The Empire's Ruin, page 82
“It did not happen the way you think.”
Gwenna started to respond, then pulled up short, her thoughts spinning. She turned slowly to stare at the historian.
The truth was a cold blade sliding silently between her ribs.
“You’re one of them,” she said. “You’re Csestriim.”
Kiel nodded, as though the revelation were an afterthought.
She moved instantly, instinctively to put space between them, ripped a blade from its sheath, dropped into a low guard. She could kill him.…
No, she corrected herself, she thought she could kill him. That broken form looked so vulnerable, so unthreatening, but that was because he wanted it to look that way. He’d survived the battle with the Manjari. He’d survived the hamaksha. He’d kept pace with Gwenna herself, despite his limp, as she climbed into the mountains. She realized with a shock of horror that, in truth, she had no idea what the immortal historian was capable of.
He looked straight past her unwavering blade into her eyes. “I am not your enemy.”
Kill him, whispered a voice inside her. Kill him now, before it is too late.
She didn’t know if it was wisdom or the sickness talking.
“Not my enemy?” She shifted to the side, tried to create an angle. “Is that what you told the Nevariim before you strapped them to the table?”
“I was never posted here.”
“You know a lot about the place, for someone who was never here.”
“I know a lot about a lot of things.”
He moved with her casually, almost indifferently, but she could see it now, see what she’d missed all the many long weeks they’d spent together—the way he always left himself either a parry or a way to slip free, the way he matched his movements to her own so effortlessly that she’d never even noticed.
“Why did you let me find out?”
He’d allowed her to see the truth. That much was obvious. He’d been dangling it in front of her for weeks, even months. If she hadn’t been so stupid, so lost in herself, she would have realized it earlier.
“It will be easier to collaborate,” he replied, “if you understand who I am, if you understand the source of my knowledge and abilities.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t Adare fucking tell me?”
“It would have destroyed the foundation of your trust.”
“I don’t have any trust in you.”
“Yes, you do,” the historian replied evenly. “Over the past months I have helped you time and again. Before you learned that I was Csestriim, you learned that I was strong, resourceful, reliable.”
“A reliable person wouldn’t have spent all this time lying.”
“Reliable people lie all the time. None of my omissions endangered you, the ship, the men, or the mission.”
Slowly, methodically, she forced herself to go over every statement he’d made, every action taken since the moment they left Annur. So far, the things he’d said about Menkiddoc and the sickness had all turned out to be true. When the Manjari ships attacked, he had been there on deck, loosing his arrows into the fray. During the storm, he’d helped Bhuma Dhar keep the Daybreak on course. If he’d wanted to scuttle the mission, he’d had plenty of chances to do so. He’d saved her from the poison of the gabhya’s bite.
None of which meant she had to trust him. She’d be insane to consider him an ally. But she had to reckon with the fact that he hadn’t behaved as a foe.
“You’re not here,” she said slowly, “not on this expedition, out of idle, historical curiosity.”
“Curiosity is never idle.”
“I’ll be sure to have that carved on your tombstone.”
“People have been waiting for me to die for a very long time.”
He seemed to take no satisfaction from the fact.
“Let me put it more directly,” she said. “Why are you here? Why did you come on this mission? You sure as shit don’t care about the Kettral.”
He looked at her with those gray eyes. “On the contrary. I care a great deal about the Kettral. But you are correct that the Kettral are not the only thing I care about.”
“I can’t wait for you to elaborate.”
“In the histories—”
She cut him off. “History is over. Whatever this place was in the past, it’s not anymore.”
Kiel regarded her gravely. “History is never over. Sometimes it sleeps for a while, that is all.”
“Whatever the fuck that means.”
“It means that something is amiss in Menkiddoc.”
She stared at him. “No shit.”
“Something beyond the sickness. The city we found in the south—it should not have been there. The bodies in Solengo.” Kiel shook his head. “The world is out of joint.”
“That’s the way the world is. You ought to know that; you’re the historian. Something’s always fucked up somewhere.”
“This time, there is a pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“I have yet to see all the pieces.”
“That’s what you’re doing here? Looking for more pieces?”
“As well as preparing for various contingencies.”
“What contingencies?”
He regarded her with those stone-gray eyes a long time. When he finally replied, his voice was cold as the vault around them. “War.” He raised a finger that had been broken and healed Hull knew how many times. “Famine.” Another finger. “Plague. Madness. Chaos.” When all his fingers were spread before him, he stared at his palm as though he didn’t recognize it, then clenched his fist shut. “Annihilation.”
54
The morning of the third day of the culling was split in half. To the north, cloud blackened the sky. Lightning stabbed into the delta. Thunder grumbled along the horizon, rivaling the clamor of the gathered crowd. Directly overhead, however, the sun blazed, hot and unyielding. Ruc reached for the water, though he’d been drinking steadily all morning.
His body, like the day itself, felt cloven in two. At the thought of the slaughter to come, his gut had clenched down into a sick, furious fist. After the months of running, lifting, and training, the time had finally come to kill. Kill or end up dead. When he imagined his hand wrapped around the shaft of a spear, imagined burying it in another body, the urge to vomit swamped him. He could see Eira with her huge eyes witnessing his failure. And yet the nausea was not all. Beneath it, like the hot crackle of a summer storm, coursed an almost convulsive eagerness, as though, once the vomiting and regret had run their course, he would be free and clean to pursue his hunting unencumbered.
He took another swig of water, hauled his attention back to the moment, reminded himself that the fight wasn’t the end. It was just a passage they needed to go through to reach the true goal: escape.
Monster, Mouse, and Stupid had reacted to the revelation of the plan with a mixture of disbelief and glee.
“This is some stupid fucking shit,” Monster cackled. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course I’ve been running with stupid for a long time—no reason to quit now.” She’d narrowed her eyes. “You’ve got to know it’s gonna be tempting, once that door’s open, to just keep going without you.”
“Going where?” Ruc asked quietly.
She gave an elaborate shrug. “Lots of places to hide in a city the size of Dombâng.”
“Is that what you want to do? Spend the rest of your life hiding?” He shook his head. “Getting out of the Arena means nothing. If you want to escape, you need to get out of the city entirely. And to do that, you need me.”
Her face soured. “You sure know how to shit on a girl’s dreams.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “I don’t mind you having your dreams. I just want to make sure that Bien, Talal, and I are in them.”
In the end, the woman had agreed to go through the wall, see if she could pick the storeroom lock, then report back. Whether she’d stick to the agreement was another question altogether, one that—with the fight almost upon them—there was no time left to consider.
Talal was leaning against the wall of the box, gazing out over the sand. After a while, he shook his head.
“Hundreds of people die in this city every day—spider bites, drowning, old age—but still they need to do this.”
“Sacrifice,” Mouse said with a shrug, then glanced back toward the piss pot and the cracked board behind it.
“A false sacrifice,” Bien growled, “to false gods.” She had gnawed her fingernail down to the quick; blood filled the nail bed. She stared at it a moment, as though surprised to see it there, then wiped it on her noc and turned to Talal. “What’s it like, growing up somewhere no one’s ever heard of the Three?”
“People are people.”
“Whatever the fuck that means,” Monster said.
“It means,” Talal replied, “that people like watching things die. They come up with different reasons for the killing—for the gods, for the Emperor, for their children, for honor—and they come up with different ways to do it—war, slavery, a little light genocide somewhere out at the edge of the empire.…” He trailed off, gave a half shake of his head. “The killing, though, is mandatory. There’s always killing.”
Bien stared at him. “I don’t believe that. There has to be a better way.”
He turned to her at last. “Sure. But no one wants a better way.”
He gestured to the thousands of Dombângans filling the Arena. They were hanging from the framing, leaning out over the stands, hammering with their heels on the planks, filling the air with a noise so great it felt like a weight leaning on everything.
Ruc forced himself to look up into the crowd, to peruse the individual faces.
After a moment, he fixed on a man with thinning hair and a boil on his cheek. His brown arms were almost purple to the elbows. A dyer, then. Any other day he’d be at his vats, probably working quietly, coloring cloth, doing his small part to make the world more bright. Now, as he bellowed in the face of his neighbor, spittle flew from his mouth.
A few seats to the right, a little girl, no more than six or seven, had fashioned a doll from sweet-reed husks. It was dressed with rags to look more or less like one of the Worthy—a scrap of net in one hand, a stick standing in for a spear in the other. As he watched, she began to dismember it slowly, deliberately, with obvious glee, tossing the limbs into the people gathered below.
“Eira offers a better way,” he said.
The words sounded false, like poorly fired clay, ready to crumble beneath the slightest weight.
Talal met his eyes. “There’s no place for Eira in what we have to do today.”
Stupid chuckled from beneath the broad brim of his hat. “Just to remind you—you’re here to fight, not compose a treatise on the theological underpinning of human ethics.”
He gestured toward the pit, where the slaves were carrying the weapons table out onto the sand.
“When do we find out who we’re fighting?” Bien asked, turning to Goatface.
“Soon,” the trainer replied. “First, the high priestess will … favor us with some words.”
Monster spat onto the sand. She, however, seemed to be alone in her contempt. As Vang Vo stepped to the rail of the ship high above, a quiet slid over the space, as though simply by standing and showing her face the woman had transformed the raucous mob into something different, something almost holy.
She took a moment to run her eyes over the throng, then spoke.
“Chum.”
She paused after that one word. Then, to Ruc’s surprise, grinned.
“That’s right: chum. Two days ago, a man walked into this arena to spit on our gods.…”
She paused as a murmur of disquiet rippled through the crowd, then made a motion with her hand as though she were shooing away a fly.
“He talked and talked and talked about his lord and his army, how strong they were, how terrifying. And then what happened?” Ruc could hear the smile in her voice. “We turned him into chum.”
A cheer erupted from the stands, but she raised her hand to quell it.
“His death in the Arena was only the start. That night, I took his body, tossed it in a swallowtail, and paddled out into the delta. I cut him up—first the fingers, then the joints of the wrist, elbow, shoulder. Nothing special. Just like taking apart a pig or a goat or a chicken. Piece by piece, I tossed the meat into the water for the crocs. They came to take communion at my boat and do you know what this fool’s master—this First, whoever he is—did to defend the mutilated body?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.
“When I was done, I cleaned my hands and came home, just the way I would after slaughtering an animal.
“That idiot wasn’t the first person to deny the Three or taunt our belief. The most powerful empire in the world tried for two hundred years to crush the spirit of Dombâng. It failed. You can bet your last copper coin that anyone else who comes here, to our home, spouting nonsense about submission is going to meet the same fate.”
She shook her head once more.
“Dombâng does not submit.”
She pointed a finger down into the Arena.
“These Worthy are our reminder. A reminder that our gods are gods of struggle and defiance.
“Whoever the First is, I hope he comes, and I hope he comes soon. I look forward to teaching him that the delta is always hungry.”
A roar erupted from the crowd. Waves of sound rolled over the hot sand, shook the sky.
Despite himself, Ruc found an obscure pride surging in his own heart.
He’d tried to leave Kem Anh and Hang Loc, tried to forsake their bloody path of struggle and death, and yet they were the closest thing to parents that he had. Beasts, yes, but beautiful beasts, and a part of him bristled at the thought of some foreign tyrant having the nerve to threaten them. He realized to his chagrin that he agreed with Vang Vo; he wanted someone to attack the delta, to march an entire army into the reeds. He wanted to be there when the bastards died. Ruc Lakatur Lan Lac, priest of the goddess of love, wanted to take part in the killing.
“Some of the Worthy are going to die today,” Vang Vo continued when the noise settled back to silence. “But we don’t worship death.”
“Pig shit,” Bien muttered.
“We worship in these Worthy the traits of the Three themselves: beauty, bravery, skill, strength. It is this that makes us great. It is this that keeps us free.”
Stupid grunted when she was finished. “Eloquent, for a croc wrangler.”
“Ex–croc wrangler,” Goatface observed. He stood just to their side, shaded, as usual, by his parasol. “Never forget that those who succeed in the Arena are … elevated.”
Monster spat. “Putting on different clothes doesn’t make you a different thing.”
She looked like she had something else to say on the matter, but the fight crier was already striding into the pit. Today, the barrel-chested man wore a resplendent purple vest with his black noc. When he reached the center of the sand, he held out his arms, spoke in a bellow that had to reach all the way to Drowned Horse Island.
“In the first contest of this day, fighting from the eastern side of the Arena, under the training of Lao Nan: the Worthy known as Ruc Lakatur, Bien Qui Nai, and Talal the Annurian.”
Not Kettral, Ruc noticed. Vang Vo hadn’t revealed that little piece of the truth. Not that it mattered. No one seemed to wonder where Talal had come from—maybe he was a merchant who’d been hiding in an attic, maybe a soldier captured prowling around the far end of the causeway. Whatever the case, at the mention of Annur the crowd went rabid. The stands shook until Ruc thought they might collapse. Directly above and behind Goatface’s box, the Arena guards were cursing, holding their spears sideways, using them to shove back the surge of bodies.
Monster clapped Talal on the shoulder. “They really fucking hate you,” she said cheerfully.
The soldier nodded. He didn’t look particularly tense, but then, he never looked all that tense. Instead of glancing up into the stands he turned to Goatface, held out the iron ball that was still chained to his ankle.
“Do I have to fight with this?”
The trainer tutted. “Of course not. Such an impediment would be … anathema to the fair contest of the culling.”
He fished inside his shirt for the leather thong, pulled out a key, then knelt to unfasten the cuff around the Kettral’s ankle. Talal watched silently, then glanced up to meet Ruc’s gaze. A single blow of that iron ball to the back of the trainer’s skull, and that would be the end of him. It was amazing that most people survived so long when they were so fragile, so easily broken. For a mad moment, Ruc was tempted to do it himself, snatch the iron from Talal’s hands, kill the trainer, and break through the wall behind them. Everyone would see, of course. The guards would be after them in moments, but at least they’d be doing something. They’d die, but they’d die trying to escape rather than out on the hot sand, dancing for the delight of the Dombângan mob.
He ground out the thought as though it were an ember.
He’d watched birds caught in traps, the way they’d flap and flap endlessly, pointlessly, striving against the cruel cord until they were too exhausted to twitch when they were finally lifted from the snare. It was an animal failure not to imagine a moment beyond the present, a failure he could not afford.
He would fight—he, and Bien, and Talal. Monster would go through the wall and find a way out. They would escape from the Arena, but not today.
The voice of the crier cut into his thoughts.
“Fighting from the western side of the Arena, under the training of Goc Lo: Yon To, Nung the Fisher, and Sang the Ox.”
Goatface nodded approvingly. “A winnable fight.”
“I like to think that all the fights are winnable,” Ruc replied.
The trainer shrugged. “Some wins are more … conceivable than others.”
“I feel like shit,” Monster announced to no one in particular.
