My own beast showed its teeth. I bared mine in return.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you still haven’t told me the truth.”
“Learning I’m a priestess of Ananshael isn’t enough truth for you?”
“No. It is not. You said you came back to Dombâng, but you never said why.”
“To serve my god.”
“People die the same way everywhere. I watched them. I’ve killed them. No need for you to trudge all the way to Dombâng.”
It was easier, somehow, talking about it while facing the jaguar, as though the animal were a reminder of my god’s power, of the fact that, whatever we said to each other, whatever pain we inflicted or felt, death was there to take it away, to smooth it over. I raised my spear in the old Manjari crane guard, halfway above my head, then closed my eyes.
I don’t know what sense it was with which I felt the jaguar leap. Maybe the wind of its attack stirred the tiny hairs on my arm. Maybe I heard it. Maybe I saw a shift in the shadows beyond my eyes’ red lids. Maybe my god spoke in my bones. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I knew. With all the strength in my weakened arms, I slammed the spear down, through the pelt, through the corded muscle, through the choked feline scream, down in the sun-baked dirt. I could hear Ruc fighting behind me, locked in his own mortal contest, but I kept my eyes closed, my hands tight around my spear as the cat spasmed. When all I could feel vibrating through the wooden shaft was the last, trembling breaths, I allowed myself to look.
I had thrust the spear straight through the jaguar’s back, just above the front shoulder, pinning it to the earth. It stared at me with those liquid eyes, bared its teeth, then lay its head on the dirt, a wild creature finally tamed beneath Ananshael’s patient hand.
It wasn’t until I’d ripped the spear free of the blood-soaked body that I realized the fight behind me was over, too. I turned to find Ruc leaning on one knee, panting above the second jaguar’s corpse. Sunlight snagged on his sword’s bronze, glistened in the blood slicking the edge, transforming each drop into a ruby as it fell. Sweat dripped from his face, soaked his vest, mingled with the blood leaking from his shoulder, where the cat had snuck inside his guard, and from the punctures on his arm, the remnant of our fight with the croc. He didn’t seem to notice any of it. His eyes never left me. The whole world might have disappeared, might have sunk into the mud.
“Why did you come back?” he asked.
I could feel the answer inside me like a thorn snagged on my mind: I came back to fall in love with you, then give you to the god. Kossal could have said it. Kossal always said exactly what he meant. Ela could have said it. When I opened my mouth, however, to finally speak the truth, I found different words.
“I came back to find out what was living in the delta. I wanted to know what happened to me as a child.”
Not a lie, but not the whole truth either.
Ruc studied me warily, chest heaving, but before he could press the matter further, Chua shuddered awake with a moan. For a few heartbeats she groped at the air, the ground, obviously lost.
“Chua,” I said, moving toward her.
She froze at the sound of her name, then rolled onto her hands and knees, clawed a rock from the soil, and came up with the jagged stone between her fingers as though she were ready to smash my skull into splinters.
“Chua,” I said again, taking a step back as I spoke. “It’s Pyrre and Ruc. We’re on an island. They poisoned us, then dumped us.”
Her dark eyes flitted from me to Ruc, then back, focusing slowly.
“I remember,” she said, voice dry and ragged. She didn’t let go of the stone. “Where are the other two?”
“Disappeared,” Ruc replied. “They were gone by the time I woke up.”
The fisher nodded as though she expected as much. “Then they are dead.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I said.
“Your bets do not matter.” She studied the river’s sluggish current for a moment, then shook her head. “We need to get farther from the water.”
“Why?” Ruc asked.
“Crocs. Water snakes. We should not have survived the night. There are a hundred creatures.…”
She stopped, eyes fixed on the carcass of the dead spider. She dropped the stone. Her hands groped at her stomach as though following some intuition all their own, found the scabbed-over gash where the creature had laid its eggs. Slowly, in the way of a woman weary from a long day’s labor anticipating rest and a warm bath, she closed her eyes. I expected her to claw at the wound, to rip it open, to try to find whatever had been left inside her and force it out. Instead, she pressed her palms to the bloody skin. The motion was slow, tender, almost protective.
Ruc glanced at me, then looked back at Chua. “What’s going on?”
She opened her eyes. “I did not survive the night after all.”
“Another snake bite?” Ruc asked, looking down at the woman’s hands.
She shook her head. “Something slower. Something worse.”
Out on the river, a fish the color of butter broke the surface to catch a low dragonfly, then disappeared into the murk, leaving behind only the slowly spreading rings. I watched it for a moment, then turned back to find Chua’s eyes on me, warm and steady.
“Kill me,” she said.
The spear was feather-light in my hand.
“No,” I replied quietly.
“That spider,” she pointed to the crabbed corpse, “has laid her eggs inside me. Soon, they will hatch, grow, begin to devour my stomach, my intestines, and then they will burst through my skin.”
“I know.”
“Then kill me.”
“I can’t.”
Chua’s forehead wrinkled. “You are Skullsworn. I heard you in the cell.”
I could feel Ruc’s gaze driving into me, as though he could see past my chest and into my heart.
“I’ll give you to the god when the time comes.”
“The time is now,” the woman insisted. “By noon they will have hatched.”
“Then we will wait until noon.”
It felt wrong to refuse. Ananshael’s beauty is exactly this: his ability to deliver us beyond our own suffering. With a quick thrust of my spear, I could spare her the hot, burrowing agony to come. She would be free before she hit the ground, released. This is what I had trained for, what I believed more deeply than I believed any other thing. Another day, another month—I would have opened her throat in a moment, gladly, but suddenly my days were numbered, and my work was still undone.
A woman, her stomach ripe with new life.
Had Ananshael answered my prayer? Had he sent the spider to give me one final chance to complete my Trial? Or was I deluded?
A million million mortal creatures trace their paths over the world each day, threading the air and water, walking the land. Not all of them are sent by gods. There is no special providence hidden in the death of every spider. It seemed viciously possible that Chua’s fate had nothing to do with my Trial, that I was betraying the very god I had begged to serve by drawing out her agony instead of ending it. Again I considered thrusting the spear through her throat. Again I did not.
There are moments in life when reason fails, when even the greatest genius is worth nothing. All the years studying, learning, training obscure the brutal fact that there are things we cannot know. A woman could pace out the distance between Dombâng and Rassambur, but the world is filled with spaces we can never measure, effects forever severed from their causes, furious motion for which the prime mover has been lost. It was possible Ananshael sent the spider, possible he did not. In the face of a god who resists all interrogation, the only way forward is faith.
Chua and Ruc were both watching me as I shook my head again.
“This is not the time.”
The fisher spat onto the matted grass, then crossed to the small pile of bronze weapons remaining. She selected a bone-hilted dagger, ran her finger along the edge,
then nodded.
“I will do it myself.”
I could have disarmed her. Could have knocked her out again, tied her with her own clothes, forced her to wait, to stay alive until the spiders hatched inside her, until she was ripe. I’d given her to the puppeteer for this very reason. If she killed herself now, I was lost. I would go to my god—to the god who had delivered me from the agony of my childhood, who had given me everything good and beautiful in my life—a failure.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t move.
All I could manage, as she pressed the bright point against her side, were two words: “Not yet.”
Chua stared at me, knife dimpling her skin. “Why not?”
Ruc stepped forward before I could answer. “Because there’s a way to stop it. You know that better than I do. Drink a couple of gallons of blackleaf tea; the eggs will die before they ever hatch.”
“Blackleaf grows close to the ocean,” Chua said. “Nowhere else.”
“You don’t know that,” Ruc said.
“I’ve spent my life in this delta.”
“You’ve spent the last two decades in a shack in the Weir,” he shot back. “Blackleaf could have spread all through the delta by now. You stay alive,” he said, shooting a glance at me, “because as long as you’re alive, there’s still a chance.”
You stay alive, I amended silently, because it’s not yet time for me to kill you.
Chua grimaced, then turned back to me. “Promise me that when they hatch, you will finish it.”
“I promise,” I said.
Chua’s death would make six. Which left Ruc.
The rushes sighed, sifting the warm wind. Tiny ripples ridged the water, then subsided. Flies droned over the carcasses of the jaguars. The late morning smelled of blood and rot.
“Where are the gods?” I murmured, half to myself. The question was both practical and bottomless.
It was Ela who answered, stepping out of the brush, a bronze sickle in each hand.
“They’ve been here,” she said brightly.
“How do you know?” I asked.
She gestured over her shoulder. “Well, it’s either them, or someone else with a strong interest in stacking skulls and tending exotic flowers.”
24
Achest-high wall circled the low, rocky rise near the center of the island. It looked like a stone pen for goats, though its elevated position suggested defense, some sort of fortification long abandoned. And, of course, goat pens aren’t normally ringed with skulls.
Hundreds of skulls topped the circular wall, each nestled carefully in its place, the rain-washed, sun-bleached bone blindingly white. Delta violets grew from eye sockets packed with dark earth, purple flowers swaying gracefully at the ends of long green stems. Those flowering gazes had long given up all mortal sight, but I felt watched all the same, anatomized in a way that made me want to hunch, hide, slide back into the rushes and run.
“This is a bad place,” Chua said. She seemed to be understating the matter.
We had stopped just inside the wide clearing, as though pinned where we stood.
The fisher glanced down at her scabbed stomach. “We are going to die here.”
“At least we have company,” Ela observed, nodding toward the skulls.
Ruc grimaced. “There must be what, three hundred? Four?”
Kossal shook his head. “There are thousands.”
He leveled a gnarled finger at the wall beneath the skulls. Violets grew there, too, a waterfall of purple and green cascading from the stones.
No, I realized, squinting against the light. Not stones. More skulls.
These were brown rather than white, streaked with the dirt from the sockets above, rank upon rank, at least five feet high and twice as wide at the wall’s base. Those at the bottom had crumbled halfway to mud beneath the weight pressing down from above, finally pried apart by time’s subtle levers.
“These gods take their gardening seriously,” Ela observed. She pointed down the hill, toward the west. “There are two more of these down that way. One of them’s basically just a ring of dirt at this point. This one seems to be the newest.”
I looked over at the priestess. Mud smeared the hem of her noc, and her bare legs beneath. Her hair was matted down on one side, presumably where she’d been tossed against the dirt when the Greenshirts abandoned us. The snake’s venom, however, didn’t seem to have slowed her down any. Her smile was as bright as the sickle in her hand.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You were all sleeping so soundly, we thought we’d take a walk.”
“I wanted to use you as bait,” Kossal added, staring past us at the ring of skulls, as though it had offended him in some way.
“Bait?” Ruc rounded on the older priest, half raising his sword.
Kossal had selected two bronze hatchets from the cache of weapons, but he didn’t bother raising them.
“Bait is something you put in a trap to attract an animal.”
“Or a god,” Ela added. Then she frowned thoughtfully. “Though I guess it doesn’t work on gods.”
I watched Ruc struggle with his anger, strangle it.
“If you believe in these things,” he said slowly, “if you’re so excited to kill them, don’t you think you have a better chance with all five of us alive?”
Kossal squinted into the distance, considering the question, then shook his head. “Not really. Ela and I have fought together a long time. The three of you don’t know the tempo.” He frowned. “You’d have been better as bait.”
I stared at the old priest. There had been times in the last month—during the long walk south, and even after we reached Dombâng—when Kossal had seemed almost sweet, gruff but paternal, the kind of grandfather who, in between cutting throats, might give you some good advice about life, about love. That Kossal had almost disappeared. The man who stood before me now seemed to have shed both his age and his absentmindedness. Despite the deep lines marking his face, the slight stoop to his shoulders, he looked ready, predatory, deadly, as though he’d been waiting all his life to find this island lost in the delta grass.
“I, for one, am glad you’re still alive,” Ela said. “Kossal is good at giving things to the god, but he’s dreadful company. And besides,” she winked at me, “there’s another story that I’m looking forward to seeing the end of.”
“The only stories we will see the end of are our own,” Chua said quietly.
Ela eyed the woman. “Well, that seems unduly pessimistic.”
“This is their shrine,” Chua replied, staring at the wall of flower and bone.
Kossal looked over at her sharply. “You’ve seen it before?”
She shook her head. “I’ve heard of it. People come here to die.”
“Then let’s leave,” Ruc said, turning away.
It was a sane suggestion, as good as anything else, given the circumstances. Those skulls, however, drew me forward. I was a fish hooked through the gills and hauled inexorably in. As I crossed the open space between the edge of the scrub and the shrine, I felt myself come unmoored, as though I were moving backward through time, back toward my own childhood, toward the memories that had bloodied my dreams for so long. I’d never been to the island or seen that ring of skulls, but the space reeked—not in the nose or the back of the throat, not with the quotidian scent of mud, or blood, or anything to which a person could put a word; it reeked in the mind, in the deepest recesses of myself, of something ancient, barbed, beautiful, and undeniable—of her. My legs were limp beneath me, my vision hazed as I crossed the sun-baked dirt to kneel beside the wall.
The violets swayed in the light breeze. I picked up one of the shards of bone, turned it between my fingers, tried to imagine the woman it had belonged to—for some reason I thought it was a woman. I knew nothing about her, nothing of her life, nothing about her face or her fears, but I knew what she had seen in her final moments because I had seen them too—those eyes set i
n that horribly beautiful face.
I drove the jagged corner of the bone into my palm until my skin parted, blood welled. As the memory receded, the world coalesced around me once again: sky where the sky belonged, reeds swaying beneath it, the slight weight of the bone in my hand. I studied it.
“There are thousand-year-old skeletons in Rassambur that look newer than this.”
Ela shrugged. The rest of the group had joined me at the shrine. “Rassambur is dry. This isn’t.”
“That’s one explanation,” Kossal said. “The other is that these bones are more than a thousand years old.”
“And the ones down the hill?” I asked. “The older ones?”
“Are older.”
I grappled with that, tried to imagine people coming to this place since before Annur was founded, before Dombâng was anything more than a few huts on stilts, people coming and dying, the sacrifice unaltered across all those millennia. It made me dizzy.
“The Three were here before Dombâng,” Chua said, giving voice to my thoughts.
“A fascinating mystery,” Ruc added, “but not one we’re going to solve now. We have to leave. Fix what happened in the city. Then we come back.”
“Leave how?” I asked, rising, turning to face him. “We’re on an island. There’s nowhere to go.”
“There is an entire fucking delta,” he said, gesturing with his sword.
“And how long do you think we’d last in that delta without a boat?”
He turned to Chua. “You made it once. You survived. What’s the play?”
She shook her head, gestured to the skulls. “There is no play. We can fight jaguars or crocs. We might escape the snakes and spiders. If we floated still as logs in the water and tried hard not to bleed, we might even pass the qirna. But not the Three. This is their den.”
“I’m staying,” Kossal said.
“To do what?” Ruc demanded.
“To kill Csestriim,” the old priest replied.
I stared at him. “You still think they’re Csestriim? That all these years they’ve been hiding in the delta impersonating gods?”
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