I saw a thousand skulls, a thousand eyeless skulls,
Meat of their minds made mud for the delta flowers.
I saw men and women gorging on foreign coin, choking on it,
I heard them cry out in horror, gold dripping from their lips.
In the place of priests, I have seen the beasts of the waters,
Their jaws agape, howling, “Woe, woe, woe.”
Woe to you, Dombang, for I have seen the day of our salvation,
I have seen the day and the hour of our gods’ return.
Woe, woe, woe to you Dombang, for I have seen it,
And it is blood and fire and storm. And it is soon.
“That’s a lot of woe,” Ela observed when I’d finished. “Prophecy is so exceedingly dour. Just once, before I go to the god, I’d enjoy hearing a happy prophecy.” She dropped her voice to a portentous register: “And you shall lick honey from honeyed lips. Yea, and it will be very, very delicious.”
“Happy people don’t make prophecy.”
“People aren’t supposed to make prophecy at all. They’re speaking for the gods. That’s the point of prophecy.”
I nodded. “But the gods of Dombang have been gone a very long time.”
“They’re coming back,” Ela countered cheerfully. “Soon! According to Chong Mi.”
“Chong Mi died a hundred and fifty years ago,” I observed pointedly.
Ela spread her hands. “Who can say what time means to a god? Ten thousand years could be the blink of an eye. A whole age could be soon.”
“I don’t have a whole age,” I said grimly. “Or ten thousand years. I have fourteen days.”
Ela narrowed her eyes. “Surely you can fall in love without the help of Dombang’s missing deities.”
I let out a long, weary breath. “Actually, I don’t think I can.”
“We’re back to the teetering insurrection.”
I nodded. “Dombang has never fully accepted Annurian rule. Five years ago, the city was on the edge of open revolution.”
“And then what happened?”
“Ruc Lan Lac happened.”
Ela pursed her lips. “Your boyfriend singlehandedly put down an insurrection?”
“He and the four Annurian legions placed temporarily under his control.”
“A soldier,” Ela purred. “I like soldiers.”
“Ex-soldier. When things started to heat up here, Annur sent him back to command the Greenshirts.”
“Constabulary,” Ela said, grimacing. “I like constables less.”
“Most people in Dombang would agree with you, especially after Ruc got done ripping the throat out of the local insurgency.”
“He should have ripped more thoroughly. For a creature with no throat, the insurgency did a pretty good job knocking down the causeway.”
I nodded. “Annur’s been trying to root out the old worship for two hundred years, ever since conquering the city. The best they’ve managed is to force it underground.”
Ela swirled the wine in her glass. “And what,” she asked, “does all this have to do with the warming of your calcified heart?”
I hesitated. Suddenly my whole plan seemed insane. “I thought … if I helped him fight the insurgency, we might have a chance to…” I shook my head, unsure how to go on.
“To snuggle up close,” Ela said, smiling. “I understand. So when do you go find him?”
“Not yet. First, I need to drag the insurgency fully into the open.”
“Knocking down causeways isn’t open enough?”
I shook my head. “I want to help Ruc fight a war. That means there needs to be a war.”
After a moment of silence, the priestess exploded in delighted laughter.
“And where are you going to get one of those?”
I pressed my hand against the carafe again, made another print on the table.
“‘I saw hands of blood,’” I recited quietly, “‘ten thousand bloody hands reach up from the waters to tear the city down.’”
“You know,” Ela murmured, “that it’s supposed to be the work of the gods, fulfilling prophecies.”
I shook my head. “I told you. I need a way to get close to Ruc, and the gods of Dombang have been gone for a very long time.”
3
I’ve always thought it strange that so much of the world remains unbroken. Take something as simple as a clay cup. So much time and effort goes into the making—the quarrying of the clay, the spinning on the wheel, the glazing, the firing, the painting—and yet it takes only a moment to destroy. No malign intent required, no violent design, just a moment’s inattention, a careless elbow, fingers too slick with wine, and the vessel drops, lands wrong, shatters. Most things are like this. Daily, by imperceptible degrees, a boat’s hull warps with the sun, the rain, the heat, comes uncaulked, springs leaks. Rice takes months to grow from seed; left wet, it will begin to rot overnight.
Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little—a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep—to unmake a man or woman. It’s amazing, given everything’s fragility, that we don’t live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing.
It takes work to keep the world whole. A simple thing like a cup needs to be cleaned each day, placed carefully back on the shelf, not dropped. A city, in its own way, is every bit as delicate. People move over the causeways, ply the canals with their oars, go between their markets and their homes, buy and barter, swindle and sell, and all the while, mostly unknowingly, they are holding that city together. Each civil word is a stitch knitting it tight. Every law observed, willingly or grudgingly, helps to bind the whole. Every tradition, every social more, every act of neighborly goodwill is a stay against chaos. So many souls, so much effort, so difficult to create and so simple to shatter.