The Empire's Ruin, page 6
“You will get out of the boat now, or I will order my men to shoot.”
Gwenna took a slow, steady breath. She could smell Annick, the thin vein of the sniper’s anger hammered into that glacial calm. She could smell the terror of the troops, all vinegar and rust. She could smell Frome’s rage and frustration, the too-sweet stench of the delta mud, the green of the reeds, the water slopping against the hull of the small boat.
She could probably escape, she and Annick both. They could go over the rail, swim beneath the ship, disappear into the rushes … but where would that leave them? Stranded with the spiders, snakes, crocs, jaguars—no boat, no supplies, a dozen miles deep in the delta, a dozen miles from the sea. The fish alone would likely rip them to ribbons, and even if they survived, it would take days to make their way back to Dombâng, days during which Talal might be tortured, might be killed. She imagined him bound to some table, high priests crowded around him, pressing red-hot steel into his flesh, asking over and over again the questions he refused to answer in anything but screams.
Like a woman in a dream, she raised her hands.
None of it felt real, not the sun on her face or the pain blazing in her shoulder, not Frome’s wary gaze or the hammering of her own heart. For a moment she thought she might finally wake, discover that Talal was all right after all, that they were all all right. But she did not wake.
Slowly, so as not to spook the soldiers above, she stood, climbed the rope ladder, slid over the rail. The need for haste had passed. Frome would want her to grovel, and so she would grovel, but he would make her wait first. He would make sure every sailor and soldier on the ship saw her waiting.
“Bind her,” he said, as she stepped onto the deck.
The men hesitated. Judging from the looks on their faces, he might as well have told them to leap into the delta and start swimming.
“It’s all right,” Gwenna said, putting her wrists together before her.
The words were a lie. Nothing was all right, but this wasn’t a situation she could fight her way out of.
After a long pause, one of the soldiers stepped forward, steel shackles in his hands. Not the fault of the soldiers that they served under Frome.
“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” she said.
Talal’s blood-smeared face filled her memory. Jak’s neck opening beneath the blade …
Gwenna looked past the men to the admiral. “Are those really necessary?”
He met her eyes, lifted his chin. “Take her to the brig.”
“I’m sorry, Commander,” the soldier murmured as he clamped the cool steel down around her wrists.
“So am I,” she replied. “So am I.”
* * *
The brig wasn’t much to look at, just three tiny chambers deep in the hull. The one into which they’d shoved Gwenna was so small that when she sat with her back against one bulkhead she had to bend her knees. There was no way to stand up or lie down, no way to stretch out. It reminded her of the wooden cages back on the Islands that were used for captivity training. She’d spent a full week in one of those cages once—a week getting rained on and pissed on. Pissing on herself, for that matter. All the cadets had agreed that nothing could be worse than cage week, but what did cadets know? At least you could see the sun from inside the cage. At least you could feel the breeze. At least there were human faces when someone came by to piss on your head. The brig, by contrast, was pitch black, steaming hot, and rank with the twin lingering scents of fear and regret.
Worse, there was nothing to distract her. There was no one to fight, no one to carry, no oars to haul or generals to defy, nothing to do in the darkness but stare into the face of her failure, rehearse again every decision.… If she’d followed a different search pattern. If she’d been watching for a starshatter. If she’d chosen to infiltrate the Baths on foot. If she’d kept a hand on Jak. If she’d forced Talal out of the Baths first … She stared into those other worlds like a starving woman gazing through the open door of an inn she could never enter.
The ship’s bell tolled the watches: morning, noon, dogwatch, night, morning, noon.…
No one brought water. Her tongue swelled. The wound at her shoulder throbbed hot, then cold. She found herself pressing at it idly, fingering the swollen tissue just to feel the pain, then forced herself to stop. She listened for Annick’s voice, for Frome’s, but caught only fragments of either, nothing she could stitch into any kind of meaning. Her muscles cramped, spasmed, pulled so tight it felt as though they were tearing away from the bone. She imagined Talal’s body being torn apart, shredded slowly by his torturers as they searched for information.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered into the darkness. “Sweet holy Hull, I’m sorry.”
The words felt dead on her tongue, rotten. What was it worth, this sorrow of hers? What did it fix?
Nothing. It was worth nothing. It fixed nothing.
Finally, late on the second day, boots sounded in the passage beyond.
Gwenna tried to sit up taller inside the cramped box.
There was a fumbling with the lock, then a feeble gray light that burned in her eyes. She squinted, turned toward the door. She could make out the shapes of two men, soldiers, maybe the same ones who had escorted her down, and beyond them, stiff-backed in the darkness, Admiral Frome.
She opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue was too cracked to manage the words.
“He’s dead,” Frome said after a long pause. “Your other soldier. The one who was captured.”
He didn’t use Talal’s name.
Gwenna stared at him. Her mind refused the thought. The Dombângans would torture a captured Kettral, but they wouldn’t kill him, not yet, not until they’d wrested every piece of intelligence out of him that they could. They’d keep him alive for days, for weeks.…
“No,” she managed.
The admiral nodded grimly. “The high priests executed him on the steps of the Shipwreck this morning, just after dawn. A strong man, dark brown skin, shaved head, many scars.”
He studied her, waiting for some kind of reaction. When she didn’t move, he shook his head.
“He’s dead, and it is your fault. This mission is over. We are returning to Annur on the next tide where you will answer to the Emperor herself, bright be the days of her life, for all your heinous mistakes.”
Gwenna didn’t speak. She didn’t move. The door to the brig slammed shut.
Something was moving in her lap. Her own hands, she realized. Now that they had nothing to hold—no swords, no explosives, no wounded comrade—they shook. She stared down at them. Even in the dark of the ship’s brig she could make them out, though she barely recognized them as her own. She was used to thinking of them as strong hands, but they didn’t look strong. Slashed with blood and blackened by fire, trembling in the meager light, they looked like weak, broken creatures, as though they had dragged themselves there all on their own, out of the light, out of the whole wide world to die.
3
Please, goddess, Ruc begged, blood streaming down his face, sluicing from his chin, draining onto the bridge even as the hot, driving rain washed it away, help me to love these men.
The men weren’t making it easy.
Two of them held him by the wrists while the third—a bastard the size of a warehouse door—loomed over him, frowning at his own fist.
“Look what you did,” he said finally, pointing to a gash along the back of his knuckles.
Ruc tried to focus, to see past the blood and the haze of pain.
“Look!” screamed one of the others, seizing a handful of his hair, dragging his face up, then shoving it forward, until the fist was so close he could have kissed it.
“Your filthy tooth,” said the leader, “cut my hand.” He cocked his head to the side. “What do you have to say about that?”
“I’m sorry,” Ruc murmured without raising his eyes.
Please Eira, Lady of Love, he pleaded. Help me to be sorry.
There were priests who claimed that the goddess spoke to them daily, but as Ruc hung there, held up by the hands of these men who hated him, he could hear nothing but the rain drumming on the bridge, on the tiled roofs, on the water, rain so loud it nearly drowned out the sound of people passing a few paces away, of oars creaking in their locks in the canal below, of everything but his own breath rasping painfully in his chest as he struggled to breathe.
Too much rain …
The man with the cut knuckles had hit him enough times that his thoughts were beginning to drift. He could feel them floating off, but had no tether to lash them down.
Far too much rain …
The hot, wet jiangba season should have ended weeks earlier, around the equinox, but aside from one or two breaks, the storms refused to relent. The sun, which should have been blazing in the sky, was little more than a pale, green-gray disk, like a dream of sun. No fire, no substance.
The rain, on the other hand, was all too real. The rain had weight. Not the individual drops, of course, which splattered harmlessly on the bridges and wooden causeways, drained from the baked-clay tiles of the rooftops, stippled Dombâng’s ten thousand canals, but the idea of the rain, countless days of it, crouching over the city, pressing down, down, down, gently but unrelentingly, with a billion implacable fingers until even people who had lived their entire lives in the delta, who had seen forty or fifty or seventy rainy seasons, began to go about stooped, hunched, as though the weather were a weight that they bore on their backs.
The canals churned with debris, flooding the decks and markets. First Island was half-underwater. The bridge into the Weir had collapsed. A block of tenements near the east end of the Heights had been washed away, and after years of silting up, Old Harbor looked almost like a harbor again, the Ring of the Worthy standing incongruously at its center, a giant arena awash in the current. Dombâng had grown so large over the centuries that it was easy to forget that the whole place—all the apparatus of bridges and docks and causeways—was built on mudflats and sandbars, but as Ruc struggled to hold on to his thoughts a vision filled him, a vision of Dombâng sinking, all the tiled roofs, each with its carved wooden guardians, sliding beneath the flood until there was nothing left of the ancient city but the wind over the waters.
If only that rain had stopped the fire.…
If the rain had stopped the fire, then the Purple Baths wouldn’t have burned. If the Baths hadn’t burned, there would have been no riots. If there had been no riots, then the man screaming in his face might have passed him by.…
“Hey.” A quick slap dragged him back to the present. “I’m not finished talking to you, mud sucker. Did I say I was finished talking to you?”
With an effort, Ruc focused on the man’s face, watched the black-red heat of slow-building anger baking beneath his features.
“He asked you a question!” screamed one of the others, shaking Ruc by the hair.
“No,” Ruc managed. “We’re not done talking.”
On the other side, the third man remained silent—he hadn’t spoken a word since the attack began—but his hands were a vise around Ruc’s wrist, and he followed the unfolding violence with disquietingly eager eyes.
Striker, Screamer, and Silence. A grim triumvirate.
“What do you have to say,” asked Striker patiently, displaying his bloody knuckles once more, “about what you’ve done to my fist?”
Ruc struggled to frame a reasonable reply.
“I’m sorry for your fist,” he said.
Striker nodded, as though he’d expected the repentance, as though it were only appropriate. Then he frowned again.
“I’m not worried about the scratch,” he said with a shrug. “I see worse every day.” He stared down at his hands, which were stitched with scar. “What I’m concerned about is disease. I hear you mud suckers carry all kinds of diseases.”
Screamer leaned in close. “I hear they can’t even speak right. Got their own mud sucker babble: la tra. Chi cho cha.” He laughed a high, giddy laugh at his own mockery. Then he narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “How in the Three’s names did you learn to speak so good?”
“I’m not Vuo Ton,” Ruc replied. “I live here, in the city.”
“Well, I know that’s a lie,” Striker responded, shaking his head.
He hooked a finger, then almost delicately drew back the cuff of Ruc’s sodden robe, revealing the tattoos streaking his arm. “Only mud suckers got this crazy ink.”
For most of Ruc’s life, that ink—slashes of black lines slender as young reeds—had spared him interactions like this. For centuries, the people of Dombâng had held the Vuo Ton in a kind of wary awe. While most of the city’s citizens didn’t dare set foot into the delta surrounding Dombâng, the Vuo Ton lived their entire lives in that deadly labyrinth of reeds and shifting channels, making their home among the jaguars and crocs, the schools of qirna, nests of snakes that could fell a man with a single bite, webs of spiders that laid eggs in the warm flesh of the living. The delta was an easy place to die; city folk gave a wide berth to anyone who managed to survive out there.
They had, at least, before the revolution.
One of the consequences of Dombâng’s blood-soaked bid for independence was this hatred. Anything different, anything strange, the wrong shade of skin, the wrong texture of hair, the wrong accent … any of it could see a person beaten, or worse. It had been easy to understand that feeling when it was directed toward the Annurians—after two centuries of occupation, most of Dombâng’s population was glad to be rid of the imperial yoke and fiercely jealous of their newfound freedom. That righteous hatred, however, like a river after too many weeks of rain, had strained at its banks, gnawed away at the old levees of human sympathy, until finally the shores burst. When most of the Annurians were finally killed, or driven from the city, or forced into hiding, Dombâng turned on the small Antheran community, then on the Manjari, demanding of each in turn a submission every bit as abject as that to which Dombâng itself had been subjected.
After the worst of the purges, the violence had gradually subsided. People were still murdered, boats were still scuttled, homes were still burned to the waterline for no graver sin than their owners having the wrong eyes or name, but mostly it was possible to move around the city unmolested. Had been, anyway, before someone decided to burn the Purple Baths.
The attack had brought back all the city’s savagery in the space of a single night, and this time, it seemed, even the Vuo Ton were not exempt.
Not that he was Vuo Ton.
“I was raised in the delta,” he said, “but I chose to live here, in the city.”
Screamer glanced at Striker, obviously confused. Vuo Ton never abandoned the delta. The Given Land was as much a part of them as their worship of the Three.
Striker, however, just spat. “Sure. To get close. To blend in. To burn down our buildings when we’re asleep.”
Most rumor pinned the attack on the Annurians, but the men weren’t in the mood to discriminate. Vuo Ton or Annur, someone had been bold enough to attack, and Ruc was the person they’d found.
Striker spat again, this time in Ruc’s face, then slammed a fist into his gut.
Ruc almost choked on the pain. After a moment, he managed an unsteady breath, then one more, then opened his eyes, made himself look at the son of a bitch who had hit him, really look.
Please, goddess, he prayed, help me to see the man behind the monster.
They were log drivers—that much was obvious from the tools they’d set aside when the beating began: pike pole, cant hook, a pair of ring dogs. Dangerous work in the best of times, and the height of a too-long rainy season was hardly the best of times. Dombâng relied on lumber felled upstream, well above the delta, then driven down the Shirvian. Without it there could be no boats, no buildings, no bridges, no city at all. Which meant the log drives never stopped, not even for the rain. Men and women died on nearly every drive, caught between the logs and crushed, driven under the surface, held down by the weight of wood until their breath gave out. Sometimes the bodies washed up in the city. More often they were lost, devoured by the millions of things with teeth that lived out in the delta.
Ruc studied Striker’s face, tried to look past the violence and rage.
Despite the early hour, the man reeked of quey—they all did. They’d obviously been at it all morning.…
And then at last, with a flick of her infinite fingers, the goddess opened Ruc’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “for the loss of your friends.”
The truth of his guess was clear in Striker’s narrowing gaze, in the tightening of Silence’s grip, in the way Screamer, who the whole time had been leaning so close Ruc could smell the quey and sweet-reed mingled on his breath, yanked suddenly back, as though struck.
Understanding is the gateway to love—so ran the Fourth Teaching of Eira—and in that moment Ruc understood a little more of their anger.
“What do you know about our friends?” Striker demanded after a pause.
“Nothing,” Ruc replied. Every word hurt, but pain was better than the alternative.
Love shuns the easy path, he reminded himself. She walks on daggers and sleeps on coals. Her strength lies in her surrender. It had taken him a long time to learn to surrender. Sometimes, as now, he was frightened he had not learned it fully enough.
“I don’t know anything about them,” he went on, forcing aside his thoughts, “except that they were probably soldiers, and they died defending the Purple Baths, defending Dombâng. The city owes them a debt. We all owe them a debt.”
For just a moment he caught a glimpse of the world as it must look to them. While the merchants and priests, shipwrights and seamstresses lived safe behind their wooden walls, the log drivers and fishers and soldiers risked everything to keep the city alive. Risked anything and, if the reports of the violence at the Baths were to be believed, sometimes lost everything.
Never mind that no one inside Dombâng was safe. Never mind that ever since the revolution those shipwrights and seamstresses could be tied to a bridge piling and left for dead if their neighbors heard them whispering the wrong words, uttering the wrong prayers, questioning the wrong priests. Never mind that even now, years after the execution of the last Annurian legionary, people were still dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, hauled into the delta, and abandoned to the beasts—a barkeep maybe, who had once served Annurians with a little too much friendliness; someone who had unwisely taken a soldier as a lover.…
