The lanterns were already lit by the time we returned to Dombang. Our vessel slid silently past Rat Island, through the Water Gate, beneath Bald Bridge, then up Cao’s Channel toward the Shipwreck. I felt like a stranger in the city all over again as the tall teak buildings loomed above us. Threads of song twisted out from the windows and alleys to tangle in the wind, then fall apart. We’d been gone barely a day, hadn’t left the delta, and yet the channel where we burned the Annurian transport might have been in a different time or a different world altogether. The hot, bright silence of that lost backwater shared nothing with the human shapes and rhythms of the city. It seemed a miracle, suddenly, that we had gone there and returned.
As our pilot leapt onto the dock, Ruc turned from the rail to face the Greenshirts on the deck. The men looked exhausted, even those who hadn’t been rowing, as though the horror at what they’d witnessed were a weight they’d been carrying all day, the hot heft of it bowing their shoulders, weakening their knees. They studied their commander warily in the light of the dock lanterns.
“Anyone who speaks of what we saw today,” Ruc said quietly, “will be executed. If that seems extreme, consider this: our city is on the brink of civil war. An Annurian commander was found murdered in an outhouse, and someone has been slapping bloody hands on every building in sight. The legion charged with helping to keep the peace is the same legion we just found massacred in the delta.
“At this point, most commanders would try to reassure you. They would tell you that everything is under control, that we have nothing to fear. I am not going to tell you that. Dombang is in danger. Everyone you love is in danger. Not from some mythical triad of gods. The gods, if they exist at all, don’t trouble themselves with our affairs. We are in danger from the very citizens we’ve sworn to protect. If there are riots, people will die. If there are fires, people will burn.”
He slid his gaze over the assembled soldiers.
“It is your job to see that there are no riots or fires. You will do what you swore to do, which is to protect this city, and you will keep your mouths shut while you’re doing it. If you’re tempted to whisper something to your wives about what you saw today, to your friends, remember this: that whisper could kill them as surely as a knife in the eye. Continue the normal schedule of patrols. Continue to guard Dombang as you have done since you joined this order. Uphold your oaths. I know you’ll do this, because you are Greenshirts.” He paused. “Are there any questions?”
After a moment, one soldier raised an unsteady hand. “What are we going to do? About what happened out there. About what we saw.”
Ruc smiled. “Leave that to me.”
I waited until all the men had filed off the boat to approach him. I couldn’t quite make out his eyes in the darkness, but I could see the planes of his face reflected in the light of the dock’s swaying lanterns.
“And just what are you going to do?” I asked.
“Talk to some people.”
“Which people?”
He shook his head, then started to turn away. When I took him by the arm, I could feel his body shift, dropping toward a crouch, getting ready to throw me or to strike out. Then he caught himself, and it was over. Anticipation drained out of me, leaving behind a dry, dull disappointment.
“What do you want, Pyrre?” he asked quietly.
“I want to do the job I came here to do,” I replied. His skin was warm beneath my hand. “I want to help you.”
“Why do you think I brought you out to the transport?”
“The transport was the start of this, not the end.”
Ruc shook his head slowly. “This started a long time before the transport. Whoever hit that boat, they might have been acting out scenes from the bloody delta ballads no one’s allowed to sing anymore. The soul snakes, the fucking violets in the eyes…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
“So who are you going to talk to?”
He scrubbed his face with a weary hand. “We have prisoners. Men and women instrumental to the insurgency.”
“The insurgency,” I pointed out, “was one of the two teams that got slaughtered out there.”
Ruc turned away from the dock and the lanterns, away from me, back toward the black water running silently past. The corded muscle of his forearms flexed as he gripped the rail of the vessel.
“Obviously, it is more complex than I realized. Multiple factions.”
The vision of a woman with serpent’s eyes blazed across my mind, then vanished, leaving me blinking in the darkness.
“You think it’s just people,” I murmured quietly.
“Of course it’s fucking people,” Ruc growled. “Don’t tell me the Kettral sent you here to dig up a handful of missing gods.”
I stared at the back of the man I had come to Dombang to love, to kill. The reason Ruc made a good military commander was that he didn’t succumb to the shibboleths and superstitions of most soldiers. If someone hit him in the face, it wasn’t because the day was unlucky or he ate the wrong thing or forgot to bathe the right way; it was because he made a mistake, and once he identified that mistake, he never made it again. A fight, a battle, a city on the verge of chaos—to Ruc, they were all the same: problems to be solved, problems that sprang ultimately from people. If he could see the person, find the weakness, he could win.
I wasn’t sure, however, that whatever killed the legionaries was a person.
I’d spent so much of my life in Rassambur, where men and women talked to a god daily, where they gave themselves willingly, happily into his infinite embrace. I didn’t believe the old gods stalked the delta beyond Dombang, but the thought that there might be something out there, something I didn’t understand, something beyond the ken of mortal women and men—the notion, at least, was something I’d been raised to entertain.
Kossal had come all this way for the same reason. The old priest could be gruff and elusive, but if he believed there were Csestriim hiding in the delta, maybe he was right.
“The Vuo Ton,” Ruc said finally.
I looked over at him, yanking my mind from my own thoughts.
“What about them?”
“They could have done it.”
“The Vuo Ton haven’t meddled with Dombang since they abandoned it.”
“Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past.”
I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. “I’ve been short on prognosticating pigs.”
“Life is perfect for a pig,” Ruc said. “Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals.”
“And in this vivid analogy,” I concluded, “Dombang is the pig.”
“The fact that my head’s still attached at my neck doesn’t mean no one’s sharpening a knife.”
I watched the bloody light of the lanterns play off the water as I tried to think through the idea. The thought that after more than a millennium out of sight the Vuo Ton would suddenly attack Dombang seemed implausible. But then, everything about the Vuo Ton was implausible. Someone had murdered the soldiers and the priests scattered over the transport deck, someone fast and dangerous, someone capable of melting back into the delta without leaving a trace. I thought again of the man who had followed me through the city, the black slashes inked across his face, the way he’d smiled when I finally noticed him.
“We need to find Chua Two-Net,” I said finally.