13

The lanterns were already lit by the time we returned to Dombâng. Our vessel slid silently past Rat Island, through the Water Gate, beneath Bald Bridge, then up Cao’s Channel toward the Shipwreck. I felt like a stranger in the city all over again as the tall teak buildings loomed above us. Threads of song twisted out from the windows and alleys to tangle in the wind, then fall apart. We’d been gone barely a day, hadn’t left the delta, and yet the channel where we burned the Annurian transport might have been in a different time or a different world altogether. The hot, bright silence of that lost backwater shared nothing with the human shapes and rhythms of the city. It seemed a miracle, suddenly, that we had gone there and returned.

As our pilot leapt onto the dock, Ruc turned from the rail to face the Greenshirts on the deck. The men looked exhausted, even those who hadn’t been rowing, as though the horror at what they’d witnessed were a weight they’d been carrying all day, the hot heft of it bowing their shoulders, weakening their knees. They studied their commander warily in the light of the dock lanterns.

“Anyone who speaks of what we saw today,” Ruc said quietly, “will be executed. If that seems extreme, consider this: our city is on the brink of civil war. An Annurian commander was found murdered in an outhouse, and someone has been slapping bloody hands on every building in sight. The legion charged with helping to keep the peace is the same legion we just found massacred in the delta.

“At this point, most commanders would try to reassure you. They would tell you that everything is under control, that we have nothing to fear. I am not going to tell you that. Dombâng is in danger. Everyone you love is in danger. Not from some mythical triad of gods. The gods, if they exist at all, don’t trouble themselves with our affairs. We are in danger from the very citizens we’ve sworn to protect. If there are riots, people will die. If there are fires, people will burn.”

He slid his gaze over the assembled soldiers.

“It is your job to see that there are no riots or fires. You will do what you swore to do, which is to protect this city, and you will keep your mouths shut while you’re doing it. If you’re tempted to whisper something to your wives about what you saw today, to your friends, remember this: that whisper could kill them as surely as a knife in the eye. Continue the normal schedule of patrols. Continue to guard Dombâng as you have done since you joined this order. Uphold your oaths. I know you’ll do this, because you are Greenshirts.” He paused. “Are there any questions?”

After a moment, one soldier raised an unsteady hand. “What are we going to do? About what happened out there. About what we saw.”

Ruc smiled. “Leave that to me.”

I waited until all the men had filed off the boat to approach him. I couldn’t quite make out his eyes in the darkness, but I could see the planes of his face reflected in the light of the dock’s swaying lanterns.

“And just what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Talk to some people.”

“Which people?”

He shook his head, then started to turn away. When I took him by the arm, I could feel his body shift, dropping toward a crouch, getting ready to throw me or to strike out. Then he caught himself, and it was over. Anticipation drained out of me, leaving behind a dry, dull disappointment.

“What do you want, Pyrre?” he asked quietly.

“I want to do the job I came here to do,” I replied. His skin was warm beneath my hand. “I want to help you.”

“Why do you think I brought you out to the transport?”

“The transport was the start of this, not the end.”

Ruc shook his head slowly. “This started a long time before the transport. Whoever hit that boat, they might have been acting out scenes from the bloody delta ballads no one’s allowed to sing anymore. The soul snakes, the fucking violets in the eyes…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“So who are you going to talk to?”

He scrubbed his face with a weary hand. “We have prisoners. Men and women instrumental to the insurgency.”

“The insurgency,” I pointed out, “was one of the two teams that got slaughtered out there.”

Ruc turned away from the dock and the lanterns, away from me, back toward the black water running silently past. The corded muscle of his forearms flexed as he gripped the rail of the vessel.

“Obviously, it is more complex than I realized. Multiple factions.”

The vision of a woman with serpent’s eyes blazed across my mind, then vanished, leaving me blinking in the darkness.

“You think it’s just people,” I murmured quietly.

“Of course it’s fucking people,” Ruc growled. “Don’t tell me the Kettral sent you here to dig up a handful of missing gods.”

I stared at the back of the man I had come to Dombâng to love, to kill. The reason Ruc made a good military commander was that he didn’t succumb to the shibboleths and superstitions of most soldiers. If someone hit him in the face, it wasn’t because the day was unlucky or he ate the wrong thing or forgot to bathe the right way; it was because he made a mistake, and once he identified that mistake, he never made it again. A fight, a battle, a city on the verge of chaos—to Ruc, they were all the same: problems to be solved, problems that sprang ultimately from people. If he could see the person, find the weakness, he could win.

I wasn’t sure, however, that whatever killed the legionaries was a person.

I’d spent so much of my life in Rassambur, where men and women talked to a god daily, where they gave themselves willingly, happily into his infinite embrace. I didn’t believe the old gods stalked the delta beyond Dombâng, but the thought that there might be something out there, something I didn’t understand, something beyond the ken of mortal women and men—the notion, at least, was something I’d been raised to entertain.

Kossal had come all this way for the same reason. The old priest could be gruff and elusive, but if he believed there were Csestriim hiding in the delta, maybe he was right.

“The Vuo Ton,” Ruc said finally.

I looked over at him, yanking my mind from my own thoughts.

“What about them?”

“They could have done it.”

“The Vuo Ton haven’t meddled with Dombâng since they abandoned it.”

“Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past.”

I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. “I’ve been short on prognosticating pigs.”

“Life is perfect for a pig,” Ruc said. “Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals.”

“And in this vivid analogy,” I concluded, “Dombâng is the pig.”

“The fact that my head’s still attached at my neck doesn’t mean no one’s sharpening a knife.”

I watched the bloody light of the lanterns play off the water as I tried to think through the idea. The thought that after more than a millennium out of sight the Vuo Ton would suddenly attack Dombâng seemed implausible. But then, everything about the Vuo Ton was implausible. Someone had murdered the soldiers and the priests scattered over the transport deck, someone fast and dangerous, someone capable of melting back into the delta without leaving a trace. I thought again of the man who had followed me through the city, the black slashes inked across his face, the way he’d smiled when I finally noticed him.

“We need to find Chua Two-Net,” I said finally.

Ruc turned. “Who is Chua Two-Net?”

“A fisher, although she quit fishing before I left Dombâng. She must be fifty years old by now.”

“Why do we need an elderly fisher?”

“She knows the delta.”

“A thousand people know the delta,” Ruc replied, shaking his head. He gestured across the canal to where a flotilla of boats were tied up for the night, bobbing quietly with the small waves, creaking against each other. “There are fishers right over there.”

I shook my head. “Not like Chua. She was raised by the Vuo Ton.”

“Chua Two-Net.” Ruc narrowed his eyes. “I think I have heard of her, actually.”

“She spent two weeks alone in the delta without a boat. Came out alive.”

“Happened while I was down in the Waist with the legions,” Ruc said. “Sounded made up.”

“It wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was there when she came back.”

Ruc studied me, then nodded. “I can’t leave the Shipwreck now. I’m going to be up half the night trying to contain this mess.”

I wanted to grab him, to drag him with me into the night in search of Chua, but Ruc had never been one to be dragged.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll come here mid morning.”

He nodded again. “Tomorrow.”

*   *   *

All rivers flow toward an ocean. Which means that everything people toss in a river—all the piss and shit and rotten slop—also flows toward an ocean. If you look closely, you can see the channels of Dombâng grow fouler and murkier as you move east, but there’s no need to look at the water. If you want to know what direction you’re going, it’s easier to take note of the buildings. All the sprawling teak palaces and bathhouses stand on Dombâng’s far western end, where the channels run quick and clear. East of New Harbor the dwellings crowd together, stacked into three-story tenements that overhang the canals. Still farther east, at the city’s last fringe, the tenements give way to warrens of shacks tacked up on rickety stilts, rotting docks bobbing on the water, a patchwork of permanently tethered barges. Instead of causeways, narrow planks span the gaps between platforms.

On maps, this end of the city is called Sunrise. Everyone who lives there thinks the name is a joke. You can never see the sunrise. There’s too much smoke from the cook fires and not enough wind to blow it away. Clearly, the idiot responsible for the maps never visited. The people who live there call it the Weir, which sounds almost picturesque until you realize that weir is just another word for trap.

“You’re going to see things here,” I said, turning to Ruc as we crossed one of the wobbly bridges into the quarter, “that offend your notions of order and law.”

He snorted. “I grew up in Dombâng. I’ve been commanding the Greenshirts for years. We send patrols into the Weir all the time.”

“We’re not a patrol,” I pointed out. “We’re not here to bring the bright light of Annurian justice. We’re here to find one particular woman, ask her some questions, then get out without killing anyone.”

I took a deep breath, then immediately regretted it. The Weir reeked of sewage and offal, smoldering cook-fire smoke, thick fish soup, and the hot delta peppers people mixed in with everything to disguise the taste. That smell was my childhood, and I realized, standing on the swaying wooden span of the bridge, that I was not eager to go back.

“I won’t kill anyone if you don’t,” Ruc said.

“No promises,” I replied. It was in the Weir, after all, that I’d first discovered the might and silent mercy of my god.

He shrugged. “How do we find her?”

From the top of the bridge’s arc, the Weir seemed to stretch away forever, all crooked wooden roofs, dogleg canals, and shoulder-wide alleys hazy with smoke. A woman could spend a day wandering around down there and not find her way out—and that was if no one put a knife between her ribs for something she said, for something she had.

“Chua used to live on the water,” I said. “She and her husband slept on their boat down in the Pot.”

“I know where it is. Let’s go.”

I shook my head. “After she came back, she didn’t have the boat anymore. Or the husband. She went as far from the water as she could get.”

Ruc considered the web of brown canals stretched out below us. “Which is just how far, in the Weir? About a dozen feet?”

“A dozen feet can mean the difference between watching the crocs and feeding them.”

“I thought she was too fast for the crocs.”

“Everyone gets slow, if they live long enough.”

“That an argument for dying young?”

“Argue all you want; death comes when it comes.”

“How philosophical.”

I glanced over at him, then nodded toward the warren ahead. “You grow up down there, you either become a philosopher, a corpse, or a madwoman.”

“I’m glad you didn’t decide on corpse.”

“Who says I got to decide?”

The Weir closed around us like a net. After twenty paces, it was impossible to look back and find the bridge we’d crossed. The stained walls of the shacks threatened to shove us from the narrow walkways into the sluggish water below, and though I’d grown up swimming in those same channels, almost oblivious to all but the worst filth, my standards had changed. I’d forgotten just how vile everything was. There were no bathhouses in the Weir, no real ways to get clean. Fishers washed in the river outside the city; everyone else just lived with the stench until their noses went dead.

Almost worse than the smell was the chaos, the racket. People lived right on top of one another. Voices and bodies, entire lives spilled out of perpetually open doorways. Cook fires burned in wide clay bowls in the center of the walks. If you wanted to get anywhere, you had to step over people, around them, had to elbow garrulous mothers with children on their hips out of the path and skirt the small circles of gamblers squatting in the alleys. It was the opposite of Rassambur. Where the mountain fastness of my god was all emptiness, stone cliff, knife-edged shadow, and the stark sun, carving its perfect arc across the sky, the Weir was sweat and rot and life, ten thousand voices, ten thousand hands, all so close they seemed to press against your flesh.

By the time we reached Rat Island, I was ready to stab someone in the eye just to make a little space. The island, fortunately—the only true island in the whole quarter—was less crowded than the canals surrounding it, and for obvious reason.

There are no burials in Dombâng—there isn’t enough dirt to bury anyone. According to the stories, the city’s earliest inhabitants laid their dead in slender canoes, set them alight, then shoved them out in the current. It sounds like a beautiful practice. As Dombâng grew, however, the tradition became impractical. There would have been an armada of burning canoes blazing through the channels every night, getting hung up on docks, setting the wooden homes alight. The city wouldn’t have lasted a week. Instead, the dead are cremated, the very rich in broad plazas inside their homes, everyone else on Rat Island.

Unlike literally every other structure in the Weir, the crematorium sat all by itself, ringed by a firebreak of ten paces on every side. Four stone walls—some of the only stone walls in Dombâng—delimited a wide courtyard. The walls were high enough to block the sight of what happened inside, but not so high that we couldn’t see the flickering tips of the fires. I’d climbed those walls once as a child—part of a dare—and I could still remember the sight: five long troughs carved in the dirt, each one filled with dozens of bodies, bundles of rushes piled under and over the corpses. I’d watched, horrified, mesmerized, as workers doused the pits with oil, then set them alight. Not so different from cooking, I’d thought, my stomach twisting. Ash settled over the whole island, white and silent. You could see your footsteps in it each morning. When I first saw snow, years later, my first thought was that it looked like the ashes of my city’s dead.

“She lives here?” Ruc asked.

I pointed to a small shack just at the edge of the firebreak. “Like I said, she doesn’t like the water.”

“There are places to get farther from the water. Even in Dombâng.”

“Not if you’re a fisher who’s quit fishing.”

Unlike most of the structures in the Weir, the door to the shack was closed and latched from the inside. Maybe to keep out the ash.

I knocked. No reply.

“How long ago did you leave the city?” Ruc asked after a moment.

I grimaced. “Fifteen years.”

“She could be dead by now, gone somewhere else.”

“She said she meant never to go near the water again.”

“People change their minds.”

I knocked again, louder this time, then tried the door once more. The stench of the crematorium clogged my nostrils, coated the back of my throat, but I caught a whiff of fish congee from inside the hut. A moment later, through the crack between the door and the frame, I glimpsed someone moving.

“Chua Two-Net,” I called out. “We need to talk to you. It’s worth a full Annurian sun if you open the door.”

Ruc shot me a glance. “Who’s supplying the gold?”

“You are.”

“Not the Kettral?”

“You’re the one in charge of keeping the city from going up in flames. I’m just here to help.” I turned back to the door, “Chua—”

The spear slid through a chink in the wall fast as a striking viper. I saw it at the last minute, knocked it aside, caught the shaft with one hand just below the head—a fishing spear, I realized, with a barbed fork rather than a leaf blade—then twisted. Usually, that would have been enough to get the person on the other end to drop the weapon, but in this case the person on the other end was strong as an ox; I managed to yank the spear a few inches out through the gap and then it was being hauled back. I wrapped my other hand around the shaft—I didn’t intend to give the weapon back until I knew no one was going to stab me with it—and after a momentary struggle we settled into a stalemate.

“Well, you may be stupid,” a woman’s voice drawled through the wall, low and ragged, “but you’re fast. I’ll give you that.”

“Chua,” I replied. Even after sixteen years, I remembered that voice. “You want the gold, or you want to keep trying to stab me?”

“I was planning to do both.”

“Time for another plan. Can we come in?”

“Let go of my spear.”

“So you can stick me with it when I walk through the door?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Spear’s no good in here. If I’m going to come after you, I’ll use the gutting knife.”

I found myself smiling. “You’ve got a strange notion of hospitality.”

“You’ve got a strange notion of the Weir,” she spat back, “if you think pounding on strangers’ doors bragging about all the money you got is a good way to stay alive.”

“I don’t have the money,” I said, then nodded toward Ruc. “He does.”

“Who the fuck’s he?”

“Ruc Lan Lac. The commander of the Greenshirts.”

Ruc had taken a step back when the spear snaked through the wall, but aside from that he remained still, those inscrutable green eyes of his wary, ready.

“Long way from home, Greenshirt,” Chua said after a pause.

Ruc shrugged. “The Weir was part of Dombâng last time I checked.”

“When was that? Don’t see too many green shirts this far east.”

“I imagine you don’t see much of anything,” Ruc replied evenly, “if you insist on talking to everyone through the wall.”

“I like to know a person before I invite them into my home.”

Ruc spread his arms. “Now you know me.”

The spear twitched in my hands. “And you? You got the delta accent, but it’s strange.”

“I’ve been away.”

“Away. Lucky for you. Why’d you come back?”

I glanced over at Ruc. “Dombâng is in trouble.”

“Dombâng,” Chua replied, “is a rotting cesspool sinking slowly into the delta, and one dumb girl isn’t going to change that. I don’t care how quick you are.”

“The rotting and the sinking aren’t really my concern,” I said. “I’m more interested in the slaughter.”

“Slaughter is a mite more interesting than rot,” Chua conceded.

“Especially for people in my line of work.”

“Which is what? Grilled meat?”

“Fighting.”

“You don’t look like a soldier.”

“Kettral,” I said quietly.

It was getting easier, each time I said it, as though simple repetition could transmute the most basic lie into truth. I wondered briefly if the same thing could work with love. I glanced at Ruc. If I just said it over and over—I love him, I love him, I love him—would the bare words flower into actual emotion? It might have been easier to imagine if we’d been somewhere else, anywhere else. Outside the ramshackle door, however, a spear shaft clutched in my hands, ash from burning bodies falling softly on my hair, love seemed as distant as the sky.

“Kettral and Greenshirts,” Chua said after a long pause. “It might be fish shit, but it’s not boring—I’ll give you that.” I felt her let go of the spear. There was a clattering and scratching, as of multiple latches being undone, and then the door swung open.

When I’d left Dombâng, Chua Two-Net had been somewhere in her middle thirties, which put her around fifty now. The woman I remembered had been black-haired, brown-skinned, brown-eyed, like most people native to the delta. The resemblance to her fellows ended there. Where most citizens of Dombâng wore their hair long and glossy, Chua kept hers shaved to a dark stubble. She’d caught me once watching her as she dragged a long knife again and again over her oiled scalp. You want to stay alive out there, she’d said, you don’t want hair. Just another place for the spiders to hide, another thing to tangle in the net.

Coiled around her shoulders and arms—her body was muscled like the ropes used to tether ships in New Harbor—someone had inked dozens of serpents, red and green and black, all writhing upward, ringing her throat with a necklace of slit eyes and bared fangs, each tattooed viper arrested in the attempt to reach her face. According to the stories, she inked another every time she killed a snake, a claim that, judging from the species, meant she should have been dead a dozen times over. Chua, however, had always been defiantly alive, a character too large for the narrow alleys of the Weir, like one of the heroes who stepped straight out of the songs the old folks sang nightly around the embers of cook fires, someone as fierce and terrifying and glorious as the gods we had forsaken.

She looked like a god no longer. I recognized the snakes, of course, still hissing silently at her neck, but she’d grown her hair halfway down her back and her wide shoulders were slumped, the muscle cording her arms half melted away. The old scars from when she fought her way free of the delta raked her skin into puckered welts. Half of her face was badly discolored, a red stain spreading beneath the brown—the reminder of a fang spider bite that would have killed someone weaker. Aside from her eyes, she looked like an old woman who might have trouble on the city’s more rickety walkways. Those eyes, however—bright, defiant—were the eyes I remembered.

“Never them,” I said, nodding to her.

She blinked. Until that moment, until seeing her standing there before me, I’d forgotten Chua’s unique salutation. In any situation, greeting or farewell, she would say those two words: Never them.

“Evening, Two-Net.”

“Never them.”

“Luck out there in the rushes today.”

An incremental nod. “Never them.”

No one seemed to know if it was a promise, or a warning, or a curse. No one I knew was ever brave enough to ask. I’d forgotten all about it in my years at Rassambur, but it came back to me now, as so many things had come back since returning to Dombâng.

“I don’t know you,” she said, studying me.

“I grew up here.”

“Said that once already.”

“I saw you win the New Year boat race three times.”

“Eight times.”

I nodded. “I was too young to remember the first five.”

Chua glanced over at Ruc, chewed at her lip for a moment, looked past me, over my shoulder, then back at me and nodded. “Come in and close the door. The dead will choke you, if you breathe them long enough.”

The small shack was comprised of a single room. A rush mattress lay in the corner. A woven mat, thinner, but of the same rushes, covered the rest of the floor. There was a clay bowl, half filled with the congee I’d smelled, a pitcher of water, also clay, an empty basin, half a dozen salted fish hanging from a low rafter, along with a bundle of dried sweet-reed tubers. A fire pit sat at the center of the room, but when I glanced up, I saw the smoke hole above it was closed.

The older woman followed my eyes. “I get my fires finished before they start theirs.” She nodded through the wall toward the crematorium.

The space was cramped, grimy, unkempt, save for the wall immediately behind the mattress. Two fishing nets hung neatly from a series of pegs. Above them, horizontally on a wooden rack, lay a series of spears—forked, barbed fishing spears like the one I was holding. In Dombâng, fishing spears are as common as fish. Every child has one. You can see women and men on the bridges and docks any time of day, chatting idly while they wait, arms cocked, for the right moment. The spears on Chua’s wall were not like those. I wasn’t a fisher, but it was obvious from the smooth, clean grain, from the qirna teeth laid into the head as barbs, from the patterns painstakingly burned into the shafts, that these were, in the way of tools passed down from generation to generation, sacred. In a small rack below them, sheathed in snakeskin, hung three gutting knives, bone handles carved for the best grip.

The rush mats hadn’t been changed in weeks, maybe months. The fire pit needed digging out. The fish stew was starting to congeal in the bowl. Those spears and knives, however, were meticulously oiled. None of the ash that had settled around the rest of the room had touched them.

“The bottom two belonged to Tem,” Chua said, settling herself cross-legged on the mat by the burned-out fire.

“Who is Tem?” Ruc asked.

“My husband. He died.”

And that, of course, was the part of the story I’d forgotten. Everyone had been so shocked to see Chua Two-Net come in from the delta after twelve days missing that it was easy to forget that her husband, Tem, had not come back. Part of the problem was that he had never fit easily into Chua’s legend. Everyone knew that she’d been born outside the city, raised and trained in the hidden village of the Vuo Ton, that that was where she’d learned to row, to fish, to survive in the delta. It made sense.

What did not make sense was the next part. According to the story, she’d crossed prows with Tem one day, fallen in love, forsaken her home and her people, and come to Dombâng. We might have believed it if Tem had been something other than what he was … a reed-slender fisher with a pronounced limp and no particular renown. He could sing, he could tell a tale that would make children squeal in horror or delight, but he seemed a small person beside Chua—he was even known around the Weir as Small Tem—and so when he died, it seemed only right. Of course Small Tem couldn’t survive in the delta. Of course Chua Two-Net came back. When people told the story, they forgot him.

Chua, evidently, had not forgotten.

“My condolences,” Ruc said.

“Are worth less than a holed canoe,” Chua replied. “Where is the gold?”

Ruc glanced at me. “My friend gets ahead of herself sometimes.” He rummaged in a vest pocket. “I have a handful of silver. The gold is at the Shipwreck.”

“And the fish are in the river,” Chua replied, face souring.

“He’s good for it,” I said.

Ruc’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything. I passed the spear across to Chua, then sat down. After a moment, Ruc joined me.

“So,” the woman said, studying us. “Doom comes for Dombâng.”

“You don’t sound concerned,” Ruc observed.

Chua croaked a laugh. “I’m not!”

“No love for your adopted city?”

“Your city’s a pisspot.”

“I notice,” Ruc replied, voice perfectly level, “that you’re still here.”

“Lot of people in this world end up places they didn’t mean to, places they never should have went in the first place.”

Chua shifted her gaze to me as she said the words. My guts roiled. Memories choked me, as though I had breathed them in with the ashen reek of the crematorium.

“Someone slaughtered a transport filled with Annurian legionaries,” I said, my voice a good deal steadier than I was.

Chua laughed. “No shortage of hatred for the legionaries in this city.” She looked pointedly at Ruc. “Or for the Greenshirts. That’ll happen, if you kill enough people just for believing what they believe.”

“This didn’t happen in the city,” Ruc replied quietly. “It happened in the delta. Southeast of here.”

“So the priests managed an ambush.”

I shook my head. “The priests were there. Whatever killed the legionaries killed them, too.”

The woman went suddenly, perfectly still. Her stare slammed into me.

“Killed how?”

“Throats torn out. Soul snakes in stomachs. Delta violets planted in the sockets of skulls. Between the legionaries and the priests who planned to ambush them, there were over a hundred people. Well over.”

“All dead,” Chua murmured, half to herself.

Ruc leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

She turned to stare at him. “Because the Three don’t leave people alive.”

Low sunlight lanced through the cracks in the hut, turning the flecks of fine floating ash to flame.

“No,” Ruc said after a moment. “There are no gods haunting the delta.”

“How much time you spent in the delta?”

Ruc shook his head. “I don’t believe that three creatures, three anything could slaughter over a hundred armed men.”

“Oh, they don’t need you to believe,” Chua replied. “They just need you to bleed.”

Ruc rose fluidly to his feet. “I’m done. I can hear this same shit on any bridge in the city.”

“Something hit the transport,” I pointed out quietly.

“Someone,” Ruc insisted. He turned back to Chua. “The Lost.”

She shook her head slowly, almost hypnotically, eyes fixed on something beyond us. “The Vuo Ton want nothing to do with your city. They care nothing for your politics.”

“Politics,” Ruc said grimly, “is just a word for people trying to get what they want. The Lost are people—I’ve seen them in the harbor, in the markets—and all people want things. Maybe they resent the city’s spread. Annurian incursions into the delta…”

Chua laughed a long, mirthless laugh. “There are no incursions into the delta.”

“The spread of the northern quarters?” Ruc demanded. “The causeway?”

“The causeway is a ribbon looped around the neck of a tiger. The delta could swallow your northern quarter in a single flood. If you have not lived in the rushes, it is impossible to believe how small this city is, how insignificant.”

“You came here,” Ruc observed. “You quit the Lost to come to Dombâng.”

Chua’s grip tightened momentarily around the fishing spear, as though she planned to plunge it through his throat.

“I did not come for the city. I came for a man. Now he is gone.”

“Then why don’t you go back?”

“Because I have no desire to pay homage to the gods who took him.”

“What gods?” I demanded.

She looked at me. “If you grew up here, you know their names.”

“Sinn,” I said quietly. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh.”

“Myths,” Ruc growled. “Kept alive because they’re politically useful.”

Chua looked at him. “Does a myth rip out throats? Do politics pull heads from bodies, then plant flowers in the sockets of the eyes?”

“Men do, when they want something bad enough. If the Lost want the city, they’ll want it weakened, divided.…”

“You are not listening,” the woman said. “The Vuo Ton are not Lost. They know exactly where your city is. They do not come here because they do not care. Their lives, every day of their lives, are bent to the struggle.”

“What struggle?” I asked.

“Against the Three.”

“You just said they worshipped their gods,” Ruc cut in. “That they pay homage.”

Chua shook her head, as though baffled by his stupidity. “The struggle is the worship. The fight is the devotion.”

“So these gods of yours can be fought.”

The woman cocked her head to the side. “A hundred heartbeats ago you insisted the Three were a myth. Now you want to fight them?”

“What I want,” Ruc said, “is to find whoever hit the transport and killed the legionaries. I think it was the Lost. You think it was these mythical gods. Either way, I’m not going to find the truth here in Dombâng. I need to go to the village of the Vuo Ton.”

“You can take us,” I said quietly.

Chua stared into the blackened ashes of her fire pit for a long time, then shook her head. “I escaped the delta enough times. I do not intend to go back.”

Ruc’s jaw flexed. “The Greenshirts will pay you five Annurian suns,” he said at last. “In addition to the one already promised for this meeting.”

I shook my head, cutting in before Chua could respond. “Five hundred golden suns.”

Chua’s eyes narrowed. Ruc blinked, then began to shake his head. “No guide is worth a fraction—”

“There is no guide,” I said, riding over him, “who can take us to the Vuo Ton. You know that as well as I do.”

“I will not go into the delta again,” Chua said. “Not for any pile of gold.”

I turned away from Ruc to meet her eyes. “The gold is not just gold.”

She studied me. “The coins…”

“Are miles,” I concluded. “They are the distance you can put between yourself and this delta. With five hundred suns, you can take a ship to Annur, or Badrikas-Rama, or Freeport. In Freeport, there are no snakes, there are no venomous spiders. Snow falls every day of the year; men and women live underground, warmed by the fires of the earth. People there have never heard of the Three.”

When Chua finally responded, her voice was dry as a husk. “And what would I do in Freeport?”

“You would live. Instead of hiding inside the furthest shack from the water, suffocating beneath the ashes of the dead. You could be free.”

“The only work I know,” she said, hands closing and unclosing around the spear, “is the work of the delta.”

“You’re not in the delta,” I said. “And with five hundred suns, you won’t need to work.”

Chua looked down at the spear in her hands, began tracing the markings, as though she were a child learning her letters, as though an answer was written there somewhere, if only she could read it.

“If the money’s not enough,” I said, “there is the other thing.”

She glanced up at me. “What is the other thing?”

“I believe in your gods,” I said quietly, ignoring the irritation pouring off of Ruc. “I grew up here, in the Weir, and so they are my gods, too.”

“Your belief changes nothing.”

“It might when I kill them.”

Chua shook her head wearily. “They cannot be killed. The Vuo Ton train their entire lives to fight against them.”

“The Vuo Ton are an inbred population of several thousand with no access to modern weapons, no access to explosives, no access to birds of prey large enough to devour a croc in a few bites. The Kettral are the best fighting force in the world.”

“The delta is not the world,” the woman said. Still, there was a brightness in her eyes that had not been there before.

I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. If so, I’ll be rotting on the river bottom while you’re sitting on the deck of a small mansion on the Breatan coast a thousand miles from here. If I’m right, whatever killed your husband, whatever ripped out the throats of all those legionaries, will finally learn what it feels like to die. I’m not alone. There are other Kettral with me, Kettral bent on finding your gods and destroying them. You just have to go back out there one more time.”

The woman closed her eyes. “The Vuo Ton might kill you. They might offer you to the gods.”

“Not your problem.”

“We might not even reach the village.”

“A thorn spider might bite you in your sleep. You want to die in here, hiding, or out there, trying, at least, to get free?”

She opened her eyes. “Five hundred Annurian suns.”

I nodded.

“You will wish you never went out into the delta.”

“I have a lot of wishes,” I replied, glancing over at Ruc. He sat motionless as an idol skewered by the low bars of sunlight. “I’m getting used to not having them come true.”