It wasn’t until just before dawn that I realized I was being followed.
I spent hours quartering the city, slapping my handprint wherever I could find a free space. From First Island I made my way past Old Harbor—the anchorage long since silted up and given over to a maze of rotting hulls; then Little Basc, where most inhabitants had coal-dark skin and spoke a complex tongue somewhere between Annurian and the language of their old island; and on to The Heights, whose eight-foot banks were high only in comparison to the rest of Dombang’s lowlying islands. I spent a few extra moments in the markets fronting New Harbor, studying the huge ships swaying at anchor, wondering if I ought to swim out to leave some paint on their hulls, then decided against it. Though I grew up half a fish in the canals of Dombang, my skills had soured in the dry, desert mountains of Rassambur, and I wasn’t sure about my ability to swim and keep the paint clear of the water.
By the time the unrisen sun had smudged the eastern sky pink, I’d refilled my clay crock with paint a dozen times and left hundreds of bloody palms scattered throughout the city. The prophecy said ten thousand, but I figured no one was likely to be counting. Before returning to the inn, however, I decided to go back to First Island, to see what had become of the violence there. Crossing one of the low, hanging bridges, I glanced behind me, caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure just stepping onto the span, then half turned away before I realized I’d seen the person before, several times over the course of the night, always in the middle distance—across a canal, or several aisles away in the market, face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat and streaked with shadow.
My heart bucked inside me, but I kept walking, cleaving to the casual, unhurried pace I’d been using all evening.
Kossal, I thought. The figure was tall and lanky, like the priest, and of course it was Kossal’s task to follow me wherever I went. The marvel was I hadn’t noticed him earlier.
When I reached the next corner, however, and looked back casually over my shoulder, I realized it wasn’t Kossal after all. Not Kossal or Ela or anyone I’d ever seen. The person following me was a stranger, and yet, as he moved through the light of a swaying lantern, I realized with a frigid thrill that I recognized the garb—tight snakeskin pants, black scales glittering red in the lamplight, snakeskin jerkin laced across the chest, bracers of croc hide running from wrist to elbow—and I recognized the tattoo slashed across his face. What I had taken for shadow in the night’s darkness was ink, long black lines like rushes streaked across the brown skin from neck to hairline. I knew those tattoos. Everyone who grew up in Dombang knew them. They were the mark of the Vuo Ton.
For most people, Dombang was the delta’s only safe haven. To stray on foot beyond the city’s bounds, or the causeway linking it to the rest of the world, was to die. Even the city’s fishers refused to ply the channels much more than a few miles outside the safety of Dombang’s domesticated wildness. No one could survive out there. Everyone knew that. No one except the Vuo Ton.
According to the stories, they’d once been citizens of Dombang itself, descendants of the same few hundred terrified humans who had first taken refuge in the delta. As Dombang grew, however, from a collection of shacks to a village, from a village to a town, from a town to a city, there were those who claimed that success had made the people of that city soft. The delta had been driven back too far, they insisted; too much security had made people weak. They tried for a while to bring the city back to the old ways, and then, when that failed, they left, several hundred of them slipping into the delta to establish their own settlement, a place where they could live closer to danger, where they could remember the lessons the delta had taught to its first inhabitants. To a place where they could more properly remember their gods.
People from Dombang had tried to find that settlement over the years. They had failed. Failed so thoroughly, in fact, that it would have been tempting to believe the Vuo Ton had all perished, except for the fact that they showed up in the city occasionally, one or two of them, dressed in the skins of boa and anaconda, faces inked to blend with the reeds. Usually they came to trade, bartering for iron or steel or glass, the few things they needed but couldn’t make themselves. They rarely stayed more than a day or two, slipping back into the delta in their snake-thin boats, disappearing among the rushes, despite the occasional effort to follow them. I knew of only one who had chosen to stay.
There had been a woman in my neighborhood when I was growing up—Chua Two-Net. Two-Net was a legend. She’d been raised in the delta by the Vuo Ton, then quit her people to come to Dombang for love. Not that the love seemed to have softened her any. Her arms and shoulders were steel-strong after half a lifetime paddling and hauling nets. She’d won the small boat race through the city’s main canal three years running, despite—she insisted it was because of—drinking a full bottle of quey before each contest. She’d strangled a ten-foot keel slider with her bare hands once, then stitched the snake’s black skin into a vest that glistened like midnight water wherever she walked. She could swim faster than anyone I’d ever seen, woman or man. She was also the only person I knew who had ever capsized in the delta and survived.