Without the sun overhead, I would have lost track of west, south, and every other direction almost instantly. The delta was a web of green-brown streams and backwaters threaded between tiny islands, mud bars, stands of spear rushes, a thousand branching channels that all looked the same: reeds and mud, sluggish water tugging imperceptibly toward the sea. Crocs lazed on the flats, but they left us alone. Aside from the occasional scream of some hapless creature struggling, then dying out of sight, the day was calm, almost soporific. For long stretches there was no sound but the steady rhythm of the dripping oars, water chuckling under the hull, the light breeze feathering the rushes.
Since leaving the city, Chua had pointed the direction at each forking channel with her long fishing spear. She didn’t speak aloud until midmorning, as we were passing a wide stand of blood rushes.
“Stop here.”
The Greenshirts paused, oars hanging motionless above the water.
“Why?” Ruc asked.
The woman pointed to the rushes. “We need one of those.”
I glanced over at the long stalks. The rushes were named for their color—a red the hue of dried blood—and for their edges, which could slice through human skin as readily as a carving knife.
“Why?” Ruc asked again.
Caught in a slight breeze, the boat drifted toward the swaying reeds.
“Not too close,” Chua said, ignoring Ruc’s question, drawing her blade. “Things live in those shallows.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things we do not want on the boat.”
When we were still a full pace away, she tucked a foot under the thwart, then leaned backward out over the rail, stretching until her body was parallel with the water. The motion was at once gracefully acrobatic and perfectly natural. As the rowers held water, she sliced one of the rushes just above the waterline, let it fall into the water, then picked it out carefully, pinching the flat of the stem between her thumb and forefinger.
“Shove off,” Ruc said, and Dem Lun, who had been eyeing the bank warily, drove the blade of his oar into the mud, forcing us back toward the center of the channel.
Chua ran the back of her knife along the full five-foot length of the reed, first one side, then the other, slicking the water from the fibrous stalk, pausing for a moment when she reached a thumb-sized spider.
“Widow’s kiss,” she said, pointing with the tip of her knife, then flicked the creature into the water.
The surface tension held it up a moment, legs twitching and jerking, slick, black carapace drinking the light. I remembered the name from my childhood. Fishers bitten by the spider did not come back alive. Ruc ignored it, his eyes on Chua.
“I assume there was a reason for the risk.”
She nodded, sighting down the length of the rush, first one side, then the other. When she was satisfied it carried no other passengers, she slid the base down through the small hole in the front decking through which the boat’s painter was threaded.
“It is a flag,” she said.
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“It says we are searching for them.”
“Searching?” Ruc said, narrowing his eyes. “You told me you knew where they were.”
“In the delta nothing stays in the same place.”
“So how do we find them?” I pressed.
The older woman fixed her eyes over the bow, as though looking through the rushes, past them, into some vision of her childhood.
“There is no one place,” she replied finally, “but there is a pattern to their movement. When we get close enough, there will be signs.”
“And this thing?” I asked, pointing again at the red, swaying reed.
“They will see it,” she said, “and know that one of their own has come back.”
The woman didn’t turn when she spoke. From my bench in the center of the boat, I watched her back. Since leaving Dombang, she seemed different; not changed, but changing, as though the scarred skin of the broken woman we’d found in the shack by the crematorium was something she was in the process of molting.
“What if we didn’t have it?” I asked. “What if we just went searching without the flag?”
“They would kill us.”
Ruc nodded, as though the woman’s words had confirmed some long-held belief. “The Greenshirts have sent boats after the Vuo Ton. Not recently, but there are accounts in the records. Most returned exhausted, defeated, having seen nothing. Some did not return.”
Chua shrugged. “The delta offers a thousand deaths.”
“One of which,” Ruc noted drily, “is at the hands of the Vuo Ton.”
“How do the Vuo Ton survive?” I asked.
Chua glanced down at the spear in her hand. “The people of Dombang understand building, and coin, and trade. The Vuo Ton know what lives on the water and underneath, what stalks the reeds and rushes. They learn early to face their gods. To worship and to sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice.” Ruc shook his head grimly. “I’ve seen what passes for sacrifice. Kids or idiots too drunk to fight back, tied up and tossed into the delta. All to appease these fucking gods.”
Chua shook her head dismissively. “The people of Dombang are weak. They mean nothing to Kem Anh and her consorts.”
“They die all the same. I’ve seen the bodies.”
“The Three have no interest in the dead.”
“And just what is it,” Kossal asked lazily, “that they’re interested in?”
The priest had been sitting on one of the narrow benches, elbows on his knees, chin in his hands. He’d been silent all morning. Now, however, at the mention of the gods, he straightened up, dark eyes bright with the sun, posture giving the lie to his indolent drawl.
“They are hunters,” Chua replied.
“Good place for it.” Kossal nodded toward a flock of tufted ducks floating silently past. “Plenty of waterfowl.”
Chua’s smile was all teeth. “The Three prefer more spirited prey.”
“Have you ever seen a duck defending her nest?” Kossal raised one eyebrow. “Very spirited.”
“Less so than a woman fighting for her life.” The fisher glanced speculatively into the shifting reeds. “Or a man, for that matter.”
I shook my head. My wrists ached with the old memory of cord biting into my flesh. I could feel the ribs of the boat pressed against my own ribs, hard and unyielding.
“The people sacrificed to the delta don’t get to fight.”
The words came out as a snarl, and the old fisher looked over at me, her weathered face grave.
“The sacrifices of your city are blasphemy. Worse than the worship of the Annurians.”
Ruc hadn’t shifted his eyes from the channel. His right hand rested calm and steady on the tiller. His voice was absolutely casual when he spoke, but I could see him testing his left hand, flexing it just slightly.
“Sounds as though your people would be pleased to see the whole city burned,” he observed. “Priests and legionaries alike.”
Chua snorted. “Your city is nothing to the Vuo Ton. A tiny, reeking privy, meaningless in the vastness of the Given Land.”
Ruc frowned. “The Given Land?”
“The delta,” the fisher replied, sweeping her spear in a wide arc to indicate the water, the reeds, the hot and shifting sky.
“Given to who?” Kossal asked. “By who?”
“Given to us by the gods,” Chua said.
Kossal shook his head. “The Three didn’t make the delta.”
“No,” Chua said. “But they made it safe.”
I stared at her. “Safe? By hunting people?”
“That was the bargain. We sacrifice; they stand guard.”
The old priest’s gaze was a naked blade. “Guard against what?”