The Empire's Ruin, page 58
“What if the wolves aren’t going to kill it?”
He stared at her.
“What if,” she continued, “they’re not eating it, but carrying it? The way they carry their pups.”
“Why would Eira help an avesh? And if the wolves are helping it, what about the paintings where she’s running it through with a sword? Or the ones where she’s burning it with the hand that holds the fire?”
“What does that sword represent, Ruc? What does the fire represent?”
The truth went through him like a blade. Like a flame. “Love,” he said quietly. “Love.”
“She’s not slaughtering the avesh.…”
“She loves it,” he concluded.
Bien nodded wearily. “She loves it. Eira’s grace extends even to the filthiest creatures, even to the most monstrous.”
“This isn’t from the sermons. I’ve never read anything like this in the commentaries.”
“So?” She shrugged. “The priests who wrote those commentaries were just people. They weren’t prophets.”
“Neither are we.”
“But you see it now. The avesh is there to show there is no limit to the breadth of Eira’s love.” She withdrew her hand gently from his, put it to his cheek. “You and I though—we have limits. We don’t know how to love what isn’t good.”
He watched her awhile, savored the feel of her hand against his skin. The Arena afforded almost no privacy. It had been weeks since they’d been alone. He shifted in his chair, lifted the bracer from her grasp, set it down on the table. She let it go without protest.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to kiss you.”
“That’s not going to fix anything.”
“Maybe not,” he said, then leaned forward.
Her lips were chapped, ragged from too much sun and too little water. For a moment, she didn’t move. Then, with a cry deep in her throat, the half sob of a dying creature, she pulled him into her. Her mouth opened to the kiss—the urgency was almost violent—then she was climbing out of her chair and into his lap, straddling him, thighs pressed tight around his hips, one hand reaching down to pull up his noc.
He felt himself harden. For all that people talked about sex and love in the same breath, the needs of the body were older than love or language, bred in the bones. A growl rose in his throat. The weariness in his legs forgotten, he rose, Bien still clutching him, crossed the room in three strides, tossed her onto the bunk. Her eyes were shut tight, lower lip caught between her teeth. He watched her a moment, then lifted her noc, slid down her body, nipping at her breasts as he passed, buried his face between her legs. She took her head in his hands, pressed her hips up into him, shuddered once, then twisted violently, shoving him away.
“I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t.”
He took a deep, ragged breath, tried to find his way back.
Before he could reply, she rose, turned away.
“They were going to rape us,” she said.
He sat up slowly, straightened his noc. The sight of his own body seemed suddenly obscene.
“They were.”
“I thought…” When she turned back to him, he saw that she was shaking. “I thought this might be a way to, to erase it. To put something good in its place.”
“Maybe we can. Not this.” He gestured to the bed. “Not now, but something.”
She shook her head, eyes bleak. “No. There’s no erasing it, Ruc. There’s no erasing anything.”
39
In the darkness of the brig, Rat’s conversation improved almost as rapidly as her grappling skills. Despite the cramped space, she insisted each day on drilling her technique, all the chokes, wrist locks, and arm bars that Gwenna could teach her. At night, the two of them talked with Bhuma Dhar.
Without a world to point at—that is a mountain; that is a tree; that is a sword—it was hard going, but the girl was indefatigable. Faster than Gwenna would have imagined she could speak basic, broken sentences: The food is shit. The admiral is shit. This ship is shit. Gwenna’s fault, probably, that every sentence seemed to contain at least one curse, but after a month aboard the Daybreak she could communicate, there was no denying that. It might have been something to celebrate, a little light in the unbroken darkness, except for the fact that her growing vocabulary put her in danger.
Every few days Jonon came down to the brig to demand an update on the girl’s progress. Another commander might have congratulated himself on finding the eggs and returning. Jonon, however, had grown convinced that Rat’s compatriots had abandoned their city, left behind their entire homeland, in order to invade Annur. It didn’t matter that the city lay thousands of miles from the empire. It didn’t matter that to transport the whole population of the city would require hundreds of ships, maybe thousands. It didn’t matter that no one at the ass end of Menkiddoc would have any reason to know about Annur.
“I will have answers for the Emperor when we return,” he told Gwenna grimly, “if I have to crack them out of her savage skull myself.”
Of course, cracking Rat’s skull would ensure that he never got his answers. Twisting off a few fingers, however, or flaying a patch of skin … Gwenna could well imagine the admiral ordering such things if he believed the security of the empire was at stake.
Which left her walking a knife edge. When she claimed that the girl had made no progress, Jonon threatened to remove her from the brig and undertake the tutelage himself. If she admitted, on the other hand, just how much Rat had truly learned, confessed that the girl could speak and understand, she would almost be inviting him to begin his torture. The only way forward seemed to be a vague, constant delay: She’s trusting me more. She said something about the leader of the city, about his goals. Said something about where they’re going. I just need to learn a few more of her words. We just need a little more time.
All of which was utter fucking horseshit.
Despite her fascination with language, Rat refused to talk about any aspect of her life before she came creeping into the Annurian camp trying to steal food. If Gwenna so much as asked her name she clamped her jaw shut, retreated to the corner of the brig, and turned her face to the wall.
The only exception to this rule was the avesh.
The fourth or fifth night out to sea, Gwenna woke to the voices of sailors shouting. With her Kettral-keen hearing, there were always at least half a dozen conversations she could make out at any given time, but usually she ignored the constant wash of sound. She didn’t care about the carpenter’s gout, the cook’s filthy dreams, or the superstitions of the soldiers. The urgency of these voices, however, hooked her attention, and she closed her eyes to focus on them.
“… Just shoot the ’Kent-kissing thing!”
“Already loosed two dozen arrows at it. It’s too fast.”
“Shit. Shit!”
Then Rahood’s deep voice cutting into the conversation. “Two of you will go up there with a net and bring it down.”
Gwenna shook her head. Somehow, for some reason, that wide-eyed, bloody-fanged monster had come aboard the Daybreak. Judging from the curses that followed, the men sent into the rigging to fetch it down had failed. Not surprising, given how nimbly the creature had moved through the trees. It could probably survive up in the ratlines for weeks, maybe the whole voyage, provided it found something to eat. Gwenna couldn’t decide whether the idea was funny or worrying. Maybe both.
When Rat awoke, Gwenna pointed up through the deck above.
“Your monster. She’s on the ship.”
The girl’s eyes went wide. “Yutaka?”
“What’s a yutaka?”
“Yutaka,” Rat said again. “Her name. Yutaka.”
Across the brig, Bhuma Dhar had come awake—Gwenna could hear the shift in his breathing—but he didn’t speak.
“Is she your … pet?” Gwenna asked.
“Pet?”
“Yutaka belongs to Rat? Rat owns Yutaka?”
“We hunt. Rat and Yutaka hunt.”
Gwenna considered her next question. “Do all the people from your city have hunters?”
Rat opened her mouth to reply, then scowled. “Fuck all the people.”
And that was the end of that conversation.
“You’re sure,” Gwenna asked Bhuma Dhar one night, after the girl had fallen asleep, “that those people from up in the northwest—Solengo and them, all those little towns—you’re sure they didn’t explore any farther south? That they didn’t establish that city we found?”
The captain shook his head. “No. I am not sure. Those whaling villages have stood on that coast for over a thousand years. They were part of a larger—going out, an abandonment of our coast during the Time of Hunger. It is possible that some ships went south, established colonies, built an entire city. A thousand years is a long time. But the girl does not look like a child from my portion of the world—her hair is pale, like yours. And her skin. Nor is her speech the same as my own.”
“What about the gabhya?” Gwenna pressed. “You said that the Manjari elites are obsessed with them. The lion with the wings? The one that’s buried beneath the palace?”
“They are a sign of status, yes. Of prestige.”
“Seems like Rat’s people felt the same way. All those statues. And she talks about that toothy beast like it’s her ’Kent-kissing pet.”
“People keep pets the whole world over. It seems to me the gabhya are less striking than the claims of your historian.”
Gwenna blew out a frustrated breath. She’d avoided thinking about those claims, first because she wasn’t thinking about anything, then later because they were too large, too outlandish to know what to do with. On the other hand, Kiel had been right about the birds, right about the maps.…
“The Nevariim,” she said, shaking her head. The historian had made it sound like a simple matter of fact—These are my fingers; that is an oak tree; this is the work of the Nevariim. In her own mouth, the word sounded ridiculous. “It’s crazy.”
“The historian does not strike me as a madman.”
“Don’t have to go mad to be wrong.”
“What tales do the people of Annur tell of the Nevariim?”
Gwenna snorted. “Probably the same as on your side of the Ancaz. They’re a fantasy—something from the darkest days of the Csestriim wars, hope for the hopeless, a final salvation, all that shit.”
“I would not be so dismissive of hope.”
“Hope is fine. Hope is great. But hope doesn’t sharpen any swords or lug any loads. The best way to get saved is not to fuck up in the first place.”
“Sooner or later everyone errs.”
“Doesn’t mean someone else is going to come fix it. Certainly not some mythical race of gorgeous, naked saviors.”
Of course, according to Kiel, they weren’t saviors. What was it he’d said? The Nevariim were beasts. They lived to fuck and to hunt.
She wished, now, that she’d taken the opportunity afforded by the march into the mountains to ask him more. Jonon had called the historian to his tent nearly every night, but Gwenna had been too lost in herself or too busy with Rat to listen. It was hard to say why she hadn’t been more curious, not just about Kiel’s crazy Nevariim claims, but about everything—what happened in Solengo, the abandoned city, the ziggurat, the missing people, Rat, Rat’s family.…
Those days, like the days on the journey south, felt like something she’d dreamed. She could remember the events, but none of those events made sense, certainly not her own thoughts and actions. She felt like a woman who had wakened finally after months of sweating fever. The irony, of course, was that just as she began to come alive she was locked once more in the brig.
“Let us entertain, for the moment, the ideas of the historian,” Dhar said.
Gwenna shrugged. “Plenty of time to entertain all kinds of ideas.”
He nodded, smoothed his ragged mustache into his ragged beard.
“We’ve got a city,” Gwenna said, “ruled by Nevariim. The Nevariim like to hunt stuff. Judging from the piles of skulls, they hunt monsters and people with equal glee. Or maybe the people hunt the monsters and give them to the Nevariim. Or the monsters hunt the people.” She shook her head. “Sounds like a shitty place to live, however you figure it.”
Rat didn’t move, but as Gwenna spoke, she heard the shift in the girl’s breathing, the quickening of her heartbeat. She was awake, awake and listening. How much she’d heard, Gwenna couldn’t say, let alone how much she’d understood, but something in the conversation had frightened her. Gwenna could smell the fear.
“So much hinges,” Dhar said, “on the nature of the Nevariim.”
As Dhar said the name, the girl tensed.
It made no sense. Nevariim was hardly a word she’d learned from Gwenna or Dhar. They’d been more focused on practicalities, like Piss in the bucket, and There are maggots in the bread. There’d been no reason to introduce the name of a long-dead race. Gwenna tried to imagine the explanation: They were people, but not real people, who lived in a story, but not now—thousands and thousands of years ago.…
No. Rat hadn’t learned the word from her.
Maybe the Annurian word just sounded like something in the girl’s own language, some other word that was frightening but utterly unrelated, like murder or torture. She tried to sift back through her memories of Rat’s babble. There hadn’t been much of it. The girl had spent much of the march into the mountains in stubborn silence. When she’d spoken, it was mostly to pester Gwenna to teach her some new fighting technique, always in Annurian. Really, the only words she’d used …
“Rashkta-bhura,” Gwenna said quietly.
Rat jerked upright, shedding instantly all pretense of sleep.
She couldn’t see Gwenna in the darkness, that much was obvious, but Gwenna could see her, those large eyes boring into her.
“What’s a rashkta-bhura?” Gwenna asked quietly.
Rat stabbed a finger at Gwenna’s chest.
Gwenna shook her head. “I don’t know what that is.”
Dhar couldn’t see what was happening, but made no move to interrupt.
“Something about my body, right?” Gwenna pressed. The girl had said it first back in the cave, looking at Gwenna’s wounds. “Something about how it heals quickly. Gwenna Sharpe body fuck quit. That’s what you said, right?”
Rat nodded. “Axochlin body fast. Faster. Axochlin body stronger.” The girl reached out, questing in the darkness for Gwenna’s shoulder, then her neck. “But no…” She searched for the word in Annurian, then gave up. “Axoch. Rashkta-bhura has axoch. Gwenna Sharpe has no axoch.”
“Axochlin.” Gwenna tested the strange syllables. “Is that the same thing as rashkta-bhura?”
The girl’s frustration smelled like rusted iron. “Rashkta-bhura is kind of axochlin.”
Gwenna glanced over at Dhar. “Does any of this mean anything to you?”
The captain shook his head.
“Did they hurt you?” Gwenna asked, turning back to the child. “The rashkta-bhura? Did they hurt your family?”
Rat hissed, bared her teeth. She smelled momentarily of sour bafflement and grief. “Axochlin want Rat. Want put … axoch on Rat. Axochlin want make Rat shava-bhura.”
The main words remained vexingly unclear, but Gwenna didn’t need the words to understand the story. “They wanted to make you into one of them,” she said. “They wanted to put a…” She shook her head in confusion. “Collar? Is an axoch a collar?”
Rat stared at her blankly.
Gwenna unbuckled her belt, slid it in a loop around her own neck, brought Rat’s hand up to feel it.
“Collar?”
The girl hesitated. “Axoch is collar. Axoch is … alive.”
“A living collar…” Dhar mused.
Gwenna shook her head. “Or she has the word wrong. There’s something we’re not understanding.”
“Not wrong,” Rat insisted.
Gwenna started to reply, then broke off as something shifted just on the far side of the door. No, she realized, fear flaring inside her, not something. Someone. If she strained, she could hear the heartbeat through the wood. With all the other sounds on the ship—the shouting and creaking and shifting of ballast—she hadn’t noticed it before.
Someone listening.
Wood creaked as whoever it was retreated down the passageway, bare feet light on the decking. The sailors went barefoot, of course, but a grim suspicion was mounting inside her that this had been no sailor. They’d been waiting out there, patient as a stone, listening at the door. Now that they’d heard what they needed to hear, they were leaving, going to get …
It wasn’t long before the tramp of boots shook the deck—three people, judging by the sound. A key rattled in the lock, the door swung open, and there was the admiral, flanked by Vessik and Chent.
“Get her out of there,” Jonon said, gesturing.
The men peered into the gloom, blind.
“Get who out?” Gwenna asked.
“You have been lying to me,” Jonon replied. “Not only does the girl know more of our language than you have admitted, but she has been conveying to you information about her land and her people. Information that you have withheld.”
Gwenna got to her feet. “I haven’t been withholding anything.…”
Jonon raised a hand. “Enough. I will handle the questioning from here.”
“You’re going to torture her.”
“I am going to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the empire.”
“She is a child,” Gwenna snarled.
“A savage child with knowledge of a savage people. I will have that knowledge. If she relays it freely, there will be no need to summon the surgeon.”
It was impossible to know how much of the conversation Rat understood, but like Gwenna she had scrambled to her feet.
