Kem Anh stepped forward, lifted her companion’s slashed limb to her lips, bared her teeth, licked the blood clear. Sinn growled low in his throat, then nodded, once to Kossal, once to Ela, an acknowledgment beyond all words. This was what they wanted, these three immortal creatures. This is why they had remained in the delta all these thousands of years, this same scene played out over and over and over. It was for this they trained the Vuo Ton, for this they had left me alive as a child, for this they lived every one of their unnumbered days.
What would it mean, I wondered, thinking with a part of my mind that calved off from the world of blood and mud and sun, to live all those years without ever changing?
“You lied to me,” Ruc said. “You weren’t even trying, back in Sia, back in the ring. I never saw you fight like that.”
I shook my head, staring first at Kossal, then Ela, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.
“That’s because I can’t. Because I’m not like that.”
The priestess wore a smile wide as a noonday sky, a smile that she turned on me.
“Maybe one day you will be.”
“After today,” I replied, “I will be dead.”
She smiled wider. “Then if there’s something you want to be, you’d better hurry up and start being it.”
Sinn hissed, slid forward. The gash on his arm had already stopped bleeding. He didn’t look slowed or dismayed by the wound. If anything, he looked eager.
“There are five of us now, you fucking monster,” Ruc spat.
I glanced past the pale creature, to where the other two Nevariim stood watching. Kem Anh had slid halfway behind Hang Loc, pressed herself up against him and wrapped one arm around his chest. With her other hand, she was stroking his massive cock. Her lips were bloody from where she’d bitten him on the shoulder. I wondered how many of those scars on his skin had been left by her. Both of them were watching us, chests rising and falling as they waited for the fight to begin once more. Neither made any move to intervene.
I edged to the left, toward Kossal, while Ruc broke right.
The old priest fixed me with a stern look. “I didn’t invite you.”
“Our god welcomes all,” I replied, keeping my eyes on Sinn’s sinuous, shifting form.
“I intend to kill this thing,” he said. “To see it unmade.”
“So do I.”
I was surprised by my words even as I spoke them, surprised by how ardently I felt them. After a lifetime dreaming of these gods—false gods—waking to soaked sheets and my heart thudding in my chest, after a decade and a half doubting my own memory, my own mind, the very fabric of my childhood, I had finally arrived where I could bury a length of bronze in their flesh.
Kossal stared at me a moment longer, then nodded, as though that settled the matter.
We’d spread out into a rough circle, hoping to come at Sinn from four different directions at the same time. I stood off to his right-hand side, measuring the distance between us, trying to track the movement of the Nevariim against that of my allies in the fight. Our only chance, if it was a chance at all, would lie in a concerted attack. The others seemed to realize that—all except Chua, who was approaching the creature head on, her bronze spear held back behind her, arm cocked for a fisher’s throw. She might have been all alone for the attention she paid us.
Sinn bared his fangs, opened his arms, inviting her to strike.
Chua refused.
She crossed the intervening space at an implacable walk. There was no rush to her gait, no tension in her shoulders, nothing to suggest she was doing anything but fishing from a bank, looking to take a ploutfish or a blueback with that long, glittering spear. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kossal sliding closer to the Nevariim, hatchets held in the old Manjari guard—one high, one low. He was humming a tune I didn’t recognize, something slow and solemn. On the other side of Sinn, Ela was saying something to Ruc, chatting like a woman in a tavern, gesturing expansively with her twin sickles even as she inched in.
Chua stopped two paces from the Nevariim. Her eyes were calm in the way the eyes of the dead are calm.
“I do not worship you,” she said.
Sinn clicked his teeth together, a fast staccato rhythm, opened and closed his hands, as though flexing claws.
“You can have my skull,” she went on, “but never—”
Kossal launched himself at Sinn halfway through the word, hatchets sweeping in and down even as he leapt. Ela was in motion, too, rolling low, underneath whatever guard the Nevariim might put up, lashing out for a hamstring with her sickle.
It was an impossible attack to block.
Sinn blocked it, catching one of Kossal’s hatchets by the head, ripping it free of the priest’s grip, then smashing it down into the arc of Ela’s sickle. Ruc surged forward with a roar, swinging his sword in a great looping arc. Sinn leaped it easily, hurled the hatchet at his attacker, turned to knock away Kossal’s second attack, swatting the flat of the bronze with his palm, then backhanding the priest so viciously across the chest that he fell back into the dirt, gasping. The Nevariim roared, whirled to face Ela—she was on her feet again, sickles a nimbus of bronze in the air around her—when Chua struck.
Like all good fishers, she had chosen her moment, waiting in the midst of that maelstrom for the opening, then hurling her spear. The bright bronze sank into the Nevariim’s shoulder, spinning him halfway around before tearing free and clattering to the dirt. Blood welled from the wound, flowed down the arm, staining the skin red.
“Never…” Chua began again, then stopped, opened her eyes wide, put a hand to her stomach, and lurched into an awful, staggering dance.
The meat puppeteer.
The name of the spider was apt. She looked like a marionette jerked by some insane master, her limbs jittering and twitching as her body rocked from side to side. She opened her mouth, tried to speak again, choked on the words, then turned—with obvious and agonizing effort—to stare at me.
Pain glazed her eyes. One hand thrashed at her stomach as she tried to claw at the wound while the toxin flipped the limb back and forth like a fish dying on a deck.
I went to her, ignoring the others, ignoring the bleeding Nevariim. If he wanted to kill me while my back was turned, he was welcome to try. I had made a promise, and I intended to keep it.
I put an arm around the fisher’s shoulders, whether to still her or comfort her, I couldn’t say. Her skin was like fire.
“I’m here, Chua,” I told her quietly. “I’m here.”
She trembled in my arms as I dragged the silent knife over her throat. Her eyes fixed on mine, then slipped past me, opening wide, then wider, drinking in some final sight. Then she raised a hand halfway to her neck, sighed blood, let it fall. The body collapsed. Ananshael towered over the island, tall as the sky.
I turned away from the corpse to face Ela. The priestess stood a few paces away, chest heaving, sweat’s sheen glistening on her face.
“A mother,” I said, “ripe with new life.”
She raised an eyebrow. “A little old for it.”
“Hundreds of spiders have hatched in her stomach.” I pointed to the wound, which was already bulging, pulsing with the creatures inside. “That makes six.”