The Empire's Ruin, page 14
Delta silence roared in his ears.
He measured the distance from the snake’s head to his face, from his hand to the snake’s head. Not close enough. If he was going to have any chance at all, he needed to draw it off. His chest ached with the effort of doling out his breaths, as though he’d been bitten already.
Slowly as a reed floating on the water’s top, he shifted his free hand, drawing it back toward him until it hung even with the dancemaster’s head. Like Ruc himself, the snake could see heat. The warmth of his body had it intrigued, but plenty of things in the delta were warm. It wouldn’t strike until there was motion.
He tucked aside all the stories he’d heard—of people clawing at their own throats, of eyes bulging with the lack of breath—and tried to remember his sun-bright, naked days playing with the snakes. They tended to strike high, not at where their prey was but where it would be when startled into flight. Ruc pressed the pad of his thumb against his middle finger, felt the tension creep up his arm to his shoulder, then, all in one motion, snapped, dropped the hand, looped in underneath, swept up, and caught the striking serpent just behind the head.
For a shard of a heartbeat he thought he’d pulled it off.
Then the dancemaster twisted in his grip, doubled back on itself, sank fangs deep into his wrist.
Ruc dropped the paddle, seized the snake with both hands, wrung hard until he felt the spine beneath the coiled muscle snap.
Too late.
He’d grabbed the creature too far behind the head, left it enough room for it to bury one final bite. The dead, red eyes gazed at him. He tossed the body in the bottom of the boat—no need to chum the water for some other eager predator—and raised his hand to study the wound.
Two drops of blood welled at the puncture. He didn’t bother slicing it or trying to suck out the venom. It was too far inside him already. He could feel it, like barbed, white-hot wire threaded into his vein, dragged deeper and deeper with each spasm of his heart. He tried to remember how many breaths he’d taken—three? Four? The delta air clogged in his lungs, suddenly too hot, as though he’d plunged his head into a boiling pot and tried breathing the steam. Around him, the reeds shifted, swayed, wavered. A breeze? Or his vision, already fraying?
He put an unsteady hand on the rail of the boat, stared into the reed-sliced sunlight, waited for his body to start that last awful dance.
Instead, the fiery spike that had been driving up his arm slowed, then stopped. After another dozen agonizing breaths, it began to fade from a blaze to a vicious itch, then a vague tingle, until all that remained was a deep ache at the site of the puncture and a hand’s span upward toward his elbow.
He lifted the limb, turned it over, stared awhile at the twin drops of blood, drops that were clotting already, clotting, as they always had, far faster than human blood should clot.
He closed his eyes. The sounds of the delta swaddled him—water lap and bird chirp and the low drone of ten million tiny insects.
So.
Fifteen years away had changed nothing. Turning his back on that sun-green world of mud and blood and death had changed nothing. Denying the gods of the Vuo Ton had changed nothing. Eira had not remade him in her image. Despite the years of prayer and penance, it was all still there, the redsight and the memory, the strength, the ability to survive what no one should survive. He was still what he had always been.
Whatever that was.
9
Gwenna felt, during the ride to the western port of Pirat, as though she were moving underwater, or into an unrelenting wind. It was no fault of the weather. The air was clear and crisp. Sun shone on the towns and wide fields outside Annur. In fact, she, Kiel, and the two legionaries charged with guarding them made good time. The short imperial flag carried by Cho Lu ensured that all traffic on the wide boulevard—farmers with their carts, merchants with their wagons, women and men going about their business—moved smartly aside to stand on the verge of the road until Gwenna and the others passed. They were able to trot the flats and mild downhills, keep their horses to a brisk walk on the ups. Compared to some of the treks Gwenna had been on it was relaxed, even casual. And yet, it was a struggle just staying on the fucking horse.
She couldn’t say exactly what she wanted to do instead. Stop? Turn around? Dismount and start fucking running? Sleep? It was insanity—the small part of her mind not bent to the struggle recognized that. There was no reason not to carry on, nothing impeding her, and yet just sitting in that saddle took an effort of will equal to any she’d ever felt when fighting for her life.
Cho Lu and Pattick only made it worse. They might have been a couple years older than her—twenty-three or twenty-four, maybe—but they looked young. She caught the glances they shot at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. Even with her eyes closed, she could smell the awe on them, the marvel, the excitement. She hadn’t come flat out and told the two legionaries that she was Kettral—that she had been Kettral—but they weren’t fucking blind. They could see the blacks and the twin blades—there’d been no reason to discard the weapons she’d spent a lifetime learning to fight with. They could see her scars.
The legionaries had probably never met one of the Kettral before, but they knew the stories. Some of the stories, anyway, the ones where the empire’s greatest warriors swam oceans, razed fortresses, fought on in the face of horrific wounds, saved people, won everything in the final moment, triumphed. Obviously they’d never heard the ones where Kettral died pointlessly because their commanders fucked up.
Halfway through the first day, Cho Lu couldn’t restrain himself any longer. Reining his horse in a little, he fell back beside Gwenna.
“I just want to say,” he murmured, “that it’s an honor to be riding with you, Commander. For me and Pattick both.”
Gwenna turned to look at him.
He looked vaguely Dombângan—straight black hair, brown skin, brown eyes.
“I’ve spent the last two months,” Gwenna said, “killing people with names like yours, Cho Lu. People who look a lot like you.”
The words were cruel, unnecessary. The Annurian legions were home to soldiers from all over Vash and Eridroa. Cho Lu’s family might have been Dombângan—his father or his mother, or one of their parents. Didn’t mean he was any less loyal to the empire. Still, if a little nastiness meant he’d stop looking at her with all that ’Shael-spawned admiration, she was willing to pay the price.
The legionary looked momentarily taken aback, then he smiled, shook his head. “I know about the trouble down in Dombâng.”
“Trouble?” Gwenna shook her head. “It’s been a half-decade fucking massacre, one that started with thousands of legionaries hacked up and chucked in the canals.”
He nodded resolutely. “We all heard when it happened. My grandfather was Dombângan, but he moved to Annur eighty years ago. My parents grew up in the Silk Quarter, and so did I.” He rolled up his sleeve to show her the rough tattoo of the Annurian sun inked into his muscular forearm. “There’s not a man in the legions more loyal than I am.”
“It’s the truth,” Pattick added.
He’d dropped back beside them while they were talking. Unlike Cho Lu, Pattick was almost as pale as Gwenna herself. His hair was brown rather than red, but freckles spattered his cheeks and forehead. He didn’t have his friend’s good looks or easy smile, was, in fact, more than a little ugly, his chin and ears too large, his green eyes too close together. Like Cho Lu, however, he had the physique of a soldier.
“Back when that Dombângan nastiness first happened,” he went on, “there were a few men in the company who went after Cho Lu.”
“Back when it first happened,” Gwenna said, “the two of you were what? Fourteen?”
“Sixteen.” Cho Lu grinned.
“A year too young for the legions,” she pointed out.
His grin widened. “We lied.”
Not that Gwenna was one to judge. She’d been a cadet at eight, had been blowing things up since the age of ten.
“So what happened,” she asked, “when your brothers in arms came after you?”
Cho Lu shrugged. “I had to … reeducate a few of them. Remind them that the oaths we take are more important than the names our parents gave us.”
“And how did they take to this reeducation?”
“Scorch still has the scar over his eyebrow, and Farrel’s fingers healed a little crooked, but they got the message. Fought shoulder to shoulder for another five years. Until now, actually. We were the ones who put down the Anklishan Rebellion. We were the ones that burned Setje’s bandits straight out of Raalte.”
For a moment, his smile was almost cocky. Then he remembered who he was talking to, and the pride slid from his face, replaced by that ’Kent-kissing awe again.
“Of course,” he went on, “I’m sure all that’s nothing, kids’ stuff next to whatever the Kettral have been up to.”
The Kettral, she wanted to tell him, have been having their asses handed to them. We’re practically extinct. The birds are gone, and the few soldiers who survived the civil war are mostly too old or too injured to fight.
Instead she looked him in the eye, said nothing, then rode on in what she hoped was a pointed silence.
Not pointed enough, evidently.
After pacing her for a quarter mile or so, Cho Lu spoke again.
“I get it. Of course we know you can’t talk about … whatever it is you’ve been doing. But maybe you can settle an argument Pattick and I have been having.”
Pattick looked uncomfortable, but Gwenna could smell the eagerness on him, too, the curiosity.
“Probably not,” she replied.
Cho Lu laughed as though she’d cracked the best joke of his life. “Probably not!” He glanced over at Pattick. “Probably not, she says.” He shook his head, then went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “So, here’s the question, right? Can Kettral breathe underwater?”
“No.” Maybe that would be the end of it.
The two legionaries exchanged a glance. Cho Lu didn’t look remotely convinced.
“Is it true you can see in the dark?”
That one was true, but there was no reason to feed their obsession.
“No.”
“Do you feel pain?”
She almost choked. Since the slaughter at the Baths, her pain had been almost constant. She’d thought, for the first few days, that it was the result of the shrapnel she’d ripped from her shoulder, along with the other cuts and bruises she’d picked up fighting her way free. Her skin had stitched itself shut just as it always did. The bruises had faded. But she still felt as though there was an iron fist wrapped around her heart, long thorns driving into her brain, a pile of bricks on her chest, making it hard to breathe.
“Yes,” she managed grimly. “We feel pain.”
Pattick looked slightly disappointed. Cho Lu, however, just winked at her. “Understood, sir. We don’t expect you to reveal your secrets.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
A lie, of course, but there was truth behind it. The secrets she had weren’t the kind either of the legionaries wanted to hear.
“About the birds…” Cho Lu began.
“About shutting your mouth,” Gwenna said before he could continue, “and letting me ride in peace.”
Pattick looked chastened, but Cho Lu just smiled. “Of course, Commander. Just an honor to ride at your side, sir.”
An honor. As though she were some kind of fucking hero.
* * *
If they’d pressed hard, they could have reached Pirat in a single day. According to the Emperor, however, the ship wouldn’t be provisioned and ready to sail for two, and so they stopped at a small inn frequented by travelers between the western port and the capital. Cho Lu went about acquiring rooms while Pattick saw to the stabling of the horses, which left Gwenna alone with Kiel in the private dining room the innkeeper had fallen over herself to provide them with. The woman brought food—quail, figs, goat cheese, sliced firefruit—along with a bottle of wine.
Gwenna ignored it all. Her stomach was a knot. Any time she put food in her mouth it tasted like ash. She had dreams where she was choking to death, and when she looked at the figs she could imagine them swelling in her mouth, lodged in her throat, blocking the air as she clawed at her neck.…
“You should eat,” Kiel said.
“I don’t think the Emperor would have sent me on this mission if I didn’t know how to feed myself.”
The historian shrugged, twisted one of the legs from the quail, stripped the meat from the bone with his teeth. Gwenna watched him chew.
She didn’t want to be there, in that room. She wanted to be away already, on board the ship. She wanted to be fighting someone, killing someone. She clenched her fist, felt her anger rise. She couldn’t put anything right sitting in a private dining room watching the historian eat his quail, but her room wasn’t ready, and if she went out to the common room, Pattick and Cho Lu would be waiting with their wide eyes and their questions. She forced herself to pick up a slice of firefruit, forced herself to chew and swallow it. If she was going to fight, she needed to stay strong, and besides, she had questions for the imperial historian.
“What don’t I know?” she asked, studying him.
Kiel paused in his chewing, raised an eyebrow. “The list, I would imagine, is long.”
It was a good joke, but he didn’t smell like a man who’d just made a joke. He smelled like a fucking stone.
“Are you a leach?” she pressed.
The question would have provoked some kind of reaction from almost anyone. The Kettral worked with leaches, but everyone else in Annur burned them or hanged them or drowned them. Kiel should have been shocked, angry. Instead, he looked mildly intrigued.
“Why do you ask that?”
Gwenna hesitated. She couldn’t answer honestly without revealing a secret of her own. No one outside the Kettral knew about the Trial, the slarn, the eggs, and the heightened senses they conferred.
“I’m good at reading people. What’s your well?”
The historian shook his head. “I’m not a leach.”
“You’re not just a historian.”
“No one is just anything.”
It was hard to know what to say to that. Gwenna herself was just a soldier. Or she had been, until the Emperor stripped her of her rank.
“Why are you on this mission?”
“As the Emperor said—for my knowledge of Menkiddoc. Among other things.”
“Your knowledge of Menkiddoc comes from a pile of books that are thousands of years out of date.”
“Some of it.”
“You’re working with a Csestriim map and a Csestriim text when the Csestriim have been extinct for how long now?”
“Roughly ten thousand years.”
“Right. Ten thousand years. If I planned an invasion of Eridroa with a Csestriim map, I’d be mighty fucking dismayed to find an entire empire already here.”
“The coastlines did not die with the Csestriim, though some have shifted. New mountains did not spring from the ground in the last ten thousand years.”
“You’re not coming along to show us the coastlines and mountains. That’s what maps are for.”
“There is more to Menkiddoc than what appears on the maps.”
The words were mild enough. He chose a fig from the platter, chewed thoughtfully. He didn’t look like a man discussing a lost continent. He didn’t look like a man discussing much of anything at all. Thing was, Gwenna didn’t trust the way he looked.
“You’ve been there,” she said at last.
It was the only explanation that made sense.
The historian nodded. “A long time ago.”
Gwenna gestured to his crooked nose, crooked jaw, crooked fingers. “Is that where you got all this?”
“My injuries?” The historian studied his own hands. “No. Most of those came much later.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Studying.”
“Studying what?”
“History.”
She frowned. “I thought historians were interested in people. Why go to a place where there aren’t any?”
“It was not always as empty as it is now.”
“It’s been uninhabited as long as Annur’s been around, as long as people have been writing history.”
“People,” Kiel replied, “have not been writing history very long.”
The words sat between them while the historian returned his attention to the quail. Gwenna watched as he used a fork and knife to carve into the breast. She’d been eating meat her entire life—fish, mutton, pork, beef, venison, whatever she could trap or Annick could shoot—and yet suddenly the sight of the historian stripping the meat from the skeleton beneath made her think of Talal standing in the doorway to the Baths, blood pouring from his wounds, his skin charred, as though he’d been roasted on a spit.
She turned away, gazed out the small window. The road to the west was wide and spear-straight, stabbing through the low hills and villages toward the distant glimmer of the sea. The sun setting on the water looked like fire, then like blood.
“So what’s in Menkiddoc?” she asked finally.
“Monsters,” Kiel replied evenly. “Sickness. Madness.”
Gwenna turned to stare at him. “According to the Emperor, that’s all just horseshit and stories.”
“People wouldn’t tell stories,” the historian replied, “if those stories didn’t mean anything.”
She grappled with that a moment. “And you’ve told the Emperor this? She didn’t believe you?”
He shook his head.
“You didn’t tell her?” Gwenna pressed, surprise warring with her confusion.
“I did not.”
“You understand that’s treason?”
“Treason?” He mulled the word as he poured tea into a cup, spooned in honey, swirled it around. “It seems to me more treasonous to deny the empire a tool of which it has such dire need.”
“The birds.”
He inclined his head. “The birds.”
