“How?”
“I’ve spent most of my life hunting them.”
“Hunting isn’t finding,” I replied.
“I’ve found two. I gave both of them to the god.”
The delivery of those last words was so indifferent, so offhand, that he might have been talking about slaughtering sheep or gutting fish rather than finding and killing the last remnants of an immortal race. He raised the flute to his lips, played a few notes to a dance tune we’d heard while walking into the city, switched the melody to a minor key, inverted it, slowed it down, and suddenly it was a dirge.
“Why would Csestriim be hiding in the delta?” I asked, not quite believing the words even as they left my lips.
Kossal played a few more bars, then lowered the flute. “They have to hide somewhere. It is the kind of thing they do.”
“Sulk in the mud?”
It didn’t seem to fit with the descriptions from the histories. The Csestriim in the chronicles were soulless but brilliant, builders and inventors, masters of lost knowledge beyond all human imagining.
“Become gods,” the priest replied. “Twist human credulity to their own end. Dombang could be their project, their experiment.”
“The first people came here to escape the Csestriim,” I insisted.
Kossal raised an eyebrow. “What if they failed?”
It was almost too much to imagine: Dombang, thousands of years of history, a city of hundreds of thousands—the toy of a few immortals.
“You think they’re here?”
The priest shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve stopped making guesses.”
“And if they are?”
“Then they are long overdue for a meeting with our lord.”
He tapped the flute against his palm as though testing the heft of the instrument or trying to dislodge any sound left stuck inside, then raised it to his lips once more.
5
I woke to find early evening smeared across the sky. Though I hadn’t used my knives since the causeway, I slid them from their sheaths, ran an oiled cloth over the blades, then strapped them to my thighs once more. After fifteen years, I felt more naked without those knives than I did without my clothes, which I slipped into next: loose-fitting delta pants and a dry vest. When I emerged onto the main deck, I found Ela seated at a small table close to the bar, a carafe of chilled plum wine before her.
“Pyrre!” she exclaimed brightly, waving me over, then gesturing to one of the bare-chested servingmen to bring another glass. She studied the sculpted muscle of his shoulders and torso with open admiration as he poured for me, then slipped him a silver coin. He raised an eyebrow at the extravagance, then nodded his thanks. Ela cocked her head to the side and smiled.
“You could have bought another bottle for that,” I observed after he left the table.
Ela laughed gaily. “It’s not the bottle I’m after.” She pursed her lips, sipped her wine, then shrugged. “Or, not just the bottle. How was your night? I’ve been listening to the talk here on the deck,” she purred, leaning closer. “You got up to some mischief, didn’t you?”
I forced myself to sit normally, not to glance over my shoulder.
Ela just smiled wider. “How clandestine. Tell me everything.”
I lowered my voice.
“I did a little painting.…”
The priestess waved an impatient hand. “Skip all the tedious preamble about inciting revolution.”
I stared at her. “You’re not interested in eleven men dead in the middle of a city square?”
“People die all the time, Pyrre. I’ve seen enough corpses to last a lifetime. Get to the good stuff.”
“The good stuff?”
“This delicious man,” she replied, brown eyes flashing, “to incite whose favor you’ve been … redecorating the entire city.”
I sucked breath nervously between my teeth. Everyone on the deck seemed to be holding a whispered conversation. Everyone had a wary eye for the other tables. We don’t look any different, I told myself, though that wasn’t exactly right. Of all the people gathered on the deck, only Ela seemed entirely at ease. She leaned on one elbow, fingering the rim of her wineglass as she studied me. And, of course, of all the people gathered on the deck, I was the only one who had spent the previous night fulfilling prophecy all over the ’Kent-kissing city.
“You saw him, didn’t you?” Ela demanded, eyes narrowed.
“I saw him,” I admitted, then paused, uncertain how to continue.
“Pyrre,” Ela said finally, “I have given women to the god for less frustration than you are causing me right now.” She upended the carafe of wine into my glass, gestured impatiently, then waited for me to drink. “Did you talk to him?”
I shook my head.
“Did he see you?”
“No.”
Ela frowned. “This story is getting less interesting by the moment. You’ll just have to tell me the other one.”
I stared at her. “What other one?”
“How you met.”
I looked away, out over the narrow canal. “How do you know there’s a story?”
“Oh, my sweet girl. There is always a story.”
*
I was nineteen when I first laid eyes on Ruc Lan Lac. This was in Sia, the Flooded Quarter of the old city, hundreds of miles from Dombang. I wasn’t looking for him that night, wasn’t looking for anyone. I’d left my tiny, lakeside room in search of music. I’d been in Sia almost eight months, and though the city, like any city, has music—rough-voiced men belting out shanties from upturned barrels in taverns down by the docks, elegant trios in fine mansions, playing close enough to the open windows that I could stop in the street outside to catch a few bars—I missed the music of Rassambur.
Ananshael’s faithful are taught to sing long before we learn to hold a bow or blade. Children of ten, sitting on the mesa’s edge, tossing stones into the emptiness below, will make their way merrily through polyphonic pieces beyond the range of most professional bards. I liked Sia, liked the spicy food and the sunrise over the lake, but I missed Rassambur’s music. When I heard that Lady Aslim’s Singers—a legendary choir sustained by the old woman at great personal expense—would be singing outside the cloistered walls of the lady’s piazza, I had to go. When I learned they would be performing Antreem’s Hymn for the Forgotten, nothing could have kept me away.
That’s what I thought, anyway, before I encountered Ruc.