Ruc, of course, had other concerns. When we rounded the tip of First Island, the Shipwreck loomed into view. The huge, haphazard wooden fortress brooded over the canal, low towers stabbing the sky, ramparts, like rows of jagged, broken teeth, gnawing at the night. There, at least, the windows were ablaze with light, as though every candle and lantern were burning, every soldier awake. Down at the docks, too, torches and lanterns illuminated the ranks of boats. Two dozen sentries patrolled those docks, chain mail catching the light, breaking it, reflecting it back. All of them carried flatbows.
Ruc glanced over his shoulder to where I was holding the tiller. “Stay wide,” he murmured, then nodded toward one of the larger vessels swinging at anchor in the center of the current. “Over there. I want some cover while we decide what to do next.”
“You don’t think they’re your men?” Kossal asked.
“Can’t tell yet,” Ruc said, “and sitting still in the middle of the river doesn’t seem the greatest place to find out.”
One of the Greenshirts noticed us just as we slid in close to the looming hull of the double-masted carrack.
“Fishers,” he called out. “You’re in violation of curfew.”
A few of the Greenshirts moved toward one of their own boats tied off at the dock.
“Curfew?” Ruc replied, voice barely loud enough to carry over the water. “Under whose authority?”
“Commander Lan Lac,” the Greenshirt said. “There are to be no unmoored boats between sunset and sunrise.”
“You’ve been busy,” Ela murmured. “Chasing down the Vuo Ton and issuing orders back here in the city.”
Ruc shook his head. “I left instructions.” He raised a hand to his mouth. “Hoai,” he called out. “Those are my fucking orders.”
That caused a stir on the dock, Greenshirts murmuring to one another, lowering their bows, pointing into the darkness where we floated. The soldier named Hoai turned to another, shorter man, conferred for a moment in a voice too quiet to hear, then looked back to us.
“Apologies, Commander,” he said. “I didn’t recognize your voice. Still, I need to ask you for the pass phrase before you approach. Your own orders, sir.”
“How delightfully paranoid,” Ela observed.
Ruc ignored her. I expected him to call out a word or sentence, but instead he raised his voice and began to sing the haunting opening bars to Antreem’s Mass. His singing voice was deeper than his speech, a full octave lower, and the notes seemed to vibrate the very hull of the boat, to tremble the surface of the water, to shake something inside my chest, a drum-tight organ that might have been my heart. He sang for a few moments only, but the music lingered in the air, in the ear, even after he was finished. The last time I’d heard the Mass had been that night in Sia, the night we first met. Ruc glanced toward me as he fell silent, but in the darkness I couldn’t see his face.
“Come on in, sir,” Hoai said. “And again, my apologies.”
“Stop apologizing,” Ruc said. “If you’d ignored my orders I would have had you flogged.”
He nodded to Chua, the two dipped their oars, and the boat shifted beneath me as we slid over the glass-black water toward the dock.
Hoai caught the painter as Ruc and Chua backed water, snugged the bow in close while another of the Greenshirts reached out to haul in the stern. Ruc was out of the vessel before it was even tied, leaping across the gap, landing easily, already asking questions.
“Riots or an organized push?”
“Organized, sir,” Hoai replied. “Three coordinated attacks.”
“The result?”
“We crushed two. The third we’ve got bottled up just south of New Harbor, although there are outbreaks of violence all over the city. Hence the curfew.”
“Casualties?”
Before the Greenshirt could reply, the man behind him gasped, choked, then collapsed, clutching at a knife buried in his chest.
My knives were out of their sheaths before he hit the dock, as was Ruc’s sword. The rest of the soldiers, who had lowered their flatbows as we approached, scrambled to train the weapons on us once again, some dropping to a knee to steady their aim, others spreading out, as though to block off any avenue of escape. Hoai was staring, frozen, at Ela, who spread her hands innocently.
“What have you done?” Ruc demanded, rounding on the woman.
She nodded toward the fallen soldier. His blood, slick as polished lacquer, caught the starlight, reflected it back in a score of bright pinpricks.
“I thought it might be a good idea to kill him,” she said mildly, “before he killed us.”
“These are my men,” Ruc spat.
Ela pursed her lips, glanced over the Greenshirts. “I don’t think so.”
Ruc laid the tip of his sword against her throat.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice.
“Hoai,” he said, not moving his eyes from the priestess. “Take her. Take all of them to a holding cell.”
The Greenshirt’s silence was wide and dark as the night itself. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were bleak.
“He’s not on your team, love,” Ela said, shaking her head.
“She’s right,” Hoai said. He glanced over at Ruc’s men, at his men, two dozen of them, every flatbow aimed at one of us. At that distance, a child could put a bolt through an eyeball. “Take all of them to a holding cell,” he added, then nodded to Ruc. “Including him.”
Ela glanced over at Kossal. “We could make a great gift to the god.”
The older priest shook his head irritably. “I want to see Pyrre’s golden-eyed, unkillable goddess before I am unmade.”
“Drop your sword, sir,” Hoai said.
Ruc turned from Ela to his lieutenant, the sword still in his hand.
His voice was the scrape of a knife over stone when he replied. “Why?”
Hoai shook his head, as though the question were too big to answer. “Drop your sword.”
“Tell me why.”
“No,” the younger man replied grimly. “You tell me why you betrayed your own city.”
“Where is the betrayal in stopping centuries, millennia of bloody ‘sacrifice’?”
“What of the sacrifice required by Annur? The coin stolen from our pockets? The freedom torn from our hands? What about the history scrubbed out, the pride annihilated? What about the people, our people, that we execute right here, in front of this very fortress?”
His voice was shook, and even when he fell silent I could see his shoulders trembling with barely suppressed rage.
“Without law,” Ruc replied quietly, “there is only suffering.”
Hoai shook his head. “From now on we will make our own law. As we did before Annur put her boot on the city’s throat.”
“You are an idiot. You won’t know how easily this city breathed until these so-called priests begin choking it.”
The Greenshirt started to respond, then checked himself. “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to drop your sword.”
I put a hand on Ruc’s arm before he could attack. If it were darker, if the range was greater, if we had any cover or flatbows of our own, we might make a fight of it. As it was, however, we stood near the center of an empty dock. The nearest escape was the water, half a dozen paces away. The men with the flatbows wouldn’t even need to be fast to put bolts in our backs, and before I died I wanted to pass the Trial. When Ananshael finally untangled the stuff of my soul, I wanted him to know the full measure of my devotion.
“Not now,” I murmured.