“Speaking of whom,” I said, turning to study the deck once more. “Still think it was your insurgents who did this?”
Even by the forgiving measures of Rassambur, the deck was a mess. The transport was a good-sized vessel, wide and double-decked, almost a barge, with just enough oars to make progress against the delta currents. A single Annurian legion comprised a hundred men, at least two-thirds of whom lay scattered across the wide planks of the upper deck, their flesh already festering in the heat. And the Annurians were not alone. As many or more of their attackers sprawled dead in the chaos, natives of Dombang, judging by their hair and skin, by the light delta spears some still clutched in their hands. Thousands of dusk beetles crawled over the corpses, the iridescent shimmering of their folded wings bright with the late sun, furiously alive against the dull brown of the dead.
I knelt by the nearest of those corpses. The beetles buzzed angrily when I flicked them away, hovered above the body in a glittering cloud, then dispersed. The soldier had been young, barely into his third decade from the look of it. He had the pale skin and flame-red hair of Breata, more than a thousand miles away. I wondered how long Ananshael had been following him, how many miles, how many years, before choosing this moment to do his quick, inimitable work. The young man had managed to draw his sword—his fingers were still clenched around the handle—but the blade was unbloodied, while his own throat had been hacked open; the windpipe and esophagus dangled obscenely from the ruin, both of them snapped.
“Whatever he was swinging at,” Ruc observed, “he didn’t hit it.”
“Strange,” I replied, leaning closer to scrub away the blood.
“He can’t be what … twenty? Someone better with a blade—”
“He wasn’t killed with a blade.” I pointed to the four punctures at the edge of the wound, laid the tips of my own fingers into those gouges. “Someone tore out his throat by hand.”
Ruc squatted down beside me, ran a finger along the ragged end of the windpipe, then whistled slowly. “Not cut.”
“You see a lot of that kind of thing in the city?”
He studied the wound a moment longer, as though it were a mathematical problem, or a vexing phrase in a language he’d never learned to read, met my eyes, then shook his head. “No.” He glanced back at the dead soldier appraisingly. “I didn’t even realize that was possible.”
“For most people, it’s not.” I straightened up, unsure how much to explain. Some of my brothers and sisters were fast and strong enough to tear out a throat. As a child, I’d watched old blind Rong Lap plunge his gnarled, stiffened hand into the body of a sheep and come out holding the creature’s still-beating heart. I’d never seen anyone else do that though, not in the rest of my years at Rassambur, and Rong Lap was a decade dead and more.
“Here!” One of Ruc’s men was scrubbing vomit from his chin while waving us toward the stern. “The helmsman.”
As we threaded our way through the litter of corpses, a flock of winebeaks passed overhead, dark wings spread wide, casting quick, fleeting shadows over the deck below. When they’d passed out of sight, the sky seemed suddenly still, like a great, leaden weight pressing down on the delta.
“He still has a neck,” Ruc observed, when we reached the helmsman.
“Not doing him much good,” I replied.
Unlike the bodies strewn everywhere else on the transport—bodies torn apart in dozens of different ways, bodies missing throats or arms, bodies with the slick ropes of the intestines ripped free of their guts—the helmsman didn’t even look hurt. He lay on his back, head propped up slightly against the inside of the hull, glazed eyes staring at the sky. For some reason, the glittering dusk beetles had not alighted on the corpse, though they swarmed everywhere else on the transport.
“Maybe he’s not dead,” one of the Greenshirts murmured.
“He’s dead,” Ruc said flatly, then narrowed his eyes. “What is that?”
He squatted beside the body, took the man’s jaw in his hands, and forced open the mouth. Something slick and black dangled between the teeth. I took it for the helmsman’s tongue, at first. Strangulation can have that effect, but there was no sign that the man had been strangled, no bruising on his throat or purpling of his lips. Then, too, that black bit of flesh was too narrow, too pointed for a human tongue.
It twitched.
The soldier beside me jerked back, blurted out something halfway between a scream and a shout. Ruc, however, just dropped a hand to his belt knife, growled at his man to lean closer, studied that strange, black not-tongue for a moment, then drew his blade. When he prodded the thing with the steel’s shining tip, it moved again.
“Soul snake,” he said grimly.
I blinked. The Greenshirt beside me gasped. Ruc considered the situation a moment longer. Then, with a single deft movement, drove his knife through the snake’s tail, skewering it. The helmsman’s throat spasmed, as though he were still alive, were trying to swallow over and over. Of course, he was finished swallowing. The motion came from the snake trying to writhe deeper into the lungs of its host.
Ruc had it, however, and slowly, pulling with the back of his blade against that rigid tail, inch by glistening inch, he drew the creature out. It was longer than I expected, almost two feet long. Most of it must have been coiled inside the helmsman’s chest, feeding. When the snake’s head finally came free, the creature whirled on Ruc, yellow eyes blazing in that scaled midnight face, fanged jaws agape.
The soldier stumbled back, crying out in dismay, but Ruc just waited for the creature to strike, then caught it neatly beneath the head with his free hand. He examined the snake, as though trying to read something in that ravenous, alien gaze, then pulled his knife free of the tail and cut the head from the body.
The deck of the transport was silent for a moment, the only sound the splash of water against the hull, the twittering of blue throats in the rushes. Then one of the Greenshirts dropped to his knees, face gone gray.
“‘I saw the vipers of the waters rise up to feed.’” He murmured the words as though caught in a trance. “‘Saw them gorge on the hearts of foreign soldiers.’”
Ruc turned to face the soldier. People had been hanged for reciting Chong Mi’s prophecy, but though it was Ruc’s job to do the hanging, he didn’t threaten the soldier, didn’t even chastise him. Instead, he reached down, helped the man to his feet, then held out the snake’s severed head. The soldier tried to draw back, but Ruc held him in place.
“Look,” he said, rolling the grisly trophy around his palm. “It’s just a snake.”
“It’s a soul snake,” the man protested.
Ruc nodded. “The delta is filled with them. Do you know what they do when people aren’t around?”
The man shook his head, mute.