“You look tired,” Ela said as we rounded the third or fourth landing.
I glanced over at the priestess. Despite the rope binding her wrists, the clothes wrinkled and scuffed with grime, she seemed blithe and well rested.
“I am,” I replied after a moment.
“This is the third time I’ve been thrown in a dungeon,” she confided. “I’m starting to develop a low opinion of them.”
One of the guards shoved her roughly from behind. “Quit talking.”
Ela didn’t miss a step, even as she turned to cast a disapproving eye on her assailant. “What’s your name?” she asked.
The man, obviously baffled by this response, glanced over at his companion.
“You don’t have an unattractive face,” Ela went on, “and judging from the way your uniform hangs, the body underneath might be pleasant as well.” She shook her head regretfully. “Your personality, however, is deplorable.”
“I told you to shut your face, bitch—” the man began.
Before he could finish, Ela slid past his loaded flatbow and slammed her bound hands into his throat. He collapsed, choking. It was a mortal blow, although it would take him some time to die. The whole thing happened so quickly, with so little noise or fuss, that only the guards closest to us noticed anything at all, at least at first. There was a moment of silence, like a rest before a new bar of music, then the Greenshirts started shouting all at once, falling over themselves either to get closer or move back, training their flatbows on Ela to the neglect of everyone else.
The priestess didn’t seem to notice. She was busy fixing some imagined imperfection in her hair while the soldier choked to death at her feet.
Kossal, who had been walking one pace farther on, turned around, studied the scene, then shook his head again. “I will be vexed if you go to the god before we reach the delta. I might need you.”
Ela frowned. “That almost sounds sweet.” She turned to me. “I can never decide if it’s better to be needed or wanted.”
“Get on the fucking ground.”
After long moments, some leadership was finally emerging out of the green-shirted chaos. The huge brute with the cudgel was pointing at Ela, alternating, in his bellowed address, between the priestess herself—Get the fuck down—and his men—Get your bows on that bitch.
Ela glanced at the wooden floorboards, then shook her head. “The ground is filthy. So no. Also,” she added, nodding toward the twitching figure at her feet, “I don’t like the word bitch.”
In the wire-tight silence that followed, I thought I could hear my god sweeping down upon us all through the wide corridor. I measured the space between myself and Ruc, trying to decide if I could get to him in time, if I could kill him before someone else put a flatbow bolt through his chest. Not that that would be enough. I still had no idea if the feeling stalking my heart was love. Even if it was, I owed the god another death—the pregnant woman. Even if I reached Ruc, even if I choked him lifeless before the Greenshirts finished me, I failed. Still, after all this time, it seemed wrong to let someone else, someone who had no feelings for him at all, deliver him into the hands of the god.
I tensed, ready to dive through a rain of flatbow bolts.
Before anyone could attack, however, Kossal raised his bound hands.
“She won’t kill anyone else,” he said.
Ela raised an eyebrow. “Much as I cherish you, Kossal, I don’t remember making you my prophet.”
“Gods have prophets,” Kossal said. “Priestesses get irritable old men who want to go to the god somewhere more interesting than a dimly lit corridor surrounded by twitchy idiots.”
“He means you,” Ela whispered toward the Greenshirts, lowering her voice as though she were confiding a secret. “You’re the idiots.”
Rage spasmed like a muscle in the face of the lead soldier, but after a moment, recalling some order or imperative momentarily forgotten in the aftermath of Ela’s impromptu violence, he raised a hand.
“Everyone back,” he growled. “Two paces.”
“She broke Qang’s neck,” protested one of the men, who had set down his bow to drag the now-still soldier away from Ela. “She broke his fucking neck.”
“And I’ll break yours,” the leader replied grimly, “if you don’t follow orders. The high priestess wants them whole and unharmed, so we are bringing them whole and unharmed.” He turned to Ruc. “Unless we can’t. It’s your job to keep your people in line.”
For the first time Ruc glanced back at us. His eyes held mine for a moment, then he shook his head.
“They’re not my people.”
*
It looked as though half of Dombang had turned out to see us sacrificed to the old gods. After centuries hiding their worship; praying to hidden idols; gathering in forgotten shrines; making bloody, clandestine offerings for which Annurian law would have seen them hung; the citizens of my city had finally hauled their ancient worship back into the hot, dazzling light.
We stood at the top of the wide steps fronting the Shipwreck, at least half a dozen paces above the plaza below. That plaza was filled with people, thousands upon thousands upon thousands—fishers dressed in their practical vests; merchants, women and men rich enough to afford a cordon of enormous bodyguards; beggars in their rags; children racing in feral packs through the crowd, howling to each other over the protestations of their elders; barefoot sailors with rigging knives at their belts; grandmothers bent over canes, diminutive beneath their huge reed hats; the whole motley citizenry of Dombang gathered to share in a vicious release centuries in the making.
Some carried effigies of Intarra mounted on fishing spears, the goddess impaled through the stomach, or chest, or eyes. Others shredded flags bearing the Annurian sun, chanting Death to the Emperor. Death to Sanlitun. Death to the Malkeenian dogs. Still others held up idols of their own gods; tiny clay figures small enough to fit in a palm, life-sized wooden carvings, painted and repainted in intricate detail, that must have lain waiting in attics or hidden chambers for generations. Despite the variety of those latter sculptures, there was a ferocity to all of them that I recognized, the heft of terror and death in even the smallest figure.
A wave of nausea passed over me, through me, momentarily blotting my vision. I’d known what had to happen since shortly after we were captured, but only in that moment did the knowledge finally seep from my mind into my bones: I was going back. Once again, I would be sacrificed to the delta. My bonds chafed just as bonds had chafed my child-size wrists so many years earlier. My breath tasted sick in my mouth. I groped desperately for the words I’d learned in the intervening years:
Ananshael watches over me. His might obliterates all. In the darkest hour, his mercy remains.