I studied his lined face as he waved over a mug of ta for himself. Old wasn’t quite the right word for him; it was too tangled up with other words like feeble and unsteady. The years had done their work on Kossal—moles and liver spots dotted his shaved scalp; knuckles broken long ago stood crooked from his long, elegant fingers—but like good steel or fine leather, he seemed to have aged into a kind of rightness, as though for decades his body had just been waiting for old age. The thought of him with Ela seemed strange, but not grotesque.
“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
“Used to. For a few years I gave every lover she had to the god.”
“How many was that?”
“Forty-seven.”
I blinked. “Anyone you knew?”
“Four priests of Ananshael; two priestesses. One was an old friend.”
“Is that why you stopped?”
He took a sip of his ta, then shook his head. “I stopped because I couldn’t keep up. That woman fucks quicker than I can kill.”
Before I could think of a response, a shocked exclamation broke out from a table halfway down the deck. I turned to find a tall man in a blue vest leaning over, whispering urgently, while his audience leaned in. I couldn’t hear most of it, but I managed to make out the phrases Goc My and bloody hands.
“So,” Kossal said, studying me through the steam rising off his ta. “Looks like word of your evening’s labors has caught up with you.”
He didn’t shout it, but he didn’t whisper either.
“You were following?”
He nodded. “Unfortunately.”
“I thought you might be grateful for a tour of the city’s greatest monuments.”
“The peaks of the Ancaz are monuments. What you have here is a pile of rotting wood and a superfluity of stagnant water.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“Engrossed, no doubt, with your artistic pursuits.”
I hesitated. “Did you see anyone else following? Tall. Tattoos streaked across his face?”
The priest nodded. “Strange choice for someone in the sneaking business.”
“Only if you’re in a city. Out in the delta those tattoos blend with the rushes.”
“Fisher?”
I shook my head. “The city’s fishers stay in their boats. He was one of the Vuo Ton.”
“I assume that means something.”
“First Blood.”
“How illuminating.”
“The Vuo Ton left Dombang not long after the city’s founding. Set up their own village in the delta.”
“To be closer to the crocs?”
“To be closer to their gods.”
Kossal sucked at a tooth, took a sip of his ta, swirled it around his mouth while he studied me.
“Tell me about these gods,” he said finally.
I opened my mouth to reply, and for half a heartbeat the world seemed to tip sideways. A hot-bright fire blazed across my vision, blotting out Kossal, the deck, the canal, the whole city beyond. There was only the light, endless as the sky, then there, surfacing from the brilliance, two slitted pupils. They were midnight dark, featureless, but it seemed as I stared back at them that they watched me with a predatory delight.
No, I tried to say. It was what I always tried to say when those eyes loomed up in my mind, in dreams or waking visions: No. As always, the word would not come. I groped for the table in front of me, caught it, steadied myself, and then the vision was gone, replaced by Kossal and the rest of the world fading back into existence around him. He was still sitting across from me, his eyes narrowed, inquisitive, his pupils blessedly round.
“Want to explain what just happened?” he asked.
I shook my head, trying to clear the last remnants of the vision. “Just tired.”
Kossal glanced pointedly at my hand, which was locked furiously on the rim of the table. “Don’t wear yourself out holding up the furniture.”
It took a moment to pry my fingers open. I flexed them gingerly. “Dombang worshipped different gods before the Annurians came. Local deities. Creatures of the delta.”
“Ever seen one?”
I stared at him, forced down the dread flooding my veins. “You ever see a red crow?”
“Don’t exist.”
“Neither do the old gods of Dombang.”
The blinding vertigo threatened to engulf me again, but I kept my eyes fixed on Kossal’s and hauled a long breath into my lungs. By the time I exhaled, the dizziness was gone.
“There’s some folks in this city,” Kossal replied after a moment, “seem to be working awful hard in the service of something that doesn’t exist.”
The mood on the deck in front of Anho’s Dance had shifted from relaxed to furtive. Women and men hunched over their tables. Hisses and whispers had replaced the low murmur of casual conversation. From where I was sitting, everyone looked like a conspirator.
“Pick any city in Eridroa,” I said, turning back to Kossal. “You’ll find people telling stories about old gods.”
“Folks here seem to go a bit beyond storytelling,” Kossal pointed out. “It’s one thing to spin a yarn by the fireside, another to start sawing through causeway pilings and feeding people to the crocs.”
“The local mythology took deeper root here because the citizens of Dombang never witnessed the truth.”
“Lots of truths floating around. Which one are you talking about?”
“The truth about the gods. Dombang’s first settlers fled here thousands of years ago, during the wars against the Csestriim. They came to the delta because it was a place they could hide, one of the only places the Csestriim couldn’t follow them.”
Kossal snorted. “If Annur could conquer Dombang, you can bet your ass the Csestriim could have managed it.”
“And maybe they would have, in time. But they didn’t have time. The young gods came down, took human form, and helped to turn the tide of the war.” I shook my head. “But the people of Dombang didn’t know any of that.”
“Too busy hiding.”
I nodded. “Word of the young gods spread across Vash and Eridroa, but it didn’t spread here. Not until much later, when the war was millennia over and the city finally opened to trade. By that point, the local stories were entrenched and the stories that might have replaced them too far back in history to make much of an impression.”
Kossal tapped thoughtfully at the side of his mug, then looked back at me. “And yet, you seem to have escaped the local penchant for superstition.”
I took a long, steadying breath. The hot morning air smelled of lemongrass, sweet-reed, smoked fish. It smelled like home, like a place I thought I’d never come back to.
“A greater god liberated me.”
“Not yet, he hasn’t,” Kossal replied.
“He will. Ananshael leaves his mark on the world each day. Unlike the so-called gods of the delta.”
“Which you think are just stories?”
“If it’s between stories and real immortal deities creeping around in the rushes, I’ll go with stories.”
The priest explored the recesses of his cheek with his tongue while he studied me.
“Not everything immortal is a god.”
It took me a moment to make sense of the statement. “You’re talking about the Csestriim,” I managed finally. “Or the Nevariim.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “The Nevariim really are a myth.”
“So are the Csestriim,” I replied, “at least by this point. We destroyed them in the wars.”
Kossal frowned, picked up his flute, fingered a few notes without raising it to his lips. “Not all of them.”
I stared. “You think that some survived? That they escaped?”
“I know they did.” His fingers ran through a quick arpeggio.