the eyes I remembered.
“Never them,” I said, nodding to her.
She blinked. Until that moment, until seeing her standing there before me, I’d forgotten Chua’s unique salutation. In any situation, greeting or farewell, she would say those two words: Never them.
“Evening, Two-Net.”
“Never them.”
“Luck out there in the rushes today.”
An incremental nod. “Never them.”
No one seemed to know if it was a promise, or a warning, or a curse. No one I knew was ever brave enough to ask. I’d forgotten all about it in my years at Rassambur, but it came back to me now, as so many things had come back since returning to Dombâng.
“I don’t know you,” she said, studying me.
“I grew up here.”
“Said that once already.”
“I saw you win the New Year boat race three times.”
“Eight times.”
I nodded. “I was too young to remember the first five.”
Chua glanced over at Ruc, chewed at her lip for a moment, looked past me, over my shoulder, then back at me and nodded. “Come in and close the door. The dead will choke you, if you breathe them long enough.”
The small shack was comprised of a single room. A rush mattress lay in the corner. A woven mat, thinner, but of the same rushes, covered the rest of the floor. There was a clay bowl, half filled with the congee I’d smelled, a pitcher of water, also clay, an empty basin, half a dozen salted fish hanging from a low rafter, along with a bundle of dried sweet-reed tubers. A fire pit sat at the center of the room, but when I glanced up, I saw the smoke hole above it was closed.
The older woman followed my eyes. “I get my fires finished before they start theirs.” She nodded through the wall toward the crematorium.
The space was cramped, grimy, unkempt, save for the wall immediately behind the mattress. Two fishing nets hung neatly from a series of pegs. Above them, horizontally on a wooden rack, lay a series of spears—forked, barbed fishing spears like the one I was holding. In Dombâng, fishing spears are as common as fish. Every child has one. You can see women and men on the bridges and docks any time of day, chatting idly while they wait, arms cocked, for the right moment. The spears on Chua’s wall were not like those. I wasn’t a fisher, but it was obvious from the smooth, clean grain, from the qirna teeth laid into the head as barbs, from the patterns painstakingly burned into the shafts, that these were, in the way of tools passed down from generation to generation, sacred. In a small rack below them, sheathed in snakeskin, hung three gutting knives, bone handles carved for the best grip.
The rush mats hadn’t been changed in weeks, maybe months. The fire pit needed digging out. The fish stew was starting to congeal in the bowl. Those spears and knives, however, were meticulously oiled. None of the ash that had settled around the rest of the room had touched them.
“The bottom two belonged to Tem,” Chua said, settling herself cross-legged on the mat by the burned-out fire.
“Who is Tem?” Ruc asked.
“My husband. He died.”
And that, of course, was the part of the story I’d forgotten. Everyone had been so shocked to see Chua Two-Net come in from the delta after twelve days missi
ng that it was easy to forget that her husband, Tem, had not come back. Part of the problem was that he had never fit easily into Chua’s legend. Everyone knew that she’d been born outside the city, raised and trained in the hidden village of the Vuo Ton, that that was where she’d learned to row, to fish, to survive in the delta. It made sense.
What did not make sense was the next part. According to the story, she’d crossed prows with Tem one day, fallen in love, forsaken her home and her people, and come to Dombâng. We might have believed it if Tem had been something other than what he was … a reed-slender fisher with a pronounced limp and no particular renown. He could sing, he could tell a tale that would make children squeal in horror or delight, but he seemed a small person beside Chua—he was even known around the Weir as Small Tem—and so when he died, it seemed only right. Of course Small Tem couldn’t survive in the delta. Of course Chua Two-Net came back. When people told the story, they forgot him.
Chua, evidently, had not forgotten.
“My condolences,” Ruc said.
“Are worth less than a holed canoe,” Chua replied. “Where is the gold?”
Ruc glanced at me. “My friend gets ahead of herself sometimes.” He rummaged in a vest pocket. “I have a handful of silver. The gold is at the Shipwreck.”
“And the fish are in the river,” Chua replied, face souring.
“He’s good for it,” I said.
Ruc’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything. I passed the spear across to Chua, then sat down. After a moment, Ruc joined me.
“So,” the woman said, studying us. “Doom comes for Dombâng.”
“You don’t sound concerned,” Ruc observed.
Chua croaked a laugh. “I’m not!”
“No love for your adopted city?”
“Your city’s a pisspot.”
“I notice,” Ruc replied, voice perfectly level, “that you’re still here.”
“Lot of people in this world end up places they didn’t mean to, places they never should have went in the first place.”
Chua shifted her gaze to me as she said the words. My guts roiled. Memories choked me, as though I had breathed them in with the ashen reek of the crematorium.
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