Not that anyone seemed to have noticed. Half a mile behind us, hundreds of people were dying in the delta. Dying or already dead. On another day, the sight of a mud-smeared woman striding down the causeway in her drawers, knives strapped to her arms and thighs, would have caused people to stop and gawk. Today I was a sideshow at best; one of the disaster’s least interesting casualties.
“I’ll take muddy and pantsless over soggy and betrousered,” Ela replied. “No one was going to look at you twice in what you were wearing earlier.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be noticed.”
Ela tsked. “You’ve been listening to Kossal too much. Just because he’s old doesn’t mean he knows everything.”
Three men in chain mail and green tabards shouldered past us, cursing loudly at the crowd to make way as they forced their way north, toward the site of the collapse. Each wore a short sword at his hip, but for the moment they’d left them sheathed, using heavy truncheons to bull a path through the throng.
“Greenshirts,” I murmured. “Arriving too late, as usual.”
Ela narrowed her eyes. “The city constables?”
I nodded.
“I thought the uniforms looked familiar,” she said. “I gave two of them to the god the last time I was here.”
A dozen more soldiers trailed behind the vanguard, sweating and cursing in the noonday heat—the Greenshirts maintained way stations every ten miles along the causeway and patrolled the entire length. They were hardly a formidable force—the order had been all but gutted after the Annurian invasion two hundred years earlier—but the sight of them made my stomach clench all the same. We tell children they will grow into adults one day, but that’s not quite true. The child never goes away, not fully. The girl I had been, the filthy-faced Weir-rat who grew up prowling Dombang’s more stagnant channels, cringed at the sight of these grown men, men I could now have given to the god in a hundred different ways. I found myself walking faster, averting my eyes, feeling acutely my almost-nakedness as they passed.
“Perhaps I should have a word with them,” Ela mused. “I don’t like to be critical, but someone really ought to check on the causeway from time to time. Make sure it’s not going to fall over.”
“They do,” I said. “There’s a whole division of Greenshirts tasked with checking the pilings.”
Kossal glanced over. “Not very good at it.”
“They don’t have enough men to patrol the full length.”
“How many men do you need to watch wood rot?”
I shook my head. “Not rot. Sabotage.”
Ela raised an eyebrow. “Sabotage? How delightful! I was having trouble getting excited about rot.”
“How do you feel about sedition?”
She shrugged. “More interested.”
“They’re still at it?” Kossal asked, frowning. “Annur conquered the city, what, two hundred years ago?”
“A little more.”
“Seems like enough time for the local religious zealots to realize they’ve lost.”
I glanced over at the old priest. “How much time would it take you?”
“To what?”
“Give up on your god?”
He met my gaze. “I’ll give up on Ananshael when creatures stop dying.”
Before I could respond, a cry sliced through the noise behind us. We’d finally managed to break free from the densest part of the press, and when I looked over my shoulder, I could see that half a dozen Greenshirts had doubled back, sweaty faces grim as they scanned the crowd. They’d put away their truncheons and drawn swords instead, which didn’t seem like a promising development. A pace ahead of them, fingers leveled directly at me, strode the man and woman whom I’d helped climb up onto the broken causeway, the friends of Bin and Vo.
“Her!” they screamed in unison. Through some musical fluke, their voices were a perfect octave apart. The man broke into a run. “She’s the murderer.”
“Murderer,” Ela said, shaking her head. “Such a distasteful word.”
Kossal blew out an irritated breath. “Should have tossed them to the crocs along with their friends.”
“I didn’t think they noticed,” I replied, my stomach turning over inside of me.
It sounded ludicrous when I put the thought into words, but the two of them hadn’t been looking at me when I threw the knives. They’d been panicked, screaming. The scene below was a maelstrom of blood, and mud, and violence. The open jaws of a croc are a lot more obvious than the hilt of a knife tucked discreetly against a chest, and neither of the two survivors had so much as glanced over at me as their friends fell. They had seemed thoroughly lost in their own grief and disbelief.
Kossal, Ela, and I had left them to their unquiet vigil. We’d managed to follow the railing the length of the downed span, leaping the smashed-open gaps, balancing carefully where there was only one rail, mindful that a misstep would drop us back into the mud and rushes below, where people were still fighting for their lives. Fighting and losing, mostly. When we reached the point where our section had torn away, we found hundreds clustered at the jagged lip of the causeway above. Most were just shouting and gesturing uselessly, but a few had contrived to lower a rope. Kossal went up first, then me, then Ela, folded parasol swinging gaily from the strap of her pack. Of the man and woman we’d left on the fallen causeway, there was no sign.
Evidently, they’d caught up.
The man’s face was twisted with rage and grief, but something about the sight of us made him pause, shrink back into the knot of Greenshirts that surged up around him. I couldn’t believe that we appeared all that intimidating. I had a lot of knives, sure, but I looked like I’d just escaped from a whorehouse through the privy. Ela was twirling her folded parasol around one finger while Kossal grimaced, tapping his flute against his palm.
“The god is greedy today,” he muttered.
I shook my head, smoothed my sweating palms down the front of my filthy shirt. “We can’t kill them.”
“Six constables and two traumatized idiots?” the priest asked, raising a bushy eyebrow. “Even Ela ought to be able to manage that.”
“What about six constables, two traumatized idiots, and a worn-out old priest?” she asked, stabbing at his side with the point of her parasol. He parried the attack casually without taking his eyes from the Greenshirts, who were advancing down the causeway more slowly now, twenty paces distant. The leader, a short, square man, was eyeing us warily. His hand flexed on the grip of his sword.
“I’ve already begun my Trial,” I reminded him. “I can’t kill anyone not described in the song.”
“You’ve had a busy morning,” Kossal replied. “We’ll take care of it.”
“There are a hundred people on this bridge,” I hissed, “watching us right now. If you give them to the god, the Greenshirts will be hunting us the whole time we’re in Dombang. We’ll spend the entire time hiding in attics.”
Kossal shrugged. “Attics are quiet.”