Ruc took a step forward, as though he intended to address the crowd, but the guards seized him by the shoulders, hauled him back. The priestess stepped aside, and the two priests, the men in the red and gray robes, stepped forward. They carried snakes in their hands, small, crimson vipers that they held just behind the heads, raising them up for the crowd to see.
“Heel snakes,” Chua muttered.
Kossal frowned. “Deadly?”
The fisher shook her head. “Their bite will paralyze you, steal your thought for half a day.”
“A ridiculous bit of theater,” Ruc said. “Something else for the mob, and a way to make sure we don’t kill whoever brings us to the delta.”
The priest in the bloodred robe stopped in front of me. His front teeth were jagged, broken, as though someone had smashed his face into an anvil, and half a dozen scars wrapped up his cheek, behind his head. His breath smelled like rot. The serpents writhed in his hand, the yellow eyes furious, mouths stretched wide, small fangs bare and glistening. The priest reached out to me, and the creature struck so fast I didn’t realize it had happened until I felt the pain bloom through my neck, the blood drain down my chest, hot as my sweat. I tried to speak, but my tongue felt suddenly huge in my mouth. The world tipped on its side, and a moment later my legs abandoned me. I lurched, then the ground slammed into my face.
Down in the plaza people were screaming again, but they sounded far away, as though they weren’t there at all, as though all those thousands of voices were something I remembered, every person I’d ever spoken to or overheard calling out to me, or maybe not calling at all, but singing a loud, gleeful song, the melody of which I tried to follow, then failed.
23
Before the light came back, or the sound, or any feeling in my flesh, there was a drum. It sounded far off at first. I imagined some solitary woman at the center of a dugout canoe, wooden drum between her knees, eyes closed, pounding out the same basic rhythm over and over, unflagging, as though she’d been doing it for years without respite, as though she’d been doing it her whole life. Slowly, the sound grew louder, closer, so close that I could feel each beat reverberating inside me. The tempo quickened. Her hands, which had been so steady, grew frenzied. I watched inside my mind as the canoe approached, closer and closer, the drumming louder, faster, until the woman was barely a pace away. Lost in her rhythm, she didn’t see me. I tried to move, but something restrained me.
I tried to call out—Who are you?—but I had no voice.
For a moment, she looked like Ela, black hair a cloud around her head. Then, though there had been no shift that I could see, she was the woman who had saved me from the jaguar all those years ago, the muscles of her bare arms flexing as she drummed, her sleek black hair soaked with sweat, whipped across her face. Then, as though for the first time hearing something other than the trembling skin of her drum, she raised her eyes. My eyes, I realized. My face. She smiled at me with bloody teeth, closed her hands into fists, slammed them through the drum’s skin, shredding it. With a shudder that seized my entire body, I woke to the delta’s darkness.
The fronds of a finger palm shifted above me. The tree was named for the shape of the leaves, which looked like human hands. They were little more than shadows now, swaying with the wind, folding and unfolding as though trying to grasp the moon, the few dozen stars unobscured by the shredded clouds. I could hear water running almost silently between the rushes, or through the branches of some downed tree. Some creature I didn’t recognize shifted and chittered in the brush a few paces behind me.
When I tried to raise my head, pain lanced through my neck, as though someone had dragged a rusted knife along the inside of my spine. I swallowed the moan rising inside me—no need to call the delta creatures to me before I could fight, before I could even get up—and tried very hard not to move until the pain finally subsided.
The ground beneath me felt firm, even rocky. That and the palms meant I’d been abandoned on one of the delta’s true islands. If I listened carefully, I could hear breathing: Ela’s and Kossal’s, Ruc’s low rasping snore, a series of quick gasping spasms that had to be Chua. So we were all together. All still alive. Not that I liked our chances of staying that way if we remained paralyzed.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the Three sweeping toward us over the delta, leaping channels or diving through them, emerging glistening wet and naked to race through the reeds.
A hallucination, I told myself. A vision kindled from fear.
Somewhere else—seated on the deck of Anho’s Dance, for instance, with people all around me and a cup of quey in my hand—the words might have sounded reasonable, sane. How could I see creatures leagues distant streaking through the night? It was impossible. Paralyzed in the dirt of the delta, the thought brought no comfort. I opened my eyes, and tried very hard not to close them again.
After counting out a thousand heartbeats, I tested my own body once more, rolling onto my side this time, instead of bending at the waist. I managed it, barely. The snake’s venom seared my veins as I lay there, gasping for breath, ribs bruised against the rocky soil. I almost blacked out, but I knew what was waiting for me in that insensate darkness, and I clutched to consciousness like a woman to her dying child.
When the agony drained away once more, I could make out Chua lying on her back a few paces from me, mouth hanging stupidly open, still lost in her mind’s own dark corridors. She’d been untied, as had I. A little beyond her, I could see a small pile of weapons—swords, spears, axes—though for the moment the discovery didn’t do me much good. I tried to move my fingers, failed, tried again, felt as though I’d dragged them through a fire, then gave up, stared fixedly into the shifting reeds, tried to think of something to do next that might prove more effective than just lying there.
I needed to survive.
There were no pregnant women stranded on the island with us. Which meant even if I managed to fan my feelings for Ruc into an open flame, I would fail my Trial, fail my god. Lying there in the hot dark, unable to move, each breath a searing pain, I faced the possibility head on for the first time. I’d feared this failure all along, of course, from the moment back in Rassambur when I first heard Ela and Kossal sing the song. Fearing a thing, however, is not the same as believing it might come to pass.
God of mercy, I prayed silently. God of justice, you saved me. You gave me a reason to keep going when my life had no reason. Please don’t let me fail you now. Please, my lord, show me a way.
Somewhere far off in the delta, a creature screamed, then screamed again, then fell suddenly, perfectly silent. Hope flowered inside me. The delta was stitched with death. Since the first serpent sank her fangs into the flesh of another creature, Ananshael had walked the mudflats, had parted the rushes with his million hands, searching for the living things of the world, holding them close in the moment of their unmaking. My god was here. He had always been here. I had decided to come home for the Trial, not just for Ruc, not just because I began my life’s journey in Dombâng, but because it was a place where I could feel my god. The delta belonged to him, even more than the redstone mountains surrounding Rassambur.
And yet, if the Vuo Ton could be believed, if my own memories of a woman with golden eyes were to be trusted, there were things in the delta that mocked my god, that had been here as long as him or longer, bright, beautiful, defiantly undying. It was for the sport of these we had been captured, poisoned, dragged to the island, and they cared nothing for my Trial, for my devotion. If I wanted to complete the full measure of my offering, I would need to do it in spite of them.
I forced myself to focus on the world once more. Chua was moving now, twitching in silent pain. There was something strange about her struggle, unnatural. I squinted blearily at the shifting shadows, trying to understand. Then, between one heartbeat and the next, the wind tugged a scrap of cloud off of the moon. Milky light washed over us, and I could see. Chua wasn’t moving after all. She lay sprawled motionless on the mud.
The movement came from a spider the size of my open hand. It had crawled onto her stomach where it sat preening, folding and unfolding its legs, making an awful clicking noise.
I tried to call out, but pain flooded my throat, strangling the warning; the best I could manage was a whispered moan and sliver of warm drool. I forced myself up onto an elbow, but my body locked there, caught in the fist of the toxin. The muscles of my chest and shoulder trembled, quaked, then failed, dropping me back onto the dirt where I lay panting, a thousand tiny fires blazing beneath my skin.
When I could see again, the spider seemed to be digging, stabbing at Chua’s stomach over and over. The fisher twitched, convulsed, but she was too lost to wake up. Again, I tried to move, to roll, and again I failed. The spider had grown furious in its exertions, frenzied, hacking at Chua’s flesh with all the intensity of something fighting for its life.
Or for its spawn.
I finally recognized the creature from nightmare tales of my childhood. “Meat puppeteers” we’d called them as kids. That’s what they did—they made meat dance, dance itself to death. A female would find a sick creature—a dog, a pig, anything big enough to feed her young and too feeble to fight back—hack her way into the skin, then lay her hundreds of eggs. For half a day or so, the poor beast would seem fine. Then, as the tiny spiders hatched, began to feed, the host would begin to jerk, twitch, even leap into the air as though suspended from the strings of some sadistic puppeteer. After a day of that, the final violence of the myriad spiders bursting forth seemed like a relief, a last, merciful severing of the strings.
The spider was still digging, burrowing madly into Chua’s body. A thin line of blood—black in the moonlight—slipped down her side. If I could reach her before it laid the eggs, I could save her. I took an unsteady breath, then hurled myself against my own treacherous muscles once again. This time I managed to drag myself a pace, then two, pain shredding my flesh, searing each labored breath. A desperate whimper caught on the wind. I thought for a moment it was Chua, then realized the sound came from my own throat. Chest quaking, arms throbbing, I dragged my way to the woman’s side.
In time.
The puppeteer was still burrowing.
I raised a weak hand to knock it aside, then stopped.
The spider’s multiform eyes glittered in the moonlight like dozens of dark jewels. Her mandibles twitched, as though tasting the air. I could smell Chua’s sweat, her blood—probably the same thing that had drawn the spider. I could save her, batter at the thing, keep it away until she woke. Puppeteers went after sick creatures for a reason—despite their size, they weren’t dangerous enough to subdue a healthy host. I could keep Chua alive, and yet, as I lay there shaking, my arm raised to strike, a new thought blossomed in my mind: Let her die.
What was I, after all, if not a servant of Ananshael? What was the spider? As I lay on the hard ground, eyes clutched against my pain, I had prayed to my god; and he had answered. I imagined the hundreds of tiny eggs hatching inside the fisher, all those new-made creatures feasting in darkness on her blood, her flesh, voracious and burgeoning, all of them, straining inside the skin until finally they were strong enough to burst forth, new life crawling black and bloody from the wreckage. This too, was my god’s work. It happened every day in the delta, a thousand times a day. Who was I to deny it? Especially when I could fashion it to my own end, bend it to my devotion.
Slowly, I let my arm drop.
The spider watched me. What she could see in the darkness I had no idea, but those glittering eyes remained fixed on me even as she went absolutely, perfectly still to lay her eggs. My horror had left me. She was beautiful, that spider, sleek and long-limbed, magnificent in the purity of her purpose. Like the snake that had poisoned me earlier that day, like the crocodile I had cut apart beneath the village of the Vuo Ton, like the jaguar that had come for me as a child, she was a creature of the delta, as was I, a minister of death, both humble and gorgeous. Since returning to Dombâng, I had been trying to be something I was not, to find inside myself emotions I had never known. What did the spider know of love? What did she care?
Sometimes it is enough to be only what you are.
“Go on,” I murmured to her. “Go on.”
I expected her to skitter away when she was finished laying. She did not. Instead, she withdrew her body from the rent she’d made in Chua’s flesh, took a handful of staggering, unsteady steps, then collapsed onto the dirt. I had forgotten that part. Laying eggs was the last act of the puppeteer. She would never see her brood emerge into the sunlight, never see them grow.
I stretched out a hand to her, cupped her body in the moonlight as she twitched herself still, as Ananshael came with his own deft, gentle hands to unmake her. I was still holding the corpse when blackness closed over me once more.
* * *
I woke the second time to Ruc’s hand on my shoulders, shaking me awake. Over his head, the morning sun blazed, blinding me, casting his face into shadow.
The movement hurt, but not nearly as much as it had the first time, during the night.
The night.
I turned to find the carcass of the spider an arm’s length away. Already it was buzzing with flies, crawling with ants. A few steps farther, Chua was still passed out, the wound in her side scabbed over. Ela and Kossal were gone. The space where they’d been sprawled when I first awoke was empty, the only sign that they’d been there at all some matting of the grasses. Before I could worry about their absence, however, Ruc was dragging me onto my feet.
“What’s happening?” I managed, raising a hand to shield my eyes.
“Jaguars are happening,” he growled. Even as he spoke, he threw something with his left hand, a stick or stone—my vision was still too blurry to make it out. “Two of them. They were wary of me at first, but I think they’ve figured out my secret.”
“What’s your secret?” I asked, blinking my eyes, scanning the tangled brush around us. My mouth tasted like ash and my head throbbed, but after a moment my vision began to steady. We were in a small clearing maybe a dozen paces across. A wide, muddy channel swept in a lazy arc behind us. Thorny shrub and reed ringed the rest.
“My secret,” Ruc murmured, “is that if I take more than two steps in any direction, I fall over.”
I tested a step myself, wobbled, almost toppled, then caught myself on Ruc’s shoulder.
He was holding a sword, I realized, a strange, gorgeous weapon of cast bronze.
“Where’d you get a sword?” I asked stupidly, forgetting for the moment about the cache I’d noticed earlier.
“They left us with weapons,” Ruc replied, pointing to the diminished pile.
“Thought they brought us out here to die.”
“I think we’re supposed to make the dying interesting. Here.” He pressed the shaft of a spear into my hands. It was about as long as I was high, the point also of bronze. I might have spent more time admiring it if the jaguars hadn’t chosen that moment to attack again, both of them flowing out of the brush from opposite sides, testing our flanks. Ruc lashed out, sunlight flashing off his blade, and I turned to face the other beast.
I hadn’t seen a jaguar since the last time someone decided to make a sacrifice out of me. The cat I remembered was huge; its jaws had seemed large enough to crush my skull. Of course, I had grown since then, and had shed my childhood terror. The creature facing me now didn’t weigh much more than I did. It moved with all the deadly grace that I remembered, but I had grown more graceful too. As long as I kept the spear’s point between us, I could hold it at bay.
The jaguar bared its fangs, hissed, stalked side to side, searching for an opening. Its green-gold eyes were almost human as they studied me.
“Come on,” I whispered to it. “Come on.”
The cat lashed its tail, circled wide, swatted at the spear’s point, then circled again, testing. Behind me, its companion howled in frustration.
“I can’t help but notice the lack of immortal w
omen leaping from the water to our rescue,” Ruc said. “Or does that come later?”
His breathing was heavy, but even.
“I wouldn’t be too eager,” I said. “According to the Vuo Ton, she left me alive so I’d be more fun to kill the next time.”
“Yeah, well, she’d better hurry up if she doesn’t want these cats to do the job first.”
I’d been so disoriented when I woke, then so focused on the jaguar stalking me, that only then did I realize that Ruc’s fury from the day before, his disgust for me, his disdain—all of it seemed gone. I didn’t dare turn to see his face, but his voice was the voice I remembered: wry, focused, unflappable.
“Why didn’t you let them kill us?” I asked. “Kill me?”
“And fight my way out of the delta on my own?”
“You could have saved just Chua. She knows the delta better than any of us anyway.”
I turned side-on to the cat, as though I’d forgotten all about it, waited for the flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, then whipped the spear back around, knocking it from the air mid-leap. It was a long time since I’d fought with a spear, and though I nicked a gash on the jaguar’s flank, most of the blow’s force connected through the shaft. The creature rolled to its feet, hissed, then backed away, those molten eyes never leaving me.
“I take it you missed,” Ruc said.
“It’s not dead.”
“Some fucking Skullsworn you are.”
“Why did you save us?” I asked again. “Why did you bother to wake me up?”
Instead of answering, Ruc let out a low curse. There was a quick scramble, the sound of a blade biting into flesh, then a high, furious scream, followed by Ruc’s panting.
“You still alive?” I asked.
“For now.”
“Then answer the question.”
Ruc spat. “I’m sure I’ll have a few agonizing moments to regret my decision, but for now I’m not finished with you.”
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