Ruc gestured with his sword to the bodies lined up across the floor. “Why don’t we ask them who they think has betrayed them?”
Quen snorted. “Backwater trash. Three drunks who wouldn’t have survived the year, the other three so starved they’re halfway dead already.”
“Truly,” Ruc said, “a great sacrifice for your mythical gods.”
The priest drew himself up. “The Three are real, and they will consume you. We will feed you to the serpent and storm. We will give your blood to the river.”
“Actually,” Ruc cut in, “we’re going to do something different. We’re going to have a nice trial. Plenty of people to testify very publicly.” He nodded toward the captives still trussed on the floor. “Then, once we’ve squeezed out all your secrets, all the names in your seditious little cabal…” He shrugged. “I don’t know if Intarra is real or not, but I know you’ll feel the fire.”
“Blasphemers,” hissed the priest, his voice a high, pinched whine. “The goddess will swallow you. She rises. She rises, her executioners at her side.”
“This,” Ruc replied, “is the same song I heard the last time your ilk started splashing paint on the buildings. Maybe you remember how that turned out.”
The priest sneered. “It is as it was in the first days. The waters seem to recede. The enemy, emboldened, enters, only to find himself swallowed at last by the righteous flood.”
“Too bad for you, you won’t be here to see it.” Ruc turned to me, eyes hard as shards of jade. “Kill him.”
I tensed. “What about squeezing the secrets, giving him to Intarra, all that?”
“It’s her secrets I want,” Ruc said, nodding to Quen. “We’ve been following this idiot for months. I know everything I need to know about him.”
“So why kill him now?”
“Because I don’t know everything I need to know about you.” He cocked his head to the side. “Let’s just say killing him would provide further evidence that we’re actually on the same side.”
“I’m not sure it would,” I replied, scrambling for some way out, some way around it. “He’s more dangerous to any insurrection as your prisoner than as a corpse. There’s always another secret he might reveal as long as he’s not dead.”
“You’re right, obviously,” Ruc said, then narrowed his eyes. “But you’re also stalling.”
My chest felt tight, my breathing pinched.
He gestured to my blades, dripping blood in the candlelight.
The priest, too, was staring at them, rapt. Suddenly, however, he ripped his gaze away.
“Whatever you do to me,” he snarled, “they will come for you. The Three will come for you.”
Then I saw the way.
“Who the fuck are these Three everyone keeps yammering on about?”
Quen was watching me in the way a raptor studies a piece of meat.
“Kettral,” she said quietly. “So the empire’s most rabid dogs are finally here.”
“It’s birds, actually,” I replied, glancing over at her. “The founder of our order briefly considered riding dogs, but decided on monstrous, man-slaughtering hawks instead.”
The priest, lost in his own fervor or terror, didn’t seem to hear the exchange. He was nodding vigorously, almost rabidly, as though working himself up to something.
“Sinn,” he hissed finally, the word halfway between a curse and an invocation. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh. They will avenge me. They will avenge all Dombang’s fallen and oppressed. You can open my throat now but—”
The names still wet on his tongue, there was no need to let him finish. I cut his throat with a backhand flick, wiped the knife against my leg as he collapsed, my mind carried back down the dark current of memory.
Sinn, Hang Loc, Kem Anh.
They were names I had not heard since my childhood, and even then, only in whispers. One of my young companions had shown me the forbidden icons of his family once, climbing into the reed-thatched rafters of his house to draw out three statues of crudely modeled clay, two men and a woman, hand-high, naked, muscular, cocks half as long as the arms, buttocks high and taut, shoulders wide, legs spread in readiness. I can’t remember the name of the young boy, but I remember the names he recited, voice and hand trembling as he touched each statue in turn. Sinn, bloodred, whip-thin; Hang Loc, larger and darker; Kem Anh, the goddess, the largest of the trio, her arms outstretched, eyes the product of some violence, jagged, as though someone had gouged them into the wet clay with the tip of a knife.
It is the nature of names to come unmoored from the world. Down the centuries, the syllables grow remote, then incomprehensible, the language that birthed them lost, their only right to concrete things a right that we bestow. It is easy to forget that names, too, were words once, no more august than any other words. So, too, were these, in the ancient language of Dombang: serpent, dark storm, river death.
The ancient gods of my city were crueler, closer, hungrier than the bright, inscrutable goddess of Annur.
Even so, the empire might have tolerated them. A part of the Annur’s brilliance was the willingness of its emperors to tolerate other faiths. The royal Malkeenian family worshipped Intarra, of course, but the capital hosted hundreds of temples, thousands, to deities beyond the Lady of Light, old gods and young rubbing shoulders in the same streets and plazas. A merchant might murmur a prayer of thanks to Intarra on the sun’s rising, leave an offering to Heqet—a bowl of rice, a strip of meat—on her household shrine, then stop midafternoon in the temple of Bedisa to pray for a pregnant daughter. Even the more obscure cults, discredited by the mouths of the gods themselves millennia before, persisted unmolested in the empire’s quieter corners. The Malkeenians had no desire to see newly conquered people rise up over some irrelevant theological grievance. Only in Dombang had the empire set its shining boot on the throat of the old beliefs.
The conflict lay in the nature of Dombang’s gods. While the stone spirits of the Romsdals or the mythical fish-men of the Broken Bay posed no barrier to Annurian rule, our gods were both bloody and jealous. They were creatures, not of some celestial sphere, but of the delta itself. Their blood was the water, their flesh the mud, their screams the thunder of the summer storms. Their arrangement with the people of the city was both simple and cruel: sacrifice, and you will be protected. Make offering of your young, strong, and beautiful, and we will crush all those who come against you.