“Against what chased us here in the beginning.”
Hidden in the reeds, an unseen bird scratched out a few strident notes against the stifling silence.
“The Csestriim,” Kossal said quietly.
Chua parried his gaze with her own. When she finally spoke, it was in the cadence of words handed down through uncounted generations. “In the beginning, the folk knew only terror and flight. They fled from the deathless across mountain and desert until they came to a land where the gods still lived. The Three turned back the deathless, and in return, we agreed to worship them.…”
“So you could be slaughtered by ‘gods’ instead of Csestriim?” Ruc demanded.
“Never them,” the fisher replied quietly. “This was our pledge. We would live in the delta and die here. We would give ourselves to these gods and to their servants, but never to the Csestriim. Never them.”
“Shitty fucking bargain,” Ruc said, “now that the Csestriim are millennia dead.”
“An oath is an oath,” Chua replied. “The people of Dombang forsook this oath.”
“So did you,” Ruc observed. “A lot of righteousness here from a woman who quit her people to live with the filthy apostates.”
Chua tensed. For a heartbeat, I thought she was going to plunge the barbed wooden spear directly into Ruc’s chest. Then she shook her head. Her eyes went distant, vague.
“I paid my price.”
“I thought it was an honor to your people,” Ruc growled. “You made it sound like the Vuo Ton want to die in the delta.”
“The Vuo Ton want to be worthy of the hunt.”
Ruc nodded, as though that settled everything. “They want to be sacrificed.”
“What they want,” the fisher replied quietly, her eyes fixed past Ruc’s shoulder as though he weren’t there at all, as though she were talking to the delta itself, “is the honor of facing their gods.”
*
The strike, when it came, happened so fast that Hin was dead before he finished crying out.
He had stopped rowing a little past noon, and when I glanced over, he looked embarrassed.
“I’ve got to take a … short break,” he said vaguely.
Ruc just nodded.
The boat slowed, swayed as Hin stood on the bench. A moment later I could hear his piss splashing into the river. A flock of winebeaks passed silently overhead. I watched them gliding south until they disappeared. Ruc was checking on the twin barrels he’d loaded aboard the boat, testing the seals with his thumbnail. I tried, as I’d been trying all morning, to guess what might be inside. Some sort of bribe for the Vuo Ton, if we ever found them? Quey or plum wine? Did he hope to get them drunk, then slit their throats in the night? It seemed like an implausibly shitty plan.
Ruc raised his eyes, found me staring. For a moment we were locked there, linked in our silence. Then he winked at me—the first bit of levity I’d seen from him since we discovered the transport—and I found a grin twitching at the corner of my lips.
Then Hin started screaming.
The Greenshirt’s cries were more terror than pain, a wordless animal howl over and over until he collapsed.
I drew my knife as he dropped, but couldn’t find anything to stab. In Rassambur we learn to kill people, not snakes, and at first I didn’t even see the black ribbon slithering up the inside of the boat’s hull, flowing over the thwarts and benches fast as a shadow. Chua didn’t share my blindness. The woman pivoted and thrust all in one fluid motion, driving the forked point of her fishing spear down around the snake’s head, pinning it against the planks. The serpent—dull black and twice as long as my arm—hissed furiously, lashed the empty air with its tail.
Hin had tumbled into the boat’s bottom, eyes straining from his head, limbs convulsing, swollen tongue—purple and foaming—twitching between swollen lips. Dem Lun abandoned his oars, seized his friend, hauled him up onto the bench. It was a human gesture and futile one—my million-fingered god had the Greenshirt in his grip, and Ananshael, when he closes his fist, does not let go.
Ruc was trapped in the stern of the boat, unable, given the vessel’s narrow beam, to move past Ela or Kossal. Another man would have been bellowing useless orders or waving a sword. Ruc kept his hand on the tiller, keeping us clear of the banks. His jaw was clenched so tightly I thought it might break, but he stayed silent, letting the people near the fight do the actual fighting.
In the space of a few heartbeats, the snake had managed to writhe free of Chua’s spear. It reared up, looking for another target, and Kossal caught it just below the head, his movement as casual as a man picking up an old, familiar tool before setting to work.
“Kill it,” Chua said grimly.
The old monk didn’t seem to hear. He lifted the snake until its slit eyes were inches from his own, the jaws unhinged for another bite. The tail lashed him over and over, but Kossal paid it no mind.
“Kill it,” Chua said again.
“What is it called?” Kossal asked, never taking his eyes from the snake.
“‘Tien tra’,” Chua replied. “Four steps.”
“A strange name,” Kossal observed, “for a creature without feet.”
“It is named for the paces of its prey. When it bites you, you walk four steps. Then you die.”
Hin hadn’t made it that far. On the bench behind me, Dem Lun cradled the dead man’s shoulders, stared blankly into those blank, bulging eyes. The surviving Greenshirt seemed not to notice anything else in the boat, or anything beyond it. He was shaking his head slowly, murmuring over and over the same low syllable: “No. No. No.”
Kossal wrapped another gnarled hand around the snake, just below his first. The creature whipped furiously as he began to twist, slowly and inexorably.
“It would be easier,” Chua said, “to use a knife.”
The priest ignored her. The muscles in his forearms corded with the strain, but his face was calm, thoughtful, as he finally tore the head from the body. The tail he tossed overboard, where it thrashed, then sank. He studied the head a moment longer, then carefully closed the mouth, sheathing the fangs, and tucked it into a pocket in his robe.
Chua watched him through slitted eyes. “A dangerous trophy,” she observed finally.
“It is not a trophy,” Kossal replied, shaking his head. “It is a reminder.”
“Of what?”