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Автор Брайан Стейвли

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Table of Contents

About the Author

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For Jo,

who shows me the notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I’m tremendously grateful to all the people who contributed to this book in ways large and small, general and particular. It takes a village to tell a story, and I worry that if I started listing the villagers I would never stop. There are, however, five people who have read the manuscript all the way through, several times over in each case. Suzanne Baker and Gavin Baker are a formidable mother/son team, absolutely indefatigable in reading draft after draft, generous in their praise, keen and unflinching in their criticism. I’ve always thought it’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m about the luckiest writer alive to have Hannah Bowman as my agent and Marco Palmieri as my editor. Finally, this book, like all the others, wouldn’t exist without Johanna Staveley, who believed in it and me more powerfully than I did.

PROLOGUE

This is a story I never intended to tell. I thought, when I finally walked away from you all those years ago, that I was taking the tale with me. I thought, because it happened to me, because I seemed to stand at the center of everything, that it was my story—but that’s not how stories work.

A tale belongs only partly to the teller—even the wildest fabrication needs a listener, and this is no fabrication. It is the truth—or as close to the truth as I can come, so many years later—and there are other characters in it. This story is theirs as much as it is mine, but since they are dead, the telling falls to me. You were there, of course, the only other person who survived straight through to the end, but you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t. I should have told you a long time ago, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized this story is yours, too. It’s late, but I’m telling you now.

I went to Dombâng for love.

And yes, to kill seven people in fourteen days, sure, but I wasn’t worried about the killing. I grew up in a place where women wear vests ribbed with stilettos, where each priest has a dozen knives, steel traps, needles so fine you can slide them beside the eye into the brain and out again without leaving a mark. I watched my fellow priests die by fire and iron, sometimes quickly, leaping from the tops of the sandstone cliffs, or slowly, by dehydration’s intimate degrees. By my fifteenth year, I had set to memory a thousand ways to offer a woman or man to my god’s sure unmaking. I wasn’t concerned about my piety or my ability to make the sacrifice.