Ruc turned. “Who is Chua Two-Net?”
“A fisher, although she quit fishing before I left Dombang. She must be fifty years old by now.”
“Why do we need an elderly fisher?”
“She knows the delta.”
“A thousand people know the delta,” Ruc replied, shaking his head. He gestured across the canal to where a flotilla of boats were tied up for the night, bobbing quietly with the small waves, creaking against each other. “There are fishers right over there.”
I shook my head. “Not like Chua. She was raised by the Vuo Ton.”
“Chua Two-Net.” Ruc narrowed his eyes. “I think I have heard of her, actually.”
“She spent two weeks alone in the delta without a boat. Came out alive.”
“Happened while I was down in the Waist with the legions,” Ruc said. “Sounded made up.”
“It wasn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there when she came back.”
Ruc studied me, then nodded. “I can’t leave the Shipwreck now. I’m going to be up half the night trying to contain this mess.”
I wanted to grab him, to drag him with me into the night in search of Chua, but Ruc had never been one to be dragged.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll come here mid morning.”
He nodded again. “Tomorrow.”
*
All rivers flow toward an ocean. Which means that everything people toss in a river—all the piss and shit and rotten slop—also flows toward an ocean. If you look closely, you can see the channels of Dombang grow fouler and murkier as you move east, but there’s no need to look at the water. If you want to know what direction you’re going, it’s easier to take note of the buildings. All the sprawling teak palaces and bathhouses stand on Dombang’s far western end, where the channels run quick and clear. East of New Harbor the dwellings crowd together, stacked into three-story tenements that overhang the canals. Still farther east, at the city’s last fringe, the tenements give way to warrens of shacks tacked up on rickety stilts, rotting docks bobbing on the water, a patchwork of permanently tethered barges. Instead of causeways, narrow planks span the gaps between platforms.
On maps, this end of the city is called Sunrise. Everyone who lives there thinks the name is a joke. You can never see the sunrise. There’s too much smoke from the cook fires and not enough wind to blow it away. Clearly, the idiot responsible for the maps never visited. The people who live there call it the Weir, which sounds almost picturesque until you realize that weir is just another word for trap.
“You’re going to see things here,” I said, turning to Ruc as we crossed one of the wobbly bridges into the quarter, “that offend your notions of order and law.”
He snorted. “I grew up in Dombang. I’ve been commanding the Greenshirts for years. We send patrols into the Weir all the time.”
“We’re not a patrol,” I pointed out. “We’re not here to bring the bright light of Annurian justice. We’re here to find one particular woman, ask her some questions, then get out without killing anyone.”
I took a deep breath, then immediately regretted it. The Weir reeked of sewage and offal, smoldering cook-fire smoke, thick fish soup, and the hot delta peppers people mixed in with everything to disguise the taste. That smell was my childhood, and I realized, standing on the swaying wooden span of the bridge, that I was not eager to go back.
“I won’t kill anyone if you don’t,” Ruc said.
“No promises,” I replied. It was in the Weir, after all, that I’d first discovered the might and silent mercy of my god.
He shrugged. “How do we find her?”
From the top of the bridge’s arc, the Weir seemed to stretch away forever, all crooked wooden roofs, dogleg canals, and shoulder-wide alleys hazy with smoke. A woman could spend a day wandering around down there and not find her way out—and that was if no one put a knife between her ribs for something she said, for something she had.
“Chua used to live on the water,” I said. “She and her husband slept on their boat down in the Pot.”
“I know where it is. Let’s go.”
I shook my head. “After she came back, she didn’t have the boat anymore. Or the husband. She went as far from the water as she could get.”
Ruc considered the web of brown canals stretched out below us. “Which is just how far, in the Weir? About a dozen feet?”
“A dozen feet can mean the difference between watching the crocs and feeding them.”
“I thought she was too fast for the crocs.”
“Everyone gets slow, if they live long enough.”
“That an argument for dying young?”
“Argue all you want; death comes when it comes.”
“How philosophical.”
I glanced over at him, then nodded toward the warren ahead. “You grow up down there, you either become a philosopher, a corpse, or a madwoman.”
“I’m glad you didn’t decide on corpse.”
“Who says I got to decide?”
The Weir closed around us like a net. After twenty paces, it was impossible to look back and find the bridge we’d crossed. The stained walls of the shacks threatened to shove us from the narrow walkways into the sluggish water below, and though I’d grown up swimming in those same channels, almost oblivious to all but the worst filth, my standards had changed. I’d forgotten just how vile everything was. There were no bathhouses in the Weir, no real ways to get clean. Fishers washed in the river outside the city; everyone else just lived with the stench until their noses went dead.
Almost worse than the smell was the chaos, the racket. People lived right on top of one another. Voices and bodies, entire lives spilled out of perpetually open doorways. Cook fires burned in wide clay bowls in the center of the walks. If you wanted to get anywhere, you had to step over people, around them, had to elbow garrulous mothers with children on their hips out of the path and skirt the small circles of gamblers squatting in the alleys. It was the opposite of Rassambur. Where the mountain fastness of my god was all emptiness, stone cliff, knife-edged shadow, and the stark sun, carving its perfect arc across the sky, the Weir was sweat and rot and life, ten thousand voices, ten thousand hands, all so close they seemed to press against your flesh.