Skullsworn (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 0)
Brian Staveley
For Jo,
who shows me the notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I’m tremendously grateful to all the people who contributed to this book in ways large and small, general and particular. It takes a village to tell a story, and I worry that if I started listing the villagers I would never stop. There are, however, five people who have read the manuscript all the way through, several times over in each case. Suzanne Baker and Gavin Baker are a formidable mother/son team, absolutely indefatigable in reading draft after draft, generous in their praise, keen and unflinching in their criticism. I’ve always thought it’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m about the luckiest writer alive to have Hannah Bowman as my agent and Marco Palmieri as my editor. Finally, this book, like all the others, wouldn’t exist without Johanna Staveley, who believed in it and me more powerfully than I did.
PROLOGUE
This is a story I never intended to tell. I thought, when I finally walked away from you all those years ago, that I was taking the tale with me. I thought, because it happened to me, because I seemed to stand at the center of everything, that it was my story—but that’s not how stories work. A tale belongs only partly to the teller—even the wildest fabrication needs a listener, and this is no fabrication. It is the truth—or as close to the truth as I can come, so many years later—and there are other characters in it. This story is theirs as much as it is mine, but since they are dead, the telling falls to me. You were there, of course, the only other person who survived straight through to the end, but you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t. I should have told you a long time ago, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized this story is yours, too. It’s late, but I’m telling you now.
I went to Dombang for love.
And yes, to kill seven people in fourteen days, sure, but I wasn’t worried about the killing. I grew up in a place where women wear vests ribbed with stilettos, where each priest has a dozen knives, steel traps, needles so fine you can slide them beside the eye into the brain and out again without leaving a mark. I watched my fellow priests die by fire and iron, sometimes quickly, leaping from the tops of the sandstone cliffs, or slowly, by dehydration’s intimate degrees. By my fifteenth year, I had set to memory a thousand ways to offer a woman or man to my god’s sure unmaking. I wasn’t concerned about my piety or my ability to make the sacrifice.
Love, though. Love was tricky. By the time I turned twenty-five, I’d had lovers and laughter, long nights in the high desert peaks learning the ways of my own body, alone or in the hot clutch of another. And yet love had eluded me.
To the uninitiate, this will not seem strange. How can love, you might demand, take root in the stony heart of a Skullsworn? How can Ananshael’s knives know love?
I’m not offended. For most people, my god—like the death he brings—is all mystery and terror. You have not been to Rassambur, have not heard our choruses beneath the new moon, have not enjoyed the sweet fruit of the trees espaliered against our sandstone walls. How could you know the first thing about the men and women you call Skullsworn? How could you know if I don’t tell you?
Maybe we could start with the word itself. It’s wrong.
I don’t swear on skulls, not on them, not to them, not around them. I haven’t seen a skull for years, in fact. A bit of blood-smeared bone through a torn-open scalp, perhaps, but an actual skull, wide-eyed and jawless? What in the god’s name would I be doing with a skull?
“Drinking the blood of innocent children,” seems to be a common notion, so I’ll set that little misconception to rest, too: I do not drink the blood of children, either guilty or innocent. I do not drink the blood of humans or beasts. I did have a blood sausage in Sia once, a thick black slab perched on a mountain of rice, but I ate it off of a normal plate, not out of a skull, and everyone else there seemed to be eating the same thing.
I should also clarify that I do not bathe in cauldrons of blood. I get bloody enough going out into the world to do the work of the god. The whole point of the bath is to scrub the blood off. The priests of the God of Death bathe in hot water, just like every other sane person on either side of the Ancaz. Back in Rassambur, I sift a little jasmine and ground sage into the boiling water. I like to be clean.
A few other clarifications, in no particular order:
I have no garments made of human skin. I prefer silk, although it tends to be easier to scrub the blood out of wool.
I have never fucked a dead person. I’m not sure who’s going around sizing up the erections of the hanged, but I can promise you, it’s not me. Most men are confused enough in bed already without the added disadvantage of death to slow them down. I like my lovers like I like my baths—warm, clean, and, if at all possible, good-smelling, although I’m willing to compromise on the last two.
I understand, of course, how people make these mistakes. If you’re seeing a skull, or a barrel full of blood, chances are good that my god has come, unmade a creature, then disappeared. Surely as a strong dawn wind kicks up dust and bends the branches of the trees, Ananshael leaves blood and skulls in the wake of his passage, but blood and skulls are not death any more than a bent branch is the wind.
Death resists all comparison and simile. This is something I learned in my first year at Rassambur. To say death is like a land beyond the sea or like an endless scream is to miss the point. Death is not like anything. There is no craft analogous to Ananshael’s work. The truest response to his mystery and majesty is silence.
On the other hand, to remain silent is to encourage the fantasies of the uninitiate—skulls brimming with blood, graveyard orgies, infants dangling like impractical chandeliers from the ceilings of candlelit caverns—and so maybe an imperfect analogy is better than none at all.
Take a grape.
The purple skin is muted, as if by mist or fog. Polish it, or not, then pop it into your mouth. The flesh is firm beneath the cool, smooth skin. If you find yourself becoming aroused, stop. Start your imagining over. The grape is a grape. Imagine it properly, or this will not work.
Now. What does the grape taste like?