“Where is the betrayal in stopping centuries, millennia of bloody ‘sacrifice’?”
“What of the sacrifice required by Annur? The coin stolen from our pockets? The freedom torn from our hands? What about the history scrubbed out, the pride annihilated? What about the people, our people, that we execute right here, in front of this very fortress?”
His voice was shook, and even when he fell silent I could see his shoulders trembling with barely suppressed rage.
“Without law,” Ruc replied quietly, “there is only suffering.”
Hoai shook his head. “From now on we will make our own law. As we did before Annur put her boot on the city’s throat.”
“You are an idiot. You won’t know how easily this city breathed until these so-called priests begin choking it.”
The Greenshirt started to respond, then checked himself. “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to drop your sword.”
I put a hand on Ruc’s arm before he could attack. If it were darker, if the range was greater, if we had any cover or flatbows of our own, we might make a fight of it. As it was, however, we stood near the center of an empty dock. The nearest escape was the water, half a dozen paces away. The men with the flatbows wouldn’t even need to be fast to put bolts in our backs, and before I died I wanted to pass the Trial. When Ananshael finally untangled the stuff of my soul, I wanted him to know the full measure of my devotion.
“Not now,” I murmured.
Ruc didn’t look at me, but after a moment he tossed his sword contemptuously aside.
“The rest of you, too,” Hoai said.
Kossal spat onto the dock. “Don’t have any weapons.”
“Which, at the moment,” Ela added thoughtfully, “is starting to look like an oversight.”
* * *
I caught a glimpse of the cell as Ruc’s renegade Greenshirts shoved us inside: a narrow box ten feet by ten feet, the floor and walls carved out of the island’s red-brown bedrock, ceiling built of cedar beams, each one nearly as thick as my waist. Not the perfect prison. Given a chisel, a stool to reach that ceiling, and an uninterrupted week in which to work, anyone with a brain and a little muscle could break out. Of course, no one had given us a chisel or a stool, and a week seemed optimistic. I was still scanning the space for another weakness when the door slammed shut behind us and darkness closed its unrelenting fist.
“I’ll admit I’m vexed,” Ela said after a few moments of silence. “I was looking forward to a bath, a bottle of plum wine, and one of those attractive young men from Anho’s Dance.”
“It was a mistake,” Kossal said, “putting us in the same cell.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Ela replied.
The old priest snorted. “We’re more dangerous together.”
“To whom?” I asked. My eyes had had time to adjust and I still could see nothing, not even shadows to attach to the various voices. “We might have made a play on the docks. Now that we’re in here, all they need to do is keep the door closed to kill us.”
“They’re not going to kill us.” Ruc’s voice, at the far end of the cell. In the momentary silence that followed, I could hear him dragging a hand along the rough wall. It was easy to imagine he wasn’t a man, but some animal, patient and dangerous, even caged. “They want us alive. Probably for some mockery of a trial.”
“I can understand why they want you,” Ela said. “Traitor to your home, your people, all that. I’m not sure what they’ll get out of putting Kossal and me on trial. He’s done nothing but sit around and gripe since we arrived in the city, and unless Dombâng has some ridiculous archaic laws about who is allowed to put what inside whom, I can’t imagine I’ve done anything wrong.”
“You just put a knife in the chest of that Greenshirt on the dock,” I pointed out.
“Surely a woman can be forgiven the occasional indiscretion.”
“How did you know?” Ruc asked. He had paused in his circuit of the cell just behind my shoulder. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel him there, a strength in the darkness.
Kossal replied instead of Ela. “They were all looking at the wrong thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Us,” the old priest went on. “They had their flatbows aimed at the river, but they were watching us.”
“We’d just returned from two days in the delta,” Ruc pointed out. “It could have been amazement. Curiosity.”
“Could have been,” Kossal said. “But it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
“If I said something, one of you fools might have done something. They had flatbows on us, which meant dying, which is fine, but I’m still keen to put a knife into whatever’s out there in the delta.”
From the far corner of the cell, Chua spoke. She sounded older in the darkness, more tired. “You might still have the chance.”
“They’re not going to put us on trial,” I said, the whole thing blooming in my mind at once. “That’s not why they’re keeping us alive.” It only made sense once I saw it. “Trials aren’t native to Dombâng. They’re Annurian. To anyone who worships the Three, justice and sacrifice are the same thing. Before the empire came, criminals weren’t tried by courts; they were given to the delta.”
No one spoke. The only sound was our breathing’s whispered polyphony.
“Well, that,” Ela said finally, “raises my spirits considerably. A trial sounded tedious.”
* * *
Lock most people in a hot, lightless cell with only the promise of a bloody, vicious death to look forward to, and they will stay awake all night, imagining the horrors of the future in a thousand different forms. Most minds will supply their own torture well before the executioner comes with his ax, before the sticks are piled around the stake, before the furious mob hurls the first stone. History is filled with tales of women and men locked in small rooms, sane on the day they entered, raving mad by the time they emerged to face their various fates.
Kossal and Ela were not like those people.
After establishing that there was no way out, that there was no point clawing at the walls, that, in all likelihood, we would be sacrificed to the delta—a positive development as far as both of them were concerned—they chose the smoothest spots they could find on the rough floor and went promptly to sleep, Kossal’s snoring the jagged bass line to Ela’s deep, steady breathing. Peace is one of Ananshael’s greatest gifts—when you have spent your whole life preparing to meet the god, his approach holds no terror.
Chua took longer.
“I knew this,” she said after Kossal and Ela had fallen asleep.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“That I would die here.”
Ruc was sitting next to me, his back to the cool rock wall. “We’re not dead yet,” he said.
“We will be.”
“You survived the delta once,” I pointed out. “Twelve days alone.”
“Ten days alone,” she said. “Tem was with me for the first two.”
I tried to find some shape in the blackness, some human form, then gave up and closed my eyes.
“What happened to him?” I asked. “How did he die?”
“I killed him.”
Ruc shifted at my side. I could imagine him, too, staring into that perfect black. For a long time, no one spoke.
“Why?” I asked finally.
“The knife seemed kind. More kind than spiders or crocs, jaguar or qirna. I did not expect to survive. Not him. Not me.”
The next question seemed wrong to ask, and I had no idea how to pose it, but I needed the answer.
“Did he know? That it was you?”
“I stabbed him as he slept. He woke, looked into my eyes, and died.”
“And you thought you could escape from that,” Ruc said, “with a few hundred pieces of gold?”
“I told myself I might.” Chua paused, then went on. “I knew I could not. The Given Land is inside me.”
>
“What the fuck does that mean?” Ruc demanded. He sounded more tired than angry, despite the edge to his words.
“No one escapes. Even those who walk out walk out different. The Land makes them into something else.”
All over again I could feel the boa coiling around my eight-year-old body, could feel myself slamming the knife into the snake over and over and over, then later, days later, into the chest of my father as he slept, into my mother’s neck, the blood hot all over my hands, my own scream strangled in my throat.
“Save the superstition for the priests,” Ruc growled.
He couldn’t see my memory. With the hot darkness packed between us, he couldn’t see my hands trembling. “The delta is a place like any other place. More dangerous, maybe, but still just dirt and water, plants and animals.”
“And something else,” Chua said quietly.
I dragged myself free of my memories. “Did you see her?”
“Not her,” Chua replied. “The other two. Sinn and Hang Loc. I saw them first just as I killed Tem. They were watching, standing on a bank across the channel. I took them for men at first, called out, but what men would be standing naked on a mudbank with no boat, no spears, nothing but those beautiful, awful eyes?”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“Watched. For days they watched, followed me. I thought they were gone a dozen times only to find them around the next bend, through the next wall of rushes. They moved through the delta like shadows, like sunlight.”
“For creatures that love killing,” Ruc said, “these gods of yours seem to let a lot of people go.”
“I was too weak to hunt,” Chua replied. “After snake bites and spider bites I could barely move my left arm. Half my blood I had poured into the river. There was no sport in hunting me.”
“Maybe they’ll let us go this time, too,” Ruc said.
“No,” Chua said. “I go into the delta this time to die.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I feel it.”
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Ruc burst out. “What is it about the Three that obliterates all capacity for rational thought? I’ll concede there may be something out there, something unbelievable. Maybe even Csestriim. I don’t understand why that means we need to abandon all reason and start speaking entirely in ominous, meaningless fragments.”
“Bring your rational thought with you into the delta,” Chua said. “All men should have something to cling to as they die.”
* * *
During the long silence while I waited for Chua to fall asleep, my mind shuttled back and forth between two problems. The first was one of devotion. All women die, but when the moment came, I wanted to go to my god a priestess rather than a failure. I had two days left to complete my Trial, two days in which to make two offerings: a pregnant woman and the love of my fucking life. Putting aside the vexations of the latter, even the first of the two kills suddenly looked improbable. There was a dearth of mothers ripe with new life inside the cell, unless Ela had been improbably careless in her liaisons. If we’d been free, out in the city itself, I could at least have completed that part of the Trial. As it was, I expected to be dragged directly from the cell to the delta. If there were some sort of trial, some public spectacle, I might manage to kill a woman en route, but that would do nothing to solve the other, larger problem.
Love.
I lay my head back against the stone wall of the cell and closed my eyes. I could remember Ruc’s hands on my skin, his mouth on mine, could remember him moving over me, inside me, those eyes, that scarred, bronze-brown skin flexing with the muscles beneath. That night with the Vuo Ton had brought us closer than we’d been when I first arrived in Dombâng, and not just because of the sex. We’d survived the delta together, fought our way free of the crocs, found the Vuo Ton. Every challenge shared, every revelation, seemed to bind us closer. On the other hand, those revelations had their limits: almost everything I’d told him, everything except the story of my childhood sacrifice, had been a lie.
Is it possible to love a person you’ve lied to? Possible to love a person to whom you’ve told almost nothing but lies? How could I love Ruc if he didn’t know me, and how could he know me if I never told him the truth? Ela could love a man who’d never seen her before, love a man based only on the shape of his face or the work of his hands—but I was not Ela. To drop my guard, to test the full limit of my feeling for Ruc, I needed to know what he felt for me … and to know that, I needed to give him the truth.
But which truth? How much of it?
I came here to find you.
I came here to fall in love with you.
I came here to kill you.
The first two were all right, but the last statement seemed unlikely to kindle in him the unquenchable flame of desire. The ways of my lord are obscure. Even brave men misunderstand his justice and his mercy. Ruc’s comments to the Vuo Ton were evidence enough that he saw himself as a soldier, not a sacrifice. If I had more time, I could have explained it to him, I could have shown him the truth: sacrifice is part of who we are. Without it, nothing we do—not the loving or hating, the victories or defeat—mean anything. The Csestriim and the Nevariim were immortal vessels, but hollow. Antreem’s Mass would be impossible without its ending, and Ruc was a creature every bit as gorgeous and ungraspable as that mass. All true music ends. Death is no diminishment.
With more time, I might have explained this, but I didn’t have more time. I had two days. I couldn’t give him the whole truth of who I was or why I’d come, but maybe I could give him more. Maybe I could give him enough.
I opened my eyes, stared blankly into the dark. I could hear him breathing evenly beside me. He didn’t seem to be asleep.
This is a terrible gamble, I thought, then reminded myself that everything is a gamble. Life is a gamble. The only sure bet is death. I turned my face to him, glad he could not see me when I spoke.
“I started this.”
He shifted slightly. I could imagine his eyes on me. “For a short sentence, that’s remarkably unclear.”
I gathered myself. “The revolt.” The first words were the hardest, like the first few strokes in cold water when the chest constricts and breath comes jagged and uneven. “When I arrived in the city, I was the one who left the bloody hands everywhere.”
The air in the cell felt suddenly, dangerously still. I found myself tensing for a fight, turning slightly to face the coming attack, getting ready. I forced myself to stop. The whole point of the truth was to drop my guard, not to redouble it. Ruc was still as a boulder balanced at the top of a great cliff.
“Why?” he asked finally.
I hesitated. The whole point was to approach the truth, but just how close?
“You’re not Kettral,” Ruc said after a long pause.
I dragged in a long, unsteady breath. “No.”
I felt the space between us shift then deform beneath the weight of that single syllable.
“What are you?”
“I was hoping you would ask who.”
“I guess neither one of us is going to get what we’d hoped for tonight.”
“I’m telling you this,” I insisted, trying to seize the conversation, to hold it together, “because I want to be honest.”
“And what, exactly, is it you’re telling me? You’re not Kettral. You came to Dombâng to start a riot, maybe a revolution.” He paused, testing the various possibilities. “If you’re with them, I’ll kill you before we ever get to the delta. I’m about finished with betrayal for today.”
Truth is like a snake. If you’re vigilant, you can keep it caged. If you’re brave, you can set it free. Only an idiot, however, lets half of it out hoping to keep the rest penned in.
“I am a priestess of Ananshael,” I said. The words felt good, right. “Trained in Rassambur. I came here, came home, in service to my god.”
Ruc was silent a long time, but when he finally spoke, he didn’t sound shocked.
“Skullsworn.”
“It is not a term we prefer.”
“You came back to Dombâng to murder people by the boatload, and you’re worried about names?” I could hear him shake his head. “I should kill you now. All of you.”
“You couldn’t,” I said quietly. “Besides. If they really are sending us into the delta, you’re going to need us. You’re going to need me.”
“So you can put a knife in my back?”
“So I can stand beside you.”
“Is Two-Net Skullsworn, too?”
“Chua is what she says she is.”
I could hear him shaking his head. “You sure? Sounds like she killed her beloved husband quick enough.”
“You’ve seen people die of snake bites,” I replied. “That knife was a kindness.”
To my surprise, Ruc started laughing. The sound was hollow, rusted, mirthless. “Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you justify it?”
“We learn early not to try to justify ourselves. Our devotion can be difficult to understand.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you because I want you to know the truth.”
It’s easy, when you’ve lived a long time among women and men for whom death holds no sting, to forget how the rest of the world sees Ananshael’s mercy. I didn’t expect Ruc to rejoice at the revelation. I expected him to be furious and confused, to demand answers, some of which I couldn’t provide, some of which weren’t mine to give. I expected the conversation to be difficult, but my mind was too full of the peace and beauty of Rassambur. When I thought of Ananshael’s faithful, I thought of people like Kossal and Ela, men and women vibrant, full of life.
It seems stupid now, but I didn’t reckon on Ruc’s disgust.
I could feel whatever heat had been between us draining away. I reached out through the darkness, found his shoulder. He caught my hand in a vicious grip, and for a moment I thought everything would be all right after all. Then he let it drop. I heard the scrape of his boots on the stone as he moved to the far side of the cell.
“Ruc—” I said.
The silence swallowed his name. I could hear his breathing, heavy as though he’d been running for miles, as though he were holding some impossibly heavy weight, unable to put it down.
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