“What did we do?” demanded the mud-spattered man. “They’re the fucking killers!”
“And if they are,” the Greenshirt snapped, “then they’ll face Annur’s justice when this is all finished.”
Ela raised a conciliatory hand. “I, for one, am happy to wait.” She settled on the railing, oblivious to the drop at her back. “Kossal,” she said, motioning toward him imperiously. “Get over here.” As the old priest stomped down the causeway toward us, she stripped the gloves from her hands, laid them carefully on the railing. “So much death,” she said, shaking her head regretfully. “So much senseless death.”
*
The sun had barely budged in the sky before Thun collapsed. The soldier, who had been watching us fastidiously, suddenly lowered his sword, put a hand to his chest, winced, then fell over. Von knelt beside him, gave him a confused shove, then, when the man didn’t respond, put down his sword, tried to revive him with increasingly desperate entreaties, then slumped to the boards himself, pained puzzlement traced across his features. The rest were dead within a hundred heartbeats.
“Well,” Ela said brightly, getting to her feet. “I guess that settles that.”
“Itiriol?” I asked, studying the corpses.
She smiled. “And here everyone in Rassambur told me you were only good with your blades.”
I glanced over at the calfskin gloves. “The powder doesn’t soak through the leather?”
“Eventually.” She shrugged. “It’s not a good idea to dawdle.”
Kossal straightened up irritably. “There were faster ways to do that.”
“More obvious ways,” Ela countered. “Ways that would be remembered.” She nodded toward the people swarming over the causeway. A few glanced in our direction, but by this point the wooden bridge was packed with the bleeding and terrified, the exhausted and distraught. A few people lying down by the railing were hardly worth noticing. “This way we can still stay in a nice inn,” she added, “instead of holed up in an attic with the bats.” She looked at me appraisingly for a moment, rummaged in her pack, then tossed me a tightly rolled ki-pan. “As much as I appreciate the legs-and-knives look, maybe you should wear something a little less conspicuous, at least until we get into the city.”
*
We reached Mad Trent’s Mountain after dark. Like the causeway itself, the massive elevated platform was a legacy of the Annurian invasion. A quarter mile from Dombang’s northwestern edge, the wooden road, which had run spear-straight and dead flat for so many miles, began to climb gradually, the pilings growing longer, the scaffolding more complex as the delta dropped away below. The huge structure is comprehensively misnamed: a wooden scaffold (many times repaired and replaced over the decades) is hardly a mountain, and General Trent hadn’t been remotely mad. Two hundred years earlier, Annurian trebuchets had pounded the northern quarter of the city into flaming oblivion from that manufactured height.
Dombang was still burning, although the flames had been long since contained, tamed, caged in ten thousand stoves, torches, lanterns, the fire a servant once more. From atop the mountain, the whole labyrinthine expanse sprawled before us like a muddier, nearer echo of the stars. I found myself dizzy looking down at it, dizzy in a way I’d never been atop Rassambur’s vertiginous cliffs. It felt as though I wasn’t just looking down, but also looking back across the abyss of years into my own past.
Hidden City, Goc My’s Marvel, Labyrinth of Lanterns—the city bore a dozen names, each one true in the right light, each one a lie. The maze of canals, barges, and floating markets had, indeed, remained hidden for centuries, millennia, but it was hidden no longer, the bonds of causeway and channel shackling her to the world. Goc My had, in fact, worked a marvel centuries earlier, starting the transformation of a small fishing hamlet into the greatest city of the south. On the other hand, Goc My was long dead, and his city had fallen to a greater, less miraculous power two hundred years earlier. The truest name was the last: Dombang was still a labyrinth—a place of canals and causeways, bridges and barges, passing ropes strung between the tops of buildings, ladders everywhere, ten thousand alleys and backwaters where a woman could get lost, where she could lose herself.
“Ahh,” Ela purred, pausing to take in the sight, “I could fall in love here.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Truly a city of romance.”
Kossal grunted. “If you think a whole town built on an open sewer and peopled by angry political schismatics is romantic.”
“Look at those lanterns,” Ela protested. “There weren’t so many the last time I was here.”
Red and amber lanterns hung from the bows of ships, candles flickered in open windows, open flames blazed at the base of wooden statues hewn in the postures of the gods—the Annurian gods, Intarra foremost among them. Even at this distance, I could hear hints of music, both the bawdy banging of drinking songs and the softer thread of wooden flutes laid across the night’s hot breath.
“What’ve lanterns got to do with anything?” Kossal demanded.
Ela ignored him, turning to me instead and raising a playful eyebrow. “Good choice, Pyrre. How could you not fall in love with so many lanterns?”
“They’re fish,” I said, shaking my head. “All those lanterns are made of fish skin. Red snapper or ploutfish. They gut them, stretch the skin over a frame, then slide the wick and the whale oil inside.”
“I take it from your tone,” Ela said, cocking her head to the side as she studied me, “that something about the fishiness dims the romance for you.”
“The smell, for starters,” Kossal replied.
I shook my head slowly. “They don’t smell. Not if they’re made properly.”
The memory filled me, dredged from the silt of my childhood. I was squatting on a narrow dock between piles of snapper. The fish were still, dead, cool in the morning heat, stupid eyes fixed on the sky. It was my job to gut and clean them, to salt, then hang the filets, then to scrape the skins until they were paper thin, ready to be sold to the old lantern-maker down the street. The fish were fresh enough that they never reeked. It was only later, at night, when people started to light those ruddy lanterns, that I smelled the thick stench soaked into my skin, no matter how much I scrubbed.
“Your problem, Kossal,” Ela said, turning to face the older priest, “is that you don’t understand romance.”