Roaring. Rage. Ten thousand hands raised in the air, as though every one of those assembled sought to drag us down. When the mob finally fell silent once more, Quen continued.
“For centuries, rot has gnawed at the pilings of this city. Too many of us have forgotten our gods, and so those gods have turned their faces from us in disgust. Until now. We will forget them no longer.”
She gestured to Ruc. “This man you know. Ruc Lan Lac, this son of Dombang who was paid in Annurian gold for every back he broke, for every neighbor betrayed. Today, he will face judgment.”
Ruc studied the howling crowd as though it were a storm sweeping over the city, dangerous but not deadly.
“These four,” the priestess went on, pointing to the rest of us in turn when the chaos had subsided, “are his lieutenants, his willing executioners, sent or paid for by Annur to keep Dombang under the empire’s boot. Today, they too will face the Three.”
Ruc took a step forward, as though he intended to address the crowd, but the guards seized him by the shoulders, hauled him back. The priestess stepped aside, and the two priests, the men in the red and gray robes, stepped forward. They carried snakes in their hands, small, crimson vipers that they held just behind the heads, raising them up for the crowd to see.
“Heel snakes,” Chua muttered.
Kossal frowned. “Deadly?”
The fisher shook her head. “Their bite will paralyze you, steal your thought for half a day.”
“A ridiculous bit of theater,” Ruc said. “Something else for the mob, and a way to make sure we don’t kill whoever brings us to the delta.”
The priest in the bloodred robe stopped in front of me. His front teeth were jagged, broken, as though someone had smashed his face into an anvil, and half a dozen scars wrapped up his cheek, behind his head. His breath smelled like rot. The serpents writhed in his hand, the yellow eyes furious, mouths stretched wide, small fangs bare and glistening. The priest reached out to me, and the creature struck so fast I didn’t realize it had happened until I felt the pain bloom through my neck, the blood drain down my chest, hot as my sweat. I tried to speak, but my tongue felt suddenly huge in my mouth. The world tipped on its side, and a moment later my legs abandoned me. I lurched, then the ground slammed into my face.
Down in the plaza people were screaming again, but they sounded far away, as though they weren’t there at all, as though all those thousands of voices were something I remembered, every person I’d ever spoken to or overheard calling out to me, or maybe not calling at all, but singing a loud, gleeful song, the melody of which I tried to follow, then failed.
23
Before the light came back, or the sound, or any feeling in my flesh, there was a drum. It sounded far off at first. I imagined some solitary woman at the center of a dugout canoe, wooden drum between her knees, eyes closed, pounding out the same basic rhythm over and over, unflagging, as though she’d been doing it for years without respite, as though she’d been doing it her whole life. Slowly, the sound grew louder, closer, so close that I could feel each beat reverberating inside me. The tempo quickened. Her hands, which had been so steady, grew frenzied. I watched inside my mind as the canoe approached, closer and closer, the drumming louder, faster, until the woman was barely a pace away. Lost in her rhythm, she didn’t see me. I tried to move, but something restrained me.
I tried to call out—Who are you?—but I had no voice.
For a moment, she looked like Ela, black hair a cloud around her head. Then, though there had been no shift that I could see, she was the woman who had saved me from the jaguar all those years ago, the muscles of her bare arms flexing as she drummed, her sleek black hair soaked with sweat, whipped across her face. Then, as though for the first time hearing something other than the trembling skin of her drum, she raised her eyes. My eyes, I realized. My face. She smiled at me with bloody teeth, closed her hands into fists, slammed them through the drum’s skin, shredding it. With a shudder that seized my entire body, I woke to the delta’s darkness.
The fronds of a finger palm shifted above me. The tree was named for the shape of the leaves, which looked like human hands. They were little more than shadows now, swaying with the wind, folding and unfolding as though trying to grasp the moon, the few dozen stars unobscured by the shredded clouds. I could hear water running almost silently between the rushes, or through the branches of some downed tree. Some creature I didn’t recognize shifted and chittered in the brush a few paces behind me.
When I tried to raise my head, pain lanced through my neck, as though someone had dragged a rusted knife along the inside of my spine. I swallowed the moan rising inside me—no need to call the delta creatures to me before I could fight, before I could even get up—and tried very hard not to move until the pain finally subsided.
The ground beneath me felt firm, even rocky. That and the palms meant I’d been abandoned on one of the delta’s true islands. If I listened carefully, I could hear breathing: Ela’s and Kossal’s, Ruc’s low rasping snore, a series of quick gasping spasms that had to be Chua. So we were all together. All still alive. Not that I liked our chances of staying that way if we remained paralyzed.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the Three sweeping toward us over the delta, leaping channels or diving through them, emerging glistening wet and naked to race through the reeds.
A hallucination, I told myself. A vision kindled from fear.
Somewhere else—seated on the deck of Anho’s Dance, for instance, with people all around me and a cup of quey in my hand—the words might have sounded reasonable, sane. How could I see creatures leagues distant streaking through the night? It was impossible. Paralyzed in the dirt of the delta, the thought brought no comfort. I opened my eyes, and tried very hard not to close them again.
After counting out a thousand heartbeats, I tested my own body once more, rolling onto my side this time, instead of bending at the waist. I managed it, barely. The snake’s venom seared my veins as I lay there, gasping for breath, ribs bruised against the rocky soil. I almost blacked out, but I knew what was waiting for me in that insensate darkness, and I clutched to consciousness like a woman to her dying child.
When the agony drained away once more, I could make out Chua lying on her back a few paces from me, mouth hanging stupidly open, still lost in her mind’s own dark corridors. She’d been untied, as had I. A little beyond her, I could see a small pile of weapons—swords, spears, axes—though for the moment the discovery didn’t do me much good. I tried to move my fingers, failed, tried again, felt as though I’d dragged them through a fire, then gave up, stared fixedly into the shifting reeds, tried to think of something to do next that might prove more effective than just lying there.