She glanced up at me. “What is the other thing?”
“I believe in your gods,” I said quietly, ignoring the irritation pouring off of Ruc. “I grew up here, in the Weir, and so they are my gods, too.”
“Your belief changes nothing.”
“It might when I kill them.”
Chua shook her head wearily. “They cannot be killed. The Vuo Ton train their entire lives to fight against them.”
“The Vuo Ton are an inbred population of several thousand with no access to modern weapons, no access to explosives, no access to birds of prey large enough to devour a croc in a few bites. The Kettral are the best fighting force in the world.”
“The delta is not the world,” the woman said. Still, there was a brightness in her eyes that had not been there before.
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. If so, I’ll be rotting on the river bottom while you’re sitting on the deck of a small mansion on the Breatan coast a thousand miles from here. If I’m right, whatever killed your husband, whatever ripped out the throats of all those legionaries, will finally learn what it feels like to die. I’m not alone. There are other Kettral with me, Kettral bent on finding your gods and destroying them. You just have to go back out there one more time.”
The woman closed her eyes. “The Vuo Ton might kill you. They might offer you to the gods.”
“Not your problem.”
“We might not even reach the village.”
“A thorn spider might bite you in your sleep. You want to die in here, hiding, or out there, trying, at least, to get free?”
She opened her eyes. “Five hundred Annurian suns.”
I nodded.
“You will wish you never went out into the delta.”
“I have a lot of wishes,” I replied, glancing over at Ruc. He sat motionless as an idol skewered by the low bars of sunlight. “I’m getting used to not having them come true.”
14
There were tracks in the fine, white ash outside Chua’s shack—bare feet approaching the southern wall, then departing the way they had come. As promised, Kossal had been trailing me, watching. I scanned the ramshackle buildings ringing the crematorium, but he knew his work well enough to stay out of sight. I wondered if he’d been on the boat somehow, when we’d found the transport. It seemed unlikely, but he wouldn’t have made a very good priest if he’d restricted himself to the realm of the likely.
Ruc didn’t notice the tracks. He didn’t seem to notice me, either, as he stalked away from Chua’s hut, then through the alleys of the Weir, eyes fixed straight ahead as he threaded his way between drunks, fishers, and orphans. One grubby kid of maybe ten or eleven tried to lift the knife Ruc wore at his belt. Ruc caught his wrist and tossed him into the canal without breaking stride. He only stopped when we emerged from beneath the overhanging roofs into the open space of the Weir’s harbor.
The sun had sagged beneath the peaked roofs to the west. Cramped shacks stretched their shadows across the darkening water. Unlike New Harbor, which was deep enough for the proud-masted, oceangoing merchant vessels, the Pot—the local name for the harbor, really just a collection of docks around the fattened backwater of one of the canals—was a mess of canoes and hide coracles, half-sunk rafts, permanently tethered craft that no sane person would trust out in the delta. People had begun lighting their lanterns, hanging them from long poles. The red of the lanterns was the sunset’s red, as though someone had stolen that horizon-wide light and sealed it inside the carcasses of dead fish.
Ruc had his back to the nearest lanterns, and a shadow fell like a mask across his face. Red limned the hard line of his jaw, the muscles of his neck, but I could barely see his eyes.
“Five hundred suns?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Cheaper than seeing the whole city burn.”
People jostled us, but Ruc’s face kept away the beggars and thieves. Since the transport, something had changed inside him. He’d always been a fighter, a soldier, but there had been music in his violence, a sly wit in his voice, even when he wasn’t smiling. Another man, one with less curiosity and more anger, wouldn’t have spent the last few days bantering and sparring with me. I’d been counting on Ruc’s love of adventure when I decided to return to the city. The man I’d known from Sia liked taking chances; he thrived on it. I was starting to worry, however, that after what we’d seen on the transport, Ruc was done taking chances.
“You think she can find them?” he demanded.
“The Vuo Ton?” I cocked my head to the side, trying to get a better look at his face. “Or the gods?”
He turned to me. “There are no gods, Pyrre. Or if there are, they don’t give a shit about us.”
I fought down the urge to reach out, seize one of the anonymous bodies that kept passing, offer the person to the god, and show him Ananshael’s might. My Trial, however, didn’t allow killing for the sake of theological argument, and Kossal was still out there, watching. Besides, Ruc wasn’t talking about Ananshael.
“How do you know?” I asked, keeping my voice mild.
“Wrong question.”
“Seems to me the woman asking gets to decide what she asks.”
He shook his head. “Ask all you want. Still the wrong question. Might as well ask me how I knew you were gone.”
“I’m right here.”
He shook his head. “That morning back in Sia, all those days after.”
I took a slow breath, steadying myself. “Just because you don’t see a thing, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Is that right?”
“I might have been.”
“Might have been what? Hiding just out of sight? Following me around?”
“Good Kettral practice.” I’d meant it as a joke, but the line landed like a dead eel on the deck.
“I could have thought you were coming back,” Ruc continued after a moment. “I could have believed you just stepped away unexpectedly for a day or two, forgot to leave a note, that you were going to climb back any night through my window and into my bed. I could have believed that just the same way that everyone in this ’Kent-kissing city thinks their gods are going to come back and save them.
“But that wouldn’t have been reasonable, would it? I wasn’t asking myself why I should believe you were gone—that would have been an insane question. The sane question was why I should believe you were coming back.
“I did ask myself that one. Asked it more than once. And do you know what I told myself?” He drove the last two words like nails into my silence. “She’s not.”