Skullsworn Page 10

  For all that coiled violence, however, his voice was quiet; deep, but quiet. Not the voice I’d expected from a man with sunken knuckles and a broken face. He might have been a singer himself—he had the timbre, although the way he spoke seemed to eschew all music.

  He shook his head. “Expected something a little more lively out of Antreem? Something better to dance to?”

  I considered killing him all over again. I still wasn’t sure why I’d left the temple, but it wasn’t to trade that perfect music for his derision. I could feel the twin knives strapped against my thighs, their hard weight reassuring as a prayer or a promise. I traced the outline of one of the handles with a fingernail through the cloth of my pants. My god, however, is very clear on the nature of his preferred devotion: Ananshael’s priests may kill for justice, or mercy, or even pure, incarnate joy, but our offerings are not to be made in anger. Anger cheapens the gift, profanes it.

  “You’re the one who walked out,” I observed.

  “Tough to focus on the music, considering.”

  “And what is it that we’re considering?”

  He turned finally. He didn’t snarl or glare. His hands hung loose at his sides. Still, there is a way a person moves when readying for a fight—a gauging of distance, a loosening of the neck and shoulders, a settling of the body’s weight into the strength of the legs. It had been clear, back in the temple, that this was a man who had fought. Standing half a dozen paces from him now, I could see more: this was a fighter.

  “The throat or the gut,” he replied, studying me.

  “Is this a riddle?”

  He shook his head. “Riddles are fun. More fun, at least, than a woman planning to stick a knife in your gut.” He pursed his lips. “Or your throat.”

  I hesitated, suddenly off-balance. His good eye flicked down my body. I had the feeling he could see the slim shape of my knives beneath my clothes.

  “Who sent you?” he asked. “Qudis? Shahood?”

  The names meant nothing to me. I’d been in Sia since the spring, but Sia was a city of a several hundred thousand souls. I’d met maybe two dozen people, and of those, I’d already given four to the god.

  “No one sent me.”

  He shook his head. “Horseshit. I’ve still got one eye that works. You didn’t just wander in off the street to hear a piece of music by a man a thousand years dead. You were there to find me. You found me. Then you followed me out. The only question is what you’re planning to do now.” He cocked his head to the side. The cut on his lip had broken open again, and he tested it with his tongue, then spat blood onto the cobbles. “I assume even Shahood isn’t stupid enough to want me completely dead.”

  “I don’t know Shahood,” I replied. “Or Qudis. And if I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”

  * * *

  “Spoken,” Ela purred contentedly, “like a woman in love.”

  I studied her face. If the three carafes of wine had affected her at all, I couldn’t see it. Even sitting still, she looked fast.

  “I wasn’t in love with him. I was furious.”

  She twirled her wineglass by the delicate stem. There were almost no glasses in Rassambur—a pointless luxury where clay cups served the purpose just as well—and yet Ela seemed utterly at ease holding the implausible vessel.

  “Fury might not be love, but it’s a road that goes there.”

  I stared at her. “Next thing, you’re going to be telling me you’ve thrown in with the monotheists, that it’s all the same: pleasure and pain, love and hate.”

  Ela sipped from her glass, then set it down neatly in the ring of its own moisture. “In the end, of course, our god obviates all such questions.”

  Her certainty galled me, as did the lazy way she waved her hand when answering, like she was swooshing away a fly.

  “Of course,” I replied, unable to keep the edge from my voice, “we’re not quite at the end, are we? If I were eager for the god’s unmaking, I wouldn’t be here, trying to create a reason to run into Ruc Lan Lac.”

  For half a heartbeat, she narrowed her eyes, as though some dimness had become momentarily, surprisingly bright. Then she smiled.

  “You’re right, and I apologize. For the death to matter, for it to mean anything, there must first be a life.”

  “I’ve had a life,” I snapped, aware that I’d shifted abruptly to the other side of the debate and furious at the awareness.

  Ela’s smile just widened. “Tell me more about the boy.”

  “He was twenty-four. A man.”

  She lifted the wine to her lips again, sipped, then closed her eyes contentedly. “A man. Even better. Tell me more.”

  * * *

  It was idiocy, obviously.

  Ananshael’s faithful are trained to practice a ministry of silence and shadows. We are taught to slide through unlatched windows, to open throats, then to slip away again like ghosts. A little poison smeared on the bottom of a drunkard’s crock, a black-fletched arrow through the neck—these are the ways of Rassambur. And yet, here I was, standing in the middle of the street, boasting about killing.

  It wasn’t love. Ela was wrong about that. She might manage to fall in love during the first movement of a mass, but that degree of abandon lay far beyond the ambit of my heart. It wasn’t love, and yet something blazed just under my skin; some emotion had goaded me from my seat, some eagerness I couldn’t name made me fling my idiotic taunts at him as though they were kisses or knives.

  I hadn’t noticed when he first sat down, but he was handsome under all the blood and bruises, even beautiful. The swelling could only partially obscure the high, bold bones of his cheeks. Even discolored, even broken, his brown skin looked warm in the torchlight. And there was more: he wasn’t just a moss-eyed beauty, but a fighter, too, broad-shouldered and wiry, and not just a fighter, but a fighter who wept at Antreem’s Mass. I’d never encountered someone quite like him, not even at Rassambur.

  The feeling seemed not to be mutual.

  “‘If I wanted you dead, you would be dead’?” He sucked some blood from between his teeth, then spat it onto the cobbles. “What is that? A line from some mid-century melodrama? You hear that onstage a few nights ago?”

  He didn’t look intrigued. He looked disgusted.

  Again my fingers itched for my knives. Rather than reach for them, I sang in my mind the chorus to one of Ananshael’s oldest hymns:

  Death is an embrace,

  Not an escape.

  The tune is simple. It is taught early to the children of Rassambur, and with good reason. Most people raised outside our faith must face their problems without recourse to killing. The average woman has only the vaguest idea where to place a knife in a human body to end its operation, which means, when she is angry, that the knife is not the first thought in her mind. People raised outside Rassambur learn early to argue, to barter, to protest, to apologize, and only in the most dire cases do the blades come out. To Ananshael’s faithful, however, the knife holds no mystery. To so many questions, it seems the easy, obvious answer, and yet our problems are not the god’s; his ways are meant to be more than the means of our petty escapes. Hence the hymn. Hence the fact that I kept talking to Ruc Lan Lac—though even then I didn’t know his name—instead of cutting out his liver for making me feel foolish.

  “If you’re going to pull that blade on me,” he said, staring pointedly at my thigh, “go ahead and pull the ’Kent-kissing blade. If I had time to waste, I’d still be in there,” he stabbed a finger past me, toward the faceless statues standing vigil at the temple’s door, “listening to Antreem, not out here enduring your babble.”

  Shame blazed in my cheeks. It was a strange sensation.

  He spread his arms as though inviting my attack. “Well?”

  For the first time, the people crowding the street seemed to notice him. They saw the dried blood on his face, followed his one-eyed gaze, glanced over their shoulders to find me, and then shied away, leaving us standing like two stones, mot
ionless in the larger current.

  “I followed you…” I began, lowering my voice.

  He shook his head. “I don’t care. I have a fight to get to. If you’re supposed to keep me from getting there, by all means, have at it.”

  He didn’t sound scared. He sounded, if anything, almost bored. Intrigue and irritation warred inside me. I wanted him to know the truth of me, of what I could do. I wanted to show him, to see that beautiful green eye widen in surprise.

  By the age of nineteen, I had grown accustomed to feeling stronger, smarter, faster than anyone outside Rassambur. Ananshael’s elder priestesses and priests could take me apart joint by joint, of course, but I’d started to think of everyone beyond our white sandstone walls as slow, almost bovine. The muscle-bound men boasting in wharf-side taverns, the crook-nosed merchants’ guards, the hard-eyed harlots on the street corner with their bright-pleated dresses and half-hidden knives, the angry drunks and the huge, slow bodyguards of the rich, who carried their own wide shoulders as oxen carried their yokes—they all seemed weak, ignorant, irrelevant. This is a danger, for those of us who follow the god of death. When you can unmake a woman as easily as breathing, it becomes easy to believe that you are somehow greater than that woman, more.

  Ananshael loathes this type of hubris. It runs counter to all that he holds dear. In the grave’s slender space, there is no room for pride. The final truth of our inevitable ending erases all line between the weak and strong, the great and small, between the priestess with her knives and her pride, and the carter on the street, bent double beneath his load. I used to imagine my god as an avenging force wide as the sky, his hundred hands wielding a hundred weapons. Now, I see him as an old man, patient and slow. He holds spring’s wet dirt in his hands, lifts it up to the light so that we can see, repeats the same words over and over, endlessly patient—You are this. You are this. You are this.—until we understand.

  Back then I didn’t understand; not really, not fully. And so the scorn in the beautiful young fighter’s voice scalded. I could have borne his rage, but I could not bear this weary dismissal. I could not kill him, not while my mind was disarranged by my own pride and anger, but neither could I let him go.

  “What fight?” I asked.

  * * *

  “Pyrre, you minx,” Ela cut in, shaking her head in good-natured amazement. “The whole way from Rassambur you’ve been pissing and moaning about love, and all this time you’ve been hiding this delicious little story under your skirts.”

  “I haven’t been hiding—”

  “Of course you have. You’ve been treating it like one of those jade cocks we saw back in Mo’ir, getting all sloppy and bothered on it when you thought Kossal and I weren’t looking, then tucking it away in your pack and playing the stone-hearted, loveless, unlovable killer all the long day long.”

  I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me that you didn’t see the cocks. That huge woman with the headscarf and knives was selling them in the morning market. They were thick as my wrist!” She circled her wrist with her fingers by way of demonstration, then narrowed her eyes, suddenly sly. “You bought one, didn’t you?”

  “What would I want with a wrist-thick jade cock?”

  “I’ll go ahead and assume that the question is rhetorical.”

  “I’ll go ahead and assume you understand that a polished stone phallus has nothing to do with love.”

  Ela frowned speculatively. “Let’s not say nothing.”

  “I’d imagine falling in love with a rock would be a stretch, even for you.”

  “Nothing wrong with stretching.” She winked.

  I bit back a retort, took a long swig of my wine instead, waited until the draught had snaked all the way down into my stomach before responding. “Do you want to hear the end of the story, or not?”

  The musicians had packed up early, but a few determined revelers remained on the deck, sprawled around tables in groups of two or three. Two tables over, a young couple was bickering—he kept taking her hand, and she kept pulling it away angrily, holding it close, then laying it on the table all over again, as though it were bait. Past them, a very fat, very drunk man was singing listlessly, transforming a lively dance tune into a dirge. Most of the servingmen had started stacking chairs and mopping the deck, although no one had bothered us yet.

  “No,” Ela replied finally. “Not tonight.”

  The words took me by surprise. “Half a heartbeat ago, you complained that I was hiding the whole thing.”

  “Oh, I like hiding.” She drained her glass of wine, locking eyes with me over the rim the whole time. “If no one’s hiding anything, then what is there to find?”

  I shook my head, suddenly baffled. “I need to go to bed.”

  Ela rolled her eyes. “You slept all day.” She glanced over at the bare-chested young man who had been taking care of us. “And Triem won’t be done working for ages.”

  “I have to go to bed,” I said again, standing up unsteadily. “I need to be ready tomorrow.”

  “Oh?” The priestess raised an eyebrow. “Ready for what, may I ask?”

  “Ready to kill someone.”

  6

  Hitting things and drinking things seemed to be the Neck’s central activities.

  I knew that the enormous soldier was called the Neck because every time he slammed another wooden tankard down on the table, the other men seated around him—soldiers under his command—would chant, “The. Neck. The. Neck. THE! NECK!”

  It wasn’t hard to see how he came by the name; the Neck’s neck was a column of flesh dropping straight from his ears onto the foundation of his massive shoulders. Tattoos climbed from the open collar of his legionary uniform, thorny vines and twisted barbs mostly, although an unsteadily inked woman sprawled across his jugular, naked, legs spread as though she were trying—very implausibly—to derive some pleasure from that bulging artery. The rest of the bastard was every bit as big as that neck, as though someone had cobbled him together out of huge slabs of flesh without much regard for the skeletal anatomy beneath.

  The Neck didn’t chant. Instead, whenever the chorus of cheers around him rose to a pitch, he would pound on whatever was nearby: the table, his knee, the shoulder of a companion, as though insisting on both his drunkenness and his levity.

  I didn’t believe in either.

  Certainly, he’d consumed an impressive amount of beer in the time I’d been watching him, but though he swayed in his chair, the sway wasn’t quite right. It looked like something rehearsed, performed. And his eyes—instead of stuttering in the way of the truly drunk, they remained steady. He seemed to be paying attention to nothing beyond the beer and the other men at his table, but his gaze never stopped moving, panning quickly and calmly over the room. Whenever the door opened, the Neck glanced over, the movement so quick that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been watching.

  There’s a common misconception that big men are stupid. I’ve heard dozens of explanations: all that muscle steals blood from the brain; their heads are broken from getting into so many fights; they’ve just never needed to be shrewd. In plays, they’re usually depicted as comic brutes, in literature as willing idiots of slighter, brighter human beings. It’s as though our basic sense of fairness is offended by the idea that the same person could be both intellectually and physically formidable. There should, we think, be some sort of trade: the poor in wealth should be rich in spirit, the homely more noble than the beautiful. It doesn’t work that way. Fairness and justice have never interested the goddess of birth. Bedisa bestows her blessings arbitrarily, showering one person with health, strength, wisdom, denying the next the basic comfort of an unbent spine. It is not until death that we are finally made equal.

  Of course, the Neck wasn’t dead yet—that was my job—and to my great inconvenience, he was starting to look like one of those upon whom Bedisa had lavished her most expansive gifts. I glanced at the other men around him—soldier
s from his legion, judging from the insignia on the Annurian uniforms. It would have been easier to kill one of them. In fact, it might well have been easier to kill all of them. They were young, obviously strong from years marching and fighting down in the Waist, but unlike the Neck they were built on a human scale. Their necks looked like bundles of spine and esophagus, windpipe and nerve, rather than architectural features. They also looked nervous.

  They did their best to hide it, of course, laughing too loud and clapping one another on the shoulder, pointedly ignoring the other patrons, local folks who sat in loose knots around the tavern’s circular tables, their faces barely illuminated by the low light of the red-scale lanterns above. A few of the soldiers were trying to go tankard to tankard with the Neck, although, judging from the slur in their song and the stagger in their step, they lacked their commander’s stomach for ale. Even half a barrel of that ale, however, couldn’t hide the wary glances, the way their hands kept reaching, as though of their own accord, to the swords and knives belted at their waists. When someone dropped a clay mug over by the bar, even the drunkest of the soldiers lurched halfway to his feet, as though expecting to fight.

  I had set the stage for that skittishness, of course, at least partially. In the centuries since conquering Dombâng, Annur had insisted that the city was part of a peaceful and unified whole, as though it were all as easy as signing a few treaties and lifting old tariffs. The world tends to be more stubborn than that.

  I used to spend idle hours poring over Rassambur’s vast collection of old maps. I still do, actually, and one fact about those yellowing sheets of vellum always strikes me: while the names of the kingdoms and empires shift—smaller polities combining or fracturing off, giving the illusion of change—the most fundamental borders remain the same, century after century. No empire has ever united the lands east and west of the Ancaz. No potentate has brought the cities north of the Romsdals into any greater state. And none of Eridroa’s central powers had ever leashed the wild territory north of the Waist—territory including Dombâng and the Shirvian delta—not until Annur.