The Empire's Ruin, page 28
“Watch a cat play with a mouse sometime. Seeing the thing struggle is part of the cat’s fun.”
Vo lowered her ruined wrist, shifted her shrewd gaze to Ruc. “Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Looks like I was wrong.”
Ruc blinked. “Didn’t take much to convince you.”
“Not about the gods,” she said. “About you. You have seen them.”
His memories surged against their shackles—Kem Anh floating on her back with Ruc in the sun-spangled water, Hang Loc with his huge hands tending to the delta violets planted in the skulls of the vanquished, the two of them tossing Ruc back and forth through a warm evening rain as he laughed and laughed and laughed.…
“I’ve seen them slaughter people.”
“The Vuo Ton won’t tell me shit, but I always thought their warriors went willingly. That’s what people always said.” She frowned. “That’s why I went, after the revolution.”
“People do all sorts of things willingly. They gamble away fortunes and drink themselves to death. They betray their friends and family. They steal. They rape. They kill.”
“Hardly the fault of the gods.”
“What are the gods for, if not to help us be better?”
“Better,” Vo mused. “There’s a word slick as an eel.” She ran her eyes over his body once more. “Has serving Eira made you better?”
“It has,” he replied without hesitation.
They locked gazes. Then she shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see. The Arena has a way of clarifying these things.”
She shifted her gaze to Bien. “What about you?”
Bien didn’t move, didn’t reply, kept her eyes fixed on the deck of the ship.
Vo frowned. “Whoever you are, you seem a lot less promising than your friend.”
Gao Ji shifted uneasily. “Perhaps I was wrong to bring her, High Priestess.” He glanced at Bien. “She may have nothing to offer the Three.”
“Well shit, Gao. You dragged her all the way here. Besides…” Vang Vo took Bien by the chin, tilted her head back, stared down into her face. “Everyone has something to offer.”
“She’s not a fighter,” the man protested, carried away by his own self-castigation.
“You were in the temple when it burned?” Vo asked.
Bien refused to reply, refused to meet her eyes.
“We were,” Ruc said.
Vo nodded. “Then she’s something better than a fighter.” She looked over at the captain. “She’s a survivor.”
“I won’t do it,” Bien said, her voice raw but firm.
Vo turned back to her. “Won’t do what?”
“I won’t serve the Three. I’ll never kneel before them.”
The priestess nodded again. “Good. Too many people want to kneel. Not enough know how to stand.”
A roar went up from the crowd. Ruc glanced down into the pit. The huge swordsman was stumbling forward, but the Rooster caught him in one arm, kept him from falling, spat in his face. Then, with the blunted bronze tip of his dagger, he dragged a furrow through the soft flesh of the cheek. The larger man made a sound, half roar, half cry, the anguish and rage swallowed up in the larger noise.
Vang Vo ignored it, shifting her attention from Bien to Ruc.
“I went into your temple once. Saw a statue of your goddess. Not what I expected. Those wolves. All those arms. The fire and the sword. The avesh, chomping on its kits.” She shook her head. “What does it mean?”
“Symbols,” Ruc replied, “for the different types of love.”
“What are the different types of love?”
He hesitated. He hadn’t expected this line of questioning from the priestess.
“The scholars disagree—”
Bien cut him off. “Romantic love, familial love, love of friends and countrymen, universal love.”
Ruc glanced over at her. She was worrying the inside of her cheek with her teeth. He’d never seen her do that before. She’d always been so sure, so confident. Now it looked as though she was trying to devour herself by incremental degrees. For all that, though, she had raised her eyes for the first time since their capture, and she met Vang Vo’s stare without looking away.
The priestess pursed her lips. “What about the rest?”
“What do you mean, the rest?”
Vo shrugged. “What about love of self? Love of sun on your face? What about love for…” She frowned, searching for the word. “… doomed things? For things that won’t last?”
It was hard to know whether the woman was mocking them or not. Her voice was level. The questions seemed serious, but Ruc couldn’t imagine a croc wrangler taking a true interest in the finer distinctions of Eiran theology.
“The point,” Bien said, “is that love is the opposite of what happens here.”
Down in the pit, the larger man had finally fallen. Rooster cocked back a foot, then kicked him in the jaw.
“You know,” Vo replied, “I loved the crocs.” She grinned at the memory. It was the first time she’d fully smiled since they emerged onto the deck, and Ruc realized that one of her front teeth was broken. “The ones I was hired to kill, I mean.”
“Then why did you kill them?” Bien demanded.
The priestess shrugged. “That was the job. Didn’t stop me loving them.”
“It wasn’t love.”
“No?” Vo raised her brows. “That feeling, like something’s squeezing your heart a little bit tighter than normal? The eagerness. The way, when you really get into it, you lose track of where your body starts and the croc’s begins. The way you know in your bones what it wants, what it needs, what it fears. That … hollowness when it’s over.”
She was looking out over the Arena, not at the fight winding up below, but beyond the rough stands and the tiled rooftops of Dombâng to the green-gray smudge where the sky met the reeds.
“Bloodlust,” Bien said. “Not love.”
The priestess blinked, as though she’d forgotten Bien was there, then refocused on her. “You’re pretty quick to tell another woman what she loves.”
“You can feed me pig shit, but I won’t call it pudding.”
To Ruc’s surprise, Vang Vo laughed, snorting through her nose. “You make that one up yourself?”
Bien shook her head grimly. “One of the priests in my temple used to say it. One of the priests your men murdered yesterday.”
Vo let go of her laugh with visible regret. “They weren’t my men, girl. It was a mob.”
“One you did nothing to stop.”
“There’s a lot going on in the city right now. Annurian attacks on the Purple Baths. All this idiotic chatter about some army marching on Dombâng…”
“It’s not just chatter,” Ruc said quietly. “It’s not a normal army. And it’s not marching. At least not all of it.”
Vang Vo turned to him slowly.
“What are you talking about?”
He hadn’t intended to tell the high priestess about the khuan or their attack on the village of the Vuo Ton. When the Greenshirts seized him and Bien, his first thought had been to flee, his second to resist. Now that he was here, however, standing on the deck of the ship, confronted with the most powerful woman in Dombâng, it occurred to him that there could be a better course than mindless resistance. The information he’d gathered in the delta was valuable. Valuable things could be traded.
“I just returned from the delta,” he replied evenly. “From the Vuo Ton.”
“Thought you said you hadn’t been back in fifteen years.”
“I lied.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “And what did you find there?”
He shook his head. “Before I tell you, I want your vow, sworn on the names of the Three, to let us go.”
“To let you go.”
“Bien’s not a warrior. There’s no point forcing her to fight in the pit. All she can do down there is die.”
He felt Bien stiffen beside him, but ignored her, kept his eyes on Vang Vo instead.
“Release us,” he continued, “and I’ll tell you what’s coming. You have plenty of Worthy already. You don’t need two more.”
The high priestess studied him awhile, then turned away to gaze out over the swaying reeds once more.
“No,” she said finally. The word was a spear driven into the deck between them.
“It’s not an unreasonable trade,” Ruc pointed out.
“Reasonable trades,” Vo replied, still not looking at him, “are for fishmongers and merchants. I am neither.”
“You’re a high priest of Dombâng. It’s your job to keep the people safe.”
“If it were my job to keep them safe, I have chosen a strange way to do it.” She gestured toward the open space of the Arena. Rooster had stepped up onto the defeated warrior’s back, placed one foot between the shoulder blades, settled the other at the base of the head, grinding the man’s face into the sand. The crowd roared. After a time, he finally dismounted down, like some merchant prince alighting from a palanquin. His bow was disdainful, sardonic, but no one in the crowd seemed to mind. People were shouting, stomping furiously, bellowing their approbation. Some—unwilling to wait the necessary months until the sacred fights—were screaming for more blood, for a sacrifice right then and there. The fallen man was trying to rise, or maybe just to drag himself free of his own pain. The Rooster turned back, kicked him savagely in the ribs, spat on him once more, then strolled away toward the gate in the far wall.
“Not a lot of safety down there,” Vang Vo observed. “Even less out in the delta.” She shook her head. “It might be the work of the Greenshirts to keep people safe, or the builders, or the doctors. My work is larger than that.”
“Opening throats for your bloodthirsty gods?” Bien demanded. She seemed unable to tear her gaze away from the broken, crawling warrior.
“Showing people that survival is not the same thing as life.”
“You won’t be able to show them anything,” Ruc ground out, “if the army of this … First takes Dombâng.”
“We are preparing.”
“You can’t prepare if you don’t know what’s coming.”
“Preparation isn’t about sharpening spears and testing bowstrings. It’s here that you need to be ready,” she said, tapping him gently on the chest. “And here.” Two fingertips laid against his forehead. She shook her head. “I will not trade away my faith or the faith of the people for a few scraps of the enemy’s battle plan.” Once again she squinted toward the horizon. “If there is even an enemy.”
“There is,” Ruc said. “I can promise you that. There’s an army, and it’s coming.”
Vang Vo nodded thoughtfully. “In that case, you will be glad to have been trained here, by the best warriors in Dombâng, at the city’s expense.”
17
The air in the small room was hot, still. There was a table with a chipped ewer of water but no cups, two chairs, one of which was missing a seat, and a stool. Sunlight lanced through cracks in the walls, illuminating motes of dust. After their meeting with Vang Vo, Gao Ji had escorted them here, to a wooden chamber buried deep inside the belly of one of the abandoned ships, shoved them inside, then locked the door. There’d been no explanation about what to expect next, or how long they might have to wait for it. Bien paced back and forth several times, as though measuring the length of the room, then sat on the stool. Ruc remained standing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, after the footsteps had retreated down the corridor outside.
Bien snorted. “For burning down our temple and murdering our friends?”
“For not getting us out of the city when we had the chance.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have trusted Li Ren. Should have taken us straight to the delta…”
As he was speaking, Bien rose abruptly from the stool, crossed the small room, took him firmly by the shirt with both hands.
“If you continue talking about me,” she said, voice deceptively mild, “as though I were a small child or a delicate trinket to be transported from one place to the next with no volition of my own, joining the Worthy is going to be the least of your problems.”
Her hesitation from earlier had vanished. Her gaze was dark, fierce, sober, brave, her face inches from his own.
“In that case,” he replied after a long pause, “I’d like to be the trinket. You have my full permission to transport me out of here.”
“You’re not pretty enough to be a trinket.”
“Hasn’t stopped you from keeping me all these years.”
He could feel the heat of her fists against his chest, her breath warm on his face. It didn’t matter. She might as well have been on the other side of the delta.
Bien seemed to feel the same distance in the same moment. She loosened her grip on the front of his shirt, smoothed down the fabric, then turned away.
“We can’t stay here.”
“I think most prisoners feel that way.”
“This isn’t a prison,” she said, testing the latch on the door, then running her fingers over the rusting strap hinges. “It’s a slaughterhouse. You saw that Rooster person down in the pit earlier. There will be dozens like him. If we don’t escape, we die.”
Ruc watched as she probed the hinges, the boards of the door, the frame, the latch again, the hinges again, testing the unyielding iron and wood over and over.
“It’s not dying I’m worried about,” he said quietly.
“That seems short-sighted.”
“It’s killing.”
Bien went still. She didn’t turn.
Her voice when she spoke was barely a whisper. “We don’t have to kill.”
“That’s what they brought us here to do.”
“Then we refuse.”
He considered that. The histories of the order were filled with tales of men and women martyred in far-off lands, the words of the goddess on their lips even as the steel slid between their ribs or the fire lapped at their naked flesh. You are beautiful, St. Henseln told the Edish as they staked him down to the ice, slit his skin, and left him for the great white bears. There is more to you and better—the ivory piercing him, pinning him—than this act of violence. I see it shining in your faces, blazing in your eyes.
Unlike Henseln, however, Ruc was no saint.
Alone, he might have managed the sacrifice. He’d spent half a lifetime starving the instincts of his youth, bridling the violence, learning to find something more in life than the raw, bloody struggle. Without Bien, he might have found a way to bow his head when he was brought among the Worthy, to accept the blows, the broken bones, his own bloody end as it closed down around him. He might have gone to his grave with bravery and grace, faithful to the goddess who had raised him up and saved him from the swamps.
Or maybe that was just a story he told himself.
In truth, he hadn’t buried the past nearly as deeply as he’d hoped. Returning to the delta had dredged up all the old bones. It had felt good to be out among the rushes, paddling the narrow boat, watching the crocs sliding through the silty water. Eira help him, it had felt good to kill the snake. A snake wasn’t a person, of course—Eira held no prohibition against the killing of animals—but he knew how easily that hot, red eagerness could slide into evil. When the men came to burn the temple, when they bared their blades and began hacking down his friends, a part of him had been glad.
“You’re right,” he said. “We need to escape.”
Bien shook her head. “This ship may be a hundred years old, but the door is solid.”
“Can you…” Ruc hesitated. He wasn’t even sure of the right words.
Bien’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t want to do that,” she murmured, not looking at him. “I don’t want to be that.”
He nodded. “All right.”
Despite the fact that he’d been the one asking, it was almost a relief to hear her refuse. The thought of her giving up a fight she’d been waging her entire life, giving it up just because he’d asked, sickened him almost as much as the idea of his own eroding faith. As long as she stayed strong, he could lean on her.
She didn’t look strong.
“It’s awful,” she said quietly, “to have this thing inside you, this terrible thing.”
“I know.”
“I tell myself that I can ignore it, defeat it, that it doesn’t have to be a part of me, but that doesn’t make it go away.”
He nodded, mute.
Bien blew out a weary breath.
“It doesn’t matter what I want, does it?”
“Yes,” Ruc replied. “It does.”
He stepped behind her, wrapped an arm around her waist, pressed his lips into her dark hair. It reeked of smoke and blood, but beneath it all he could still smell her, the woman who, as much as Eira herself, had saved him from the delta.
“There will be other opportunities to escape,” he said quietly. “Other ways.”
She slipped free of his encircling arm. “Or there won’t.” Her face hardened.
“Bien—”
“If I do this,” she said, staring at the door, “then at least the … whatever it is inside me … it doesn’t have to be all evil.”
“You aren’t evil, Bien.”
“The Teachings tell us to love everyone, even those who hate us. What did I do when those men came for you? I killed them. Two men, utterly defenseless, and I shattered their skulls.”
Ruc stared at her. He could still see the blood-slicked bronze of the weapons. “They weren’t defenseless.”
She met his gaze without flinching. “Against me they were.”
Before he could reply, she turned away from him, pressed her hand against the lock, and closed her eyes.
It felt suddenly hot in the small chamber, close, as though the air had grown too thick to breathe.
Bien’s jaw tightened, the muscles in her cheek clenched, the cords of her neck strained beneath the skin. The heat radiating from her face deepened from yellow into baking reddish-black. Sweat slicked her brow, as though she weren’t just standing there but laboring beneath a crushing load. An anguished moan slipped from between her gritted teeth.
