“I need you,” he said quietly.
“No, you don’t. You just said it—I’m vicious, sick, twisted.”
“That’s why I need you,” he said again, then nodded over my shoulder. “If I’m going to live through this, I need all the vicious I can get.”
Slowly, as though just in that moment reawakening to the feel of my own body, I turned.
The noon sun hung directly overhead, hammered like a bronze disc into the sky. The delta, normally so filled with the music of bird and insect, had fallen totally silent.
They were here.
As I stared, the Three stepped naked from the brush, two men and a woman, just as Dombang’s priests had claimed for centuries. They were easily the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen, lithe as any jaguar, sweat-dappled skin shifting over the muscle beneath, eyes like liquid jewels, hair slicked back with water or sweat. The tallest of them, one of the men, was dark as midsummer midnight, each of his arms almost as wide as my waist. For all his size, however, he didn’t look cumbersome or slow. He moved like flowing water, like a storm rolling over the land. The other man was shorter, slimmer, paler, built like a whip rather than a bull, constantly coiling and uncoiling, even when he seemed still.
Sinn, I thought. That has to be Sinn.
He caught my eyes, then smiled. His teeth were sharp as knives.
If the two men had come alone, I might have stared at them forever, lost in their perfection, but they were not alone. A woman stood between them, a woman I remembered from my childhood, bronze skin glistening in the sunlight, her flesh every bit as deadly as the weapons we held. A strip of black hair ran down the center of her shaved scalp, cascaded between her shoulder blades. Scars hatched her skin, as they did the skin of her companions. On a human body, those smooth ridges might have been blemishes; Kem Anh and her consorts wore them like priceless finery. They were naked otherwise, naked in such a way that made me feel ashamed of my clothes, ashamed to have hidden my goddess-given body beneath the skin of creatures long dead.
And then there were her eyes, golden, as I remembered, liquid and shifting as quicksand, dragging me in, down.
It seemed impossible that I had ever walked away, that I had ever had another thought in my life beyond finding her again, following her, staring into that gaze. With an effort so violent I almost cried out, I forced my own eyes closed. It felt like stepping from sunshine into frigid water, like trying to breathe ice. Even in my mind’s dark I could see her, the attenuated vision more perfect than any human form.
“You’re wrong, Kossal,” I heard myself murmur.
The annals of Rassambur describe the Csestriim in great detail. There had been hundreds of years of war, after all, in which to compile the accounts. Those tomes all agreed on a few things: the Csestriim were inhumanly brilliant, undying, utterly emotionless, effortlessly cruel. None of the chronicles mentioned this impossible beauty. I tried to imagine setting this down in words as I am doing now. I tried to imagine overlooking that soul-rending perfection in my account. I could not. Even now, years later, I could drench pages and pages in ink trying to find the right words, the fragment of a phrase that might start to describe them truly. I would be wasting my ink. There are things on this earth beyond all language.
I opened my eyes again.
“These are not Csestriim.”
All three of them shifted at the word, not the reflexive jerk a human fighter might make, but a languid settling into their own power, like a cat crouching before it pounces.
Hang Loc and Sinn bared their sharpened teeth, growled, seemed ready to come for us. Then Kem Anh put a hand on each of their arms, trailed her fingers from elbow to shoulder, the gesture erotic and terrifying all at once. She shook her head slowly.
“No,” Kossal agreed. I turned to find the old priest, his hatchets set momentarily aside, sliding out of his robe, that same robe he’d worn through the city for weeks. It puddled on the ground at his feet like a snake’s molted skin as he took up the bronze weapons once more. “These are not Csestriim.”
Again, the two men growled, and again Kem Anh held them back, draping her arms over their shoulders, sliding her flanks against them until they subsided.
“I told you,” Chua murmured. “They are gods. We would not give ourselves to the Csestriim. This was our pledge: Never them.”
I didn’t look at Chua. I was staring at the creature she thought was a god, staring into her eyes until it seemed the rest of the world had fallen away. “It’s not a pledge,” I whispered finally, understanding settling on me like a heavy stone, almost crushing the breath from my chest.
“You have forgotten…” Chua began.
I shook my head. “It is the Vuo Ton who have forgotten. Never them. It is not a pledge. It was never a pledge.”
“What are you talking about?” Ruc demanded.
I thought my heart would shatter my ribs. “It is a name.”
“Strange name,” Ela observed.
“Not the name of a person,” I said. I was so hot I felt my skin might catch fire. “It is the name of their race. These are not Csestriim. They are the Nevariim.”
Ken Anh’s smile was a white, vicious sickle.
The sun was an inferno.
My own breath was flame.
“The Nevariim are a kids’ tale,” Ruc said.
“And how are they described,” I asked quietly, “in those tales?”
No one replied, as though the weight of the words was too much to haul up out of the chest.
“They are always gorgeous,” I said. “Strong. The implacable foes of the Csestriim.”
“In the tales,” Ruc managed finally, “they are good.”
“Stories never get everything right.”
Through this whole conversation, they just stood there—if stood is the right verb for creatures who seemed, even in their stillness, to gather light, to warp the whole world so that they waited at its center. They watched us with those ineluctable eyes. When Sinn growled deep in his throat, Kem Anh leaned into him, pressing her warm flesh against his, purring from between sharpened teeth into his ear. They had not spoken—maybe they never spoke—but they understood what we were saying. I was sure of it.
“Nevariim,” Kossal said finally. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter.”
I turned to stare at him. “We found the remnants of a race that should have been extinct millennia before the Csestriim wars, a race that you believed never existed in the first place, and it doesn’t matter?”
The old priest shrugged, shifted his weight from foot to foot, tested the heft of the twin axes in his hands. “Anything that will not die insults our god.”
“On the other hand, they have given a lot of women and men to Ananshael,” Ela observed. “And just look at them.” She was almost purring. “Maybe we could be friends? Before we kill them, I mean.”