The Empire's Ruin, page 86
“What other party? You just got done telling me that almost no one can go through that fucking thing.”
“Almost no one is not no one.” He looked past her toward the gate. “And the centuries have taught me to distrust my own convictions.”
Gwenna bared her teeth in frustration. The pain inside her flared, then subsided.
“Whatever the case, all that shit is gone. The seed, the weapons, all of it, and we don’t know a ’Kent-kissing thing about whoever took it.”
“We know one thing,” Kiel replied gravely. “We know they are preparing for war.”
Gwenna narrowed her eyes. “Wait. You’re Csestriim. Adare knows you’re Csestriim. You can sing your way through all these locks. If you’re so concerned about this seed, about all these weapons, why didn’t you just come check on them? Move them somewhere safe?”
“This was somewhere safe. An armory guarded by Csestriim locks. An empty fortress in the center of an abandoned continent. It was only on this expedition that I realized something is wrong here.”
She stared at him. “Something has been wrong here since you assholes poisoned the whole fucking place.”
“Not that. Something more. Something worse.”
“Looks like your girlfriend understood.”
“She was always adept at seeing patterns.” For a few heartbeats he stared out into the snow. Then: “I must return to Annur. To warn the Emperor.”
“We’ve been working on that for a couple months, right? Just a jaunt down the northern slope of the mountains, through the foothills, an overland trek through land we hope is still unpolluted, then start looking for someone with a boat—”
“I must go now.” He turned, stared through the kenta. “Here.”
“Ah.” Stupid. She should have seen it earlier. Immediately. “You can bring the eggs.” The words blurting out of her even as the idea occurred. “The rest of us might not make it, but the eggs will get back.”
The historian shook his head. “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I could no more carry the eggs through the kenta than I could carry you.”
“Then how did, what’s her name? Axta. How did she get in? How’d she bring the sword with her? Why isn’t she naked?”
“The kenta allow clothing to pass, small objects, even weapons. Not other living creatures. The gate would annihilate the eggs.”
She considered that. It sounded like bullshit, but no more bullshit than the idea that, on the other side of that slender arch, waited other continents.
For a long time they stood in silence, staring through the empty space circumscribed by the kenta. Gwenna felt a stab of envy at the man—no, she reminded herself, not a man—for his ability to go free. The rest of them faced an overland voyage of hundreds of miles only to arrive on an alien coastline that was hopefully still untainted. Kiel could just step through the arch and be home.
If Annur was even home.
She turned the thought over in her mind. It had felt like exile when Adare sent her south with the expedition, a banishment from everywhere and everything she understood. After months at sea, however, months wandering the blighted wilderness of Menkiddoc, months trying to survive the tangled jungle of her own mind, when she looked back at the place she’d left she found it difficult to recognize. Even if she was allowed back to the Islands, what would she find? A home? No. The woman who had lived there, who had inhabited that world, that life—she was gone.
She stared at the kenta. If she could step through the gate, if it could take her anywhere she chose, where would she go?
It seemed a simple question; she had no answer.
Grimly, she turned away. “Do me a favor. When you get back to Annur, send a fucking ship to meet us.”
The historian didn’t answer right away. He traced a finger down the side of the arch, seemed about to reach through, then drew his hand back.
“You going?” she demanded roughly.
“I’m no longer certain I can use it.”
She frowned. “They’re a Csestriim creation. I thought all the Csestriim could use them.”
“We could. I could. And yet, the last time I went through I felt myself … waver.”
“Waver?”
He nodded. “I’ve spent so much time around humans, I’ve lived so many centuries in a world touched by your gods of fear and love, hatred and courage, that some of those emotions have taken root inside of me.”
“Love?” Gwenna asked incredulously. “Fear? I’ve met stones with more emotion than you.”
“Only the roots,” Kiel replied. “The slenderest tubers.”
“And those stop you from using the gate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you come back? After you’ve warned Adare?”
“I will try.”
He held her eyes for two heartbeats, three, four, then turned, stepped forward, and vanished.
Gwenna studied the empty space beneath the arch. Kiel was gone—that much was obvious—but the two possibilities about where he’d gone seemed equally impossible. Either he’d traveled to Annur between one step and the next, or the kenta had obliterated him.
She turned away, crossed the snow-crusted chamber, gazed out one of the open windows.
The wind howled and tore at her, tried to yank her into the void.
Something is amiss.…
When had that ever not been true? She was no historian, but you didn’t need to be in order to see that the chronicle of the world was a chronicle of things going wrong, of plague and famine, slaughter, rebellion, greed and cowardice, human misery wide as the sea. And yet, when she thought about the pollution of the seed, the awful twisting of Menkiddoc, the fact that it could happen somewhere else, maybe everywhere else, she couldn’t suppress a shudder. She’d come on the expedition because she had nowhere else to go, because she thought that by finding the kettral eggs and bringing them back she might redeem herself, but what did it matter, one woman’s redemption, in the face of what she’d seen in the jungles below?
The poison ached inside her.
She closed her eyes, watched again as Jonon drank from the tainted water, that miserable, arrogant bastard sacrificing himself to save the tattered remnants of his crew. Had he understood what he was doing? Had he seen what he would become?
Outside the window, the storm screamed in a voice almost human, high and furious, like Rat’s voice.…
Gwenna’s eyes slammed open. Her heart bucked inside her chest.
Not like Rat’s voice; it was Rat’s voice, stabbing up from far below where the door of the fortress opened into the saddle, screaming the same two syllables over and over:
Gwenna! Gwenna! Gwenna!
56
They spent the rest of the day watching people die.
There was no way to ask Monster if she’d managed to pick the lock, no way to ask her what she’d found on the other side, no way to ask her anything at all. Her smirk suggested success, but Ruc wanted more than a smirk. He wanted to hear the words: It’s open. We can get out. Instead, the six of them had been stuck in Goatface’s box, the blood of the fight drying on their skin, the aches and twinges blooming beneath it while overhead the sun traced its blazing path across the sky. Ruc kept stealing glances at Monster, and he wasn’t the only one. Even Talal, with all his vaunted Kettral discipline, looked at her more often than was truly warranted.
The only one who seemed indifferent to the success of Monster’s mission was Bien. She didn’t look at the woman, or anything else for that matter, just stared with blank eyes out over the sand as the Worthy screamed and swore and fought and bled and died. When Ruc offered her water, she took the crock, drank, handed it back, all without saying a word. At one point, Talal sat beside her on the bench, leaned over to ask something Ruc couldn’t quite hear. She shook her head slightly, refused to meet his eye.
The last of the bodies weren’t dragged from the pit until the sun had dipped below the western wall of the Arena. Then there was the procession of the Worthy back to the yard, the trip to the mess hall, which meant talking to the other warriors, and then, back at the barracks, Goatface’s seemingly interminable analysis of the fight, the ways in which they’d both succeeded and failed, opportunities for improvement, pitfalls to be avoided. Finally, in the dark stretch of time between sunset and the midnight gongs, the trainer retired, and at last there was a chance to learn what had happened in the dusty shadows beneath the Arena.
Monster, of course, was in no hurry to rush the revelation.
“It was dark back there,” she said.
“Dark,” Mouse said mournfully.
She nodded. “Dark as fuck.”
“As a simile,” Stupid opined, “I’m not sure that makes sense.” He’d taken up his customary spot, lying on the bench along the wall, although for once he didn’t have the straw hat pulled down over his eyes.
“You want me to tell you where you can shove your simile?” Monster demanded.
Stupid furrowed his brow, then shook his head. “Also doesn’t make sense.”
“Did you pick the lock?” Ruc asked.
Monster turned back to him, waggled a finger. “Look who’s so impatient! This is what’s wrong with men—always in such a rush to get to the end that they don’t enjoy the ins and outs along the way.”
“According to Bien,” he replied, “the ins and outs are just finding your way through a few rows of crates to the door.”
Bien said nothing, just stared into the lantern flame.
“Fine, you fucking killjoys,” Monster said. “I found the door. I picked the lock. We’re free.” She spread her hands, glared at Ruc. “See. Every story’s boring if you tell it too fast.”
“Or too slowly,” Stupid observed.
“We’re not here for the story,” Ruc said. “What’s beyond the door?”
Monster glared at him, took another swig of her quey, then shrugged. “A long corridor. More storerooms on either side. It doubles back around beneath the stands, probably makes a huge loop all the way back to the Arena.” She winked. “But there’s a back door. Little dock about opposite the main gates where barges bring in supplies.”
“Guarded?” Talal asked.
“’Course it’s fucking guarded.”
“Did anyone see you?”
Monster offered a derisive snort in response.
“She is a constant vexation of the spirit,” Stupid offered from over on the bench, “but there’s no one in the city better at sneaking around in the shadows.”
“So that’s our path out,” Ruc said.
“What about the lock?” Talal asked.
Monster glowered at him. “I’m not a fucking idiot. Door’s closed but not locked.”
“What if someone checks it?” Ruc asked.
“Then they’ll fucking lock it.” She tapped her temple. “I know the trick of the little bastard now, though. I’ll be able to pick it in a tenth the time if it comes to that.”
A silence settled over the room. Ruc looked at Bien. She didn’t look back.
“Well,” Monster said, glaring around the table. “Don’t everyone thank me at once.”
“We’re not out yet,” Talal observed.
“Obviously fucking not, but we will be. You can bet your Annurian ass on that.”
Ruc nodded slowly. Now that the dangers of the day were behind them, it seemed suddenly, almost suspiciously easy. He reminded himself that they’d almost failed. If the fight had finished a few beats earlier, if Goatface had been more suspicious, if Monster hadn’t managed to fit the wooden board back into place—they would all be dead, executed before the setting sun.
“Easy,” Stupid said.
“Easy?” Mouse asked.
Ruc shook his head. “Things are always easy until they’re not.”
* * *
He was lying in his bunk when the midnight gong finally tolled. He could hear Talal’s even breathing from across the room, Bien tossing and turning in the bunk above him. He thought she was struggling with some nightmare until she spoke.
“This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”
He paused a moment before replying. “The escape?”
“The fight,” she replied, voice thick with anguish. “We were supposed to be gone already. Off into the delta. Or maybe dead. We weren’t supposed to kill anyone.”
Ruc stared into the darkness. He had no answer. A priest of Eira, a true priest, faced with the contest of the Arena, would have tossed his weapon into the sand and accepted death, would have gone to his foe with open arms and an open heart, absolved the killer even as the bronze slid between his ribs. It was a hard thing, realizing half your life had been a lie.
In the end, however, it was Talal who replied.
Evidently none of them could sleep.
“When we stepped into that pit, someone had to die.”
His voice was calm, serious but conversational.
“They weren’t even good,” Ruc said, shaking his head.
That, he realized, was the crux of it. It was one thing to stalk a jaguar, to struggle with it in the prime of its strength. There was something beautiful in that, something noble. Try as he might, though, he could find nothing beautiful or noble about what had happened out on the sand.
“They weren’t good,” Talal said, “but they were good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
“To kill us.”
“But we killed them,” Bien whispered. “That kid couldn’t have been what? Seventeen? And I murdered him.”
The quiet was a weight pressing down on Ruc’s chest.
“It will get easier,” Talal said at last.
“I don’t want it to get easier.”
“Sometimes,” the Kettral replied, “the world doesn’t care what you want.”
“How many people have you killed?” she demanded.
“Why do you want to ask that?”
“How many?”
A pause.
“I don’t know.”
Bien made a sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp. “How can you not know?”
“War is ugly. Battle is messy. There’s not always time to keep count.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Every day.”
“Then how do you do it?”
“I consider the alternative. If we’d refused to fight, if we’d let them kill us, then what? Someone else would have killed them when the time came—”
“But it wouldn’t have been us,” Bien snarled. Her shape on the bunk above was a blaze so bright it seemed she should ignite the mattress, set the entire room aflame.
“I’m glad it was us,” Talal replied quietly. “We didn’t draw it out, didn’t mock them, didn’t make them suffer.” He paused. “And when you don’t see the blood on your own hands, it’s too easy to forget that there’s a price for every decision. Too easy to believe you’re innocent.”
Bien exhaled raggedly. “It’s just … It’s different for you. You’ve done this before. Ruc and I have never killed anyone.” She flinched at her own words, then added quietly, “Not on purpose, anyway.”
A fly circled in the darkness, buzzing, bumping dumbly off the wall, buzzing again. The Witness had told him once that most flies lived less than a week. Some survived barely a day. They hatched into the world in the morning and were dead by night.
Why? Ruc remembered asking the old man. What’s the point?
The Witness shrugged. What’s the point for any of us?
He shifted on his sweat-soaked bunk, stared up at Bien’s burning shape.
“I have,” he said at last.
Bien flinched, as though she’d been bitten by something. She didn’t reply, however, so he kept talking.
“My early memories are all sun and blood.
“The people of Dombâng worship Kem Anh and Hang Loc like they’re gods, but they’re not. They’re animals. Predators.
“When I couldn’t even walk, they taught me to cover myself in mud and wait for the gorzles. I was snapping the birds’ necks before I took my first steps. Later, they showed me how to catch snakes, twist off the heads, strip the flesh from the bones, how to take a croc’s back, hold on while it thrashed and dove, how to drive a knife into the joint below the skull. I spent months stalking jaguars through the reeds, paw print after muddy paw print. By the time I was seven I had a necklace of teeth hanging halfway to my waist.”
“Those were animals, Ruc,” Bien said. He could hear the fear and hope tangled in her voice. “Just animals.”
“Just animals to start,” he replied. “Then the people started coming.”
He reached back into the bright heat of his childhood, felt all over again the sun blazing on his naked skin, the joy of his own strength.
“It seems insane now, but the first time I saw people, I didn’t know what they were. They wore clothes, which confused me, and they showed up in a boat. I’d spent my life swimming and running; I’d never seen a boat before. And even though they had two legs, two arms, one head, all the rest of it, they were so much … less than the creatures that raised me. Smaller. Slower. Uglier. I thought they were disgusting.
“I recognized their knives, at least. Hang Loc had given me a knife when I was almost too young to hold it. He never hunted with one. Kem Anh didn’t either. Either one of them could take a croc apart with their bare hands. I thought—if I thought about it at all—that the blade was something I was allowed because I was young, that when I grew up I wouldn’t need one either.
“Anyway, when the Vuo Ton came—that’s who the people were: the chosen warriors of the Vuo Ton—I expected them to die, and they did. They fought bravely, ferociously even, but Hang Loc killed them anyway, crushed a chest, ripped out a throat, choked the life from the last of them. I’d seen him do the same to countless animals over the years, so it wasn’t a surprise. What did surprise me was the sick misgiving I felt after, as I watched him separate the heads from the bodies.
“I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling that way, had no words to put to it. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know the word for wrong or slaughter or murder. All I knew was that my stomach ached and my head felt too light, as though it had come unmoored from the world. I made myself stand there as he scooped out the eyes, tossed them in the mud, packed the sockets with dirt, then planted the delta violets. I made myself watch as he and Kem Anh unmade the bodies, then feasted on the dark meat of the liver. When they offered me the flesh, I couldn’t bring myself to eat.
