Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “This,” Kossal observed mildly, “reminds me of a chute where animals are slaughtered.”

  The prospect didn’t seem to bother him. Ruc, however, was scanning the rushes, one hand on the tiller, the other holding his loaded flatbow. He shifted to aim the weapon at Chua.

  “If you have betrayed us,” he said, “the first quarrel goes through your throat.”

  The woman glanced at the weapon, then turned away to prod at the reeds with her fishing spear. “If the Vuo Ton wanted to kill us, we would be dead.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  For a while, she didn’t respond, just kept testing the rushes, sliding her spear between them down into the muddy bank, then pulling it back. Finally, she found a place where the forked head came back dripping water instead of covered with mud.

  “We go through here.”

  I eyed the rushes. “Looks like a perfect place for more widow’s kiss. Or snakes.”

  Chua shook her head. “The Vuo Ton scatter ash and salt on the water. The spiders and snakes stay away from it.”

  Salt and ash seemed like meager shields against the predators of the delta, but we had come this far under Chua’s protection. Ruc studied the reeds for a while, then nodded to Dem Lun. The Greenshirt—his eyes still wide and blank with the horror of Hin’s death—began paddling once more, and the boat nosed into the rushes, parting them, gliding up the hidden channel until we were surrounded by the swaying stalks, the open water behind us lost. No one spoke. Bright-winged birds—red, flame-orange, blue—flitted back and forth, vexed at the encroachment on their nests, but no snakes slipped into the boat. No spiders dropped from the reeds above. Then, between one paddle stroke and next, we broke from the rushes and into the open.

  It took a moment for me to realize what I was seeing.

  Backwaters dotted the delta, spots where the current slowed or disappeared, places that seemed more like ponds than the forgotten channels of a great river. This was no pond. It was a lake. Open water stretched away for hundreds of paces in every direction. After weeks hemmed in by the walls and alleys of Dombâng, by the ranks of rushes flanking every channel, I’d forgotten the size of the sky. Instead of a fragment of cloud, a glimpse of the sun wedged between the rooftops, I could see all of it now, the huge, unbroken blue. After the dappled shadow of the rushes, the sunlight shattering off the open lake was so dazzling that for a moment I could see nothing but light and space. I shaded my eyes with a hand, and slowly shapes began to resolve from the brilliance.

  Near the center, ringed by open water, was a village, if village is the right word for a settlement in which nothing is settled. The Vuo Ton seemed to have built everything—their homes, their barges, their walkways, even a few of their boats—from rushes. Narrow sheaves served as posts or railings. Larger bundles—waist thick, cinched with cord—took the place of beams and posts, holding up cleverly thatched roofs. At first I thought the Vuo Ton had built on one of the delta’s low-lying islands, but as I stared at the settlement, I realized it was flexing, rising and falling with the water, as though the whole thing were alive, breathing.

  “It floats,” I said stupidly.

  Chua nodded. “Every home is a boat.”

  Dugout canoes ringed the village, two or three tied off to each structure. Half a dozen small children were playing in one, chanting a song in a language I couldn’t understand while they danced bafflingly complex steps on the gunwales, leaping from one side to the other just as the boat started to tip. In another canoe, two girls balanced on the rails as they did battle with fishing spears, stabbing and blocking, each rocking the hull in an effort to topple the other. A few old folks sat on a floating raft a few paces away, sipping something from clay cups and heckling.

  Behind me, I heard the crack, then groan of a cask being opened. I turned to find Ruc tossing aside the wooden cover. His shoulders flexed as he hefted the thing up onto the rail, then dumped the contents. Gray-blue ropes of tangled intestine slopped into the water, buoyed up by pockets of gas caught inside. Blood spread in a dark slick beside the boat. Ruc watched it for a moment, eyes unreadable, then went to work with his belt knife on the second cask.

  “What are you doing?” Chua asked.

  “The gods want an offering,” Ruc replied, pouring the second barrel into the water. “This is an offering. If the Vuo Ton love blood, here is blood. Call it a gesture of good will.”

  The fisher studied him warily, but held her peace. Overhead the birds had already begun to gather, a dark cloud of razor-beaks and blue throats eager for the feast.

  Dem Lun had stopped paddling in order to stare at the village. “They don’t even seem to know we’re here,” he murmured.

  Chua snorted, then jerked her head back the way we had come.

  I turned. Immediately behind us, four canoes slid from between the reeds into the open water. The men and women in the slender boats carried short bows. They sighted down the length of arrows which were trained, as far as I could tell, directly on our throats. The arrowheads weren’t steel—they seemed to be bone or, I realized after a moment, teeth. I studied the one closest to me, then followed the shaft of that arrow back to the steady eyes behind it.

  The Vuo Ton looked like just about everyone else born in Dombâng: brown skin and fine black hair, high cheekbones, square jaws. Like Chua, they wore hide—crocodile or snakeskin—tight breeches, and vests that left bare their slender, muscled arms. The main difference, of course, between the people in the boats and the citizens of Dombâng was the ink: dark lines slashed across faces and down arms, streaking necks and hands, as though every bit of flesh had been raked with shadow. I recognized the man aiming at me after a moment; he was the same man who had followed me through the alleys the night I’d painted my prints all over the city. He didn’t lower his bow, but to my surprise he smiled, then winked.

  “I think they like us,” Ela said. The priestess had finally woken up, climbed out of the bottom of the boat, and stood between the thwarts stretching lazily, leaning to one side then the next, bending forward to touch her toes.

  “People who like me tend to bring fewer bows,” Ruc replied. He was still holding the belt knife he’d used to open the casks, but after a few heartbeats wisely returned it to its sheath.

  I hadn’t quite believed we would find the Vuo Ton. Especially after Hin died, it seemed possible we might return to Dombâng empty-handed, defeated. Even moments earlier, as we’d shoved through the reeds, I couldn’t really imagine discovering anything on the other side of the vegetation but another channel, another leg of the watery labyrinth. It seemed it might go on forever, that the whole world had been swallowed by the delta, that we were alone in it, six people and a corpse blundering blindly forward, relying on Chua’s decades-old memories of a place and a people that might have vanished years before.

  And then here they were, sliding toward us in those black canoes, smiling disconcertingly from behind their bows. The man who finally broke their silence carried a paddle rather than a bow. Unlike the others, he had remained sitting in the stern of his canoe, still as an idol as he studied us. Long lines of scar streaked his face, cross-hatching the tattoos. One of those scars had ruined an eye, leaving behind a puckered welt. The man’s other eye, however, was keen, bright with the light of the sun.

  “Never them, sister,” he said finally, nodding to Chua, his voice quiet as the wind through the rushes.

  She nodded to him in return. “Never them, Cam Hua.”

  He smiled, shook his head, then held a finger to the empty socket. “Cam Hua died in the delta. I am the Witness of the Vuo Ton.” He spoke perfect Annurian, but an accent tugged at the edges of his words, as though the language felt strange on his tongue.

  Ela raised her eyebrows speculatively at the mention of a witness. She glanced over at Kossal, who just shrugged. The title might have seemed a strange coincidence, but then, I was hardly the only creature in the world that bore watching.

  Chua hadn’
t taken her eyes from the seated figure. “When I left, you were barely more than a boy.”

  “And you not much more than a girl.” He shrugged. “Water flows. Channels shift. In enough time, even the lost return.”

  Chua shook her head. “Not to stay.”

  “You should not hate the place that made you what you are.”

  “What about the place that took the man I loved?” she countered. “May I hate that?”

  “I saw him, this man you loved. He was not made to face the delta.”

  “Of course he wasn’t. Just as you are not made to face the wide sea. And yet he braved the channels each day all the same.”

  The man who called himself the Witness bowed to her then, an odd ceremonial gesture that might have been a concession or an apology. It seemed utterly out of place for someone sitting in the stern of the canoe, paddle in hand, especially given all the arrows pointed at us. When he spoke again, however, he sounded sincere.

  “Each heart beats its own rhythm. You have my grief. I will plant a violet for the one you loved.”

  Ruc, who had been watching silently, shifted at those words.

  “Tell me about the violets,” he said quietly.

  The Witness ignored him, kept his gaze on Chua. “Here are more people who do not belong in the delta.”

  “They demanded to come.”

  “There was a transport,” Ruc began grimly, “packed with Annurian soldiers—”

  The Witness tapped a finger idly on his paddle, a bowstring hummed, then an arrow sprouted from the rail of our boat, inches from Ruc’s leg.

  “Explain to him,” the older man said, “that he has not earned his voice.”

  Chua’s face tightened. “He is not Vuo Ton.”

  “None of them are,” the Witness replied mildly. “And yet you brought them here.”

  “They were persuasive.”

  “Perhaps you have forgotten our laws: the Vuo Ton allow children, and those who have earned their voice. None other. These,” he gestured with the paddle, “are hardly children.…”

  “They are not here to become Vuo Ton,” Chua replied. “They want to talk to you.” She hesitated. “About the Three.”

  “How will they talk with no voices?”

  Chua sucked a breath between her clenched teeth. “They are made from the same stuff as my husband. They are not built to face our gods.”

  “Our gods?” The Witness shook his head. “I would give the rest of my sight before offering such feeble creatures to the gods. If they want to talk, they can earn their voices.”

  “How do we do that?” Ruc demanded.

  “In the same way as the rest of our children,” the older man replied with a gentle smile. “There is a test.”

  I found myself suddenly, massively tired of tests. The words fell out of me, tumbling through my lips before I could catch them.

  “And what if we don’t?”

  The Witness shrugged again. “The delta is always hungry.”

  Ruc shook his head, furious but ready. “What’s the fucking test?”

  * * *

  Our group made a strange procession over the rafts and bridges of the floating village. The warriors from the canoes stalked at our back, bows drawn and fixed on our shoulders, while small children ducked and darted around us, stabbing at our legs with barbed fishing spears. There seemed to be no malice in the attacks; the lithe little bastards treated the whole thing like a game, laughing and pointing, racing back and forth, poking at one another almost as much as they did at us.

  “I am considering giving this entire village to the god,” Kossal muttered, parrying the hundredth attack with an open hand.

  “Why do you hate fun?” Ela asked. She danced and twirled her way over the bridges, knocking aside the spears, catching the stones hurled at her and throwing them back, poking kids in the nose, tugging on ears.

  Ruc ignored the barbed spears entirely. Even when they drew blood, he didn’t glance down, and after a short time the children tired of him. He was studying the village with a look I recognized, sizing it up, planning for a fight.

  For something built entirely of rushes, the town looked surprisingly comfortable. Each house had tall windows to let in the breeze and cleverly contrived blinds to block out the brightest sun. Wide awnings overhung the fronts of the rafts, shading clusters of mats woven from the rushes. We passed a wide hall—far larger than I would have suspected possible working only with reeds. The high windows were hung with stitched tapestries of feather—red and yellow, orange and blue—through which the late-day sunlight poured its warm light, drenching the floor with color.

  The line of rafts where the cooking took place looked at first to be hewn of stone. As we drew closer, however, I realized it was clay baked over the surface of the reeds beneath. Dozens of clay bowls steamed above carefully banked fires, while skewered meat smoked above steaming palm leaves. The fires washed the southern half of the town in a haze of smoke that smelled of baked fish, and fire-peppers, and sweet reeds.

  “Where are we going?” Ruc asked, turning to Chua.

  “To meet the Scales of the gods.”

  “Scales?” I asked, seizing the closest spear, blocking two others, then cracking it over the heads of my diminutive attackers. They shrieked with delight, retreated, began to regroup.

  “Snakes, crocs, fish,” Kossal grumbled. “Aren’t there enough scales in this miserable cesspool?”

  I glanced at the warriors behind us. If they took offense at Kossal’s words, I couldn’t see it. On the other hand, those bows were still bent, the tooth-tipped arrows still pointed directly at our backs.

  “Wrong kind of scale,” Chua said, as we stepped from the houses into the open. “These Scales are the kind used for measuring.”

  “What are we measuring?” I asked.

  “You are not measuring anything. You will be measured. To see if you deserve a voice.”

  “That is incredibly sensible,” Ela said. “The world would be a better place if everyone who wanted to talk had to pass a test first.”

  Chua snorted. “If all the world took this test, the world would be a quieter place.” She nodded. “Here.”

  We had emerged beside a wide pool of water. I glanced over my shoulder to get my bearings, then realized a moment later that the village of rush huts and rafts formed a rough circle at the center of the lake. Inside that circle was a pond a few dozen paces across, a small lake inside the lake, ringed by the huts and boats. It might have been a pleasant place for kids to swim and adults to bathe, a sort of watery town square protected from the rest of the delta. Protected from everything, that is, aside from the three crocodiles lounging inside it.

  I didn’t see the creatures at first—none of us did.

  It took me a moment to find the scaly tails parting the water, the eyes floating just above the surface. Each of the crocs looked at least ten feet long, all scale and tooth and claw.

  Whenever a crocodile drifted into Dombâng on the river’s current, a group of fishers—usually one or two dozen—would go after it with nets and spears. The hunt was part revenge—crocs killed fishers every year—and part practical city management. No one wanted to live and work within paces of a beast that could take off a leg in a single bite, that would rear up to seize its prey, drag it screaming into the water, then roll over and over until it drowned or bled out.

  No one, that is, aside from the Vuo Ton.

  “Here,” the Witness of the Vuo Ton said, “you will worship in the Scales of the gods.”

  “Worship,” Ela replied, frowning, “can be such a dull enterprise. A lot of mumbling and mantras.”

  “If a mantra helps you face the Scales,” the Witness said, smiling, “you are welcome to it.”

  Dem Lun was staring, frozen, at the circling creatures. “Face them?” he managed, voice barely more than a charred whisper. “You mean fight them?”

  “A less strenuous devotion would not be worth the name. Succeed, and you will earn y
our voices.”

  Chua sucked in a deep breath, then let it out. “I will worship with them.”

  I glanced over at her. “You didn’t even want to come back here, and now you’re ready to wrestle crocs?”

  “If you die,” the fisher replied, “my coin dies with you.”

  The Witness turned to consider Chua. After a moment he shook his head regretfully. “So this is why you have come back. I remember you, sister, from a time when you would not forsake your people for a handful of metal.”

  “I left for Tem,” she said.

  “And this coin?”

  “The coin is so I don’t ever have to come back.” She tossed her spears onto the floating raft at her feet, pulled free the net coiled on her back, then spread it open with an expert toss. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The Witness shook his head. “You earned your voice years ago.”

  “Then I’ll earn it again.”

  “You know this is not the way.”

  “They’ll be slaughtered,” Chua said grimly.

  The massive creatures circled the small lake as though they could sense the coming violence. I could feel my own eagerness, too, rising inside me. For more than a week I had been sneaking around the city, inciting civil war, following Ruc like a puppy, trying to fall in love. The days had been muddy, baffling. I couldn’t tell from one moment to the next if I was edging closer to my goal or drowning slowly without noticing it. It seemed a long time since I had placed myself in the hand of my god. I found myself aching for the focus, the clarity.

  “We’ll be fine,” I heard myself say.

  The Witness raised his brows, but before he could respond, Dem Lun began backing away. “No,” he murmured, eyes fixed on the crocodiles, then again, louder, as though a single word could hold the world at bay, “No.”