Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  She wagged a finger at him. “But you drank the water.”

  “Drugged,” I said stupidly. “They drugged us.”

  “For which I, at least, am grateful,” Ela said, shrugging. “I appreciate a good, dreamless sleep after a day fighting crocodiles and a night of dancing.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  I turned to find Chua standing in front of her own hut, fully dressed, fishing spear in hand, studying the empty lake.

  “There were a hundred buildings here at midnight,” Kossal said.

  The fisher shook her head. “A hundred boats. I told you the Vuo Ton do not stay in the same place.”

  “You knew where to find them,” I pointed out. “We came directly here.”

  “No,” Chua said. “I knew where to look. We passed half a dozen other moorings, empty moorings, before finding this place, and we only found it because they allowed us to.”

  “But they did allow it. We passed the test. They welcomed us.”

  “I certainly felt welcomed,” Ela added with a wink, “by a lovely couple whose names now escape me.”

  “The Vuo Ton move,” Chua said, “when they need to move. When the village is threatened.”

  “Where’s the threat?” I asked, gesturing to the wide, empty lake.

  The door to the hut behind me rustled, and a moment later Ruc stepped out, shirtless, his good hand balled into a fist. “The threat,” he said grimly, “is fucking late.”

  Ela raised her eyebrows. “How mysterious.”

  I struggled for a couple heartbeats to make sense of the strange proclamation. Then it all fell into place.

  “You planned an attack,” I said, studying his face.

  He nodded wearily. “If they were responsible for the slaughter on the transport, this was the only chance.”

  Ela cocked her head to the side. “I’m a little unclear on the details. Were we supposed to massacre everyone last night? Because if that was the plan, I would have done less dancing and had less sex.”

  “No,” Ruc said. “We were just the dogs. The hunters are behind us, following our baying.”

  “I’ll admit that I enjoyed myself,” Ela said, frowning, “but it seems uncharitable to use the word baying.…”

  “The chum,” I realized. “Yesterday. The barrels you dumped overboard. That wasn’t a sacrifice.”

  “Blood brings qirna,” he said. “Qirna bring delta hawks. The birds have a wingspan of eight feet. With a long lens, you can see them circling from miles away, high above the rushes.”

  “Your men have been following us,” I said.

  He nodded. “The Greenshirts and the legions both. They have orders to ring the village and attack at dawn.”

  Chua spat in the water. “I told you already—no one finds the Vuo Ton if they do not want to be found.”

  “I expected a settlement,” Ruc said. “Not a batch of boats tethered together.” He scanned the waving rushes, searching for some break. “How far away are they?”

  “Miles,” Chua replied.

  “Can you track them?”

  She fixed him with a flat stare.

  “Why all the feasting?” Kossal asked. He was picking at something caught in his teeth, squinting speculatively into the waxen sky. “Why let us in at all, if they knew about the trap?”

  “The blood rush we plucked in the delta,” Chua said.

  Kossal frowned. “Sticking a bit of the local plant life in the front of a boat seems like a pretty meager excuse for planning an ambush.”

  “The Vuo Ton were never in any danger,” the woman replied. She turned to Ruc. “You will have told your men to stay well back, to let us make contact before closing in.”

  He grimaced, nodded.

  “So … what?” I said. “They just wanted to get to know us?”

  Chua shrugged. “The Vuo Ton trust in the providence of the Given Land. It is not often a boat from Dombâng finds its way here. Those that the Three let pass are not to be ignored.”

  “We found them,” Ruc said, “because you knew where to look. Not because the delta brought us here. Not because the Three were secretly leading the way.”

  “Even after what you’ve seen,” the fisher said, “you still do not believe.”

  “What have I seen?” Ruc demanded, turning to face her. “A trick village built out of boats. Two of my men killed, one by a croc, one by a snake.” He gestured to the rushes. “No gods. No golden-eyed women leaping out of the water.”

  “You have seen the Vuo Ton,” Chua replied. “Do you still believe they killed the men on your transport?”

  Ruc stared at the swaying reeds as though they were a script he could almost but not quite decipher. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally.

  “Sometimes it’s better,” Ela suggested, “to kill everyone first and leave the details for later.”

  “My orders weren’t to kill everyone,” Ruc said, shaking his head. “Not if they didn’t fight back. I just wanted the leaders, the warriors, whoever was responsible for the attack on the transport.”

  “And how many men,” Kossal asked, “did you think it would take to subdue the leaders, the warriors?”

  Ruc grimaced. “Two hundred. I would have brought more, but I didn’t want to weaken the force remaining in Dombâng.”

  “Two hundred,” Kossal said, “against thousands of Vuo Ton.”

  “It was a gamble,” Ruc admitted. “I figured half the population would be children or men and women too old to fight. I knew they’d see the boats before the final attack, but figured that still gave us an element of surprise. We have the superior weapons—flatbows, the rest of it.”

  Chua shook her head. “I could have told you this was wrong.”

  “I didn’t trust you not to warn them.”

  The morning was still. The sun, ruddy and reluctant, had risen a handsbreadth above the eastern rushes. I pointed to it.

  “You said your men had orders to attack at dawn. So where are they?”

  * * *

  We still hadn’t answered the question by the time we returned to Dombâng. After spending the whole day retracing our route through the delta’s winding channels—the same channels Ruc’s soldiers should have been following—we’d encountered only crocs and tufted ducks, winebeaks and tiny blue-headed rush thrushes. The sun had dropped out of the purpling sky by the time we could see the smoke rising from Dombâng’s chimneys. The first boat we spotted was a long coracle crewed by half a dozen fishers. They paused in the hauling of their nets, studied us warily, but didn’t raise a hand in greeting or cry out.

  Ruc and I had been rowing all afternoon, but when he noticed the fishers he shipped his oar and stood up.

  “Have you seen Greenshirts?” he shouted. Like most sound in the delta, his voice didn’t carry. It seemed to fade into the reeds, to sink into the mud. “War boats,” he went on. “Packed with soldiers?”

  The oldest of the fishers shook his head gravely, watched us a moment longer, then turned back to his nets.

  “Your soldiers are probably dead,” Ela announced lazily. “Just like the others. The ones on the transport.”

  It wasn’t the first time during the long trip back that she’d made the observation, but for the first time Ruc responded. He rounded on the woman, who was reclining lazily in the bow, leveled his finger at her as though he planned to plunge it through her neck.

  “The men on that transport were tricked, then ambushed. Most of them were probably drunk, finishing off the last of the journey’s rum before gliding into the city. Every one of the soldiers I sent out this morning was armed with a flatbow, sword, and spear. They knew the foe and they were ready.”

  “No one is ready for the Given Land,” Chua said. She slid onto the bench beside me, lifted the oars from my hands. “Move.”

  “I can finish,” I said.

  “Night is almost here, and you are slowing down. I do not intend to die so close to Dombâng that I can
smell the smoke.”

  Reluctantly, I climbed aside. Ruc and I hadn’t spoken all afternoon, but there had been a satisfaction, even a joy, in sitting close to him, matching my rhythm to his, listening to his breath, deep and even, as he leaned back against the oar, feeling his bare shoulder brush against mine. We’d spent so much time vying with each other, sparring, testing, distrusting; it felt good to labor at the same task, to work in concert. The oar felt honest in my hands. As long as we were silent, there could be no lies.

  Chua was right, though; I was exhausted. The sooner we docked at the Shipwreck, the sooner we could find out what happened to Ruc’s missing boats and the missing soldiers. More than that, I realized I wanted to be back in Dombâng. No one had died on the return trip—Chua had neatly speared the one snake that swam close to the boat—but the open delta at night brought back memories of my childhood, of huddling hungry and terrified in the low branches of that tree, knife clutched in my hand, waiting for something to emerge from the shadows to kill me. The dying part didn’t bother me any longer, but not all fears are about death, and I breathed a long sigh of relief as the city buildings closed around us once more, as ruddy lanterns replaced the last light draining from the sky.

  The relief didn’t last.

  Before we’d gone two dozen boat lengths into the city’s canals, I realized something was strange. There were too few people on the docks, bridges, and causeways. Usually, the folk of Dombâng tended to congregate outside in the relative cool of the evening. Tavern terraces overlooking the canals would begin to fill. Fishers would yoke their boats together, come out from the canvas tents onto the decks. Stalls on the bridges, closed during the day’s worst heat, would open, selling fruit and crushed ice, plum wine and a hundred varieties of quey. That, at least, was what happened on a normal night. This night felt different. At first I thought my mind was playing tricks after two days in the delta. Maybe it wasn’t as late as I thought. Maybe this part of the city didn’t see the same kind of traffic. As we slid noiselessly over the darkening water, however, I noticed Ruc, too, studying the walkways and bridges, a frown on his face.

  Ela picked her head up from the bench where she’d been dozing, cast a sleepy eye over our surroundings. “It seems less lively than I remember.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Ruc said.

  The few people who were out scuttled along the walkways, glancing furtively over their shoulders every few paces. The boats on the canal gave us a wide berth as we approached. No one hailed us. No one so much as looked our direction. We might have been ghosts drifting through the evening on an empty boat. We might have died out in the delta for all the notice anyone gave us.

  “The city was skittish when we left,” I pointed out. “If there was another riot…”

  Ruc nodded. “Curfew. I gave orders for the Greenshirts to lock the city down at the first sign of violence.” He cursed quietly. “That explains where the legions went.”

  “I thought you left enough men to deal with the city.”

  “So did I. But it’s a big fucking city. Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.”

  Despite rowing all afternoon, he picked up the tempo. Chua glanced over, then matched him, and the boat darted forward, carving through the water as though it were a living thing eager to be home. I watched the great buildings of the city slide past: the Temple of Intarra, spangled with glass; the brooding, half-collapsed custom house of Old Harbor; the water gates, built by Anho the Fat as a way to close off the city’s heart from any ocean-borne attack. It looked dead, all of it. Instead of lanterns and cook fires, singing and drumming, we passed empty alehouses, empty whorehouses, boats with empty decks. I had thought a lot about killing in my life, had witnessed the life pour out of dozens of people, but I’d never imagined the death of an entire city. There was something holy about Dombâng that night. It seemed larger than I remembered, more grand, less filthy. I found myself wanting to explore the dark canals, to leave Chua, and Kossal, and Ela, take up my oar again at Ruc’s side, see for the first time the city where I had grown up.

  Ruc, of course, had other concerns. When we rounded the tip of First Island, the Shipwreck loomed into view. The huge, haphazard wooden fortress brooded over the canal, low towers stabbing the sky, ramparts, like rows of jagged, broken teeth, gnawing at the night. There, at least, the windows were ablaze with light, as though every candle and lantern were burning, every soldier awake. Down at the docks, too, torches and lanterns illuminated the ranks of boats. Two dozen sentries patrolled those docks, chain mail catching the light, breaking it, reflecting it back. All of them carried flatbows.

  Ruc glanced over his shoulder to where I was holding the tiller. “Stay wide,” he murmured, then nodded toward one of the larger vessels swinging at anchor in the center of the current. “Over there. I want some cover while we decide what to do next.”

  “You don’t think they’re your men?” Kossal asked.

  “Can’t tell yet,” Ruc said, “and sitting still in the middle of the river doesn’t seem the greatest place to find out.”

  One of the Greenshirts noticed us just as we slid in close to the looming hull of the double-masted carrack.

  “Fishers,” he called out. “You’re in violation of curfew.”

  A few of the Greenshirts moved toward one of their own boats tied off at the dock.

  “Curfew?” Ruc replied, voice barely loud enough to carry over the water. “Under whose authority?”

  “Commander Lan Lac,” the Greenshirt said. “There are to be no unmoored boats between sunset and sunrise.”

  “You’ve been busy,” Ela murmured. “Chasing down the Vuo Ton and issuing orders back here in the city.”

  Ruc shook his head. “I left instructions.” He raised a hand to his mouth. “Hoai,” he called out. “Those are my fucking orders.”

  That caused a stir on the dock, Greenshirts murmuring to one another, lowering their bows, pointing into the darkness where we floated. The soldier named Hoai turned to another, shorter man, conferred for a moment in a voice too quiet to hear, then looked back to us.

  “Apologies, Commander,” he said. “I didn’t recognize your voice. Still, I need to ask you for the pass phrase before you approach. Your own orders, sir.”

  “How delightfully paranoid,” Ela observed.

  Ruc ignored her. I expected him to call out a word or sentence, but instead he raised his voice and began to sing the haunting opening bars to Antreem’s Mass. His singing voice was deeper than his speech, a full octave lower, and the notes seemed to vibrate the very hull of the boat, to tremble the surface of the water, to shake something inside my chest, a drum-tight organ that might have been my heart. He sang for a few moments only, but the music lingered in the air, in the ear, even after he was finished. The last time I’d heard the Mass had been that night in Sia, the night we first met. Ruc glanced toward me as he fell silent, but in the darkness I couldn’t see his face.

  “Come on in, sir,” Hoai said. “And again, my apologies.”

  “Stop apologizing,” Ruc said. “If you’d ignored my orders I would have had you flogged.”

  He nodded to Chua, the two dipped their oars, and the boat shifted beneath me as we slid over the glass-black water toward the dock.

  Hoai caught the painter as Ruc and Chua backed water, snugged the bow in close while another of the Greenshirts reached out to haul in the stern. Ruc was out of the vessel before it was even tied, leaping across the gap, landing easily, already asking questions.

  “Riots or an organized push?”

  “Organized, sir,” Hoai replied. “Three coordinated attacks.”

  “The result?”

  “We crushed two. The third we’ve got bottled up just south of New Harbor, although there are outbreaks of violence all over the city. Hence the curfew.”

  “Casualties?”

  Before the Greenshirt could reply, the man behind him gasped, choked, then collapsed, clutching at a knife buried in his chest.
<
br />   My knives were out of their sheaths before he hit the dock, as was Ruc’s sword. The rest of the soldiers, who had lowered their flatbows as we approached, scrambled to train the weapons on us once again, some dropping to a knee to steady their aim, others spreading out, as though to block off any avenue of escape. Hoai was staring, frozen, at Ela, who spread her hands innocently.

  “What have you done?” Ruc demanded, rounding on the woman.

  She nodded toward the fallen soldier. His blood, slick as polished lacquer, caught the starlight, reflected it back in a score of bright pinpricks.

  “I thought it might be a good idea to kill him,” she said mildly, “before he killed us.”

  “These are my men,” Ruc spat.

  Ela pursed her lips, glanced over the Greenshirts. “I don’t think so.”

  Ruc laid the tip of his sword against her throat.

  She didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice.

  “Hoai,” he said, not moving his eyes from the priestess. “Take her. Take all of them to a holding cell.”

  The Greenshirt’s silence was wide and dark as the night itself. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were bleak.

  “He’s not on your team, love,” Ela said, shaking her head.

  “She’s right,” Hoai said. He glanced over at Ruc’s men, at his men, two dozen of them, every flatbow aimed at one of us. At that distance, a child could put a bolt through an eyeball. “Take all of them to a holding cell,” he added, then nodded to Ruc. “Including him.”

  Ela glanced over at Kossal. “We could make a great gift to the god.”

  The older priest shook his head irritably. “I want to see Pyrre’s golden-eyed, unkillable goddess before I am unmade.”

  “Drop your sword, sir,” Hoai said.

  Ruc turned from Ela to his lieutenant, the sword still in his hand.

  His voice was the scrape of a knife over stone when he replied. “Why?”

  Hoai shook his head, as though the question were too big to answer. “Drop your sword.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “No,” the younger man replied grimly. “You tell me why you betrayed your own city.”