Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  I began again: “Ruc—” but everything beyond his name seemed useless.

  The truth was out, free. Half of it, anyway. I stared into the cage of my mind, wondering what I had done.

  22

  Instead of flowers, here are the still-spasming corpses of a dozen traitors.

  I tried, as the guards hauled open the door to our cell, as I blinked watering eyes against the dim, blinding light, to imagine saying those words to Ruc. For a heartbeat, it seemed like a plausible peace offering. These were the same men, after all, who had betrayed him, corrupted his city, and usurped his fortress.

  “Who’s in charge?” Ruc demanded, blinking, bulling forward even though, after a whole night locked in perfect darkness, he was just as blind as the rest of us. “Where are my men? The ones who aren’t traitors, that is?”

  The nearest soldier, a huge man who looked as though his muscles had been molded sloppily out of mounds of river mud, slammed a cudgel into Ruc’s head. After years of bare-knuckle fighting, Ruc knew how to take a blow, but there’s only so much technique to getting bashed in the skull with a length of wood. He stumbled into a wall, caught his balance with a shoulder against the rough stone, then turned back to the giant who had hit him.

  “Where are my men?” he asked again.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Chua, Ela, and Kossal were up. The two priests looked no less deadly than usual, although I could hardly count on them to back whatever play I made. I could take down the brute with the cudgel at least, and then go from there. A pile of bodies wasn’t the most traditional romantic gift, but Ruc and I had never been too keen on roses or rubies. Maybe getting an early start on some revenge would help to heal the rift I’d hacked between us with my idiotic honesty. It would be something, at least; a gesture of good faith.

  One heartbeat later, and I’d discarded the idea.

  It wasn’t practically feasible, for one thing. There had to be two dozen guards, all wearing mail, most with loaded flatbows. I’m fast with my hands, but not that fast. Even so, I might have taken the chance—except that sort of wholesale slaughter was expressly forbidden by the terms of my Trial. It would be no good finally falling in love if I’d already failed.

  The huge Greenshirt—he was still wearing the uniform, although, like the rest of them, he seemed to have a flexible interpretation of the loyalties it entailed—raised his cudgel for another blow. I stepped smoothly into the gap.

  “Might as well save the questions,” I said, speaking to Ruc even as I met the big bastard’s eye. “I have a feeling we’re about to meet whoever’s in charge.”

  The Greenshirt smiled. There is something chilling in the eyes of people who believe completely in their own rightness.

  “Indeed,” he replied. “Indeed you are.”

  One by one, they bound us at the wrists. I tried to catch Ruc’s gaze as the guardsman shoved him toward the door. Tried and failed. The man who had wrapped me in his arms two nights before walked past me as though I were a doorpost—not even a person, but some architectural necessity utterly beneath his notice. I studied his straight back as he strode down the corridor, led and flanked by armed guards. It was hard to decide whether I hated that unrelenting pride or admired it. How would I have felt if he’d glanced back at me, showed some sign of confusion, of weakness? Would that have made me love him more or less? As with most matters pertaining to my heart, I had no idea.

  The Greenshirts motioned to the rest of us to follow. Kossal shook his head, as though irritated at the whole thing, while Ela seemed to be making eyes at the man who’d been beating Ruc. I turned away from them both, played the docile prisoner as the soldiers marched us up the stone steps, out of the subterranean chill and damp, into the delta’s midmorning swelter.

  “You look tired,” Ela said as we rounded the third or fourth landing.

  I glanced over at the priestess. Despite the rope binding her wrists, the clothes wrinkled and scuffed with grime, she seemed blithe and well rested.

  “I am,” I replied after a moment.

  “This is the third time I’ve been thrown in a dungeon,” she confided. “I’m starting to develop a low opinion of them.”

  One of the guards shoved her roughly from behind. “Quit talking.”

  Ela didn’t miss a step, even as she turned to cast a disapproving eye on her assailant. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  The man, obviously baffled by this response, glanced over at his companion.

  “You don’t have an unattractive face,” Ela went on, “and judging from the way your uniform hangs, the body underneath might be pleasant as well.” She shook her head regretfully. “Your personality, however, is deplorable.”

  “I told you to shut your face, bitch—” the man began.

  Before he could finish, Ela slid past his loaded flatbow and slammed her bound hands into his throat. He collapsed, choking. It was a mortal blow, although it would take him some time to die. The whole thing happened so quickly, with so little noise or fuss, that only the guards closest to us noticed anything at all, at least at first. There was a moment of silence, like a rest before a new bar of music, then the Greenshirts started shouting all at once, falling over themselves either to get closer or move back, training their flatbows on Ela to the neglect of everyone else.

  The priestess didn’t seem to notice. She was busy fixing some imagined imperfection in her hair while the soldier choked to death at her feet.

  Kossal, who had been walking one pace farther on, turned around, studied the scene, then shook his head again. “I will be vexed if you go to the god before we reach the delta. I might need you.”

  Ela frowned. “That almost sounds sweet.” She turned to me. “I can never decide if it’s better to be needed or wanted.”

  “Get on the fucking ground.”

  After long moments, some leadership was finally emerging out of the green-shirted chaos. The huge brute with the cudgel was pointing at Ela, alternating, in his bellowed address, between the priestess herself—Get the fuck down—and his men—Get your bows on that bitch.

  Ela glanced at the wooden floorboards, then shook her head. “The ground is filthy. So no. Also,” she added, nodding toward the twitching figure at her feet, “I don’t like the word bitch.”

  In the wire-tight silence that followed, I thought I could hear my god sweeping down upon us all through the wide corridor. I measured the space between myself and Ruc, trying to decide if I could get to him in time, if I could kill him before someone else put a flatbow bolt through his chest. Not that that would be enough. I still had no idea if the feeling stalking my heart was love. Even if it was, I owed the god another death—the pregnant woman. Even if I reached Ruc, even if I choked him lifeless before the Greenshirts finished me, I failed. Still, after all this time, it seemed wrong to let someone else, someone who had no feelings for him at all, deliver him into the hands of the god.

  I tensed, ready to dive through a rain of flatbow bolts.

  Before anyone could attack, however, Kossal raised his bound hands.

  “She won’t kill anyone else,” he said.

  Ela raised an eyebrow. “Much as I cherish you, Kossal, I don’t remember making you my prophet.”

  “Gods have prophets,” Kossal said. “Priestesses get irritable old men who want to go to the god somewhere more interesting than a dimly lit corridor surrounded by twitchy idiots.”

  “He means you,” Ela whispered toward the Greenshirts, lowering her voice as though she were confiding a secret. “You’re the idiots.”

  Rage spasmed like a muscle in the face of the lead soldier, but after a moment, recalling some order or imperative momentarily forgotten in the aftermath of Ela’s impromptu violence, he raised a hand.

  “Everyone back,” he growled. “Two paces.”

  “She broke Qang’s neck,” protested one of the men, who had set down his bow to drag the now-still soldier away from Ela. “She broke his fucking neck.”

  “And I’ll
break yours,” the leader replied grimly, “if you don’t follow orders. The high priestess wants them whole and unharmed, so we are bringing them whole and unharmed.” He turned to Ruc. “Unless we can’t. It’s your job to keep your people in line.”

  For the first time Ruc glanced back at us. His eyes held mine for a moment, then he shook his head.

  “They’re not my people.”

  * * *

  It looked as though half of Dombâng had turned out to see us sacrificed to the old gods. After centuries hiding their worship; praying to hidden idols; gathering in forgotten shrines; making bloody, clandestine offerings for which Annurian law would have seen them hung; the citizens of my city had finally hauled their ancient worship back into the hot, dazzling light.

  We stood at the top of the wide steps fronting the Shipwreck, at least half a dozen paces above the plaza below. That plaza was filled with people, thousands upon thousands upon thousands—fishers dressed in their practical vests; merchants, women and men rich enough to afford a cordon of enormous bodyguards; beggars in their rags; children racing in feral packs through the crowd, howling to each other over the protestations of their elders; barefoot sailors with rigging knives at their belts; grandmothers bent over canes, diminutive beneath their huge reed hats; the whole motley citizenry of Dombâng gathered to share in a vicious release centuries in the making.

  Some carried effigies of Intarra mounted on fishing spears, the goddess impaled through the stomach, or chest, or eyes. Others shredded flags bearing the Annurian sun, chanting Death to the Emperor. Death to Sanlitun. Death to the Malkeenian dogs. Still others held up idols of their own gods; tiny clay figures small enough to fit in a palm, life-sized wooden carvings, painted and repainted in intricate detail, that must have lain waiting in attics or hidden chambers for generations. Despite the variety of those latter sculptures, there was a ferocity to all of them that I recognized, the heft of terror and death in even the smallest figure.

  A wave of nausea passed over me, through me, momentarily blotting my vision. I’d known what had to happen since shortly after we were captured, but only in that moment did the knowledge finally seep from my mind into my bones: I was going back. Once again, I would be sacrificed to the delta. My bonds chafed just as bonds had chafed my child-size wrists so many years earlier. My breath tasted sick in my mouth. I groped desperately for the words I’d learned in the intervening years:

  Ananshael watches over me. His might obliterates all. In the darkest hour, his mercy remains.

  Slowly, as I repeated the mantra, my vision cleared.

  Cao’s Canal—just beyond the plaza—was packed so tight with boats, rafts, canoes, coracles, that you could have walked straight across to the Serpentine. The women and men on the decks were drinking from jugs of plum wine and quey, roasting sweet-reeds, hollering to each other across the gaps. The revolution had become a celebration. There was no way to tell, gazing out over the floating mass, that everyone had gathered, not just for music or feasting, but for a human sacrifice. It seemed like a holiday.

  It will be a holiday, I realized.

  The priests who had seized their city from Annurian clutches would carve this date into a new calendar. Each year, another group of prisoners would stand on these steps while the crowd howled for their blood. Annur would decry this barbarity, but at least it was honest. Most holidays, after all—the military victories, the triumphs of one family or faction over another—are watered first with blood. It’s just that over the years people tend to forget.

  As we stepped out of the shadow into the sun’s hammer, the low grumble of the mob erupted into a roar, thousands of upraised, sweat-soaked faces, mouths wide as though they were singing, pouring their souls into the melody of some long-forgotten chorus.

  “I’m impressed,” Ela said, turning to Ruc. “You were holding together a city in which every single citizen hates you.”

  Ruc shook his head, jaw tight. “This is only a fraction of Dombâng. There will be tens of thousands hiding today, men and women loyal to Annur, or just indifferent to the old religion. Normal people hoping the fire passes over without burning them to ash. We won’t be the only ones fed to the delta today, just the most famous.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Ela mused, “why they don’t like us. There’s not a single person down there who even knows who I am.” She paused. “Except for a handful of young men and one singularly flexible woman, and I don’t think I did anything to offend them.”

  “It doesn’t matter who you are,” Ruc growled. “You were taken with me. There will be a thousand stories already about how you’re Annurian agents sent to crush the resistance. Some people will be spreading a ludicrous tale that you’re Kettral.” He glanced over at me, eyes hard as chips of jade. “A lie, as it turns out, but that doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter to a mob. Justice doesn’t matter. What matters is rage, having a target for that rage.”

  Before he could say anything else, the noise of the crowd, which had been nearly deafening before, found a new pitch, something between shouting and screaming.

  I turned to find three hooded figures emerging from the steel-banded double doors of the Shipwreck. They strode out onto the wide platform, pausing half a dozen paces behind and above us—we’d been herded down a couple of the broad steps so that we would not stand at their level—to bask in the righteous fury of the throng. Each wore a robe of a different color: storm gray, vermillion, and a brown so dark it was almost black. I’d never seen the regalia before—such robes had been outlawed in Dombâng for centuries—but I recognized it from dozens of whispered stories and songs. After a lifetime of hiding, the city’s high priests had emerged into the light, had emerged to send us to our doom.

  The foremost of the three, the one robed in bottomless brown, turned to the others, seemed to murmur something, and then, with a theatrical gesture, all three tossed back their hoods. I didn’t recognize the two men; they might have been picked out of a Dombâng crowd at random. The woman, however, the one who led them—I recognized her immediately. Her robe was different, but it would be hard to forget that imperious face, those hawk’s eyes, the way she studied us as though we were fish flopping on a deck. Even last time, when she’d been our prisoner, she had refused to bend.

  “Quen,” Ruc growled.

  Somehow Lady Quen managed to smile without loosening her lips. “Ruc Lan Lac. You must be surprised to find yourself here, in chains, on the steps of your own fortress.”

  “Only an idiot expects to step into a nest of vipers and emerge unbitten.”

  “Vipers.” The priestess raised an eyebrow. “Holy creatures.”

  “Legless sacks of venom,” Ruc countered, “with no end beyond their own survival.”

  “Even here,” the priestess said, shaking her head, “even defeated and in chains, you insist on your profanation.”

  “Let me tell you,” Ruc said, “what is profane. Profane is feeding people to the delta, innocent people, all to shore up your own power.”

  “Innocent?” The woman glanced at her hands, as though she expected to find blood there. “I’ll admit that, while the true faith of Dombâng was forced into hiding, people forgot the old ways. In their ignorance, they were forced to make … desperate sacrifices. Now that we have returned, however, now that we have thrown off the yoke of your empire, I will correct those mistakes.”

  “Meaning the only people you throw to the delta will be those who oppose you.”

  The woman shook her head. “Dombâng was a great city once, proud and free, before you sold it for a handful of coin.”

  “It wasn’t sold,” Ruc said. “It was invaded. And that happened twenty decades before I was born.”

  “Every generation has betrayed her anew. Every generation until now.”

  “Sending five people into the delta isn’t going to rid you of Annur,” Ruc said.

  The priestess shrugged. “This will be the first of our sacrifices, but not the last. Great corruption r
equires a great purge.”

  Ruc spat onto the steps. “Innocent people, dead.”

  “Innocent?” The woman frowned as she said the word again. “The leader of the Greenshirts, three Kettral conspirators, and one of the Vuo Ton, who forsook her people for a foreign god. I would hardly say you are innocent.”

  “We’re not Kettral,” I said wearily.

  “That was just something she made up,” Ela added. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The priestess studied me a moment, then shook her head.

  “Judgment is for the Three. We are only their servants. I told you last time we met: Kem Anh rises.”

  Before I could respond, she turned away, stepped toward the crowd, and raised a hand. The clamor, which had surged, then subsided when she first stepped out of the fortress, dropped away entirely. The only sounds were a baby crying in the distance, the hollow thudding of hulls bumping up against one another on the water, and the light breeze flapping the flags at the top of the tower behind us. I glanced up at those flags. The Annurian sun had been stripped from the pole.

  “People of Dombâng,” she announced, her voice louder than I expected, “today we reclaim our city.”

  Roaring. Rage. Ten thousand hands raised in the air, as though every one of those assembled sought to drag us down. When the mob finally fell silent once more, Quen continued.

  “For centuries, rot has gnawed at the pilings of this city. Too many of us have forgotten our gods, and so those gods have turned their faces from us in disgust. Until now. We will forget them no longer.”

  She gestured to Ruc. “This man you know. Ruc Lan Lac, this son of Dombâng who was paid in Annurian gold for every back he broke, for every neighbor betrayed. Today, he will face judgment.”

  Ruc studied the howling crowd as though it were a storm sweeping over the city, dangerous but not deadly.

  “These four,” the priestess went on, pointing to the rest of us in turn when the chaos had subsided, “are his lieutenants, his willing executioners, sent or paid for by Annur to keep Dombâng under the empire’s boot. Today, they too will face the Three.”