Hope washed through my heart, so hot it almost hurt.
Despite Kossal’s absolute refusal to back my play, Ruc hadn’t given his snipers the order. It was a measure of my desperation that I took the absence of my execution as a promising romantic development. My mind scrambled for purchase on the tricky, shifting situation. After a moment, I rounded on Kossal.
“Tell him what we are.”
The old priest was grimacing. He had the snake impaled on the wooden splinter, but couldn’t manage to draw it out through the neck of the bottle. “And for the love of all that’s holy, why don’t you just drink the rest of the fucking quey if you want the snake so bad?”
“Have to stay mostly sober,” he said, obviously distracted by his task, “in case I have to kill someone.”
Ruc cocked his head to the side. “You have anyone in particular in mind?”
“Plenty of options,” Kossal muttered. He jerked his head toward Ela. “I’m always tempted to start with her, but my god disapproves of offerings made in frustration or anger.”
“Your god?” Ruc asked quietly.
Kossal grunted. “Your god, too. Everyone’s god. Ananshael.”
“You’re telling me you’re Skullsworn,” Ruc said, voice flat.
Ela laughed, a long, joyful sound straight from the belly. I wanted to punch her in the throat.
Kossal just shrugged. He had the snake pinned against the wall of the bottle now, and was drawing it up slowly through the neck.
“We’re Skullsworn,” I said, “who just happen to take a vivid interest in the civic life of Dombang.”
There was no forcing Kossal’s words back into his mouth, no pretending they hadn’t been spoken. The only hope was to ride them out. If I judged the old priest correctly, he wouldn’t have any more interest in convincing Ruc of the truth than he did in convincing him of my lie. He didn’t seem to give a pile of slippery shit what Ruc thought at all, actually.
“What do you want us to be?” Ela murmured coquettishly, pursing her lips as though tasting the alternatives. “Skullsworn? Or Kettral?”
Ruc looked at the woman a moment, then turned to me.
To my own shock, I found myself laughing, all the tension of the day shaking itself free in great, breathy spasms.
“I’m telling you the truth, Ruc,” I said. “So is Ela. Kossal’s just a cantankerous old bastard who takes military regs about revealing our identities way too seriously.” I shook my head. “But does it matter? There’s something out in the delta. Maybe it’s the Vuo Ton, and maybe it’s something else, but either way, you need to find it, and you need to kill it.”
Kossal had just bitten off the head of the snake, but he paused in his crunching, interested for the first time.
“That’s what I want to talk about.”
Ela glared at Ruc. “We’ve been sitting here half the night, and you didn’t even tell me about your adventures in the delta?”
“Lower your voice,” Ruc growled.
Ela ignored the warning—all the other patrons on the deck were several tables away—and leaned toward Ruc instead. “We’re very good at killing things,” she purred, then glanced at me. “What are we killing?”
“Something capable of ripping the throat out of half a hundred armed legionaries,” I replied. “Something planting violets in the eye sockets of the dead. Something pretending to be a god.”
“It’s not a god,” Ruc said.
Kossal swallowed the snake head into the side of his cheek. “The woman in the shack seemed to think so.”
Ruc turned to study the old priest. “You followed us into the Weir?”
“We follow her everywhere,” Ela said. “I was there in the bathhouse, for your first reunion.”
Ruc was just about the most unflappable person I’d ever met. I’d seen him take a club to the ribs and barely wince, and yet even Ruc wasn’t used to dealing with the likes of Ela and Kossal. His composure, normally so absolute, was starting to fray, if only in ways so minor that only I would have noticed them.
“And you didn’t even notice me,” Ela said, shaking her head regretfully.
“What were you doing in the bathhouse?”
The priestess spread her hands. “Pyrre’s more than capable when it comes to putting sharp pieces of steel in the softest parts of the enemies of our shining empire, but sometimes,” she winked at him, “you need a woman along who can make your whole world explode.”
She lingered on that last word, shaping her lips into an O around the vowel.
“You’re in demolitions, too,” Ruc said.
“I prefer to tell people I’m in conflagrations.”
“She’s a priestess,” Kossal cut in irritably. “I’m a priest. She…” he went on, stabbing a finger at me, “is an acolyte of our god. Now,” he rounded on Ruc, “can we discuss what we saw on the transport?”
“Why do you care about the transport,” Ruc asked warily, “if you don’t care about Dombang?”
“He does care,” I said. “He’s Kettral. He’s been fighting for Annur for the last fifty years, but he inherited the last generation’s rigid, idiotic secrecy protocols, which means he’s never going to tell you he’s Kettral, even if you tie him to a table and light him on fire.”
“Which I, for one, do not recommend,” Ela put in.
“I care what happened on the boat,” Kossal said, as though we’d never spoken, “because anyone ripping the throats out of armed men is a servant of my god, an adept servant, and I am always eager to meet my fellows in the faith.”
Ruc shook his head. “The people who ripped out the throats on the boat worship the old gods of this city: Kem Anh, Hang Loc, Sinn.”
“Ananshael is an old god. These others are imposters.”
“On that we agree,” Ruc said. “But they’re imposters who have proven surprisingly durable. People in this delta have worshipped them for thousands of years, as far back as the records go and further. All the way to Dombang’s founding during the Csestriim wars, if you believe the city’s myths. Annur outlawed the worship, but all the legions they send can’t seem to kill the old trinity.”
Kossal drummed his fingers on the table, noticed the half of the snake he’d set aside, picked it up, and bit into the scaly hide. “We’re coming,” he announced around the flesh filling his mouth.
“Coming where?” Ruc asked.
“With you into the delta. To see these Vuo Ton.”
Ela laughed again. I half hated her, but a woman could get drunk on that laugh.
“You want to help?” Ruc asked. “If you’re Skullsworn, then what the fuck do you care about the politics of Dombang?”
“I don’t,” Kossal replied, pausing to pick a bone out from between his teeth with that same wooden splinter. “But I take offense when I hear of things that can’t be killed. In the name of my god, I’m inclined to find them and kill them.”