“Then let’s leave,” Ruc said, turning away.
It was a sane suggestion, as good as anything else, given the circumstances. Those skulls, however, drew me forward. I was a fish hooked through the gills and hauled inexorably in. As I crossed the open space between the edge of the scrub and the shrine, I felt myself come unmoored, as though I were moving backward through time, back toward my own childhood, toward the memories that had bloodied my dreams for so long. I’d never been to the island or seen that ring of skulls, but the space reeked—not in the nose or the back of the throat, not with the quotidian scent of mud, or blood, or anything to which a person could put a word; it reeked in the mind, in the deepest recesses of myself, of something ancient, barbed, beautiful, and undeniable—of her. My legs were limp beneath me, my vision hazed as I crossed the sun-baked dirt to kneel beside the wall.
The violets swayed in the light breeze. I picked up one of the shards of bone, turned it between my fingers, tried to imagine the woman it had belonged to—for some reason I thought it was a woman. I knew nothing about her, nothing of her life, nothing about her face or her fears, but I knew what she had seen in her final moments because I had seen them too—those eyes set in that horribly beautiful face.
I drove the jagged corner of the bone into my palm until my skin parted, blood welled. As the memory receded, the world coalesced around me once again: sky where the sky belonged, reeds swaying beneath it, the slight weight of the bone in my hand. I studied it.
“There are thousand-year-old skeletons in Rassambur that look newer than this.”
Ela shrugged. The rest of the group had joined me at the shrine. “Rassambur is dry. This isn’t.”
“That’s one explanation,” Kossal said. “The other is that these bones are more than a thousand years old.”
“And the ones down the hill?” I asked. “The older ones?”
“Are older.”
I grappled with that, tried to imagine people coming to this place since before Annur was founded, before Dombang was anything more than a few huts on stilts, people coming and dying, the sacrifice unaltered across all those millennia. It made me dizzy.
“The Three were here before Dombang,” Chua said, giving voice to my thoughts.
“A fascinating mystery,” Ruc added, “but not one we’re going to solve now. We have to leave. Fix what happened in the city. Then we come back.”
“Leave how?” I asked, rising, turning to face him. “We’re on an island. There’s nowhere to go.”
“There is an entire fucking delta,” he said, gesturing with his sword.
“And how long do you think we’d last in that delta without a boat?”
He turned to Chua. “You made it once. You survived. What’s the play?”
She shook her head, gestured to the skulls. “There is no play. We can fight jaguars or crocs. We might escape the snakes and spiders. If we floated still as logs in the water and tried hard not to bleed, we might even pass the qirna. But not the Three. This is their den.”
“I’m staying,” Kossal said.
“To do what?” Ruc demanded.
“To kill Csestriim,” the old priest replied.
I stared at him. “You still think they’re Csestriim? That all these years they’ve been hiding in the delta impersonating gods?”
“Yes.”
I straightened up, plucked a skull from the top of the wall. It was heavy with packed dirt. “You think Csestriim did this?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him. “The Csestriim were creatures of reason. I’ve read the chronicles. They were utterly untouched by emotion. They had no superstitions. They didn’t create shrines.”
Kossal shrugged aside the objection. “To twist an entire city to their will they could play at being gods.”
Ruc shook his head. “You’re even crazier than the Vuo Ton.”
“And what,” Kossal asked, turning to face him, “is your explanation?” He gestured to the wall of skulls. “Something piled those bones. Something has been piling them for thousands of years, and not just heaping them there and leaving, but tending them. Planting flowers. Replacing them when they fall. Adding to the pile.”
“Some cult,” Ruc said. “Another group like the Vuo Ton.”
“The Three are gods,” Chua murmured.
“No,” Kossal replied. “They are not. Ananshael is a god. Eira is a god. Gods don’t do this.” He raised his chin toward the wall.
“What he means,” Ela cut in helpfully, “is that gods don’t spend thousands of years squatting in the backwater muck making towers out of skulls. They have better things to do.”
“But why would the Csestriim spend millennia in the delta?” I asked, shaking my head.
“They have nowhere else to go,” Kossal replied. “We defeated them, hunted them almost to extinction. In the thousands of years since the wars, the Csestriim who survived have done whatever they needed to do to continue surviving, to continue defying our god. They have posed as sailors and soldiers, peasants and priests. Maybe this is part of a larger plot. Maybe these three are the only ones left. Maybe this is just their revenge.”
“The bronze weapons,” Ela pointed out, angling one of her sickles so that the sunlight darted across the skulls. “The first humans didn’t have steel. They would have fought with bronze.”
I ran a hand along the wooden shaft of my spear. “This isn’t thousands of years old.”
“Of course not,” Kossal snapped. “It looks like it was made last week. It’s the ritual that’s old, just like the myths. The Csestriim have been here for thousands of years, cheating Ananshael. Men and women go to the god more frequently. When they pass their stories on, they get some things right, miss others.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Chua said.
Kossal turned to face her. “Anything that doesn’t die insults my god.”
“Speaking of dying,” Ela said, turning to me, “aren’t you cutting things a little close, Pyrre?”
I glanced furtively at Ruc, then shook my head. “I have until the end of the day.”
“We may not see the day’s end,” Kossal said. “If you have business to settle, now is the time.”
“Besides,” Ela added, “it gives us something to do while we wait.” She pursed her lips, studied Ruc for a long time, then turned back to me. “So. Are your body and mind singing with love?”
And just like that, it was time to face it, to confront once and for all the question that had plagued me since the moment Kossal and Ela first sang to me in the Hall of All Endings back in Rassambur. There were no more days, no more evasions.