The Empire's Ruin, page 87
“This is not right.
“That’s what I would have told them, if they had ever taught me any language.”
He fell silent awhile, listened to Bien’s breath rasping between her chapped lips, to the claws of some animal or other skittering across the sunbaked tiles of the roof. It was strange to speak the story aloud after so many years, to force all that brightness and violence, the blood and flashing bronze into a handful of words. Was Bien seeing anything like what actually happened? No way to know. If he stretched out his arm he could touch the bottom of her mattress. She might as well have been on the other side of the delta. The other side of the world.
“A year later, the Vuo Ton came again,” he said finally. Once he’d begun to tell the story, there was no way to stop or call it back. “This time it was my turn.”
He saw it all again, the low mist shrouding the channel, the ripples where shortfins rose to feast on the striders, and then the canoe sliding out of the silence, grinding up onto the low beach where he waited, flanked by Kem Anh and Hang Loc.
“The Witness sat in the back. He told me later that he was watching me, but I had eyes only for the warriors. Like the last time, there were three of them, two men and a young woman, and like the ones who came before, they carried bronze weapons in their hands. They bowed to Hang Loc, then to Kem Anh. I could almost smell their awe.
“Kem Anh killed the first two. She tore out one man’s throat with her teeth, ripped free the woman’s heart. The last of them she left to me.
“I knew what I was supposed to do. I’d known it for a whole year, since the last warriors came to the beach to test themselves against their gods. The man I faced, however, was confused, then surprised, then furious to find himself fighting a child, a human child. He’d been prepared to lose an arm or an eye, prepared to die, but he wasn’t prepared for the humiliation of fighting me while Kem Anh and Hang Loc looked on. That humiliation molted almost instantly into violence.
“He came at me with a long delta spear. I’d never fought a man before, let alone one with a spear, and I had only my knife. His first attack plunged past my guard, ripped open a gash along my shoulder.” He ran his fingers over the scar as he spoke. The skin was smooth and cool in the darkness. “I didn’t know any of the right techniques to kill a man with a weapon, but my whole life had been a lesson in survival. I’d spent endless days learning to dodge, roll, feint, attack. As the warrior attacked, I saw things that I recognized—the way his gaze betrayed him before each lunge, how he moved his weight onto the back foot before uncoiling, the breath that came heavier in his chest as the struggle dragged on.
“His best chance to kill me was right away, in the opening moments, before I understood the kind of creature I was facing. When he failed to do that, I knew. I knew at some deep, old, predatory level that I had him. It wasn’t over—the fight seemed to last half the morning—but every time he tested me with that spear I learned something new. Every time he retreated, I saw his weaknesses more and more clearly, and as the sun bore down, he began to slow.
“I killed him by pieces.
“A nick to the ribs. A gash across his lower back. A kick to the outside of his knee.
“I landed a deep slash across the thigh—that hobbled him, soaked the sand with blood.
“Then a stab to the ribs that would have put down most men. It was a mortal wound. I could see it on his face, I could smell it, but he refused to fall.
“I took his spear away, stabbed him again in the gut, and then, when he tried to get his hands around my throat, I put the bronze straight into his eye.
“He died beneath me, half holding me, his hands slick with his own blood.
“I climbed off, stared at him as the heat seeped from his body, then puked into the sand.”
His own stillness felt suddenly intolerable. Driven by the memory of the violence he rose from the bed, crossed to the window, pulled back the canvas flap, gazed out into the night. The rickety walls of the yard looked nothing like the delta of his childhood, but he recognized the smells drifting in on the hot night wind—mud and rot and wet green reeds. When he spoke again, he might have been addressing the night itself.
“Kem Anh came up behind me, put an arm over my shoulder, but I shrugged her off, stumbled away into the bush. I wanted to scream, but the creatures that raised me had taught me to scream only in triumph, and though I’d killed the man who stood against me, the slick sickness washing my gut felt like anything but triumph. I felt like I’d lost, not just the fight but something else, some part of myself I’d never even recognized before that moment.
“She found me later. I’d spent the afternoon staring into a still pool, studying my own reflection. When she loomed over me, I compared her face with mine. It seemed impossible that I’d never noticed the difference. She glowed with the heat of the late sun on the water. The lines of her face were clean as the arc of a fish leaping from the water, or the slice inscribed on the sky by a plunging marsh hawk. Even her scars she wore like adornments.
“Me though? I was lopsided. One ear was slightly higher than the other. My teeth were too blunt, like the teeth of a creature made to feast on reeds and rushes rather than raw meat. There was a dark mole low on my cheek, two more on my shoulder. They reminded me suddenly, powerfully, of some kind of mold, or the rot that spreads through sodden leaves. She didn’t have any such blemishes. Neither did Hang Loc.
“I didn’t have the words to frame my revelation, but it burned inside me all the same, torching my world to ash. I wasn’t their child. How could I be—a crabbed, twisted thing, a stunted creature who had to fight with a knife? How had I ever believed that? No. Now that I’d seen the warriors from the boat, now that I’d fought them, I understood. There had been a mistake. It was as though a clumsy mud duck had slipped an egg into the nest of a marsh hawk. I wasn’t a predator. I was something sadder and weaker, the kind of thing they preyed upon.
“Her reflection watched me from the water with those golden eyes. My eyes were the color of mud.
“I turned away from her gaze, pointed in the direction from which the boat had come.
“I didn’t know who the people were, but I knew that I was one of them.
“Kem Anh bared her teeth, tried to slide an arm around my waist, but I forced it back, held my slender brown arm straight out, pointing, until at last she made a sound like a jaguar giving up a hunt, turned away, melted back into the brush.
“I sat up all night on the river’s bank. A hot wind carved the rushes. The moon reminded me of bronze.
“I waited for her to come, or him. I wondered if they could cradle me as they always had, or kill me now that their mistake was clear. I tried to imagine the feeling of my neck snapping, or my heart being lifted from my chest. That night might have been easier—a little easier anyway—if I’d had the words for loneliness or love, loss or hunger or hate. If I’d had the words for mother or father? All I had, though, was the starlight burning my eyes, my small hands clenched into fists, and a taste like bile on my tongue.
“The next day, when the Witness appeared in his boat to carry off the bodies, I went with him.”
After so many words, the silence felt tight, heavy and hot. It had seemed important to tell the truth at last, to put voice to the simple fact of his life: he was a creature raised to kill. Not murder, not exactly—the Vuo Ton who faced their gods came prepared to fight and ready to die—but not hunting either. There was no reason to slaughter the warriors with their bronze, no need, nothing beyond the sheer delight of blood and struggle. He’d understood the ugliness of it, even as a child, but despite fifteen years as a patient servant of the goddess of love, nothing had blotted out the beauty.
He heard Bien’s feet hit the floor behind him, soft on the hard wood.
He listened as she crossed the floor.
For a crazed moment he imagined that she was Kem Anh come to kill him finally for his failure. His relief tasted like rage.
She stopped behind him, so close he could feel her breath on his back, the heat radiating from her chest.
“Thank you,” she said, sliding a slim arm around his waist, resting her forehead against his spine.
He shook his head. Exhaustion washed over him, as though he hadn’t just been recounting the fight, but living it all over again.
“For what?” he asked.
“For reminding me.”
“Reminding you of what?”
“That we’re lost.”
He choked up a laugh. “You and me?”
“Yes. And Talal. And the people we killed today. Rooster and Snakebones. All the people who fought. All the people who watched.”
“I wish that were true,” he replied, “but some people are just hungry for blood.”
He tried to free himself, but her arm was strong.
“Of course they are,” she said, then kissed him lightly on the shoulder. Her lips were both warm and cold. “But I was only thinking about the blood. I hated them for all that blood, hated them in a way that severed me from myself, hated them until this moment, tonight, listening to you tell your story at last.” She turned him to face her. For the first time in months, the first time since the slaughter at the temple, she looked like herself beneath the scars. “You reminded me that they’re hungry, Ruc, and I learned long ago, learned at the feet of the goddess herself, how to love all those who hunger.”
57
By the time Gwenna arrived in the domed antechamber of the fortress—lungs heaving, legs ablaze from the endless descent, both blades naked and eager—there was nothing left to fight.
The stone room reeked of terror and blood. A few paces distant, Pattick lay sprawled across the floor. Pattick, who had always been so frightened and so brave, his throat torn out as though by a rabid dog.
“No,” Gwenna growled. “No.”
Cho Lu had fallen just beyond him, facedown, sword dropped from his nerveless hand. The steel gleamed, bloodless; he hadn’t managed to land a blow against whatever killed him.
“It was Jonon.”
Gwenna whirled to find Bhuma Dhar slumped against the wall. He was struggling to stand, but his right leg sprawled in front of him, twisted sickeningly at the knee. When he tried to weight it pain flooded his features and he collapsed, sweating, gasping, his back to the stone. Like the slaughtered legionaries, he had also drawn his cutlass. Like theirs, his was unspotted with blood.
“He entered,” the captain continued, grimacing through the words, “like a wind.”
Gwenna stared, silent. It wasn’t that she couldn’t ask the questions. There was no need; she already knew the answers.
Dhar went on anyway.
“He smiled. He chided us for leaving him. He asked after you. Then he took Rat by the arm. The girl cursed at him, fought, tried to draw her knife. It was like watching a mouse struggle against a snake. A brave mouse, but still.”
He closed his eyes against the memory or the pain or both, but continued speaking.
“He invited the soldiers to join him. You will be my deputies. These were his words. My honored lieutenants. You will feast as I have feasted on the fruits of this land, and you will know strength and bliss and wisdom beyond your imaginings. Cho Lu drew on him then. A bold attack, but useless.” He gestured toward the body. “Jonon was still holding Rat with one arm when he took the soldier’s heart.”
Gwenna glanced over her shoulder. She hadn’t noticed the sodden lump draining onto the stone. It lay just a few inches from Cho Lu’s empty, outstretched hand, as though he were reaching for it, straining to hold it once more.
“Pattick and I attacked.…” The captain trailed off, gazed blankly at the wall. “Useless.”
He held his hands before him, lowered his face between his palms. The same gesture he’d made months ago back on the Daybreak, just after the sinking of his ship, the gesture that meant shame.
Gwenna could taste her own shame. She was the one who’d ordered them to leave the door open. She was the one who’d insisted they stay below. It had seemed reasonable at the time, as she felt her own mind slipping away and that awful hunger rising. She’d been so consumed by the fear of what she herself might do that she’d left them open to Jonon, a creature already in Menkiddoc’s clawed grip.
“What did he want?” she asked.
She said the words, but she could already see the answer to this question.
“You,” Dhar replied. “He broke my knee, but left me alive to deliver the message.”
“What message?” Her voice sounded dull, lifeless, but her body throbbed. Blood hammered in her veins.
“That if you want the girl you’ll follow him.”
“Where?”
“Back,” Dhar said, gesturing toward the south. “Down. Where we faced the gabhya.”
“It makes no sense,” she snarled. “He could have killed you and taken me when I came through the door, right here in this room.”
“I do not know,” the captain replied, shaking his head wearily, “whether there is any sense left inside him. When he was not laughing, he was muttering to himself. Something about this place.” He gestured to the walls, the ceiling. “He seemed to believe it was too small. Too small to contain him.”
For the first time, Dhar looked over his shoulder, back toward the door through which Gwenna had come. “Where is the historian?”
“He had somewhere to go.”
The Manjari squinted through his pain. “Go? Where?”
Gwenna tried to imagine explaining it all—Kiel’s true identity, the poisoning of Menkiddoc, the seed, the kenta—gave up, slid down the wall beside Dhar. “He’s gone, at least for now. Csestriim leach bullshit. Maybe he’ll come back. Not in time to help Rat.”
She clenched her teeth against a sudden flood of nausea, let her head tip back against the stone. From where she sat, she could see down the short corridor to the pass outside. The snow had begun to flag, its energy spent almost as quickly as it had come on, leaving the world beyond the fortress a rectangle of painful light. She ached to hurl herself out into that light, to go charging down the mountainside after Rat, but she hadn’t forgotten the fight against the gabhya, the way Jonon had sliced his way past those hundred arms and buried his sword in its heart. He’d killed an unkillable monster. He’d survived an explosion and a rockslide. If she went after him without a plan, she would die. And then Rat would die.
“You found your cure,” Dhar said.
For a few heartbeats she didn’t reply. She didn’t feel fucking cured. Her body ached like she’d been beaten with bricks, like she’d just swum a hundred miles.
“Yeah,” she said finally, lifting her hand to show him the ring.
Dhar studied the artifact, but made no effort to touch it. “This is what?”
“Fucked if I know. Something the Csestriim made to hold the horror of this place at bay.”
“Does it succeed?”
“Does it succeed,” she repeated blankly. A strange way to ask the question. “I guess. I haven’t started tearing out people’s hearts.”
She let her eyes rest on the bodies of the two legionaries. She should have found their deaths easier than Quick Jak’s or Laith’s or Talal’s—provided the leach was dead, that she hadn’t abandoned him back in Dombâng. She hadn’t spent a lifetime training and fighting beside the two soldiers, hadn’t shared all the experiences—the barrel drops, endless swimming, sunset training fights, all that memorization of maps and languages—that bound the Kettral together. She knew nothing about Pattick’s family, or Cho Lu’s favorite foods, or why they’d enrolled in the legions in the first place. To her surprise, none of that seemed to matter. They’d sailed beside her, marched beside her, fought beside her. She’d heard them muttering in their sleep and watched them stumble when they were exhausted. She remembered the sound of Cho Lu’s laugh and the shape of Pattick’s frown. She knew that when Jonon lem Jonon came for Rat, when the man who’d been their admiral tried to take away an orphan girl, they’d drawn their swords.
What else did she need to know?
It hurt that they were dead, hurt like a weight of gravel stitched into her chest, and that hurt added to the other, deeper hurt of the poison and whatever was fighting it.
“I lost them,” she said.
Dhar shook his head. “They were not yours to lose.”
“I lost her.”
“People are not things, Gwenna Sharpe.”
Not Commander. Not Gwenna. Gwenna Sharpe. The way Rat always said her name.
“No. She’s not a thing. She’s a girl. A brave, smart, stupid little girl, and I let Jonon take her.”
“You lost … You let…” The captain shook his head. “You speak about the world as though everything in it were yours to command.”
“I was in command,” she snarled. “Back on the beach, right after the wreck, you all put me in command.”
And back in Dombâng, she didn’t add. Back in the Purple Baths …
“And what does it mean to you,” Dhar asked, “to be in command?”
“That the decisions are mine. The responsibility is mine. The fucking mistakes are mine.”
“And those that you command? What are they?” She could feel him studying her from beyond the gulf of his own agony. “What are we?”
She stared back, wordless.
“Are we stones on a board?” he pressed after a time. “Pieces to be moved around?”
“If you were stones, you wouldn’t keep dying.”
He nodded. “So. Not stones. What, then? Slaves?”
“That’s horseshit, and you know it.”
“I am asking about what you know.” Dhar closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall. “There was a time before you rose to command, yes? When you were just a student, or a common soldier?”
