The soldier stopped, stared at Ruc as though baffled, then turned to point in mute appeal at the eyeless, flowering skulls, as though the simple fact of their presence there changed everything. The rest of the men grew silent, too, scanning the banks as though they expected their own deaths to leap screaming from the reeds.
The delta met our sudden silence with a silence of its own. The wind fell still. The reeds unbowed, straightening their razor-sharp spines. The bright-winged birds that had been darting through the thickets disappeared between one instant and the next, ducked into their hidden nests or winged off somewhere else. Only the water moved, patient, silent, laving the transport’s hull, as though trying to persuade it of some secret. Without the breeze the day was unbearably hot, the air thick and heavy, the sky like a damp pillow pressed down over our mouths. It seemed impossible that an entire city waited somewhere to our west, that people had managed somehow to defy the delta, to carve their own channels, to hold back the death that gathered on every side. It seemed, standing on the deck of the transport, that we had come to some alien, inhuman place, a sky-vaulted temple purged by flood and storm, sanctified with blood. I suddenly understood the desire of Ruc’s baffled soldier to pray, to beg the mercy of some unseen powers.
Ruc was having none of it.
“Those are skulls,” he said, pointing. “Just like the skulls inside your own heads.”
By way of illustration, he rapped one of his men on the brow with his knuckles, then turned to the deck. “Those are bodies. That’s blood. This is a ship. That, right there, is the bank of mud where the ship got stuck. That’s the sky. Those are some reeds.”
He hammered down on those blunt monosyllables as though each one were an iron nail, as though he intended, through the force of language alone, to affix this strange, silent, inhuman world back onto something we all knew.
“We’re here,” he went on, “because some cowardly bastards lured the transport out here and attacked it.”
“But the soul snakes,” one of the Greenshirts protested. “The skulls. The dead men…”
Ruc turned to face the man. “What about them?”
The soldier shook his head, baffled and aghast. “Something tore out their throats.”
I knew how fast Ruc could move, and even I was surprised when he lashed out, seizing the man by the neck. The muscles in his shoulder knotted as he half lifted his own soldier from the deck. The soldier’s face darkened, his eyes bulged, but he made no move to fight back. Ruc looked past him to the rest of the Greenshirts, meeting their horrified stares with the trackless jungle of his own.
“Anyone,” he said, the surfaces of the word planed perfectly smooth, “can tear out a throat.”
The soldier managed a sort of strangled gargle.
“It is a matter of squeezing, then pulling.” He turned his attention back to the man who had started to twitch in his grasp, shook his head, then let him drop. As the Greenshirt gasped on the deck, Ruc waved a hand at the skulls. “A child can scrape away skin, gouge an eye from a socket. A grandmother can plant flowers.”
“But why?” someone managed.
“Because this is how they win,” Ruc replied grimly. “The attack is the least of it. The murder of a hundred Annurians, good men, just like you, just coming to do a job—that is the least of it. This is a trap, but these poor fools weren’t the prey.” His swept his stare across the assembled men as though it were a scythe. “They were the bait.”
A few of the Greenshirts glanced nervously over their shoulders, as though they expected something horrible to burst blood-toothed and howling from the leaves.
“No,” Ruc went on, addressing the unasked question. “They don’t want to attack us. The men—and they were men, not monsters, not the sneaking gods from the stories your parents whispered to you when you were kids—the men who did this don’t want a single one of you hurt. They want you alive and terrified. What they want is for you to go back to the city and spread this ridiculous story. They want you to tell your friends, your brothers, your mothers that some thing was here, that the delta itself rose up against these soldiers.”
He shook his head, disgusted, gesturing to the deck.
“All of this is fake. It is posed.”
“Except the dead part,” I couldn’t help interjecting. “They are actually quite dead.”
“But the violets,” protested one of the men. His uniform was damp with his own vomit. “The soul snakes. In all stories, those are the marks of the gods. In the myths—”
Ruc silenced the man with a glance.
“Anyone who grew up in Dombang knows the myths,” he growled. “We’ve all heard them. Half of your parents probably still have the old idols hidden away somewhere. Your grandparents probably still mutter the old prayers. And do you know why?”
He raised a brow, studying one man after another.
“Because they’re scared. You’ll notice the gods of our delta aren’t gentle. Our myths are filled with storm and blood, poison and flood. We don’t have any stories of the gods walking among us curing disease or bringing food in a time of famine. In Dombang, people worship the old gods because they’re terrified of what will happen if they stop.”
“The gods protected the city,” murmured one of the men. “When we forgot them, the Annurians came, conquered us.”
“And when Annur conquered the city,” Ruc asked quietly, “what happened then?”
He spread his hands, waiting. He hadn’t even glanced at me, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from him. I’d never seen him like this before. Back in Sia, he’d been a bare-knuckle fighter with a love for music. I knew he could hold the attention of a room, knew he could trade barbs as quick as anyone, both in the ring and out of it, but this …
Standing astride the deck of that bloody transport, I realized for the first time just why Annur had made him a commander, and his speed with his fists was the least of it. He was—and I realize the word sounds slightly ridiculous when applied to a sweating soldier with his vest hanging open, his irritation scribbled across his face—but he was regal. Another leader would have coddled his men or belittled them.
Ruc, however, just met their eyes and set his will against the rising flood of their fear. And they believed him. I could see that clearly enough in the dozens of gazes. They were willing to forget everything they’d been told as children, all the myths they’d heard whispered of Kem Anh and her might, at least as long as Ruc kept talking. There was something thrilling about the sight.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he went on, “after Annur conquered the city: it became larger, richer, and safer.” He paused a moment, waiting for someone to object. No one did. “You can walk through one of Dombang’s markets and find goods from two dozen cities. If you’re robbed while you’re there, you can appeal to one of the Annurian courts for redress. If a block of the city burns, it’s rebuilt faster than it would have been two hundred years ago. So why do people keep whispering myths of the old gods?