She shook her head. “Didn’t know … hoped.”
“You planned it.”
Blood seeped between her teeth as she smiled.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Thought you’d make a good priestess … Just needed you to stop … being so … serious all the time.”
Her eyes were vague, gazing at something far away, as I lowered her to the ground.
“Live…” she murmured.
“We’re about to die,” I protested.
“Live anyway … Live more … That’s the trick.”
Her face was beautiful even now, even flecked with blood, but her breath rattled in her throat. Each time she inhaled, she winced. “It hurts,” she whispered. “Sweet lord, it hurts.”
I brushed a smear of mud from her cheek.
“Not anymore,” I replied.
I cut her throat with the sacrificial knife. Blood gushed over the blade, flooded my hands, soaked the ground around me. Her body went gradually slack as the life drained out. It was impossible to say how much pain I had saved her—maybe only moments. It didn’t really matter. Her whole life she had been ready for its end. That’s what it is to serve the God of Death.
She was gone, utterly gone, but that didn’t matter either. Love is not something you can keep. It is something you do, every day, every moment, regardless of who is dying.
I smoothed the sweat-soaked hair back from her brow. Slowly, I straightened, wiped the blade on the leg of my pants, reclaimed my spear, then turned to face the Three.
“Seven,” I said quietly.
Their gazes were grave, ancient, inscrutable.
A few paces behind me, I could hear Ruc shift.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded. The words were quiet, as though he didn’t have enough breath for the question.
“I’m a priestess of Ananshael,” I replied without turning to look at him.
Wind sifted the rushes.
“You’re a monster,” Ruc said finally.
I turned the statement over in my mind, tried to understand what it might mean.
“She was happy to go to her god.”
“No one is happy to die.”
“You’re wrong.”
Ruc stepped up beside me, put the blade of his sword against my cheek, turned me to face him.
“The only people who want to die are the ones who hate their lives.”
I shook my head. The bronze sliced my cheek. I didn’t mind. Ela’s voice sang in my ears.
“Notes or moments—you can’t hold on to them.”
“So that means you give up?”
His eyes were a deep, baffled green.
I leaned forward, kissed him full on the mouth. He didn’t resist.
“No,” I replied, when I finally pulled away. “It means you listen. It means you play.” I nodded toward Sinn, who watched us with venomous eyes. “Will you play with me, Ruc Lan Lac?”
“You’re insane,” he said for the second time that day.
Instead of replying, I gestured to the Nevariim once more. “You like to fight, Ruc. This is a good fight. A great fight. Will you fight it with me?”
He was silent a long time, then shook his head. “Kiss me one more time,” he said quietly.
I smiled, then kissed him one more time. He tasted like blood and sorrow.
We fought that immortal creature like dreaming. If Chua, and Kossal, and Ela hadn’t injured him, slowed him down, we wouldn’t have had a chance, but even so, I never thought we would survive. He was too fast, too strong, too perfect in every motion. I didn’t fight him because I wanted to win; I fought because I wanted to fight. I didn’t love Ruc, but I liked him, I admired him, and it felt good to move my body beside his, not to be fighting against him for once, but with him, to be testing ourselves against something that had never been defeated. Everything felt good. The sun on my skin, the blades in my hands, the hot wind on my face, the breath in my chest. Even Ruc seemed to feel it as we fell into our rhythm, covering each other’s attacks and retreats, trying to pry open the tiny cracks in the creature’s guard. When I finally stole a glance at him, he had that look I recognized so well, the look of a brawler in a deadly brawl or a singer lost in a song. The world had contracted to this. There was no place else, no one else. The moment was all we wanted. I felt something new, a perfect surrender, an annihilation of whatever lifelong thought-thin membrane had separated me from everything else, from the whole glowing world.
The song of life echoing in my heart, I feinted high, low, high again, dodged a fist, ducked under a blow from the wounded arm, and slashed Sinn across the chest.
It wasn’t a killing blow, shouldn’t have been, but when he stepped back, Ruc roared and hurled himself forward. I barely had time to think how stupid it was, the attack of a mindless drunk in some barroom brawl, a lunge that left no reasonable defense, no chance to extricate himself if it went wrong. Sinn swatted aside the sword, and Ruc let it drop, but kept coming on, opening his arms. Even as the Nevariim shattered his chest, Ruc wrapped the creature in a huge embrace, pulled the immortal thing in tight as life seeped out of him.
“Pyrre,” he managed, my name half a cough, half a moan, and I saw that he hadn’t been stupid at all. His attack wasn’t an attack, but a sacrifice, one last gift to me, the woman he thought was a monster. In the quarter heartbeat that the Nevariim was tangled in Ruc’s arms, I stepped in and cut the creature’s throat.
Ananshael is a humble god. He claimed that immortal trophy with the same quiet grace he claims all things. In the end, this creature that the people of the delta had worshipped as a god for so many thousands of years died in the same way as a bird, a fish, a lizard, any of the world’s small, scuttling creatures that live their flame-quick lives, then unravel in his gentle hands.
Ruc fought the god a moment longer, long enough for me to hear him whisper in my ear as I knelt, just one word, one solitary syllable: “Love…”
Then, before he could finish, the light went out of those green, green eyes. I still don’t know if love was a word he was using for me, or something he intended to explain, something he believed I still had wrong. I closed his lids. The sun would keep his skin warm until night fell. That seemed right, somehow. He’d always been warm.
I straightened, then turned to face the two remaining Nevariim.
My knives were light in my hands. The day was young. I could feel myself smiling.
“Who’s next?” I asked, pointing a bronze blade at Hang Loc. “You?” I turned to Kem Anh. “You?”
The woman cocked her head to the side, as though trying to see me clearly, or to understand what she saw. I gazed into those eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me since my childhood. They were the same—liquid and inhuman—but the terror I’d felt of them for so long had vanished. How could I feel terror in a world brimming with such beauty?
“Let’s fight,” I murmured.
Kem Anh didn’t move forward, didn’t even raise a hand. She examined me a while longer, and then she smiled, shook her head, turned away, toward the brush and the thick forest beyond, Hang Loc following her as they receded toward legend once more.
I threw the knife, not because I expected to see it strike, but for the beauty of the bronze flashing in the sunlight. As I expected, Kem Anh turned, caught the blade as it spun end over end, studied the weapon for a moment, then tossed it aside. When she stepped into the brush with her consort, I didn’t try to follow. The Three were Two now, gone, vanished back into the labyrinth of the Given Land.
I turned to consider the slaughter behind me. The corpses were gorgeous, even in the postures of their ending. The wind had picked up. It gusted through the rushes, half whistling—a note, a voice as wide and bright and gracious as the world, that lifted, shifted, then disappeared each time I thought I almost heard it clearly.
EPILOGUE
That is the story, my love. My story, but yours, too.
The Vuo Ton found me on the island three days later, a
slender boat sliding out of the warm morning mist, tattooed figures silent as idols, even those at the oars motionless as the hull drifted toward the shore. The Witness stood near the bow, one foot on the thwart. When the boat was still a pace and a half from the sand, he leapt, landed easily, then stood watching me for a long time.
“You are alive,” he said finally.
I nodded, but didn’t get up from where I was sitting. I’d made no effort to escape the island. If Ananshael wanted me, he knew where to find me.
I’d spent the first day burning the bodies of the dead. I laid Kossal and Ela, Ruc and Chua on a great pyre of dry rushes, labored half the morning to kindle an ember with a dry stick in a piece of driftwood, then stood back and watched as the fire devoured the piles of bone and meat. The four warriors were gone, utterly unmade, but their bodies burned bright as anything still alive.
Sinn, I did not burn. I carved his head from his shoulders with the bronze knife, then spent the afternoon shaving away the skin from the skull, prying out the eyes, scooping clear the brain—which seemed heavier than human brains, more dense—then washing the bone in the river until it gleamed. When it was finally clean and dry, I placed it atop the wall of skulls, packed the sockets of the eyes with dirt, then planted a pair of river violets.
I spent a long time looking at the monument. To the people of Dombâng, the island is a sacred place, the abode of their gods. It is not sacred to me—no more sacred than any other place where my god has unmade a creature—but it is beautiful. I smiled, laying Sinn’s skull atop the pile; he had been a gorgeous creature, and it seemed appropriate that what was left of him, too, should be gorgeous.
After that I spent the days and nights seated on the shore, listening to the birds, watching the clouds. I expected my god to gather me to him, but instead of my god, the Witness of the Vuo Ton had arrived in his long boat.
“You are alive,” he said again.
I realized that I hadn’t replied the first time, rose to my feet, and smiled.
“I am. The only one.”
“The Three gave you back.”
I considered telling him that his gods were not gods, but the remnants of a near-forgotten race, then decided against it. People worship as they will. It was not my place to take the faith of another.
“Now there are Two,” I replied.
He blinked. “The gods…”
“… Wanted a hunt worthy of them. They found it.”
I pointed to the skull. It was larger than a human skull. Thicker, too.
The Witness crossed to it, lifted it to the sky, stared into those dirt-packed eyes for a long time, then laid it reverently back on the pile. When he turned to me, his eyes were full of tears.
“Where would you have us take you?”
I smiled. “Home.”
I didn’t mean Dombâng. Rassambur was my home, my true home. It had been my home even before I knew its name. I stayed in Dombâng a little more than a year, however. I knew, shortly after I’d returned to the city, while I was still healing, that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one to have survived the island after all.
Love sang inside my heart—Ela’s last gift—and you were growing inside me, tiny but getting larger every day. You are a child of the delta, son, conceived in a hut of the Vuo Ton. Your father was a scion of your city, and you are the last of that line, the last of Goc My’s lineage. What you’ll do with that fact, I don’t know. This story might not matter to you, but it is your story as much as mine, and you deserve to know it.
I stayed in the city long enough to see you born, then to nurse you. You were a wide-eyed, laughing child from the first. No one would have guessed at the violence of the first days of your gestation. You rarely cried, and your laughter sounded like song. It was hard to let you go, but I owed a debt for a prayer I had made, a prayer answered finally on that island in the delta. One night in autumn, just after you were weaned, just before the Annurians arrived with their legions and their blockade, I laid you on the altar of the temple of Eira, trusting to her priestesses and priests, to the goddess herself, to raise and watch over you, my only child. I imagine you in that temple now, surrounded by white light and the smell of jasmine. The thought makes me smile.
I used to loathe your goddess. She seemed to me a player of favorites, a fickle, capricious creature, the opposite in every way of the god I serve. I was wrong. Our gods, of course, are beyond all human understanding, but I imagine Eira as the daughter of Ananshael. I imagine the two of them holding hands, her smooth fingers laced through his old, gnarled joints. The Nevariim do not die—not natural deaths—and they do not love.
We do both. We must do both.
Perhaps I will come back to the delta one day and hold you in my arms again. Perhaps not. In either case, I hope this finds you well, my son, child of my doubt and my delight, your heart full of life, and your mouth still brimming with song.
ALSO BY BRIAN STAVELEY
The Emperor’s Blades
The Providence of Fire
The Last Mortal Bond
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRIAN STAVELEY lives in rural Vermont. This is his fourth novel in the world of The Emperor’s Blades.
Visit him on the Web at brianstaveley.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Also by Brian Staveley
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SKULLSWORN
Copyright © 2017 by Brian Staveley
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Richard Anderson
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8987-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8989-3 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9780765389893
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First Edition: April 2017
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