“I figure there are two possibilities,” Ruc said.
I’d followed him out of the pool, into the warren of benches and cubbyholes, wooden trunks, hooks hung with robes, and ranks of narrow closets running the length of the long northern wall. He’d been studying me silently as we toweled ourselves dry. My skin was still flushed with the water’s heat, a fact for which I was both irritated and grateful. I didn’t want him to think I was blushing; on the other hand, I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.
It’s amazing how easy it is to be naked around someone who doesn’t interest you; bodies are simple, straightforward, no more worth noticing than the walls. Add attraction, however, and all that cool composure goes to shit. As Ruc twisted and stretched to dry the difficult spots, I couldn’t figure out where to put my eyes. Whenever I looked away, I felt like a cloistered milkmaid, but whenever I let my gaze linger—on his ass, on that perfect joint where his leg met his hip—I felt the blush burning up through my cheeks.
He didn’t seem to share my dilemma. His skin was darker than mine, which gave him an advantage in the blushing game, but I suspected that even if he’d been pale as the moon my nakedness wouldn’t have fazed him. He’d been watching me with such frank curiosity as we dried then dressed that when he finally spoke, the words were a relief.
“You were working with the Neck,” he went on, pausing with his pants half buttoned to gauge my response. “Working with him or about to start. The note I found on his body was from you. That’s why you’re here.”
“That’s one possibility,” I conceded.
“The question is what kind of work you hoped to accomplish. That’s where we get to the possibilities.”
I glanced casually over my shoulder. A knot of women occupied the far end of the bench, laughing, chatting, and getting dressed, but they were a few paces away and paid us no mind.
“Either,” Ruc said, raising a finger, “you’re working for Annur, which puts us on the same side. Or you’re working with Dombâng’s seditious priests, in which case things start looking a lot less rosy for the two of us.”
“I’d tell you the answer,” I said, “but I can see you’re having so much fun figuring it out all on your own.”
Ruc flashed me a smile. “Why don’t I tell you a story,” he suggested. “There was a woman, born in Dombâng, who wanted nothing more than to drive Annur from her city—”
“Lousy start.”
“I thought,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “you were going to let me work it out on my own.”
“It’s the storytelling I’m objecting to. Don’t tell the listener everything in the first sentence. You’ll spoil the mystery.”
He picked up his sheathed belt knife, slapped it contemplatively against his palm a few times, then threaded it through his belt. “I find you can skip the mystery as long as there’s enough screaming and blood.”
“Nothing like playing to a crowd’s finer sensibilities.”
“And sex,” Ruc added, winking at me without cracking a smile. “Let’s not leave out the sex.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. If we can’t have decent storytelling, at least we can enjoy the violence and fornication.”
Ruc pursed his lips. “A pretty sound approach, I’d say.”
“So…” I bent to strap my own knives to my thighs. “According to this tawdry tale of concupiscence and blood…”
“Our protagonist,” he said, nodding to me, “this daughter of Dombâng, tailed me six years ago.”
“For the sex,” I asked, straightening up, “or the blood?”
“The one was a means to the other. She tried to enlist me in the city’s uprising, plying me with all her feminine wiles. When she failed, she vanished. Now here she is again, reappearing just days after someone has begun spanking my city bloody with red-painted palms.”
I felt less exposed with the weight of my blades strapped to my thighs. Less exposed but still naked. I started to pick up my pants, then left them where they lay. This whole thing—the story, the indifferent pace at which he was getting dressed, the tapping of his knife against his palm—it was all the circling and feinting before a fight, and I’d be fucked if I let him see me flinch. Instead, I stepped closer, put a hand on his bare chest, traced a line down his stomach to his belt, then tucked a finger in behind the leather and the cloth beneath. He was still warm from the water. Not just warm—hot.
“I’m waiting to hear why this woman, one of Dombâng’s chief conspirators, was planning to meet with the Neck, the Annurian legionary responsible for dismantling her carefully planned revolution.”
Ruc glanced down at my hand, made no effort to move it, then met my gaze. “For the same reason she found me six years earlier: she hoped to seduce the Neck into some kind of collusion.”
“Your grasp of female characters leaves something to be desired.”
“Oh?”
“For starters, the woman in question, this revolutionary genius, seems to rely somewhat single-mindedly on her vagina.”
“I shouldn’t have made her sound so simple,” Ruc conceded. “She also excels at punching.”
I smiled. “Let me tell you a story. I call it Betrayal of a Native Son.”
“Lighthearted.”
“You’ll die laughing.”
“The title seems to give away the mystery.”
“Not if you don’t know who’s going to be betrayed.” I ran my finger back up his stomach and chest, up to his neck, lifting his chin. “The fun is in seeing it play out.”
“Sure that fun is the right word?”
“Oh, the most vicious stories can be the best—provided you’re not the one living them. Are you going to listen or keep interrupting?”
Ruc put a hand on my bare hip. “I’m listening.”
It was hard to concentrate with him so close. It was all just part of the sparring, each of us trying to knock the other off guard, but I could still feel the heat in his hands, his breath tangling in my hair, his smooth chest brushing for just half a moment against my own. Memory’s delicious ministrations slid over me: those warm Si’ite nights, the breeze through the open window tangling my hair, his hands on my hips, the small of my back, gliding up in the insides of my thighs, his eyes deep as the jungle and every bit as easy to get lost in. My heart bucked like a paddocked horse eager to be free. With an effort, I shackled all that recollected passion, forced myself to focus on the story.
“There was a young man,” I began, “a scion of his city, heir to a proud but dilapidated legacy. He might have been expected to lead his people—these centuries enslaved—to a long-awaited freedom.”
Ruc chuckled. “Expected by whom?”
“Those who know the truth—that he is descended from Goc My, the greatest of the Greenshirts—”
He raised an eyebrow. “The same Greenshirts that quit mattering two centuries ago, when Annur conquered the city?”
I shook my head. “The past never quits mattering. Dombâng’s silent priesthood was only waiting for the right moment, the right man—”
“This legionary?” Ruc asked. “Someone who served the empire for eight years rooting savages out of the Waist? Doesn’t seem as though you’ve thought through your characters, their motivations.”
“Haven’t I? Who better than this legionary, one trusted by the decadent minds of the empire, one well versed in their ways and wiles, to bring Annur to its knees? Who better than the son of Goc My—”
“All Goc My’s sons are centuries dead.”
“The spiritual son of Goc My, then. Who better, as I was saying, than this prince of Dombâng to see the Greenshirts and the priesthood returned to their former glory?”
“Someone should have told him he was a prince. He would have quit boxing, saved himself some bruises and broken bones.”
I met his eyes, traced the scar running up the edge of his jaw. “No, he wouldn’t have.”
“Not everyone needs to fight.”
“He does,” I murmured.
“Let me see if I can guess how it ends. At long last, this prince heeds the call of his downtrodden people. He begins murdering the very Annurians charged with helping him keep order in the city, starting with a legionary known—quite colorfully, I might add—as the Neck.”
“We knew the betrayal was coming.…”
“Then he goes to the baths to find the legionary’s secret ally and murder her as well.”
I nodded, never taking my eyes from his. “An audience likes betrayal. They like a story that ends with everyone drenched in blood.”
Ruc slid his hand up from my waist, brushing my breast, coming to rest gently against my throat. “It’s an exciting story,” he said. “Compelling. The trouble with it is—and I’m sure you’ve noticed this—you’re still alive.”
“As are you.”
“Which means,” he said, “that either we’re slow when it comes to killing, or we’re on the same side.”
I nodded. “That could prove useful, what with a revolution brewing.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about that?”
I shrugged. “The same as everyone else. Paintings dashed up on the statues and bridges. The kind of painting that has a way of getting people killed and whole huge chunks of the city burned down.” I smiled. “I’m here to stop it.”
“I thought that was my job.”
“It ought to be. There are those, however, who have developed the opinion that you don’t seem to be doing that job.”
Ruc snorted. “Back-room second-guessers. A bunch of clean-fingered bureaucrats who’ve never set foot outside Annur.”
“I can’t comment on the cleanliness of their fingers, but some of the second-guessers rise well above the level of ‘bureaucrat.’ The Kettral don’t take orders from bureaucrats.”
I winked, stepped back, took my pants from the bench, and slid into them, forcing myself to patience as I waited for his response to the lie.
I’d thought hard, during the long slog to Dombâng, about what kind of life to invent for myself. Finding Ruc Lan Lac was, after all, only the first step. Once I found him, he would have questions, and while I’d managed to side-step most of those six years earlier, I had a nagging worry that he would prove less trusting the second time around. My new identity needed to be unassailable, utterly unfalsifiable, even by someone as smart and tenacious as Ruc. Just as important, the tale I told needed to be relevant. If I was going to fall in love with him, I had to give Ruc a reason to talk to me, to work with me, to keep me close.
It took me weeks to come up with the Kettral cover—strange, given that it wasn’t just the perfect story, it was about the only one to fit the bill. For starters, Ruc could never check on my lies. The Kettral, elite warrior-assassins of the Annurian empire, were notoriously secretive. They lived, according to rumor, on an archipelago of hidden islands—the Qirins—the location of which was known only to themselves, a handful of merchant captains with military clearance, and the ocean’s bolder and more desperate pirates. Ruc had no way to reach the Kettral, no way to follow up on a story about a young woman, such-and-such a height, so many years of age.…
Even better, the Kettral backstory gave me a reason to work with the Greenshirts. Ruc himself, of course, had been tasked with crushing any rebellion inside Dombâng. The legions provided the muscle. It seemed only natural, however, that Annur would have a contingency plan, another set of eyes and knives keeping watch, not just on the city, but on the city watchmen. For all I knew, the story was actually true. Somewhere in Dombâng there could have been one or two Wings of Kettral, the empire’s greatest soldiers posing as fishermen or barkeeps. It was plausible, at the very least, and even better—it explained my unlikely abilities. Servants of Ananshael are trained to be discreet, and I’d certainly managed to hide the bulk of my training from Ruc the last time we crossed paths. Even the little he’d seen, however, was enough to raise eyebrows, a level of martial ability completely unbelievable from most of the world’s professions.
The Kettral provided me with the perfect lie, one he couldn’t not believe.…
“I don’t believe it,” he said, voice flat.
I raised an eyebrow, sucked a slow breath in between my lips, tried to find a way to strike back. “How many other people do you know who could go toe-to-toe with you in a bare-knuckle fight?”
He drummed a thumb absently over his ribs, just the spot where I used to hammer him in the ring.
“Of those,” I went on before he could respond, “how many weigh forty pounds less than you? How many are nineteen-year-old women?”
“If you’re Kettral,” he asked slowly, “then what in ’Shael’s name were you doing in Sia?”
I shrugged. “Work.”
“Where was the rest of your Wing?”
“We don’t always work in Wings.”
I had no idea if that was true or not, but I was betting he didn’t either.
“What was the mission?”
“Everyone off the Qirins who knew the answer to that is dead. I wouldn’t suggest joining them.”
“And your mission here, in Dombâng?”
“Meeting the Neck, for starters.”
“Not off to a great start.”
“Just means we have to do things the hard way.”
He studied me a moment. “We?”
I nodded. “The rest of my Wing.”
“You just said you didn’t work with a Wing.”
“That was last time. Different mission. Different parameters.”
“And this mission, beyond chatting with a dead man?”
“Under normal circumstances,” I said slowly, “I wouldn’t tell you.”
“When are the circumstances ever normal?”
“A valid point,” I conceded.
“Let me see if I can guess the rest,” he said, appraising me with that unfairly green gaze.
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
“You’re Kettral, or so you claim. You’re here in Dombâng because the city’s sedition seems to be rolling to a boil all over again. Annur put me in charge of the Greenshirts, loaned me a few legions to keep the peace, but something happened back in the capital, and someone there doesn’t trust me as much as they used to. So they sent you to watch me.” He raised an eyebrow. “How’s my narrative sense now?”
“Improving.” I patted him on the cheek. “We’re here to watch you. If your loyalties haven’t shifted, we stay in the shadows, let you do your work, then we clean up whatever mess you leave behind.”
“So, I’m either a traitor or an idiot.”
“I assured them you weren’t either.”
He eyed me. “And yet, here you are.”
I shrugged. “I go where I’m told.”
“Why you?”
I pursed my lips. “Maybe you are an idiot after all.”
“Fine,” he snorted. “You’re from Dombâng. You know the city.…”
“… And I know you.”
He tapped absently at the handle of his belt knife. “Is that it? You’re supposed to drag me to bed, fuck the suspicion out of me, get at all my secrets?”
I frowned, put my hands on my hips. “Did we not just discuss some of the ways in which my skills extend beyond the spreading of my legs?”
Ruc ran his eyes the length of my body, but I couldn’t read his gaze. Was that a sliver of lust? Or just the steel glint of a fighter sizing up another fighter?
I tried to imagine I was Ela, a woman well versed in the ways of the world, as comfortable moving from one man to the next as she was changing her dresses. I pictured her brown eyes as she raised her wineglass, the way they brimmed with lamplight, seeming to laugh even when she didn’t move. I leaned back against the wooden wall, trying to find something like her languid pose, that way her limbs fell that whispered readiness and relaxation at the same time.
Maybe I managed it. It was impossible to tell from Ruc’s face. In truth, my palms were damp, my mouth dry.
“Of course,” I went on, reaching for Ela’s easy, throaty voice, “Kettral need to be prepared for all contingencies. I’m certain, if it becomes absolutely necessary, that I could find the willingness to bed you for the sake of our great empire.”
The line was supposed to be coy, enticing. Ruc didn’t look enticed. In fact, he looked as though he hadn’t heard me at all. Instead, he was gazing past my shoulder, down the length of the narrow room. He’d barely moved, just a small shift of his weight, a slight dropping and angling of the shoulders, but I recognized the posture at once. I’d seen it dozens of times in Sia, and each time it meant the same thing—he was about to hurt someone, probably quite badly.
* * *
“The woman in the gray is the Asp,” he murmured as we stepped out of the bathhouse into the hot Dombâng night.
It took me a moment to find her again—a short, middle-aged woman with a pockmarked face and a slight limp. No one I would have looked at twice. She made her way slowly through the dozens of people crowding the wide bathhouse steps, moving aside for knots of revelers, bowing almost reflexively when someone jostled her, eyes downcast the entire time.
“Doesn’t look like the kind of person to name herself after a venomous snake,” I said.
“She didn’t. It’s the name we’ve been using for her.”
“Her own wasn’t exciting enough?”
Ruc shook his head grimly. “I haven’t been able to learn it.”
He started down the steps, slicing fluidly through the crowd as I followed half a step behind.
“Why are we so excited to see her?”
“Not just her,” Ruc said, “but the person she’s with.”
I squinted. Dozens of red-scale lanterns flanked the steps, but they cast shifting, inconsistent shadows as they swayed with the night breeze.
“I don’t see anyone.”
“Not there,” Ruc muttered, increasing the pace. “Down at the canal. Third boat back, the one with the black awning. The man approaching it.”
It took me a moment to find him, a tall, slender figure in a calf-length noc and black vest. He glanced over his shoulder before stepping into the vessel; I was able to catch a glimpse of a long face, high forehead, hatchet nose.
“They don’t seem to be together,” I observed.
Ruc nodded. “That’s the point. There’s a reason I haven’t been able to dig out the roots of this priesthood, even after five years.”
“So they’re priests.”
“The one in black is. The Asp works for Lady Quen, although we didn’t know that until a few months ago.”
“Is Quen a name that should have been in my briefing?”
“Depends on how good your briefing was. She’s one of the richest people in the city, an outspoken critic of Annurian policy, but so far I haven’t been able to tie her to anything that might survive a trial.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got hundreds of Greenshirts and I don’t know how many legions under your command. Who needs a trial?”
“You don’t understand Dombâng,” Ruc replied. “This city’s balanced on a blade. Most of the citizens appreciate Annur—the empire’s laws, her trade, her prosperity—but the quarter that don’t could turn the place upside down in half a day. Whenever I take a person down I need proof, I need bodies, I need piles of stolen loot, and even then there’s a risk that the whole thing turns into a riot.”
“Maybe you should have stuck with the boxing after all.”
“You have no idea how often I think that.”
The man in black—the priest—had disappeared beneath the boat’s canopy. The Asp paused at one of the stalls lining the bottom of the bathhouse steps, spent a few copper flames on a leaf filled with crushed ice and honey, then crossed to the edge of the canal where she picked at the dessert with a bamboo spoon while looking out over the water.
“If they’re trying to keep secret,” I asked, “what are they doing meeting here, in the largest bathhouse in Dombâng?”
“It’s harder to keep track of them that way. We watch Lady Quen’s mansion day and night, but she knows that. She’d gut any priest who came within a hundred paces of her doors or docks. So they do it this way: surrogates, discreet signs, public places. Could be here, any of the markets, the harbors, the taverns. Different priests have different circuits. It’s always changing.”
“What is the it?” I asked, although a sick dread churning in my stomach suggested I already knew.
Ruc looked over, met my eyes. “Sacrifice,” he replied quietly. He nodded toward the Asp. “Come on.”
The woman finished the last of her honeyed ice, tossed the leaf into the canal, watched it bob away, a diminutive little ship, then strolled the length of the dock to the same boat the priest had boarded earlier. The bathhouse docks were a hive of activity: slim swallowtail boats, opulent pleasure barges, snub-nosed wearies shouldering through the press of hulls to deliver passengers or pick them up. There was nothing remarkable about the vessel with the black canopy. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, if Ruc hadn’t pointed it out. The Asp stepped lightly from the dock onto the rocking hull without even a glance back, just one of the thousands of people who would pass over the same decking each day. She murmured something to the oarsman, then ducked under the canopy and disappeared.
I glanced over at Ruc. “Should we kill them?”
He shook his head. “If I wanted the priest, I could have taken him months ago. I want Lady Quen.”
“I suppose it would be too simple to assume she’s waiting quietly in that boat.”
“The good lady is anything but simple. It’s the Asp’s job to make contact, to bring the priest to Quen, and to make sure she’s not followed.”
“So we need to be sneaky.”
“I hope you’ve stayed fit,” Ruc said, running his eyes over me once more.
“How fit do I need to be to lie in the bottom of a boat while we trail them?”
“We’re not going in a boat. They’d spot us.”
“Please tell me we’re not swimming.”
“We’re not swimming.”
I studied him. “We’re swimming.”
He nodded. “Of course we’re swimming.”
“Sweet Intarra’s light.”
“I thought Kettral were good swimmers.”
“We are,” I replied. “But I prefer water that isn’t an open sewer.”
“Lucky for you, we’re at the clean end of town.”
“How lucky.”
The Asp’s oarsman had shoved off from the docks, was poling his way through the press of vessels, bellowing abuse at the owners of the other boats.
“Let’s get messy,” Ruc said, striding into the crowd.
I took a deep breath, checked my knives, and followed him.
Dombâng is a city unlike any other I’ve seen. Most of the streets aren’t streets at all, but canals, winding waterways that thread between blocks built up out of the mud on thick, tarry stilts. Causeways and wide promenades front some of those canals, running for miles alongside the slow-moving current. We started out along one of those, keeping to the densest part of the crowd, following the black-canopied boat at a safe distance. If we’d been able to do that all night, the job would have been easy. Unfortunately, the Asp knew her work well enough not to make things easy.
After the quarter mile, the boat turned from the main channel into a narrow canal branching off to the north, leaving us on the wrong side. As the boat slipped out of sight, I glanced over to find Ruc stripping his vest, shucking his boots, then his pants. Passersby slowed to look him up and down with obvious amusement. A few, seeing me watching, made lewd suggestions that Ruc ignored.
“Swim in your shirt if you want,” he said, “but if you fall behind, I’m not waiting.”
As I watched, he vaulted the railing. His splash bloomed like a flower in the dark water. With a muttered curse, I tugged my shirt over my head, dropped my own pants and sandals, and followed him into the water. The last waves of the boat’s low wake were already fading.
“Far dock,” Ruc said, pointing to a private landing directly across the channel, then fell into a strong, steady stroke. After all the lying and verbal sparring in the bathhouse, it felt good to swim, to throw my body into a simple, physical task requiring no finesse or second-guessing. It had been a long time since I’d swum hard for more than a few dozen paces—the largest pools in the Ancaz are little bigger than bathtubs—but the motions of my childhood came back to me in moments, carrying me forward though my arms and shoulders burned.
I reached the dock a few paces behind Ruc, who had already hauled himself out of the water.
He reached down to pull me out, and my wet body slid over his as he straightened. When I looked up, his face was inches from mine. For a moment he didn’t let go of my wrist.
“Weren’t we chasing some evil-doers?” I asked, pursing my lips.
I could feel his chest shake with his chuckle. “Just giving you a breather.”
“Oh, I’m just getting warmed up.”
The side canal into which the boat had disappeared stretched away into the darkness. It was obvious why we’d climbed clear—two swimmers splashing their way up the narrow waterway would be even more noticeable than a boat. Unfortunately, there was no other way to follow. This was a residential canal—no walkways or promenades, just a handful of docks, some illuminated by lanterns, protruding at regular intervals into the current.
“How long do you want to wait?” I asked.
Ruc shook his head. “I don’t.”
Before I could respond, he crossed the narrow dock to the door, tested it, found it locked, then kicked it in with his bare foot.
I raised my eyebrows.
“They go around the blocks,” he said. “We go through them.”
“And if the owners of the houses object?”
“We go through them, too.”
That first block couldn’t have stretched more than two hundred paces from one end to the other. In that space we broke down fourteen doors and two windows, climbed two brick walls—one to get into a gorgeous flowering courtyard, one to get out—threatened one angry man with a knife, knocked out another with the bottle from which he’d been drinking, burst through a white-curtained bedchamber—the massive wrought-iron bed at the center of which held at least four naked bodies—knocked out a screamer with a candlestick, told the others to shut up, rammed through a wooden gate into yet another garden, then found ourselves peering over a low wall onto the moon-lapped water beyond, where the narrow canal we had been flanking drained into a small basin. The Asp’s boat was halfway across, angling toward the gap beneath a low, delicate bridge.
I glanced over at Ruc. He was soaked with sweat, and his chest heaved with the effort, but his eyes, when he met mine, were bright.
“That was easier than I expected,” he said.
I was doubled over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. “I thought you were the one in charge of keeping the city’s peace.”
“I’m also in charge of protecting the innocent. Sometimes the two don’t mix.”
When I’d gulped enough air into my lungs to stand up straight, the bow of the boat was just slipping beneath the bridge.
“You know,” I managed finally, “Kettral usually go a little heavier on the planning.”
“I have a plan.”
“Want to share it?”
“Keep going.”
He leapt up onto the low wall, then dove into the water below.
We must have traversed several miles that way, busting down doors, swimming across channels, sprinting through narrow alleys. Four or five times I thought we’d lost the boat, but in each case Ruc was able to come up with a shortcut, a leap of faith, an educated guess that led us back to our quarry, sometimes a few paces ahead, looking down from a window or balcony, often quite a bit behind. The Asp was both fantastically careful and staggeringly paranoid, her watery path wandering in great loops, doubling back on itself three times to shadowy alcoves where she could watch unseen for pursuit. As Ruc predicted, however, she was watching the water, not the insides of the houses. Not the fucking roofs.
In the end, evidently satisfied, she charted a more direct path southeast, finally arriving in Old Harbor. Centuries earlier, the harbor had been the city’s heart, the one basin deep enough to accommodate the draft of the oceangoing vessels that brought trade from as far away as the Bend and Anthera. As Dombâng grew, however, as more and more ships came to dock and trade, the harbor became overburdened. When Anho the Bald completed the massive dredging project that became New Harbor, the old port fell into disuse. Warehouses began to rot, then crumble. Ships damaged by storm and abandoned at the dock by destitute owners slowly settled into the mud as the river silted up the neglected basin. It made a surreal sight. What had once been an open body of water five hundred paces across had become a wide mud flat divided by a few narrow channels and punctuated by the hulks of stranded ships.
The boat we’d been trailing and another of similar make and coloring were tied up alongside the shadowy hull of one of the largest wrecks, a huge schooner, three of the four masts snapped off or chopped down, the one remaining stabbed up into the belly of the night sky, shreds of rotten rope that hadn’t been scavenged twisting idly in the breeze. I could just make out the name in faded gilt up near the prow: Heqet’s Roar. A ladder of much newer rope hung from the rail of the listing vessel thirty feet above, where two guards stood watch. I could make out the outlines of flatbows in the moonlight, the bulky shape of armor, the swords strapped to their hips, but nothing of their faces.
“Quen’s men,” Ruc murmured, laying a hand on my shoulder, then pointing.
The two of us had fetched up a few dozen paces away, behind a pile of waterlogged roots and branches, detritus washed down the Shirvian from the north, dragged out of the canals by the maintenance crews, and dumped here to be burned later. My legs ached from the chase, and my shoulders screamed, ready to rip from their sockets after so much swimming. At the same time, I felt bright in the darkness, warmed by the chase, alive. I couldn’t tell if my heart’s hammering came from Ruc’s momentary touch or my own exhaustion. Maybe both. Whatever the case, it felt good to be close to him, to be hunting. Amazing how fast an old intimacy can come back. When I first set out from Rassambur, I hadn’t dared to hope for so much.
But is it love? I wondered, sliding my gaze along his moonlit skin.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
I hauled my mind back to the work at hand, wiped a smear of blood from his shoulder—we were both covered with a dozen minor grazes and cuts.
“Just making sure you’re not about to collapse on me. You hit some of those doors pretty hard.”
“The doors didn’t have flatbows,” he said, then gestured to the ship once more. “They do.”
“Where’s Lady Quen?”
“Down below, I’d guess. Somewhere in the hold.” He shook his head. “It’s a son of a bitch to sneak up on.”
I nodded slowly, studying the scene. The only approaches were over the open mud or up the canal. The gibbous moon gleamed like silver on the wet flats. Anyone trying to cross might as well carry a lantern and bang a drum. There was no subtle way to do it.
“The far side?” I asked.
“She’s not an idiot. She’ll have someone posted there, too.”
“We’ll have to float in.” I gestured to the logs in front of us. “There’s more of this back around the last bend, out of sight. If we drag a few branches into the water, we can drift in behind them.”
“It’s going to be ugly,” Ruc said, “but if we come in on this side, we could cut free the boats, hope to create some commotion. Maybe lure them down the ladder. We’ll be in the shadows, and the bastards won’t have much of an angle.”
The bastards in question hadn’t moved since we first arrived. They weren’t talking, or pacing, or sitting down.
“They’re vexingly disciplined,” I pointed out. “Not exactly the type to go chasing off after the nearest distraction.”
“If you’ve got another way inside that hull, I’m listening.”
I tapped the knives strapped to my thighs as I contemplated the situation. Then, I smiled.
“Let’s get floating.”
* * *
It was all a question of angles and rot.
If the planking of the ship was too steep or too sound, I wouldn’t be able to drive the knives in far enough. If, on the other hand, the boards were too rotten, they wouldn’t hold my weight, let alone Ruc’s. The curve of the ship’s hull shielded us from the guards above, but I moved slowly all the same, testing a few different places before driving my blade into the chink where the planking had sprung loose. It flexed when I pulled on it, but held. Slowly, I slipped another knife from its sheath, pulled myself up on the first, so that only the lower half of my body remained in the water, reached up as high as I could with my free hand, and slid the second blade into the wood. From there, it was easy enough to get a foot on the first knife, stand up, slip a third from the sheath at my waist, and place it half my body height higher than the last.
Back at Rassambur some of my brothers and sisters had teased me about carrying so many blades—Giving people to the god is a great devotion, Pyrre, but you don’t need to give them all at once. Four knives, however, had always struck me as a reasonable number: one on my belt where everyone could see it, one on each thigh, and one strapped high on my arm.
I vowed, after that night scaling the ship’s hull with Ruc, to carry more, as soon as I could return to Rassambur and have them made.
We climbed the hull, angling for the ship’s prow, on a shifting ladder of four knives. As soon as Ruc’s weight was off of the lowest, he would stretch down into the darkness, yank it from between the planks, straighten, then hand it up to me. It was slow work, especially as we were trying to be quiet. In one way, at least, the guards’ vigilance was working for us. They assumed any attack would come up the ladder, which meant they didn’t budge from that spot. They couldn’t have expected to find us inching up the glistening hull.
None of which made our job any easier. If I drove the knives in all the way to the hilt, Ruc had trouble pulling them out again. On the other hand, he was heavier than me. Whenever he would reach up to grab the handle of the blade on which I was standing, I could feel it flex beneath my bare feet, threatening to tear free of the soggy wood altogether. I had no doubt that we could survive the fall, but Quen’s guards weren’t likely to ignore the loud smack of bare skin against wet mud, mud that would hold us motionless while they filled us with crossbow bolts. I had no objection to dying in Ruc’s arms, but I wanted to survive long enough to fall in love with him, to pass my Trial.
When I was finally able to toss a hand over the ship’s top rail, I let out a long, quiet breath, then pulled myself up slowly. The deck was a wreckage of smashed crates, downed spars, the remnants of what might have been long-abandoned tents, canvas rotted and shredded by the wind. Lady Quen’s guards were well out of sight behind the piled trash. I pulled myself over the rail carefully, then reached back down for Ruc.
He was bent double, prying the lowest knife out of the wood. When he had it in hand, he passed it to me, stepped up onto the next knife, caught my hand, then tried to hurl me headfirst over the ship’s rail and into the mud below.
That was what it felt like, anyway.
It took me half a heartbeat to realize that the knife beneath his foot had torn free, that he was dangling in the darkness, one hand wrapped around the handle of the last remaining blade, the other caught in my grip. The fallen knife landed with a quiet thunk in the muck below. For a few moments I didn’t move. I was bent halfway over the rail, the wood grinding into my ribs, my breath searing my lungs. Sweat dripped the length of my arm, weakening my grip on Ruc’s hand. I reached down with the other arm, caught his wrist, and tried to haul him in.
He grimaced, then gave a tiny shake of his head.
Somewhere off to my right, I could hear the guards talking to each other, grumbling in the way men with a boring post are wont to grumble. I tried to breathe even more quietly.
“Just hold,” Ruc mouthed.
I nodded, redoubled my grip.
His eyes locked on mine, he let go of the last blade, caught my wrist, and for a moment all his weight was on me. To my shock, he smiled. Then he tossed his foot up onto the handle of the remaining knife, shifted his weight over it, and he was up. I didn’t let go of him until he’d stepped over the rail.
“It’s a good thing,” I whispered, “that I brought a lot of knives on this mission.”
He leaned in so close I could feel his lips as he murmured in my ear. “And how does this compare to your other missions?”
I squelched a wild urge to laugh, turned my head, slid my lips over his cheek’s stubble to his ear. “Sort of boring, actually.”
He pulled back just enough to look in my eyes. “I’ll have to find some other way to keep you entertained.”
A delicious ache opened inside me.
Yes, I thought, meeting his shadowed eyes. Yes, you will.
* * *
Whatever thrill had come over me on the ship’s deck evaporated inside the hold.
We’d managed to drop down to the first level through a dilapidated hatch near the bow. I’d expected near-perfect darkness, but a bloody light seeped up through the cracks in the boards beneath our feet. It was easy enough to follow it half the length of the hold—moving slowly to avoid tripping over the shattered lathes of broken barrels, the dusty remnants of various nests, all the rest of the garbage littering the inside of the ship—to another hatch, this one with a ladder sticking up from below.
I put an eye to a gap in the decking and peered down.
The narrow chamber beneath was illuminated by candles, dozens of them, far more than necessary to light the small space, some standing on the floor, others perched on the wooden stays running between the ship’s ribs. Blinking against the sudden light, it took me a few moments to understand what I was seeing.
Six bodies lay across the wooden floor, each bound at the wrists and ankles. Black hoods obscured their faces, but it was obvious enough from the sizes that two were children, maybe eight or ten years old, while the others were adults. Regardless of age, the clothes they wore bordered on rags—scraps of cast-off cloth tied at the waist and shoulders mostly, bits of sail canvas repurposed into pants or vests. Only one of the six wore shoes, and those were little more than decomposing sandals.
Beside me Ruc made a low sound in his throat, almost a growl.
At the far end of that low-ceilinged compartment stood the Asp, two guards, the priest we’d followed from the bathhouse, and a graceful swirl of a woman who could only have been Lady Quen. Like her servants, the lady had made some effort to be nondescript. Unlike them, she had failed. Her gray silk cloak might have blended into the night’s shadows well enough, but by the light of the candles it was obviously cut from cloth that only Dombâng’s richest could afford, tailored to her form in such a way as to draw the eye rather than avoid it. She was striking, even regal, and stood like a woman enduring the supplication of a suitor she knew to be beneath her, dark eyes sharp, hawklike; black hair streaked with gray, drawn back from her temples, and held with a silver clasp; her lips pressed together in silent disapproval.
“Lady,” the priest said, bowing low. “It is a great offering you make.”
“I did not expect to be making it so late,” she snapped. “The sun will be up by the time this is done.”
“Apologies, lady,” the Asp murmured, staring deferentially at the floor. “Annurian eyes are everywhere. I wanted to be certain we were not followed.”
Quen bared her teeth, gave a quiet hiss of vexation. “A day will come when they will no longer dare.”
“Indeed, lady,” the priest said, nodding his head sagely. “Indeed. But it is we who must hasten that day through our struggle and our sacrifice.”
“I’ve been hastening it my entire life. For all the good that’s done.”
“Have faith,” the man replied, his eyes aflame with reflected light. “Red hands have risen to pull the city down. The day of the prophecy is at hand.”
One of the figures on the floor, one of the children, twitched, then began to thrash.
Quen shook her head, rounded on the guards. “They were supposed to be sedated.”
The man bowed almost to the ground. “Apologies, lady. Deepest apologies. The child is small. I did not want her to die before her time.”
Memory lashed me: memory of a rope binding my hands, of my face pressed against the hull of a boat, of mud, blood, terror. A memory of eyes slitted like a cat’s, but belonging to no cat, of a woman stronger than any woman.
“Your man is right, Lady Quen,” the priest murmured, crossing to the child. “She is no good to our gods already dead.”
Slowly, almost lovingly, he peeled back the hood to reveal a girl’s filthy face, mud-streaked and smudged with tears, green eyes wide, horrified. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the priest produced a rag from somewhere in his noc, stuffed it in her mouth, then turned to Lady Quen, smiling beneficently. “The child is strong. The Three will be pleased.”
“And I would be pleased,” Quen responded, “if we could complete this ceremony before we all grow old.”
“Of course,” the priest said, ignoring the thrashing child as he rose. From a shelf beside one of the candles, he lifted a wide, short, double-bladed knife, its handle the yellow of old ivory, the blade of cast bronze. Crossing the room, he stepped carefully over the bodies, then passed the weapon to Lady Quen.
For the first time, the distaste faded from her eyes. Veneration replaced vexation as she closed her hand around the knife, then turned it back and forth, admiring it in the light. When she turned back to the priest, I could hear a new fever in her voice.
“They will rise soon,” she murmured. “They must.”
The priest nodded eagerly. “It is we who forsook the Three. They have been waiting to return, waiting all this time for us to prove our worth. Your sacrifice,” he said, indicating the prisoners, “will show the gods we have not forgotten, that we are still willing, in our faith and our obedience, to give up that which is most precious to us.”
The captives tied on the floor didn’t look precious to anyone. Unless things had changed in Dombâng, Lady Quen had ordered her henchmen to round up a few drunks and orphan children too weak or stupid to run. According to the stories, when Dombâng was founded, only the greatest warriors went into the delta to face their gods, to offer their own bodies as sacrifice. We had fallen a long way, however, from the stories.
“My lady,” the Asp murmured. “As you say, it is late.…”
For a moment, Quen seemed not to have heard her. She was gazing, rapt, at the knife in her hand, deaf to the whimpering of the girl who had awoken. Then, as though jolted from some beautiful vision by the rude hand of an ugly world, she turned to the nearest body—a man, judging by his size and shape—pulled down the front of his filthy shirt, and dragged the tip of the blade across his chest, deep enough to cut, to bleed, but not so deep as to give a serious wound. It was all part of the theater. The priest would bring the prisoners into the delta. The priest would abandon them to die. To reap the favor of the gods, however, Lady Quen needed to draw the first blood.
The man groaned slightly in his stupor, rolled onto his side, then fell still.
Ruc touched me gently on the shoulder, put his lips to my ear.
“She’ll cut them,” he whispered, “and then she’ll go. She’ll leave the others to get the bodies out. We’ll take her at the top of the ladder. You kill the guards.”
I’d known, of course, that it would come to this. We hadn’t tracked the Asp and the priest halfway across the city just to sit down together over a bottle of quey. The trouble was, I couldn’t kill them, not without violating the rules of my Trial. If one of them fit the song, of course, I could give them to the god, but the odds didn’t look good. No one in the room below looked pregnant. None of them seemed to be singing. Of course, there are ways to incapacitate a man without killing him. Silently, I slid one of my knives back into its sheath, switched my grip on the other, then shifted into the shadows just above the hatch.
I waited to strike until the second guard had stepped off the ladder, brought the heavy pommel of my blade down across the crown of his head, then pivoted, slammed the second man in the stomach with my fist, caught him by the throat, squeezed the arteries along the side of his neck as he flailed for his sword and then went slack, collapsing onto the deck in a clatter of steel.
“What’s going on?” Lady Quen demanded from below.
I ignored her, focusing instead on the two guardsmen. My attacks wouldn’t leave them unconscious for long—I couldn’t risk killing them—which meant I needed them incapacitated before they woke. It was grim work slitting the tendons of their wrists and ankles, the sort of thing I’d never thought to do as a priestess of Ananshael, and I felt filthy when it was over. There is a beauty, a terrible nobility to a fast, clean death. What I’d just done felt more like torture, like a version of what was happening in that hot, cramped room below.
“Three more above,” Ruc murmured, then dropped straight down through the hatch, ignoring the ladder.
Just under my feet, I heard Lady Quen’s strangled curse, the priest’s screaming, but before I could glance down, the guards from the deck above were leaping through the hatch. The first of them almost landed on my head, but these—their eyes useless in the dimness—were even easier to dispatch than the first two. I reminded myself, as I went about hamstringing them and snipping the tendons in their wrists, that they were here as part of the sacrifice. They were complicit in the bodies lying bound in the hold below.
It may seem strange that a worshipper of Ananshael would object to such a sacrifice. What was I doing in Dombâng, after all, but offering women and men into the nimble hands of my god? People have such a fear of death that they tend to conflate the two, to see fear and death as two sides of the same coin. It’s hard for most to imagine the annihilation offered by Ananshael without that attendant fear.
In truth, however, my god abjures terror almost as much as he does pain. Both are antithetical to the peace he offers. The most perfect offering is one in which the sacrifice is dead before they feel the blade. It is, in other words, the opposite of the sacrifice that happens in Dombâng. In Dombâng, the terror of the victims is all part of the act. They’re supposed to struggle, to fight, to plumb the depths of dread—for days if possible—before they die. Under other circumstances it would have felt good to put a stop to such suffering, but bound by the rules of my Trial, I could only trade the misery of the victims below for that of the guards.
The five of them thrashed on the deck, bellowing like mad bulls, unable to stand. One reached out to seize my ankle, but I had wrecked their hands as well, and his fingers slipped uselessly from my skin. He stared at his own hand, aghast, a ruined moan draining from his lips. I turned away from the carnage, sick to my stomach, and leapt through the hatch to join Ruc in the hold below.
He had killed the Asp, shattered her neck with one curt blow, then backed both the priest and Lady Quen into the far corner.
Quen stared at him, contempt resplendent in her eyes.
“Ah,” she said. “The traitor, come to betray his own people once again.”
Ruc gestured with his sword to the bodies lined up across the floor. “Why don’t we ask them who they think has betrayed them?”
Quen snorted. “Backwater trash. Three drunks who wouldn’t have survived the year, the other three so starved they’re halfway dead already.”
“Truly,” Ruc said, “a great sacrifice for your mythical gods.”
The priest drew himself up. “The Three are real, and they will consume you. We will feed you to the serpent and storm. We will give your blood to the river.”
“Actually,” Ruc cut in, “we’re going to do something different. We’re going to have a nice trial. Plenty of people to testify very publicly.” He nodded toward the captives still trussed on the floor. “Then, once we’ve squeezed out all your secrets, all the names in your seditious little cabal…” He shrugged. “I don’t know if Intarra is real or not, but I know you’ll feel the fire.”
“Blasphemers,” hissed the priest, his voice a high, pinched whine. “The goddess will swallow you. She rises. She rises, her executioners at her side.”
“This,” Ruc replied, “is the same song I heard the last time your ilk started splashing paint on the buildings. Maybe you remember how that turned out.”
The priest sneered. “It is as it was in the first days. The waters seem to recede. The enemy, emboldened, enters, only to find himself swallowed at last by the righteous flood.”
“Too bad for you, you won’t be here to see it.” Ruc turned to me, eyes hard as shards of jade. “Kill him.”
I tensed. “What about squeezing the secrets, giving him to Intarra, all that?”
“It’s her secrets I want,” Ruc said, nodding to Quen. “We’ve been following this idiot for months. I know everything I need to know about him.”
“So why kill him now?”
“Because I don’t know everything I need to know about you.” He cocked his head to the side. “Let’s just say killing him would provide further evidence that we’re actually on the same side.”
“I’m not sure it would,” I replied, scrambling for some way out, some way around it. “He’s more dangerous to any insurrection as your prisoner than as a corpse. There’s always another secret he might reveal as long as he’s not dead.”
“You’re right, obviously,” Ruc said, then narrowed his eyes. “But you’re also stalling.”
My chest felt tight, my breathing pinched.
He gestured to my blades, dripping blood in the candlelight.
The priest, too, was staring at them, rapt. Suddenly, however, he ripped his gaze away.
“Whatever you do to me,” he snarled, “they will come for you. The Three will come for you.”
Then I saw the way.
“Who the fuck are these Three everyone keeps yammering on about?”
Quen was watching me in the way a raptor studies a piece of meat.
“Kettral,” she said quietly. “So the empire’s most rabid dogs are finally here.”
“It’s birds, actually,” I replied, glancing over at her. “The founder of our order briefly considered riding dogs, but decided on monstrous, man-slaughtering hawks instead.”
The priest, lost in his own fervor or terror, didn’t seem to hear the exchange. He was nodding vigorously, almost rabidly, as though working himself up to something.
“Sinn,” he hissed finally, the word halfway between a curse and an invocation. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh. They will avenge me. They will avenge all Dombâng’s fallen and oppressed. You can open my throat now but—”
The names still wet on his tongue, there was no need to let him finish. I cut his throat with a backhand flick, wiped the knife against my leg as he collapsed, my mind carried back down the dark current of memory.
Sinn, Hang Loc, Kem Anh.
They were names I had not heard since my childhood, and even then, only in whispers. One of my young companions had shown me the forbidden icons of his family once, climbing into the reed-thatched rafters of his house to draw out three statues of crudely modeled clay, two men and a woman, hand-high, naked, muscular, cocks half as long as the arms, buttocks high and taut, shoulders wide, legs spread in readiness. I can’t remember the name of the young boy, but I remember the names he recited, voice and hand trembling as he touched each statue in turn. Sinn, bloodred, whip-thin; Hang Loc, larger and darker; Kem Anh, the goddess, the largest of the trio, her arms outstretched, eyes the product of some violence, jagged, as though someone had gouged them into the wet clay with the tip of a knife.
It is the nature of names to come unmoored from the world. Down the centuries, the syllables grow remote, then incomprehensible, the language that birthed them lost, their only right to concrete things a right that we bestow. It is easy to forget that names, too, were words once, no more august than any other words. So, too, were these, in the ancient language of Dombâng: serpent, dark storm, river death.
The ancient gods of my city were crueler, closer, hungrier than the bright, inscrutable goddess of Annur.
Even so, the empire might have tolerated them. A part of the Annur’s brilliance was the willingness of its emperors to tolerate other faiths. The royal Malkeenian family worshipped Intarra, of course, but the capital hosted hundreds of temples, thousands, to deities beyond the Lady of Light, old gods and young rubbing shoulders in the same streets and plazas. A merchant might murmur a prayer of thanks to Intarra on the sun’s rising, leave an offering to Heqet—a bowl of rice, a strip of meat—on her household shrine, then stop midafternoon in the temple of Bedisa to pray for a pregnant daughter. Even the more obscure cults, discredited by the mouths of the gods themselves millennia before, persisted unmolested in the empire’s quieter corners. The Malkeenians had no desire to see newly conquered people rise up over some irrelevant theological grievance. Only in Dombâng had the empire set its shining boot on the throat of the old beliefs.
The conflict lay in the nature of Dombâng’s gods. While the stone spirits of the Romsdals or the mythical fish-men of the Broken Bay posed no barrier to Annurian rule, our gods were both bloody and jealous. They were creatures, not of some celestial sphere, but of the delta itself. Their blood was the water, their flesh the mud, their screams the thunder of the summer storms. Their arrangement with the people of the city was both simple and cruel: sacrifice, and you will be protected. Make offering of your young, strong, and beautiful, and we will crush all those who come against you.
A fine deal, until it collapsed straight into the shitter.
When the Annurian legions attacked Dombâng, no deities erupted from the waters to stop them. The army took the city, put the leaders of the Greenshirts to the sword, tore down the main temples, all without the slightest divine opposition. A man proclaiming himself Hang Loc slathered his naked body with mud, then hurled himself bare-handed at an Annurian garrison. He was taken by the soldiers, castrated and decapitated beneath Goc My’s statue, then tossed into the canal. A week later, a woman claiming to be Kem Anh took to North Point in the midst of a great storm, exhorting the waters of the delta to rise and smother the Annurians. The waters rose, as they always did during a storm, then fell. The Annurians, in their methodical, unimaginative, brutal way, decapitated her as well, then tossed her into the canal. No further aspiring divinities came forth.
The Annurian triumph was evidence to many that the gods of Dombâng had never existed at all. There was no place for them among the great pantheon laid down during the long wars with the Csestriim, when the young gods had walked the earth in human form. For centuries, traders from far-off lands had mocked our local superstition. That our gods did not, in the end, save us, was proof to many that they were no gods at all, just a set of dolls painted to remind us of the dangers—flood, serpent, storm—of the home chosen for us by our ancestors.
Proof, I say, for many. Not for all. In the eyes of some, it was not the gods who had failed Dombâng, but the people of Dombâng who had failed the gods. To these, the presence of Annur was a call to a greater piety, a more severe observance of the old forms, a committed resistance to the foreign plague. That resistance failed. Annur was rich, ruthless, tireless. The legions rooted out the underground priests, beheaded them, threw still more bodies into the canal. For good measure, the tiny statues of our trinity, still balanced impotently on shrines outside each home, or carved into the tillers of boats, were smashed or sanded out, banned from the city they were supposed to protect. People were thrown in stocks for whistling the wrong tunes, and executed for singing the wrong words. The old holy books were burned, priests tortured. Like all occupations, it was ugly. Some thought the newfound peace and prosperity worth the price. Some did not. I might have hated the Annurians with the same fervor as Lady Quen were it not for my own experiences with our outlawed religion. Annur kept the old festivals, but changed the names. Kem Anh became Intarra; Sinn and Hang Loc, her servants, Heat and Fire. Even at this desecration, our gods did not rise up. The two centuries following proved enough time for many to forget them.
Many. Not all.
The priest dead at my feet, the bodies tied behind me, the haughty woman back against the wall were proof enough of that.
“Kem Anh rises,” she sneered. “You will choke on her waters.”
Ruc shook his head. “Do you know that you are the one hundred and forty-first prisoner to tell me that? Those exact words?”
“Her truth,” Quen replied, baring her teeth, “will not be denied.”
“Maybe not, but it’s been five years since I came back to this city.” He tapped at his throat with a finger. “No choking yet. I keep killing you, and yet the waters…” He paused, put a hand behind his ear as though listening, then shook his head again. “Nope. Not rising.”
When he turned to me, his eyes were wary, searching.
It was a triumph of sorts, and yet the bright hope with which I’d started the night, the thrill I’d had chasing with Ruc through the buildings of Dombâng, had drained away. I didn’t know what I felt in that moment, but it wasn’t love.
“Dead,” I said, pointing to the priest.
“Dead,” Ruc agreed.
A giver of names, I told myself, my mind tracing the melody of Ananshael’s sacred song as I glanced down at the priest’s body one final time. I had given my god a giver of names, and ancient names at that.