Ela straightened up, glanced at Kossal. He winked at her. I’d never seen him wink. Ela shook her head ruefully.
“Ananshael,” she prayed, “please take this love of mine before he begins to gloat.”
“The god comes for us all,” the priest replied, then turned back to Sinn.
Kem Anh stepped forward, lifted her companion’s slashed limb to her lips, bared her teeth, licked the blood clear. Sinn growled low in his throat, then nodded, once to Kossal, once to Ela, an acknowledgment beyond all words. This was what they wanted, these three immortal creatures. This is why they had remained in the delta all these thousands of years, this same scene played out over and over and over. It was for this they trained the Vuo Ton, for this they had left me alive as a child, for this they lived every one of their unnumbered days.
What would it mean, I wondered, thinking with a part of my mind that calved off from the world of blood and mud and sun, to live all those years without ever changing?
“You lied to me,” Ruc said. “You weren’t even trying, back in Sia, back in the ring. I never saw you fight like that.”
I shook my head, staring first at Kossal, then Ela, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.
“That’s because I can’t. Because I’m not like that.”
The priestess wore a smile wide as a noonday sky, a smile that she turned on me.
“Maybe one day you will be.”
“After today,” I replied, “I will be dead.”
She smiled wider. “Then if there’s something you want to be, you’d better hurry up and start being it.”
Sinn hissed, slid forward. The gash on his arm had already stopped bleeding. He didn’t look slowed or dismayed by the wound. If anything, he looked eager.
“There are five of us now, you fucking monster,” Ruc spat.
I glanced past the pale creature, to where the other two Nevariim stood watching. Kem Anh had slid halfway behind Hang Loc, pressed herself up against him and wrapped one arm around his chest. With her other hand, she was stroking his massive cock. Her lips were bloody from where she’d bitten him on the shoulder. I wondered how many of those scars on his skin had been left by her. Both of them were watching us, chests rising and falling as they waited for the fight to begin once more. Neither made any move to intervene.
I edged to the left, toward Kossal, while Ruc broke right.
The old priest fixed me with a stern look. “I didn’t invite you.”
“Our god welcomes all,” I replied, keeping my eyes on Sinn’s sinuous, shifting form.
“I intend to kill this thing,” he said. “To see it unmade.”
“So do I.”
I was surprised by my words even as I spoke them, surprised by how ardently I felt them. After a lifetime dreaming of these gods—false gods—waking to soaked sheets and my heart thudding in my chest, after a decade and a half doubting my own memory, my own mind, the very fabric of my childhood, I had finally arrived where I could bury a length of bronze in their flesh.
Kossal stared at me a moment longer, then nodded, as though that settled the matter.
We’d spread out into a rough circle, hoping to come at Sinn from four different directions at the same time. I stood off to his right-hand side, measuring the distance between us, trying to track the movement of the Nevariim against that of my allies in the fight. Our only chance, if it was a chance at all, would lie in a concerted attack. The others seemed to realize that—all except Chua, who was approaching the creature head on, her bronze spear held back behind her, arm cocked for a fisher’s throw. She might have been all alone for the attention she paid us.
Sinn bared his fangs, opened his arms, inviting her to strike.
Chua refused.
She crossed the intervening space at an implacable walk. There was no rush to her gait, no tension in her shoulders, nothing to suggest she was doing anything but fishing from a bank, looking to take a ploutfish or a blueback with that long, glittering spear. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kossal sliding closer to the Nevariim, hatchets held in the old Manjari guard—one high, one low. He was humming a tune I didn’t recognize, something slow and solemn. On the other side of Sinn, Ela was saying something to Ruc, chatting like a woman in a tavern, gesturing expansively with her twin sickles even as she inched in.
Chua stopped two paces from the Nevariim. Her eyes were calm in the way the eyes of the dead are calm.
“I do not worship you,” she said.
Sinn clicked his teeth together, a fast staccato rhythm, opened and closed his hands, as though flexing claws.
“You can have my skull,” she went on, “but never—”
Kossal launched himself at Sinn halfway through the word, hatchets sweeping in and down even as he leapt. Ela was in motion, too, rolling low, underneath whatever guard the Nevariim might put up, lashing out for a hamstring with her sickle.
It was an impossible attack to block.
Sinn blocked it, catching one of Kossal’s hatchets by the head, ripping it free of the priest’s grip, then smashing it down into the arc of Ela’s sickle. Ruc surged forward with a roar, swinging his sword in a great looping arc. Sinn leaped it easily, hurled the hatchet at his attacker, turned to knock away Kossal’s second attack, swatting the flat of the bronze with his palm, then backhanding the priest so viciously across the chest that he fell back into the dirt, gasping. The Nevariim roared, whirled to face Ela—she was on her feet again, sickles a nimbus of bronze in the air around her—when Chua struck.
Like all good fishers, she had chosen her moment, waiting in the midst of that maelstrom for the opening, then hurling her spear. The bright bronze sank into the Nevariim’s shoulder, spinning him halfway around before tearing free and clattering to the dirt. Blood welled from the wound, flowed down the arm, staining the skin red.
“Never…” Chua began again, then stopped, opened her eyes wide, put a hand to her stomach, and lurched into an awful, staggering dance.
The meat puppeteer.
The name of the spider was apt. She looked like a marionette jerked by some insane master, her limbs jittering and twitching as her body rocked from side to side. She opened her mouth, tried to speak again, choked on the words, then turned—with obvious and agonizing effort—to stare at me.
Pain glazed her eyes. One hand thrashed at her stomach as she tried to claw at the wound while the toxin flipped the limb back and forth like a fish dying on a deck.
I went to her, ignoring the others, ignoring the bleeding Nevariim. If he wanted to kill me while my back was turned, he was welcome to try. I had made a promise, and I intended to keep it.
I put an arm around the fisher’s shoulders, whether to still her or comfort her, I couldn’t say. Her skin was like fire.
“I’m here, Chua,” I told her quietly. “I’m here.”
She trembled in my arms as I dragged the silent knife over her throat. Her eyes fixed on mine, then slipped past me, opening wide, then wider, drinking in some final sight. Then she raised a hand halfway to her neck, sighed blood, let it fall. The body collapsed. Ananshael towered over the island, tall as the sky.
I turned away from the corpse to face Ela. The priestess stood a few paces away, chest heaving, sweat’s sheen glistening on her face.
“A mother,” I said, “ripe with new life.”
She raised an eyebrow. “A little old for it.”
“Hundreds of spiders have hatched in her stomach.” I pointed to the wound, which was already bulging, pulsing with the creatures inside. “That makes six.”
“You’re still trying to pass the Trial?” she asked, cocking her head to the side. Then she smiled, a warm, luscious smile. “That’s my girl.”
Behind me, Sinn growled deep in his throat. I turned to find him watching me with those inhuman eyes. His chin was soaked with blood—he’d been licking the rent in his shoulder—and red stained his sharpened teeth. He bared them wide, spat onto the ground, then spread his arms in invitation. The rig
ht arm, I noticed, didn’t go as high as the left. His shoulder still worked, but Chua’s spear had sliced something deep inside, something important.
“I think he still wants to play,” Ela said.
Ruc nodded grimly, slid off to the far flank. His bronze sword flashed sunlight, as though it were made of flame. He was trying, I realized, to blind the Nevariim. Sinn blinked as the light slid across his eyes, Kossal pounced, and the fight was on once more.
The old priest hammered implacably away with his twin hatchets—he’d reclaimed the second one from where Sinn had tossed it contemptuously in the dirt—his lined face intent on his last devotion. Ela seemed to dance, hurling her sickles in great, whirling arcs that kept the Nevariim from getting close enough to strike at her. Ruc worked like a man at an unpleasant job, mouth hanging open as he feinted, thrusted, searched for an opening.
I did nothing. I wanted to kill the creature as much as the rest of them; even if I couldn’t pass my Trial, I could give my god that one final offering. There was a realization blooming inside me, however, a hot, horrifying feeling that I didn’t recognize or fully understand. Not fear, exactly, though it felt like fear. Not amazement, though that was there, too. I stared at Ela as I grappled with this tremor in my chest—she was smiling, laughing as she fought, every lineament of her body bright with her delight.
I wanted to be like that, like her. I was tired of doubting the heft of my own heart, of parsing my emotions as though they were weights on some merchant’s scale. I wanted to be full, and furious, and free. I ached with that need, and the ache kept me pinned in place as the priestess whirled through the ecstatic stations of her devotion. It kept me pinned in place when I could have helped.
The attack happened in the moment between heartbeats, as that indefatigable muscle gathered itself in my chest, ready to crush the blood through my veins for the millionth time, or the billionth. Even now I don’t know exactly what occurred. Kossal was surging forward, driving his foe back. Sinn seemed to be collapsing. Ruc was harrying him from one side, and Ela from the other. It seemed that they had him, and then … faster than a bowstring’s snap, the Nevariim lunged forward, twisting through the faintest lapse in the old priest’s guard.
Kossal’s throat exploded, blood’s red spraying out across the dirt.
He stood a moment longer, holding vigil, eyes distant, as though watching the approach of his god over the waters, through the rushes and reeds. In my mind, he was still alive, still struggling, but our minds are inadequate. Ananshael came while we stared, unmade his priest without anyone seeing, then slipped away. Kossal never fell. By the time his body hit the earth, he was gone.
Ela exhaled all at once, as though someone had buried a fist in her gut. Then she straightened herself, opened her mouth wide, and poured forth the final agonizing, ecstatic bars of Antreem’s Mass. It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was—stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful—that I understood, finally, about love.
She had been telling me, but I couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she’d loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn’t learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both.
The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy in all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but the in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.
My breath failed me first. When the priestess finally fell silent, she closed her eyes, nodded in response to something I would never know, then glanced back to us and raised an eyebrow. “Just because Kossal got tired is no reason for the two of you to begin loitering. He really should have set a better example.”
Sinn studied Kossal’s crumpled body, hissed his satisfaction, then turned to face the three of us. We had wounded him, slowed him, but two of us were gone. Over his shoulder, Kem Anh and Hang Loc looked on, beautiful as gods, eager as beasts, their bared teeth gleaming with the sun. For millennia they had trained the people of the delta to be their prey, but they could not have faced prey like us before. Even in Rassambur, there had been no one else quite like Kossal or Ela.
Ela had turned away from me, toward the Nevariim. I couldn’t see her face any longer, but I could read the readiness in the set of her shoulders, in the way she flipped those sickles—one after the other—caught them, twirled them happily in her hands. Her brown skin, soaked with the light of the noonday sun, seemed to shine. She was singing again, one of the children’s songs from Rassambur this time, a lilting melody that the few kids who grow up on the mesa learn to sing as they chase each other in wild summer circles. She had become a statue of bliss.
Sinn hissed and stepped forward, ready to destroy her.
A sound like a howl exploded from my chest: “No.”
A flock of winebeaks burst from the rushes, whirled in a clamor above us, then wheeled out of sight to the south.
The world went still. I imagined it all—me, Ruc, Ela, the Three, the delta, everything beyond, the whole spherical world—hanging in a great emptiness, suspended by nothing in a great void, waiting to fall.
I said it again, screamed it this time—“No!”—as though that single syllable could hold at bay all the strength coiled in the flesh of that immortal creature. Sinn turned his head, twisted it toward me like a snake, held me in the coils of his gaze, then looked back at Ela, slid a step forward. At that same moment, the priestess glanced over her shoulder toward me, brow furrowed. That was when the creature struck, lashing across the empty space like a whip uncoiling to knock the sickles from her nerveless hands and seize her by the throat. Ela’s face twisted. She kicked out at him as he lifted her from the ground, but his flesh didn’t yield, and as he choked her, the kicks weakened. Her face purpled, lips swelled. When she tried to speak, her tongue lolled from her mouth.
Without thinking, I started in.
“Pyrre…” Ruc began.
I ignored him. My whole being was fixed on the priestess and the Nevariim strangling the life from her.
“You cannot have her.” I hurled the words before me like spears. “You cannot have her.”
Sinn smiled wide. Ela’s arms and legs, starved of air, started to jerk. The Nevariim turned to me, opened his mouth, and roared. The sound throbbed in my heart, my lungs, as though my organs were drums, as though my skin had been stretched tight over my frame for a single purpose: to tremble when it was beaten.
“No,” I said again, forcing myself to step forward, so close I could feel the heat radiating off of him. How was it possible a living thing could be so hot? My voice, when I found it again, was shredded to a whisper. “She is not yours.”
The Nevariim raised a fist.
Kem Anh’s growl stopped him. I glanced past Sinn to find her gliding forward, her eyes on me, curious, searching.
“I need her,” I said, speaking directly to the creature of my dreams. “She is my Witness.”
It couldn’t have made sense. No one raised outside of Rassambur would have understood the words. I didn’t even know if the Three were capable of speech. None of them had spoken since entering the clearing. It was madness, trying to explain, but my own death made me bold. I could hear my god, his million hands winnowing the air, his nimble fingers already at work in Ela’s failing flesh. My whole life Ananshael had watched me, guarded me. I wasn’t ready yet for him to take me, but knowing he was near annealed my will.
I put a hand against the chest of the Nevariim. It was like pressing against a wall of living stone.
He bared h
is teeth, but behind him Kem Anh growled again, louder this time, and finally, with a furious hiss, he tossed Ela’s twitching body to the dirt.
It took the priestess a dozen heartbeats or so to open her eyes. When she did, she looked momentarily confused, as though she’d never seen the delta before, or the sky, or the reeds. Then she focused on me, on my face, and smiled as she forced herself to her feet.
“Pyrre,” she said, shaking her head, “you can’t save me. I have been ready to die for a very long time.”
I stared at her, stared into those wide, joyful eyes, then leaned down to kiss her on the lips. Despite the pain, she raised a hand, taking me by the back of the head to pull me closer. When I finally pulled away, she was smiling, and I realized, to my shock, that I was smiling too.
“I’m not trying to save you,” I murmured, then drove the knife into her still-trembling flesh. “I’m finishing my Trial.”
Give to the god the one who makes your mind
And body sing with love
Who will not come again.
She doubled over the bronze blade, groaned, coughed a splatter of hot blood across my chest, raised a broken hand to her lips to wipe it away, then slowly straightened. For a moment I thought she intended to fight on somehow, despite the mortal wound. Then I saw her smile was still there, even brighter for the blood.
She put a hand on my cheek.
Her words were wet, ragged. “I didn’t know … it would work.”
I put an arm around her waist to hold her up. I was crying. The tears were hot as blood but leached of all sorrow. She was so light.
“Didn’t know what would work?”
“Kossal kept saying … I was too old.… You’d never … love…”
I stared at her, stared past her, through her eyes into the weeks we’d shared together in Dombâng, the nights she’d insisted I stay up drinking, talking, that day on the deck in the rainstorm when I’d tried to kill her over and over and over while she laughed. I heard her whispering again in my ear: Love is like killing. You do it with every part of you, or not at all.
“You knew…” I managed weakly. “You knew it would be you, not Ruc.”
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