As we were loading up, a soldier I didn’t recognize rolled two small wooden barrels over a gangplank and into the boat, lashing them in the stern just ahead of the tiller.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Supplies,” Ruc replied.
“Want to be a little more specific?”
He shook his head as he untied the painter. “Nope.”
Without another word, he set a foot on the transom, shoved off from the dock, then stepped nimbly into the boat.
Night’s hot, salty fog had settled over the city, shrouding bridges and causeways, making vague the red lights of the hanging lanterns. Dem Lun and Hin rowed in silence, oars slicing soundlessly into the water, pulling free at the end of each stroke with a slick, whispering sound. We passed a few dozen craft as we worked our way south, flame fishers returning from their work, low cargo scows loaded past the rails with barrels and crates, a single wide pleasure boat, lanterns blazing at prow and stern, the revelers doggedly finishing off the last of the wine, belting their drunken songs into the night.
The sun had just blistered the eastern sky when we left behind Dombâng’s buildings. In moments, the house-high rushes closed around us. Aside from the smoke smudging the sky behind, the city might have been swallowed up, hundreds of thousands of souls, all their hopes and hatreds sinking into the mud in the space between one stroke of the oars and the next. The sky sat on the delta, heavy, gray, bright as steel. The day was hot, and going to be hotter.
Ela laid her head back against the hull of the boat, crossed her legs over the far rail, and closed her eyes.
“Wake me up,” she murmured, “when it’s time to kill something.”
Chua shook her head. “More likely, something will try to kill us.”
Ela smiled without opening her eyes. “I’ll wake up for that, too, I suppose, but only if it’s very, very exciting.”
* * *
Without the sun overhead, I would have lost track of west, south, and every other direction almost instantly. The delta was a web of green-brown streams and backwaters threaded between tiny islands, mud bars, stands of spear rushes, a thousand branching channels that all looked the same: reeds and mud, sluggish water tugging imperceptibly toward the sea. Crocs lazed on the flats, but they left us alone. Aside from the occasional scream of some hapless creature struggling, then dying out of sight, the day was calm, almost soporific. For long stretches there was no sound but the steady rhythm of the dripping oars, water chuckling under the hull, the light breeze feathering the rushes.
Since leaving the city, Chua had pointed the direction at each forking channel with her long fishing spear. She didn’t speak aloud until midmorning, as we were passing a wide stand of blood rushes.
“Stop here.”
The Greenshirts paused, oars hanging motionless above the water.
“Why?” Ruc asked.
The woman pointed to the rushes. “We need one of those.”
I glanced over at the long stalks. The rushes were named for their color—a red the hue of dried blood—and for their edges, which could slice through human skin as readily as a carving knife.
“Why?” Ruc asked again.
Caught in a slight breeze, the boat drifted toward the swaying reeds.
“Not too close,” Chua said, ignoring Ruc’s question, drawing her blade. “Things live in those shallows.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things we do not want on the boat.”
When we were still a full pace away, she tucked a foot under the thwart, then leaned backward out over the rail, stretching until her body was parallel with the water. The motion was at once gracefully acrobatic and perfectly natural. As the rowers held water, she sliced one of the rushes just above the waterline, let it fall into the water, then picked it out carefully, pinching the flat of the stem between her thumb and forefinger.
“Shove off,” Ruc said, and Dem Lun, who had been eyeing the bank warily, drove the blade of his oar into the mud, forcing us back toward the center of the channel.
Chua ran the back of her knife along the full five-foot length of the reed, first one side, then the other, slicking the water from the fibrous stalk, pausing for a moment when she reached a thumb-sized spider.
“Widow’s kiss,” she said, pointing with the tip of her knife, then flicked the creature into the water.
The surface tension held it up a moment, legs twitching and jerking, slick, black carapace drinking the light. I remembered the name from my childhood. Fishers bitten by the spider did not come back alive. Ruc ignored it, his eyes on Chua.
“I assume there was a reason for the risk.”
She nodded, sighting down the length of the rush, first one side, then the other. When she was satisfied it carried no other passengers, she slid the base down through the small hole in the front decking through which the boat’s painter was threaded.
“It is a flag,” she said.
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“It says we are searching for them.”
“Searching?” Ruc said, narrowing his eyes. “You told me you knew where they were.”
“In the delta nothing stays in the same place.”
“So how do we find them?” I pressed.
The older woman fixed her eyes over the bow, as though looking through the rushes, past them, into some vision of her childhood.
“There is no one place,” she replied finally, “but there is a pattern to their movement. When we get close enough, there will be signs.”
“And this thing?” I asked, pointing again at the red, swaying reed.
“They will see it,” she said, “and know that one of their own has come back.”
The woman didn’t turn when she spoke. From my bench in the center of the boat, I watched her back. Since leaving Dombâng, she seemed different; not changed, but changing, as though the scarred skin of the broken woman we’d found in the shack by the crematorium was something she was in the process of molting.
“What if we didn’t have it?” I asked. “What if we just went searching without the flag?”
“They would kill us.”
Ruc nodded, as though the woman’s words had confirmed some long-held belief. “The Greenshirts have sent boats after the Vuo Ton. Not recently, but there are accounts in the records. Most returned exhausted, defeated, having seen nothing. Some did not return.”
Chua shrugged. “The delta offers a thousand deaths.”
“One of which,” Ruc noted drily, “is at the hands of the Vuo Ton.”
“How do the Vuo Ton survive?” I asked.
Chua glanced down at the spear in her hand. “The people of Dombâng understand building, and coin, and trade. The Vuo Ton know what lives on the water and underneath, what stalks the reeds and rushes. They learn early to face their gods. To worship and to sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice.” Ruc shook his head grimly. “I’ve seen what passes for sacrifice. Kids or idiots too drunk to fight back, tied up and tossed into the delta. All to appease these fucking gods.”
Chua shook her head dismissively. “The people of Dombâng are weak. They mean nothing to Kem Anh and her consorts.”
“They die all the same. I’ve seen the bodies.”
“The Three have no interest in the dead.”
“And just what is it,” Kossal asked lazily, “that they’re interested in?”
The priest had been sitting on one of the narrow benches, elbows on his knees, chin in his hands. He’d been silent all morning. Now, however, at the mention of the gods, he straightened up, dark eyes bright with the sun, posture giving the lie to his indolent drawl.
“They are hunters,” Chua replied.
“Good place for it.” Kossal nodded toward a flock of tufted ducks floating silently past. “Plenty of waterfowl.”
Chua’s smile was all teeth. “The Three prefer more spirited prey.”
“Have you ever seen a duck defending her nest?” Kossal raised one eyebrow. “Very
spirited.”
“Less so than a woman fighting for her life.” The fisher glanced speculatively into the shifting reeds. “Or a man, for that matter.”
I shook my head. My wrists ached with the old memory of cord biting into my flesh. I could feel the ribs of the boat pressed against my own ribs, hard and unyielding.
“The people sacrificed to the delta don’t get to fight.”
The words came out as a snarl, and the old fisher looked over at me, her weathered face grave.
“The sacrifices of your city are blasphemy. Worse than the worship of the Annurians.”
Ruc hadn’t shifted his eyes from the channel. His right hand rested calm and steady on the tiller. His voice was absolutely casual when he spoke, but I could see him testing his left hand, flexing it just slightly.
“Sounds as though your people would be pleased to see the whole city burned,” he observed. “Priests and legionaries alike.”
Chua snorted. “Your city is nothing to the Vuo Ton. A tiny, reeking privy, meaningless in the vastness of the Given Land.”
Ruc frowned. “The Given Land?”
“The delta,” the fisher replied, sweeping her spear in a wide arc to indicate the water, the reeds, the hot and shifting sky.
“Given to who?” Kossal asked. “By who?”
“Given to us by the gods,” Chua said.
Kossal shook his head. “The Three didn’t make the delta.”
“No,” Chua said. “But they made it safe.”
I stared at her. “Safe? By hunting people?”
“That was the bargain. We sacrifice; they stand guard.”
The old priest’s gaze was a naked blade. “Guard against what?”
“Against what chased us here in the beginning.”
Hidden in the reeds, an unseen bird scratched out a few strident notes against the stifling silence.
“The Csestriim,” Kossal said quietly.
Chua parried his gaze with her own. When she finally spoke, it was in the cadence of words handed down through uncounted generations. “In the beginning, the folk knew only terror and flight. They fled from the deathless across mountain and desert until they came to a land where the gods still lived. The Three turned back the deathless, and in return, we agreed to worship them.…”
“So you could be slaughtered by ‘gods’ instead of Csestriim?” Ruc demanded.
“Never them,” the fisher replied quietly. “This was our pledge. We would live in the delta and die here. We would give ourselves to these gods and to their servants, but never to the Csestriim. Never them.”
“Shitty fucking bargain,” Ruc said, “now that the Csestriim are millennia dead.”
“An oath is an oath,” Chua replied. “The people of Dombâng forsook this oath.”
“So did you,” Ruc observed. “A lot of righteousness here from a woman who quit her people to live with the filthy apostates.”
Chua tensed. For a heartbeat, I thought she was going to plunge the barbed wooden spear directly into Ruc’s chest. Then she shook her head. Her eyes went distant, vague.
“I paid my price.”
“I thought it was an honor to your people,” Ruc growled. “You made it sound like the Vuo Ton want to die in the delta.”
“The Vuo Ton want to be worthy of the hunt.”
Ruc nodded, as though that settled everything. “They want to be sacrificed.”
“What they want,” the fisher replied quietly, her eyes fixed past Ruc’s shoulder as though he weren’t there at all, as though she were talking to the delta itself, “is the honor of facing their gods.”
* * *
The strike, when it came, happened so fast that Hin was dead before he finished crying out.
He had stopped rowing a little past noon, and when I glanced over, he looked embarrassed.
“I’ve got to take a … short break,” he said vaguely.
Ruc just nodded.
The boat slowed, swayed as Hin stood on the bench. A moment later I could hear his piss splashing into the river. A flock of winebeaks passed silently overhead. I watched them gliding south until they disappeared. Ruc was checking on the twin barrels he’d loaded aboard the boat, testing the seals with his thumbnail. I tried, as I’d been trying all morning, to guess what might be inside. Some sort of bribe for the Vuo Ton, if we ever found them? Quey or plum wine? Did he hope to get them drunk, then slit their throats in the night? It seemed like an implausibly shitty plan.
Ruc raised his eyes, found me staring. For a moment we were locked there, linked in our silence. Then he winked at me—the first bit of levity I’d seen from him since we discovered the transport—and I found a grin twitching at the corner of my lips.
Then Hin started screaming.
The Greenshirt’s cries were more terror than pain, a wordless animal howl over and over until he collapsed.
I drew my knife as he dropped, but couldn’t find anything to stab. In Rassambur we learn to kill people, not snakes, and at first I didn’t even see the black ribbon slithering up the inside of the boat’s hull, flowing over the thwarts and benches fast as a shadow. Chua didn’t share my blindness. The woman pivoted and thrust all in one fluid motion, driving the forked point of her fishing spear down around the snake’s head, pinning it against the planks. The serpent—dull black and twice as long as my arm—hissed furiously, lashed the empty air with its tail.
Hin had tumbled into the boat’s bottom, eyes straining from his head, limbs convulsing, swollen tongue—purple and foaming—twitching between swollen lips. Dem Lun abandoned his oars, seized his friend, hauled him up onto the bench. It was a human gesture and futile one—my million-fingered god had the Greenshirt in his grip, and Ananshael, when he closes his fist, does not let go.
Ruc was trapped in the stern of the boat, unable, given the vessel’s narrow beam, to move past Ela or Kossal. Another man would have been bellowing useless orders or waving a sword. Ruc kept his hand on the tiller, keeping us clear of the banks. His jaw was clenched so tightly I thought it might break, but he stayed silent, letting the people near the fight do the actual fighting.
In the space of a few heartbeats, the snake had managed to writhe free of Chua’s spear. It reared up, looking for another target, and Kossal caught it just below the head, his movement as casual as a man picking up an old, familiar tool before setting to work.
“Kill it,” Chua said grimly.
The old monk didn’t seem to hear. He lifted the snake until its slit eyes were inches from his own, the jaws unhinged for another bite. The tail lashed him over and over, but Kossal paid it no mind.
“Kill it,” Chua said again.
“What is it called?” Kossal asked, never taking his eyes from the snake.
“‘Tien tra’,” Chua replied. “Four steps.”
“A strange name,” Kossal observed, “for a creature without feet.”
“It is named for the paces of its prey. When it bites you, you walk four steps. Then you die.”
Hin hadn’t made it that far. On the bench behind me, Dem Lun cradled the dead man’s shoulders, stared blankly into those blank, bulging eyes. The surviving Greenshirt seemed not to notice anything else in the boat, or anything beyond it. He was shaking his head slowly, murmuring over and over the same low syllable: “No. No. No.”
Kossal wrapped another gnarled hand around the snake, just below his first. The creature whipped furiously as he began to twist, slowly and inexorably.
“It would be easier,” Chua said, “to use a knife.”
The priest ignored her. The muscles in his forearms corded with the strain, but his face was calm, thoughtful, as he finally tore the head from the body. The tail he tossed overboard, where it thrashed, then sank. He studied the head a moment longer, then carefully closed the mouth, sheathing the fangs, and tucked it into a pocket in his robe.
Chua watched him through slitted eyes. “A dangerous trophy,” she observed finally.
“It is not a trophy,” Kossal re
plied, shaking his head. “It is a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That my god is everywhere, and one day he will gather even the ministers of his mercy into his patient hands.”
No one spoke. The current flowed on, opening its throat beneath the boat’s sharp bow. Half crouched on my bench, I wondered at the snake’s perfection, the way it had slipped silently into the boat and killed a man before the rest of us even noticed. It was only a beast, of course. It killed to eat, not to worship, but the thing’s humble grace made me feel foolish and ungainly. I straightened finally, slid my knife back into its sheath, then turned to look at the wrecked flesh that had been Hin. While I plotted and fretted and schemed, while I spent days trying to fall in love, to pass my Trial, to become a priestess, Ananshael had a million servants like the snake—patient, unordained—going about the work, unmaking lives and the misery and confusion woven through them. What need did the god have of me, of my clumsy devotion? What did it matter, finally, if I loved Ruc and killed him, or if, when I failed, Ela took my throat in her long, perfect hands and held it until I was gone?
There is an inexplicable hubris in any decision to serve a god.
I turned to look at Ela. During the whole frantic episode, she hadn’t stirred. Even as Hin screamed, twitched himself to stillness, she’d remained asleep, bare feet kicked up on the rail, brown legs glowing in the sun, hands folded behind her head. Now, though, as though she felt my gaze upon her, she opened a single, lazy eye. Without moving she glanced over the boat, the small, floating tableau of death, then closed her eye again and sighed.
“Does this mean I have to row?” she asked.
19
We reached the village of the Vuo Ton just before dusk.
At first, I thought Chua had lost her way. The channel in which we’d been traveling tightened, then tightened further, spear rushes leaning over our heads until we drifted through a brown-green tunnel, cut off from the sky and sun. When there was no more room for Dem Lun to ply the oars, he shipped them silently, secured them inside the hull, then picked up a wooden paddle from the boat’s bottom. The hot air was heavy with the sweet smells of mud and rot. Hidden in the stalks to either side, invisible creatures hissed and chittered. I kept seeing, out of the corner of my eye, flickers of motion, quick slitherings, but every time I turned there was only the wall of rushes, the still green water.
Skullsworn Page 29