The Empire's Ruin, page 9
It might have been the dumbest, bravest thing that Ruc had ever seen; Eira seized him by the throat, the grip of love’s goddess stronger than any need for survival.
He shrugged off the people pressing in around him, shucked away his own pain, ducked under Striker’s extended weapon, and, with the fury of the crowd pelting down around him, hurled himself at the man on the railing of the bridge. The priests of Eira knew nothing of hunting, nothing of tracking, or stalking, or leaping, but Ruc had not been raised from an infant by the priests of Eira.
He hit the man with his shoulder, knocking the wind from him, folding him neatly in half, then wrapped him close in his arms as they fell away from the murderous mob into the churning current below.
5
“Sweet Eira’s mercy,” Bien breathed, rushing to Ruc’s side as he kicked open the door to her room.
Bloody light from the red-scale lantern washed her face. Fear twisted her features, fear and anger. For a moment she stood there, frozen. Then relief washed over her like a wave.
“You’re alive,” she said, reaching up to touch his face, as though to reassure herself.
“I’m alive,” he agreed.
Alive was about the best he could say for his battered state. His body throbbed. The echoes of Striker’s fists ached in his face and chest. The ribs on his left side twinged whenever he twisted, and blood dripped from the gash across his forehead and his split lip.
“I just came back for a lantern when it got too dark,” Bien went on. “I’ve been out looking for you all day.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruc replied, lowering the unconscious messenger as gently as he could onto the bed. “Seemed like a good idea not to be found.”
“How’d you get him back here without anyone seeing you? The city’s a kicked termite nest right now. People are everywhere, most of them eager to kill something.”
“It was slow work. Drifted down past the Fish Market hidden in some flotsam, but Cao’s was too busy east of that to risk it. Swam north instead, hid out until dusk in the wreckage of Intarra’s temple, then floated east in the shadow of a patrol boat.”
“A patrol boat?” Bien’s eyes widened. “If they’d caught you with him, you’d be locked in the Shipwreck or the Baths.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “The Baths burned, remember? And they didn’t catch me. Anyway, I’m not the one you should be worried about.”
He gestured toward the bed.
Valaka Jarva’s skin had gone waxen, yellow rather than tan. Whoever he was, he didn’t look good. The collar had chafed his neck an ugly red, and his lips had gone a livid shade of blue. They twitched for a moment, as though he were trying to talk, then fell still.
“What happened to him?”
Ruc grimaced. “One of the sawed-off pilings from the old bridge was just beneath the water. When I knocked him off the railing, he landed on it. I landed on him.”
He lifted the messenger slightly. Bien gasped. The rotted end of the piling had torn into the man’s back, shredding skin and breaking ribs. Finger-long splinters of dark wood protruded from the wound, which was already soaking the bedding with blood. For most of the day he’d been unconscious, muttering fragments of what sounded like warning or prophecy in a language Ruc didn’t recognize.
“We have to clean it…” Ruc began, but Bien was already moving, scooping her ewer and washbowl from the bedside table, then crossing to the bed.
She plunged her facecloth into the water. “Roll him over.”
The messenger let out a faint groan as Ruc dragged him onto his stomach, reached weakly for something, then subsided. The wound was vicious enough, but the real danger lay in it souring. The canals to the west, where the Shirvian first flowed into Dombâng, were clean enough, but the mid-city channels bred flies and disease. Despite the gashes in his own skin, Ruc wasn’t worried for himself. He had never in his life taken sick—another inexplicable gift, like the redsight, of his childhood in the delta. Untended, however, the messenger would almost surely die. He might die even if they tended him.
Bien had pulled a stool alongside the bed, sat crouched over the wound. She spread it open with one hand while pulling free the largest of the splinters with the other. Blood and pus smeared her fingers. She wiped them absently on the bedsheets and went on about her work. As a priestess of Eira, she’d spent half her childhood tending to the city’s sick and injured. Her voice was calm, focused when she spoke.
“I need white quey. From the infirmary. And slick-reed.”
Ruc nodded, took one more glance at the inexplicable man they’d rescued from the mob, then slipped out the door.
Eira’s temple was part of a larger compound built in a rough rectangle, with the refectory, sleeping quarters, infirmary, and the temple itself forming the four sides. Ghostblossom vines climbed dark teak walls; the evening flowers were just starting to open, spilling their perfume into the hot, thick air. Two young acolytes were lighting the red-scale lanterns hanging from the long lines overhead. The dried, gutted bodies of the fish glowed a soft orange-red, as though they’d acquired in death a heat they’d lacked while still alive. Dangling from their lines, mouths agape, they might have been finning their way straight up through the murky air to join the stars.
Ruc strode across the courtyard, trying to hurry without seeming to.
He’d just reached the infirmary when a familiar shape stepped from the door—Old Uyen, leaning heavily on his cane. He paused at the sight of Ruc, studied him with half-blind, milky eyes, then smiled.
“Hello, son.”
Uyen called everyone son, but to Ruc the word carried more than a casual warmth. Ruc had been twelve when he abandoned the delta to come to a strange city where he knew no one and nothing. Everything he’d learned out among the rushes—to hunt, to hide, to stalk, to kill—was useless in Dombâng. The buildings were too high and too close, the reek of too many people packed together made it hard to breathe. There were days that he felt the city might crush him. Even now, fifteen years later, he could remember standing motionless as a stunned burrow rat, convinced that his chest would collapse beneath the weight of the place. Somehow, in those moments, it always seemed to be Uyen who found him, Uyen who led him up to the roof of the dormitory, where the air was cleaner, the walls less close, Uyen who would light a pipe and sit with him in silence until the panic passed, Uyen who never asked any questions, who seemed to understand that some terrors could not be talked away, only outlasted. By the age of twelve, Ruc had reconciled himself to the fact that he had no true parents, none he would ever meet, at least. Still, he felt a moment of peace every time Uyen looked at him, saw him, smiled, and called him son.
“Hello, Father,” he said, pausing a few feet from the infirmary.
“A strange day.”
Ruc kept his face still, his body relaxed. He would trust Uyen with any secret, but the courtyard was hardly the place for the sharing of secrets. Eira’s temple was one of the safest places in the city. That did not mean it was safe.
“I heard some talk of a crazy man,” Ruc said carefully. “Naked, over the Spring Bridge.” He hesitated. “Heard he was killed, knocked into the river and drowned.”
“I heard that, too,” Uyen replied. “That was one of the stories. I also heard that the Vuo Ton took him.” He paused for a long moment, gazed at Ruc with those worn-down eyes. “Or someone who looked like the Vuo Ton, who had the tattoos. Spirited him away into the delta.”
Ruc stifled a curse. The whole thing had happened so fast—barely a heartbeat between when he hit the man and when they’d plunged beneath the water—the scene on the bridge had been so chaotic, the rain blinding.… It hadn’t seemed unreasonable to hope people might miss the tattoos snaking out from beneath the cuffs of his robe.
“Most people,” Uyen went on mildly, “don’t believe the thing about the Vuo Ton.”
“What would the Vuo Ton want with some crazed fool?”
“Indeed. I suspect the poor man was killed, just as the others were.”
Ruc felt his pulse quicken. “Others?”
The priest nodded gravely. “There were at least a dozen, maybe more, all over the city. One at the Arena. One at the Purple Baths. Mad Trent’s Mountain. Goc My’s. The Grog Market.”
“What did they want?”
“They all had the same message: hail. Someone named the Lord or the First. Join his ranks. A great and holy purpose…”
“And they were all killed?”
Uyen nodded once more. “Fear fills Dombâng, especially after this violence at the Purple Baths. One could almost wish that the man from the Spring Bridge had been rescued by the Vuo Ton.” He eyed Ruc shrewdly. “Or by one who looks like the Vuo Ton.”
Ruc put a gentle hand on Uyen’s shoulder. “Best not to spread that story, Father.”
The priest smiled. “Of course not, my son.”
It didn’t take long to slip into the infirmary and retrieve the quey and slick-reed, but by the time he’d returned to Bien’s room she was already waiting impatiently, one of her clean tunics pressed to the messenger’s wound.
“You walk all the way to the Grog Market for the quey?”
He passed her the jar and the small pot. “I didn’t want to draw attention. People are already talking about what happened on the bridge. Some are saying the messenger was taken by the Vuo Ton.”
She glanced up at him sharply.
“It’s just a rumor,” Ruc said. “Still, I didn’t feel like adding to it by racing back and forth.”
“One of the disadvantages, I guess, to having your skin slashed with ink.”
Blood and pus welled in the wound the moment she pulled back the makeshift bandage. She uncorked the quey, doused a cloth with the liquor, then pressed it to the shredded flesh. The messenger writhed at the touch—quey burned even worse in a wound than it did on the tongue—then cried out a few words.
Bien glanced up at Ruc. “What was that?”
“I don’t know. He’s been trying to talk on and off all day.” He looked out the narrow window into the night. Sacrificial fires, large and small, burned on a hundred rooftops. “I spoke to Uyen. He said there were messengers all over the city, a dozen or more.”
“I know.” Bien dabbed more quey onto the wound, then set the bottle aside. “I heard people talking when I was out looking for you. Rumor has it the Greenshirts snatched one before the people could tear her fully apart. She died before the high priests could put her to the question.”
“That must have displeased the high priests.”
“Not as much as foreigners showing up in the city to blaspheme the Three.”
“Would we call it blasphemy?”
Bien glanced up at him. “One is coming like those you revere, but stronger, faster? Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’d call it blasphemy.”
The slick-reed was already prepared, sliced down the middle into long, flat strips. Bien took one up, laid the wet, fleshy side against the messenger’s shredded skin. With any luck, that and the quey would keep the wound from turning sour. She worked confidently, quickly. When she’d plastered it with the leaves, she pressed her blood-soaked tunic atop it, then wrapped the whole thing in a fresh shirt.
“Your belt,” she said, holding out a hand. “You sit him up, while I wrap it around the bandage.”
Ruc slipped the belt from his waist, passed it to Bien, then took the messenger by the shoulders. He tried to be gentle, but as he lifted, a scream spilled from the man’s lips, a wordless, animal cry that lasted half a heartbeat before Ruc could get a hand clamped over his mouth. Bien slipped the belt deftly around the messenger’s torso, cinched it tight. He thrashed, but Ruc held him in place until it was finished, then laid him back gently against the bed.
The man murmured a few words, then subsided against the gory sheets.
Ruc studied him a moment, then turned to Bien.
“What are people saying about the Baths?”
“People are saying it was Annur.”
Ruc frowned. “Annur?”
“Huge empire? Just to the north? Occupied Dombâng for two hundred years…”
He ignored the sarcasm. “Attacked the Baths with what?”
“One of those giant birds they have. Keppral. Kestrel. Whatever.”
Ruc shook his head. “People in this city are always talking about kettral. Whenever a cloud crosses the moon, someone’s convinced the Annurians are back.”
“Yes. Well. This was a very convincing cloud. The high priests had the charred remains dragged out of the wreckage, hauled over the Arena, displayed in the pit for everyone to see.”
“Did you see them?”
She stared at him like he’d gone mad. “I was looking for you, asshole. Even if I wasn’t, you know I don’t go to the Arena. But Chui went. A few of the others. They said the claws were as long as paddles.”
“Were there any other attacks?”
Bien shook her head. “Just the Baths. Burned it to the ground, more or less.”
“Did the priests get any captives?”
“One. They’re saying they’re going to execute him on the steps of the Shipwreck tomorrow at dawn.” Her face hardened. “If I hadn’t been searching for you, I would have gone tonight, offered to sit with him.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Kindness has become a dangerous game in this city.”
“It is not a game,” she replied. “Regardless of his crimes, he must be terrified.”
Ruc decided to sidestep the argument. “Was he wearing one of these collars?”
He gestured to the strange, snakelike thing coiled around the messenger’s neck.
She shook her head. “Not that I heard. But it can’t be coincidence, can it? The Annurians burn down the Purple Baths and then, the very next morning, these naked fools show up talking about an attacking army.”
“Not much of an army—a few soldiers burning down the Baths.”
“The Baths were a major barracks for the Greenshirts.”
“Still seems vaguely half-assed. The Annurians conquered the world with good planning, not casual arson.”
“Maybe they’re desperate. Maybe the plan went wrong.”
He nodded. “Maybe.”
As Bien opened her mouth to reply, the messenger spasmed, tried to sit, fell back, but seized her by the wrist. His eyes were open, glassy but commanding.
“You must prepare,” he groaned.
Bien glanced over at Ruc, then back at the messenger.
“Prepare for what?”
“The Lord. You must join with him, with his people, his host.…”
Ruc shook his head. “Who is the Lord?”
“The First. I told you. I have poured the truth like honey into your ears, but you refuse to hear.”
It didn’t sound like honey to Ruc. It sounded like something barbed, something spiked and violent.
Sweat drenched the messenger’s brow. He looked even paler than he had that morning on the bridge.
“Yeah,” Ruc replied. “We heard. Great and holy purpose, all that. But who is he?”
“Our source and our scourge. The one who comes to break you, then see you made anew.”
“It’s talk like this,” Bien added sternly, “that almost got you murdered back there on the bridge.”
“Murder.” The man shook his head weakly. “What do I care for my murder? What is this one life set in the scales against all that I have been, all I will become?”
Ruc shouldered aside his frustration.
“You said he has a host.…”
“Not a host. The host. A great army of his people.”
“Fine. Where are they coming from? How many people?”
“All of them.”
“All?”
“Every woman, man, and child of every hoti. The andara-bhura, the rashkta-bhura, the shava-bhura, all…”
The words trailed off, bubbling into blood.
Bien shook her head. “We don’t know what any of that means.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ruc said. “No army is going to make it ten paces into the delta.”
Faith filled the messenger’s gaze. “The Lord is already in the delta. Even as we speak, he comes for your gods.”
“We worship Eira, the Lady of Love,” Bien said, not taking her eyes from the man. “The Three are not our gods.”
She glanced over at Ruc. He nodded slowly, but at the same time memory flooded him—riding on Hang Loc’s huge shoulders, playing slap-hands with Kem Anh, feasting on the fish they ripped from the river’s gleam. Bien was right—they weren’t his gods.
To Ruc Lakatur Lan Lac, they were something far more intimate than gods.
“What do you mean,” he asked carefully, “when you say he comes for them?”
The man nodded eagerly. “He comes to accept their submission, their fealty.”
Ruc tried to imagine Kem Anh submitting to anything. His mind balked at the thought. He could, if he worked very hard, just barely imagine something killing her—Sinn had been killed, after all, whatever the high priests and people of Dombâng believed—but the notion that anyone could force her to submit …
“If he is real, this Lord of yours, and he is really in the delta, then he is already dead.”
The man shook his head with an awful vigor. “He is not dead. If he were dead, I would know it. I would feel it.”
Bien frowned. “Feel it. How?”
He gestured to his collar. Ruc had taken that collar for snakeskin or some other kind of scaled hide. As he leaned closer, however, he realized there was more to it than skin. It was thicker than a belt, almost round in cross section, as though someone had taken an actual snake, hacked off the head and tail, then stitched the ends back together to form a ring. He reached out a finger to touch it, but the messenger recoiled, bared bloody teeth.
As Ruc watched, the collar convulsed. A ripple ran under the scaled skin, as though the thing were alive and tightening, then fell still.
