I hesitated, then shook my head. “Not his style. If he decided he didn’t trust us, he wouldn’t leave us where we could burn down his city while he was away.”
“Then what is he doing? Doesn’t take two days to load a boat with supplies.”
“I should have followed him.”
The old priest looked at me like I’d just started drooling on the table. “What you should have done is continued your work instead of wasting time pining. There’s more to Ananshael’s Trial than the last lines.”
Before I could respond, one of the young servingmen approached. His name, I remembered vaguely, was Vet. Ela had lured him into her bed days earlier, but Ela wasn’t up yet—most days she slept until almost noon—and he gave me a sly smile, one that suggested he could keep a secret if I could. Kossal, predictably, shattered the mood.
“Bring me ta,” the older priest said, “and something to eat that doesn’t smell like fish.”
“At once,” Vet murmured, then turned to me. “And anything else for the lady?”
That confident smile suggested my list of options extended beyond the offerings of the kitchen.
I shook my head.
“Perhaps later,” he said, smiled again, then turned away.
I watched him as he threaded his way between the tables. It wasn’t hard to see what Ela liked about him. He was built like a statue, all square jaw and bare shoulders. He wore his vest open, like the rest of the serving staff, to show off a chest and stomach that looked carved out with a chisel. And that smile … somehow it managed to be mischievous and reassuring all at once. What would it be like, I wondered, to peel off that vest, to feel his hands roaming over my body? What would his voice sound like, murmured in my ear? Would it be possible to thread the discrete facts of attraction into something that felt like love? Someone could love him; I was certain of that, just as I was certain that that someone would never be me. For all that my life depended on it, I could not say why.
I turned back to Kossal.
“It doesn’t matter that I haven’t given anyone else to the god. None of that matters. If I fail at the last lines,” I concluded quietly, “I fail.”
“Sometimes the failure is the devotion.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Our bodies go,” he said, gesturing to himself. “Then our minds. Failure is what it means to be mortal.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Kossal didn’t reply. He watched me, both eyes open now, his pupils still, sharp-edged, absolute, as though they’d been cored from his irises with a knife. I shoved forward into his silence.
“You passed your Trial. Ela passed hers. No one told you to fail in the name of your devotion.”
“You were twenty years unborn when I faced my Trial,” the priest said, his voice quiet. “You have no idea what I was told.”
“I know you’re here,” I burst out. “I know that you survived.”
“Survival,” he said. “What does the Lord of the Grave want with our survival?”
I stared at him. “Then why are we doing this? Any of it? Why all the songs, the training, the Trials? Why don’t we just open our own throats and be done?”
It was a question, I realized suddenly, that had been rising in my chest for years, ever since I first arrived in Rassambur. I had never doubted Ananshael. The god’s mercy and justice were as obvious to me as the sky. I wanted nothing more than to serve such a lord, and yet there was something in the service I had always struggled to understand. My brothers and sisters gave thousands of souls to the god each year. More than that, they offered themselves in dozens of ways. Not a month went by without one of the faithful stepping from a precipice or sipping quietly from a poisoned cup. When the god calls, we say in Rassambur, listen. And yet, the whole process seemed somehow … inefficient. If Ananshael wanted us, and we wanted to give of ourselves, the simplest obeisance seemed suicide.
It was a paradox. We were expected to kill, to die with a heartfelt smile, but never to rush. I’d raised the question half a dozen times over the course of my years in Rassambur, without ever receiving a sensible reply. There seemed to be a hundred aphorisms and no actual answers, just inscrutable stuff like The wheat does not find the scythe. After a while I stopped asking. Rassambur was a beautiful place to be alive. The sun burned bright, the blue air blazed, I was both young and strong. Someday, I told myself, I would understand.
Suddenly, that looked a lot less likely.
I was going to die. When my time was up, either Ela or Kossal would open my veins and drain my blood out into one of Dombâng’s canals, and I still didn’t understand the most basic thing about my faith.
“Every year we live,” I murmured, “every day—it’s just a delay, an abdication of faith. You’re right. Why am I even trying to survive?”
I stared down at the shifting water of the canal. It would be so easy to step over the railing, tumble forward, break the surface with a quick slap, then sink into the depths, let the current carry my body to the sea. I’d seen a drowned woman in Sia once, facedown in the shallows of the lake, white dress unfolding around her like the petals of a flower, arms spread as though she was flying. I’d never seen a body quite so beautiful.
“Survival,” Kossal said quietly, “is not life.”
I studied the old priest. “I don’t know what that means.”
“What is it we give to the god?”
“Our selves. Our lives.”
“And what kind of life do you want to give him? What kind of self?”
I tried to find some answer that might fit the question, failed.
“Why do you think, at my age, I’m still stomping all over this ’Kent-kissing continent? What do you think I’m doing in this miserable city?” He waved a hand at the canal and everything beyond. “The whole place smells like soup.”
I hesitated. “Ela says you’re doing it for her. Because you like to be around her.”
“For her? Because I enjoy being around her?”
“That’s what she said.”
The priest looked like he was going to spit. “That woman,” he ground out finally, “is a daily ordeal.”
“She’s the ordeal?” I was too confused to consider my words. “The whole way from Rassambur Ela was kind, cheerful, curious … while you’ve been what? An old bastard with a kidney stone. Every time we sit down, you look like someone pissed in your quey. The only time you stop scowling is when you’re playing your flute.”
“I play my flute,” Kossal said, “to keep from killing people I should not kill.”
I stared at him. “You mean Ela.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “Ela. Although you’re managing to elbow your way onto my list as well.”
“Which list is that?” I demanded. “Kill? Or Do Not Kill?”
His eyes narrowed beneath his bushy brows. Then, to my shock, he exploded into a long, rich laugh.
“There’s just the one list, kid,” he said finally.
I shook my head. “And that is?”
“The ones who matter. The ones who aren’t just scenery. The ones who turn survival into life.”
“Why would you want to kill them?”
He raised his bushy brows. “Because life, Pyrre—it’s a lot harder than survival.”
“And Ela makes you feel alive.”
“To my unspeakable exhaustion.”
We fell silent as Vet returned with a steaming kettle, poured Kossal’s ta, then withdrew, his eyes lingering on me as he went. I tried to imagine what we looked like to him: just an old man and a young woman, not Ananshael’s faithful. We might have been talking about anything—the antics of a drunk relative, someone’s tumble into one of the canals, the ludicrous price of fire fruit—anything but the silk-thin line dividing the living from the dead. I tried to imagine what it might be like to live that sort of life. What did most people think about when they got up in the morning? Pissing and ta, probably. Maybe the job they had to do that day. It seemed
a sad way to live—pale, attenuated.
“What do you think we’ll find,” I asked finally, “out there in the delta?”
Kossal swirled the ta in his cup, took a sip, pursed his lips, then looked at me. “I don’t know.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“I learned a long time ago that my guesses aren’t all that good.”
“So you just quit guessing? Quit having expectations?”
The old priest nodded. “Been working well enough this past half century or so.”
I studied him, the lines etched into his weather-beaten skin, those calm, strong hands. “You’re lying.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Quit doing that too. My lies weren’t much better than my guesses.”
“But you’re curious,” I pressed. “You think there’s something out there worth fighting.”
“Fighting?” Kossal frowned. “I dislike fighting.”
“Killing.”
He shrugged. “A heart doesn’t tend to find its way out of a ribcage all on its own, and there were an awful lot of naked hearts on that boat.”
“You think it’s the Vuo Ton?”
He shrugged again. “First time I heard about the Vuo Ton was a few days ago. For all I know, they’re a group of tuber-eating pacifists. Only one way to find out.”
“But you are going to find out.” I shook my head. “Which means you think it’s not the Vuo Ton. You think it’s the gods out there.”
Kossal studied me through the veil of steam rising from his wide cup.
“If there is something out there other than some idiots with knives and an interesting myth, it’s been there a long time.”
“You really think there’s a chance that the city’s gods are real?”
“Doubt it. But there are other things than gods that don’t die without a little persuading.”
“You mean Csestriim.”
It was still hard to believe we were actually talking about it. For all their implausibility, the gods of Dombâng were familiar. I’d grown up with their names on my tongue, the shapes of their forbidden idols rough in my hands. The Csestriim, however, despite the ample historical record, despite Kossal’s claims to have found them, killed them, seemed like creatures from a storybook, immortal foes of the human race vanquished from every corner of the world so long ago that they might never have lived at all.
“Csestriim,” I went on, “hiding in the Shirvian delta, impersonating gods.”
“Not really, no. But if there are, they’ve been cheating Ananshael for a very long time.”
“And if not?”
He took another sip of his ta. “Then I’ll see if any of these Vuo Ton need to be given to our lord.”
He discussed it all so casually, both the question of the Csestriim, and the more quotidian issue of his own devotion.
“How do you decide?” I asked, thinking back to the priestess of Eira, to the few drops of her warm blood that had spattered my hand as I lowered her to the temple floor.
“I assume there is a second half to that question.”
“What offerings to make. The world is filled with people. Even Dombâng…” I trailed off, imagining the canals crowded with boats, the oarsmen shouting at one another, women and men jostling on the wooden walkways, leaning from the windows of teak houses, shouting at children who forced their way through the scrum. “You can’t kill them all,” I concluded finally.
“There have been priests who tried.”
I blinked. “Really? What happened?”
“Didn’t work.”
“I gathered that.”
“People notice what you’re doing when you start going building by building, block by block, cutting throats. They start to take exception.”
“But if you don’t do that, how do you decide?” I pressed. “We see thousands of people pass by each day from where we’re sitting right now. There are two dozen people right on this deck. You haven’t killed any of them.”
“Two,” Kossal said.
“Excuse me?”
“I killed two.”
I glanced around the deck. People sipped their juice or ta, alone or in groups of two or three. No one was dead. No one seemed to be dying. I turned back to Kossal, wondering if he was joking. “I don’t see any corpses.”
He waved away the objection. “The poison takes a while.”
Not joking, I concluded. That seemed like the end of the conversation, but after a moment Kossal went on in that low, rumbling voice of his.
“Devotion isn’t a system, Pyrre. You pass a hundred people, a thousand, and nothing. Then, when you pass the thousand-and-first, you feel the god seeing with your eyes, you feel him stirring in your limbs. The way you know the will of a god is not the way you know the area of a square or the distance to Annur. It is not a matter of facts or equations. Our devotion is not a list of chores.”
I shook my head. “Sounds like the way Ela describes love.”
To my surprise, Kossal nodded. “I suppose. Death, love—they’re both the work of a god framed in mortal flesh.”
“How are you supposed to know one from the other?”
Kossal swirled the ta in his cup, then stared down into the miniature whirlpool. “I’m not sure you do.”
18
Ruc’s messenger knocked furtively on my door, waking me from an unsteady sleep sometime in the hot, foggy hours between midnight and dawn. I had been dreaming of Ruc and Ela, of the two of them naked, tangled in each other’s limbs, eyes closed with the bliss of their tight-pressed bodies. I called out to them, but they didn’t hear me, or they heard me, but refused to respond.
I tried to move closer, but I was tied to something, rope wrapped around and around me. When I looked back up, Ruc was on his back, Ela on top of him, astride him, riding him, smiling as she reached down to pull him to her … no. She was reaching down to strangle him. Her fingers closed around his throat even as her back arched with pleasure. I couldn’t tell if Ruc was struggling to be free or just fucking her harder.
He doesn’t know, I thought. He doesn’t know what she is, what she’ll do to him. I screamed into my gag. Silence.
I wished for a knife, and a knife was in my hand. As quickly as I could, I sliced my way free of the ropes, sawing desperately through the thick, bristling strands, focused on nothing but getting loose, stopping the priestess before she finished her strangling. When the last coils fell away, I lunged forward, hurling myself across the undefined space. When I reached the bodies, they were still, bloody, dead. Ela’s head lay on Ruc’s muscled chest, the haze of her dark hair matted with blood. Someone had stabbed them, stabbed them both over and over. When I looked down, the knife in my hand dripped dark blood. The drops hit the floor—drip, drip, drip—the measure of a music that didn’t yet exist, or had already stopped.
By the time we reached the docks of the Greenshirt fortress, the vision had faded, but sweat still slicked my hands, my chest; and my heart, normally so steady, leapt into my throat when Chua stepped from behind a stack of barrels piled on the dock. Not an auspicious start to the day that wasn’t likely to get any easier.
The woman carried a folded net and two fishing spears, both as long as she was tall. She wore a slender filleting knife strapped to one thigh and a longer, heavier blade for hacking sheathed on the other. It was standard kit for a fisher headed into the delta. Her vest and trousers were not. Most of the fishers working the channels around Dombâng wore cotton or, if they could afford it, silk—light cloth that wasn’t too hot in the wet afternoon heat. Chua’s clothes seemed to glisten in the dock’s fickle lamplight, to shift and writhe each time she moved. It took me a moment to realize her tight vest and trousers were stitched from some kind of skin: snake or maybe crocodile, something with dark, glittering scales.
She ran a hand over the hide when she noticed me studying her. “Blocks spear rushes,” she said, “and most things with fangs.”
“Must be hot.”
“If you are hot,�
� she replied, dark eyes glittering, “then you are alive.”
“I, for one, despise being too hot,” Ela said. The priestess, unlike the fisher, had dressed less than practically for an expedition into the delta, although she had traded her customary ki-pan for a light silk noc and sleeveless top. Both seemed unlikely to block either spear rushes or things with fangs. “You must be Chua,” she said, smiling as she stepped forward. “Pyrre tells me you’re quite resourceful.”
The older woman examined her, as though she were some exotic fish hauled up onto the deck, then glanced over at me. “This one is Kettral?” She looked wary. “Where are the weapons?”
“Weapons?” Ela shot me a wide-eyed, panicked look. “Pyrre! Did you forget the weapons?”
“She might not look like it,” I said, ignoring the priestess’s theatrics, “but she’s Kettral.”
“But what is a Kettral without weapons?” Ela went on. “I forgot my broadswords at the inn.”
“Less noise,” Ruc growled. “We’re leaving before dawn because I don’t want the whole city to notice our departure.”
“It is not the city you should be worrying about,” Chua said.
“Luckily,” Ruc replied, voice flat, “I’ve gotten good at worrying about more than one thing at a time.”
He made up for Ela’s lack of weapons: a short sword on one hip, a dagger on the other, and a crossbow strapped across his back. He gestured to the slim swallow-tail boat tethered up at the dock. Two Greenshirts sat at the oars, half-shrouded in shadow.
“Who are they?” Kossal asked.
“Dem Lun and Hin,” Ruc replied. “They’ll be doing the rowing.”
Chua eyed the two skeptically. “They are soldiers, not fishers.”
The nearer of the two men turned. He was older than I’d realized, almost as old as Chua. “Your pardon, ma’am, but we grew up fishing the west channel, both me and Hin.”
“We’re not going to the west channel.”
Dem Lun nodded. “Understood, ma’am. But water’s water. We both remember how to pull an oar.”
“I’m grateful for the help,” Ela announced. “I’ve never pulled an oar in my life, and I was up half the night entertaining.” She leapt lightly into the stern of the boat and, while the rest of us found our places on the wooden benches, settled herself between the thwarts.
Skullsworn Page 28