by Jay Lake
The clack of tiles and the rattle of dice was the heartbeat of the room. We sat in the shadowed back like two actors waiting for our light.
She sipped at her drink and watched me for a while. Being raised as I had among the harshest teachers, I was quite accustomed to this. I amused myself by staring back. Nothing I saw altered my earlier assessment of her. The Dancing Mistress had the mountain way about her now. She didn’t seem to have been in any serious fights lately, for her muzzle and face bore no fresh scars.
We had been lovers, briefly, and I knew her body well enough. She’d lost weight. Become, if anything, more rangy.
Eventually, I outwaited her, for my old teacher spoke first. “I am come to Copper Downs once more in search of an edge. An old, old edge.”
“That brought you down out of your mountains?”
“Yes.” She toyed with her bowl of drink, an excuse not to meet my eye. “The search has something to do with you, though I did not expect the matter to pass directly through your hands.”
“Do you regret seeing me here?” I asked softly.
“We have not met since Federo’s death.” Now the mourning was clear in her voice.
But did she mourn the man? Surely not the god Choybalsan, who had made terrible war upon her people, themselves only a remnant of an earlier age of glory when men were not so strong. “His time was done,” I said, “and the power that was upon him needed to pass further onward.”
“It was never his power.” Her eyes met mine again. Something ancient and hard lay in her gaze now. “You took that stolen power and made another god of it.”
“You say that as if I were a carpenter who’d chosen to build one thing over another. Besides, I could hardly have returned the power.” Where to?
After a long moment, as if in consideration, the Dancing Mistress said, “I have spent time alongside a very wise woman of my people.”
To my left, one of her guardians—or wardens? I realized—murmured a name. Matte, it sounded like. “You yourself are a very wise woman of your people,” I told her.
“In certain, specific ways, perhaps,” she admitted, “but not about the wider concerns of life.”
I did not like where this conversation was heading, though I could not yet say why. “What did you learn from this wise woman?”
“That our people gave away our power too easily.” Her voice grew tense and fierce. “That in my turn I was part of that giving up. That there is much to be rectified.”
The Rectifier? Surely her choice of words could not be coincidence. “Every people with a long past could say such a thing,” I told her, keeping my own tone gentle and easy. “Surely that has been true since the morning of the world.”
Now the Dancing Mistress was very nearly growling, and her claws splintered into the tabletop as she spoke. “This is ours, the soulpath of my entire people. The decision to take it up or lay it down again should be ours alone.”
“You’ve caught a bad case of pardine politics, haven’t you?” I was fascinated. I’d always understood her kind to work through consensus, a sort of oversized tribal family. What made the Rectifier so unusual among pardines was the strength of his individual passion and purposes.
“Matte has shown me certain truths I had long needed to hear,” she admitted. “We are on a Hunt, of sorts. A Hunt of history.”
That frightened me. I knew a little of pardine Hunts. It was a practice they had laid down, or claimed to, these past few centuries. A group would band together and share their senses, their intentions, perhaps even their thoughts, so they became one creature with a handful of bodies and cunning multiplied through all those hearts and minds. “Who is Matte, then?”
“She speaks of a doctrine of Revanchism. Our people should take back what was once ours and yet rightfully belongs to us.”
Something in the Dancing Mistress’ voice told me she saw a weakness in her own thinking. I drove toward it. “Speaks? Or preaches? You were always so much the champion of individual responsibility. This Revanchism is not a soulpath idea. This almost sounds human.”
“What do you know of soulpaths!?” she shouted, slamming her hand into the table so that our bowls of bournewater slopped.
I came up out of my chair. My words had struck a nerve, and we were once more on the verge of violence. Into the silence that rang about the tavern I hissed my reply: “Nothing. I know nothing of soulpaths. I would no more play at being a pardine than you and your Revanchists should play at being human.”
“I apologize, Green,” she answered after a long moment. “Sit, please.”
Sitting, I remained silent. This was on her now. I could not twist out whatever truth she was choking upon.
“I did not intend to take up this cause.” The Dancing Mistress was quiet as well, speaking almost too low for me to hear. Once more the clack and murmur of men at their games swelled up around us, though we still very much had an audience. Any battle between us here would be the stuff of legend within the hour. I’d already had my fill of legends, and resolved anew not to fight my old teacher.
She went on: “When you brought the god into being, I thought the long struggle was over. The power seemed safely grounded in a mute and pleasant beast. I do not foresee Endurance becoming greedy for conquest, or world-weary, or even particularly dangerous. Your choice was inspired.”
“Hardly a choice.” This was not modesty—at the time I’d had little notion of what I was doing. I had understood even less since that fateful day.
“As may be. I left without seeing you because, well, it was over. My time here. My work. With Federo, of course, but also in the city as a whole. I was done with humans. Most specifically, you.”
I ignored the twinge in my heart. “And yet here you are, back a few months later.”
“Because of Matte.” Now her tone was almost pleading. “I do not agree with much of what she says, but she is right in one thing. Our people’s power should live, and die, with us. Not in the hands of some immortal duke, or a rogue human with the aspect of divinity upon him. Nor even a mute and pleasant ox god.”
I wondered if this Matte was offended by Endurance. What if the god had manifested as something with sharp teeth and swift wit? A frightening thought. “It is an old theft, oft repeated,” I answered her. “And the threat is now safely grounded. Your people and mine fought great wars in the past. That is one reason your power was laid down. By you.”
“It was ours to lay down, it should be ours to take up again.” Now her tone was stubborn. I was far too familiar with the sound of a woman arguing to convince herself. She had nothing to convince me of. “And that is why I am here once more, in Copper Downs. Where I never expected to be. Looking for the edges of the power.”
“What edges?” I had the sickening notion that she was referring to my baby. I could not fight the entire pardine race. I could not even fight the Dancing Mistress. Taking ship to a port far beyond any horizon had a rapidly growing appeal.
“We are not here to make war upon Copper Downs, and especially not to find any quarrel with you, Green. But there is something taken from us long ago, by the Duke himself when he first grasped for our power. A token we would redeem for our own.”
Not my child then, and not the god Endurance. I sighed heavily, expelling a tension I had not realized I was holding in until that moment. “What is this token, and what does it have to do with me?”
“Something precious to us has been brought back to the city recently. Matte has seen it while walking her soulpath in the moondark. With your return, I wondered if you might be carrying it.”
“I carry nothing but a child in my belly and the knives in my hands.”
That brought a smile from the Dancing Mistress. A genuine pardine smile. “You carry far more than you know, Green. But in this case, I refer to the Eyes of the Hills.”
That meant nothing whatsoever to me. “You propose a puzzle to which I have no clues.”
“Once, far in our past, my people made temp
les. We did not build, not as humans do, but we find great trees and certain caves to be, well, entrances to the soulpath. You would perhaps say sacred. A wise old pardine might give up her body there, but remain on watch through the windows in her bones as a guardian of our people. Or this one might bring a lucky stone, and that one another lucky stone to join it, until one day a pillar of great good fortune has been raised.”
I thought of the sky burial towers of my earliest youth, and temples of Kalimpura and Copper Downs. “Every people has an architecture of the sacred, a house for the spirit. That is what we do with minds unable to contemplate the fullness of the divine.”
“As may be. One of our spirit houses was a statue. Sculpture is a rare art among my people, but not unknown. This was an ancient mother of the pardine race, idealized long after her death but honored all the more for the hand that wrought her image. She had two eyes, one a green tourmaline and the other a cobalt spinel. These were taken by the Duke as a token of his theft of our power.”
For a moment, my heart stilled, then pounded within my chest. My gut roiled, the baby rejecting the paneer and bournewater along with the Dancing Mistress’ words, until only by sheer force of will did I hold down my stomach.
Michael Curry, the man I had killed aboard the ship Crow Wing in harbor at Kalimpura, on orders from Mother Vajpai herself, had carried a key with blue and green gems inset within a head cast in the form of a snake. It was meant to guard a treasure I never had seen. At the time I’d thought the colors were to match his eyes. The key with its emerald and sapphire chips I had thrown away on purpose, to spite the Bittern Court and their shameful politics.
Surali was here for me because of the way I had ruined the Bittern Court’s intentions for the death of Michael Curry. But blue and green. Green and blue. Passing through my hands to spite the plans of the mighty. The coincidence was too great.
He must have been carrying the Eyes of the Hills behind whatever lock that key was fitted to.
“You know,” she said.
I had taken too long to reply. Besides which, of all people this woman could read my hesitations as if they were the stirrings of her own heart.
“I do not know enough to tell you what you wish.” Which was a lie of omission, but not an untruth as such. I needed to extract myself from this conversation as quickly and smoothly as possible. Unless I wanted to set the wild pardines upon the Selistani embassy. Far more important that I retreat and think these revelations through. This bit of business tied back to the Lily Goddess, to Endurance, to all my reasons for being in Copper Downs.
Hoping to find help dealing with Blackblood, I’d come here. Instead I’d uncovered … what?
Something that frightened me.
The Dancing Mistress studied me carefully for a while. I pushed the paneer and the drink away as she did so—the smell of both worked to further threaten my stomach.
“I don’t suppose you’re carrying the gems,” she finally said. “You could not lie to me about that, and I can see your surprise. You’ve seen them, though. Or know of them.”
“A rumor only,” I blurted. “Back in Kalimpura. Off a Stone Coast ship. I followed the smuggling trade, for the sake of children. I heard things.”
“Blue eyes and green?”
Her shrewdness was closing in on me. I had to give up something more, and do so convincingly enough that my old teacher would believe she’d winkled the secret from me. “A man. Named Michael Curry. They called him Malice. His eyes were mismatched, and he may have guarded the gems.”
“What ship?”
Did I dare deepen the lie? Or was the truth more dangerous? Such things were too easy to check, though, if you had friends in the Harbormaster’s office. “Crow Wing. Of the Stone Coast. I am not sure which city flagged her.”
So much remained unsaid. I did not mention that I had killed him myself, or that I had thrown his snake-headed key into the harbor, or that I had cut out his eyes to fulfill the letter of the Bittern Court’s death order while entirely abrogating the spirit of it.
She did not need to know these things, my old teacher. Not as feral and strange as she had become. Her struggle against Federo and Choybalsan had marked her as surely as it had marked me. But the Dancing Mistress’ scars were much deeper and stranger. Especially concerning the theogeny of Endurance. Had that calling on her people’s power torn away part of her own spirit?
Now more than ever I wished for the advice of the Rectifier. He was difficult and dangerous, but charmingly unsubtle. Honest to the point of insanity, I suspected.
“I must depart,” I told her. “This food sits ill, and I am needed back at the temple.”
The Dancing Mistress did not ask which temple. I could see a flash of calculation in her eyes as she considered holding me here against my will. Our old bond won out, or perhaps common sense prevailed. Scraping my chair back, I rose with a brief bow to her guardians. “I hope you find what you are searching for,” I said politely. “And I hope even more it brings you what you expect.”
“Thank you, Green.” The Dancing Mistress rose as well, then stepped around the table to embrace me. I tensed, wondering if she would try to take me now much as Mother Vajpai had attempted, but in truth, all she did was hug. While her mouth was close to my ear and the scent of her was stirring the memory of something warm and sweet inside me, she whispered, “I am sorry.”
I smiled and broke away to weave through the tables full of busy men. None of them would look straight at me, but out of the corner of my eye I could follow the wave of stares. At the bar I paid for my food, then leaned close to the pardine working there. “Tell the Tavernkeep that I would speak to the Rectifier should that old rogue decide to call here.”
“Yes, Mistress.” His tone was thoroughly cowed. Was the fact that I associated with the Dancing Mistress so overwhelming for him?
No matter. I strode out the door without hurrying. Once in the alley, I checked again for watchers, then stumbled to the little loading bay I’d used to climb down earlier and spewed everything I’d eaten and drunk in the past hour.
* * *
I was sick of being sick. After throwing up, I retreated to the rooftop, not so much to watch the street as to have time to think alone, out of the public eye. The sloping tiles were a bit of unexpected trouble. On the other hand, I now enjoyed privacy, respite, and time.
At moments like this, I very much missed the Blade handles. I’d grown quite accustomed to working in company, to benefitting from experience and wisdom and the annoyance of advice.
Alone, I was responsible for everything.
Alone, I had no check upon my foolishness or my ambitions, either one.
Alone, I was, well, alone.
Still, it helped me to lay things out as if explaining them to a fellow Blade or one of the teaching mothers. That habit has stood me in good stead ever since, just as it served me then. The problem of the raid upon the Temple of Endurance still loomed. Stuck in a line of reasoning that was later to prove foolish, I continued to believe Blackblood responsible, more by process of elimination than through any positive evidence. The attack certainly would have been the style of the old Pater Primus. And the Temple Quarter was stirring. The gods of Copper Downs had awoken in the time since the Duke’s death. That was part of the lifting of the magical hold he’d placed on the entire city. Gods being who they were, I could guarantee they were becoming fractious. Having personally spoken to four gods, slain one, and birthed another, I was sadly an expert on this topic that no sane person would wish to understand too well.
Then there was the assault on the Temple of Marya sometime after my departure for Kalimpura four years ago. I knew very little about Marya as a goddess, except that she seemed to be a local equivalent to the Lily Goddess—watching over women and girls, and possessing mostly a soft kind of power. The Blades notwithstanding, this was as far as that went in Kalimpura. We were a secular force in the service of the goddess, not a divine aspect. Most cities would not tole
rate an order of armed and dangerous women, charged with righting wrongs and fighting crime. It would make life too difficult for men.
Marya had no Blades serving her. Only prostitutes and working women and perhaps some of the wives of this city. So when—who? Someone had come for her, bearing whatever power it took to strike down a goddess; if rumor was to be believed, the goddess had resisted.
Even if Marya had fallen, after a time another would have risen in her place. That was the way of things among the gods. Trouble might come between, however, especially for those dependent on the goddess or her successor for protection. Those were never easy transitions.
I’d read enough theogeny during the days of my forced education to understand something of how the divine settled upon the world. Much like lightning stalking beneath the storm, divinity was power that sought grounding. I had no idea if the stories of Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes and their garden before time held any literal truth, but the figurative truth was undeniable. Male and female principles filled the world with the same energy they drew forth—from sex, from death, from flowering trees and falling leaves and the spume of rivers. And most of all from the hopes and fears and thoughts and prayers of the men and women of every race and kind and species in the endlessly long plate of the world.
What we people provided for the divine was a channel. A concept. A mold. Blackblood manifested as he did because his followers expected it of him. Pain was real enough, and those who suffered sought a focus for their need. Likewise my own Lily Goddess. She manifested as the regiment of women who worshipped Her could best see Her. One of us. Just vaster, wiser, deeper. As the ocean is to the dreams of a raindrop.
But as to the question of who could even attempt to throw down a goddess, I didn’t care to contemplate it overmuch. I knew all too well what was involved in such a task, and I had been supremely fortunate in my endeavors. Whoever the god killers had been, they were gone. I was here now, my divine patron mute as I had made him. On my own, for most purposes.