“I don’t know,” he replied after a pause. From someone else, in another situation, the words might have been an admission, even a capitulation. From Ruc, standing on that dock beneath those lanterns, they were a wall, a fucking fortress.
Out in the harbor, hulls rocked on the small swells. A polyphony of discordant voices filled the night: a woman screaming over and over, demanding that someone—a lover, a child—just leave her alone; the rumble of old men grumbling into their clay cups; shrieks that might have been fear or delight; so many lives crammed so close together. Down below us, on a long, narrow barge, a group of children were playing a game involving dice and a knife, chanting the same refrain between rolls:
One for your heart,
Two for your eyes,
Three for the ones
Who will weep when you die.
Four for your limbs,
Five for your lies,
Six for the ones
Who will laugh when you die.
Dead Man’s Dice, we called it when I was a kid, or sometimes just Bloody Cuts. I remembered playing in the alleyway a few streets over from my shack, the quick, eager thudding of my heart as the dice flew, the scramble to grab the knife, the hot, warm wash of the blade slicing my fingers when I failed. I never really liked Dead Man’s Dice, but every night I could I snuck away to play.
Caught up in the chant, seized by some impulse I couldn’t quite explain, I turned to Ruc.
“Come with me.”
He didn’t move. “Where?”
“Not far. Just the other end of the Pot.”
I thought he was going to refuse, but after a moment he nodded, sliding away from the wooden railing smooth as a shadow. We didn’t talk. The night was crammed enough with voices without us adding our own. The wooden walkway swayed and creaked beneath us. I wondered if I was making a mistake as I led the way out onto an empty rotting dock.
I could make out a man’s voice on a gill-netter across the way, singing the refrain to one of Dombâng’s love songs, a simple, antique piece. The fisher didn’t seem to know the verses, only the refrain, and he worked through the same handful of notes again and again, rising above the tonic, falling below it, then returning to that base note over and over. The music reminded me, for some reason, of a bear cub I’d found years earlier in the Ancaz. His mother had been killed by rockfall, her hindquarters utterly crushed. The poor, baffled cub kept wandering a few feet away, then coming back to nuzzle at his mother’s fur, wandering away, then coming back, as though in the whole vast world he could think of nowhere else to go.
I pointed across the Pot to a line of dilapidated shacks canted precariously toward the water.
“That’s where I grew up.”
I didn’t look at Ruc. After a moment, I stopped looking at the shacks, too. I had not intended to come back.
“Why are you showing me this?” Ruc asked after a while.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I was finished.”
“Your parents?” Ruc asked.
“Dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hesitated. “I was the one who killed them.”
Lanterns swayed, as they had swayed all evening, from the poles at the sterns of the boats. The current tugged at the vessels with slender, undeniable fingers, the same tonight as on every other night. You say a thing, sometimes, that you expect to change the world. When the world doesn’t change, it’s hard to know what to do next. Ruc didn’t respond, so I plunged ahead, my own story closing over me like the river, warm and welcoming and rotten.
“My father came here from the north, from Nish—I inherited some of the lightness of his skin, his eyes. He was rich when he arrived, a merchant. He met my mother, married, they had a child, lost him. I don’t know my brother’s name; they never spoke it. My father blamed himself, blamed my mother, blamed the entire world, started drinking quey. By the time I was born, he’d lost his fortune. Their house at the western end of the city was gone. The only home I knew was here.
“He’d come home at nights, hit me if he could find me. Hit my mother. He kept the knife for himself, though. After he’d bloodied my lip or blackened her eye, he’d go out on the dock and drag that knife over his skin again and again. I never knew if he was doing penance for hurting us, or for losing my brother, or for ruining his own life. Probably for all of it.”
I fell silent, gazed out over the harbor into the hot, cramped chambers of my past. When Ruc put a hand on my shoulder, I almost hit him. I felt like that child again: lost, terrified, brokenhearted.
“My mother tried to save him,” I went on, finally. “I came home one day from scavenging in the canals to find my father gone and a strange man in our shack.
“‘Who’s this?’ I remember asking.
“At first my mother didn’t meet my eyes. ‘He is a priest.’
“That word, priest, sent a thrill through me. Priests were secret and powerful. It was like learning we had a stash of gold hidden somewhere in the house. Only we didn’t have gold. The only thing we had was me.”
Ruc made a sound in his throat that might have been a growl. His fingers tightened on my shoulder.
“The priest smiled, gave me something to drink, told me I was going to save my family. When I woke up, I was alone in the delta, a sacrifice to the gods.”
“How did you survive?” Ruc asked.
“Luck,” I replied. It was partly true. I left out the golden eyes, the woman with the scale-black hair. For all I knew, she was no more than a nightmare.
“I realized something about life then: it’s not always good. People hold on to it because they don’t know anything else, like Chua refusing to leave the city even though she loathes it. She just needs a little help, a little nudge, something to show her another way. So did my mother and father. They were just worshipping the wrong gods.” I shook my head. “They didn’t need Kem Anh and her consorts. They needed Ananshael.”
Away over the water, the fisher was still singing the same handful of notes over and over, as though there were no other in the world.
“When I got back to the city, I killed them both. It was so easy. They were asleep. His arm was wrapped around her. They looked peaceful, in love. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t done it years earlier.”
It was strange, I thought when I finally fell silent, that so many days—an entire childhood—could fit in so few words.
“And then what?” Ruc asked quietly.
“I found the Kettral,” I replied. After so much truth, the lie caught in my throat like a broken bone.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Then, after a moment, I shook my head. “No. I’m telling you because I want you to know.”
“Most people would try to hide a story like that.”
“I’ve been hiding it for a long time.”
I stepped closer to him, close enough that I could finally see the planes of his face beneath the shadow, the movement of his eyes. He didn’t pull back when I put a hand on his chest, didn’t even tense. His skin was warm in the warm night air. I could feel the strength waiting in the muscles beneath.
“I want you to kiss me,” I said, the words barely breaking into breath.
He didn’t move. Didn’t flinch or lean in. Across the canal, the fisherman followed the sad notes of his song out and back, out and back. Ela’s voice whispered in my ear: It matters how you hold your body. I shifted just slightly, following some instinct older than my own perseverating thoughts, moved marginally closer to Ruc, faced him more directly, and this time he moved with me, one hand slipping behind, sliding up my spine, closing firmly on the back of my neck, and drawing me slowly, inexorably forward.
I was shocked at how much I remembered, details I’d thought I’d forgotten flooding back: how he kissed the way he fought, patient and implacable both; the tiny chip in his tooth that my tongue alway
s seemed to find; the vibration of his chest beneath my hands as he half growled, pulling me closer; the way his skin smelled of salt and smoke and something else I’d never quite been able to place; how he didn’t ever close his eyes. I could feel my own body responding, loosening and coiling at once, something that might have been hunger uncurling from my stomach up through my throat, through my tongue, and down into my legs.
When we finally broke apart, I felt like a marionette with half its strings cut.
“Does that mean you trust me after all?” I managed.
We’d shifted as we kissed, turned toward the lanterns, so I could see his eyes when he replied, green and alien as the delta we’d just survived. “No,” he said quietly. “It does not.”
Across the canal, the fisherman had finally fallen silent. Maybe his nets were furled and tucked away, or maybe he was still over there, working in the darkness, but had grown tired of the song.
15
I took the long way back to the inn.
Ruc split off from me just west of the Weir, returning to the Shipwreck to begin preparation for our second foray into the delta. I could have carried on, following the series of islands and bridges that flanked the northern side of Goc My’s great canal, but instead I wandered south, reluctant to return to my bed, to the dreams that so often came with sleep. After being so close to Ruc, after feeling his body pressed against me, his lips on my own, I needed time to be alone, to try to understand what had happened, what it meant.
Not that I was truly alone.
I didn’t see anyone behind me when I glanced over my shoulder, but those had been Kossal’s footprints in the ash outside Chua’s shack. If there is one thing the priests of Rassambur do as well as killing, it is stalking. Which meant Kossal had been watching me and Ruc down by the Pot. He had witnessed our kiss. Maybe he’d even been listening as I poured the story of my childhood out into the hot night. Ela had told me, that first night back in Rassambur, that the two of them would decide in concert whether I passed the Trial, which would mean deciding whether or not I was in love. I wondered what Ruc and I had looked like in the ruddy lamplight, his hands tangled in my hair, mine on his chest. From inside my head, the whole thing was baffling.
I turned deliberately in place to study my back trail. I’d been strolling alongside one of the smaller canals—I couldn’t remember its name—following the wooden walkway that hung out over the water on posts cantilevered from the walls of the buildings. It was only a few feet wide and I could see back twenty or thirty paces, to where it doglegged, following the canal out of sight. There were only a few people behind me, all of them in loose pants and vests, none even vaguely disguised, none that could be Kossal. I wondered whether he’d gone home early. It seemed unlikely.
Down in the canal itself, a few thin-waisted minnow boats parted the dark water. A rower stood in the stern of each, propelling the vessels forward with a long oar set in the transom. They were far enough away from the walkway and the red hanging lanterns that I couldn’t make out faces, could barely even see the shapes. One of them might have been Kossal; there was no way to tell.
Not that I had anything to hide from my Witnesses. Still, if you’re being followed it’s nice to catch a glimpse of the pursuit every so often. I thought of the crag cats that made their home high in the Ancaz, lithe, fast predators that moved over the stone like the shadows of clouds. Being followed, when you can’t see what’s following, starts to feel a lot like being hunted. I tapped my knives through the fabric of my pants, shrugged the tension out of my shoulders, and kept moving. What had I learned, after all, in my years at Rassambur if not that simple fact: we are all hunted, always. No one hides from Ananshael.
A quarter mile farther on, I reached a wide span bridging the canal, the graceful arch hung with fish-scale lanterns and crowded with merchants’ booths, all of them bustling with traffic. Bridges, in Dombâng, serve the same purpose as market squares in most other cities; they’re places to meet, to trade, to gossip. Given the delta heat, most of that trade and gossip happens after dark. I slowed as the crowd clotted, let the human current nudge me this way or that. It felt good to be around people who didn’t know me, whom I didn’t know. People I had no need to love.
The hum of a hundred conversations washed over me, loud but indistinct, the way sound is underwater. I passed a woman selling flat-fin heads from wide rush baskets. The eyes of the fish bulged wide and accusing. Their jaws gaped, revealing twin rows of needle-sharp teeth. I imagined Ruc’s severed head set among them on the rushes. His green eyes locked on me, glazed and serious. I could read nothing in the gaze.
A few stalls down from the fishmonger, a blind man was hawking squeezed rambutan juice. I gave him a copper for a cleverly folded leaf filled with the stuff. It slid down my throat, warm and sweet, but somehow it seemed like cheating to have the juice without shucking the fruit, without working around the hard, unyielding seed at the center.
I had just tossed the leaf into the canal when a conversation resolved out of the general hum, a few women muttering to one another a few paces behind me.
“The goddess,” one hissed, her voice low enough I knew she wasn’t talking about Intarra, “was never gone. She was only waiting.”
“All these years? For what was she waiting?”
“For us.”
“We’ve been here all along,” a new voice cut in, tired but caustic. “Our mothers before us and their mothers before them, and where was Kem Anh then?”
A chorus of hisses and hushes half smothered the end of the goddess’s name, but the speaker remained undeterred.
“Speaking her name’s no crime. Never has been.”
“Close enough,” the first woman growled.
“Fish shit. I’ll talk all I want. It’s worship the Greenshirts won’t stand.”
I turned fractionally, just enough to catch sight of the women. They were older than I’d expected, probably into their seventh decade, backs stooped, hands twisted into claws—the reward for years tossing and hauling nets. They weren’t part of any organized insurgency; their loose, foolish talk out here at the base of the bridge for everyone to hear was proof enough of that. They might have seemed harmless—a few old women gossiping in the way of old folks everywhere—and yet, if rumor of revolution simmering in Dombâng had reached even these utterly unconspiratorial women, if they were invoking the name of Kem Anh here in the open, then Ruc’s hands were about to be very full indeed.
I smiled, nodded to them, then winked.
They stared at me, gap-toothed and mystified.
“She rises, sisters,” I whispered, stepping closer. “Just yesterday, deep in the delta, the goddess and her consorts slaughtered a full Annurian legion.”
The shortest of the three—a woman with a sagging face but shrewd eyes—proved to be the boldest. Finding her voice first, she hissed at me, “How do you know? Who are you?”
“A friend,” I replied. “A loyal daughter of Dombâng.” I pressed her hand between mine, let my fingers linger around the cool, papery skin, then winked again and melted back into the crowd.
I lost sight of the women almost immediately, but found that I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Their conversation should have been reassuring. It meant that my graffiti was working. Rumor was spreading. The insurgency was starting to reach out past its secret councils and cabals into the very streets. Ruc needed me now, or thought he did, which was just as good. It was all happening fast, faster than I’d dared to hope, and yet that speed gave me pause.
The bloody hands were mine, of course, as were the corpses beneath Goc My’s statue, at least in a way. I’d set out to remind people of Chong Mi’s prophecy, and I’d succeeded. I expected the city to rise slowly to a boil, but I had not expected someone else to pick up my work reenacting the prophecy, certainly not someone so viciously efficient. The vision of those severed heads of the delta violets swaying lazily in the breeze, filled my mind once more.
I saw a thousand sk
ulls, a thousand eyeless skulls,
The meat of their minds made mud for the delta flowers.
It had been barely five days since I spent the night painting the city with my palms. Who could have arranged a hit on the transport in five days? My sisters and brothers in Rassambur would have been hard-pressed to manage such a strike.
I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to catch a glimpse of the tattooed Vuo Ton. Of all the people in Dombâng, only Kossal, Ela, and that unnamed man from the delta knew what I had done that night. If Ruc was right, if he had returned to his hidden village and told them what he’d seen, it was just possible that they might have managed to ambush the transport.
Except there had been no corpses of the Vuo Ton on the deck. However deadly they were, however ruthless, however capable in the delta, I couldn’t believe they could tear apart over a hundred foes and disappear with no casualties. They might have carried their dead away with them, of course, but there was still the matter of the wounds I’d witnessed on the ship. Could the Vuo Ton have ripped out so many throats with their bare hands? It didn’t seem likely.
Events had outpaced my expectations, dramatically outpaced them. In other circumstances I might have tried to slow things down, to stop scheming long enough to understand what was happening. There was no time, however, to stop scheming. I was eight days into my Trial—over halfway—and I had yet to fall in love.
The kiss on the dock had been hot with promise, but I needed more than promises. If the murder of a hundred Annurian legionaries and local priests could lead to a kiss, what kind of emotion might come from a riot? I imagined me and Ruc tangled in each other’s arms, the sheets soaked with our sweat while somewhere below the insurrection surged to open battle in the streets. I imagined pinning his arms above his head while the Greenshirts and legionaries faced off against Dombâng’s secret priests and their faithful. I imagined him inside me while the city crumbled. It was ludicrous, obviously. If the Greenshirts were fighting, Ruc would be there with them, and yet somehow, in some way I still can’t quite put into words, I felt as though the city had become a part of me, had always been a part of me, one I had forgotten in my long, sky-blue years at Rassambur.
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