“This is not the time.”
The fisher spat onto the matted grass, then crossed to the small pile of bronze weapons remaining. She selected a bone-hilted dagger, ran her finger along the edge, then nodded.
“I will do it myself.”
I could have disarmed her. Could have knocked her out again, tied her with her own clothes, forced her to wait, to stay alive until the spiders hatched inside her, until she was ripe. I’d given her to the puppeteer for this very reason. If she killed herself now, I was lost. I would go to my god—to the god who had delivered me from the agony of my childhood, who had given me everything good and beautiful in my life—a failure.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t move.
All I could manage, as she pressed the bright point against her side, were two words: “Not yet.”
Chua stared at me, knife dimpling her skin. “Why not?”
Ruc stepped forward before I could answer. “Because there’s a way to stop it. You know that better than I do. Drink a couple of gallons of blackleaf tea; the eggs will die before they ever hatch.”
“Blackleaf grows close to the ocean,” Chua said. “Nowhere else.”
“You don’t know that,” Ruc said.
“I’ve spent my life in this delta.”
“You’ve spent the last two decades in a shack in the Weir,” he shot back. “Blackleaf could have spread all through the delta by now. You stay alive,” he said, shooting a glance at me, “because as long as you’re alive, there’s still a chance.”
You stay alive, I amended silently, because it’s not yet time for me to kill you.
Chua grimaced, then turned back to me. “Promise me that when they hatch, you will finish it.”
“I promise,” I said.
Chua’s death would make six. Which left Ruc.
The rushes sighed, sifting the warm wind. Tiny ripples ridged the water, then subsided. Flies droned over the carcasses of the jaguars. The late morning smelled of blood and rot.
“Where are the gods?” I murmured, half to myself. The question was both practical and bottomless.
It was Ela who answered, stepping out of the brush, a bronze sickle in each hand.
“They’ve been here,” she said brightly.
“How do you know?” I asked.
She gestured over her shoulder. “Well, it’s either them, or someone else with a strong interest in stacking skulls and tending exotic flowers.”
24
Achest-high wall circled the low, rocky rise near the center of the island. It looked like a stone pen for goats, though its elevated position suggested defense, some sort of fortification long abandoned. And, of course, goat pens aren’t normally ringed with skulls.
Hundreds of skulls topped the circular wall, each nestled carefully in its place, the rain-washed, sun-bleached bone blindingly white. Delta violets grew from eye sockets packed with dark earth, purple flowers swaying gracefully at the ends of long green stems. Those flowering gazes had long given up all mortal sight, but I felt watched all the same, anatomized in a way that made me want to hunch, hide, slide back into the rushes and run.
“This is a bad place,” Chua said. She seemed to be understating the matter.
We had stopped just inside the wide clearing, as though pinned where we stood.
The fisher glanced down at her scabbed stomach. “We are going to die here.”
“At least we have company,” Ela observed, nodding toward the skulls.
Ruc grimaced. “There must be what, three hundred? Four?”
Kossal shook his head. “There are thousands.”
He leveled a gnarled finger at the wall beneath the skulls. Violets grew there, too, a waterfall of purple and green cascading from the stones.
No, I realized, squinting against the light. Not stones. More skulls.
These were brown rather than white, streaked with the dirt from the sockets above, rank upon rank, at least five feet high and twice as wide at the wall’s base. Those at the bottom had crumbled halfway to mud beneath the weight pressing down from above, finally pried apart by time’s subtle levers.
“These gods take their gardening seriously,” Ela observed. She pointed down the hill, toward the west. “There are two more of these down that way. One of them’s basically just a ring of dirt at this point. This one seems to be the newest.”
I looked over at the priestess. Mud smeared the hem of her noc, and her bare legs beneath. Her hair was matted down on one side, presumably where she’d been tossed against the dirt when the Greenshirts abandoned us. The snake’s venom, however, didn’t seem to have slowed her down any. Her smile was as bright as the sickle in her hand.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You were all sleeping so soundly, we thought we’d take a walk.”
“I wanted to use you as bait,” Kossal added, staring past us at the ring of skulls, as though it had offended him in some way.
“Bait?” Ruc rounded on the older priest, half raising his sword.
Kossal had selected two bronze hatchets from the cache of weapons, but he didn’t bother raising them.
“Bait is something you put in a trap to attract an animal.”
“Or a god,” Ela added. Then she frowned thoughtfully. “Though I guess it doesn’t work on gods.”
I watched Ruc struggle with his anger, strangle it.
“If you believe in these things,” he said slowly, “if you’re so excited to kill them, don’t you think you have a better chance with all five of us alive?”
Kossal squinted into the distance, considering the question, then shook his head. “Not really. Ela and I have fought together a long time. The three of you don’t know the tempo.” He frowned. “You’d have been better as bait.”
I stared at the old priest. There had been times in the last month—during the long walk south, and even after we reached Dombang—when Kossal had seemed almost sweet, gruff but paternal, the kind of grandfather who, in between cutting throats, might give you some good advice about life, about love. That Kossal had almost disappeared. The man who stood before me now seemed to have shed both his age and his absentmindedness. Despite the deep lines marking his face, the slight stoop to his shoulders, he looked ready, predatory, deadly, as though he’d been waiting all his life to find this island lost in the delta grass.
“I, for one, am glad you’re still alive,” Ela said. “Kossal is good at giving things to the god, but he’s dreadful company. And besides,” she winked at me, “there’s another story that I’m looking forward to seeing the end of.”
“The only stories we will see the end of are our own,” Chua said quietly.
Ela eyed the woman. “Well, that seems unduly pessimistic.”
“This is their shrine,” Chua replied, staring at the wall of flower and bone.
Kossal looked over at her sharply. “You’ve seen it before?”
She shook her head. “I’ve heard of it. People come here to die.”