The Empire's Ruin, page 56
Snakebones furrowed her brow in mock consternation. “And we haven’t even begun.”
Rooster pointed out toward the yard. “You may not have noticed, but people are always making noise in here—grunting, shouting, cursing, and yes, even an unseemly amount of screaming. No one seems to care much, but by all means—add your voice to the chorus!”
“There are easier targets than us,” Ruc said quietly.
“Easier?” Rooster chuckled. “Who said we were looking for easy?”
“There’s no way you can hold both of us at the same time.”
“There’s no need to hold you down,” Snakebones pointed out, “if you’re dead.”
Ruc studied the woman. Eagerness and lust baked off of her in a red-black haze. This was why she’d volunteered for the Worthy—not to face the Three, or not primarily—but for the thrill of bending men and women to her wishes. He’d seen her about it dozens of times already, leaning over people in the mess hall, snapping at them, grabbing whatever she could grab. He’d watched cats play similar games with mice and small rats, batting at them, tossing them in the air, nipping at the tails as the creatures cowered or tried to flee.…
“You don’t want us dead,” he said.
Snakebones stared at him incredulously, then turned to Rooster, as though to share the hilarity.
“No one sweats when they’re dead,” Ruc went on. “No one cringes. No one cries. And that’s the fun of it for you, isn’t it? Not the sex. A woman among the Worthy? You can get sex anywhere. It’s the cringing and crying you want.”
Snakebones laughed, but this time anger edged her mirth.
“I won’t deny that I enjoy a little light cringing.”
“You’re not going to get it. You don’t want to kill us, at least not right away, but there’s no way you can hold us.”
Rooster ran a hand over his spiked comb of hair, then waggled a finger at Ruc.
“You think you’re smart.”
“I think I can count. There’s two of you, two of us. Unless you kill us, we’re walking out of here. Unmolested.”
The shorter warrior sighed. “He may have a point, Snakebones. I don’t know that I can hold them both while you do … whatever it is you’re planning to do. I guess we’ll have to involve a fifth in this little tryst of ours.”
Ruc stole a quick glance at the storehouse. No one was approaching, despite Rooster’s threats.
“Another day, maybe,” Ruc said, stepping forward.
Snakebones moved faster than he would have believed, pivoting on one foot, whipping her spear at him. Ruc’s body took over as his mind was still grappling with the fact, tossing up an arm to block the shaft, knocking it aside, pulling back into a defensive guard.
Rooster raised an eyebrow. For the first time since they’d met, he looked surprised.
“Not bad, love boy. Not bad. Where’d you learn that?”
Ruc ignored the question. Obviously, he’d been wrong. Snakebones really was willing to kill them. To kill him, at least. It made a bleak sort of sense. She wouldn’t be able to watch him squirm, but then she and Rooster could take their time with Bien. The realization should have terrified him, but he’d learned from the delta gods themselves how to handle terror.
He could still remember Hang Loc abandoning him in the middle of a river churning with qirna. The fish, Ruc knew, were attracted to only two things: movement and blood. He wasn’t bleeding, which meant that if he could remain perfectly still in the neck-deep water, if he could clamp down on his panic, then he would survive. All day, they left him there, watching from the bank, Kem Anh with her golden eyes, Hang Loc with his dark ones. Night fell. Ruc could feel the fish brushing against his chest, his shins, some of them even testing the dead flesh of his feet with small bites. On the sand, Hang Loc and Kem Anh coupled noisily. All night he waited, measuring out each breath so that his chest didn’t rise or fall too quickly. When the morning finally came, he looked down and found the fish gone, along with his fear.
The same calm settled over him now. A mistake would doom both himself and Bien. Rooster still hadn’t drawn his knife. He was watching with a mix of interest and amusement. Snakebones, however, looked deadly serious. She was fast, faster than any of the Worthy aside from maybe Rooster himself. And the spear gave her the reach.
She feinted high, feinted low.
Ruc let go of all the techniques Goatface had been trying to drill into him and let his body respond. Once, twice, three times he knocked away the spear. She was pressing him, striking at his arms and legs, but avoiding the chest, the stomach, the head. Evidently she wanted him alive after all, alive but disabled. That limited her attacks.
The next time the spear lashed out, he caught it just behind the bronze head. For a moment he and the woman stood there, frozen, each straining with the shaft as the sharp head glittered a handsbreadth from his shoulder. Her breath came in gasps between her bared teeth as she bore down. She was strong—far stronger than Ruc would have expected—and she held the spear’s shaft in both hands. He shouldn’t have been able to hold it back, hadn’t really expected to. His muscles bunched with the strain, trembled, but refused to give way.
The woman met his eyes, her grimace turned to a grin, and, without warning, she ripped the spear back. He let go almost in time, but the barb caught his palm, ripping a shallow furrow through the skin.
Snakebones grinned even wider.
She kept her eyes on Ruc as she spoke to Rooster. “Our fifth friend should be here any moment now.”
And then, between one breath and the next, it hit him.
The gash in his hand burned as though branded. Pain raged in the wound for a moment, then crawled into his veins, began to drag its agonizing way up his arm. He recognized the shape of that pain, though in his languageless days in the delta he’d had no words for either the small orange snake or its poison. He knew that its bite could paralyze a mud rat or jaguar, but it was only later, when he joined the Vuo Ton, that he realized it did the same to humans as well. Most humans, anyway. Those not suckled for years at the breast of Kem Anh.
Snakebones stepped back. She was breathing heavily, but he could see the eagerness gleaming in her eyes.
Rooster spread his hands in mock apology. “What can I say? She cheats.”
“Don’t worry,” Snakebones cooed. “It won’t kill you. It’ll just make you a little more docile.”
“What did you do to him?” Bien demanded, shoving her way forward, anger blotting out her fear of the warriors or their weapons.
Ruc started to lift a hand to hold her back, then stopped himself, let the limb fall.
Snakebones’s smile widened.
“He’s just feeling a little stiff, sweetheart,” she said, stepping forward, reaching out for Bien. “Not stiff in the exciting way, I’m afraid, but Rooster and I are used to making do.”
To Ruc’s shock, Bien lashed out, aimed a punch directly at the other woman’s face.
Snakebones caught it, twirled her around as though the two of them were dancing, then dragged her close, pressed her body against Bien’s, her face to the back of her neck. Bien struggled, but the woman held her tight.
“First thing we do,” she murmured into Bien’s ear, “is we watch.”
Ruc’s heart raged. He ached to hurl himself at Snakebones, to shatter her face, to rip Bien from her grip, then keep ripping. He forced the instinct down. A predator knew when to lie still and when to lunge.
The pain in his arm had eased, whatever fortified his blood chasing the poison back until all that remained was a nasty throbbing. He ignored the strength returning to his limbs and instead let himself stiffen, then drop to the soft dirt. Rooster narrowed his eyes, as though sensing something wasn’t right.
Snakebones had no such misgivings.
“Let’s see what kind of lover your man really is,” she said, dragging Bien down so that her face was a few inches from Ruc’s own.
Her eyes brimmed with horror. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Ruc, I’m sorry.”
He met her gaze but didn’t reply. The poison of the orange snake locked the jaw along with everything else.
Above and behind him, he heard Rooster approaching finally.
“One thing I appreciate about the Dombângan fashion,” the man said, reaching down, flipping up Ruc’s noc so that he was naked from the waist down, “is that we never adopted trousers.”
He slid a hand up between Ruc’s legs.
Bien’s face was torn between disbelief and rage. Ruc had seen her frightened before, seen her angry, but never this.
He closed his eyes, pictured a jaguar motionless in the high grass as he felt the other man kneel behind him. The jaguar was the delta’s most patient predator. No wasted motion. No premature haste. A jaguar would wait and wait and wait, half a day if necessary, patient as sunlight, patient as silence, patient as the sky, watching its prey draw closer and closer, smelling and hearing as much as seeing it, feeling the movement in its paws. Only when that prey was close enough, only when all chance of escape was gone, only when fate closed motionlessly around its victim, did it strike.
His elbow caught Rooster in the jaw.
The man’s head snapped back.
Ruc rolled, tossed the weight of his body off, struck Snakebones in the temple with a vicious fist.
She bellowed—half pain, half rage—jerked back, tried to keep her hold on Bien, but Bien was already twisting away. She might not know how to fight, but she’d spent a lifetime evading groping hands, and Snakebones was rattled, half-dazed by the blow, and within moments Bien was free.
Ruc surged to his knees to find Rooster up already, though hunched over, blood draining between his teeth, reaching for the blade at his belt. Ruc lunged, caught him around the waist, bore him back to the dirt, drove his shoulder into the other man’s gut, felt the air rush out of him.
“Come on,” Bien was shouting. “Ruc, come on.”
He didn’t want to come on. He wanted to kill the man beneath him. He could do it, too. He could feel the ability uncoiling inside of him, but Bien was screaming.
“Ruc! The spear! She has the spear!”
He let go of Rooster, rolled to the side, saw motion out of the corner of his eye, and kept rolling. The tip of the fishing spear drove into the soft dirt, raising a furrow. Snakebones, wobbly on her feet and drooling as much blood as her companion, yanked the weapon back, lost her balance, stumbled against the storehouse wall.
A hand closed on Ruc’s shoulder—Bien, dragging him up, out, away from the fight, away from his own strength and rage, back toward light, and life, and safety, toward a world where love was still just barely possible.
For a perfect, frozen moment, he hated her.
37
Gwenna caught up with the admiral and his crew just after daybreak, a few miles from the coast.
Luckily, it was Cho Lu and Pattick bringing up the rear of the column, rather than one of the others. Cho Lu and Pattick and, on a short leash between them, Rat.
So, Gwenna thought, staring at the girl’s skinny back, her tattered pants, the squirrel’s nest of her hair, the admiral hadn’t given her to Chent or Vessik after all.
She almost coughed up a laugh. Could have skipped the whole trip. Maybe it would have been fine if she’d stayed in the mountains alone, building that cabin.
As she watched, Rat paused, sniffed at the air, then turned.
“Come on,” Pattick said, not ungently. Instead of tugging on the leash, he put a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
Rat, however, after a moment’s shocked stare, snatched the leash from his hand.
“Hey—” Pattick exclaimed. He reached for her, but the girl was too fast. She sprinted back along the rough track, then hurled herself at Gwenna so violently she almost knocked her over, buried her face in the filthy blacks, kept growling something over and over and over. It was only when Gwenna managed to pry her away that she could make out the words.
“Need Gwenna Sharpe.” There were tears in the girl’s eyes, but she sounded furious. “Need Gwenna Sharpe.”
She wrapped her arms around the girl’s slender shoulders. Such strength there. Such fragility. “I’m here.”
When she finally looked up, she found the two legionaries staring, frozen, as though she were one of Menkiddoc’s gabhya come to hideous life.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Pattick breathed finally.
She shook her head. “Nope. Just me.”
In fact, she felt like the opposite of the goddess of light. She’d plunged herself into the river at the valley’s base, tried to scrub off the kettral’s blood, pretty much failed. It remained matted in her tangled hair, soaked through her blacks, dark beneath her fingernails. The intervening days and miles had done nothing to improve the situation. Grime caked her face, her arms, her ears, her hands.… She might have expected the sweat to clean it away—she’d been stumbling forward more or less constantly for days—but all it did was lace the dirt with a thick salt rime. There’d been no time to forage or to hunt, and so for the first few days she ate strips of the bird’s liver, ate it until she woke one morning to find it crawling with maggots. After that she lived on water from streams and the thin taste of her own exhaustion.
Slowing to a stop proved a problem, actually. Without the momentum carrying her on, she wobbled a moment on her feet.
Pattick slammed his half-drawn sword back into its sheath, darted over, took her by the elbow.
“I’m not your ’Kent-kissing grandmother,” she growled.
Cho Lu was beaming. “You lived through that?”
She nodded. “Evidently.”
Between one breath and the next, however, the legionary sobered. He and Pattick exchanged a fraught glance.
“You lived,” Cho Lu said after a pause. “And we left you.” He smelled of shame. “We wanted … Jonon ordered us to pack up and march out, said there was no time for a search.”
“We should have searched,” Pattick said quietly.
“Don’t be stupid,” she replied, unsure what to do with this unexpected emotion. “A woman tied to a kettral falls out of the sky? You can be forgiven for thinking she’s dead.”
“Not you,” Cho Lu insisted.
“Especially me.”
Pattick shook his head. “We should have looked.”
“Sweet ’Shael on a stick, boys, it’s not your fault. You’re soldiers. You’ve got orders to follow.”
Cho Lu frowned. “There’s stuff more important than orders.”
“Not to a soldier, there’s not,” she replied, raising her voice, shifting her gaze past the legionaries. “Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral?”
For some reason, Jonon had been marching near the rear of the column. He was far enough away from Pattick and Cho Lu that Gwenna had dared to hope he’d keep marching, but at the sound of Cho Lu’s first exuberant whoop he’d turned, a hand on the pommel of his cutlass. His gaze, as he approached, brimmed with the same irritation and disdain that she’d come to expect, but for the first time since she’d met him he smelled faintly wary. Not the wariness that one soldier reserved for another—nothing so dignified. More the guarded caution of a farmer around a dog that might have gone rabid.
“There is a rich irony,” he said, “in listening to you, of all creatures, talk about the following of orders.”
Another Gwenna in another life might have argued, but that woman was dead.
“Easier talking about it sometimes, than actually doing it,” she replied.
“She killed a kettral,” Cho Lu put in.
The admiral shook his head. “A military is not run on the individual whims of its various soldiers, let alone by indulging the suicidal madness of women who hold no rank at all.”
“She saved my life,” Pattick added quietly, not daring to meet Jonon’s gaze.
Jonon turned to him, face grave. “Your life.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is that what you think this expedition is about?” the admiral demanded. “Your life?”
Pattick hesitated. “No, sir, but—”
“If I had wanted to save lives, yours or any others, I would never have weighed anchor back in Pirat. When I accepted the Emperor’s charge, I did so knowing men would die, good men.” He shook his head. “We serve a cause greater than ourselves, soldier, and in order to serve that cause we must look beyond our own lives, beyond the lives of our friends, look to the larger work. It is my job to see that we never take our eyes from that work, and when one of you disobeys me—even if the reason seems selfless, noble—you endanger the mission. Don’t be seduced by stories of mad individual bravery. Trust me when I tell you that way leads only to chaos, to ruin, and to failure. The Kettral were the jewel of the Annurian military, brilliant tacticians, peerless warriors, and what did they do? They destroyed themselves.”
He’d begun by speaking to Pattick and Cho Lu, but at some point during the speech he turned his attention to Gwenna.
“I will not allow you—either through your neglect or your recklessness—to endanger this expedition further. When we return to Annur, you will face trial. Until then, from the moment we reach the Daybreak until the moment we dock, you will remain, like any other disgraced prisoner, in the brig.”
Whatever else Gwenna thought about the admiral, he kept his word.
As soon as they were back on board the ship, she and Rat were led back belowdecks and tossed into the darkness.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Rat—who’d caught a glimpse of the seated form leaning against the far bulkhead—raised her small hands in the way Gwenna had taught her, as though she expected to have to fight. Gwenna put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s all right. Captain Dhar is a friend.”
“Friend?” Rat asked warily.
“Well,” Gwenna amended. “He only tried to kill me once, which is more than I can say for you.”
Dhar’s chuckle was dry, rusty. His voice, when he spoke, sounded as though it had not been used for years.
“Welcome back, Commander Sharpe. Who have you brought with you?”
“This is…” Gwenna hesitated. She felt guilty, suddenly, for the name she’d given the girl. “Rat, what’s your real name? The name your parents gave you?”
