The Empire's Ruin, page 88
“Of course.”
She leafed through the memories: Adaman Fane screaming in her face for swimming too slowly; Daveen Shaleel twisting every limb in her body to the breaking point, just to show how it was done; the Flea sending them out on yet another barrel drop; Valyn ordering them to fight the Flea.… They were all her memories, though they didn’t feel like hers. They felt like something she’d overheard in a tavern somewhere, or witnessed from a distance. She tried to remember what it felt like, not to be in command, not to be personally responsible for another life, or two, or five.
“What were you then?” Dhar asked quietly.
“Just a person.”
“You are still just a person.”
“It’s a commander’s job—”
“To command. To make decisions.”
“To make the right fucking decisions.”
“No.” Dhar shook his head weakly. “This is a davi too great for anyone to carry.”
She turned to stare at him. “Doing a good job? That’s too much? Making the right call?”
“Yes. This is too much. There is no life without error, without failure.”
She laid her swords gently on the stone floor, stared down at her hands.
“It was this vision of his davi,” Dhar went on, “that broke your admiral.”
“The poison of Menkiddoc broke him,” Gwenna replied, but she could find no heat for the words. Instead, she remembered Jonon standing a pace away from her in the poisoned jungle, the fury of his own failure carved into his face. What was it he’d said? My men are dying, and I can’t save them.
The memory shimmered, shivered, and she saw herself standing in Jonon’s place, clutching the skin of polluted water, raising it to her lips, drinking it down.
The captain cut into her thoughts. “Your davi has nothing to do with victory or defeat. Nothing to do with life or death. Not yours. Not those of the men and women you command.” He shifted, winced, took a deep, unsteady breath.
“What then?”
“Do what you are able to do. Do everything you are able to do. The rest…” He made the gesture of a person holding something loosely, then letting it go.
She gazed out into the light.
“He’s going to kill me,” she said. “He’s going to kill me, and then he’s going to kill Rat, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him.”
To her surprise, the Manjari captain nodded. “He will destroy you, as a vicious boy rips the wings from a fly.”
Gwenna almost choked on her laugh. “Thanks for that.”
“Does it change anything to know it?”
“The people who trained me would say it changes everything. There’s even a passage from Hendran: Heroic last stands and suicidal charges make for excellent stories and terrible strategy. Only a fool goes into an unwinnable fight.”
“Life is an unwinnable fight, Gwenna Sharpe. If ends are all that matter, then we are all fools and failures.”
She closed her eyes once more. The smell of the dead legionaries filled the chamber, thick, wet, red. Had they known, when they drew their blades, that Jonon would take them apart? Probably. They were bright boys. They had been. Now they were … what? No one. Nothing.
“I’m going after her.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “No. You don’t. I’m going after her, and I am going to kill Jonon.”
She could feel the captain’s eyes on her, but she didn’t look over. Instead she found herself staring at the Csestriim ring, those not-quite-possible curves and whorls, the light reflecting off it. Inside of her, the war raged, the poison of Menkiddoc straining against whatever it was that held it at bay, whatever it was that kept her human.
Slowly, deliberately, she twisted the ring from her finger.
The moment it slipped free, relief washed over her, cool as a light rain. Between one breath and the next her pain vanished. She could feel the blood coursing in her veins, the strength coiled in her legs and shoulders, each breath filling her with light and air and eagerness. She shut her eyes and shuddered with something approaching delight.
“Gwenna.” Dhar’s voice sounded far-off, as though he were speaking to her from a distant mountain peak. “Gwenna.”
“Don’t,” she said. She didn’t want to hear her name.
“This is not the way.”
“It is the only way.” Bliss rippled up her skin, trembled on her tongue. She slid the ring into a pocket of her blacks. “If I’m going to kill him, I need this strength.”
“It is no true strength.”
She shook her head. “You saw what he did to the gabhya. You saw.…”
“I saw a soldier who lost himself, who could not face his own failure.”
Gwenna rose to her feet. Dhar followed her with his eyes, but made no attempt to stand up. It felt good, standing above him like that. It felt right.
“I won’t abandon Rat. I won’t leave her to him.”
The captain scrubbed his brow with a filthy hand. “And what will happen to her, after you kill your admiral?”
“He’s not my admiral. He was never my fucking admiral.”
“What will happen to the child,” Dhar pressed, “when you are done killing the man?”
“I’m going to send her here, to you.”
“And what will we do when you come for us?”
“I’m not going to come for you. I’m going to kill Jonon—” The word kill sent a shiver down her spine. “And then I’m going to put the ring back on.”
Dhar watched her. “You know this is not the case.”
“I put it on once already. I can do it again.”
“And if you cannot? If you choose not to?”
She took a deep breath, pointed toward the massive slab of stone. “Then close the door.”
Dhar shook his head wearily. “This would transform the fortress into a crypt.”
“No. Kiel will return. He can bring you both food and water, enough to keep you alive while you heal, while you figure out a way to escape.”
“To escape from you.”
She swept her swords from the floor, slammed them into their sheaths.
“Yes. To escape from me.” She stabbed a finger toward the door. “You wait for Rat. Watch from the pass. If you see me coming, and I’m not … not myself, you get her inside and close that fucking door, and you do not let me in until you are certain, absolutely certain, that you can kill me.”
58
Night had a way of unmaking the world. As a child Ruc had marveled at this, at the way the delta, by sunlight so bright and green and sharp, seemed to dissolve as the sun drained into the western reeds. The far lines faded first, the sharp slash of the rushes hazing to a vague wall of green, then gray. The sky flamed awhile, orange and red; then the clouds lost their shapes in the gulf of gathering dark. Water gave up reflecting anything but the stars. You could never see far in the delta, but after dark the whole world shrank to the scrap of dirt on which you sat, those stones, that swaying branch.
The world shrank at night, and at the same time, strangely, it seemed to grow.
Darkness ground down the boundaries between land and water, water and sky. The night was larger than the world it had replaced. The scrap of sandbar—delimited by day—became infinite. The channels stretched on forever.
It was the same way, Ruc realized, inside the Arena.
Lanterns ringed the pit, hundreds of them, while hundreds more hung from poles above the carefully raked sand. The place where the Worthy would be doing their fighting, their dying, was bright as a comfortable room, and yet beyond and above that ring of fire he could see nearly nothing, just the vague red heat of innumerable bodies pressed tight together. The lack of lanterns in the stands made sense—it would take only one lantern knocked askew to set the entire structure alight—but the effect was almost dizzying. There was no visible limit to the great crucible of the Arena. It stretched up and away into darkness on all sides, a cage as tall as the sky, a theater without end.
Night in the delta, however, was quiet. The air inside the Arena trembled with sound. The pit was loud by day, sometimes deafeningly so, but at noon you could look into the ranked seats and see the thousands of mouths from which the screaming poured. Now, as he gazed up, he could make out only the faces of the spectators in the lowest rows, maybe a few hundred of them, ruddy with the torchlight. The rest were swallowed by the emptiness. It felt as though the night itself was bellowing its heat and rage and eagerness, and for a moment the sound stopped him short. Like the first sheets of a monsoon rain, it felt almost solid, impenetrable.
“Looks different,” Monster muttered.
Her habitual scorn seemed, for the moment, to have abandoned her. Ruc glanced over. She looked younger than her thirty years, eyes wide, the incipient lines of age smoothed away by the shifting torchlight. For half a heartbeat he saw what she might have looked like as a child, an orphan lost on the streets of Dombâng.
Goatface turned. “It is the same Arena you have fought and trained in all these months. The same size. The same sand. The rest”—he gestured to the torches, to the red and bronze drapery hanging from the walls—“is but pomp and ostentation.”
Monster furrowed her brow, spat into the sand, and the thief and murderer swallowed up the little girl once more. “No fucking shit.”
Ruc glanced over at Bien. Her expression was a new language, one he hadn’t had a chance to learn. Or maybe an old one that he’d forgotten. Whatever the case, since the last day of the culling she seemed … changed. Stiller, calmer. Whether it was the stillness of resignation he couldn’t say. While the rest of them went over and over the details of the escape, she held herself apart, listening to the discussions, nodding sometimes, but adding little. She’d kissed him that night. He could still feel the press of her lips on his shoulder, the tightness of her arm around his waist as he stared out the window, but that contact hadn’t bloomed into anything more. Her distance reminded him of the distance in the eyes of the Vuo Ton warriors in the days before they went to face their gods. The approach of death affected everyone differently.
“Come,” Goatface said, gesturing toward the center of the pit. “The good people of Dombâng are eager to welcome you.”
A low, wide wooden dais stood at the center of the sand. Ruc had never seen it before—not during training, nor the three days of the culling. He did, however, recognize the crier who waited just at its side. For the first of the high holy days, the man wore a bloodred leather vest and a black noc. The bronze hoops in his ears reflected the torchlight. He offered a toothy smile as they approached, threw wide his arms as though to welcome old friends, then pivoted to the crowd.
“Next…” he announced as they mounted onto the platform, “fighting under the tutelage of Lao Nan, also known as the Goatface…”
Goatface frowned. “Goatface,” he muttered. “Just Goatface. No the.”
“The Worthy known as Monster, Mouse, and Stupid.”
Stupid didn’t bother glancing up from beneath the brim of his straw hat as a roar erupted from the crowd. Mouse hunched slightly, as though to make himself smaller. Monster made a series of rude gestures that earned her jeers and cheers in about equal measure.
Goatface frowned at her. “Hardly the behavior of a holy warrior.”
“Not feeling all that fucking holy tonight,” she replied.
“And a second three,” the crier went on, “also trained by the Goatface: two priests of Eira…”
Ruc looked up sharply. During the culling, the crier had given only their names. Vang Vo knew their history, of course, but she’d made no indication that she intended to share it.
At the mention of the goddess, the crowd erupted into a frenzy. Ruc could make out individual voices stitched into the larger tapestry of sound:
… Unbelievers …
Annurian puppets!
Traitors! Traitors! Traitors!
Beside him, Bien raised her chin slightly. Ruc gazed up, past the torchlit faces at the rim of the pit, into the faceless dark beyond. Up there somewhere stood people that he or Bien had helped. The porter with the broken leg, maybe. Or the mother of triplets whose milk never dropped. The young man with the monsoon cough? The scabrous orphan? The boy who sold his body beneath the Bridge of Flowers? The brokenhearted fisher? The merchant who’d lost her daughter to the pox?
In his mind, they packed the stands, shoulder to shoulder, staring down at priests at the center of the pit. Did they remember the gifts of food and clothes? The offer of a warm room beneath Eira’s roof? The hours of shared prayer and conversation? When the rest of Dombâng chanted for Ruc’s blood, for Bien’s, what would they do? Stand silently by or join their neighbors?
He could see no faces, but the weight of sound hammering down was all the answer he needed. Tonight was not a night for the remembering of kindnesses.
If possible, that hammering grew even louder with the announcement of Talal.
The Kettral didn’t bother looking up, just held that iron ball patiently in the crook of his arm and waited for the crier to wave them off the dais toward the box.
The box.
The wooden bucket sat in the corner, as it always had, and no one seemed to have noticed the cracked board behind it, but whatever luck Ruc might have hoped for ended there. Four torches blazed overhead, one at each corner, chasing away the last sliver of darkness. Above and behind them, atop the high wall of the pit, stood both Arena guards and Greenshirts—there were hundreds more guards than usual in the Arena—some carrying spears, others flatbows. Those closest to Goatface’s booth studied Ruc and the others with a mix of interest and contempt. The contempt didn’t matter, but the interest was disastrous.
“We may be fucked,” Monster said, not bothering to lower her voice.
“Fucked,” Mouse agreed bleakly.
“Nonsense,” Goatface replied, mistaking the source of their concern. “While you may not be … virtuosos of death, you are better trained than most of those you’ll face.”
“Who will we face?” Bien asked, staring out across the sand as the other Worthy and their trainers filed to their booths.
“That,” Goatface said, “is a truth known only to Vang Vo.”
He gestured.
Ruc had grown accustomed to finding the high priestess far above, perched like some carrion bird on the rail of her ship. For the first of the high holy days, however, she had descended to the pit itself. Even as he watched, she crossed the sand toward the wooden dais.
“I wouldn’t mind fighting that bitch,” Monster muttered.
“Yes, you would,” Talal replied. He was studying the priestess with that hooded gaze of his.
Monster shot him a glance. “What do you know about it?”
“I know she’s more dangerous than most of the Worthy.”
“You’ve never seen her fight.”
“I don’t need to.”
Ruc shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. No one’s fighting Vang Vo.”
“Maybe no one has to fight anyone,” Bien murmured, too quietly for Goatface to hear.
Ruc snuck a glance behind him. The crack in the board looked obvious, wide enough to slide a knife through. It seemed amazing that no one else had noticed—none of the guards, none of the trainers—but then, who would have thought that any of the Worthy would attempt to escape from the center of the pit in the middle of a fight? It was the very madness of the plan that had given it a chance of success.
“When do we do this?” Monster demanded.
She wasn’t even bothering to be subtle, but then, Goatface was as unlikely to understand her question as he was to notice the crack at the back of his box.
“You will fight,” he replied, “in the order Vang Vo decrees.”
“Let’s wait for the fights to start,” Talal said.
That was the plan they’d settled on. It wasn’t a good plan. They’d still need to deal with Goatface, and the Worthy in the neighboring boxes were still likely to notice the six of them disappearing behind the parasol one by one. Still, they’d have a better chance when everyone was distracted by people dying out in the middle of the pit.
Stupid tipped back his straw hat, sucked at something between his teeth. “Hope we don’t fight first. Or against each other.”
Bien shook her head. “I won’t fight you.”
Monster laughed. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all fucking night. Wish I could promise the same.”
Goatface tutted, interposed himself between them. “It is … highly improbable that the six of you will fight. In the early bouts, Vang Vo pits the Worthy of the different trainers against one another. With any luck you will not be forced to cross blades.”
“And by luck,” Stupid noted drily, “you mean that at least three of us will be too dead to fight.”
“Yes,” the trainer replied. “Well. This is a night, above all other things, of sacrifice.”
While they were talking, Vang Vo had reached the center of the pit. She stepped up onto the wooden dais, waited patiently as the crier raised his hands for quiet. The din of the Arena settled like blood through water. When it was finally silent, she spoke.
“Sooner or later,” she said, “we’re going to forget.”
Ten thousand bodies leaned in just slightly in order to hear her better.
“We’ll spend enough years free, worshipping our own gods in our own city, and we’ll forget that it wasn’t always this way. There are kids here tonight who weren’t alive when the Annurians went around knocking down doors, taking our idols, telling us what stories we could tell, what songs we could sing, which sacred names we could speak aloud.”
She began to pace the perimeter of the dais.
“One of the reasons we do this”—she gestured to the sand, to the Worthy waiting in their boxes, to the invisible bowl of the Arena immuring them all—“is so that we don’t forget. These warriors remind us that no one is born free. No one has a right to it. Freedom is something that has to be fought for, that has to be seized over and over and over, every year, every day, every moment.”
