“They crawl down the gullets of sick or dying animals, creatures too close to death to move.”
“They are the delta’s vengeance,” the soldier managed.
Ruc shook his head. “They’re trying to stay alive, just like every other beast out here. Just like us. The corpse provides food and hiding until it rots.”
The Greenshirt stared at him unsteadily. Ruc held the stare.
“They’re not some kind of divine scourge,” he said quietly. “They’re just snakes.”
To punctuate the point, he tossed the head overboard. Ripples spread outward from the spot where it struck. A moment later, I caught a flash of silver-white just under the surface—some fish braving the razor-beaks of the delta birds to seize its prize.
“If the gods were here,” Ruc went on, gesturing toward the lazily spreading ripples, “do you think they would choose such puny messengers?”
The Greenshirt shook his head hesitantly, his eyes still fixed on the water.
“Go,” Ruc said, pointing. “Help Truc’s team.”
The soldier trembled, as though shaking himself awake, then finally turned to make his way down the deck.
“Just a snake?” I asked when Ruc and I had the stern to ourselves.
“Scales, triangular head, no legs—fits the description.”
I sighed. “I understand that you don’t want your men to panic. I understand you don’t want rumors started in the city.” I patted him gently on the shoulder. “But I’m not one of your men. I’m not going to start any rumors. You brought me out here to help, but I can’t help if you won’t talk to me as though I’m a grown woman with her own two eyes and a working brain sitting right behind them.”
Ruc glanced down at the hand I’d left on his shoulder. My gesture had felt natural at first, casual, but faced with those bottomless green eyes, lost in the stretching silence, I began to feel awkward, then foolish, a girl who once again didn’t know what to do with her body. I let the hand drop.
“Someone put that snake down the helmsman’s throat,” I said, tossing the words into the silence between us as though they might plug the gap. “You know it and so do I.”
“Soul snakes crawl down throats all the time. It’s what they do.”
“They crawl down the throats of creatures that are sleeping. I doubt the helmsman slept through a pitched battle in the middle of his deck.”
“He could have been dead.”
I shook my head. “Soul snakes are called soul snakes because they feed on the living.”
Ruc grimaced, looked past me down the deck to where the Greenshirts were still poring over the carnage. “If you want to see Dombang burn,” he growled, “keep talking.”
“I don’t really think I’m the problem here.”
“As long as you keep talking, you are.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You think if I keep my mouth shut your men will take this for a simple ambush?”
“Nothing simple about an ambush.”
“Especially not an ambush with three different sides.”
Ruc put a hand on my shoulder, turned me away from the deck to look out over the transom. Half of me wanted to knock that hand away, or to break his wrist. The other half hoped he would leave it there. I liked the weight of it, the strength, even as I loathed being led. To even the score, I leaned in, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek as I murmured into his ear.
“Are we being sneaky now?”
He dropped his hand, pulled back. “My men are watching.”
“Your men are puking all over their uniforms.”
“That won’t stop them noticing your tongue in my ear.”
“If they notice that, I think they’ll notice there was a third faction that came to this party. A faction that killed a lot of people, then departed.”
“My men aren’t Kettral. They don’t have your training reading a battle.”
“They don’t need to be Kettral,” I exclaimed. “The Annurians are carrying swords. The men who attacked them are carrying knives and spears. But half the men on this deck were killed with someone’s bare hands.”
“If a soldier loses his weapon, he’ll fight with his hands.”
I gave him a flat stare. “Save the shit for your men. You know as well as I do that there was someone else here, someone fighting both sides.”
Ruc studied my face, then nodded fractionally. “You think you can avoid announcing that to my entire crew?”
“Strange strategy—relying on the dimwittedness of your own troops.”
“They’re not dimwitted; they’re young. This”—he gestured to the deck—“is a language no one taught them to read.”
“Fortunately,” I replied, “you and I are literate. The question is: What story are we reading?”
Ruc started to reply when a shout from one of his men cut him off. A group of them had gathered at the starboard rail, pointing toward the shore. It took a moment after joining them to see what had kicked up all the fuss. Over on the bank, just a few paces away, someone had arranged fifteen or twenty severed heads, pressing them into the mud so that they stared into the sky. They would have stared, that is, if someone hadn’t scooped out their eyes. Instead of the lifeless gaze one tends to expect from severed heads, the sockets had been emptied out, then packed with dirt, faces turned into makeshift planters, from each of which grew the graceful stalk of a swamp violet, slender purple flowers dipping and nodding with the breeze.
I was alone, evidently, in finding the sight strangely beautiful.
Half the Greenshirts were cursing, vowing revenge—implausibly, it seemed to me, given how little we knew about whoever had attacked the transport—spluttering their impotent outrage. The other half seemed more frightened than angry. Hands drifted toward the hilts of swords once more, despite Ruc’s orders, and several of the men were muttering prayers, old wards against the ancient anger of the delta, prayers begging the mercy of old gods, gods that, according to Annur, had never existed in the first place.
Ruc rounded on the soldier nearest him, a middle-aged man, his face marred, probably in childhood, by the ravages of the whispering sickness. He was muttering a refrain I half remembered from my life before I left Dombang:
Spare us, O lord of serpents,
Spare us, O lord of storm,
Lady of flood and fury,
Spare us your—
“Enough.” Ruc’s voice was a knife of pitted iron sliced across the prayer.