“To my unspeakable exhaustion.”
We fell silent as Vet returned with a steaming kettle, poured Kossal’s ta, then withdrew, his eyes lingering on me as he went. I tried to imagine what we looked like to him: just an old man and a young woman, not Ananshael’s faithful. We might have been talking about anything—the antics of a drunk relative, someone’s tumble into one of the canals, the ludicrous price of fire fruit—anything but the silk-thin line dividing the living from the dead. I tried to imagine what it might be like to live that sort of life. What did most people think about when they got up in the morning? Pissing and ta, probably. Maybe the job they had to do that day. It seemed a sad way to live—pale, attenuated.
“What do you think we’ll find,” I asked finally, “out there in the delta?”
Kossal swirled the ta in his cup, took a sip, pursed his lips, then looked at me. “I don’t know.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“I learned a long time ago that my guesses aren’t all that good.”
“So you just quit guessing? Quit having expectations?”
The old priest nodded. “Been working well enough this past half century or so.”
I studied him, the lines etched into his weather-beaten skin, those calm, strong hands. “You’re lying.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Quit doing that too. My lies weren’t much better than my guesses.”
“But you’re curious,” I pressed. “You think there’s something out there worth fighting.”
“Fighting?” Kossal frowned. “I dislike fighting.”
“Killing.”
He shrugged. “A heart doesn’t tend to find its way out of a ribcage all on its own, and there were an awful lot of naked hearts on that boat.”
“You think it’s the Vuo Ton?”
He shrugged again. “First time I heard about the Vuo Ton was a few days ago. For all I know, they’re a group of tuber-eating pacifists. Only one way to find out.”
“But you are going to find out.” I shook my head. “Which means you think it’s not the Vuo Ton. You think it’s the gods out there.”
Kossal studied me through the veil of steam rising from his wide cup.
“If there is something out there other than some idiots with knives and an interesting myth, it’s been there a long time.”
“You really think there’s a chance that the city’s gods are real?”
“Doubt it. But there are other things than gods that don’t die without a little persuading.”
“You mean Csestriim.”
It was still hard to believe we were actually talking about it. For all their implausibility, the gods of Dombang were familiar. I’d grown up with their names on my tongue, the shapes of their forbidden idols rough in my hands. The Csestriim, however, despite the ample historical record, despite Kossal’s claims to have found them, killed them, seemed like creatures from a storybook, immortal foes of the human race vanquished from every corner of the world so long ago that they might never have lived at all.
“Csestriim,” I went on, “hiding in the Shirvian delta, impersonating gods.”
“Not really, no. But if there are, they’ve been cheating Ananshael for a very long time.”
“And if not?”
He took another sip of his ta. “Then I’ll see if any of these Vuo Ton need to be given to our lord.”
He discussed it all so casually, both the question of the Csestriim, and the more quotidian issue of his own devotion.
“How do you decide?” I asked, thinking back to the priestess of Eira, to the few drops of her warm blood that had spattered my hand as I lowered her to the temple floor.
“I assume there is a second half to that question.”
“What offerings to make. The world is filled with people. Even Dombang…” I trailed off, imagining the canals crowded with boats, the oarsmen shouting at one another, women and men jostling on the wooden walkways, leaning from the windows of teak houses, shouting at children who forced their way through the scrum. “You can’t kill them all,” I concluded finally.
“There have been priests who tried.”
I blinked. “Really? What happened?”
“Didn’t work.”
“I gathered that.”
“People notice what you’re doing when you start going building by building, block by block, cutting throats. They start to take exception.”
“But if you don’t do that, how do you decide?” I pressed. “We see thousands of people pass by each day from where we’re sitting right now. There are two dozen people right on this deck. You haven’t killed any of them.”
“Two,” Kossal said.
“Excuse me?”
“I killed two.”
I glanced around the deck. People sipped their juice or ta, alone or in groups of two or three. No one was dead. No one seemed to be dying. I turned back to Kossal, wondering if he was joking. “I don’t see any corpses.”
He waved away the objection. “The poison takes a while.”
Not joking, I concluded. That seemed like the end of the conversation, but after a moment Kossal went on in that low, rumbling voice of his.
“Devotion isn’t a system, Pyrre. You pass a hundred people, a thousand, and nothing. Then, when you pass the thousand-and-first, you feel the god seeing with your eyes, you feel him stirring in your limbs. The way you know the will of a god is not the way you know the area of a square or the distance to Annur. It is not a matter of facts or equations. Our devotion is not a list of chores.”
I shook my head. “Sounds like the way Ela describes love.”
To my surprise, Kossal nodded. “I suppose. Death, love—they’re both the work of a god framed in mortal flesh.”
“How are you supposed to know one from the other?”
Kossal swirled the ta in his cup, then stared down into the miniature whirlpool. “I’m not sure you do.”
18
Ruc’s messenger knocked furtively on my door, waking me from an unsteady sleep sometime in the hot, foggy hours between midnight and dawn. I had been dreaming of Ruc and Ela, of the two of them naked, tangled in each other’s limbs, eyes closed with the bliss of their tight-pressed bodies. I called out to them, but they didn’t hear me, or they heard me, but refused to respond.
I tried to move closer, but I was tied to something, rope wrapped around and around me. When I looked back up, Ruc was on his back, Ela on top of him, astride him, riding him, smiling as she reached down to pull him to her … no. She was reaching down to strangle him. Her fingers closed around his throat even as her back arched with pleasure. I couldn’t tell if Ruc was struggling to be free or just fucking her harder.