Kossal rolled his eyes, but didn’t bother responding.
“Kettral,” the Witness said, drawing the word out as though studying it. “I have heard stories of these warriors. Now I start to understand how you weighed so heavy in the Scales.”
He turned to the Vuo Ton seated closest, murmured a few words I couldn’t understand, then said again: Kettral. Surprise rippled down the line, questions and exclamations. Women and men began studying us anew, eyes bright in their tattooed faces.
“And why,” the Witness asked after a pause, “have the Kettral come to the Given Land?”
“To find you,” Ruc said grimly, shifting languorously as an uncoiling snake.
“You are not Kettral,” the chieftain said. “We have seen you in the city. Why do you want to find something you have ignored for so long?”
“Because a week ago almost two hundred men were slaughtered. Half were Annurian, half native to the city.”
“Ah.” The Witness paused to translate for the others, then turned back to Ruc. “A fat ship? Its decking reeked of salt?”
“More blood than salt, by the time we found it.”
The Witness nodded. “A great sacrifice. Holy.”
“Explain to me,” Ruc said, “what is holy about two hundred men with their throats torn out, their arms ripped from their shoulders, heads severed, eyes gouged, vines planted in the empty sockets?”
“This was the work of the Three,” the Witness replied, as though that explained everything.
Ruc watched him for a moment, then turned to study the mass of Vuo Ton scattered over the boats and rafts. “The Three?” he asked quietly. “Or the three thousand?”
“You think we attacked your people?”
“I’ve never seen a god,” Ruc replied. “But I have seen you.”
The chieftain shook his head. “You have not seen the gods because, like all in the city, you have forgotten your worship.”
“Oh, worship is doing just fine in Dombang. Kids get dragged out into the delta to die every week.”
The Witness shook his head. “The Three would no more take one of your feeble city dwellers than a jaguar would a slab of rotten meat.”
“I’ve seen the bodies,” Ruc replied quietly.
“The Given Land is rich in ways to die,” the Witness said. “Snakebites and spiders. Drowning. Thirst.”
A hot vision seared across my mind—the eyes of a jaguar and beneath them the eyes of something else, a woman who was not a woman. Pain blazed through me. My skin had long since scarred over, but I could feel the wounds that made the scars as though they still bled. I felt dizzy suddenly. The light of the lanterns reeled in vicious orbits around me. Even the stars seemed to be on fire.
“What the priests of your city do,” the Witness went on—he was still talking to Ruc, oblivious to the fact that I’d come momentarily unmoored—“is not worship.”
“Says the man who tried to feed us to the crocs.”
“You came to us. You demanded this.”
“We demanded a conversation.”
“Only those weighed in the Scales are given a voice.” The one-eyed man shook his head. “You chose this,” he said again.
“And what about the men on that transport?” Ruc asked. “Did they choose it, too?”
“We are bound by the oaths of our ancestors.”
Ruc snorted. “What about the feebleness of city dwellers? I thought we were rotten meat, well beneath the interest of your Three?”
The Witness smiled. “Two hundred men, all armed, ready for violence. This is not a solitary soul abandoned on a mud flat. This is a prize worthy of a hunter.”
Ruc fell silent. The slitted eyes of the dead crocodile surveyed the night while the feast cooled on the platter around it, grease congealing on the meat, which had gone from red-brown to gray.
“How do you know all this about the Three,” I asked, “if no one has ever seen them?”
The tattooed man turned to me, seemed to look at me and through me at the same time.
“Every ten or twenty years,” he replied, “they leave a warrior alive.”
I shook my head. “Why?”
“To bear witness,” he raised a hand to his own chest, smiled in bemusement as though surprised to find he had a body, as though surprised it had not been destroyed, “to the truth.”
Dizziness washed over me again, but I forced it back, forced myself to focus through the haze of memory on the present moment, on the man sitting across from me, on the question burning like fire in my throat.
“How do they choose?” My voice was husky as it left my lips, ragged. “How do they decide who to spare?”
He shrugged. “Their ways are their own.”
“Maybe,” I replied, “but you’ve been worshipping them for thousands of years. You must have some idea why they do what they do.”
The Witness raised an eyebrow. I could feel the unreadable eyes of the Vuo Ton on me, could feel Ruc at my side, studying me. I had overstepped; a part of me knew that. I was pressing too hard for a truth I should have had no reason to want. And yet confronted with a man who claimed to have faced his gods, I needed to know.
“Why did they spare you?” I demanded.
The Witness pursed his lips, traced a scar that ran the length of his arm, as though he were following some path on a map with his finger.
“I saw myself in them,” he said finally. “Perhaps they saw some fragment of themselves in me.” He shook his head, as though uncertain of the words. “Perhaps they want someone who will teach the next generation.”
“Teach them to die,” Ruc growled.
“Teach them to live,” the Witness countered. “To fight.” He paused. “The Three could end us all in an afternoon. They could rise from the waters this very night and drag us to our graves. You saw your own men on that fat ship. You know what they can do.”
“Then why don’t they?” I demanded. “If they love hunting so much,” I gestured to the dark reeds swaying at the edge of the lake, “why are we still here?”
“If we were gone, who would they hunt?”
“If this is true,” Ruc said, “and I don’t believe it is, you have made yourselves into prey.”
“We are all prey,” the Witness replied with a smile. “Life isn’t in the ending, but the living.”
Ruc shook his head. “Easy for you to say. You’re still alive.”
The smile drained off of the chieftain’s face. His eyes looked suddenly hollow, as though they were holes drilled into some bottomless darkness. “There is nothing easy about living with the memory of the Three.”
“How exciting,” Ela cooed, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You really have seen them.”
He nodded.