I left the first bloody print just before midnight on the central pier of Cao’s Bridge. The wide wooden span is one of the largest in the city, stretching north to south over Dombang’s central channel. It’s not an easy place to do anything unseen; scores of merchant stalls line either side of the bridge, men and women selling everything from fried scorpions to crushed, honeyed ice beneath their swatches of bright canvas. The bridge is never really quiet. The stalls stay open almost all night, catering to pairs of lovers or insomniac loners until the eastern sky brightens and the ranks of revelers start to give way to more prosaically dressed men and women, some headed home, others still waking up, a mug of steaming ta in hand, as they cross the city to their waiting jobs.
Cao’s Bridge is never empty, but one of the things you learn early in Rassambur is that a woman need not be alone to go unnoticed. A crowd provides just as much cover as a moonless night. It’s easier to hide in a group of hundreds than among just half a dozen. I waited at the bridge’s apex for a knot of drunken men to pass, let them jostle me into the nearest fish-scale lantern, then knocked it into the river below. It hissed angrily, then went out. It took only moments, in the shallow pool of shadow, to dip my hand into the mug—the prophecy said blood, but I was using paint—then press my palm against the pier and move along.
No one cried out. No one leveled an angry finger. No one raised the alarm. Women and men crossed the bridge as they had been crossing it all night, oblivious to what I had wrought in their midst. Destruction is like that, sometimes. The cracked cup might take days to finally break. You can stab a man so fast that he doesn’t realize until moments later, when the blood starts leaking out. A city, of course, is bigger than a cup, more complex than a man. If I was going to break Dombang, break it thoroughly enough to serve my purposes, I had more work to do.
From Cao’s Bridge I went south, then west over the pollen-stained causeways of the Flower Market. Ten thousand dropped petals dappled the still, dark water between the piers. I left the red mark of my palm on the wall of the central guardhouse while the Greenshirts were distracted harassing some poor merchant about his papers. I left it on each end of the Spring Bridge as I crossed onto First Island, and then again at the base of the huge statue of Goc My that presided over the island’s central square. He stared down at me with blank stone eyes. I slipped away while the paint was still dripping, across the open cobbles, into the darkness of one of the side streets, then paused, turning back to study the statue, wondering what he’d make of my night’s activity.
Goc My had spent his life in the service of Dombang, leading the Greenshirts when the Greenshirts were still strong, independent. It was Goc My who had the widest channels of the delta dredged, opening up Dombang to the trade of deep-keeled ocean vessels, and Goc My, at the same time, who built a canny series of traps and fortifications—underwater chains and fake reefs, guardhouses hidden in the reeds ready to lob crocks of liquid flame at would-be invaders—to protect his city even as he worked to reveal it to the world. Goc My had devoted his life to the safeguarding of Dombang, but Goc My was a thousand years dead, and Dombang was no longer the city he knew. Would he curse me for cracking his city’s tenuous peace? Or would he be grateful that someone was stirring up hatred of the empire that had forced the yoke on that city’s shoulders?
As I watched the still, stone form, half a dozen revelers, listing like boats in an invisible squall, stumbled into the square. At first I thought they planned to cross without stopping, but then the tallest, a muscular, unattractive man with his vest hanging open, lost his footing and lurched abruptly sideways into Goc My’s plinth. His companions erupted into a chorus of jeers and encouragement, but the youth cut them off with a theatrically raised hand.
“I stand for such treatment,” he announced, stabbing an unsteady finger up at the statue, “from no man!”
Then, after a moment fumbling with his belt, he dropped his pants around his ankles and began pissing on the statue’s base.
If the night had been a little darker, or the pisser had been a little drunker, things might have turned out differently. He might have finished urinating, hauled up his tangled pants, followed his friends out of the square and into the night, into the rest of his life. The square, however, was hung with lanterns, and the young man had kept just enough wits about him that when he finally raised his eyes from his cock, he saw in front of him the print of my bloody hand, still wet and glistening.
If he’d been sober, he might still have saved himself, might have turned and walked quietly away. Even during my childhood the red hands of prophecy had a way of cropping up in Dombang, a few here, half a dozen there, futile gestures of defiance, useless attempts to kindle in the people of the city a righteous uprising. Waist-high children knew enough not to be seen by the Greenshirts near one of those bloody prints. Annur hadn’t become the world’s most powerful empire by chuckling at sedition. It was worth your life, especially if you were an urchin from the east end of the city, to be accused of fomenting rebellion. If you saw a red hand, you made sure no one thought you put it there.
Evidently, this idiot had never learned that particular lesson. Still holding his cock in one hand, he stretched out the other with the inexplicable determination of drunks everywhere, to lay it over the print. The motion was slow, deliberate, almost reverent. It was also exquisitely timed. Just as he took his hand away, staring in perplexity at the red paint staining his palm, a patrol of Greenshirts entered the plaza.
I wondered if Goc My would have recognized the order he once commanded. During the long years of Dombang’s independence, while priests claimed the highest offices, it was the Greenshirts who were the city’s true rulers. The Greenshirts saw to the dredging of channels and the building of causeways and bridges; the Greenshirts ran the courts and collected taxes; they decided which nations to favor with trade and which to punish with embargoes; it was the Greenshirts who protected the priests—an imbalance of power that was lost on no one—and so when the priests spoke, it was with the voice of the Greenshirts; and the Greenshirts were able to do all this because it was they who guarded the city with boats and blades.
Then Annur came and killed them all.