Sinn, I thought. That has to be Sinn.
He caught my eyes, then smiled. His teeth were sharp as knives.
If the two men had come alone, I might have stared at them forever, lost in their perfection, but they were not alone. A woman stood between them, a woman I remembered from my childhood, bronze skin glistening in the sunlight, her flesh every bit as deadly as the weapons we held. A strip of black hair ran down the center of her shaved scalp, cascaded between her shoulder blades. Scars hatched her skin, as they did the skin of her companions. On a human body, those smooth ridges might have been blemishes; Kem Anh and her consorts wore them like priceless finery. They were naked otherwise, naked in such a way that made me feel ashamed of my clothes, ashamed to have hidden my goddess-given body beneath the skin of creatures long dead.
And then there were her eyes, golden, as I remembered, liquid and shifting as quicksand, dragging me in, down.
It seemed impossible that I had ever walked away, that I had ever had another thought in my life beyond finding her again, following her, staring into that gaze. With an effort so violent I almost cried out, I forced my own eyes closed. It felt like stepping from sunshine into frigid water, like trying to breathe ice. Even in my mind’s dark I could see her, the attenuated vision more perfect than any human form.
“You’re wrong, Kossal,” I heard myself murmur.
The annals of Rassambur describe the Csestriim in great detail. There had been hundreds of years of war, after all, in which to compile the accounts. Those tomes all agreed on a few things: the Csestriim were inhumanly brilliant, undying, utterly emotionless, effortlessly cruel. None of the chronicles mentioned this impossible beauty. I tried to imagine setting this down in words as I am doing now. I tried to imagine overlooking that soul-rending perfection in my account. I could not. Even now, years later, I could drench pages and pages in ink trying to find the right words, the fragment of a phrase that might start to describe them truly. I would be wasting my ink. There are things on this earth beyond all language.
I opened my eyes again.
“These are not Csestriim.”
All three of them shifted at the word, not the reflexive jerk a human fighter might make, but a languid settling into their own power, like a cat crouching before it pounces.
Hang Loc and Sinn bared their sharpened teeth, growled, seemed ready to come for us. Then Kem Anh put a hand on each of their arms, trailed her fingers from elbow to shoulder, the gesture erotic and terrifying all at once. She shook her head slowly.
“No,” Kossal agreed. I turned to find the old priest, his hatchets set momentarily aside, sliding out of his robe, that same robe he’d worn through the city for weeks. It puddled on the ground at his feet like a snake’s molted skin as he took up the bronze weapons once more. “These are not Csestriim.”
Again, the two men growled, and again Kem Anh held them back, draping her arms over their shoulders, sliding her flanks against them until they subsided.
“I told you,” Chua murmured. “They are gods. We would not give ourselves to the Csestriim. This was our pledge: Never them.”
I didn’t look at Chua. I was staring at the creature she thought was a god, staring into her eyes until it seemed the rest of the world had fallen away. “It’s not a pledge,” I whispered finally, understanding settling on me like a heavy stone, almost crushing the breath from my chest.
“You have forgotten…” Chua began.
I shook my head. “It is the Vuo Ton who have forgotten. Never them. It is not a pledge. It was never a pledge.”
“What are you talking about?” Ruc demanded.
I thought my heart would shatter my ribs. “It is a name.”
“Strange name,” Ela observed.
“Not the name of a person,” I said. I was so hot I felt my skin might catch fire. “It is the name of their race. These are not Csestriim. They are the Nevariim.”
Ken Anh’s smile was a white, vicious sickle.
The sun was an inferno.
My own breath was flame.
“The Nevariim are a kids’ tale,” Ruc said.
“And how are they described,” I asked quietly, “in those tales?”
No one replied, as though the weight of the words was too much to haul up out of the chest.
“They are always gorgeous,” I said. “Strong. The implacable foes of the Csestriim.”
“In the tales,” Ruc managed finally, “they are good.”
“Stories never get everything right.”
Through this whole conversation, they just stood there—if stood is the right verb for creatures who seemed, even in their stillness, to gather light, to warp the whole world so that they waited at its center. They watched us with those ineluctable eyes. When Sinn growled deep in his throat, Kem Anh leaned into him, pressing her warm flesh against his, purring from between sharpened teeth into his ear. They had not spoken—maybe they never spoke—but they understood what we were saying. I was sure of it.
“Nevariim,” Kossal said finally. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter.”
I turned to stare at him. “We found the remnants of a race that should have been extinct millennia before the Csestriim wars, a race that you believed never existed in the first place, and it doesn’t matter?”
The old priest shrugged, shifted his weight from foot to foot, tested the heft of the twin axes in his hands. “Anything that will not die insults our god.”
“On the other hand, they have given a lot of women and men to Ananshael,” Ela observed. “And just look at them.” She was almost purring. “Maybe we could be friends? Before we kill them, I mean.”
Kossal shook his head. “You know as well as I do that the killing is only half of our devotion.”
“And why do I feel,” she asked, narrowing her eyes slyly at him, “that the other half is about to come due?”
The priest didn’t respond. His eyes were fixed on the creatures who had come to add our skulls to the wall. Ruc leaned close to murmur in my ear. “This is the time. Five of us against three of them.”
He seemed to have forgotten our truncated fight, forgotten the fact that I’d come to kill him. Maybe the arrival of the Three had wiped it from his mind, or maybe my surrender had convinced him I was harmless. Either way, he didn’t want to fight me anymore. Instead, he wanted to fight these creatures who had walked the world for countless thousands of years.
I glanced over at Ela and Kossal, then down at the Three. They still hadn’t moved. If this was a hunt, they seemed in no hurry to start hunting. On the other hand, there was nowhere for us to go. To flee was to die running. They stood with the lazy ease of predators who knew their prey could not escape.
The appearance of the Nevariim had jarred something loose inside me, broken something, some notion or belief I didn’t even know I held until it shattered. They shouldn’t have been real, shouldn’t have been standing there, and yet there they were, waiting to slaughter us in exactly the same way that they had slaughtered so many thousands or tens of thousands before us.
That mattered, somehow, mattered in some way beyond our own imminent destruction. In that moment I could not say how, only that the whole world had shifted. Staring at that awful perfection, I knew that I knew nothing, that things I had believed in the deepest heart of myself were wrong. They would unmake us—I saw that clearly enough—but I wanted to see the world clearly before I was unmade, to know it.
I wanted, just for once, to know myself.
As I grappled with my own inchoate need, Kossal, who had locked eyes with the creatures the moment they first stepped out of the brush, turned to Ela. To my shock, he smiled, then made a low, formal bow. It should have looked ridiculous—a naked old man, bent over, baking in the noonday sun—but somehow he managed to look graceful, even elegant. He might have been a young soldier at a ball, half bedazzled by Ela’s beauty, harnessing his courage to his gallantry. He straightened up, then gestured toward the Three, never taking his eyes from the woman.
“Ela Timarna, priestess of Ananshael, second, greatest, and last love of my life, will you join me in this dance?”
A quick shiver snaked up my spine. It wasn’t because of the arrival of the Three, or not just that. This was something different, more. Staring at the priestess and the priest, I felt a tremor in my flesh, a new note rising, for which I had no name.
Ela smiled, stepped in, hooked the back of Kossal’s neck with the flat arc of a sickle, drew him close, then pressed her lips to his. I’d seen her kiss him dozens of times during the trek south, chaste pecks on the back of the head, mocking, wet smacks on the cheek. This was altogether different. For a long time they stayed like that, the priest and the priestess, eyes closed, hands filled with their weapons, bodies pressed together. Something inside me stirred at the sight, an ache, as though some organ I didn’t know I possessed were trembling after a long stillness.
When they finally broke apart, Ela studied him with sparkling eyes. “My love,” she said finally.
Kossal raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
Ela laughed, spread her hands. Her sickles winked sunlight. “Of course.”
Twin flowering vines of wonder and horror wrapped me, strangled me—wonder at the sight before me, horror that I would understand it all too late. Something in the way they stood, the way they looked at each other, something in Kossal’s … no, it wasn’t Kossal, it was Ela … There was something there, something about her, but I couldn’t grasp it, not quite.
I looked over at Ruc. He was wary, ready. I turned back to the priestess and priest. I wanted to study them forever, to stare at them until I knew what it was I was seeing, but of course, I could not stare at them forever. In moments the Nevariim would tear them apart.
I stumbled forward, words tumbling from my mouth. “You can’t.”
The priestess and priest turned to me.
“The Trial isn’t over,” I pleaded, searching for the words. “You are my Witnesses. You can’t die now. You can’t die yet.”
Kossal shook his head gently. “Everyone serves the god, Pyrre. Even those who never pass the Trial.”
“And today,” Ela added, winking at me, “we will make a great offering.”
“I’m not done,” I protested.
I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. My god had come. He was waiting patiently in the rushes, floating just beneath the water’s surface, lying silent on the wind. I was supposed to welcome him, to hurl myself joyfully into his embrace. I had prepared for this all my life, for the sacred moment of my own unmaking, and now that it was here … where was my faith?
I wasn’t fit to be a priestess. I had become like any other benighted woman—some fisher or farmer—scrabbling for one last moment, then another, then another, as though my life were something I could keep, as though it were some chilly crystal in a lightless cave that would stay perfectly unchanged down the endless generations.
“There is no more time,” Kossal said.
“There is. I have until the end of the day!”
Panic, like a rat trapped inside my chest, raked me with cold, awful claws. I had come so close. By afternoon at the latest, the spiders would hatch inside Chua. I could give her to the god, and then there would be only the question of my love, one last mystery, one final box to unlock. After a lifetime of bafflement I felt as though I finally had the key, that it was secreted on me somewhere, that I could find it if I only had the time … and yet that would mean nothing if my Witnesses died first.
“I’m not ready,” I whispered.
“Which is why,” Kossal replied quietly, “you have failed your Trial.”
The words went through me like a spear. I stood like a slaughtered beast, too stupid to remember to fall. Ela gave me an unreadable smile, then pursed her lips and blew me a kiss. Before I could respond, the two of them turned away, turned toward their own ends, shoulders relaxed, bronze weapons light as laughter in their hands.
Kem Anh smiled, slid a fingernail along Sinn’s neck, then nodded. He stepped forward.
I’ve been alive a long time and never seen a fight like the one that unfolded on that island lost in the delta. Nor do I expect to. Kossal and Ela numbered among Ananshael’s finest servants. I had seen them sparring, of course, back in Rassambur. I’d gone toe-to-toe with Ela. I thought I knew just how fast she was, how dangerous. I was a fool. Whatever deadliness I thought I had witnessed before had just been sport for them, casual activity to stay warm while they searched for a fight that might be worthy. Even the crocs of the Vuo Ton hadn’t tested them, not truly. As they glided down the slope toward Sinn they seemed to shed everything unnecessary, to slough off all superfluous gesture and motion. All that was left of them, when they hefted their weapons to attack, was death.
They flanked him, Kossal coming in high from the left, while Ela rolled low to the right, striking out, trying to hamstring the creature as he turned to face the priest. There was nothing unusual about the tactic, but the perfection with which they performed it made my heart ache. They might have been listening to some silent music, just the two of them, stabbing and retreating, feinting and riposting as though they could both hear the thundering rhythm, those high, staccato notes. They traded attacks like musicians passing the melody back and forth between different instruments, one, then the other, then both at once, exploring the same motif at different pitches: Kossal the drum, Ela the whip-fast fiddle played above it. There are only so many themes in a fight, but the two of them piled infinite variation on those finite notes, flipping them, slowing them, sliding echoes of earlier attacks between all the main movements.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from them, but I heard Ruc exhale quietly at my side. “Sweet Intarra’s light.”
“They don’t worship Intarra,” I replied.
“No,” he agreed, his voice thick with awe. “They do not.”
It seemed impossible that anyone, anything could survive against that attack. Sinn was naked and unarmed. They should have shredded the flesh from his bones in moments. And yet, somehow, he was still standing, fighting like the viper for which he was named—slow, almost lethargic, coiling and uncoiling, feints and counterattacks too fast to follow. He flowed between the sickles and axes as though he were not flesh, but a reflection, an apparition, something horribly gorgeous culled from a dream, impervious to all mortal instruments.
Behind him, Kem Anh and Hang Loc watched, teeth bared, eyes bright.
There is a stillness hidden in all speed. The three fought as though locked in the amber of their violence. Bronze carved gleaming lines across the day. There are moments, listening to music, when you forget to follow the intertwining lines, when you lose track of the tempo, of the counterpoint, abandon all thought and let the sound wash over you. So it was that day in the delta as my Witnesses, servants of Ananshael, fought to make their greatest offering to the god.
“We have to go in now,” Ruc growled.
He was right at my shoulder, so close he could have kissed me or slipped a knife into my side. His eyes, however, were on the fight.
“We have weapons, he doesn’t,” he went on. “Five against one. Five against three if the other two decide to get bloody.”
I turned to look at him. “We can’t win.”
He met my gaze. “Then we’ll die. Everyone dies. You should know that—you’re fucking Skullsworn.”
“I’m not Skullsworn,” I replied, shaking my head. “I failed.”
“Because you didn’t murder me?”
“Because I didn’t love you.”
“You are insane.”
I turned away from the accusation, from those awful green eyes, to find Chua beside me. Blood leaked from the wound in her stomach, streaked her pants, dappled the dust at her feet. Pain twisted her features, but beneath that pain her strength remained, her stubbornness. This was the woman, after all, who had survived two weeks alone and boatless in the delta. Despite the spiders gestating inside her, she didn’t look ready to die just yet.
> Or no. That was wrong. She was ready to die, but not lying down. Despite her wounds, she held the bronze spear steady. I hadn’t noticed her picking it up.
“He is right,” she said, then spat a bolus of blood and phlegm into the dirt.
I stared at her. “That we can beat them?”
“Of course not. He is right that everyone dies.”
Shame washed over me, hot as a monsoon rain. Despair had stripped me so violently of my faith that it had come to this: I needed a fisher and a soldier to remind me of my god’s most basic truth. I gathered my breath into my body, steadied myself, then turned back to the fight.
Ela had lost ground. Sinn had her pressed back against a patch of tangle vine. It was an even more dangerous position than it seemed; she had little room to maneuver, and worse, if a few of those thumb-long thorns snagged her clothes, she’d be held fast. Although I was staring right at it, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was impossible to imagine Ela defeated, Ela dead. Even knowing what I knew about her foe, I couldn’t believe it.
How could the world go on being the world without her in it?
“We have to move,” I said, lurching forward.
Before I’d taken two steps, however, Sinn, who had been ducking under and around Kossal’s hatchets while forcing the priestess backward and still backward, attacked. The Nevariim moved so fast I couldn’t see his hands. He was in one position, then another, the space between elided with terrifying ease. Ela, somehow, anticipated the attack, raised a sickle to fend him off. The creature moved back a step and Ela lunged, far off her balance, reaching, overreaching, then crying out in surprise as she stumbled forward. Sinn hissed, lashed out for her throat.
And Kossal’s ax was there.
For a heartbeat everything went still.
The pale creature studied the blood welling from his skin—the rent ran finger-deep from his elbow to his wrist—turned to look at Kossal, knocked aside the flurry of attacks that followed, slapping the flats of the ax-heads with his palms, then stepped back, out of range.
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