The Empire's Ruin, page 76
She opened her eyes, studied Jonon. “What do you mean,” she asked quietly, “you can smell it?”
She’d almost missed the odor herself, and she was Kettral.
Jonon just smiled that rictus smile.
“We should keep moving,” Kiel said, descending from the boulder.
She turned to the historian. “Can the gabhya follow us out of the sick?”
He nodded silently.
“It’s coming,” Jonon crooned. “It’s co-ming!”
Chent belted out a laugh. Vessik just nodded silently, his face a mask.
“Come,” Kiel said. “We may reach the fortress before nightfall. We can mount a defense there.”
“Oh,” Jonon replied. “Oh, oh, ohhhh. There’s no defending against it. If we could defend against it, Hevel wouldn’t have been ripped up, or Sorn, or Handalf.” He shook his head, slid his palm along the handle of his cutlass, caressing it. “What we need to do is fight it, face to beautiful face.”
“Not here,” Gwenna said.
“Here.” Jonon shrugged. “There. It doesn’t matter.”
50
A greenfly circled the lamp over and over, turning lazy gyres through the hot air until Monster shot out a hand, caught it in her fist, and crushed it. She’d been drinking quey most of the night—celebration of her victory, relief at being alive, or just a plain old hankering for the stuff—but that hadn’t slowed her down any.
“All I’m saying,” she announced irritably, “is that sometimes it’s a good idea to ask the questions before you murder the fucking messenger.”
“The guards exceeded their mandate,” Stupid agreed. He was reclined on the bench by the door of the common room, his hat pulled down over his eyes.
The woman belted out a half-drunk laugh. “Exceeded their mandate! They turned his face into meat!”
“Meat,” Mouse said, frowning at his leg of chicken. He took a tentative bite, grimaced, then set it down.
Ruc understood the large man’s queasiness. The guards had more than killed the messenger. They’d hit him so many times that when they finally peeled away, what was left at the center of the pit hadn’t looked like anything human.
Bien shook her head. “He had to know he was going to die. Coming here was suicide.”
“So why come?” Talal asked.
“He had a message,” Stupid pointed out.
“Bow down.” Monster rolled her eyes. “Crawl. Cower. Whatever.”
“Well,” Ruc said, “message delivered, I guess, but what was the point? He didn’t ask for anything. Didn’t offer anything. Didn’t negotiate anything. Just came, made a speech, got shot, then had the guards rip apart what was left of his body.”
“What a body it was, though,” Monster lamented, raising her glass to the memory.
“It would seem likely that he was Annurian,” Stupid suggested from beneath his hat.
“He was obviously fucking Annurian,” Monster said. “The son of a bitch was whiter than milk.”
“We do have an Annurian here.” Bien nodded across the table toward Talal. “Someone who might have some insight.”
“I don’t think he was imperial,” the soldier said, shaking his head.
Monster rolled her eyes. “You know everyone in the empire?”
“The empire doesn’t send messages before it starts killing people.”
“I guarantee you the good citizens of Dombâng believe he came from Annur,” Ruc said.
“It’s easy to blame Annur for things. That doesn’t make it correct.”
Bien squinted. “Is the First a title in the Annurian army?”
Another shake of the head. “Not in the army. Not the navy. Not the Kettral. I’ve never heard of it before.”
“What about someone else?” Ruc ransacked his memory. “Urghul? Aren’t they sort of milk-colored?”
“They are,” Talal replied, “but the Urghul all have ritual scarring. He didn’t. And he had the wrong accent for the Urghul.” He frowned. “Sounded … vaguely Manjari.”
Monster snorted. “I’ve met Manjari. They’re browner than I am.”
“Maybe not all of them,” Ruc said. “Not every place in the world murders people for having different skin.”
Talal shook his head. “Most Manjari are brown, but that’s not the point. There’s no way that a non-Annurian army could get here in the first place. If they were coming from the west or the north, they’d have to cover a thousand miles of Annurian territory, subdue dozens of fortresses and garrisons, protect supply lines from the local population.…”
“What if they’re coming by sea?” Stupid asked. “From the east?”
“Makes a little more sense,” the soldier conceded, “but the Annurian Navy is as dominant in the Channarian Gulf as its army is in central Eridroa. Not to mention the fact that any naval force would need to get from the ocean into the delta. Dombâng has blockaded all the main channels.”
Bien had been picking at a large scab across her knuckles. As Ruc watched, she bit her lip, then ripped the scab clean off. “What about from the south?” she asked quietly.
“The messengers have been naked,” Stupid observed.
Talal shook his head. “The Waist tribes don’t go entirely naked. And they’re brown-skinned, just like you. And tattooed.”
“And they’re fucking savages,” Monster added. “They’d never be able to find Dombâng, let alone attack it.”
“I wasn’t talking about the Waist tribes,” Bien said. She hesitated. “I meant farther south.”
All eyes turned to her. A moth fluttered into the lantern flame, caught fire, fell twitching to the table.
“What?” Ruc asked after a moment. “Menkiddoc?”
“Menkiddoc,” Mouse said, his voice filled with foreboding.
Silence stretched, then Monster burst out laughing.
“Listen to you idiots!” She tossed back a gulp of quey, swallowed noisily, then started laughing again. “There’s no one in Menkiddoc.”
Bien turned to her, arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you’d been.”
“I don’t need to go there, bitch. I spent enough time drinking with sailors to know the stories. The whole place is a wasteland.”
Ruc ignored her. He was watching Talal instead. The soldier traced the curve of his iron ball with a finger as he pondered the suggestion.
“The coast is barren,” he said finally. “The northeastern coast, at least. We don’t know about the rest of the continent.”
Stupid grunted from beneath his hat. “There’s something the Kettral don’t know?”
“They tried to map it,” Talal replied. “A few times, actually.”
“What happened?” Bien asked.
“No one came back.”
Ruc stared at him. “Even with the birds…”
The soldier shook his head. “The birds can’t cross the equator. Something about their physiology. Even here in Dombâng it’s almost too hot for them.”
“What about taking a fucking ship?” Monster asked. “You know, like normal people?”
“They did,” Talal said. “The first mission was more than a hundred years back. The most recent maybe a generation ago. Like I said—no one returned.”
Monster rolled her eyes. “Next thing you’re going to tell me all those sailors’ stories are true—all that pig shit about curses and monsters and madness.”
Ruc frowned. “A little madness would explain walking naked into an arena of people and pissing on their gods.”
“We’re pretty far out on a very slim limb,” Talal said. “I’ve read reports of a few small settlements clinging to the northwestern coast of Menkiddoc—fishing villages, whaling towns—but those have to be a couple thousand miles from here, all the way on the other side of the continent. There’s been no contact or commerce out of the heart of Menkiddoc, no one coming or going up through the Waist in…” He paused, shook his head. “Ever. At least as far as I know. Annur keeps a garrison in the Waist itself, but the only people who attack them are the Waist tribes.”
“And wherever he’s coming from,” Monster said, “why attack Dombâng? There are easier places. Cities not built in the middle of the Shirvian fucking delta.”
“Dombâng’s all alone,” Bien pointed out.
Ruc nodded. “Since splitting from Annur, there’s no empire to save it, no armies to pull in from other parts of the globe.”
“Still,” Talal said, “not an easy target.”
“Your gods will crawl,” Bien put in quietly. “Even now he hunts them.”
“Meaning … what?” Monster asked. “That that gorgeous dead idiot worked for a group of god-hunters?”
Mouse let out a low whistle. “God-hunters.”
“Yeah,” Ruc said. “It does have sort of an unnerving ring to it, doesn’t it?”
“Wherever he was from,” Bien said, shaking her head, “why would he warn us?”
“Make people uncertain,” Ruc suggested. “Make them scared.”
Talal frowned. “If you want to frighten people, you do something more spectacular. Blow something up. Burn something down. More fire and blood. You don’t just show up and die.”
“The First didn’t die,” Bien pointed out. “Whoever he is. Wherever he is. The poor fool in the Arena today was only a messenger.”
Monster rolled her eyes. “Yeah. We’ve been over this. Try to keep the fuck up. What soldier boy is saying is that he’d’ve been a more fucking effective messenger if he’d stomped some people.”
“Maybe not.” Memory rose inside Ruc, inevitable as a flood. “Maybe the First is like a dawn adder.”
Stupid raised his head incrementally, tipped back his hat to peer at Ruc out of the gap.
“Dawn adder?” Mouse asked.
“And just what the fuck,” Monster inquired finally, “is a dawn adder?”
“A delta snake. You don’t see them close to the city—I don’t know why. They’re orange and pink—like sunrise.”
“How poetic.”
Ruc ignored her. “They’re venomous, but the venom doesn’t paralyze or kill, at least not immediately, not from a single bite. If it’s hungry, it will bite several times in a row, make a quick end of the thing, but often it bites only once, then withdraws. The venom makes whatever’s been bitten thrash, roll around, scream if it’s a thing that screams. You can hear a jaguar that’s been bitten by a dawn adder for miles on a calm day. Scavengers come, wait, then clean up the carcass.”
“Why kill a thing,” Stupid asked, “that it never gets to eat?”
“Eating isn’t the point,” Ruc replied. “The adder isn’t hungry. It uses the screams of the dying creature to attract a mate.”
“I don’t think,” Monster said skeptically, “that the general of some foreign army is coming here looking for a hot fuck.”
“Neither do I,” Ruc agreed, “but principle is the same.”
Talal frowned. “Remind us of the principle again.”
“Most creatures,” Ruc said, “snakes, jaguars, people—they’re all fighting all the time just to survive. A jaguar doesn’t waste a kill, because it needs the food. Generals don’t throw away soldiers, because they need those soldiers.” He shook his head. “For the dawn adder, though—it doesn’t matter. It can kill at will. The snake wears these wasted lives, the pointlessness of their wreckage, the way a bird wears its plumage.”
It was Monster, finally, who broke the long silence. “Makes a fucked-up kind of sense.” She glanced over at Mouse. “You remember how we’d decide which houses to rob?”
“Trash,” he replied, nodding his huge head slowly.
“Measure a person not by what they keep,” Stupid said from beneath the hat, “but by what they can afford to throw away.”
“The First is certainly tossing these fools away like trash,” Talal said.
“Which would mean,” Bien added grimly, “that he doesn’t care whether we’re scared. He doesn’t care that we know he’s coming. He doesn’t care if we prepare. He doesn’t care if he destroys his own army before he even arrives. He’s so strong it just doesn’t matter.”
* * *
Ruc had killed a dozen flies, snatched them out of the air and smashed them into the table, but others kept coming, attracted to the heat, the light, the scent of skin. In Dombâng, there were always more flies. They buzzed around the lantern, the drone of their wings the only sound in the small bunk room. Monster, Mouse, and Stupid had retired to their bunks an hour earlier, the exhaustion of their fight finally catching up to them. Ruc, Talal, and Bien stayed up. The three of them hadn’t been alone since the morning, which meant there’d been no chance to discuss their aborted attempt at escape. Ruc had a dozen burning questions, but he could hear Monster muttering to herself in the other room, tossing back and forth while she waited for sleep, and so he waited. Bien picked her scabs. Talal traced the grain of the rough table as though he were following a path on a map.
Eventually the midnight gong broke the silence. The shivering bronze sounded like a portent or a warning, but it didn’t wake the other three. Ruc could see their heat through the wooden wall, all lost to exhaustion.
He shifted his gaze to Bien. “We’re going to have to fight,” he said quietly.
She nodded, stared into the lamp’s shifting flame. “It was obvious the day we came here. But all this time I still thought … I thought we’d discover a way out.”
“What did you find back there?” Talal asked.
She shrugged. “Like I said. A storeroom. Dark. Locked.”
“Can we break through the door?”
“Maybe. I kicked it a bunch of times. It didn’t break, but you’re both stronger than me.”
“Sounds like we’re close,” Talal said.
Bien shook her head. “Close isn’t good enough. We’ll be back in the pit tomorrow, but none of us are fighting. Which means Goatface will be in the box the whole time. And then, the day after tomorrow, we fight.”
The day after tomorrow, we fight.
The revelation held no horror for Ruc. That absence of that horror, however, was a horror all its own. Half a lifetime devoted to Eira, to love and compassion, to the helping of his fellows, even the helping of his foes, and for what? All the Teachings, all the pieties, all the worship—worthless. His years as a priest had been nothing more than an elaborate mask. He was still the same blood-soaked creature who had happily stalked jaguars through the reeds. Everything he’d tried to escape—the cruelty, the eager heat, the sheer brute joy of the hunt—it had been with him all along, waiting. He was right back where he began, faced with the same ancient, fundamental choice: kill or die.
“We need to tell the others,” Bien said quietly.
It took Ruc a moment to return to the conversation. Talal was frowning at her.
“Which others?”
“Monster, Mouse, and Stupid.”
“Why would we tell them?” Ruc asked.
“Because,” Bien replied, “while we’re fighting, they’ll have a chance to go through the wall. The same way I did. They were thieves before they came here. Breaking into houses and all that. They’ll be able to find a way out.”
Ruc shook his head. “As soon as Goatface comes back to the box to find them gone, we’re done.”
“He won’t find them gone,” Bien insisted. “We can tell them to find a way out—unlock the door, explore what needs to be explored—then to come back.”
Talal grimaced. “One thing I’ve found about people—they don’t always do what they’re told.”
“Especially,” Ruc added, “when their lives are at stake. We’d be offering them a way out and the perfect opportunity to take it.”
To his surprise, Bien smiled. For just a moment she looked almost predatory. “They don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Dombâng is a city of a hundred thousand people,” Talal said. “There’s always somewhere to go.”
“Not for escaped Worthy. No one will help them. No one ever does. They might survive a week, two, but then what? There are no ships in or out. All the main channels are patrolled by the Greenshirts. The causeway is crawling with soldiers. Anyone who gets out of here has two choices—hide or flee. Both are death sentences.”
Talal raised an eyebrow. “Remind me again why we’re so eager to get out.”
“Because,” Bien replied, “we have the two of you.” She leveled a finger at Ruc. “He knows the world of the delta, and you know the world outside it. Anyone who escapes with one of the Vuo Ton and the Kettral actually has a chance.…”
“I’m not Vuo Ton,” Ruc said.
“Close enough.”
The soldier sucked at something in his teeth, then shook his head. “So. Let’s say we tell them. Let’s say they agree. And let’s also say, since we’re having such good luck in this scenario, that while we’re fighting, one of them is able to find a way out. Then what? When will we use it?”
“The high holy days.”
Ruc studied her, then shook his head. “It doesn’t work. We always fight in threes. There’s no time when we’re all in the box without Goatface.”
“There are ways,” Talal said, frowning, “of dealing with Goatface.”
“Ways that work in front of ten thousand people?” Ruc asked. He shook his head. “It was touch and go just getting Bien through that gap and back. If Monster, Mouse, and Stupid disappear, someone’s going to notice, and then if you kill Goatface in the box—”
“Not kill,” Bien said, her voice hard, angry.
“He’s the enemy, Bien,” Talal replied.
She shook her head. “The only foe is the hate in your heart.”
She must have recited the words a thousand times, but now, her features shifting in the light of the lantern, she sounded desperate, as though the ancient Teaching were the flimsiest shield held up against what had to come, as though she expected it to shatter at the first blow.
