Be where you shouldn’t—an old Rassambur aphorism.
The frantic hammering paused for a moment, replaced by a man’s voice: “Pyrre!”
I was still bleary-eyed from sleep and aching from Ela’s drubbing, but I wasn’t about to give away my position. After a moment, the drumming started up again, so violently it seemed he wasn’t knocking so much as trying to beat down the door. With the tip of one knife, I silently lifted the hooked steel lock.
“Pyrre,” he growled again. “The commander sent me.”
This time, just as the pounding resumed, I lifted the latch, then yanked the door inward. Carried forward by the force of his own urgency, a young man stumbled into the room. I tripped him with an outstretched ankle, then leapt on top, setting the tip of my knife against his throat. The position reminded me uncomfortably of Ela’s lecture the night before. I could hear her voice murmuring in my ear: It’s the space between the bodies that matters. I glanced down at the man’s mud-spattered tunic, the short sword belted at his side, at my own bare legs pinning his shoulders to the floor, then grimaced. Somehow, in trying to create the About to Kill space, I’d stumbled into something … else.
The young Greenshirt—he was wearing one of the standard uniforms—didn’t seem to notice my nakedness. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the hilt of the blade I’d laid against his throat, eyes nearly crossed with the effort, as though he could keep the length of steel from plunging through his neck with the power of his stare. He seemed an unlikely assassin.
“I’m going to get up,” I said, trying to speak in a voice slow and calm enough not to panic him, “and I am going to put on some clothes. Please don’t try to kill me.”
His lips moved in some silent prayer, but he seemed unable to respond. I shifted the tip of my knife from his neck, but his stricken gaze followed the blade.
“Hey,” I said, slapping him on the cheek until he met my eyes. “Are you going to kill me?”
He shook his head stupidly, slowly. “No. The commander sent me. I’m here with a message.…”
“Save the message,” I said, rising to my feet, “until I’m wearing pants.”
When I went to close the door, I found Ela leaning against the casement. She’d had time, I noted irritably, to slip into a loose silk bed shirt. Or maybe she’d been sleeping in it. Or maybe she hadn’t been sleeping at all. Whatever the case, the priestess looked relaxed and amused.
“When I suggested you pay more attention to your body, I didn’t mean you had to go at it hammer and tongs right away.”
“He’s a messenger,” I growled.
Ela just shrugged. “That’s what I like about you, Pyrre. You never pass up a chance to learn.”
The Greenshirt was getting unsteadily to his feet behind me. “Who is she?” he managed.
“No one,” I said, slamming the door with my foot. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Anho,” he managed.
I suppressed a frown. It had always seemed a unique form of cruelty, naming children after famous women and men. As though the burden of one’s own proper name, one’s own unlived life, were not weight enough already to crush a person. I’d almost forgotten that about Dombang, how so many people were named for the city’s founders and protectors: Goc My, Anho, Chua, Thum, Voc. It was, I suppose, one of the only ways left for the parents of the city to hold on to some of the history that the Annurians had denied them.
He stared at me, momentarily wordless, as I snatched my pants off the back of the chair, slammed my legs into them, then pulled a loose, sleeveless tunic over my head. I flicked aside the curtain to the room’s single window. Off to the east, night’s indigo dye was fading into dawn. “What does Ruc want so bad he can’t wait till the sun’s up, Anho?”
I couldn’t hear Ela’s footsteps retreating down the hallway, but that didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t heard her approach, either. Not that it mattered. It was my conversations with Ela that I needed to hide from Ruc and the Greenshirts, not the other way around.
“You have to come,” he said, reaching for my wrist, intending, evidently, to drag me out of the room. Not too bright, this one. By this time, though, I’d woken up thoroughly enough not to kill him. I knocked his hand away, took him by the throat, and pulled him close. His artery throbbed in my grip, and his warm eyes went wide, but he made no move to pull away. He couldn’t have been far into his twenties, just one more kid in Ruc’s dilapidated army. I let up on the pressure slightly, tried to make my voice friendly, even cheerful.
“Anho,” I said, speaking slowly. “Stop pounding on things and shouting and trying to drag me out the door. Just tell me Ruc’s message.”
His brown face was purpling toward plum. When I let him go, his words splashed out all in a single gasp.
“They hit a transport.”
I frowned. “They, I assume, being the local insurgency, and the transport being a ship carrying more legionaries from Annur?”
His head yanked up and down in a puppet’s nod.
I tried to imagine the scene. Any transport would have been carrying at least a full legion, maybe two, over a hundred armed solders, almost certainly veterans, if they’d been sent to Dombang. This, against a rabble of idolatrous zealots. Hardly seemed like a fair fight.
“How many prisoners did you take?”
The young soldier gaped at me. I slapped him gently on the cheek. “How many?”
He shook his head in a mute, bovine denial, wandered his own mind a while before finding the words. “None. They’re all dead.”
I whistled. “No prisoners? Ruc must be less than pleased. I wouldn’t want to be the legionary commander when Ruc catches up with him.”
Anho stared at me. “He’s dead.”
I frowned. “The commander?”
“All of them. The legionaries, the insurgents. Everyone. They’re all dead. Someone massacred them all.”
*
I spent most of the morning sulking, standing at the rail of the ship, staring down into the murky water as it slid past.
The sudden, unexpected arrival of Ruc’s messenger had filled me with excitement. Whatever was happening, Ruc had sent for me. It meant my plan was working. He wanted my perspective, my advice, and maybe he wanted me around for something more. The thrill of the night’s chase through the canals of Dombang came back to me as I followed the messenger over the causeways, then in through the iron gates of the Shipwreck—the huge, haphazard wooden fortress of the Greenshirts.