Skullsworn Read online

  They didn’t find her, but twelve days later she returned, stumbling over the rickety bridge that separated our quarter of rotting pilings and dilapidated docks from the next island over. Two-Net had always been the toughest woman I knew, but the woman who returned to the city was almost unrecognizable, one arm black and swollen to the elbow with some spider’s poison, one calf shredded by qirna, the rest of her legs and chest lacerated by spear rushes. Chua was too tough to die, but she never went back into the delta. Even more frightening, she never talked about what she saw out there, just sat in her run-down shack, a building as far from the water as she could get. Sat there and drank. When kids would come to stare at her, she’d chase them off with a fishing spear, then go back to her drinking, staring into the dark current of the past with her dark, unreadable eyes.

  The person following me was not Chua.

  He was taller than her and, though he moved with something like her serpentine grace, more thickly muscled.

  Our eyes met for a moment. He smiled, revealing sharpened teeth, then turned into the shadow of one of the alleys.

  I took two steps after him, then stopped. I could have killed him—probably—except for the limitations imposed by the Trial. He didn’t look likely to start singing. He didn’t look pregnant. Which left me what? The chance to chase him into the alleyway, then confront him with a series of strongly worded questions? I had no idea why one of the Vuo Ton would be following me, but he’d made no effort to impede my work. In fact, if his smile was anything to go by, it was possible that he approved. The Vuo Ton came to Dombâng to trade, but they had no love for the city—that was why they’d abandoned it so long ago. It was possible that the man who’d been following me wanted to see civilization’s encroachment on the delta pulled down by my bloody hands.

  I turned the question over and over in my mind as I made my way back to First Island and the statue of Goc My. Dombâng had seemed the obvious place to perform my Trial. The only place, really. I was born in Dombâng. I made my first offerings to the god there, though I didn’t know them for offerings at the time. It was my life in Dombâng that led to my life in Rassambur. I have to go back, I had thought. And yet, I had arrived in the city only to discover that the whole place felt like a trap, as though the past weren’t the past at all, but some kind of deadfall, the weight of the years suspended by the slenderest of baited sticks, ready to crash down, to crush me the moment I touched anything.

  I heard the sound before I reached the plaza at the center of First Island, a buzzing that might have been the hum of a million insects at first, but grew as I approached the overlapping gabble of a massive human throng. I’d expected something—almost a dozen hacked-open bodies have a way of drawing attention—but I hadn’t anticipated that the entire plaza would be packed so tight that I had to turn sideways every time I wanted to move. It felt as though the whole population of the island had turned out—fishwives in their wide, oiled aprons; shipwrights in noc skirts with tools strapped around their waists; merchants pulled from their stores and stalls by the commotion; carters who had abandoned their labor for the moment, partly because it was impossible to move in the press, partly because they, like everyone else, were trying to get closer to the statue of Goc My, to see what had happened there. The adults gathered in tight knots, whispering, muttering, arguing, dark eyes darting over the shoulders of their companions to see who was close, who was watching or listening. The conversations differed, but over and over I heard the same few words: Chong Mi, bloody hands, revolution.

  When I finally neared the square’s center, the throng thinned abruptly. It wasn’t hard to see why. A dozen Greenshirts armed with flatbows and short spears had formed a rough cordon around the statue and the corpses at its base. Though they were the ones carrying the weapons, most of them looked wary, almost frightened.

  “Keep back,” growled the nearest of them, an ugly young man whose appearance wasn’t improved any by the massive wart plastered across the side of his nose. He prodded at the crowd with his spear, shifting edgily from foot to foot. “Keep back or get cut.”

  The front line of the mob, those confronted with the actual steel, shifted back half a step. Those protected by the bodies of their fellows felt more bold.

  “Go back to Annur, you fucking Greenshirts!” someone shouted. A woman’s voice. I turned, but there was no way to find her in the press.

  “Or come out here!” someone else added. “We’ll plant that spear up your ass.”

  Sweat beaded Warty’s face. He glanced over his shoulder, obviously wishing that the men behind him would finish their business before things turned truly vicious.

  At first, it was hard to say just what that business was. Through the gaps in the crowd, I could see fragments of the scene. The bodies lay exactly where they’d fallen, sprawled in their final postures. Two Greenshirts knelt in the puddled blood, going over the corpses, though what they hoped to find in the pockets of the dead youths I had no idea. I shifted slightly to see the statue’s plinth. My mark was still there, red paint obvious in the daylight. It wasn’t the symbol that interested me, however, so much as the man who stood before it.

  He was studying the bloody hand, his back turned to both me and the mob, but I recognized the set of those broad shoulders, the small, hook-shaped scar—a scar I’d given him myself—glistening in his shaved scalp, just above his ear. Unlike the rest of the Greenshirts, he didn’t wear armor. I could almost hear his voice in my ear, warm and wry: Who needs steel when you have speed? He wasn’t wearing the standard uniform of the order either. Instead of the loose green tabard, he wore a light, slim-fitting coat of gray wool over a cotton shirt, open at the throat. No insignia. No sign of rank. I had to smile; Ruc Lan Lac had always been a reluctant soldier.

  One of the Greenshirts approached him warily.

  “Sir,” the guardsman murmured. I could barely make out the word.

  Ruc didn’t move. He was almost as still as the statue itself, studying the paint as though he could see something buried beyond, some secret hidden deep inside the stone itself.

  “Sir,” the guardsman said again, louder. “The mob is getting restive.”

  This time, he turned. I’d known those green eyes were coming—green like the churned-up sea just before a storm, green like deep forest in a midafternoon downpour—but they made my stomach shift inside me all the same.

  Ela would take that for a good sign, I thought, studying his face from beneath the hand I’d raised to shade my own eyes.

  It looked as though his nose had been broken again, and a new scar puckered the corner of his chin. Not that it mattered. The scar and slightly flattened nose did nothing to diminish the high cheekbones, the smooth, bronze-brown skin, that serious brow. If anything, he would have been too pretty without the remnants of violence stitched into his face. While the rest of the Greenshirts seemed close to open panic, he scanned the crowd as though noticing it for the first time.

  “Restive,” he said, shaking his head. “I hate that word.”

  “Sir?” the Greenshirt asked, glancing warily over his shoulder.

  “It sounds like rest,” Ruc went on, ignoring the turmoil beyond. “Makes me think resting.” He paused, frowned at the mob. “Which they are obviously not.”

  “Sir…” the Greenshirt began again. Restive aside, his lexical range seemed somewhat limited.

  Ruc nodded, stepped past the man, raised his voice—a warm, deep baritone—to be heard over the clamor.

  “Who likes rum?”

  Most people don’t expect rum at a riot, and the question seemed to confuse the portion of the crowd that heard it. Eyes narrowed, lips tightened, people shushed their companions, leaned forward, wondering if they’d heard right. Ruc had always known how to play a crowd.

  “I know this seems very exciting,” he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Dead people. A handprint. I can promise you, however, that it’s quite boring. I, for one, am the opposite of excited. We’re going
to spend the morning hauling these bodies to the crematorium, then we’re going to spend some more time scrubbing blood off the flagstones, cleaning up the statue, and then I’m going to go back to the Shipwreck to spend the afternoon writing an extremely tedious report. You all can watch, or you can have free rum.”

  He raised an eyebrow, waited.

  “Ya can’t buy us off with your fucking rum,” someone bellowed from the crowd.

  “How noble,” Ruc replied. “I’m glad someone with principles will be here to oversee the scrubbing. As for the rest of you, a ship from Sellas—Roshin’s Rage—docked in New Harbor this morning. It’s loaded with barrels of red rum and olives. Bring a basket and a large crock to the station manned by my men, and they’ll fill both.”

  Ruc turned back to the statue without another word. The other Greenshirts scanned the mob warily, ready for the assault, but even as I watched, people were repeating the message—Rum. Free rum.—and those at the fringes were starting to slip away. A basket of olives and crock of red rum weren’t extravagant prizes by the lights of any reasonably wealthy merchant, but most of the men and women gathered in the square weren’t merchants. No one grew olives within three hundred miles of Dombâng, and red rum was the kind of spirit they might enjoy once a year—at a wedding or a funeral.

  The bodies were still there, of course, as was my handprint, the paint dry in the early-morning heat. Anger still simmered in the crowd, but it was cooling quickly; Ruc had given the mob nothing to do with that anger, nowhere to direct it. I could see why the bureaucrats in Annur had begged him to come back to the city, to take charge of the Greenshirts; he’d just sidestepped a riot for the price of a few barrels of rum.

  I like the fights, he used to say, that I can win without too much punching.

  It was a strange claim, coming from a bare-knuckle boxer, and I never really believed him. Ruc had always seemed ready for the violence, eager. Which was lucky for him, because, though he didn’t know it yet, this fight was just getting started, and if I had my way it was going to involve a lot more than punching.

  4

  The sun hung well above the peaked roofs to the east by the time I returned to our inn. A few dozen patrons were scattered in ones and twos around the teak tables, sipping cups of steaming ta, plucking dewy fruit from their bowls, moving slowly and talking low to spare their headaches from the night before.

  A bare-chested young servingman greeted me as I stepped off the bridge onto the deck.

  “Welcome back to the Dance,” he murmured, a sly smile twitching at the edge of his lips.

  I realized suddenly what I must look like: a young woman, obviously wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes, her hair all disheveled, returning to her own inn in the surreptitious hour after sunrise.

  “I hope you had a pleasant evening,” he continued blandly.

  I shrugged, met his eye. “About average.”

  “I’m desolated to hear it.” His smile did not look remotely desolated. “I hate to think of a woman like you forming an ill opinion of our city. Perhaps tonight you would permit me to be your guide? If you enjoy plum wine, I know an establishment—”

  I cut him off. “I prefer quey.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “A strong drink for a strong woman. There is a place I know—”

  “I’m sure it’s delightful, but the only place I want right now is a quiet table and the only company I want is a large mug of ta.”

  If my brusqueness bothered him, he didn’t show it. He just winked, gave a practiced half bow, and gestured me to a table at the far end of the deck, right next to the railing. I realized as I sat down that I was tapping a finger against the knife strapped to my thigh. I’d left the statue of Goc My in high spirits, but something about the young man’s flirtation had curdled my good humor. It wasn’t the mere fact of his advances; I’d heard worse a thousand times over in a dozen different cities. In fact, it was the banality of the scene that rankled, the ease of his invitation, his obvious indifference to my dismissal. The whole tiny episode just served to remind me how casually most people navigated the seas of romance and attraction, how love and all its more sordid derivatives seemed to come so naturally to everyone but me.

  “Bad habit.”

  I looked up to find Kossal lowering himself into the chair across from me. As a single concession to the heat of Dombâng, the old priest had traded his heavy robe for one of much lighter wool.

  “Talking to people?” I asked.

  “That too. But I meant the knife.”

  I realized I was still tapping at the hidden blade with one finger. Grimacing, I shifted the hand away, wrapped it around the handle of my mug instead.

  “Where’s Ela?” I asked.

  He shrugged, laid his wooden flute on the table in front of him. “Tangled between one naked body and another, I’d expect.”

  I studied his lined face as he waved over a mug of ta for himself. Old wasn’t quite the right word for him; it was too tangled up with other words like feeble and unsteady. The years had done their work on Kossal—moles and liver spots dotted his shaved scalp; knuckles broken long ago stood crooked from his long, elegant fingers—but like good steel or fine leather, he seemed to have aged into a kind of rightness, as though for decades his body had just been waiting for old age. The thought of him with Ela seemed strange, but not grotesque.

  “It doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

  “Used to. For a few years I gave every lover she had to the god.”

  “How many was that?”

  “Forty-seven.”

  I blinked. “Anyone you knew?”

  “Four priests of Ananshael; two priestesses. One was an old friend.”

  “Is that why you stopped?”

  He took a sip of his ta, then shook his head. “I stopped because I couldn’t keep up. That woman fucks quicker than I can kill.”

  Before I could think of a response, a shocked exclamation broke out from a table halfway down the deck. I turned to find a tall man in a blue vest leaning over, whispering urgently, while his audience leaned in. I couldn’t hear most of it, but I managed to make out the phrases Goc My and bloody hands.

  “So,” Kossal said, studying me through the steam rising off his ta. “Looks like word of your evening’s labors has caught up with you.”

  He didn’t shout it, but he didn’t whisper either.

  “You were following?”

  He nodded. “Unfortunately.”

  “I thought you might be grateful for a tour of the city’s greatest monuments.”

  “The peaks of the Ancaz are monuments. What you have here is a pile of rotting wood and a superfluity of stagnant water.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “Engrossed, no doubt, with your artistic pursuits.”

  I hesitated. “Did you see anyone else following? Tall. Tattoos streaked across his face?”

  The priest nodded. “Strange choice for someone in the sneaking business.”

  “Only if you’re in a city. Out in the delta those tattoos blend with the rushes.”

  “Fisher?”

  I shook my head. “The city’s fishers stay in their boats. He was one of the Vuo Ton.”

  “I assume that means something.”

  “First Blood.”

  “How illuminating.”

  “The Vuo Ton left Dombâng not long after the city’s founding. Set up their own village in the delta.”

  “To be closer to the crocs?”

  “To be closer to their gods.”

  Kossal sucked at a tooth, took a sip of his ta, swirled it around his mouth while he studied me.

  “Tell me about these gods,” he said finally.

  I opened my mouth to reply, and for half a heartbeat the world seemed to tip sideways. A hot-bright fire blazed across my vision, blotting out Kossal, the deck, the canal, the whole city beyond. There was only the light, endless as the sky, then there, surfacing from the brilliance, two slitted pupils. They were midnight dark, featu
reless, but it seemed as I stared back at them that they watched me with a predatory delight.

  No, I tried to say. It was what I always tried to say when those eyes loomed up in my mind, in dreams or waking visions: No. As always, the word would not come. I groped for the table in front of me, caught it, steadied myself, and then the vision was gone, replaced by Kossal and the rest of the world fading back into existence around him. He was still sitting across from me, his eyes narrowed, inquisitive, his pupils blessedly round.

  “Want to explain what just happened?” he asked.

  I shook my head, trying to clear the last remnants of the vision. “Just tired.”

  Kossal glanced pointedly at my hand, which was locked furiously on the rim of the table. “Don’t wear yourself out holding up the furniture.”

  It took a moment to pry my fingers open. I flexed them gingerly. “Dombâng worshipped different gods before the Annurians came. Local deities. Creatures of the delta.”

  “Ever seen one?”

  I stared at him, forced down the dread flooding my veins. “You ever see a red crow?”

  “Don’t exist.”

  “Neither do the old gods of Dombâng.”

  The blinding vertigo threatened to engulf me again, but I kept my eyes fixed on Kossal’s and hauled a long breath into my lungs. By the time I exhaled, the dizziness was gone.

  “There’s some folks in this city,” Kossal replied after a moment, “seem to be working awful hard in the service of something that doesn’t exist.”

  The mood on the deck in front of Anho’s Dance had shifted from relaxed to furtive. Women and men hunched over their tables. Hisses and whispers had replaced the low murmur of casual conversation. From where I was sitting, everyone looked like a conspirator.

  “Pick any city in Eridroa,” I said, turning back to Kossal. “You’ll find people telling stories about old gods.”

  “Folks here seem to go a bit beyond storytelling,” Kossal pointed out. “It’s one thing to spin a yarn by the fireside, another to start sawing through causeway pilings and feeding people to the crocs.”