“Fear.
“That’s what those myths are for, to scare people. And who benefits from that fear?” He shook his head. “Not you or me, obviously. Not the fishers or the merchants. Not the kids swimming in the canals. I’ll tell you who benefits: the priests, the men and women who used to offer sacrifice to those imaginary gods, who lived in the finest temples, took first catch from the nets, who were able to seize our very children from our homes … all in the name of those myths. Annur defeated them, but they never forgot what they lost.
“This,” he went on, indicating the carnage on the deck, the skulls with the violets planted in the empty sockets, “is their work, their attempt to take it all back. They don’t have argument or policy or military might on their side. All that they have is the old stories, stories of snakes in throats and violets in eyes—those stories are their only weapon, and stories are only weapons if you repeat them.”
He studied his men one at a time. Late-afternoon gusts tugged at his vest, his clothes. He met my eyes for a moment, then looked away.
“What happened here,” he said quietly, “was treason and it was murder. It was not the work of some invisible gods.”
Which all sounded reasonable, of course. The world is wide and filled with competing pantheons of gods. Every backwater town and mountain village has its own tales, its own stories, some of them even older than those of the Annurians. Not all of them can be true. If Kem Anh and her consorts really did rule the delta, where were they? Where had they been when Annur conquered the city two hundred years earlier? Were we really supposed to believe that they were still out there, lurking in the mud and reeds, enduring this centuries-long occultation simply because the people of Dombang had failed in their worship? The whole tale, seen through Ruc’s eyes, looked ridiculous, almost childish.
But then, there were those bodies on the deck to consider. I ran an eye over the slaughter once more, the arms torn free of their sockets, the heads wrested from the necks as if by sheer brute force. I didn’t know much about the gods of the city of my birth, but I knew something of death, and whatever had made those men dead, it was something faster, stronger, altogether better than a group of greedy, dissatisfied priests.
*
We burned the transport. Ruc’s men slopped the deck with pitch, then, when we were safe on our own boat, set the entire vessel alight. Hot, sluggish gusts smeared the smoke low and thick across the sky. Ash fell on our deck like snow. The Greenshirts brushed it away as though it could still burn them; covered their mouths as though they expected to choke.
“Seems like a waste,” I pointed out. “The men are dead, but the transport was still good.”
Ruc shook his head. “The other choice was tossing the bodies overboard, giving them to the crocs and the qirna.”
I shrugged. “So give them to the crocs and qirna. The beasts have to eat, too.”
I’ve never understood the human fascination with burial practices. Death itself is a great mystery, of course, the moment when my god’s finger touches the world. But after Ananshael’s work is done, the person is gone, replaced by a heap of bone, gristle, and meat. I understand, of course, the impulse to respect the dead, but I can’t quite follow the argument when people start associating so much carrion with the vanished person. In Sia, for instance, they dress the slabs of decomposing meat in the absent person’s finest clothes, then bury the whole ridiculous puppet under ten feet of dirt. You can see the mourners at the grave’s edge, staring down into that dark well, as though they might still catch a glimpse of the person they’d loved, as though it makes sense to call that skin bag filled with bone and puddled blood father, mother, brother. In Rassambur, when someone goes to the god, we heave the leftovers off the edge of the mesa and have done with it.
“Is that how the Kettral honor their dead?” Ruc asked, studying me narrowly through the smoke.
I felt the old, familiar thrill blaze through me at the question, the sudden, absolute focus that comes in the moment you realize an opponent has slipped inside your guard.
“We tend to put more emphasis on staying alive,” I replied blandly, trying to sound bored by the whole conversation while scouring my memory for any scrap on the Kettral view of death.
“Even Kettral die,” Ruc pressed.
“If we can get them back to the Islands,” I replied, “we burn them.”
He shook his head. “I heard there was a burial ground. Something about a huge, black tree filled with bats.”
Which was more than I’d ever heard about the Kettral or their dead, and with an alarming degree of specificity. Backpedaling, however, had never worked against Ruc. He could taste hesitation.
“You heard wrong,” I said, turning away.
In the end, the crocs and the qirna had their feast after all. The transport burned unevenly, listed hard to port as the starboard side went up in flame, then tipped, dumping its mortal cargo into the channel. Bloated with the sun, the bodies stayed up, bobbing on the surface, some charred, some miraculously unburned, looking almost placid. The crocs, for all their ungainly weight on shore, moved through the water fast as spilled shadow, great jaws opening silently, closing around an arm, a leg, then dragging the unstruggling body down. They managed to take three or four before the qirna arrived, a riot of iridescent scales and teeth churning the river so violently that it seemed to boil, rendering the corpses to their constituent parts, illustrating with absolute clarity the final, undeniable point: what had once been men were men no more, just blood to stain the water red, gobbets of wet flesh, the occasional bright flash of bone.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” murmured one of the Greenshirts, transfixed by the scene.
A little farther on, one of his companions shook his head grimly. “Whatever happened here, Intarra’s got nothing to do with it.”
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