We’d thought her lost when her old canoe fetched up in an empty tangle of roots just west of the city, and after a night of low voices hissing their own fear and recriminations, a group of her fellow fishers took up the search. But how do you search a place that won’t take a track, where each footprint is instantly swallowed in the mud, where each afternoon a storm’s fury washes away any scent? Chua’s friends set out looking, not because they hoped to find her, but because the thought of abandoning anyone to the delta was too awful to contemplate, because all of them secretly feared that one day it might be their canoe that capsized in a storm, because they could imagine wandering that watery maze alone, and because they hoped that if that happened someone would come looking for them.
They didn’t find her, but twelve days later she returned, stumbling over the rickety bridge that separated our quarter of rotting pilings and dilapidated docks from the next island over. Two-Net had always been the toughest woman I knew, but the woman who returned to the city was almost unrecognizable, one arm black and swollen to the elbow with some spider’s poison, one calf shredded by qirna, the rest of her legs and chest lacerated by spear rushes. Chua was too tough to die, but she never went back into the delta. Even more frightening, she never talked about what she saw out there, just sat in her run-down shack, a building as far from the water as she could get. Sat there and drank. When kids would come to stare at her, she’d chase them off with a fishing spear, then go back to her drinking, staring into the dark current of the past with her dark, unreadable eyes.
The person following me was not Chua.
He was taller than her and, though he moved with something like her serpentine grace, more thickly muscled.
Our eyes met for a moment. He smiled, revealing sharpened teeth, then turned into the shadow of one of the alleys.
I took two steps after him, then stopped. I could have killed him—probably—except for the limitations imposed by the Trial. He didn’t look likely to start singing. He didn’t look pregnant. Which left me what? The chance to chase him into the alleyway, then confront him with a series of strongly worded questions? I had no idea why one of the Vuo Ton would be following me, but he’d made no effort to impede my work. In fact, if his smile was anything to go by, it was possible that he approved. The Vuo Ton came to Dombang to trade, but they had no love for the city—that was why they’d abandoned it so long ago. It was possible that the man who’d been following me wanted to see civilization’s encroachment on the delta pulled down by my bloody hands.
I turned the question over and over in my mind as I made my way back to First Island and the statue of Goc My. Dombang had seemed the obvious place to perform my Trial. The only place, really. I was born in Dombang. I made my first offerings to the god there, though I didn’t know them for offerings at the time. It was my life in Dombang that led to my life in Rassambur. I have to go back, I had thought. And yet, I had arrived in the city only to discover that the whole place felt like a trap, as though the past weren’t the past at all, but some kind of deadfall, the weight of the years suspended by the slenderest of baited sticks, ready to crash down, to crush me the moment I touched anything.
I heard the sound before I reached the plaza at the center of First Island, a buzzing that might have been the hum of a million insects at first, but grew as I approached the overlapping gabble of a massive human throng. I’d expected something—almost a dozen hacked-open bodies have a way of drawing attention—but I hadn’t anticipated that the entire plaza would be packed so tight that I had to turn sideways every time I wanted to move. It felt as though the whole population of the island had turned out—fishwives in their wide, oiled aprons; shipwrights in noc skirts with tools strapped around their waists; merchants pulled from their stores and stalls by the commotion; carters who had abandoned their labor for the moment, partly because it was impossible to move in the press, partly because they, like everyone else, were trying to get closer to the statue of Goc My, to see what had happened there. The adults gathered in tight knots, whispering, muttering, arguing, dark eyes darting over the shoulders of their companions to see who was close, who was watching or listening. The conversations differed, but over and over I heard the same few words: Chong Mi, bloody hands, revolution.
When I finally neared the square’s center, the throng thinned abruptly. It wasn’t hard to see why. A dozen Greenshirts armed with flatbows and short spears had formed a rough cordon around the statue and the corpses at its base. Though they were the ones carrying the weapons, most of them looked wary, almost frightened.
“Keep back,” growled the nearest of them, an ugly young man whose appearance wasn’t improved any by the massive wart plastered across the side of his nose. He prodded at the crowd with his spear, shifting edgily from foot to foot. “Keep back or get cut.”
The front line of the mob, those confronted with the actual steel, shifted back half a step. Those protected by the bodies of their fellows felt more bold.
“Go back to Annur, you fucking Greenshirts!” someone shouted. A woman’s voice. I turned, but there was no way to find her in the press.
“Or come out here!” someone else added. “We’ll plant that spear up your ass.”
Sweat beaded Warty’s face. He glanced over his shoulder, obviously wishing that the men behind him would finish their business before things turned truly vicious.
At first, it was hard to say just what that business was. Through the gaps in the crowd, I could see fragments of the scene. The bodies lay exactly where they’d fallen, sprawled in their final postures. Two Greenshirts knelt in the puddled blood, going over the corpses, though what they hoped to find in the pockets of the dead youths I had no idea. I shifted slightly to see the statue’s plinth. My mark was still there, red paint obvious in the daylight. It wasn’t the symbol that interested me, however, so much as the man who stood before it.
He was studying the bloody hand, his back turned to both me and the mob, but I recognized the set of those broad shoulders, the small, hook-shaped scar—a scar I’d given him myself—glistening in his shaved scalp, just above his ear. Unlike the rest of the Greenshirts, he didn’t wear armor. I could almost hear his voice in my ear, warm and wry: Who needs steel when you have speed? He wasn’t wearing the standard uniform of the order either. Instead of the loose green tabard, he wore a light, slim-fitting coat of gray wool over a cotton shirt, open at the throat. No insignia. No sign of rank. I had to smile; Ruc Lan Lac had always been a reluctant soldier.
One of the Greenshirts approached him warily.
“Sir,” the guardsman murmured. I could barely make out the word.
Ruc didn’t move. He was almost as still as the statue itself, studying the paint as though he could see something buried beyond, some secret hidden deep inside the stone itself.
“Sir,” the guardsman said again, louder. “The mob is getting restive.”
This time, he turned. I’d known those green eyes were coming—green like the churned-up sea just before a storm, green like deep forest in a midafternoon downpour—but they made my stomach shift inside me all the same.