The Empire's Ruin, page 38
* * *
Gwenna stared down at her legs sprawled across the deck of the brig. She prodded one thigh with a finger. The muscle was softer than it had been, slacker, as though it weren’t muscle at all, but just so much sodden grain stuffed into her pants. After more than a month aboard the Daybreak, she’d gone from a warrior to a passenger, a passenger to a prisoner, a prisoner to … she searched for the right word. Not a foe. Foes were dangerous. Foes bore watching. She, on the other hand, had been deposited back in the brig and forgotten.
Ballast, she decided finally, considering the dead weight of her body. She had become ballast.
She shifted her leg, just to make sure she still could. Her knee ached with the movement. Strange that her body hurt more after disuse than it had after the nastiest training. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she imagined her flesh rotting, the ligaments and tendons decomposing slowly. After weeks in the tropical heat, weeks with no baths or wash water, weeks pissing and shitting in a pot, bleeding into her blacks when the time came, sweating through the grime and crusted blood, she certainly smelled like something rotten. She could hear the guards gagging their disgust when they opened the door to shove in food or remove the shit pail. It should have shamed her. It would have shamed Gwenna the warrior, or Gwenna the passenger, or even Gwenna the prisoner, but ballast didn’t feel shame.
If only she could have said the same about her other emotions.
Ever since the Purple Baths she’d expected the grief to come, and at first she’d mistaken the pain in her limbs and joints, the knotting of her guts, the obsessive poring over her memories for that grief. As the long, hot days ground past, however, she realized that she was wrong. She’d felt grief before. It burned, painful as fire or salt water in a wound, but that burning cleaned and clarified. Grief was something a woman could pass through and emerge from better, stronger, wiser. Instead of grief, what she felt during the weeks in the brig was nausea, dizziness—even in calm seas—flashes of stabbing panic, and dread, always the dread, nameless, faceless, breathless, crouching beside her in the darkness, dragging fingers through her tangled hair, whispering wordlessly in her ear.
There was nothing clarifying about any of it.
Her mind had become a swamp, and each day she sank further below the murky surface.
She would have preferred to be alone, but whenever she looked up, Dhar was there, sitting barely a pace away, sometimes asleep, sometimes alert, sometimes moving his lips in silent prayer, always smelling of cold resolve.
What he was resolved to do, Gwenna had no idea. Maybe it was as simple as not cracking, not abandoning his oaths to his empress. Not losing his pride.
A few months earlier those would have struck her as sensible goals. Now, she couldn’t see the point in them. Cracked or not, proud or not, Dhar was still in the brig, just like her. However hard he held to his oaths, his ship was still at the bottom of the ocean, littered with the bones of the men under his command. Whatever stories he was telling himself were just that—stories. The truth was the wooden cube of their confinement, the stench, the uselessness.
Hendran had penned an entire chapter on captivity—how to stay sane, gain intelligence, eventually break free. His first instruction was simple: Find something useful to do, then do it.
There’d been a Kettral commander a century before Gwenna’s time who’d spent eight years in an Antheran prison. By the time he finally escaped, he’d learned half a dozen languages from his fellow prisoners, languages that he taught at the Eyrie for the rest of his life.
When the panic didn’t have her by the throat, Gwenna tried to work on her Manjari with Dhar, reviewing the few phrases she knew, adding gradually to her vocabulary.
“What’s the word for fear?” she asked one day.
“There are many words,” Dhar replied. “As there are many kinds of fear.” He paused, waiting for her to respond. When she did not, he shrugged. “Daksha—the fear of bodily injury. Veksha—the fear one feels for others. Bhakshma—the fear that gives focus. Bhikshma—the fear that steals all thought. Yajusha—the…” He grappled for the translation. “The pure fear.”
“Pure?”
“A fear with no … source. No cause or object.”
Gwenna repeated the word quietly. “Yajusha.”
It didn’t sound like the word for an emotion. It sounded like the name of a monster.
Dhar picked something from his teeth with a fish bone, stared into the darkness near where her head was.
“I have watched men go mad inside my brig,” he said finally.
“Yeah? What happened to them?”
“One sailor tried to punch through the bulkhead. He broke all the bones in his hands and wrists. Another hanged himself with his belt.”
Gwenna tried to imagine it—looping her belt around her neck, pulling it tight, watching her vision constrict, then go black.…
“There’s nothing in here,” she said finally, “to attach a belt to.”
Dhar stared blankly into the corner of the brig where she sat.
“The stillness is difficult for you.”
“The stillness?”
The captain nodded. “You are trained to struggle, to fight. Here there is no one to fight. Nothing to struggle against. And so you turn your training on yourself.”
“I’m good at killing things,” she replied. “If I wanted to kill myself, I’d be dead.”
He nodded again, but there was no agreement in it. “The Manjari have two words for dead. There is the dead of corpses—people, animals, all of it. We call that martya. And then there is the dead of those who go on living and breathing but as husks or shells. This we call vadhra.”
Gwenna stared at him awhile, then closed her eyes.
“I think I’m done learning your language for today.”
* * *
For today.
Those were the words she’d said, but one day bled into the next, several days became a week, and gradually she realized she’d quit. It was amazing how easy it was, after a lifetime of not quitting, to just let go. She abandoned the language lessons first, then stopped bothering to wash her face and hands with the bucket of salt water they were given once a week, then stopped bothering to get up at all.
Each day, Dhar sat across from her in the brig. She could smell his concern souring into disgust. She tried to care, couldn’t. For the first time in her life, she felt herself getting fat. It seemed impossible, given the diet of warm ale, stale bread, and salt fish, but then, she’d never been so sedentary. At night she’d prod at the flesh over her ribs with a kind of morbid fascination, test the weakness of muscles going gradually slack, thinking all the time, So this is what it’s like.
Shocking how easy it was. How sickeningly close to pleasant. What the fuck had she been doing getting up all those mornings in the blue-black dark, swimming across the ’Kent-kissing sound, running laps around Qarsh? The world was filled with people who never ran a step in their lives, who never pushed themselves, never risked anything, never failed. Why couldn’t she be one of them? She hated herself, but there was a richness to the loathing, as though it were some kind of too-sweet syrup she couldn’t stop pouring down her throat.
Two or three times, Dhar offered to teach her more of his language. She declined.
She already had the only two words she needed:
Yajusha—fear, pure fear, the fear that held her by the throat almost every waking moment—and vadhra, the word that meant death.
24
The night was still and hot, heavy with rain that refused to fall and the greasy smoke from Dombâng’s uncountable cook fires. Ruc could smell the last of the congee—fish broth laced with hot peppers and roasted sweet-reed—cooling in the massive pots set at the north end of the yard. He’d managed to eat some, but another day of Goatface’s unrelenting training had left his stomach a clenched, angry fist. It would be hours, probably past the midnight gong, before his body finally relaxed enough to finish the covered bowl he’d carried back to his room. In the meantime, he should have been sleeping. Resting, at least. Off his feet, letting his body recover before the rigors of the next day. Bien had collapsed onto her cot with her food half-chewed. Monster, Mouse, and Stupid were still awake when he left the bunkhouse, but he didn’t expect them to be up when he returned. Even Talal, who endured the daily training better than the rest of them, had been stretching quietly on the floor in a corner of the common room.
Sleeping and stretching, though, weren’t going to get any of them out of the Arena. After the initial brutality of the Way of Kings, no one had attacked them, but he’d seen Rooster and Snakebones eyeing them from across the yard. Watching. Waiting for their chance. Which might have been an argument for remaining with the others back at Goatface’s barracks. The problem was, while that might keep him alive for the night, it was hardly a long-term survival strategy. Sooner or later, someone would catch him and Bien unaware. Even if they made it all the way to the high holy days, the chances of surviving them were miserable. If they wanted to live, they needed to escape, and so, instead of sleeping or stretching with the others, Ruc was out in the yard, walking a slow perimeter around the open space, studying the shape of his prison.
By night, it looked almost cheerful. No one was cursing or bellowing, and the man who’d spent the afternoon screaming beneath the surgeon’s knife had finally fallen silent, whether resting or dead, Ruc couldn’t say. It was too dark to see the churned-up mud, the brown blood splattered across the walls of the buildings, the piles of slop outside the kitchens that no one had yet bothered lugging to the top of the wall to toss into the canal below. The windows of the bunkhouses glowed with the lamplight within, and atop the walls dozens of red-scale lanterns danced in the warm, northerly breeze.
Ruc paused in his circuit to study the top of that wall. The guards couldn’t see him where he stood, of that he was reasonably sure, but even without the light he could follow their heat as they paced their rounds or kept watch from the wooden towers. Thirty-six of them. He’d expected the number to go down at night, but in fact, the opposite was true. Daytime saw only two dozen, but evidently day wasn’t the most tempting window for escapes. The wall itself wasn’t particularly high—about ten paces—but it was utterly featureless and canted slightly inward, so that the top overhung the base by a full pace. With the right tools and half a night unobserved, it would be possible to climb out. The guards at the top, however, looked disinclined to give anyone half a night.
“The latrines are a better bet.”
Startled, Ruc rounded on the speaker, ducking his head and raising his fists.
Talal nodded thoughtfully. “Definitely faster than most priests I’ve met.”
Ruc straightened, lowered his hands. “How many priests have you met?”
“Not many. Still…”
“I’d say you’re sneakier than most Kettral I’ve met, but I haven’t met any Kettral, and I imagine you’re all pretty fucking sneaky.”
The soldier smiled. “Sneaking, swimming, stabbing—those are pretty much the main qualifications.”
“What about flying those birds?”
“I mostly just hang on underneath and try not to die.” He paused, then cast a meaningful eye around the empty yard. “Speaking of not dying, you sure it’s a good idea to be out here alone?”
“I’m not alone. You’re here. Though I couldn’t say why.”
“Trying to make sure one of my only friends in Dombâng doesn’t accidentally trip and fall on a sword while taking the night air.”
Ruc raised his brows. “Are we friends?”
“You haven’t tried to kill me yet.” He shrugged. “That’ll have to do for now.”
A litany of curses erupted from one of the bunkhouses a few dozen paces to the north. Wood scraped against wood, something that sounded like crockery crashed against something that sounded like a wall, and a moment later a man careened through the open door into the yard. It took him a moment to stumble to his feet—he was either drunk or stunned—then he started to barge back in, paused for a moment swaying on the threshold, evidently thought better of it, and staggered off toward the mess hall.
“Why are you here?” Ruc asked.
“Same reason as you.” The Kettral nodded toward the perimeter of the yard. “Walls. Men on top of them who don’t want me leaving.” He hefted the iron ball in the crook of his arm. “This thing.”
“Not here in the yard. Here in Dombâng.”
“Ah.”
“Why did you burn down the Purple Baths?”
Talal shook his head wearily. “You have no idea how many people asked me that in the days after I was captured.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That the Baths weren’t a target. My Wing hit the Baths after I was captured—to get me out. They went there because of me.”
A cloud of something that might have been weariness or regret moved across his features.
“Doesn’t explain what you were doing in Dombâng in the first place.”
The soldier locked eyes with him. “Are you accustomed to getting explanations for everything?”
Ruc thought back to the axoch strangling the foreign messenger on Bien’s bed, to the hideous creature the Vuo Ton had nailed to the posts out in the Wallow. He heard again the voice of the old Witness in his ears: Boa went to see the gods. They were not there.
He shook his head. “It’s been a while, actually, since I’ve had a good explanation.”
Talal gave him a half smile and a nod. “I know the feeling.” After a pause, he gestured to the tattoos snaking Ruc’s arms.
“Vuo Ton work, right?”
Ruc blinked, then studied the man warily. “How do you know about the Vuo Ton?”
“Read about them before the mission. Read everything we had on the history of Dombâng.”
“I suppose it’s pointless to ask you about that mission all over again.”
“Probably.”
“We don’t seem to trust each other very much. For friends.”
The Kettral considered him awhile, then nodded, as though to himself. “We were arming and training the local insurgency. Training, mostly.”
“Insurgency?” Ruc frowned. “It was the local insurgency that overthrew your empire in the first place.”
Talal gave him a lopsided grin. “The insurgency changes when the regime does. We were working with Annurian loyalists.”
“Where were you finding them? Rotting in the bellies of crocs?”
“Your high priests…”
“They’re not my priests,” Ruc reminded him.
The soldier nodded. “Dombâng’s high priests were thorough in their purges, but it’s impossible to clean out a city this size. Same way that the worship of the Three survived two hundred years of occupation, there are plenty of imperial sympathizers now. They’ve been forced into hiding, sure, but it was our job to find them, give them the skills they needed in order to resist.”
“What does this have to do with the Vuo Ton?”
“That’s where we started. Thought, given their … tenuous relationship to Dombâng, that they might make a nice spearhead for the movement. We visited them to find out.”
Ruc stared.
The Kettral looked almost apologetic. “They’re much easier to find from the air.”
It took a moment to imagine that. It was the labyrinth of the Shirvian delta that had kept Dombâng safe from the outside world for so many centuries, and the same labyrinth that had hidden the Vuo Ton from the citizens of Dombâng. The ten thousand branching channels were nearly impassible, impossible to navigate for anyone not raised among them. The thought that someone might not have to navigate them had never crossed Ruc’s mind. Talal’s casual talk about flying in to visit the Vuo Ton felt, in a way he couldn’t quite describe, like a violation.
“How long does it take,” he asked, “to get from one side of the delta to the other with one of those birds?”
“Depends on how fast you’re flying. Took us weeks to find the Vuo Ton—even from the air you can’t see through the reeds—but if you were going straight across? Maybe a portion of a morning.”
Ruc let the words sink in. A portion of a morning. If he’d asked the same question to anyone in Dombâng, the answer would have been: never. Forget about making it to the other side, most of them would have died within sight of the city.
An unexpected vertigo washed over him. He’d thought about the outside world before, of course. Prior to the revolution, sailors had come and gone every day bearing tales of far-flung ports, cities with strange names: Ganaboa, Sarai Pol, Mireia. He knew that the Annurian Empire was huge, and that there were lands beyond that empire. And yet, when he thought about his world, it was the delta that filled his mind. Dombâng sat at its center, and beyond that, the reeds stretching away in all directions. He’d traveled several times to the end of those reeds—more to establish that they had an end than anything else—set foot on the solid bank, gazed up at the massive trees … then turned around and went back. Everything beyond remained a thin, vague rim.
Until now.
He tried to see the delta as Talal saw it: a tiny patch of brown and green, just so much mud. The Shirvian could flood all of it, submerge every island, drown every living thing, and there would be people, thousands of people, millions, who would never even know. It was hard, for a moment, to understand why any of it mattered—the Arena, the revolution, the high holy days, the Three, even his own survival.
A portion of a morning.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Why do you care what happens in Dombâng? Why does Annur care?”
