“Your man is right, Lady Quen,” the priest murmured, crossing to the child. “She is no good to our gods already dead.”
Slowly, almost lovingly, he peeled back the hood to reveal a girl’s filthy face, mud-streaked and smudged with tears, green eyes wide, horrified. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the priest produced a rag from somewhere in his noc, stuffed it in her mouth, then turned to Lady Quen, smiling beneficently. “The child is strong. The Three will be pleased.”
“And I would be pleased,” Quen responded, “if we could complete this ceremony before we all grow old.”
“Of course,” the priest said, ignoring the thrashing child as he rose. From a shelf beside one of the candles, he lifted a wide, short, double-bladed knife, its handle the yellow of old ivory, the blade of cast bronze. Crossing the room, he stepped carefully over the bodies, then passed the weapon to Lady Quen.
For the first time, the distaste faded from her eyes. Veneration replaced vexation as she closed her hand around the knife, then turned it back and forth, admiring it in the light. When she turned back to the priest, I could hear a new fever in her voice.
“They will rise soon,” she murmured. “They must.”
The priest nodded eagerly. “It is we who forsook the Three. They have been waiting to return, waiting all this time for us to prove our worth. Your sacrifice,” he said, indicating the prisoners, “will show the gods we have not forgotten, that we are still willing, in our faith and our obedience, to give up that which is most precious to us.”
The captives tied on the floor didn’t look precious to anyone. Unless things had changed in Dombang, Lady Quen had ordered her henchmen to round up a few drunks and orphan children too weak or stupid to run. According to the stories, when Dombang was founded, only the greatest warriors went into the delta to face their gods, to offer their own bodies as sacrifice. We had fallen a long way, however, from the stories.
“My lady,” the Asp murmured. “As you say, it is late.…”
For a moment, Quen seemed not to have heard her. She was gazing, rapt, at the knife in her hand, deaf to the whimpering of the girl who had awoken. Then, as though jolted from some beautiful vision by the rude hand of an ugly world, she turned to the nearest body—a man, judging by his size and shape—pulled down the front of his filthy shirt, and dragged the tip of the blade across his chest, deep enough to cut, to bleed, but not so deep as to give a serious wound. It was all part of the theater. The priest would bring the prisoners into the delta. The priest would abandon them to die. To reap the favor of the gods, however, Lady Quen needed to draw the first blood.
The man groaned slightly in his stupor, rolled onto his side, then fell still.
Ruc touched me gently on the shoulder, put his lips to my ear.
“She’ll cut them,” he whispered, “and then she’ll go. She’ll leave the others to get the bodies out. We’ll take her at the top of the ladder. You kill the guards.”
I’d known, of course, that it would come to this. We hadn’t tracked the Asp and the priest halfway across the city just to sit down together over a bottle of quey. The trouble was, I couldn’t kill them, not without violating the rules of my Trial. If one of them fit the song, of course, I could give them to the god, but the odds didn’t look good. No one in the room below looked pregnant. None of them seemed to be singing. Of course, there are ways to incapacitate a man without killing him. Silently, I slid one of my knives back into its sheath, switched my grip on the other, then shifted into the shadows just above the hatch.
I waited to strike until the second guard had stepped off the ladder, brought the heavy pommel of my blade down across the crown of his head, then pivoted, slammed the second man in the stomach with my fist, caught him by the throat, squeezed the arteries along the side of his neck as he flailed for his sword and then went slack, collapsing onto the deck in a clatter of steel.
“What’s going on?” Lady Quen demanded from below.
I ignored her, focusing instead on the two guardsmen. My attacks wouldn’t leave them unconscious for long—I couldn’t risk killing them—which meant I needed them incapacitated before they woke. It was grim work slitting the tendons of their wrists and ankles, the sort of thing I’d never thought to do as a priestess of Ananshael, and I felt filthy when it was over. There is a beauty, a terrible nobility to a fast, clean death. What I’d just done felt more like torture, like a version of what was happening in that hot, cramped room below.
“Three more above,” Ruc murmured, then dropped straight down through the hatch, ignoring the ladder.
Just under my feet, I heard Lady Quen’s strangled curse, the priest’s screaming, but before I could glance down, the guards from the deck above were leaping through the hatch. The first of them almost landed on my head, but these—their eyes useless in the dimness—were even easier to dispatch than the first two. I reminded myself, as I went about hamstringing them and snipping the tendons in their wrists, that they were here as part of the sacrifice. They were complicit in the bodies lying bound in the hold below.
It may seem strange that a worshipper of Ananshael would object to such a sacrifice. What was I doing in Dombang, after all, but offering women and men into the nimble hands of my god? People have such a fear of death that they tend to conflate the two, to see fear and death as two sides of the same coin. It’s hard for most to imagine the annihilation offered by Ananshael without that attendant fear.
In truth, however, my god abjures terror almost as much as he does pain. Both are antithetical to the peace he offers. The most perfect offering is one in which the sacrifice is dead before they feel the blade. It is, in other words, the opposite of the sacrifice that happens in Dombang. In Dombang, the terror of the victims is all part of the act. They’re supposed to struggle, to fight, to plumb the depths of dread—for days if possible—before they die. Under other circumstances it would have felt good to put a stop to such suffering, but bound by the rules of my Trial, I could only trade the misery of the victims below for that of the guards.
The five of them thrashed on the deck, bellowing like mad bulls, unable to stand. One reached out to seize my ankle, but I had wrecked their hands as well, and his fingers slipped uselessly from my skin. He stared at his own hand, aghast, a ruined moan draining from his lips. I turned away from the carnage, sick to my stomach, and leapt through the hatch to join Ruc in the hold below.
He had killed the Asp, shattered her neck with one curt blow, then backed both the priest and Lady Quen into the far corner.
Quen stared at him, contempt resplendent in her eyes.
“Ah,” she said. “The traitor, come to betray his own people once again.”