A fine deal, until it collapsed straight into the shitter.
When the Annurian legions attacked Dombang, no deities erupted from the waters to stop them. The army took the city, put the leaders of the Greenshirts to the sword, tore down the main temples, all without the slightest divine opposition. A man proclaiming himself Hang Loc slathered his naked body with mud, then hurled himself bare-handed at an Annurian garrison. He was taken by the soldiers, castrated and decapitated beneath Goc My’s statue, then tossed into the canal. A week later, a woman claiming to be Kem Anh took to North Point in the midst of a great storm, exhorting the waters of the delta to rise and smother the Annurians. The waters rose, as they always did during a storm, then fell. The Annurians, in their methodical, unimaginative, brutal way, decapitated her as well, then tossed her into the canal. No further aspiring divinities came forth.
The Annurian triumph was evidence to many that the gods of Dombang had never existed at all. There was no place for them among the great pantheon laid down during the long wars with the Csestriim, when the young gods had walked the earth in human form. For centuries, traders from far-off lands had mocked our local superstition. That our gods did not, in the end, save us, was proof to many that they were no gods at all, just a set of dolls painted to remind us of the dangers—flood, serpent, storm—of the home chosen for us by our ancestors.
Proof, I say, for many. Not for all. In the eyes of some, it was not the gods who had failed Dombang, but the people of Dombang who had failed the gods. To these, the presence of Annur was a call to a greater piety, a more severe observance of the old forms, a committed resistance to the foreign plague. That resistance failed. Annur was rich, ruthless, tireless. The legions rooted out the underground priests, beheaded them, threw still more bodies into the canal. For good measure, the tiny statues of our trinity, still balanced impotently on shrines outside each home, or carved into the tillers of boats, were smashed or sanded out, banned from the city they were supposed to protect. People were thrown in stocks for whistling the wrong tunes, and executed for singing the wrong words. The old holy books were burned, priests tortured. Like all occupations, it was ugly. Some thought the newfound peace and prosperity worth the price. Some did not. I might have hated the Annurians with the same fervor as Lady Quen were it not for my own experiences with our outlawed religion. Annur kept the old festivals, but changed the names. Kem Anh became Intarra; Sinn and Hang Loc, her servants, Heat and Fire. Even at this desecration, our gods did not rise up. The two centuries following proved enough time for many to forget them.
Many. Not all.
The priest dead at my feet, the bodies tied behind me, the haughty woman back against the wall were proof enough of that.
“Kem Anh rises,” she sneered. “You will choke on her waters.”
Ruc shook his head. “Do you know that you are the one hundred and forty-first prisoner to tell me that? Those exact words?”
“Her truth,” Quen replied, baring her teeth, “will not be denied.”
“Maybe not, but it’s been five years since I came back to this city.” He tapped at his throat with a finger. “No choking yet. I keep killing you, and yet the waters…” He paused, put a hand behind his ear as though listening, then shook his head again. “Nope. Not rising.”
When he turned to me, his eyes were wary, searching.
It was a triumph of sorts, and yet the bright hope with which I’d started the night, the thrill I’d had chasing with Ruc through the buildings of Dombang, had drained away. I didn’t know what I felt in that moment, but it wasn’t love.
“Dead,” I said, pointing to the priest.
“Dead,” Ruc agreed.
A giver of names, I told myself, my mind tracing the melody of Ananshael’s sacred song as I glanced down at the priest’s body one final time. I had given my god a giver of names, and ancient names at that.
9
Despite the late hour at which I finally returned to the inn, my sleep that night was fitful, stalked by a woman with a mane of black hair, her teeth dripping blood, pupils slitted like a cat’s.
I woke with my heart pounding, half reached for my blades, then subsided onto the bed. Outside the window, in the predawn dark, the canals were already alive. Flame-fishers were rowing back in their narrow sculls, oars creaking at each stroke, the night’s catch piled in their bows. Men and women called greetings, taunts, and curses from the decks of the larger, flatter, ocean-bound vessels, while carts jolted over the ramps and walkways. In the room next to my own, someone with a limp was moving ponderously around. I heard the shutters clatter open, then a splash as the contents of the chamber pot hit the water. The thick, ever-present reek of the city rose up with the smoke of the morning fires: charred fish and sweet rice, mud, stagnant water, rotten wood, and, scraped over it all, the faintest lick of salt on the hot wind blowing in from the east: a promise of the unseen sea.
My whole body ached from the previous night’s race through the city, and for a long time I lay still, reviewing everything from the meeting in the bathhouse to that final spasm of violence. We’d loaded Lady Quen on her own boat, along with her six prisoners, and rowed slowly back to the Shipwreck—the local name for the sprawling wooden fortress of the Greenshirts. I hadn’t talked to Ruc the entire way back. Partly that was because of the other ears in the boat, but mostly it was because I could think of nothing to say. My plan had moved faster than I dared expect. I’d managed to inveigle my way into Ruc’s confidence, had made myself a partner in his fight against the city’s insurgents. And yet that early success only reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: it might well prove easier to foment a full-scale revolution than to fall in love.
I studied Ruc’s eyes in my mind, rehearsed our banter, felt all over again the various jolts of excitement as we charged through Dombang, covering each other.
What does it mean? I wondered, staring at the ceiling. What did I feel?