He doesn’t know, I thought. He doesn’t know what she is, what she’ll do to him. I screamed into my gag. Silence.
I wished for a knife, and a knife was in my hand. As quickly as I could, I sliced my way free of the ropes, sawing desperately through the thick, bristling strands, focused on nothing but getting loose, stopping the priestess before she finished her strangling. When the last coils fell away, I lunged forward, hurling myself across the undefined space. When I reached the bodies, they were still, bloody, dead. Ela’s head lay on Ruc’s muscled chest, the haze of her dark hair matted with blood. Someone had stabbed them, stabbed them both over and over. When I looked down, the knife in my hand dripped dark blood. The drops hit the floor—drip, drip, drip—the measure of a music that didn’t yet exist, or had already stopped.
By the time we reached the docks of the Greenshirt fortress, the vision had faded, but sweat still slicked my hands, my chest; and my heart, normally so steady, leapt into my throat when Chua stepped from behind a stack of barrels piled on the dock. Not an auspicious start to the day that wasn’t likely to get any easier.
The woman carried a folded net and two fishing spears, both as long as she was tall. She wore a slender filleting knife strapped to one thigh and a longer, heavier blade for hacking sheathed on the other. It was standard kit for a fisher headed into the delta. Her vest and trousers were not. Most of the fishers working the channels around Dombang wore cotton or, if they could afford it, silk—light cloth that wasn’t too hot in the wet afternoon heat. Chua’s clothes seemed to glisten in the dock’s fickle lamplight, to shift and writhe each time she moved. It took me a moment to realize her tight vest and trousers were stitched from some kind of skin: snake or maybe crocodile, something with dark, glittering scales.
She ran a hand over the hide when she noticed me studying her. “Blocks spear rushes,” she said, “and most things with fangs.”
“Must be hot.”
“If you are hot,” she replied, dark eyes glittering, “then you are alive.”
“I, for one, despise being too hot,” Ela said. The priestess, unlike the fisher, had dressed less than practically for an expedition into the delta, although she had traded her customary ki-pan for a light silk noc and sleeveless top. Both seemed unlikely to block either spear rushes or things with fangs. “You must be Chua,” she said, smiling as she stepped forward. “Pyrre tells me you’re quite resourceful.”
The older woman examined her, as though she were some exotic fish hauled up onto the deck, then glanced over at me. “This one is Kettral?” She looked wary. “Where are the weapons?”
“Weapons?” Ela shot me a wide-eyed, panicked look. “Pyrre! Did you forget the weapons?”
“She might not look like it,” I said, ignoring the priestess’s theatrics, “but she’s Kettral.”
“But what is a Kettral without weapons?” Ela went on. “I forgot my broadswords at the inn.”
“Less noise,” Ruc growled. “We’re leaving before dawn because I don’t want the whole city to notice our departure.”
“It is not the city you should be worrying about,” Chua said.
“Luckily,” Ruc replied, voice flat, “I’ve gotten good at worrying about more than one thing at a time.”
He made up for Ela’s lack of weapons: a short sword on one hip, a dagger on the other, and a crossbow strapped across his back. He gestured to the slim swallow-tail boat tethered up at the dock. Two Greenshirts sat at the oars, half-shrouded in shadow.
“Who are they?” Kossal asked.
“Dem Lun and Hin,” Ruc replied. “They’ll be doing the rowing.”
Chua eyed the two skeptically. “They are soldiers, not fishers.”
The nearer of the two men turned. He was older than I’d realized, almost as old as Chua. “Your pardon, ma’am, but we grew up fishing the west channel, both me and Hin.”
“We’re not going to the west channel.”
Dem Lun nodded. “Understood, ma’am. But water’s water. We both remember how to pull an oar.”
“I’m grateful for the help,” Ela announced. “I’ve never pulled an oar in my life, and I was up half the night entertaining.” She leapt lightly into the stern of the boat and, while the rest of us found our places on the wooden benches, settled herself between the thwarts.
As we were loading up, a soldier I didn’t recognize rolled two small wooden barrels over a gangplank and into the boat, lashing them in the stern just ahead of the tiller.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Supplies,” Ruc replied.
“Want to be a little more specific?”
He shook his head as he untied the painter. “Nope.”
Without another word, he set a foot on the transom, shoved off from the dock, then stepped nimbly into the boat.
Night’s hot, salty fog had settled over the city, shrouding bridges and causeways, making vague the red lights of the hanging lanterns. Dem Lun and Hin rowed in silence, oars slicing soundlessly into the water, pulling free at the end of each stroke with a slick, whispering sound. We passed a few dozen craft as we worked our way south, flame fishers returning from their work, low cargo scows loaded past the rails with barrels and crates, a single wide pleasure boat, lanterns blazing at prow and stern, the revelers doggedly finishing off the last of the wine, belting their drunken songs into the night.
The sun had just blistered the eastern sky when we left behind Dombang’s buildings. In moments, the house-high rushes closed around us. Aside from the smoke smudging the sky behind, the city might have been swallowed up, hundreds of thousands of souls, all their hopes and hatreds sinking into the mud in the space between one stroke of the oars and the next. The sky sat on the delta, heavy, gray, bright as steel. The day was hot, and going to be hotter.
Ela laid her head back against the hull of the boat, crossed her legs over the far rail, and closed her eyes.
“Wake me up,” she murmured, “when it’s time to kill something.”
Chua shook her head. “More likely, something will try to kill us.”
Ela smiled without opening her eyes. “I’ll wake up for that, too, I suppose, but only if it’s very, very exciting.”
*