The Empire's Ruin, page 22
Confusion creased Ax’s face. He began to turn, aware, finally, that someone stood behind him. Too late.
Bien clenched her right hand into a fist, and the man’s head—like too-ripe fruit caught beneath a wagon’s heavy wheel—exploded into pulp and bone, drenching Ruc, spattering Bien’s face. The body swayed a moment, then fell, blood spraying in great gouts from the neck. Bien screamed, closed her other hand, and the other man’s skull erupted. When Ruc finally struggled to his feet, she was still screaming, trembling, her arms spread wide, hands balled into fists, as though she was holding something precious inside them, something she refused to relinquish.
14
“We have to go back,” Bien said.
Ruc shook his head. The motion almost made him vomit. “If anyone survived, the mob took them.”
“Not to look for survivors. To see to the dead.”
“One thing about being dead is that the living can’t help you.”
It was an open question, in fact, whether the living could do all that much to help the living.
He couldn’t remember much about the night before—a lot of fire and screaming, blood, the statue of Eira engulfed in flame. He couldn’t remember how he’d picked up the savage bruise on the back of his head or the throbbing pain in his neck and shoulders, or escaped from the temple, or found his way to Li Ren’s tiny shack, but one thing was clear: he and Bien had escaped alone. They hadn’t brought anyone else.
Just outside the door of the shack, Li Ren hunched over a small, smoky cook fire, stirring something in a black iron pot that smelled of eel, salt, and sweet-reed. Ruc had known her for the better part of a decade, ever since he’d spent a month tending to her after she broke her leg. The old woman—she’d been old even then—was a storehouse of tales and stories, most of them probably invented, but entertaining all the same. Even after she’d healed, he’d made a point of visiting her once or twice a season. He couldn’t remember making the decision, but it made sense that they’d come here after they escaped from the temple. As much sense as anything else.
“Our friends deserve better. So does our goddess.”
Fire flared in Ruc’s memory.
“I watched the goddess burn.”
She looked over at him sharply. “I thought you said you didn’t remember anything.” An urgency he didn’t understand prowled beneath the surface of the words.
“I remember her face. I remember watching her eyes turn to ash.”
Bien studied him a moment, as though waiting for him to say more. When he did not, her shoulders relaxed a fraction. She nodded. “That was just an image. Eira’s not like the Three. She doesn’t live inside some idol. She lives in what we feel, what we do. And what I’m going to do is go back.”
Ruc closed his eyes against the sunlight filtering through the cracks in Li Ren’s hut. Maybe it was safe. The murderous mob was almost certainly gone. The residents of the eastern Serpentine would have picked through the rubble already, dragging out anything of value. As long as they had the gold, the glass, the brass, they weren’t likely to care who came looking for the bodies. As for the Greenshirts—they didn’t have enough soldiers to patrol every burned-out ruin in the city. So what if a couple of Eira’s priests had survived the slaughter? It wasn’t as though he and Bien were in any position to mount a counterrevolution.
“Are you coming with me?” she asked, studying him.
There was an ache in her voice, a need he wasn’t accustomed to hearing.
He sat up, leaned forward. His split lip cracked open when he kissed her. He ignored the salt taste of his blood, and so did she.
“Of course I’ll come,” he said quietly, after he’d finally pulled away.
“Not before you eat.” Li Ren turned in the doorway, waved her wooden spoon in admonition. “And not until you promise to come back when you’ve finished.”
“Thank you,” Ruc said. “For everything. We’ll come back, at least for tonight.”
Bien nodded. “We’ve got nowhere else to go.”
* * *
A drunk was pissing on the smoldering wall. Urine hissed, ghosted upward in fetid steam.
“Stop it,” Ruc said, his voice rougher than he’d intended.
The drunk looked over, frowned, narrowed his eyes as though trying to decide how seriously he needed to take this order. The truth was, probably not all that seriously. Ruc’s head still throbbed. He’d walked the quarter mile from Li Ren’s shack to the temple without help from Bien, but whatever had left the massive lump on the back of his head had drained away most of his strength. The man seemed to sense his exhaustion.
“Fuck’re you?”
“I am a…” Ruc began.
Bien silenced him with a hand on the arm. She shot a significant glance at the street beyond, where people went about their business, all of them trying a little too hard not to look at the burned temple, not to look at the people standing near it.
“We had friends who lived here,” Bien replied.
“Friends!” The drunk cackled. “Hah. You want to loot the place, you’re too late. S’all gone. Picked over.”
Rage washed through Ruc, like a hot spring storm blowing up out of a clear sky. He suddenly wanted to hit the man, to shove his leering face into the ashes, to knock him down, start kicking him.…
He closed his eyes.
I am a servant of the goddess of love. I am a priest of Eira.
He didn’t feel like a priest. He barely felt like a man. Standing was hard. Thinking was hard. When he moved too quickly, the world reeled.
“Did anyone survive?”
It took him a moment to realize the words were his own.
“Hah,” the drunken man replied again. He retied the rough cord he was using for a belt, then nodded toward the wreckage. “What d’you think?”
The temple was a ruin, the lineaments of the graceful nave lost in the jumble of snapped beams and shattered glass. The roof had burned away or collapsed, leaving a few charred pillars to stab the sky. The northern and western walls still stood, though they leaned precariously inward. To the south and east there was only wreckage: smashed statuary, twisted lintels, all the polished teak burned to a shapeless slag. The place reeked of torched oil and an awful, almost-sweet smell that could only be human flesh.
Bien, who had been gnawing at her lip since they first arrived, abruptly doubled over, puked into the dirt, straightened, wiped her mouth with the edge of her sleeve, and pointed.
At first it just looked like more destruction. Then he saw. When the wall had slumped sideways, one of the tall, graceful windows had clamped shut. Clamped shut on someone who’d been trying to climb out. There was an arm—brown flesh charred black—fingers twisted into claws. There was a head, the hair singed away, the mouth locked in an open scream. It was impossible to know whether it was a man or a woman, whether the collapse had killed them or just held them there for the fire.
A delta vulture alighted on the wall just above the corpse. The bird turned its head one way, then the other. The brown-black feathers were mangy, matted, missing in places, the black eyes wary in the tight pink featherless skin of the face. But the beak—it looked like an artifact, something precious to someone, kept meticulously polished and ready for the moment it might be needed.
Ruc turned from the bird back to the drunk. “It’s time for you to go,” he said.
“Or?” the man demanded, swaying on his feet.
“It’s time for you to go,” Ruc said again.
He didn’t raise his voice or change his posture, but something in his eyes made the other man blink, then take a step back. He ran an unsteady gaze over Ruc, seemed to pause at the sight of the tattoos snaking out of his shirt cuffs, then hocked a glob of phlegm into the ash.
“Good luck with your friends,” he said, then turned to stagger unsteadily back toward the street.
For a while Ruc and Bien stood there, staring silently at the wreckage. The rest of the compound had survived. Beyond the burned temple, the dormitory still stood, and the refectory and infirmary, smeared black with soot, but otherwise untouched. No one moved across the plaza, however. The doors were all still, the windows silent.
“We need to finish burning the bodies,” Bien said at last.
“The crematorium…” Ruc glanced to the east.
“No one will take them to the crematorium.”
Ruc nodded slowly. There were people out on the street, a few dozen paces distant. The leaning walls obscured him and Bien from most of the eyes, but anyone who bothered to really look could see them clearly enough. Not that there was anything to be done for it. They had come to do a job. The sooner they finished it and got back to Li Ren’s shack, the better.
“I’ll bring the bodies.”
Bien nodded, then gestured to the labyrinth of shattered timber. “I’ll rekindle a fire with what’s left of this.”
Ruc had heard that in other parts of the world, where the dirt was dirt rather than layers of mud, people laid their dead in holes in the ground. It seemed like a disgusting, degrading custom. In Dombâng, bodies were always burned—the rich on pyres behind the walls of their own courtyards, everyone else in the massive crematorium on Rat Island. Instead of putrefying into a sack of rotting organs, the body became heat, flame, fine white ash.
But not the bodies in what was left of Eira’s temple.
Some were nearly untouched—a dent in the skull or a slit between the ribs, a smear of blood seared black, eyes wide and lifeless. These were the heaviest, but the easiest. They looked like the people they’d been. Ruc was able, as he carried them to Bien’s pyre, to imagine them alive. He apologized to them silently, bid them farewell, committed them by name into the arms of the goddess.
Most of the corpses, though, were blackened, withered, desiccated, half-chewed-through by the fire. Their limbs broke when he tried to lift them. The eyes had melted away. The skin sloughed off when he gripped it, leaving his hands covered in a black, greasy char. A day earlier they had been his family, his friends: Old Uyen, and Hoan, and Chi Hi, and Ran. Now it was impossible to tell one from the other. They felt loathsome, like things that had never been human, and Ruc hated himself for this loathing. He wanted to dive into the canal and scrub himself clean, but the priests and priestesses of Eira had not taught him to scrub off the last remains of the people he’d loved. Instead, one by one, whole or in grisly pieces, he carried the bodies to the fire, finished what the attackers began.
When it was over, he stood beside Bien, staring into the blaze. She’d been working at least as hard as he had, dragging broken beams to the pile, keeping it high enough, hot enough to do its purifying work. Her face was streaked with soot, sweat, tears, her right hand bruised and bleeding. Two fingernails on the left had torn away. Ruc wanted to put an arm around her, but he reeked of charnel. He settled for a hand on the shoulder instead. She leaned into him, as though she couldn’t hold herself up.
“We should go,” he said at last. “It’s not safe here.”
“It’s not safe anywhere.”
Fire licked up around the last of the corpses. Heat chivvied the sparks aloft, where they glowed against the wan sky, then failed.
“They might come back.”
She shook her head. “No one’s coming back. They did what they came to do.”
Ruc squeezed his eyes shut. Visions flickered across the backs of his lids—priests begging; walls aflame; weapons bright in the firelight. His head ached. He couldn’t string the memories together. He remembered sitting in the small chapel with Bien before it all started, remembered the doors bursting open, remembered Old Uyen pressed up against the altar. The rest was chaos or darkness.
“How did we escape?”
Bien shifted away. He opened his eyes to find her staring at him, her gaze black, bleak.
“You don’t remember.”
“I remember shouting, fighting.” He hesitated. “Someone with a scar and a mustache.” The face was there, leering and immediate, then gone. “Did I have a weapon?”
“You had a candelabra.”
His hand remembered better than his mind—the weight of the thing, the heat emanating from the metal.
“I fought our way free with a candlestick?”
Bien hesitated, looked past him, then nodded. “Yes. You saved us.”
Something about that wasn’t right, but he couldn’t remember what.
“There’s more,” he said slowly.
Someone he’d abandoned? The thought sickened him. He’d abandoned everyone, evidently. Everyone but Bien.
“No,” she said. “You fought them off. You saved me.”
The silence was a wedge driven between them. Ruc’s pulse pounded in his head. His legs felt like water. A few feet in front of him, fire chewed at the bones.
“Why didn’t I save anyone else?”
“You tried.” Tears stood in her eyes. “There were too many.”
“You’re leaving something out.”
In all the years he’d known her, Bien had never lied to him, not that he was aware of. He’d never heard her lie to anyone. Which meant she was protecting him from something he’d done, or, more likely, something he’d failed to do. His mind was a sieve.
“I need to know.”
He closed his eyes again, but all he found were other, older memories:
Kem Anh teaching him to plunge his stiffened fingers into the eyes of a croc, to dig deep, searching for the brain. Hang Loc showing him how to hold the throat of a wounded jaguar just so, squeezing, squeezing, his own sun-darkened, mud-slicked body pressed down into the hot fur until the beast’s thrashing weakened, then ceased.
What if he hadn’t put that behind him? What if, in the moment of truth, he’d forgotten all Eira’s lessons, lapsed back into the old animal savagery?
He met Bien’s gaze. “Whatever it is. Whatever I did. I need to know.”
She exhaled—a long, shuddering breath.
“We ran,” she said.
He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to believe that or not. Running was the coward’s path, but better a coward than a killer. He studied Bien for a long moment, trying to read her eyes, then nodded, exhausted. It made sense. There had been dozens of men in the temple, armed men. If he’d fought, he would have died, regardless of his childhood. He must have run. That’s why he was there, tending the fire, while the others lay unmade inside the wreckage left by the blaze.
“You saved me,” Bien said, putting a hand on his arm. “You held off those two while I fled.…”
Those two …
Ruc opened his eyes, stared into the fire’s heart until they burned. He could almost hold the memory—two men, both armed, sneering, backlit by flame.…
“They murdered Uyen—”
“Don’t think about it.” Bien’s voice was thin, as though someone were strangling her.
“They murdered Uyen. I went after them with the candelabra but something hit me.…”
He raised a hand to the back of his head, pressed hard against the scabbed-over egg, let the pain fill him, then let go. The relief was a kind of clarity. He stared at the fire before him as it leaped and hissed.
“We should go,” Bien said.
“I can almost remember.…”
“We should go.…”
It was a plea this time. He’d never heard her plead.
In the funeral pyre, a thick beam, chewed through by the heat, folded on itself, collapsed in a red mess and a splatter of sparks … and suddenly he could see it all over again: the heads of his attackers exploding in a bloody pulp, the bodies dropping, Bien standing just behind them, hands balled into fists, her face a mask.
The vision threatened to unstring his legs.
“You’re a leach,” he said, turning to stare at her. “Sweet Eira’s mercy, you’re a leach.”
Tears carved down her sooty face. She reached out for him. Unthinking, he moved to block.
She flinched, let her hand drop.
“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping forward.
Mute, she shook her head and moved back, refused to meet his eyes.
“Did you know?” he asked, his voice a husk. “Before last night?”
She nodded.
“For how long?”
“I didn’t want this,” she whispered. “I never use the power.”
“But for how long?”
She stared into the fire as though the answer to his question raged in the flames. “Since I was eight.”
She sat down abruptly, as though someone had hacked her legs from beneath her. Ash billowed up in a quiet cloud, settled on her black hair, turning it gray, as though she’d become an old woman in the space of a few moments.
Slowly, he lowered himself beside her.
“It’s all right,” he said. The words sounded useless, stupid.
She shook her head. “There is nothing right about it.”
“Like you said—you never use the power.”
“I used it last night.”
“Used it to save people. To save me.”
She shook her head again. “Doesn’t matter. A leach is a twisted creature, polluted and unnatural…”
“Who cares about the Annurian penal code? The empire isn’t even here anymore.”
“It’s not just Annurians,” she replied dully, “and you know it. Burn them, break them, bury them all, for every living leach is an affront to the beauty and the courage of the Three.”
How much time, he wondered, had she spent studying the statutes? How much time lacerating herself with the condemnation of poets and statesmen and playwrights? He imagined her still awake when the rest of the priests were long asleep, poring over old tomes, committing to memory the language of her own self-loathing.
“Love is not earned,” he quoted. “Love exists beyond all limit and precondition. It is given absolutely, or it is not love. It is given with no thought of merit or blame—”
She cut him off with a sob. “There’s nothing in the Fourth Teaching, Ruc, about leaches. There’s nothing in any of the Teachings about leaches.”
“You think I need a Teaching to love you?”
He shifted closer. The worst thing was that she looked just like herself. Her eyes were red from the crying and the smoke; her face smeared with soot and ash; she was gaunt, exhausted; but for all that, she looked like the woman he had held so many times. She glanced over at him.
