Chua croaked a laugh. “I’m not!”
“No love for your adopted city?”
“Your city’s a pisspot.”
“I notice,” Ruc replied, voice perfectly level, “that you’re still here.”
“Lot of people in this world end up places they didn’t mean to, places they never should have went in the first place.”
Chua shifted her gaze to me as she said the words. My guts roiled. Memories choked me, as though I had breathed them in with the ashen reek of the crematorium.
“Someone slaughtered a transport filled with Annurian legionaries,” I said, my voice a good deal steadier than I was.
Chua laughed. “No shortage of hatred for the legionaries in this city.” She looked pointedly at Ruc. “Or for the Greenshirts. That’ll happen, if you kill enough people just for believing what they believe.”
“This didn’t happen in the city,” Ruc replied quietly. “It happened in the delta. Southeast of here.”
“So the priests managed an ambush.”
I shook my head. “The priests were there. Whatever killed the legionaries killed them, too.”
The woman went suddenly, perfectly still. Her stare slammed into me.
“Killed how?”
“Throats torn out. Soul snakes in stomachs. Delta violets planted in the sockets of skulls. Between the legionaries and the priests who planned to ambush them, there were over a hundred people. Well over.”
“All dead,” Chua murmured, half to herself.
Ruc leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”
She turned to stare at him. “Because the Three don’t leave people alive.”
Low sunlight lanced through the cracks in the hut, turning the flecks of fine floating ash to flame.
“No,” Ruc said after a moment. “There are no gods haunting the delta.”
“How much time you spent in the delta?”
Ruc shook his head. “I don’t believe that three creatures, three anything could slaughter over a hundred armed men.”
“Oh, they don’t need you to believe,” Chua replied. “They just need you to bleed.”
Ruc rose fluidly to his feet. “I’m done. I can hear this same shit on any bridge in the city.”
“Something hit the transport,” I pointed out quietly.
“Someone,” Ruc insisted. He turned back to Chua. “The Lost.”
She shook her head slowly, almost hypnotically, eyes fixed on something beyond us. “The Vuo Ton want nothing to do with your city. They care nothing for your politics.”
“Politics,” Ruc said grimly, “is just a word for people trying to get what they want. The Lost are people—I’ve seen them in the harbor, in the markets—and all people want things. Maybe they resent the city’s spread. Annurian incursions into the delta…”
Chua laughed a long, mirthless laugh. “There are no incursions into the delta.”
“The spread of the northern quarters?” Ruc demanded. “The causeway?”
“The causeway is a ribbon looped around the neck of a tiger. The delta could swallow your northern quarter in a single flood. If you have not lived in the rushes, it is impossible to believe how small this city is, how insignificant.”
“You came here,” Ruc observed. “You quit the Lost to come to Dombang.”
Chua’s grip tightened momentarily around the fishing spear, as though she planned to plunge it through his throat.
“I did not come for the city. I came for a man. Now he is gone.”
“Then why don’t you go back?”
“Because I have no desire to pay homage to the gods who took him.”
“What gods?” I demanded.
She looked at me. “If you grew up here, you know their names.”
“Sinn,” I said quietly. “Hang Loc. Kem Anh.”
“Myths,” Ruc growled. “Kept alive because they’re politically useful.”
Chua looked at him. “Does a myth rip out throats? Do politics pull heads from bodies, then plant flowers in the sockets of the eyes?”
“Men do, when they want something bad enough. If the Lost want the city, they’ll want it weakened, divided.…”
“You are not listening,” the woman said. “The Vuo Ton are not Lost. They know exactly where your city is. They do not come here because they do not care. Their lives, every day of their lives, are bent to the struggle.”
“What struggle?” I asked.
“Against the Three.”
“You just said they worshipped their gods,” Ruc cut in. “That they pay homage.”
Chua shook her head, as though baffled by his stupidity. “The struggle is the worship. The fight is the devotion.”
“So these gods of yours can be fought.”
The woman cocked her head to the side. “A hundred heartbeats ago you insisted the Three were a myth. Now you want to fight them?”
“What I want,” Ruc said, “is to find whoever hit the transport and killed the legionaries. I think it was the Lost. You think it was these mythical gods. Either way, I’m not going to find the truth here in Dombang. I need to go to the village of the Vuo Ton.”
“You can take us,” I said quietly.
Chua stared into the blackened ashes of her fire pit for a long time, then shook her head. “I escaped the delta enough times. I do not intend to go back.”
Ruc’s jaw flexed. “The Greenshirts will pay you five Annurian suns,” he said at last. “In addition to the one already promised for this meeting.”
I shook my head, cutting in before Chua could respond. “Five hundred golden suns.”
Chua’s eyes narrowed. Ruc blinked, then began to shake his head. “No guide is worth a fraction—”
“There is no guide,” I said, riding over him, “who can take us to the Vuo Ton. You know that as well as I do.”
“I will not go into the delta again,” Chua said. “Not for any pile of gold.”
I turned away from Ruc to meet her eyes. “The gold is not just gold.”
She studied me. “The coins…”
“Are miles,” I concluded. “They are the distance you can put between yourself and this delta. With five hundred suns, you can take a ship to Annur, or Badrikas-Rama, or Freeport. In Freeport, there are no snakes, there are no venomous spiders. Snow falls every day of the year; men and women live underground, warmed by the fires of the earth. People there have never heard of the Three.”
When Chua finally responded, her voice was dry as a husk. “And what would I do in Freeport?”
“You would live. Instead of hiding inside the furthest shack from the water, suffocating beneath the ashes of the dead. You could be free.”
“The only work I know,” she said, hands closing and unclosing around the spear, “is the work of the delta.”
“You’re not in the delta,” I said. “And with five hundred suns, you won’t need to work.”
Chua looked down at the spear in her hands, began tracing the markings, as though she were a child learning her letters, as though an answer was written there somewhere, if only she could read it.
“If the money’s not enough,” I said, “there is the other thing.”