“A friend,” I replied. “A loyal daughter of Dombang.” I pressed her hand between mine, let my fingers linger around the cool, papery skin, then winked again and melted back into the crowd.
I lost sight of the women almost immediately, but found that I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Their conversation should have been reassuring. It meant that my graffiti was working. Rumor was spreading. The insurgency was starting to reach out past its secret councils and cabals into the very streets. Ruc needed me now, or thought he did, which was just as good. It was all happening fast, faster than I’d dared to hope, and yet that speed gave me pause.
The bloody hands were mine, of course, as were the corpses beneath Goc My’s statue, at least in a way. I’d set out to remind people of Chong Mi’s prophecy, and I’d succeeded. I expected the city to rise slowly to a boil, but I had not expected someone else to pick up my work reenacting the prophecy, certainly not someone so viciously efficient. The vision of those severed heads of the delta violets swaying lazily in the breeze, filled my mind once more.
I saw a thousand skulls, a thousand eyeless skulls,
The meat of their minds made mud for the delta flowers.
It had been barely five days since I spent the night painting the city with my palms. Who could have arranged a hit on the transport in five days? My sisters and brothers in Rassambur would have been hard-pressed to manage such a strike.
I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to catch a glimpse of the tattooed Vuo Ton. Of all the people in Dombang, only Kossal, Ela, and that unnamed man from the delta knew what I had done that night. If Ruc was right, if he had returned to his hidden village and told them what he’d seen, it was just possible that they might have managed to ambush the transport.
Except there had been no corpses of the Vuo Ton on the deck. However deadly they were, however ruthless, however capable in the delta, I couldn’t believe they could tear apart over a hundred foes and disappear with no casualties. They might have carried their dead away with them, of course, but there was still the matter of the wounds I’d witnessed on the ship. Could the Vuo Ton have ripped out so many throats with their bare hands? It didn’t seem likely.
Events had outpaced my expectations, dramatically outpaced them. In other circumstances I might have tried to slow things down, to stop scheming long enough to understand what was happening. There was no time, however, to stop scheming. I was eight days into my Trial—over halfway—and I had yet to fall in love.
The kiss on the dock had been hot with promise, but I needed more than promises. If the murder of a hundred Annurian legionaries and local priests could lead to a kiss, what kind of emotion might come from a riot? I imagined me and Ruc tangled in each other’s arms, the sheets soaked with our sweat while somewhere below the insurrection surged to open battle in the streets. I imagined pinning his arms above his head while the Greenshirts and legionaries faced off against Dombang’s secret priests and their faithful. I imagined him inside me while the city crumbled. It was ludicrous, obviously. If the Greenshirts were fighting, Ruc would be there with them, and yet somehow, in some way I still can’t quite put into words, I felt as though the city had become a part of me, had always been a part of me, one I had forgotten in my long, sky-blue years at Rassambur.
Dombang’s dark, sinuous canals had run silent, somnolent, unnoticed in my blood. Her songs trembled in my tongue. Like the city of my birth, I had been busy, but complacent. When I closed my eyes, I could see the truth: for my own heart to catch fire, Dombang would need to burn.
*
Goddesses and gods are less practical than haberdashers and fishmongers; they don’t tend to hang signs over the doors to their establishments, for one thing. The devout, it is assumed, will find their way. They will recognize the lineaments of their religion in the angle of a roof or the fluting of a wooden column. They will recognize the scent of the burned sacrifice, the incense or meat turning slowly to ash.
I didn’t recognize the temple that I stumbled upon sometime well past the midnight gong. I certainly hadn’t searched it out. I hadn’t been searching for anything during my long, meandering walk back toward the inn. I wanted to be alone, to taste the air, to interrogate the details of what had happened with Ruc, to try to make sense of Ela’s inscrutable lessons. I might well have kept on walking half the night—roaming over bridges, following the creaking wooden walkways suspended above the canals, threading my way through crooked alleys—had it not been for the singing washing out from between the open teak doors.
The single female voice wasn’t particularly good—rough and threadbare, tired, ever so slightly off key—but it was unique. In the way a face can be striking without approaching beauty, that voice was striking. The woman wasn’t singing a complicated piece, more chant than melody, a low, plangent drone, the kind of music that doesn’t dance but leans against the ear, against the chest, the long notes coming like winter waves against the shore, patient, laving away the sand in slow, inexorable degrees. It was only after listening for a while that I noticed the wooden trellis arching over the tall open doors, oiled wood spilling over in a cascade of night-flowering ghostblossom. Carved into the door itself, almost obscured by the tendrils and blooms of the plants, was a low relief, a wooden heart held in a wooden hand. I had come—following some long-forgotten memory or stumbling along in the footsteps of blind chance—to the temple of the goddess who so steadfastly denied me: Eira, the Lady of Love.
Like a moth wandering mindlessly toward the candle’s flame, I stepped inside.
I saw the swords first, twin blades flanking an aisle just within the open doors. The hilts were sunk into marble pedestals, and the points—waist high—stabbed straight up toward the vaulted ceiling above. White light from the scores of glass lanterns hanging above turned the steel of the naked blades to ice. Beside each weapon stood an acolyte in a red robe, each holding a white silk cloth slashed with dark lines. I took those lines for ink at first, some kind of pattern. Then, as my eyes adjusted, I realized it was blood.