We’d shifted as we kissed, turned toward the lanterns, so I could see his eyes when he replied, green and alien as the delta we’d just survived. “No,” he said quietly. “It does not.”
Across the canal, the fisherman had finally fallen silent. Maybe his nets were furled and tucked away, or maybe he was still over there, working in the darkness, but had grown tired of the song.
15
I took the long way back to the inn.
Ruc split off from me just west of the Weir, returning to the Shipwreck to begin preparation for our second foray into the delta. I could have carried on, following the series of islands and bridges that flanked the northern side of Goc My’s great canal, but instead I wandered south, reluctant to return to my bed, to the dreams that so often came with sleep. After being so close to Ruc, after feeling his body pressed against me, his lips on my own, I needed time to be alone, to try to understand what had happened, what it meant.
Not that I was truly alone.
I didn’t see anyone behind me when I glanced over my shoulder, but those had been Kossal’s footprints in the ash outside Chua’s shack. If there is one thing the priests of Rassambur do as well as killing, it is stalking. Which meant Kossal had been watching me and Ruc down by the Pot. He had witnessed our kiss. Maybe he’d even been listening as I poured the story of my childhood out into the hot night. Ela had told me, that first night back in Rassambur, that the two of them would decide in concert whether I passed the Trial, which would mean deciding whether or not I was in love. I wondered what Ruc and I had looked like in the ruddy lamplight, his hands tangled in my hair, mine on his chest. From inside my head, the whole thing was baffling.
I turned deliberately in place to study my back trail. I’d been strolling alongside one of the smaller canals—I couldn’t remember its name—following the wooden walkway that hung out over the water on posts cantilevered from the walls of the buildings. It was only a few feet wide and I could see back twenty or thirty paces, to where it doglegged, following the canal out of sight. There were only a few people behind me, all of them in loose pants and vests, none even vaguely disguised, none that could be Kossal. I wondered whether he’d gone home early. It seemed unlikely.
Down in the canal itself, a few thin-waisted minnow boats parted the dark water. A rower stood in the stern of each, propelling the vessels forward with a long oar set in the transom. They were far enough away from the walkway and the red hanging lanterns that I couldn’t make out faces, could barely even see the shapes. One of them might have been Kossal; there was no way to tell.
Not that I had anything to hide from my Witnesses. Still, if you’re being followed it’s nice to catch a glimpse of the pursuit every so often. I thought of the crag cats that made their home high in the Ancaz, lithe, fast predators that moved over the stone like the shadows of clouds. Being followed, when you can’t see what’s following, starts to feel a lot like being hunted. I tapped my knives through the fabric of my pants, shrugged the tension out of my shoulders, and kept moving. What had I learned, after all, in my years at Rassambur if not that simple fact: we are all hunted, always. No one hides from Ananshael.
A quarter mile farther on, I reached a wide span bridging the canal, the graceful arch hung with fish-scale lanterns and crowded with merchants’ booths, all of them bustling with traffic. Bridges, in Dombang, serve the same purpose as market squares in most other cities; they’re places to meet, to trade, to gossip. Given the delta heat, most of that trade and gossip happens after dark. I slowed as the crowd clotted, let the human current nudge me this way or that. It felt good to be around people who didn’t know me, whom I didn’t know. People I had no need to love.
The hum of a hundred conversations washed over me, loud but indistinct, the way sound is underwater. I passed a woman selling flat-fin heads from wide rush baskets. The eyes of the fish bulged wide and accusing. Their jaws gaped, revealing twin rows of needle-sharp teeth. I imagined Ruc’s severed head set among them on the rushes. His green eyes locked on me, glazed and serious. I could read nothing in the gaze.
A few stalls down from the fishmonger, a blind man was hawking squeezed rambutan juice. I gave him a copper for a cleverly folded leaf filled with the stuff. It slid down my throat, warm and sweet, but somehow it seemed like cheating to have the juice without shucking the fruit, without working around the hard, unyielding seed at the center.
I had just tossed the leaf into the canal when a conversation resolved out of the general hum, a few women muttering to one another a few paces behind me.
“The goddess,” one hissed, her voice low enough I knew she wasn’t talking about Intarra, “was never gone. She was only waiting.”
“All these years? For what was she waiting?”
“For us.”
“We’ve been here all along,” a new voice cut in, tired but caustic. “Our mothers before us and their mothers before them, and where was Kem Anh then?”
A chorus of hisses and hushes half smothered the end of the goddess’s name, but the speaker remained undeterred.
“Speaking her name’s no crime. Never has been.”
“Close enough,” the first woman growled.
“Fish shit. I’ll talk all I want. It’s worship the Greenshirts won’t stand.”
I turned fractionally, just enough to catch sight of the women. They were older than I’d expected, probably into their seventh decade, backs stooped, hands twisted into claws—the reward for years tossing and hauling nets. They weren’t part of any organized insurgency; their loose, foolish talk out here at the base of the bridge for everyone to hear was proof enough of that. They might have seemed harmless—a few old women gossiping in the way of old folks everywhere—and yet, if rumor of revolution simmering in Dombang had reached even these utterly unconspiratorial women, if they were invoking the name of Kem Anh here in the open, then Ruc’s hands were about to be very full indeed.
I smiled, nodded to them, then winked.
They stared at me, gap-toothed and mystified.
“She rises, sisters,” I whispered, stepping closer. “Just yesterday, deep in the delta, the goddess and her consorts slaughtered a full Annurian legion.”
The shortest of the three—a woman with a sagging face but shrewd eyes—proved to be the boldest. Finding her voice first, she hissed at me, “How do you know? Who are you?”