It was a question I had already asked myself a hundred times. One that had no good answer.
“His eyes,” I replied.
“I thought you could only see the one. The other was swollen.”
“Fine. His eye.”
“Care to describe it?”
I hesitated. I’d left that part out, evidently, in relating the morning’s events around the statue.
“Moss green,” I admitted finally.
Ela smiled. “I like green eyes.”
*
I was just sliding free of my pew when the second movement of the Mass began, all thirteen voices at once, half song, half scream, a single blurred note slammed between the mind and all other thought. I’d known it was coming, and even still, it almost left my legs unstrung. For a moment I hovered there, my hand on the back of the pew. The music almost dragged me back. I almost subsided onto the bench to hear the rest, but something in the young man’s bloody face proved equal to the Mass; something in that one green eye had reflected back the music’s strength, and grace, and rage, and so instead of letting him go, I followed him into the warm, Si’ite night.
When the heavy doors swung shut behind me, the music cut off abruptly. I imagined pillows slipped over the mouths of the singers, held there while they fought and struggled in silence, breath and sound alike lost in that unyielding softness. It becomes a habit, among those raised in Rassambur, to think of all endings as absolute. The song went on, of course, pouring from those thirteen throats, but for me, on that night, it was finished. I was angry suddenly, and surprised at my anger.
“It’s not for everyone.”
I turned at the sound of the words to find the young man standing in the middle of the cobbled street, his back to me. He hadn’t looked over when he spoke, just stared straight ahead, as though he were studying the torches lining the street. For a heartbeat, I thought he wasn’t talking to me at all, that he’d run into some acquaintance, but the truth was there in his posture, legible to anyone who’d spent her life learning to read the human body. He knew I was there, he expected me to come after him, and more than that: he was ready.
For all that coiled violence, however, his voice was quiet; deep, but quiet. Not the voice I’d expected from a man with sunken knuckles and a broken face. He might have been a singer himself—he had the timbre, although the way he spoke seemed to eschew all music.
He shook his head. “Expected something a little more lively out of Antreem? Something better to dance to?”
I considered killing him all over again. I still wasn’t sure why I’d left the temple, but it wasn’t to trade that perfect music for his derision. I could feel the twin knives strapped against my thighs, their hard weight reassuring as a prayer or a promise. I traced the outline of one of the handles with a fingernail through the cloth of my pants. My god, however, is very clear on the nature of his preferred devotion: Ananshael’s priests may kill for justice, or mercy, or even pure, incarnate joy, but our offerings are not to be made in anger. Anger cheapens the gift, profanes it.
“You’re the one who walked out,” I observed.
“Tough to focus on the music, considering.”
“And what is it that we’re considering?”
He turned finally. He didn’t snarl or glare. His hands hung loose at his sides. Still, there is a way a person moves when readying for a fight—a gauging of distance, a loosening of the neck and shoulders, a settling of the body’s weight into the strength of the legs. It had been clear, back in the temple, that this was a man who had fought. Standing half a dozen paces from him now, I could see more: this was a fighter.
“The throat or the gut,” he replied, studying me.
“Is this a riddle?”
He shook his head. “Riddles are fun. More fun, at least, than a woman planning to stick a knife in your gut.” He pursed his lips. “Or your throat.”
I hesitated, suddenly off-balance. His good eye flicked down my body. I had the feeling he could see the slim shape of my knives beneath my clothes.
“Who sent you?” he asked. “Qudis? Shahood?”
The names meant nothing to me. I’d been in Sia since the spring, but Sia was a city of a several hundred thousand souls. I’d met maybe two dozen people, and of those, I’d already given four to the god.
“No one sent me.”
He shook his head. “Horseshit. I’ve still got one eye that works. You didn’t just wander in off the street to hear a piece of music by a man a thousand years dead. You were there to find me. You found me. Then you followed me out. The only question is what you’re planning to do now.” He cocked his head to the side. The cut on his lip had broken open again, and he tested it with his tongue, then spat blood onto the cobbles. “I assume even Shahood isn’t stupid enough to want me completely dead.”
“I don’t know Shahood,” I replied. “Or Qudis. And if I wanted you dead, you would be dead.”
*
“Spoken,” Ela purred contentedly, “like a woman in love.”
I studied her face. If the three carafes of wine had affected her at all, I couldn’t see it. Even sitting still, she looked fast.
“I wasn’t in love with him. I was furious.”
She twirled her wineglass by the delicate stem. There were almost no glasses in Rassambur—a pointless luxury where clay cups served the purpose just as well—and yet Ela seemed utterly at ease holding the implausible vessel.
“Fury might not be love, but it’s a road that goes there.”
I stared at her. “Next thing, you’re going to be telling me you’ve thrown in with the monotheists, that it’s all the same: pleasure and pain, love and hate.”
Ela sipped from her glass, then set it down neatly in the ring of its own moisture. “In the end, of course, our god obviates all such questions.”
Her certainty galled me, as did the lazy way she waved her hand when answering, like she was swooshing away a fly.
“Of course,” I replied, unable to keep the edge from my voice, “we’re not quite at the end, are we? If I were eager for the god’s unmaking, I wouldn’t be here, trying to create a reason to run into Ruc Lan Lac.”
For half a heartbeat, she narrowed her eyes, as though some dimness had become momentarily, surprisingly bright. Then she smiled.
“You’re right, and I apologize. For the death to matter, for it to mean anything, there must first be a life.”
“I’ve had a life,” I snapped, aware that I’d shifted abruptly to the other side of the debate and furious at the awareness.
Ela’s smile just widened. “Tell me more about the boy.”
“He was twenty-four. A man.”
She lifted the wine to her lips again, sipped, then closed her eyes contentedly. “A man. Even better. Tell me more.”
*