Skullsworn Read online

“Not for you, you old goat, for Pyrre.” She nodded toward the long-haired man, who’d managed somehow to get his footing in the deep, treacherous mud. “That,” she said, smiling contentedly, “is love.”

  “Stupidity,” Kossal grumbled.

  Ela shrugged. “It’s a fine line, sometimes, between the two.”

  If it was a fine line, the painters and sculptors down through the ages had managed to stay on one side of it. Artistic depictions of love tended to focus on softer subjects: lush lips, rumpled beds, the curve of a naked hip. Fewer crocodiles, certainly. Far less screaming.

  “Would you fight a crocodile,” Ela pressed, elbowing Kossal again, “to save me?”

  “You are a priestess of Ananshael,” Kossal observed tartly. “When the beast comes, I expect you to embrace it.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be working for him,” Ela pointed out.

  Vo, too, had landed badly. While he seemed unbroken, the twin pieces of wood he’d used to hold off the beasts had disappeared. The nearest of the two creatures was bearing down on the injured woman. No weapon to hand, a scream of defiance hot in his throat, the man leaped. He landed on the croc’s back, somehow avoiding those massive, snapping jaws. The beast thrashed, churning the muddy water to a froth with its tail, while Vo clung on, arms wrapped around the crocodile’s neck, face pressed against the wet, glistening hide.

  “That’s how they do it in the fights,” I said. “Get behind the thing, get on its back. Get an arm around the neck, then go to work with the knife.”

  “He doesn’t have a knife,” Ela pointed out.

  Bin had managed to tear herself free of the mud, to drag herself a few feet along the channel’s bank, away from both the churning fury of the crocodile and the causeway itself. Beside me, her companions were screaming.

  “I’m going to give him one,” I said, slipping a blade from the sheath on my thigh.

  “Waste of a good knife,” Kossal said.

  “I’ve got others.”

  The knife landed with a wet thwock in the mud, blade down, well within reach of the desperate man. Locked in his battle with the croc, he didn’t notice. Afternoon sun gleamed off the steel, but his eyes were squeezed shut. Bin, blind with terror, blundered into the water. In fact, no one at all had noticed my throw. All eyes were fixed on the struggle below.

  “I take it back,” Kossal said.

  Ela broke into a wide smile. “That might be a first!” Then she narrowed her eyes. “Just what is it, exactly, that you’re taking back?”

  Kossal gestured to the man as the croc thrashed back into the water and rolled. “It is excellent instruction in the ways of love.”

  “Love,” Ela explained patiently, “was in the jumping off the causeway to protect the woman.”

  “Love,” Kossal countered, “is hurling yourself onto a deadly creature, then realizing once you get hold there’s no way to let go. Either you die, or it does.”

  He didn’t look at the woman as he spoke, but Ela threaded her arm through his. “Surely I’m a good deal more attractive and obliging than a crocodile.”

  “Marginally.”

  The creature stayed below for three heartbeats, five, ten. The water roiled where it had disappeared, as though someone had kindled a great fire below the surface. A few feet away, Bin stumbled to her knees, then her screams broke into an entirely new range. A moment later, a red stain bled through the mud-brown water around her.

  The crocodile rolled upright, hurling the man from his back onto the bank. He was obviously exhausted, bleeding from his scalp and shoulder, his shirt half torn away, but he hadn’t given up.

  “I’m coming,” he shouted, gesturing to the woman. “Just get to the causeway and you’ll be all right.”

  “No,” she screamed. “They have me. They have me.”

  I shook my head. “I’m ending it.”

  Kossal turned to study me. “The beasts of the land and of the water were the god’s servants long before our order.”

  “And this is the Trial,” Ela reminded me. “There are rules to observe.”

  Both my blades were in the air before she finished speaking. One took the woman square in the chest. The other sliced through the man’s throat before splashing into the water beyond.

  Kossal turned to me, old face grave. “The offerings of the Trial are prescribed by the song. To go outside of them is to fail.”

  I shook my head, pointing. “She said they had her: One who is right. He said he was coming: One who is wrong.”

  Kossal raised an eyebrow. Ela just started laughing.

  “I expect this will prove a delightful trip.”

  Staring down into the blood and mud, listening to the screams shaking the air around me, hearing my own pulse thudding in my ears, remembering all the old feelings I’d thought long banished or forgotten, I wasn’t sure I agreed.

  2

  “I consider the whole episode a blessing,” Ela announced as we made our way south through the chaos on the causeway.

  Kossal nodded. “The god’s ways are strange.”

  “I’m not talking about the god,” Ela replied, then glanced over at me slyly. “I’m talking about Pyrre’s fashion sense.”

  “In that case, leave me out,” the priest said, not breaking stride despite the press of human bodies churning around us.

  Some people were shoving frantically toward the site of the disaster, shouting the names of loved ones over and over. Others were just as eager to get away, to get off the causeway entirely. Kossal moved through the throng as though he were alone, sliding through the gaps, moving aside troublesome bodies with the occasional well-placed blow to the knee or rib. Faced with one particularly vexing scrum, he toppled a man over the railing, ignored the scream, then moved smoothly through the newly vacated space. We were gone, dissolved into the crowd, before anyone understood what had happened.

  “Don’t be coy,” Ela said, narrowing her eyes at the priest. “You’re just as eager for her to find love as I am.”

  “What I am eager for,” Kossal replied, dropping a screaming woman with a quick blow of his wooden flute, then stepping over her body, “is a quiet room and a strong drink. Panic gives me a headache.”

  Ela shook her head, turned back to me. “He’s hopeless,” she confided. “Wouldn’t know romance if it slipped a warm finger up his ass. But you can trust me when I tell you that this”—she gestured the length of my body as though showing me off to the crowd—“is a massive improvement on those baggy trousers you were wearing earlier.”

  “I’m pantsless,” I replied, “and covered in mud.”

  Not that anyone seemed to have noticed. Half a mile behind us, hundreds of people were dying in the delta. Dying or already dead. On another day, the sight of a mud-smeared woman striding down the causeway in her drawers, knives strapped to her arms and thighs, would have caused people to stop and gawk. Today I was a sideshow at best; one of the disaster’s least interesting casualties.

  “I’ll take muddy and pantsless over soggy and betrousered,” Ela replied. “No one was going to look at you twice in what you were wearing earlier.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to be noticed.”

  Ela tsked. “You’ve been listening to Kossal too much. Just because he’s old doesn’t mean he knows everything.”

  Three men in chain mail and green tabards shouldered past us, cursing loudly at the crowd to make way as they forced their way north, toward the site of the collapse. Each wore a short sword at his hip, but for the moment they’d left them sheathed, using heavy truncheons to bull a path through the throng.

  “Greenshirts,” I murmured. “Arriving too late, as usual.”

  Ela narrowed her eyes. “The city constables?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought the uniforms looked familiar,” she said. “I gave two of them to the god the last time I was here.”

  A dozen more soldiers trailed behind the vanguard, sweating and cursing in the noonday heat—the Greenshirts mai
ntained way stations every ten miles along the causeway and patrolled the entire length. They were hardly a formidable force—the order had been all but gutted after the Annurian invasion two hundred years earlier—but the sight of them made my stomach clench all the same. We tell children they will grow into adults one day, but that’s not quite true. The child never goes away, not fully. The girl I had been, the filthy-faced Weir-rat who grew up prowling Dombâng’s more stagnant channels, cringed at the sight of these grown men, men I could now have given to the god in a hundred different ways. I found myself walking faster, averting my eyes, feeling acutely my almost-nakedness as they passed.

  “Perhaps I should have a word with them,” Ela mused. “I don’t like to be critical, but someone really ought to check on the causeway from time to time. Make sure it’s not going to fall over.”

  “They do,” I said. “There’s a whole division of Greenshirts tasked with checking the pilings.”

  Kossal glanced over. “Not very good at it.”

  “They don’t have enough men to patrol the full length.”

  “How many men do you need to watch wood rot?”

  I shook my head. “Not rot. Sabotage.”

  Ela raised an eyebrow. “Sabotage? How delightful! I was having trouble getting excited about rot.”

  “How do you feel about sedition?”

  She shrugged. “More interested.”

  “They’re still at it?” Kossal asked, frowning. “Annur conquered the city, what, two hundred years ago?”

  “A little more.”

  “Seems like enough time for the local religious zealots to realize they’ve lost.”

  I glanced over at the old priest. “How much time would it take you?”

  “To what?”

  “Give up on your god?”

  He met my gaze. “I’ll give up on Ananshael when creatures stop dying.”

  Before I could respond, a cry sliced through the noise behind us. We’d finally managed to break free from the densest part of the press, and when I looked over my shoulder, I could see that half a dozen Greenshirts had doubled back, sweaty faces grim as they scanned the crowd. They’d put away their truncheons and drawn swords instead, which didn’t seem like a promising development. A pace ahead of them, fingers leveled directly at me, strode the man and woman whom I’d helped climb up onto the broken causeway, the friends of Bin and Vo.

  “Her!” they screamed in unison. Through some musical fluke, their voices were a perfect octave apart. The man broke into a run. “She’s the murderer.”

  “Murderer,” Ela said, shaking her head. “Such a distasteful word.”

  Kossal blew out an irritated breath. “Should have tossed them to the crocs along with their friends.”

  “I didn’t think they noticed,” I replied, my stomach turning over inside of me.

  It sounded ludicrous when I put the thought into words, but the two of them hadn’t been looking at me when I threw the knives. They’d been panicked, screaming. The scene below was a maelstrom of blood, and mud, and violence. The open jaws of a croc are a lot more obvious than the hilt of a knife tucked discreetly against a chest, and neither of the two survivors had so much as glanced over at me as their friends fell. They had seemed thoroughly lost in their own grief and disbelief.

  Kossal, Ela, and I had left them to their unquiet vigil. We’d managed to follow the railing the length of the downed span, leaping the smashed-open gaps, balancing carefully where there was only one rail, mindful that a misstep would drop us back into the mud and rushes below, where people were still fighting for their lives. Fighting and losing, mostly. When we reached the point where our section had torn away, we found hundreds clustered at the jagged lip of the causeway above. Most were just shouting and gesturing uselessly, but a few had contrived to lower a rope. Kossal went up first, then me, then Ela, folded parasol swinging gaily from the strap of her pack. Of the man and woman we’d left on the fallen causeway, there was no sign.

  Evidently, they’d caught up.

  The man’s face was twisted with rage and grief, but something about the sight of us made him pause, shrink back into the knot of Greenshirts that surged up around him. I couldn’t believe that we appeared all that intimidating. I had a lot of knives, sure, but I looked like I’d just escaped from a whorehouse through the privy. Ela was twirling her folded parasol around one finger while Kossal grimaced, tapping his flute against his palm.

  “The god is greedy today,” he muttered.

  I shook my head, smoothed my sweating palms down the front of my filthy shirt. “We can’t kill them.”

  “Six constables and two traumatized idiots?” the priest asked, raising a bushy eyebrow. “Even Ela ought to be able to manage that.”

  “What about six constables, two traumatized idiots, and a worn-out old priest?” she asked, stabbing at his side with the point of her parasol. He parried the attack casually without taking his eyes from the Greenshirts, who were advancing down the causeway more slowly now, twenty paces distant. The leader, a short, square man, was eyeing us warily. His hand flexed on the grip of his sword.

  “I’ve already begun my Trial,” I reminded him. “I can’t kill anyone not described in the song.”

  “You’ve had a busy morning,” Kossal replied. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “There are a hundred people on this bridge,” I hissed, “watching us right now. If you give them to the god, the Greenshirts will be hunting us the whole time we’re in Dombâng. We’ll spend the entire time hiding in attics.”

  Kossal shrugged. “Attics are quiet.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head furiously. “I need the Greenshirts.”

  I’d spent well over a month with Kossal and Ela since leaving Rassambur. We’d talked about everything from blackberry jam to garrotes, but I had avoided any mention of my plans for Dombâng or the Trial. Partly, that was because I was still working through the details. More importantly, though, I was afraid to say the words aloud, afraid that translating thought into speech would destroy it, that my hopes, buoyed up like jellyfish in my mind’s depths, would wither and collapse if I dragged them out into the air. Which meant I’d never mentioned the fact that the Greenshirts were crucial to all my plans.

  Kossal raised a questioning eyebrow, but there was no time to explain. Fortunately, Ela came to my rescue.

  “No attics,” she said, shaking her head. “I came for the wine and the dancing.”

  “You’re welcome to start dancing,” Kossal said, gesturing toward the approaching men.

  “Just let me handle it,” I said, shoving more confidence into my voice than I felt.

  It was a strange and unsettling feeling, not to be able to rely on my knives. Since leaving Dombâng as a child, I had moved through the world comforted by the knowledge that my god was always behind me, silent and invisible, but infinitely patient, always just over my shoulder, waiting to unmake anyone I marked with one of my knives. The day’s slaughter on the causeway provided ample proof that he had not disappeared—he was all around us, going about his inscrutable work—but suddenly, due to the strictures of my Trial, he was utterly beyond my call. Despite the crowd, despite Kossal and Ela at my back, I felt alone.

  As I moved down the causeway toward the Greenshirts, I tried to emulate Ela’s nonchalant grace. It didn’t come easily. For as long as I could remember, I’d found a confidence in fighting, in the feel of my knives in my hands, in the knowledge of my own mastery. Denied those knives, I felt lumbering and awkward. It didn’t help that instead of a silk ki-pan, I was wearing a pair of muddy drawers and a torn shirt.

  You’re a victim, I told myself, just like everyone else. You’re terrified and confused.

  That role, too, was something I thought I’d left behind when I quit Dombâng. I did not relish stepping into it once more.

  “Stop there,” said the leader of the Greenshirts, leveling his sword at me when I was still two paces away. “No closer.”

  I ignored
him, turning to my accusers instead, opening my arms as I stepped closer. “You survived!”

  The mud-covered man was ready for a fight or a chase; he had no idea what to do with my sudden embrace.

  “Thank Intarra!” I exclaimed, burying my face in his shoulder. I could feel his hands on me, trying to push me away as I pulled him closer. “You survived,” I murmured again, surprised to find tears in my eyes.

  “Get off of me,” he insisted, finally managing to shove me away.

  The Greenshirts stood in a loose cordon around us. They held their swords as though unsure whether to swing or sheathe them.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” their leader demanded, stepping forward, lowering his weapon at last.

  “It was horrible,” I said, turning to him, trying to pitch my voice somewhere between harried and imploring. “Horrible. We tried to fight, but the crocs, they were too strong.”

  “She killed them,” the man said, staring at me.

  “I tried,” I moaned, turning back to him. “I had one of those beasts by the jaws. I left two knives in his back, but it didn’t matter.…”

  “Not the croc,” he spat. “Bin and Vo! You fucking murdered them.”

  I tested out a baffled stare. “What? Why…”

  “What’s with the knives?” the Greenshirt demanded, studying the sheaths warily.

  “We are traveling performers,” Ela said, stepping brightly into the conversation, laying a placating hand on the Greenshirt’s wrist. She was wearing doeskin gloves, I realized, although in the moment I didn’t understand why.

  The soldier yanked away, and Ela let him go, shaking her head sadly, turning to the next man. “We were walking just a few paces behind these two when the causeway collapsed.” She managed a shudder that looked entirely real, began to faint, and crumpled into the arms of one of the other Greenshirts, who caught her awkwardly, dropping his sword in the process. A second soldier came to his aid. I glanced down the causeway to find Kossal sitting on the railing a dozen paces distant, looking half bored, half irritated.

  I turned back to the leader of the Greenshirts.

  “They saved us,” I said. “The two who died. The woman—I think her name was Bin—she held off the crocs with a stick. They saved us.…”