“Someone slaughtered a transport filled with Annurian legionaries,” I said, my voice a good deal steadier than I was.
Chua laughed. “No shortage of hatred for the legionaries in this city.” She looked pointedly at Ruc. “Or for the Greenshirts. That’ll happen, if you kill enough people just for believing what they believe.”
“This didn’t happen in the city,” Ruc replied quietly. “It happened in the delta. Southeast of here.”
“So the priests managed an ambush.”
I shook my head. “The priests were there. Whatever killed the legionaries killed them, too.”
The woman went suddenly, perfectly still. Her stare slammed into me.
“Killed how?”
“Throats torn out. Soul snakes in stomachs. Delta violets planted in the sockets of skulls. Between the legionaries and the priests who planned to ambush them, there were over a hundred people. Well over.”
“All dead,” Chua murmured, half to herself.
Ruc leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
She turned to stare at him. “Because the Three don’t leave people alive.”
Low sunlight lanced through the cracks in the hut, turning the flecks of fine floating ash to flame.
“No,” Ruc said after a moment. “There are no gods haunting the delta.”
“How much time you spent in the delta?”
Ruc shook his head. “I don’t believe that three creatures, three anything could slaughter over a hundred armed men.”
“Oh, they don’t need you to believe,” Chua replied. “They just need you to bleed.”
Ruc rose fluidly to his feet. “I’m done. I can hear this same shit on any bridge in the city.”
“Something hit the transport,” I pointed out quietly.
“Someone,” Ruc insisted. He turned back to Chua. “The Lost.”
She shook her head slowly, almost hypnotically, eyes fixed on something beyond us. “The Vuo Ton want nothing to do with your city. They care nothing for your politics.”
“Politics,” Ruc said grimly, “is just a word for people trying to get what they want. The Lost are people—I’ve seen them in the harbor, in the markets—and all people want things. Maybe they resent the city’s spread. Annurian incursions into the delta…”
Chua laughed a long, mirthless laugh. “There are no incursions into the delta.”
“The spread of the northern quarters?” Ruc demanded. “The causeway?”
“The causeway is a ribbon looped around the neck of a tiger. The delta could swallow your northern quarter in a single flood. If you have not lived in the rushes, it is impossible to believe how small this city is, how insignificant.”
“You came here,” Ruc observed. “You quit the Lost to come to Dombâng.”
Chua’s grip tightened momentarily around the fishing spear, as though she planned to plunge it through his throat.
“I did not come for the city. I came for a man. Now he is gone.”
“Then why don’t you go back?”
“Because I have no desire to pay homage to the gods who took him.”
“What gods?” I demanded.
She looked at me. “If you grew up here, you know their names.”
“Sinn,” I said quietly. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh.”
“Myths,” Ruc growled. “Kept alive because they’re politically useful.”
Chua looked at him. “Does a myth rip out throats? Do politics pull heads from bodies, then plant flowers in the sockets of the eyes?”
“Men do, when they want something bad enough. If the Lost want the city, they’ll want it weakened, divided.…”
“You are not listening,” the woman said. “The Vuo Ton are not Lost. They know exactly where your city is. They do not come here because they do not care. Their lives, every day of their lives, are bent to the struggle.”
“What struggle?” I asked.
“Against the Three.”
“You just said they worshipped their gods,” Ruc cut in. “That they pay homage.”
Chua shook her head, as though baffled by his stupidity. “The struggle is the worship. The fight is the devotion.”
“So these gods of yours can be fought.”
The woman cocked her head to the side. “A hundred heartbeats ago you insisted the Three were a myth. Now you want to fight them?”
“What I want,” Ruc said, “is to find whoever hit the transport and killed the legionaries. I think it was the Lost. You think it was these mythical gods. Either way, I’m not going to find the truth here in Dombâng. I need to go to the village of the Vuo Ton.”
“You can take us,” I said quietly.
Chua stared into the blackened ashes of her fire pit for a long time, then shook her head. “I escaped the delta enough times. I do not intend to go back.”
Ruc’s jaw flexed. “The Greenshirts will pay you five Annurian suns,” he said at last. “In addition to the one already promised for this meeting.”
I shook my head, cutting in before Chua could respond. “Five hundred golden suns.”
Chua’s eyes narrowed. Ruc blinked, then began to shake his head. “No guide is worth a fraction—”
“There is no guide,” I said, riding over him, “who can take us to the Vuo Ton. You know that as well as I do.”
“I will not go into the delta again,” Chua said. “Not for any pile of gold.”
I turned away from Ruc to meet her eyes. “The gold is not just gold.”
She studied me. “The coins…”
“Are miles,” I concluded. “They are the distance you can put between yourself and this delta. With five hundred suns, you can take a ship to Annur, or Badrikas-Rama, or Freeport. In Freeport, there are no snakes, there are no venomous spiders. Snow falls every day of the year; men and women live underground, warmed by the fires of the earth. People there have never heard of the Three.”
When Chua finally responded, her voice was dry as a husk. “And what would I do in Freeport?”
“You would live. Instead of hiding inside the furthest shack from the water, suffocating beneath the ashes of the dead. You could be free.”
“The only work I know,” she said, hands closing and unclosing around the spear, “is the work of the delta.”
“You’re not in the delta,” I said. “And with five hundred suns, you won’t need to work.”
Chua looked down at the spear in her hands, began tracing the markings, as though she were a child learning her letters, as though an answer was written there somewhere, if only she could read it.
“If the money’s not enough,” I said, “there is the other thing.”
She glanced up at me. “What is the other thing?”
“I believe in your gods,” I said quietly, ignoring the irritation pouring off of Ruc. “I grew up here, in the Weir, and so they are my gods, too.”
“Your belief changes nothing.”
“It might when I kill them.”
Chua shook her head wearily. “They cannot be killed. The Vuo Ton train their entire lives to fight against them.”
“The Vuo Ton are an inbred population of several thousand with no access to modern weapons, no access to explosives, no access to birds of prey large enough to devour a croc in a few bites. The Kettral are the best fighting force in the world.”
“The delta is not the world,” the woman said. Still, there was a brightness in her eyes that had not been there before.
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. If so, I’ll be rotting on the river bottom while you’re sitting on the deck of a small mansion on the Breatan coast a thousand miles from here. If I’m right, whatever killed your husband, whatever ripped out the throats of all those legionaries, will finally learn what it feels like to die. I’m not alone. There are other Kettral with me, Kettral bent on finding your gods and destroying them. You just have to go back out there one more time.”
The woman closed her eyes. “The Vuo Ton might kill you. They might offer you t
o the gods.”
“Not your problem.”
“We might not even reach the village.”
“A thorn spider might bite you in your sleep. You want to die in here, hiding, or out there, trying, at least, to get free?”
She opened her eyes. “Five hundred Annurian suns.”
I nodded.
“You will wish you never went out into the delta.”
“I have a lot of wishes,” I replied, glancing over at Ruc. He sat motionless as an idol skewered by the low bars of sunlight. “I’m getting used to not having them come true.”
14
There were tracks in the fine, white ash outside Chua’s shack—bare feet approaching the southern wall, then departing the way they had come. As promised, Kossal had been trailing me, watching. I scanned the ramshackle buildings ringing the crematorium, but he knew his work well enough to stay out of sight. I wondered if he’d been on the boat somehow, when we’d found the transport. It seemed unlikely, but he wouldn’t have made a very good priest if he’d restricted himself to the realm of the likely.
Ruc didn’t notice the tracks. He didn’t seem to notice me, either, as he stalked away from Chua’s hut, then through the alleys of the Weir, eyes fixed straight ahead as he threaded his way between drunks, fishers, and orphans. One grubby kid of maybe ten or eleven tried to lift the knife Ruc wore at his belt. Ruc caught his wrist and tossed him into the canal without breaking stride. He only stopped when we emerged from beneath the overhanging roofs into the open space of the Weir’s harbor.
The sun had sagged beneath the peaked roofs to the west. Cramped shacks stretched their shadows across the darkening water. Unlike New Harbor, which was deep enough for the proud-masted, oceangoing merchant vessels, the Pot—the local name for the harbor, really just a collection of docks around the fattened backwater of one of the canals—was a mess of canoes and hide coracles, half-sunk rafts, permanently tethered craft that no sane person would trust out in the delta. People had begun lighting their lanterns, hanging them from long poles. The red of the lanterns was the sunset’s red, as though someone had stolen that horizon-wide light and sealed it inside the carcasses of dead fish.
Ruc had his back to the nearest lanterns, and a shadow fell like a mask across his face. Red limned the hard line of his jaw, the muscles of his neck, but I could barely see his eyes.
“Five hundred suns?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Cheaper than seeing the whole city burn.”
People jostled us, but Ruc’s face kept away the beggars and thieves. Since the transport, something had changed inside him. He’d always been a fighter, a soldier, but there had been music in his violence, a sly wit in his voice, even when he wasn’t smiling. Another man, one with less curiosity and more anger, wouldn’t have spent the last few days bantering and sparring with me. I’d been counting on Ruc’s love of adventure when I decided to return to the city. The man I’d known from Sia liked taking chances; he thrived on it. I was starting to worry, however, that after what we’d seen on the transport, Ruc was done taking chances.
“You think she can find them?” he demanded.
“The Vuo Ton?” I cocked my head to the side, trying to get a better look at his face. “Or the gods?”
He turned to me. “There are no gods, Pyrre. Or if there are, they don’t give a shit about us.”
I fought down the urge to reach out, seize one of the anonymous bodies that kept passing, offer the person to the god, and show him Ananshael’s might. My Trial, however, didn’t allow killing for the sake of theological argument, and Kossal was still out there, watching. Besides, Ruc wasn’t talking about Ananshael.
“How do you know?” I asked, keeping my voice mild.
“Wrong question.”
“Seems to me the woman asking gets to decide what she asks.”
He shook his head. “Ask all you want. Still the wrong question. Might as well ask me how I knew you were gone.”
“I’m right here.”
He shook his head. “That morning back in Sia, all those days after.”
I took a slow breath, steadying myself. “Just because you don’t see a thing, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Is that right?”
“I might have been.”
“Might have been what? Hiding just out of sight? Following me around?”
“Good Kettral practice.” I’d meant it as a joke, but the line landed like a dead eel on the deck.
“I could have thought you were coming back,” Ruc continued after a moment. “I could have believed you just stepped away unexpectedly for a day or two, forgot to leave a note, that you were going to climb back any night through my window and into my bed. I could have believed that just the same way that everyone in this ’Kent-kissing city thinks their gods are going to come back and save them.
“But that wouldn’t have been reasonable, would it? I wasn’t asking myself why I should believe you were gone—that would have been an insane question. The sane question was why I should believe you were coming back.
“I did ask myself that one. Asked it more than once. And do you know what I told myself?” He drove the last two words like nails into my silence. “She’s not.”
His hands hung slack at his side, but he was ready to fight, eager. I could feel my own pulse pressing at the vessels of my neck, the eagerness woven through my own flesh. Eagerness for what? I wondered. To feel him pressed against me, fucking or fighting, his elbow locked around my neck, my fingers binding his wrists. It had been like that in the ring and in his bed; hot and cold all at once, dizzying, euphoric.
But not love, I reminded myself, then wondered if I was right. Maybe love was just this: the fury, the delicious anticipation, the release. I wanted to scream, clenched my teeth hard around the sound tangled on my tongue, pouring up through my throat. When I finally spoke, it was only two words, two quiet syllables to set against his own.
“I did.”
“On a mission.”
“A mission I requested.”
His green eyes were black in the shadow. When he moved, they glinted red. “Why?”
The bold answer was obvious, laid out before me naked for the taking: Because I wanted to see you. Because I needed you. Because I love you.
I couldn’t say it.
The problem wasn’t the lie; I’d lied to Ruc about a dozen things since returning to the city. I couldn’t say the words because I was afraid of them, afraid that once I’d shaped them on my tongue, laid them on the air between us, that I wouldn’t be able to live up to them. As long as they remained unspoken, they could be denied, disowned, but saying a thing gives it strength. What if the story I told about myself proved more vibrant than the life I’d lived? What does it mean, when the lies one tells about oneself are brighter than the truth?
“I was curious,” I said finally, loathing the word—its vagueness, its smallness—even as I spoke.
“Curious?”
“About you. To see if you’d changed.”
He turned away, back toward the Pot. “Everyone changes.”
I shook my head, put a hand on his arm. It was a dangerous position, overextended. If he tried to break my elbow, it would be hard to stop him. I left it there anyway. “You seem the same.”
“The same as what?” He didn’t even glance at my hand. “You didn’t know me then, and you don’t now.”
The words hurt. I wondered if that was a good sign, if the pain and shame were handmaidens to something more. It seemed possible. Or maybe the pain was just pain.
“So tell me,” I said, “what I don’t know.”
“There’s a list.”
“Tell me what you want. What you believe.”
I hoped he would say something about me, but that door, open momentarily, had swung silently shut while I groped hopelessly for the right words. When he spoke, it was with his customary calm, that perfect reserve, the wry glance that was his best defense.
“What I want is justice.
“What I believe is that people killed those legionaries and priests. Not gods. Not monsters from the delta. People. I want to find them and I want to stop them before they do more and worse.”
The words left me hollow, cold. They were noble enough, sure, but I would have preferred his rage, would have preferred him to roar at me, to try to break my hand, which was still perched like a brainless bird on his arm, than that impossibly distant civic devotion. Of course, preferring a thing doesn’t make it so. I exhaled slowly, silently, feeling my excitement drain out with the air, turned my attention back to the dull business of massacres and lost gods.
“If you believe that,” I said finally, “if you believe the Vuo Ton are really behind the attack on the transport, then going to find them is like laying your arm in the croc’s mouth. If they’re the enemy, they’ll kill us the moment we arrive.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I shook my head. “You’re not a fucking idiot, Ruc. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“And because I’m not an idiot, I’m going to continue not telling you.”
“You still don’t trust me,” I said wearily.
He shrugged. “You haven’t tried to kill me yet. And I’ve given you chances.”
I shook my head. “But it doesn’t matter. You don’t trust me.”
“Would you?”
It was a vexingly good question.
I was lying, of course, doing everything I could to see his city burn just for the excuse to be close to him. He was smart to distrust me, but surely love, whatever it was, transcended being smart. In all the songs and plays, lovers were forever ignoring the sensible, pragmatic course, spurning the advice of friends and family, ignoring a thousand signs and signals that whispered stop, go back. Most of the time it seemed that love was inextricable from bad judgment. Any love that left the rational mind intact seemed a weak, watery thing, not really love at all. And Ruc’s rational mind was still very much intact. Of course, so was my own, and I was the one who needed to feel the emotion.
I let him go, spread my hands, as though inviting an attack. “If I’m lying, if I’m not Kettral, then what do you think I’m doing here?”
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