He turned to flee, but Ruc caught him by the arm, nodded to the men and women ringing us. Some carried spears, others bows. “They will kill you if you run.”
The Greenshirt rounded on him, chest heaving, eyes darting from the crocodiles to Ruc to the Vuo Ton, then back.
“The fucking crocs will kill us. I’ve seen what they do. They bite your legs off. You’re still alive while they fucking eat you.”
Ruc hit him hard in the stomach, just below the ribs. Dem Lun doubled over coughing, the words gone.
“You are a soldier,” Ruc murmured, kneeling so that his head was just beside the man. “With you, there will be five of us against those beasts.” He paused. “We need you.”
“I’m not sure that we need him,” Ela interjected. She draped an arm around the Greenshirt’s quaking shoulders. “No offense, but you seem a little nervous.”
Dem Lun turned to stare at her. “We’re dead. We are all going to fucking die.”
“Well, yes,” Ela replied, narrowing her eyes in an effort to understand. “That’s part of the deal you make when you agree to be alive.”
“Not like this,” Dem Lun hissed.
“What’s wrong with this?” Ela ran a casual eye over the crocodiles. “They look efficient. As deaths go, eaten by a crocodile seems quicker than most.”
“We’re not going to die,” I said. “Ela, leave him alone.”
The priestess shot me a wounded look. “I am consoling him.”
“Too much speech,” the Witness cut in, “for people without voices.”
He waved a hand, and one of the Vuo Ton approached. She laid a brace of knives on the reeds before us, then retreated.
“You want us to fight those things with knives?” Dem Lun demanded.
“I was planning to bite them,” Ela said. She bared her white teeth. “I can bite very hard.”
Ruc was sizing up the blades. “One or two?” he asked quietly.
“One for each of you,” the Witness replied. “Each child of the Vuo Ton goes naked into the water with nothing more.”
“Naked?” Ela asked. She ran an appraising eye over Ruc and me. “That sounds distracting.”
“The cloth will kill you,” Chua said. “It is something else for the croc to bite. Another weight dragging you under.”
Kossal shrugged out of his robe without a word. He wore nothing beneath, but his nakedness didn’t seem to bother him.
“You could warn a woman,” Ela said, fluttering a hand in front of her face as though for more air. For all her mock dismay, she eyed him openly. “I expected more wrinkles,” she said after a moment. “And, to be honest, a little less cock.”
The two of them might have been bantering at the town fair, were it not for the crocodiles waiting a few paces away, for Dem Lun staring at the creatures with wide, frozen eyes. Ruc didn’t share the indifference of the priests or the terror of the soldier under his command. He stripped off his clothes in silence, taking the time to study the crocs. I should have been doing the same thing, sizing up the fight to come, but I found my eyes lingering on his stomach, the taut muscles of his thighs. I had hoped that the next time we were naked together, there would have been less of an audience—certainly I’d been hoping the situation would involve fewer predators—but hoping hadn’t been working out all that well for me since arriving in Dombang. Ruc glanced over, met my eyes. Ananshael was near—I could feel his hand cradling my heart, his fingers tracing my veins—but Ananshael was invisible. It was Ruc I looked at as my heart tested my flesh, Ruc whose eyes met mine as the excitement for the coming fight burned through my blood. He held my gaze a long time, then glanced over at Chua.
“What else can you tell us?”
“They’re attracted to motion,” the woman replied. “Get behind them. On their backs. Attack the eyes. If they catch you, they will roll.”
“Roll?” Kossal asked.
“Crocs prefer to drown their prey. Once they have you, they roll you under, hold you there. The jaws do not kill you. The water does.”
Before anyone could respond, a wild scream split the air. I spun to find Dem Lun charging naked toward the water, the knife the Vuo Ton had given him brandished in a raised hand. His terror had him. Fear does strange things to the mind. It can be easier, sometimes, to feel the teeth close down around you than to wait, wondering what it will feel like.
Ruc started after his man, but I caught him by the wrist, kicked his legs out from under him, rolled him onto his back, then wrapped an elbow in a choke hold around his neck. It shouldn’t have been so easy, but he’d been paying attention to Dem Lun, not me. One of the many advantages enjoyed by the priests of Rassambur is our familiarity with death. We don’t get distracted when a man is torn apart a few paces away. We don’t make bad decisions.
Ruc twisted in my grip, but I had him, my legs wrapped tight around his waist. It doesn’t take long to choke a man unconscious from that position.
“He’s dead,” I whispered into Ruc’s ear. It wasn’t true yet, but Dem Lun—splashing and flailing in his panic—was halfway to the crocs. They split off to close on him from three directions. “If you go in now, you die too,” I murmured, tightening my grip. “And then what will become of Dombang?”
I left out the rest: If the crocs kill you, I won’t ever have the chance.
The largest of the beasts opened its jaws. Dem Lun, waking too late from the madness of his attack, spun in the water, realized he was alone, began to swim back. Too slow. As he stroked desperately for the shore, the crocodile caught him by the leg. The Greenshirt screamed, thrashed at the surface. The croc reared up, lifted him clear of the surface, then slammed him down. There was blood in the water. Sunlight scribbled the red, spreading stain.
Around us, the Vuo Ton watched in silence. They were witnessing the work of their gods, just as I was watching the work of mine. Ruc was rigid in my arms, his bare skin burning against my own.
Then the crocodile rolled, dragging Dem Lun under; both vanished in a furious, red-brown froth. I counted thirty heartbeats before they emerged, the man a limp puppet in the jaws. The beast slammed him against the water again, over and over until the leg of the corpse tore free at the hip. The other two were on the remains in moments, shredding the meat between them. It was over as quickly as it started.
Chua was the first to break the silence. “This is good. They will be slower with their stomachs full.”
The moment I let Ruc up, he rounded on me, chest heaving, eyes ablaze. I thought he might go for the knife the Vuo Ton had given him, but he had too much of a soldier’s discipline.
“When this is over,” he said, the words caught in his jaws, “you will pay for that.”
“When this is over,” I replied quietly, wondering if I had sacrificed my only chance to win the Trial, “we may all be dead.”