Slowly, as I repeated the mantra, my vision cleared.
Cao’s Canal—just beyond the plaza—was packed so tight with boats, rafts, canoes, coracles, that you could have walked straight across to the Serpentine. The women and men on the decks were drinking from jugs of plum wine and quey, roasting sweet-reeds, hollering to each other across the gaps. The revolution had become a celebration. There was no way to tell, gazing out over the floating mass, that everyone had gathered, not just for music or feasting, but for a human sacrifice. It seemed like a holiday.
It will be a holiday, I realized.
The priests who had seized their city from Annurian clutches would carve this date into a new calendar. Each year, another group of prisoners would stand on these steps while the crowd howled for their blood. Annur would decry this barbarity, but at least it was honest. Most holidays, after all—the military victories, the triumphs of one family or faction over another—are watered first with blood. It’s just that over the years people tend to forget.
As we stepped out of the shadow into the sun’s hammer, the low grumble of the mob erupted into a roar, thousands of upraised, sweat-soaked faces, mouths wide as though they were singing, pouring their souls into the melody of some long-forgotten chorus.
“I’m impressed,” Ela said, turning to Ruc. “You were holding together a city in which every single citizen hates you.”
Ruc shook his head, jaw tight. “This is only a fraction of Dombang. There will be tens of thousands hiding today, men and women loyal to Annur, or just indifferent to the old religion. Normal people hoping the fire passes over without burning them to ash. We won’t be the only ones fed to the delta today, just the most famous.”
“I still don’t understand,” Ela mused, “why they don’t like us. There’s not a single person down there who even knows who I am.” She paused. “Except for a handful of young men and one singularly flexible woman, and I don’t think I did anything to offend them.”
“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Ruc growled. “You were taken with me. There will be a thousand stories already about how you’re Annurian agents sent to crush the resistance. Some people will be spreading a ludicrous tale that you’re Kettral.” He glanced over at me, eyes hard as chips of jade. “A lie, as it turns out, but that doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter to a mob. Justice doesn’t matter. What matters is rage, having a target for that rage.”
Before he could say anything else, the noise of the crowd, which had been nearly deafening before, found a new pitch, something between shouting and screaming.
I turned to find three hooded figures emerging from the steel-banded double doors of the Shipwreck. They strode out onto the wide platform, pausing half a dozen paces behind and above us—we’d been herded down a couple of the broad steps so that we would not stand at their level—to bask in the righteous fury of the throng. Each wore a robe of a different color: storm gray, vermillion, and a brown so dark it was almost black. I’d never seen the regalia before—such robes had been outlawed in Dombang for centuries—but I recognized it from dozens of whispered stories and songs. After a lifetime of hiding, the city’s high priests had emerged into the light, had emerged to send us to our doom.
The foremost of the three, the one robed in bottomless brown, turned to the others, seemed to murmur something, and then, with a theatrical gesture, all three tossed back their hoods. I didn’t recognize the two men; they might have been picked out of a Dombang crowd at random. The woman, however, the one who led them—I recognized her immediately. Her robe was different, but it would be hard to forget that imperious face, those hawk’s eyes, the way she studied us as though we were fish flopping on a deck. Even last time, when she’d been our prisoner, she had refused to bend.
“Quen,” Ruc growled.
Somehow Lady Quen managed to smile without loosening her lips. “Ruc Lan Lac. You must be surprised to find yourself here, in chains, on the steps of your own fortress.”
“Only an idiot expects to step into a nest of vipers and emerge unbitten.”
“Vipers.” The priestess raised an eyebrow. “Holy creatures.”
“Legless sacks of venom,” Ruc countered, “with no end beyond their own survival.”
“Even here,” the priestess said, shaking her head, “even defeated and in chains, you insist on your profanation.”
“Let me tell you,” Ruc said, “what is profane. Profane is feeding people to the delta, innocent people, all to shore up your own power.”
“Innocent?” The woman glanced at her hands, as though she expected to find blood there. “I’ll admit that, while the true faith of Dombang was forced into hiding, people forgot the old ways. In their ignorance, they were forced to make … desperate sacrifices. Now that we have returned, however, now that we have thrown off the yoke of your empire, I will correct those mistakes.”
“Meaning the only people you throw to the delta will be those who oppose you.”
The woman shook her head. “Dombang was a great city once, proud and free, before you sold it for a handful of coin.”
“It wasn’t sold,” Ruc said. “It was invaded. And that happened twenty decades before I was born.”
“Every generation has betrayed her anew. Every generation until now.”
“Sending five people into the delta isn’t going to rid you of Annur,” Ruc said.
The priestess shrugged. “This will be the first of our sacrifices, but not the last. Great corruption requires a great purge.”
Ruc spat onto the steps. “Innocent people, dead.”
“Innocent?” The woman frowned as she said the word again. “The leader of the Greenshirts, three Kettral conspirators, and one of the Vuo Ton, who forsook her people for a foreign god. I would hardly say you are innocent.”
“We’re not Kettral,” I said wearily.
“That was just something she made up,” Ela added. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The priestess studied me a moment, then shook her head.
“Judgment is for the Three. We are only their servants. I told you last time we met: Kem Anh rises.”
Before I could respond, she turned away, stepped toward the crowd, and raised a hand. The clamor, which had surged, then subsided when she first stepped out of the fortress, dropped away entirely. The only sounds were a baby crying in the distance, the hollow thudding of hulls bumping up against one another on the water, and the light breeze flapping the flags at the top of the tower behind us. I glanced up at those flags. The Annurian sun had been stripped from the pole.
“People of Dombang,” she announced, her voice louder than I expected, “today we reclaim our city.”