I used to spend idle hours poring over Rassambur’s vast collection of old maps. I still do, actually, and one fact about those yellowing sheets of vellum always strikes me: while the names of the kingdoms and empires shift—smaller polities combining or fracturing off, giving the illusion of change—the most fundamental borders remain the same, century after century. No empire has ever united the lands east and west of the Ancaz. No potentate has brought the cities north of the Romsdals into any greater state. And none of Eridroa’s central powers had ever leashed the wild territory north of the Waist—territory including Dombang and the Shirvian delta—not until Annur.
The empire of the midday sun won a great battle in Dombang, and suddenly, the world over, a legion of cartographers lurched into work making new maps, as though millennia of loyalties and pride could be elided through a single fight and the shifting of a few inked lines. The old priesthood was still in the city, although hidden, forced underground. Women and men still remembered the old songs. The figures whose statues still stood in the plazas and atop the bridges were those who had ruled Dombang when the city was fierce and independent. For the better part of two centuries, Annur had forced everyone to pretend that the city had no history, but history is ubiquitous as water, as rot. All it took was a little red paint and my handprint to remind everyone: for all that those legions bearing the blazing sun claimed to be a defending force, they were an occupying army.
It was obvious, watching the soldiers at the other end of the tavern, that they understood that fact. In addition to the too-loud laughter and forced jollity, they all carried their short swords despite the heat and inconvenience, as though they half expected to need to cut their way free. All of which was massively inconvenient, given that I’d come to kill their commanding officer.
In a simpler world, I could have just given the lot of them to the god. My Trial, however, forbid such indiscriminate largesse. Anyone can kill, after all. A Wing of imperial Kettral could have destroyed the entire tavern and everyone in it with a single well-timed explosion. Something more is required of Ananshael’s faithful. A priestess of Rassambur must prove her restraint even in the moment of her most perfect devotion.
I’d already confirmed with Ela and Kossal that the Neck could fit the rhyme; what is a soldier, after all, if not a “dealer of death”? I might have killed one of the others for singing, but they were all singing, and the song only gave me one. Which meant I needed to somehow separate the Neck, who was already wary, from the rest of his legion.
Across the dimly lit room, the legionaries struck up another raucous song. They had good voices, for soldiers. Three of them carried the melody while the Neck bellowed out the bass refrain: For a soldier’s a soldier no matter how old.
As he sang, the massive man met my eyes, then smiled. I gave him half a smile of my own, holding his gaze as I raised the cup of quey to my lips. The liquor looked like water. It smelled like hate. It tasted like velvet fire on the tongue.
The legionaries kept singing:
When he’s dead, dig him up!
Bring him in from the cold.
Though his hands are all bones
They still know how to hold:
His cock or his tankard, his sword or his spear …
Then the Neck, still watching me, still grinning, still pounding the table half to splinters, finished the chorus: For a soldier’s a soldier, no matter how old!
He sang as though performing the verse just for my enjoyment. When the song was over, he slammed his tankard into those of his companions, smiled wide, then raised it to me. To my chagrin, I found myself liking him. Fishing gets tricky if you start worrying about the worm.
Bait, I reminded myself. He is bait.
Even if I left him alive, someday something would kill him. Disease, dagger, drowning—or one of Ananshael’s other subtle, unnumbered tools. The death that I planned to offer him ranked among the kindest: fast and painless. I would cut him free from the world in his undiminished prime. Presumably there were other ways to fall in love, ways that didn’t involve wading through a pile of dead bodies, but in all the long trek from Rassambur, I hadn’t managed to think of one. Call it a failure of imagination.
He kept his tankard raised, but instead of meeting the toast, I glanced down at my open palm, dragged a finger across it, then pressed it to the table. The gesture was quick, subtle. To most people it would have looked like no more than a young woman fidgeting, but I counted on the Neck to be more observant than most people. Which he was. His gaze hardened. After a moment, he set down his own mug and pushed back from the table, as though getting ready to stand. I gave an incremental shake of my head, nodded toward the door at the rear of the tavern, laid a quick finger across my lips, then rose from my seat.
The rear door of the tavern opened into a narrow hallway that fronted a series of stalls, privies that dropped directly into the canal below: there was a reason that the slums of Dombang were all to the east, downstream. I entered the farthest of the five—a tiny room barely large enough to sit down, a wooden bench along the back wall worn smooth from generations of asses, the hole in the middle just large enough for me to squeeze my body through; if the Neck brought the rest of his legion, I wanted a way out that didn’t involve a hallway filled with soldiers and swords. I was, however, counting on him not bringing the others.
Enormous men might not be any stupider than their smaller brethren, but they are, as a rule, less careful. The Neck outweighed the tavern’s average patron by as much as a small pig; he wasn’t used to feeling vulnerable. If the notion of the whole city rising up in rebellion had done little to slow his drinking, it seemed unlikely that one lone woman—relatively small, seemingly unarmed—would give him pause. In all Annur, there might have been a few dozen women—Kettral, probably, or other priestesses of Ananshael—who could kill him in a hand-to-hand fight. Following me into the privy wasn’t a stupid bet.
Unfortunately for the Neck, even the smartest bet can lose. That’s why they call it a bet.